Immobile at the center

The struggle for power, anywhere, is also the struggle for the control of words. The one who imposes his verbal categories on the public mind wins. Example: the word austerity. The distance between necessary and proclaimed austerity, which would allow for alternative policies, is tightly conditioned, because the word austerity has won the battle for public opinion. People are accepting it as something inevitable. Austerity is one of the terms of virtue. From it derives a whole chain of complementary words: sacrifice, rigor, responsibility, etc. The propagandists of austerity seem to have forgotten the classic maxim: in virtue as in vice, abhor excess. And though the excess of austerity threatens to doom society to stagnation, there are many - and often contradictory - calculations about the dividends it may produce, which justify the ideological pressure on the citizen.

In the Spanish case, the ideology of austerity has some background music: the song about the inefficiency of the public sector, and of the regional government system as a machine for waste. Any new trial balloon or proposed cutback is accompanied by verbose rhetoric about the incompetence of the public sector, the frivolity of its spending criteria, the uselessness of its investments. It matters little that in this country, private debt weighs far more heavily on our economy; and that the uncontrolled leverage of many companies and the irresponsibility of the financial system, cheerfully giving away money, have resulted in company closures, mass layoffs, unemployment and a throttling of the supply of credit necessary if the Spanish economy is to get back on the path of growth.

The presumption seems to be that political squandering is the only problem. No doubt the functioning of the public sector has to be optimized, and politics has to adapt to the acceleration of world events; but it cannot be the scapegoat. Two years after the first bailouts, Durão Barroso has said what was already obvious: the dividends and securities of the banks have to serve to recapitalize them. Will these words be gone with the wind?

Since the recent municipal and regional elections, the regional government system is again being blamed for all evils. It matters little that the central state deficit is greater than that of the regions; and that part of the central state deficit was rather dishonestly transferred to the regional governments. It's open season on the latter.

What lies behind this rhetoric? The privatization of public services, and what the PP calls the closure of the regional government system - that is, an end to the expansion of regional powers. Ever since the cycle of conservative hegemony began in the 80s, the trend, which came a bit late to Spain, has been the transfer of public services to the private sector. Austerity is a good way to push a little more in this direction. Putting a lid on regional government is also in the air. The original sin is known: there were two regional problems (Basques and Catalans); and to dilute them, 17 regional administrations were created. But the PP is talking about a lid just when the two problems are back in the news. The Basque Country is entering a post-terrorist phase, while in Catalonia there is a growing, though fluid, majority for independence. The center-right Catalan nationalists of CiU say that Catalonia, like the Basque Country, should collect its own taxes. This is hard for a Spanish government to accept, and may show up not only the economic but also the political limits of the system.

Bertrand Russell once wrote of "the Aristotelian conception of the governor immobile at the center, while others orbit around him at variable speeds, giving him a maximum of relative movement. This role is now reserved to our eminent supermen, especially the financiers." He might have written this just yesterday.