The Diplomat in Spain

Melitón Cardona

Former Spain’s Ambassador

imwitted provincial politicians tend to appeal to the supposed “sovereignty” of their autonomous institutions to justify their separatist aspirations, ignoring Carl Schmitt’s wise and synthetic maxim that “sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception” (Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet).

Sovereignty is a basic concept in the theory of the State: the apex and top of a complicated building, its origin is not secular but theological, because its essence lies in not recognizing nor having superior (“superiorem non recongnoscere nec habere”, in the classic Bodino formula), an absolute attribute solely attributable to God of which the Church made its flag in the Middle Ages in its struggle with the Empire.

What Catalan politicians do not fully understand is that it is not enough not to recognize superior, but it is indispensable not to have it, because sovereignty can only become effective if a common social substratum majority of the population of a territory endorses it with its recognition, something that does not happen in today’s plural Catalan society, so the claims that are not based on that premise are mere wishful thinking of people of little intellectual solvency engaged in a journey to nowhere that only the surprising passivity of the Spanish State makes possible. I insist: if sovereignty only consisted in not recognizing superior, there would be a multitude of “sovereigns”, but the fact is that it is not only a question of “not recognizing superior” but of “not having it”.

The attitude of successive Spanish governments to the false Catalan problem is truly incomprehensible: they have never applied the forceful formula that Carl Schmitt’s concept makes explicit and consists of abstaining from decreeing that state of exception that deactivates those adventurous challenges that question the sovereignty of the State. The formula of the German political scientist would prevent them, although, of course, it would not even be necessary to resort to such drastic formulas to do so: it would suffice to introduce in the Organic Law of the general electoral system a norm similar to the Norwegian “Sperregrensen” or to the similar German formula to put an end to the nightmare: a minimum of a 4 percent to gain access to parliamentary representation would put an end to the sinister joke by virtue of which a series of political parties that in the Nation as a whole have, among all, less than 9 percent of electoral support are allowed to mortgage the destiny of the remaining 91 percent. Having said that, the question arises as to what can prevent a very large majority from giving in to the permanent blackmail of a tiny minority: it is not easy to understand the pusillanimity of the governments of Spain in the face of a problem that has a solution that is as simple as it is legally feasible.

No State can tolerate the challenging of its existence as such by a minority fraction of a group of the political class of a part of the territory over which, moreover, international law recognizes its full sovereignty and all the competences deriving from it; furthermore and above all, because no one has the legitimacy to question a centuries-old historical legacy.

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