Mikel
Sorauren de Gracia. Historian.
In
the Spain we have had to endure, dictatorship has been the
norm. The 1920s saw the military in charge. His Excellency
Don Miguel Primo de Rivera had the obsession to pave with
asphalt the traditional roads that linked the provinces with
the capital of the Monarchy, thus, reducing the work of the
government to building roads for the Kingdom. Of course, he
did a good job and never allowed anyone to challenge him.
In the press, however, his critics managed to do it. In one
occasion, a newspaper used the expression ...paving with
asphalt is not what government is all about... to separate
paragraphs throughout its pages.
His
present successors in public service, like Don José
María Aznar, turned the obsession for asphalt into
a passion for concrete -the French call it betun--
and insist on building walls in the countryside, like the
Itoiz dam, on sectioning the countryside with highways, and
turning the urban subsoil into a Swiss emmental saturated
with parking lots, without any regard for the archaeological
and artistic remains. The present government leaders--it can
be said the same of former Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez--boast
about the so-called vision de Estado, which it's nothing
more than the promotion of big companies -- aspiring multinationals
-- though the concentration of business; taking advantage
of the concessions of huge public works and financial speculation.
In
the propaganda field, they proclaim the unity of Spain under
the new democratic order. Both E.T.A. and ethnic Basque nationalism
in general, do not fit in this new order. The system uses
the anti-terrorism war taking advantage of the people's justified
outrage over the organization's attacks against human life
and property. These circumstances take the government to justify
repression against the entire Basque nationalist left and
the moderate nationalism; it imposes its uniformed reality,
labeling those who dissent a traitor and disloyal.
This
is the same power of the Francoist violence, which decides
who is the victim and who doesn't deserve to be one; and given
the peculiar perception that the government authorities have
of those who have been subjected to violence, only their dead
are the victims. So, since the death of the dictator Franco,
they continue to ignore all the victims of repression because,
after all, they can't hide that they are the executors of
his will and have imposed the so-called Democracy by violent
means and terrorizing a society that longed for tranquility
and progress.
Nothing
has challenged, or challenges, the pretensions of Spanish
power as the sovereign aspirations of the people of Euskal-Herria-Navarre;
hence, the simple reductionism to which they have arrived
in their vision de Estado. The way Aznar runs the affairs
of the State reminds us of an hijo de papá with
a new, expensive car. The rich kid likes to drive his new
car; he accelerates to the maximum as he drives on a new and
wide road without difficulties. He even so merit in what he
has done and proclaims ...Spain is doing well; the economy
is doing well... But when he gets to the end of the road and
has to drive uphill on a secondary, curved road poorly paved,
he behaves like the arrogant and incompetent driver that he
is. His brand-new car has exposed his ignorance and it is
no longer useful to him, so he puts the blame on the bad drivers
without any remorse. After all, he did what he had to do...
and those who criticized him are nothing but opportunists.
No one was capable of solving the problems he had when he
was driving.
Aznar's
performance makes it quite clear that the government leadership
of the Spanish democracy lacks State perspective. All of them
--the present ones and their predecessors-- uphold the necessity
to structure a potent and unified State to face up more effectively
the challenge of globalization. The unity of the autonomous
communities, under the guidance of the Government of the State,
provides for a greater accumulation of resources. The rational
use of those resources makes possible to reach the fullest
possible goals for the benefit of the whole, which would not
be possible --they say-- with the dispersion of forces that
would mean the fragmentation of the present Spanish state...
Therefore, Basque nationalism is pernicious because it puts
at risk this collective project.
They
are full of hot air; their goal is nothing but to use those
resources to make it easier for the groups in control of the
processes of financial concentration in the Spanish State.
Instead, they have failed to come up with a State plan to
foster the development of the space and the communities of
the entire territory. They have totally neglected the traditional
resources and their renovation, taking for granted that they
would always be viable and competitive. A suitable investment
of R & D in agriculture, fishing and certain industrial sectors
would had made possible the structural modifications of the
economic groups, which in turn would had fostered a sustainable
development, diversification, and territorial organization.
These groups would have found themselves in a better position
to face a crisis. But all this has been neglected with the
excuse that to revitalize the previous economic groups was
not profitable. They paid attention only to the speculative
operations; operations that are a tool for fraud, at the expense
of the people who end up paying a high financial and traumatic
social cost.
Unfortunately,
all this became too obvious with the Prestige crisis. In spite
of the technical resources available; in spite of the high
risk that a situation of this sort would entail --a situation
not new to Galicia--, the Spanish government, the State, lacked
the necessary planning and resources to tackle it. Other states
were able to tackle the problem with the necessary resources
but the Spanish government was unable to do it. It was the
civil society, which at the end had to face up to the situation;
the very same people affected by the crisis, and the volunteers.
The
lesson is clear. What is the point of having a State that
can't respond to a problem that brutally affects the material
resources of so many groups? What are the real goals of such
a State; all the citizens that are part of it or perhaps only
those groups and communities which benefit from a real centralization
that is higher up than the trumpeted autonomous structure
of that State? In short, paving with asphalt is not what government
is all about... or to let the chapapote* win the sea.
*
Tar or bitumen (betun in French) is called 'chapapote'."
January
2003
