Watching the scenes of violence on the part of the Guarda Civil trying to break up referendum procedures held on Sunday in Catalonia was like watching a horror movie about Europe’s fascist past. Has the central government in Spain gone utterly mad and taken up General Franco’s mantle in dealing with something it does not like?
Quite independently of whether Catalonia has a right to break away from Spain, no central authority has any legal right to send out the Guarda Civil, which is constitutionally established to protect the people, to put on their riot gear, as if the people were rioting, to protect their own identities behind helmets and visors, and then to terrorise and intimidate people by attacking, kicking, hitting and otherwise assaulting them when exercising their constitutional and fundamental right to assembly, and to express their views on any matter whatsoever.
Furthermore Spain’s Constitutional Court may pronounce itself, rightly or wrongly, on the constitutionality of any eventual independence declaration by Catalonia. But it would certainly be wrong in declaring that the people do not have a fundamental right to express themselves on the issue.
In a more perfect world built upon democracy and the rule of law, after the Guarda Civil violence, which was even directed against local police and fire fighters, who stepped in to try and protect people from being assaulted, the central government of Spain would immediately be forced to resign, Brussels would issue a strong condemnation of the violence, and demand that the thugs in the Guarda Civil be immediately brought to justice.
The new Spanish government and the Constitutional Court would then revisit and study the United Nations Charter, notable its opening article 1, on the right to “the self determination of peoples”. The hard reality is that what was sauce for Kosovo and the Balkan States, in terms of international law, remains sauce for any other region in Europe. If you lay your bed, you lie in it.
When Napoleon’s forces were defeated at Waterloo in 1815, Europe was composed of many small states that eventuality coalesced into larger nations throughout the 19th century, which also saw a massive colonisation drive that spanned the world from Europe, reaching across Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Some of these nations became large empires that came head to head in two world wars in the following century. In 1945 the United Nations Charter introduced article 1 that allowed a dismantling of such empires on the basis of the Right to Self Determination of Peoples. But at the time no one thought that this would also impact upon the big nation state, that itself had grouped together many smaller states. Do such people not also have a right to more autonomy and even full independence if they so wish?
The bitter irony is that while regions are denied more autonomy and independence, national governments are actually losing their own to transnational organisations
At a time when Europe is dealing with other pressing issues, this is yet another elephant in the room that is either being ignored by big government in Brussels, or suppressed by biased national courts and governments, that choose to use might to determine right.
The root cause of a lot of civil discontent is indeed the rise of big government. To add insult to injury, the bitter irony is that while regions are denied more autonomy and independence, national governments are actually losing their own to transnational organisations that, courtesy of secretly negotiated trade treaties, can now sue them for millions of euros for passing sanitary, environment or consumer protection laws that might eat away at their staggering profits; profits, I might add, that are usually safely ensconced in some tax-free havens away from national tax collectors.
Yet we are then baffled by the thought of regions wanting to break away and regain more freedom from big government, and maybe also big business that is smashing small and medium enterprises that have been the backbone of the European economy. People are getting poorer while multinational corporations are getting bigger than we could ever have imagined, and governments are getting more distant from the people who elect them and support them with their taxes.
I am no populist. But neither am I a supporter of so-called free trade which is not actually free, but mushrooms into monopolies, cartels and big company bullying, of alleged democratic institutions which fail to follow the principles of transparency and the rule of law, or of an ever growing military constantly crying wolf, which seeks its own expansion as it lies in bed with the arms industry, with its generals adopting a revolving door policy as they seek jobs in the latter when retiring from the former.
And certainly I am no supporter of police institutions and civil and national guards who abandon their mission to protect people, and instead turn on them like rabid dogs at the bidding of their paymasters. Was this not the fascist way? What has changed for us to now look the other way as they brandish their batons?
If we are to have a new vision for Europe in this new millennium, we must go back to basics. Gautama Buddha once said that whenever he felt lost and down, he would go back to basics, as if he were starting his spiritual practices anew, to remember the lessons he learnt.
Europe, and all its nations, need to go back to the United Nations article 1. They need to listen to the people, and respect their rights and their needs. They need to have the courage to stop the haemorrhage of finances being amassed by the very few oligarchs, to the detriment of the many. And they need to let the people express themselves without fear of police thuggery, whether it is about self-determination, autonomy, secret trade deals with built-in Trojan horses, or anything else they might deem important.
When it comes to the crunch, the state either serves the people, or the people the state. The first is called sovereignty of the people, the second is called serfdom. Historically Europe has always reinvented itself every 80 years or so, and whenever reform has been suppressed, it has always led to war, revolution, or both.
We are once again at the crossroads. Politically we can choose to be a Mount Etna or a Mount Vesuvius. If true and effective reform does not flow regularly down the political mountain scape, and is suppressed, it will remain bottled up until it blows its top.
Rodolfo Ragonesi is a lawyer and researcher in international affairs.