Mario Vargas Llosa, a Threat to Liberalism

On November 7, two days before the unofficial referendum on Catalonia’s future was scheduled to take place, the New York Times published an op-ed article titled “A Threat to Spanish Democracy” signed by Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, Núria Amat, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The timing was chosen to counter the impression on U.S. opinion of a people going to the polls despite its government’s interdiction. Publication of such an extreme document by the New York Times is commendable as a way of presenting the two sides of an argument. In this case, however, it is hard not to suspect the privilege enjoyed by a Nobel Prize winner. But if it were just a matter of throwing Nobel Prize weight on the scale of public opinion, it would have been fair to print a concurrent piece informing readers that three other Nobel Prize recipients, Desmond Tutu, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, and Dario Fo, along with twenty-three other celebrities, had just signed a manifesto in support of the Catalans’ right to vote, calling on the Spanish government to negotiate in good faith according to the result. Their terse, sober manifesto is at the antipodes of the article by Vargas Llosa at alia.

The sentiment expressed in their article not only represents a conservative viewpoint; it is antithetical to democracy. This is easily surmised from the reaction to the results of the consultation by the platform “Free and Equal”, of which Varga Llosa and Alvarez de Toledo are founding members and unofficial spokespersons. On November 10, as the results of the voting were announced, “Free and Equal” called for the Spanish prime minister’s resignation. Not for the breadth and depth of the corruption affecting his party, nor for his political incapacity to avert the Catalan crisis through negotiation but for his impotence in preventing the Catalan vote. This charge is bizarre; in fact, it takes a considerable amount of fanaticism just to level it. The Spanish government had actually gone to extraordinary legal and paralegal lengths to prevent Catalans from casting a ballot. It has debased the Constitutional Court and nullified the separation of powers by using it to block a legally innocuous expression of popular opinion. It had used the state apparatus and the conniving media to smirch the reputations of Catalan political leaders. It had threatened to prosecute anyone aiding and abetting the exercise of the right to vote. It had massed police forces including armored vehicles in Catalonia to intimidate the population. At the last moment it tried to use the courts to shut down the polling stations and ordered the police to collect the personal data of the volunteers at the tables. And the day after the voting, the General Attorney’s Office initiated the formalities to press criminal charges against Catalonia’s President and three members of his cabinet. It also considered indicting the school principals in whose premises the voting had taken place. Surely not a lenient performance, yet not enough for Vargas Llosa and his colleagues, who, disappointed that a crackdown did not occur, demand the prime minister’s resignation.

I hope I will be excused if I focus on the Nobel Prize winner. After all, it was his name that was used in an article that could have been signed by any other members of “Free and Equal”. Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo’s earlier attempt to present the Catalan cause as a threat to Europeans (Financial Times, February 19) was effectively dealt with by Mr. Geoff Cowling, former British Consul General of Barcelona, in a letter to the editor on September 10. And since I discussed Núria Amat’s Catalan phobia in Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity, I do not need to go over her curious mix of self-hatred and opportunism again. Vargas Llosa’s case is more intriguing and his social authority weightier. Why does someone who made Catalonia his home from 1970 to 1974 and who has written, “Barcelona made me a writer” turn so fanatically against the people that welcomed and promoted him? I believe the beginning of an answer lies in the title of the article that he threw like a Molotov cocktail from the pages of the New York Times. Qualifying “democracy” as “Spanish” is redolent of other ethnic restrictions of universal concepts. I will not say that it smacks of the ideology that combined rationalism and ethnicity in the notion of “German science”. I am not interested in beating him at his own game. For that is his game when, riding roughshod over historical truth and political plausibility, he asserts that an independent Catalonia “would be subjected to an extreme form of nationalism we Europeans remember all too well. Millions of lives were lost in the nationalist frenzy that tore Europe apart during the 20th century”. Never mind that Catalans were targeted by the Axis forces Vargas Llosa is alluding to, or that many were deported to Nazi concentration camps. “We” remember it so well, that to prevent recurrence of that frenzy Catalans must be kept behind legal barbed wire so as to restrict their dangerous proclivity to govern themselves. And, as one gathers from the shrillness of the warning, civilization must be saved at any cost, if need be through means proportional to the threat posed by the prospect of unqualified democracy.

