Apart from previous constitutions such as the Charter of Bayonne and the Royal Statute, Spain has had six constitutions: the constitutions of 1812, 1837, 1845, 1869, 1876, 1931 and the 1978 current one. Primo de RiveraI have resisted for a long time and you are flying.
The 1978 Constitution surpassed them all.
It is true that mere duration does not say much about the character of any law to begin with. But the resilience of this constitution, which is democratic and social, is an authentic hazaña: it was drafted, it was debated, it was voted on and it was debated for decades by ETA militants and some coup plotters. And it allowed us the longest stage of social progress in freedom.
Those enemies of freedom have nothing to celebrate. Sometimes people who swear to the Constitution only “out of legal imperative” celebrate this result if they demonstrate their generosity and aspire to reinvent it from within. However, we can and must celebrate this project, so many people believe that the text is enough to highlight the problems of the nation, because people are eager to reform it through the processes established in the same way.
No, if there have been appalled criticisms of the literal content of this constitution, no further proposals are made to improve it by reforms in the constitution, as is usually said Alfonso Guerraor with constitutional reforms as others prefer. But with your imperfections, as it corresponds to the whole human body, ahí sigue, signatures like the best rational order of liberty that we have yet met with the Spaniards.
The survival during these four great decades of constitutional order does not come from the text of our Carta Magna alone. Good institutional engineering is of course essential. But this text alone cannot provide all that democracy-building requires. This, in addition to institutions and laws, presupposes some basis for what is being built.
Fathers of the Institute who work on it.
Además de contar con leyes e institucións, democracy is based on social infrastructurewith social homogeneity such that the existence of a person is possible nosotros; something that cannot be created where social and economic aspirations are crushing or lacking a common history, language and national feeling (Bökenförde, Studies on State Derecho and Democracy). At this point the path we were looking for was still wide.
Junto a esa infrastructura social democracy specifies a ethos democratic, formed by certain habits, customs and values internalized in the majority of citizens. Democracy can only gain, decline John Stuart Mill (Representative of El Gobierno) managers and citizens are willing to accept the system and have the will and ability to fulfill the duties and functions that their maintenance requires.
Without this social infrastructure and without this democratic ethos, the most perfect text of the constitution is an empty space which, as happened with the Weimar Republic and our republic, is unable to withstand the attacks of its enemies. Ambas Repúblicas, as they said and not always fairly, were democracies without citizens.
“Finally, the vast majority of citizens understand that turnover is an inevitable consequence of political pluralism.”
Well, they are part of that social infrastructure and that ethos democratic people facilitated the drafting of the constitution for four decades.
It was at the very moment when the parties and citizens were adopting the sentiment of political pluralism, which was mentioned in the primary article of the Constitution. Both assumed that any mayor’s decisions are always provisional and subject to change by other mayors.
One after the other over four decades, we were used to seeing all the derogated presidents graciously congratulating the victor. And finally, the vast majority of citizens we care about that alternation is an inevitable consequence of political pluralism.
But unfortunately everything before looks more like today’s world.
Since a few years ago, and especially in this 15th Legislature, instead of pursuing politics as a disposition and ability to compromise between different parties, the political parties have turned to politics of restraint, politics as war, fury between blockades. If you build walls that drop much higher and react trenches that drop even deeper.
At times, the parties seem to imitate, with their language and their actions, those “cabileñas” of those who spoke Ortega and Gasset and I make sure I hear the falling feeling even more amused by the words o Larra: “We are not a society, but a battlefield.”
It is as if, step by step, the channeling of political life is seeping through our society and weakening the political culture that we have created and which has been completely absent for the last four decades.
Let us celebrate this heartfelt anniversary of the Constitution with heartfelt feelings.
On the one hand, pride in the path we took when we were born.
On the other hand, the feeling of insecurity that this XV Legislature creates. Our problems are not in the text of the Constitution, until it is fulfilled and in the deterioration of the civic culture of liberal democracies.
So yeah, no if you do it again ethos the democrat who has begun to emerge from Transition, if he continues to build walls and dig trenches, the landscape we are striving for by the end of this legislature will be devastated.
A more divided and oppressed society, a broken constitution, a government that passes through parliament, a dissolved parliament, a modified judiciary, regional and national government at war…
at the end the breakdown of the constitutional order, which will be difficult to reverse in the future.
“How hard it is to build politics. And how easy it is to destroy it”
How hard it is to build politics. It includes creative abilities, patience, integrative will, vision of the future and a democratic mentality in which it is essential compared to others. And how easy it is to destroy.
They are words Francisco Tomás and Valientegreat professor, president of the Constitutional Tribunal, man of the state and socialist without a carnet asesinado por ETA made exactly three years ago.
He lives on with his master’s degree. Y de sus Complete works I take these words from a wise man who says this:
“The present moment seems more valid than a civilized battle for power within one rules of the game, within one law, which is not only the right side until there is anything from the preservation of what we hold. Nadie wisely stopped the trend of destruction. Nadie realized that you start a fire, it spreads if it prevents effective short fires its implacable march… Who will win with it? Why is it possible to vote when the state is despicable, politics is devastated, parties in internal and external elections and institutions are discredited? If we go this way, we will lose everyone.”
They are words that, even though they were written in 1996, need to be rethought today as we celebrate the resistance, exceptional in the history of Spain, to this constitution of which we are proud.
And before the clouds gather over our constitutional order of late, it is best to adhere to the principle of the oldest wisdom once said by Professor Tomás y Valiente: “People must defend the Law with the same passion that defines its murals”.
*** Virgilio Zapatero is Rector Emeritus of the University of Alcalá.
Leave a Reply