Theology of the Fatherland. We are arriving, friends, at the ultimate consequences of the contractualist and voluntarist thesis of Juan Jacobo Rousseau. We are arriving at its ultimate consequences, as a notable and very serious forgetting that man, from nothing, has no right to existence; that children do not choose their parents; and that citizens do not opt for a determined fatherland, because existence, filiation, and nationality are given to us directly by nature. Here there are no voluntary decisions.
That’s why he was right, very right, José Antonio when he told us that the fatherland is not a contract, but the fatherland is a foundation, and, consequently, the political treatment of the fatherland cannot be equated to the legal treatment of a contractual business. He was certainly right Raimundo Panikkar when he said that we do not have a fatherland, but we belong to it. We belong to it so much that, when the tradition is forgotten, which is what gives identity and continuity to a fatherland, and when we want to dispose of our fatherland or a part of our fatherland, with amputations and mutilations, believing that the fatherland belongs to our patrimony, we are acting contra natura.
The great tribune of traditionalism said that a fatherland is not a simultaneous social whole, but a continuous social whole in which past generations, the present generation, and future generations are integrated. That’s why we have never tired of repeating that Spain, the fatherland, is a unity of history, of coexistence, and also a unity of destiny.
And when it is not thought this way, when the fatherland is not conceived as a foundation, when it is considered that the fatherland is something contractual and negotiable, what happens is what the great Uruguayan friend Álvaro Pacheco Seré asks. When one asks: is there one or two Spains?, and asks if Spain is a problem, as Pedro Laín Entralgo asked, or a historical enigma, as Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz called it in a book. When it is asked if there are sufficient reasons for Spain to continue living, if the hour of finis Hispaniae has not arrived…
We, true Spaniards; we who love Spain; who love Spain deeply; who want Spain to continue living; who want Spain to be great and free; who want Spain to be a unity of destiny in the universal; who want to live in order, in peace, and with work. We, standing up before those who call for the finis Hispaniae, we rise, we raise the flag, we intone the hymn of Spain, and we enlist in the ranks of a Spanish front, which in the face of finis Hispaniae shouts that brave cry, that noble and venerable cry of Santiago and Close Spain!
(Blas Piñar, excerpt from the speech on January 26, 2003, at the Palacio de Congresos de Madrid)