The Dark Side of Podemos? by Booth Josh; Baert Patrick; & Baert Patrick

Author:Booth, Josh; Baert, Patrick; & Baert Patrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

4 Imagining the political past

Teasing out the similarities between Weimar Germany and contemporary Spain may help explain why the Podemos intellectuals appropriated certain aspects of Schmitt’s thought. Doing so goes some way to explaining why Schmitt’s writings might have resonated with them as readers, and why left-wing variants of some of his political solutions might have seemed appealing. It is not too difficult to see how Schmitt’s opposition of the sovereign people to the liberal elites, his emphasis on public and collective politics against a narrowly economised life, and his relegation of the constitution to a position below the people’s will all fit quite widespread political narratives in contemporary Spain, as they did in Weimar Germany. But there are other aspects of Schmitt’s thought taken up by Podemos that seem anathema to a mainstream progressive political force operating under conditions otherwise so unlike those Schmitt lived through. Among these are his assertion that violence is beneath all politics and the bellicose metaphors that follow; his conviction that enemies must be excluded; and his emphasis on specifically pro-national patriotic sentiment. Spain is not, as Weimar Germany was, in the grips of an armed power struggle between extremists and moderates. It has not recently been a belligerent in a global war. But there is a historical narrative at play in Spanish politics that, once better understood, makes Podemos’ appropriation of Schmitt’s ideas both less puzzling and all the more interesting.

Something of this narrative is woven through the biography of Juan Donoso Cortés, who Schmitt refers to as “one of the foremost representatives of decisionist thinking” (Schmitt 2005, pp. 51–2). Via Cortés, this historical narrative about Spanish politics may even have influenced Schmitt’s view of Weimar Germany—which raises the possibility that Schmitt’s work is intrinsically keyed into Spanish political narrative structures. Cortés was born in 1809, the year after the French invaded the Iberian peninsula and deposed Ferdinand VII, who had been King for only forty-eight days following his father’s abdication. Napoleon—by now an enemy of the Pope—had installed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the Spanish throne. Out of the resulting opposition to the Bonapartes’ six-year rule emerged Spain’s first attempt at sovereign government by an assembly of representatives: the Cádiz Cortes. In 1810 the Cortes—composed of nobles and clergymen but also liberal middle-class intellectuals such as Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos—met for the first time. From the outset its members proposed that the Cortes, rather than the King, should be considered sovereign, since the Cortes represented the people. It was the people, “the nation”, not the monarch, who had sovereignty over all the kingdoms within the Monarchy of Spain (Cádiz Cortes, 1812). With a liberal majority, the Cortes was able to enact the Spanish Constitution of 1812, which sought to limit the executive powers of the monarchy, subjecting them to parliamentary scrutiny. Article 172 of the 1812 constitution details “restrictions upon the regal authority”. It specifies that under no circumstances can the King prevent, suspend or dissolve the meeting of the Cortes, nor

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