The debate around Gibraltar (such as there is, because nothing is going to happen) is missing possibly the first Carlist, and certainly the last to date, to have had a national British newspaper column.
Come back, Gerald Warner.
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Something tells me you have more than a few views of your own about Carlism.
ReplyDeleteA section of Carlism has swung firmly to the Left since 1971, in observing how capitalism corrodes to nought all four of Dios, Patria, Fueros and Rey.
ReplyDeleteThe difference between the left-wing and the right-wing Carlists is fundamentally strategic, about how best to adhere and attend to the Classical, Biblical, Medieval and Early Modern heritages that define the traditions deriving from disaffection with the events of 1688, 1776 and 1789.
Those traditions emphasise the indispensable role of the State in protecting against the market everything that conservatives seek to conserve.
They offer perennial critiques of individualism, capitalism, imperialism, militarism, bourgeois triumphalism, and the fallacy of inevitable historical progress.
They uphold the full compatibility between, on the one hand, the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and, on the other hand, the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.
Among the expressions of those traditions are the trade union, co-operative and mutual, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Guild Socialist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and many other roots of the British, Irish and Commonwealth Labour Movements.
Variously, those roots have been embedded in, have been fed and watered by, and have grown into economic and wider patriotism locally and nationally, proud provincialism, worker-intellectualism, and organic working-class culture and self-organisation in town and country.
Don Carlos Hugo and the Carlist Left had to look to Tito's Yugoslavia, a much-mourned entity with no shortage of good points, for the Libertad, Socialismo, Federalismo, Autogestión necessary in order to safeguard, and be safeguarded by, Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey.
In Britain, we also had and have much to learn from the past achievements of workers' ownership, self-management and profit-sharing within a multinational state which pursued a strongly multilateral and pro-peace foreign policy while eschewing weapons of mass destruction and transnational military power blocs, and which included both culturally Christian and culturally Muslim places and peoples.
Not for nothing did the words "As a Croat and as a Catholic" have to be excised from the official record Tito's words to Pope Paul VI when, in March 1971, the Holy Father received him in audience.
But we never entirely needed the Yugoslav witness in quite the same way, staunchly Anglophile though it was, and perhaps for that very reason: rather, Yugoslavia needed, and knew that she needed, the British witness.
Our own Libertad, Socialismo, Federalismo, Autogestión. Not to say, our own Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey.
For the ideological no less than the dynastic cousins of the Legitimists and the Carlists were the Jacobites.
Far from the centres of power, among the more or less politically excluded subcultures of Catholics, High Churchmen (and then first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics, as well as Scottish Episcopalians), Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers, there persisted an ancestrally Jacobite disaffection with the legitimacy of the Hanoverian State, of that State's Empire, and of that Empire's capitalist ideology.
That disaffection produced the American Republic, where Stuart-granted Fueros were very much to the point, as were such concerns again in the states' demands for the ecclesiastical and other protections set out in the Bill of Rights.
In the Old Country, it produced Tory action against the slave trade, Tory and Radical action against domestic social evils, Tory and Radical extensions of the franchise, the creation of the Labour Movement, and the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars.
Radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy. It still does.