Individual and collective rights

It should be noted that our political and social thought is personalistic. It holds that the fundamental element is the person, his ability to decide, to progress and to fulfil himself. What Péguy, for his part, and Maritain (in his Integral Humanism), introduced into twentieth-century western thought, and what we believe remains valid.

We reiterate: the priority of the person.

It might seem that this is an individualistic statement. But it is not, because the person has two components, both fundamental: individuality itself, what each one is in essence, and also one’s need to communicate, to interact with others, to share.

Hence, precisely because the priority is the person, so is everything that helps him in his development, everything that empowers him. And this cannot be achieved by the person alone. He needs collective work tools.

For example: Are language or culture strictly individual facts? Clearly, languages are facts of a collective dimension. The same holds for cultures. “Culture is collective”, Wittgenstein said.

There could not be a Catalan – or a Spanish, or a Japanese or a Finnish – culture if it did not have a collective character. Neither language nor culture can be produced or practiced individually. They are collective facts, which require the other, the others, the collectivity. Hence both language and culture are basic needs of the person. Persons have a right to it. A collective natural right, since – we repeat – this can only be exercised collectively.

The defence and perfection of these collective facts – and others such like a sense of belonging, historical memory, a set of values, etc. -, as humans needs and must be preserved and perfected. And the instruments of collective action must be put in place in order to make this possible.

There are countless examples in History in which the decline of what affords human, spiritual and social cohesion, of what affords a conscience of identity and a sense of feeling at home, eventually causes the downfall of people, of persons. Because bonds are lost, complicity is lost, references are lost. So it is entirely legitimate and essential to protect collectivities and to let them have the appropriate tools (political and administrative power to take this action, and thus competencies, material resources, recognition and respect, etc).

References are sometimes made to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in highly individualistic terms that are unfavourable to collective identities. Very much so in the line used by the Spanish right and the left: “territories have no rights, individuals do”. This is an attitude that assumes that Spain and the “Spanish people” have collective rights, but after that there are no valid communities or collectives of peoples. There are individual rights, but not collective rights, because it rejects the existence of a collectivity (such as the Catalan people).

But returning to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is worth remembering article 29: “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible”. That is, the free and full development of an individual’s personality can only exist within his community’s framework. Within the framework of his people, his nation, his cultural and intellectual habitat.

The collective dimension of person is inherent to the human being. Namely, there is no complete individual freedom, nor true equality between persons, nor respect for one’s identity, if the collective rights of peoples and national minorities are not contemplated as well. Group rights are also “human rights”.

The Spanish point of view is: they already have them. The group is Spain. Not Catalonia, because Catalonia does not exist. A Catalan identity does not exist. A Catalan is just a Spaniard, or a person who is registered as a resident in a municipality of Catalonia. Neither the language, nor the history, nor the collective feeling, nor the capacity and will to undertake a concrete project to serve the collective means anything. More precisely: it means they are those of the homogeneous and inseparable State.

This ideological battle – which the CEJP has kept up for a long time–, will have to continue. Now that politically, ideologically and legally Spain seeks to erase, or reduce to next to nothing the existence of an identity, of a nation, of a Catalan people, and hence of a Catalan collective subject with a right to be and to do and to have an outreach in accordance with our way of being.

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We conclude with a transcription of what we said at the aforementioned seminar on the rights of peoples: “In the field of ideas, concepts and doctrines, Catalonia needs the notion of State and the citoyen – by which a Catalan is a gentleman registered in Premià de Dalt and nothing more – to be reversed, or at the very least she needs a thesis to counterbalance it. This is what we need. This is the alarm bell I wanted to sound”.

“An alarm bell that could be summed up in a short sentence: Catalonia has a right. She has a right to what? To decide. Because she is a personality, because she is a subject. It is not what a many people say in Madrid, that Catalonia is not a subject of law, and as such a fiscal balance is not applicable. She can be the object of economic policy, a very fairly treated object. She may be the instrument to ensure that a specific grant reaches those Spanish citizens called Catalans whose boy who has spina bifida, but she herself is not subject to iniciative and responsibility, she has no right to it. We must seek in the intellectual field – and in the political field, evidently – a way to further consolidate this idea that Catalonia has a right”.

What does she have a right to? A right to be what she is. And to decide on everything that is fundamental to her identity, her cohesion and her capacity to serve her people – her persons - effectively.