25/06/2013
Secretary-General of FAES
The controversy over the Basque Economic Concert will not disappear without difficulty. At least not while the economic crisis keeps social sensitivity on edge before anything that could be perceived as a privilege. At this stage, invocating history to legitimate differences has a very limited persuasive power. With history you have the same situation as with opinions, everyone has their own, and in these postmodernist times, neither the past nor tradition offer the best credentials, let alone when the one and the other are arbitrarily reinvented by the nationalist discourse.
For someone who defends, as in this case, the Basque Economic Concert –and Navarra's Convention– and also considers that another quota is possible, seeing how the Basque nationalists turn into tireless advocates of Mr. Antonio Canovas' work against the harassment of Catalan sovereignism is an incredible political sight. Temporarily at least, Canovas, who was one of the favourite targets of Basque nationalist vilification, seems to be now, along with the Economic Scheme he devised, part of the genetic material of Basque autonomy. On the other hand, seeing how nationalist leaders wield the Constitution in order to deny the Concert being unfounded discrimination is a satisfaction that did not seem very likely. It is all very well to claim the founding agreements of the Transition, but nationalism should remember all of them. The reception of the historical rights in the Constitution is not the latter's submission to the past as nationalists say, but a balance agreement between unity and diversity, where the Constitution, and not history, gives effectiveness and democratic legitimacy to the recovery of these institutions.
The fact that the broad front of sovereignism in Catalonia either requires a Concert such as the Basque one, like CiU and ERC, or demands its disappearance, as the PSC, deserves some consideration indeed. That the Catalan Socialists have done so on behalf of a so-called federal State reform will not add many believers to the usefulness of such a reform to solve the problems of the territorial model. But probably the most instructive thing with regard to the Concert would be noticing the poor consistency of the argument that a fiscal pact with Catalonia would return things to normal. Empirical evidence contradicts this supposition. The Basque Economic Concert has not deactivated the secessionist claims, nor has it moderated nationalism. Actually, the sovereign frenzy of Basque nationalism featured by Juan José Ibarreche and his plan came at a time of an extraordinary economic boom and plentiful tax revenues, far away from any concern about the funding of public services.