You are surprised when you hear fragments of Mariano Rajoy speaking badly of the Catalans in events for Galicians, or you see the Valencian president happy to give us water that does not belong to him, and you wonder if anti-Catalanism will not be a private shale of the Spanish parties that when they turn off the cameras everyone bursts out laughing. When a phenomenon repeats itself without stopping, it must generate some reflection. It is between absurd and alarming that, after the exhaustion of the Process, anti-Catalanism can only seem like empty propaganda, the political equivalent of jokes about leaving the toilet paper roll empty. It is clear that there are much more serious underlying reasons, but we can also relate the fact that anti-Catalanism is still in force with the amnesty discourse.
Anti-Catalanism and jealousy
Anti-Catalanism, like anti-Semitism or any other kind of racism, is best understood with the structure of jealousy. Jealousy is always pathological regardless of what your partner does or feels: it is your insecurities projected onto the other, unable to accept the fact that you can never be completely sure of what the person you love feels about you and there will always be a space of insurmountable uncertainty. In political terms, hatred of the other is a fantasy that whispers to you that everything would be so ideal and so perfect if Catalans / Jews / immigrants did not exist. They are equivalent to, “everything would be fine if I didn’t have that nice co-worker.” In reality, we know perfectly well that societies are and will always be crossed by inequalities and divergences, but we prefer to build a fantasy that blames the other.
The problem of the amnesty discourse
The problem with Pedro Sánchez’s or Yolanda Díaz’s speech on amnesty is that they do not address this gap. Too lenient with the Catalans and too protective with the Spanish, the chant of “coexistence” and “turning the page” is of no use because it contains no vision of the future. In the logic of jealousy, it’s the equivalent of thinking that you won’t get jealous again if the other person doesn’t make a dubious joke or a slightly insinuating look again. Like the relationship between people, the relationship between communities does not work by hiding conflicts or emphasizing the facts as they really happened.
The two formulas for escaping the structure of jealousy
There are two formulas for escaping the structure of jealousy, whether political or personal. One is to work on one’s own insecurities and learn to reconcile with the openness of the world and the freedom of others. This is important and must be done no matter what. The other is as simple but as difficult as setting a common goal. The friction between subjectivities always returns. But if, instead of putting the constitutional vacuum at the center with a more or less cynical and resigned variant of relevance, you propose a cause to fight for together, the differences are retained and integrated at the same time in a direction that makes sense. Anti-Catalanism will continue to be a useful political fantasy as long as the Spanish left only has to offer discourses such as that of coexistence or “que ve la dreta” and is not able to point to a genuinely transformative horizon. Which was, by the way, what independence had before it lost credibility.