Happy Constitution Day

 

A flurry of puentes ushers in the holiday season

My plan for staying quietly at home during today's "puente" (although being a Wednesday it can't really be a "bridge" to any particular weekend) was dynamited today by a call from New York friends who have been in Barcelona and are flying home from Barajas tomorrow morning, who suggested that I go out to dinner with them.  So I did end up going into the city center this evening, on El día de la constitución, which is celebrating its 39th birthday today.  As I had arranged to meet my friends in the Plaza Mayor, I managed to make my way through the Christmas market there, which was filled with more crowds than usual, many of them holding sparklers of the kind I fondly remember from my childhood on the Fourth of July, that are now mostly illegal at home.  My friends were stunned by the crowds and noise and sparklers, and remarked that they had had no idea it was Constitution Day (though they had seen the news about the rally in Barcelona).


In return, I was surprised that they hadn't known Constitution Day was coming up, because (as mentioned yesterday) I watch too much TV, and there have been waaay too many specials about the Transition, the writing of the Constitution, the politics surrounding its adoption, its ratification, the Constitutional referendum, etc. all this week, in a run-up to today's celebration.  (Friday is also a puente which means that this is an extremely weird three day work week, in which the days worked are Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.  A teacher who had run across from the Instituto Renacimiento to the cafe on the Calle Castellflorite where I stopped for breakfast on Tuesday morning commented with resignation that her students were all crazy this week given the weird schedule, and unwilling to do any work.  My heart went out to her in true empathy.)  In any case, I finally looked it up, and today is Constitution Day, and Friday is officially a holiday because it's the Day of the Immaculate Conception.  If the Spanish parliament didn't want to officially publish that the constitution had been ratified on January 28 because it seemed inauspicious to begin a new rule of law on Holy Innocents Day, it seems similarly appropriate that the constitution is celebrated not on the day of Immaculate Conception but a few days before, since its conception was anything but immaculate, and involved some very strange bedfellows and mildly dirty politics.  (There's probably a lewd innuendo in there somewhere, but I'm too tired to sketch out the metaphor completely.  Use your imaginations.)

Actually what's celebrated officially today is not the ratification of the constitution of 1978 (on January 27, 1979), or its official publication (on January 29), but rather the national referendum approving it, which was today.  All of the documentaries show similar footage, of the streets of Madrid littered with a blizzard of flyers, and with people staring intently at paper voter lists posted on walls outside polling places, and lines of people stretching around the block with umbrellas and kerchiefs tied over their heads against the rain (since it was one of Madrid's rare rainy days -- I assume it was sunny elsewhere in the peninsula, though probably not in the north, since it seldom is anyway), all ready to (as the grave TV ads from the time say) "fulfill your civic duty and vote freely."  Some of them mention that the voting age had been lowered just a few weeks previously from 21 to 18, which allowed more than two million more Spaniards to vote, many of whom were very excited about it.  The documentary I watched last night showed reporters asking people what they thought of the new constitution, and proving that contrary to what recent results might seem to indicate, electorates are not getting stupider.  Everyone interviewed said that they were going to vote yes because the constitution was "bueno para el pueblo" or because it would "levantar a España."  But when asked what parts of it they liked they tended to say things like "all of it" or "I just think it's good for Spain" or (in the interests of moderation) "it has some good things and some bad things but mostly it's good."  When a reporter pressed one man by asking whether he had actually read the constitution he replied "del todo no, pero algunas cositas."  Not one mentioned a single specific provision.  That could have been caution and the very recent memory of a police state that was still far from dismantled, but it's hard to give that good an imitation of a low-information voter, and in those days before camera phones and youtube I don't think the public at large were that good actors.

