Published originally in Spanish. Manuel Arias Maldonado. El Mundo
It is inevitable: when the events overflow the law, violence appears. And along with it, the reflections on violence. This has been happening since last Sunday, after the police action to prevent the holding of the illegal referendum. The tension accumulates since then; the Catalan insurrection seems to have entered a revolutionary stage that might well result in a unilateral declaration of independence. In this diabolical spiral of events, the general strike in every revolutionary handbook could not be missed —it is no coincidence that George Sorel conceived it as a great mobilizer myth of sentiments that, by means of violence, prevents pragmatic compromises and establishes a messianist mythology. Anyone who saw a couple of days ago the Mossos of Mataró standing before the crowd to the sound of Els segadors, in a perfect viral representation of the symbolic emptying of Spain, will know that we are slipping into a current radically dangerous. So we have no choice but to discuss violence —a classical theme in history of political thought that, in our democratic perplexity, recovers full validity.
Let us be clear: the rule of law is assisted by the right to employ force in defence of Law. That does not make the employment of force morally desirable, neither it exempts their practitioners from respect the relevant limits according to the context where they carry out their action. If they committed police abuse, they will have to be investigated by the judiciary; that is why we are living under the rule of law. But nobody —leaving sadist pathologies aside— likes the employment of violence. So this debate can be quickly settled. More relevant is discuss about the utility of force, that is, if it serves to the intended end. And here, I am afraid that there is no univocal answer. That will depend on each case and context, on political circumstances under which the force is employed and the manner it is exerted. There are no fixed rules! That is where the true Catalan problem appears: in the complete delegitimization of the state’s power, and therefore of the force that power may exert, to the eyes of approximately two million citizens. We will have to remember it this week, since Article 155 is not some spell able to paralyze the separatist government as if we were in a B-movie. Force is necessary to enforce its application. The distressing images showing how police were expelled from the hotels they were staying at are not suggesting the existence of that force. But it does exist.
So the big question concerning the employment of force by the state within democratic frames is about its justification and effectiveness. On the former, with the support of legislation, there is little doubt. But its effectiveness depends less on the constitutional legitimacy than on the symbolic effects it produces. In that respect, there are reasons to doubt that its employment last Sunday —specially in a digitalized context that amplifies the emotional echoes of images, some of them fake, without any caption— is not counterproductive. Naturally, there are also reasons to doubt that what has happened since then could not happen anyway, but let us leave naivety for another day. Of course, foreign governments and media do an eighteenth-century exercise of hypocrisy by denouncing outside the same they do —and would do again— at home. But that was expected, too. Only one thing has been unexpected: the absence of a consistent government plan. Because the state cannot employ force and not succeed in its goal —in this case, to prevent the referendum. The result has been the erosion of its credibility, the failure of the sovereign. Just put Hobbes and Gramsci to discuss it and you will see how quickly they reach an agreement.
For many, it is another exercise of hypocrisy that the same mossos who evacuated by fire and sword the indignados from Catalonia square in Barcelona are now being glorified as popular heroes after tacitly declaring themselves in rebellion. But it is not so, or not exactly. Rather, it is a case of affective investiture that arises from the delegitimization described above. When there is a break up with the rule of law, the authority of its institutions becomes dependant on perceptions. For an independentist, the Civil Guard is an occupation force, and the mossos a symbol of the future Catalan sovereignty. That is: it is not enough to be right, you have to convince others that you are. And if two million Catalans are not convinced, albeit they were wrong, the state authority is compromised. Weber taught us that violence arranged by the state is based on voluntary or habitual relationships of mandate and obedience. Like it or not.
Now then, it would be equally naive to think that the pro-independence movement does not employ force, even if that force does not materialize in anti-riot gear. By thinking so, we would be ignoring the constitutive role of violence traditionally pointed by leftist thinking —violence as generator of novelties. It is a violence that is sometimes less physical than symbolic, capable of adopting multiple forms: from harassing dissidents to the enforcement of laws that violate the constitutional order. To speak about “the Catalans” or “a one people”, to brand as renegade to those against independence, to break the democratic coexistence on behalf of a non-existent majority or an imaginary affront, to push citizens against the state with a ballot in their hands, to threaten with a unilateral declaration of independence: all of this is also violence. The categories themselves are, as Derrida argued, violent. Saying “Spanish” has become a way to stigmatise the dissenting Catalans. In other words, the separatist movement cannot impart any lesson on democracy, no matter how in love they are with the emancipative narrative that they are telling to themselves. It is understandable: if the spell were break and saw its true face, it would have no choice but to break the mirror.
All of this is, in moral terms, far more serious than the unfortunate excess of anti-riot police. This, nothing more and nothing less, is about a systematic violation of civil rights that culminates in a coup. Or is that pushing a crowd against constitutional order is an exercise on pacifism? All this matters if we link legitimacy to democracy, of course. If we instead we make it derive from the mass mobilization, we will be placed in the bare ground of facts. But it is not the state who does that, but those who raise against the state. And I am afraid that it is the ground of facts —affected unceasingly by the meaning extracted from them—, where we have entered.
We will soon discover that the violence of democratic law is less violent that its absence, if we have not discovered that already. The former is the violence employed to ensure the compliance to laws, and cannot in any way be equated to the violence perpetrated against that same law; ignoring these distinctions is lethal for a democratic regime. That is why is so absurd to keep arguing about the legitimacy of the state’s employment of force. It is its inefficiency what should we worry about. We are already considering exceptional measures. And it is in our interest to know if they would be any useful where apparently there are not lesser evils anymore. It is not a question that can be easily answered, among other things because it requires to ponder whether it is possible to respond peacefully to those who have choose decisionism to impose a sovereign dictatorship. We could comfort ourselves by thinking that history will judge them, were it not for they also have historians. Except that there are realities that can not be embellished.