No, there is no need to trivialize Nazism or to score a cheap point. It is more honest and truer to observe how similar Vargas Llosa’s allusion to a beleaguered ”Spanish democracy” is to Franco’s “organic democracy”, also beleaguered by fantasized conspiracies in the dictator’s mind. Vargas Llosa’s odium is not new. For years he has been an outspoken critic of Catalan policies. As the military pressure let up in the 1980s and the natives started speaking in tongues again, Vargas Llosa felt threatened by the resurgence of the oppressed culture. It was as if the return of the repressed turned the Catalans’ cultural path to dignity and freedom into a shining path of archaic brutality. I am not exaggerating. The claim is Vargas Llosa’s and I have just quoted it.

Vargas Llosa loved Barcelona under the Francoist boot, but his love soured when the city began to reassert its cultural personality, and he has been trying to bring it to heel with party shoes ever since. Over the years he has signed or given support to various manifestos and declarations whose premise is the asymmetry of cultural rights. And because Catalans demand equal standing as Catalans, their detractors resort to charging them with excess. But excess is a relative notion; it depends on a normative criterion. Hence Vargas Llosa is forced to misrepresent the liberality of the norm. He mentions the “pioneering effort to integrate different cultures, languages, and traditions” as evidence of post-Franco restoration of cultural rights. Unfortunately, he does not explain on what the effort consisted, whose effort it was, or why accepting Spain’s multilingualism should have been an effort at all. The extent of that “pioneering effort”, as a cursory reading of the Spanish constitution shows, was to lift the prohibition on the use of Catalan. But it did not spell the end of the attempts to discourage that use and to defeat its socially integrative potential.

Vargas Llosa is no stranger to those attempts. In 2008 he, along with some of the people with whom he has recently launched the “Free and Equal” pressure group, sponsored a proposal to modify the constitution and the statutes of autonomy. Their program: to ensure that no language other than Spanish is required in the national territory, not even in regions with native languages of their own. It is not that the constitution or the autonomy statutes say anything different, but these people are holier than the Pope. They wanted to close the legal loopholes used by the Catalan Parliament to implement an “immersion” system that promotes equal competence in Catalan and Spanish at public schools in Catalonia. This arrangement, repeatedly vindicated by the European commission and the European Parliament, is what “Free and Equal” would like to undo.

It is significant that, in adopting the motto of the French revolutionaries whose centralized regime they admire, “Free and Equal” dropped the term “fraternity”. They must consider it undesirable or at the least impossible under the conditions they stipulate. For the freedom they demand is predicated on Catalans remaining hostage to a majority that is oblivious to the defining principle of liberalism, namely the provision of formal guarantees for the minority. In turn, the equality they advertise is the reiteration of Philip V’s decree of “new foundation” after taking Barcelona by force of arms in 1714. By that decree, the king abolished the Catalan constitution and Parliament, incidentally, the institutions that made Catalonia a functionally independent state whose very existence Vargas Llosa denies. While Philip abolished Catalan freedoms, he gave the Council of Castile jurisdiction over Catalonia and made Catalans “equal” by subjecting them to the restrictive laws of Castile, an “honor” that Franco would again confer on them (law of April 5, 1938) after conquering Catalonia “for Spain”.

If the first casualty of war is truth, then it must also be the casualty of war conducted by other means; for instance, propaganda. But the apocalyptic picture Vargas Llosa painted in harmony with the warnings of the Spanish government to wayward Catalans clashed with the lightheartedness with which Catalans voted. Most did it with a smile and some with a tear in their eye, in quiet homage to those who did not live to see the day when their people would stand up again and defy the state that alienates them. It has happened at other times in the past. The difference this time lay in the discipline with which everyone waited for their turn to cast a ballot into a cardboard box. A simple, unobtrusive rebellion, yet a nightmare for the likes of Vargas Llosa. After voting, some claimed to have done it for their departed ones, so that their sacrifices will not have been in vain.