March 1930. A few weeks after the collapse of the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, the lawyer Marià Rubió i Tudurí and his brother, the architect and garden designer Nicolau, who used the pseudonym N.Mart they finished Spanish State, Public Limited Company . The publisher Antoni López hastened to publish the book with the subtitle “Towards a convenient solution” and the subtitle “Report on the current position of Catalanism.” The essay intended to offer an alternative political proposal to the one disseminated by the propaganda at the service of the Cambó operation, which presented the leader of the Lliga as the decisive man of the moment, called to lead, from the presidency of the Spanish government, the return to the regime constitutional. For the Rubió brothers, Cambó embodied an authoritarian and politically illiberal Catalanism that had failed to establish the conquests of political Catalanism on solid institutional foundations and that had been completely discredited by giving wings to the dictatorship naively thinking that it could put it at the service not only of the bourgeoisie that the Lliga represented, but also of the transversal version of conservative Catalanism that it promoted to shore up its hegemony.
The book began by pointing out the political paralysis in which Catalanism found itself then, as now, pushed in opposite directions by two forces that neutralized each other: sentiment, which, with sovereignty as its orientation, drove it towards separatism, and interest , which, given the economic and international context, advised participation in the State. And he proposed a way out of this blind alley that involved neither the sacrifice of sentiment to interest nor the sacrifice of interest to sentiment. The relationship of Catalonia with the State thought by analogy with the relationship of the shareholders in a public limited company, in which the bond of interests, which does not presuppose love or enter into conflict with the free play of feelings, was the solution of convenience they prescribed.
The Rubió i Tudurí defended a relationship where the bond of interests does not presuppose love
But, beyond the proposal of such a formula, the book tried to warn, looking at the present and reviewing history, not only about the perverse effects of policies that sacrifice interest to sentiment, or vice versa, but also and above all about the folly of the policies that misinterpreted what was of interest to Catalonia because the sentiment offered them a distorted vision of reality and of the possible. Considered from this last perspective, the book still has a rare relevance. Almost a century later, the realistic analysis of the national interest of the Catalans and the possible ways to try to satisfy it continues to be the pending subject of a political Catalanism, which, both throughout history and in recent years, has shown a uncanny proclivity for turning self-defeating decision-making into singular branding.
