It shouldn’t have happened, because the idea of the Estado de las Autonomías was at least as valid as that of the Moncloa Pact and almost as necessary as that of drawing up a Constitution. Perhaps Suárez didn’t know a single word of history, as his detractors repeated, but what he did know is that democracy was not going to function in Spain if it didn’t satisfy the aspirations of the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia to see their historical and linguistic singularities recognized and to enjoy a certain amount of political autonomy. Title VIII of the Constitution, where the territorial organization of the state is defined, attempted to respond to these ancient demands; predictably, its writing ignited a battle between the political parties the result of which was a hybrid, confusing and ambiguous text that left almost all the doors open and which, to be applied with immediate success, would have called for guile, subtlety, a capacity to reconcile the irreconcilable and a historical intuition or sense of reality that from the beginning of 1979 Suárez was rapidly losing.
It all started long before the approval of the Constitution and it started well, or at least it started well for Suárez, who carried off another magic trick in Catalonia: in order to avert the danger of the left, which had won the general election there, forming an autonomous left-wing government, Suárez pulled out of his sleeve Josep Tarradellas, the last Prime Minister of the Catalan government in exile, a pragmatic old politician who at once guaranteed the support of all the Catalan parties and respect for the Crown, the Army and the unity of Spain, so his return in October 1977 meant turning the re-establishment after forty years of a Republican institution into a legitimizing tool of the parliamentary monarchy and into a victory for the government in Madrid. In Galicia things didn’t go so well, and in the Basque Country even less so. Many in the military took the announcement of the autonomy of these three territories to be an announcement of the dismembering of Spain, but the real problems arose later; later and in more than one sense through Suárez’s own fault or that of the General Della Rovere inside Suárez rushing to expel Emmanuele Bardone: given that with manifest incongruence in the Spain of those years nationalism was identified with the left, given that with manifest congruence the left was identified with the decentralization of the state, in part to move closer to the left and in any case so nobody could accuse him of discriminating against anybody — to continue being the fairest, most modern and most audacious — Suárez hurried to concede autonomy to all the territories, including those that had never asked for it because they lacked a consciousness or ambition of singularity, with the corollary that even before the constitutional referendum was held fourteen pre-autonomous governments appeared almost overnight and began to discuss fourteen statutes of autonomy, the approval of which would have required holding in a great rush dozens and dozens of referenda and regional elections in the midst of an improvised blooming of vernacular particularisms and of a latent war of suspicion and comparative injuries between communities. It was more than a secularly centralist state could bear in a few months without threatening to lose its mast, and even the nationalists and the most enthusiastic supporters of decentralization began to sound the alarm at a flight forward in which nobody could glimpse the finishing line and the consequences of which almost everybody began to fear. Towards the end of 1979 Suárez himself seemed to notice that the galloping disorder of the decentralization of the democratic state entailed a threat to democracy and to the state, so he tried to put it into reverse, rationalize it or slow it down, but by then he had already turned into an awkward, no longer resourceful politician, and the attempt to put the brakes on only managed to divide the government and his party and earn him unpopularity that at the beginning of the following year led him to lose in less than a month, successively and spectacularly, a referendum in Andalusia, one election in the Basque Country and another in Catalonia. It’s true that no one helped him fix the mess: by the spring and summer of 1980 it seemed anything was valid against him: instead of trying to prop him up as they had done during the first years of his mandate — because they understood that propping him up meant propping up democracy — the political parties became obsessed with toppling him at any price, not understanding that toppling him at any price meant contributing to toppling democracy; but it was not just that obsession: to articulate the state territorially was perhaps the central problem of the moment, and no other matter laid bare the indigence and frightful frivolity of a political class, which to its cost got embroiled over the course of 1980 in delirious quarrels, unscrupulously chased advantageous positions, encouraged an appearance of universal chaos and won an accelerated disrepute, placing the country in an increasingly precarious frame of mind while the second oil crisis dissipated the fleeting bonanza won by the Moncloa Pact, strangled the economy and left half the workers unemployed, and while ETA tried to bring on a coup d’état by murdering soldiers in the most merciless terrorist campaign of their history. That was the omnivorous soil in which 23 February was born and grew, and Suárez’s clumsiness in managing the start-up of the
Estado de las Autonomías fed its voraciousness more than any of the other clumsinesses he committed at that time. Seen in hindsight, however, it is at least an exaggeration to claim that in those days the situation was objectively catastrophic and that the country was rushing uncontrollably towards its disintegration, but that seems to be what everyone was thinking on the eve of the coup d’état; not just the golpista soldiers: everyone, including some of the few who on 23 February had the courage to come to the defence of democracy from the first moment. On the penultimate day of December 1980 El País depicted an end-of-the-world scenario in which the territorial chaos augured a violent solution; after accusing all the political parties without exception of irresponsibility and reproaching them for their culpable ignorance of the point of arrival of the Estado de las Autonomías, or their interested lack of interest in defining it, the editorial ended by saying: ‘A less serious political decomposition than this one [. .] led Companys to rebel, on 6 October 1934, against a right-wing coalition government, and a Socialist faction to provoke the desperate rising in Asturias.’ Since this was the pre-revolutionary diagnosis of the newspaper that best represented the Spanish left, perhaps we might wonder whether a large part of democratic society was not providing the golpistas with daily excuses to reaffirm their certainty that the country was in a situation of maximum emergency that demanded maximum emergency solutions; perhaps we might even wonder — it’s only a more uncomfortable way of formulating the same question — if a large part of democratic society was not conspiring in spite of themselves to involuntarily facilitate the task of the enemies of democracy.