Without sovereignty there are no rights

Tomas Urzainqui Mina

What is happening with the brutal closure of media outlets is not so much about another attack on freedom and the infringement of people's rights, which, of course, it is. It has more to do with something much profound and basic, the harsh confirmation of the lack of sovereignty.

Here we find ourselves before a complete example of a society without sovereignty. Without sovereignty there is no democracy and without democracy there is no real society, or what is the same, although it does exist, it is not recognized; it is useless and concealed. This is the real problem and nothing else.

Let's not get confused between the speeches of the bad jailers and the good jailers. Those who insist on accepting the social fracture, concealment, negation and division, are the dominant ones; sometimes helped by our own people, collaborators with complex characters who talk about a supposedly fragmented society in confrontation. But our society is not a closed society, divided and without liberties, but fundamentally, a society without sovereignty.

The lack of sovereignty is demonstrated by the inability to control and make decisions about any aspects that refer to the society itself, like the real inability to make decisions about linguistic, educational, media policy, cultural, economic, social or political matters.

The juridico-technical analysis of professors Iñigo Bullain and Juan Luis Crucelegui warned about the impossibility to exercise the economic, administrative and fiscal powers of the Basque Autonomous Community (CAV) and the Foral Community of Navarre (CFN) without being part of the European Union as a State, one that has been recovered. Definitely, this analysis has demolished the last argument of those in favor of the statute of autonomy.

Ferdinand Tönnies had already distinguished between the cultural community and the political society. Although our national political society is obviously denied by the Spanish state, it does exist; still, more or less, under anesthetic. This is a society that still suffers the direct aggression of the dominant society and its state apparatus, which we continue to suffer in a permanent state of exception that has the appearance of normality, only frightened by the renewed aggressions, like the closure of media outlets: the illegality of Euskalherria Irratia in Iruña, the closures of Egin, Egin Irratia, Ardi Beltza, Egunkaria…

Sovereignty, like life, health or freedom can't be negotiated or pacted. The European societies have demonstrated to be on the alert when it comes to the defense of their sovereignty. By standing up to the Bush administration's imposition, Germany and France have exercised their European national sovereignty.

Spanish society also suffers the lack of sovereignty. This becomes evident by the impossibility to get off the war train of Bush and to live in the political system of the prolonged late Francoism and its renewed nationalist and hegemonic ideals. The bipartite of the moment that supports those values is the demand by the pre-democratic regime that was imposed by means of the existing election law in the Spanish state.

Our society suffers the lack of its own sovereignty by the imposition of the dominant societies and its respective states, the French and the Spanish, as well as the lack of sovereignty that the citizens of those states suffer in a greater or lesser degree.

In the limitation of sovereignty in the Spanish and French societies lies the cause that exerts its utmost influence, which is the need to exercise a permanent tutelage and control over the people of those societies ruled by a dominant power, be them Navarrese/Basques, Catalans, Galicians, Corsicans, Bretons or Occitans. But the corset with which to impose control over others also affects the ones who exercise domination.

Sovereignty is denied by the nationalist groups of the extreme right, with their political party, the Popular Party (PP), and their media outlets ABC or La Razon, but also the entire existing political system is structured and programmed to form and perpetuate the authoritarian design. This way, the so-called constitutionalism and their constitutionalists is nothing but the ideology that supported the pre-democratic regime that created a democracy that is not much different from the one the Francoist regime had in the sixties.

This tormented society should make a dramatic call on the other sovereign European societies. As Bertolt Brecht would say: misfortunes will be suffered first by your neighbors, then by you. Aviso para navegantes. Just as European society is on the verge of being dragged into the Iraq war, and if it doesn't manage to defend its sovereignty by stopping the Bush-Blair-Aznar imposition, it will see itself reflected in what is now happening to this society under the direct control of the Aznar regime.

February 2003