Professor Josep Gifreu argues that in the context of globalization, the central role of the State is as the "nation's police". The on-going trial against the Catalan social and political leaders in the Supreme Court - and the role of the police in it - is clear evidence of this. Here is an English translation. I hope the author and the newspaper don't mind.
Click here
if need be to access the whole text.
Click here
if need be to access the whole text. The judges' discourse
JOSEP GIFREU - JOURNALIST AND EMERITUS PROFESSOR, U.P.F.28 març 2019
The judicial discourse has managed to become part of our lives. In the end, we shall all be legal experts, especially in procedural law and criminal law. The permanent sight of judges, courts and pro-independence defendants on the day-to-day screens offers us an eloquent iconographic metaphor for the metamorphosis of the (Spanish) State and of nation-states in general. I write this comment still unde the impact of the grotesque testimony of the witnesses of the Civil Guards in the "State trial" (in Salellas' wods) against the [Catalan independence] process. Grotesque? Not so much ... Their hyperbolic versions of the climate of violence and hatred in the 1 October concentrations are part of the ritual: they exaggerate so as to better represent the role of the prosecution. All they do is to support the prosecutors' narrative, which at the same time has to uphold the investigating judge's original version. In the new paradigm, the police are not limited to overseeing public order and the safety of citizens: they are primarily the executing arm of judicial orders. The police are ultimately at the service of the judiciary, more than that of the Interior Ministry. Rajoy, Santamaría and Zoido confirmed this with their evasive replies during their testimonies.
This transformation of the role of the police is the visible face of a deeper and more transcendental transformation of national states. What is left of the national state in the current phase of globalization? As scholars of globalization from Wallernstein to Beck, from Bauman to Castells, have warned, national states have undergone a progressive rolling-back of sovereignty: either by the delegation of powers to supra-state political, economic or military bodies (European Union, WTO, IMF, NATO, ITU, etc.), or by the unstoppable penetration in national markets of transnational operators and capitals.
In the con text of the current second globalization, nation-states are being driven to turn into "cultural states", as Marc Fumaroli predicted years ago. Their policies tend to concentrate on the powers that globalization (still) has not snatched away from them. The trend seems to lead states towards the defence of the "national culture" (borders, citizenship, language, heritage, education, religion, traditions, "national" parties ...). In this sense, and as I have argued on other occasions, the central role of the state is as the "nation's police". It is up to the state to define what is to be understood by "national identity". And once defined - Constitutions lay it down -, the imagined nation crystallizes in the legal set-up. The longing for (national) sovereignty is concentrated in the particular right that the state will bring to the fore to defend the nation. Hence its weakness and its strength: it is weak as a state compared to other states and markets; and it is powerful in its zone of reservation and cultural-national comfort.
Among us, Rodríguez-Amat has theorized on how to understand the fundamental role of the state in the "protection" of the nation through its enunciative devices, among which the function of the legal set-up stands out. Most contemporary nations struggle to achieve what is called "the definitive match of the legal set-up and the nation". If the state succeeds, the effectiveness of the legal set-up represents the historical success of the nation. In other words, it is definitely the legal set-up that gives meaning to, and articulates, the nation. Has the kingdom of Spain achieved this?
The (court-based) policy followed by the Rajoy government in relation to the "events of October" 2017, which have culminated in the Supreme Court trial, fits perfectly inside this theoretical framework. The Rajoy executive transferred the defence of the (Spanish) nation to the courts: it gave the investigating judge the legal power not only to exercise "legitimate" violence against the defendants, but also to generate the "legitimate" discourse on the repression of the political cause for independence, going so far as to deride and violate fundamental rights - speech, demonstration, privacy - in favour of a "higher value": the negation of any nation other than the "Spanish nation" within the country. The invocation of the legal set-up to defend the (unquestionable) unity of the (Spanish) nation has been a permanent leitmotiv of all the State institutions.
This State (as the philosopher Marina Garcés reminded us, when Article 155 and the 21 December elections were imposed; and now, with all the campaign against yellow ribbons and the other threats) has no qualms about turning the "permanent exceptionality" into the norm.
Cap comentari:
Publica un comentari a l'entrada