The End Of The European Model?

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Written by Guido Angelo Ramellini

The signs are many: the resurgence of fascism, unbridled individualism, the absolute domination of economic power over political power, racism, exploitation, poverty?

The signs, more or less strong, are everywhere and the European economic and social model is crumbling in all its versions: the Christian democratic, liberal and socialist versions. With all their limitations, the welfare models of Old Europe, its imperfect democracy, always under the tutelage of the American Friend (but has everyone forgotten the Stay Behind networks?), left room for hope that there might at least be a rational response to the looming crises. Like the unpresentable communism of the USSR, the European model continued to act as a competitor (certainly not as an alternative) to the savage Anglo-Saxon capitalism. And now?

Beyond the inefficiency of the legislative and executive powers, beyond the mediocrity exuded by today’s politicians, with minimal and often ephemeral exceptions, the symptoms of gangrene are evident in the judiciary and the media.

The Spanish state in this respect is a paradigm, but this should not surprise us, given that it is unique among all the countries that have suffered a dictatorship. In Spain there has never been a change of economic, political, military or legal elites, not even apparent or partial. The timid transition to democracy that the current Constitution supposedly represented, with the yoke imposed at the dictation of the outgoing Franco regime, did not affect the deep state, the powers that be, the spheres where the law is decided and interpreted at will.

Cases of espionage against any opposition, whether political, regional (the Catalan case now, the Basque one for many years) or even cultural, the repulsive impunity from the royal family to the corrupt and corrupters, even during the pandemic, the coup declarations of a significant part of the military commanders, the annulment of any proposal for parliamentary investigation are the order of the day. All this with the absolute complicity of the high judiciary and the national press. This press is always ready to slam, on the front page of the newspaper, the enemy of the homeland manufactured with communicative engineering, but later, when it is shown that all the accusations were false, they are denied in a small news item or not denied at all.

As Rafael Correa said recently on Televisión Española, talking about the control of the media by the economic corporations: “freedom of the press means communicating what the owner of the channel freely decides”.

With regard to Spanish justice, the sentences against Catalan politicians are also emblematic: judicial harassment of a proposal for self-determination that should be addressed through political negotiation and not through court rulings. It is enough to review the statements of the UN Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty, or the responses of the courts of other European states that have refused to extradite Catalan politicians exiled in their countries due to the lack of judicial guarantees in Spain.
In this context, the role of the European Parliament and the European Court, subsidiary to the raison d’état of each of the states, is regrettable. This conniving behaviour is unworthy of the power entrusted to them.

It is not that the Belgian, Swiss, Scottish or German courts, which opposed the inconsistent justifications for the extradition of exiled Catalan politicians, are the paradise of the just. Simply put, magistrates in states with somewhat more mature democracies have a different dignity, often more corporate than deontological, but still capable of a lesser degree of servility. They have a different conception of their role, which is that of a buffer: to block any drift towards the too acidic or the too basic, to maintain neutrality. Chemical, of course, not ideological: that would be too good!

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