04/12/2013
Xavier Matheus Reyes, Secretary-General of Dos de Mayo, Nación y Libertad Foundation. Author ofMás liberal que libertador. Francisco de Miranda y el nacimiento de la democracia moderna en Europa y América (Gota a gota, 2009).
At the congress of young European liberals recently convened in Bucharest, the European Liberal Youth (LYMEC), passed a resolution supporting the "right to decide of stateless nations" proposed by the Joventut Nacionalista de Catalunya (JNC), the youth wing of the CDC. Seeing this tendency actually isn't that strange when talking about Catalonia with young people who claim to be liberal, and who understand that the consistent thing to do with this credo is a "laissez-faire" attitude and not hinder what should be posed, in all naturality, as an open option.
However, it is necessary to define the kind of freedom that supports liberal values, and which can't just be a movement of the will, because, in any case, it is a political variable, and is therefore linked to a social order. Lack of constraint on a human act makes it a free action, and it is unquestionable that, even as a supposition, that gives it a special virtue; but it is equally clear that all the goodness of what, ultimately, will always have to be judged by its results, cannot just amount to that. Facing up to the obvious then that a free act can be good or bad, we get to the problem of anticipating those effects, as to stop them in the name of a too-zealous prevention could lead to censorship, and to authorise them according to the "right to make mistakes" could cause an injury that maybe should have been avoided. The key, then, was given by Francisco de Miranda when he said that "freedom is but wisely administered justice". Indeed, if justice is spared, no one can complain of suffering illegitimate restrictions.
When compared with justice, freedom ceases to be an entelechy and has to submit itself to the various rights at stake. In recent times, the role of human rights in legal theory has led to mistake the absolute nature that is inherent to them, rooted as they are in the non-negotiable dignity of the individual, with an acriticism which abdicates any reasoning about the ends of justice: the judgement of the Strasbourg Court is a striking example of this perversion. Doing a hierarchy of rights according to the implicit virtue of their exercise and to the situation in which the individuals are found is an unavoidable duty of legislative and judicial prudence, necessary unless you want to put in place the logic of "because I say so", capable of performing the Nietzschean "will to power" that the Nazis transformed into a slogan. However, it is absent in such clamorous issues like abortion, where it is clear that the "right to decide" of the mother is not reason enough to impose itself over the right of the child.
Anyone doubtful could denounce a certain socialist flavour in an approach to freedom subordinated to justice; but then you have to conform the latter with another value that serves as the chemical reagent under whose influence the political philosophy of each person is discovered: truth. Socialist justice is a fiction; a rationalisation of envy and resentment made to give a moral backing to instincts of hatred. In contrast, the aspirations and rights defended by liberalism must be built on the honest recognition of what reality has and what it has not. Hence, Catalonia as oppressed, trampled by Spain, a victim of imperialism, plundered and subjugated, cannot benefit from the privileges of justice and, consequently, of freedom, for a simple reason: because it doesn't exist.