What was moving on the other hand were the interviews (mostly from ten and fifteen years ago) with the politicians who sat down together to actually write the constitution, and who steered it through the parliament, and through the referendum whose anniversary is celebrated today.  These were men of strong political convictions, who were willing to take some real risks.  One of them pointed out that the Basque nationalists of ETA and the far right groups like the sinister AAA and GRAPO were between them responsible for one hundred assassinations in the year leading up to the referendum, and that in fact the parliament met to approve the referendum while the corpses of two high ranking army officers were still lying in the street after being gunned down.  All of them knew that the last time there had been real political debate in Spain politicians on the losing side had ended up in front of firing squads.  Moreover, they ranged from committed Communists to old-guard Franquistas who no longer called themselves Fascists simply because the name was not politically expedient, with pretty much everything in between.  And somehow they hammered out something that more or less satisfied most parties, and more or less resembled the constitution of a modern state (enough at least to put Spain on the path to joining the EEC, and thence the EU), and to sell it to the electorate, and the king, and enough of the army that when a few guardia civiles and army officers got the bright idea of a coup a few weeks before the referendum, one of their own ratted them out in time to stop what would have unquestionably been a disaster for Spanish democracy.  On the whole, that seems like an achievement worthy of some sparklers in the Plaza Mayor, and a day off school.

Nowadays, of course, the Constitution is much debated, and the "Regime of 1978" much criticized as being merely a continuation of the dictatorship.  But I would say that the hallmark of all good constitutions is that they can be changed, but not easily, and I think that the idea of considering a constitutional reform now, forty years later, is perhaps wise.  But if the reform happens within the parameters set up by the constitution's framers (whether or not it involves giving more or less autonomy to Spain's different communities, and whether or not it eventually eliminates the monarchy and passes once again to a republic, and whatever else it may eventually do) then the "Regime of 1978" did its job, and did its job brilliantly.

Watching the recorded interviews last night with the (now late) Santiago Carrillo and Manuel Fraga (both of whom were an illustration of the principle that only the good die young, but even the bad die eventually), I found myself thinking about the (possibly apocryphal) last words of John Adams, "Thomas Jefferson still lives," not knowing that Jefferson had died hours before.  It's one of the small neat symmetries of history that Jefferson and Adams died fifty years to the day after the publication of the Declaration of Independence that they had both been instrumental in writing.  Adams and Jefferson are usually described as "bitter" rivals for at least part of their careers, but they had nothing on Carrillo and Fraga, who spent several decades trying to kill each other (in a non-figurative manner, respectively as the head of the Spanish Communist Party, and essentially a Soviet agent, and as Franco's "Minister of Information").  Neither Carrillo nor Fraga could really be described as a good man, much less a believer in democracy (possibly because they had met too many members of the electorate, and gotten way too good at manipulating public opinion to believe that there was such a thing as an educated and rational voter).  But -- like Jefferson and Adams -- they both had some commitment to something beyond purely short term greed....whether it was self-aggrandizement, or dedication to an ideal Spain, or simply a determination to win the game by writing the rules.  And like Jefferson and Adams they lived long enough to see both the success of their brain child and some of the incipient problems, but to die in the hope that the problems would be resolved.

So I think it's good to celebrate Constitution Day.  In the US we celebrate July 4, which is a violent breaking away, and in France they celebrate July 14, which is a violent tearing down.  July is the month to commemorate successful revolutions because "now in these hot days is the mad blood stirring."  It takes a certain character to celebrate a purely civic achievement in the sobriety of the bleak mid winter.  So the sparklers in the Plaza Mayor are not the pseudo-bombs of Fourth of July fireworks, blasting away the already brief midsummer night with "the rockets red glare."  They are fizzing and uncertain attempts to light a candle rather than cursing the winter's darkness.  (Or perhaps, in this country where even atheists are soaked in deeply Catholic traditions, there was a more or less unconscious effort to have the constitution associated with Christmas, the holiday of optimism and beginnings, since Franco literally proclaimed himself ruler of Spain at the beginning of Semana Santa, the holiday of grim blood sacrifice and miserable repentance for sin.)  Complaining that the sparklers aren't the same as the sunshine, and that the Constitution was not a revolution seems to me to miss the point.  The sun will come back in springtime, and the constitution may be reformed.  But you have to start somewhere, and 1978 was the midwinter, when even a little light was something to be grateful for.

So, to all my Spanish friends, Feliz día de la Constitución.  Here's to another forty years of peace and progress, and another forty after that.  (With no interlude between them, of course.  The US had a serious screw up after about four score and seven years, but climate change and global disasters willing, the EU and Spain will see the century mark together without such difficulties.)