The New Law, the New World Order, and the Cultural Revolution. I

The New Law, the New World Order, and the Cultural Revolution

By Alejandro Ordóñez Maldonado 
Professor of Philosophy of the Law and of Constitutional Law at Universidad de Santo Tomás in Bucaramanga, Colombia


Lecture delivered at the Aula Máxima de las Universidades Católica y Piloto in Colombia, on occasion of the visit of Prince Sixto Enrique de Borbón y Parma during the Foro Internacional Universitario - Identidad y Legado Histórico on February 4, 2005

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

I. The Spanish Heritage of our Juridical Institutions

When I was invited by the organizers to participate in this Forum, several were the topics that came to my mind and I pondered for several days before choosing the definitive one I am going to present to you today.

I had first chosen a topic related to the juridical heritage of Spain in America, I had intended to point out that juridical institutions had disappeared with the advent of the Republic, which many years later returned to our code in a traumatic way. It would suffice to cite some of them:

• The eight-hour workday: 250 years before the issuance of Decree 2663 in 1950 we could find it in the Leyes de Indias.
• The action to protect fundamental rights: 311 years before it got consecrated in our Constitution of 1991; one century before the Declaration of the Rights of Man in the Virginia Constitution, it had already been contained in the Leyes de Indias under the name of 'recurso de amparo', to guarantee the rights if the Indians against abuses by 'encomienda' holders. I cannot understand why these days we find so many teachers of constitutional law or some public law treatise writers who, due to ignorance or on account of sectarianism, pretend to find the genesis of such institution in the Virginia Constitution or in the universal declaration of the rights of man.

Such social policy had no equal in any legal code at the time.

Because of institutions as beneficial as the aforementioned, the process of independence was much more a civil war than anything else, in which frequently the blacks and the Indians almost unanimously embraced the royalist cause, offering their lives in favor of the Crown. Let us recall, among others, the most noted one in history, that of Indian Agustín Agualongo. With good reason, General Joaquín Posada Gutiérrez, hero of our independence and very close to Bolívar, presents us with this testimony beyond suspicion:

"I have said hostile towns because it is necessary that it be known that the independence was unpopular among the generality of the people... the Spanish armies were made up four fifths of sons of the land, that Indians in general were tenacious defenders of the King's Government, as they had the presentment that as tributaries they were much happier than how they would be as citizens of the Republic."

An author in no way suspicious of confessionalism as is Alfonso López Michelsen corroborates this by affirming in his textbook 'Introduction to Constitutional Law':

"The constant preoccupation of Spanish monarchs, especially those of the Austrian Dynasty, to improve the condition of the Indians, in bringing and incorporating them into the Spanish civilization under the tutelage of the Crown, was an incomprehensible purpose for the Anglo-Saxon capitalists which were colonizing North America at the time. The purely practical criterion of these colonizers was to oust the redskins towards the West, removing them gradually from the fertile regions where the skin trade was being profitably conducted. Hence, whereas the Spanish legislation for the indies is an imperishable monument of wisdom, nothing similar exists among the English and Dutch of the time. At the end, the redskins and the rest of the North American tribes were practically exterminated, without a trace having been left there of any civilizing purpose on the part of the British Crown or of evangelization on the part of the Protestant churches."

On the other hand, Baron Alexander Von Humboldt, who traveled through America at the beginning of the eighteenth century brings us this extraordinary testimony:

"The Indian peasant is poor, but he is free. His status is much preferable to the one of Northern Europe. Much happier we would perhaps find the fate of the Indians if we were to compare it with that of the peasants in Courland, Russia, or a large portion of Northern Germany,"

At some moment I was tempted to expound on 'the controls imposed on the administration during the colonial period', a topic often overlooked by our Frenchified writers of treatises on Colombian constitutional history, Enlightenment on that topic came not from France or England; they come from the land of Isabella and Ferdinand. Alfonso López himself in the same cited text says:

"The greatest mirage in this process was the adoption of the liberties consecrated by the Saxons in their public law as something new, signifying a great step forward in the political progress of our institutions. This would be tantamount to accepting that before the independence, the rights of man had not been recognized or respected in America, a precarious and unprovable thesis, in our mind.

That they were not consecrated in splendid constitutions under the name of Rights of Man or of the Citizen is evident, but that they were not recognized is quite debatable, since the existence of a natural law is a distinguishing characteristic of Spanish law. So it happened that many laws which violated these principles remained unapplied, with the classic 'it is obeyed but is not complied with', which was then the brief and summary formula with which an inconvenient law or one contrary to what was understood to be natural law was suspended, just as now a law can de declared inapplicable by the Supreme Court when it is contrary to the Constitution"

I also thought of referring to the consequences which for our nationality had the abandonment of Hispanic law and the adoption of the Anglo-Saxon and North American political doctrine, showing how the latter is the cause of a great portion of our institutional calamities,

But those topics, notwithstanding their academic importance, I quickly discarded, because the presence of Spain was much more than that, the political and social institutions were instruments to insert us in a culture, in a civilization, in the Western Christian civilization. How different is the Spanish presence in America with respect to that of other powers in other territories! While in the former, the conqueror appeared to the side of the evangelizer, in the latter the colonizer appeared to the side of the bottle of whiskey and the factory. While here, as a consequence of the Christian spirit, a new ethnicity emerged, the 'cosmic race'; there, after annihilating the natives, carried those displaced by the Protestant inquisition to consolidate the conquest.

It is necessary to remember that Hispanism cannot be understood away from Catholicity; the principles of the Church impregnated the customs, the culture, the law, education — which was Christian, the family, the social environment, all had that mark.

But now we live in a post-modern and post-Christian time. Modernity notwithstanding, until well advanced the twentieth century, Christian institutions still subsisted which little by little are being dismantled. This seems to be the condition to be admitted to the world village. An efficacious instrument for such dismantling in the countries of Hispanic tradition has been the adoption by the Constitutional Judge, of the school of juridical interpretation known as the new law, which at first sight appears with unspeakable attractions especially for those who, fed up with the strict formalism of positivism, consider with juridical realism, that law is the objectively just; but beyond the appearances, underlies the most radical privatizing individualism, even of the common good; it is the juridical expression of the Promethean sign of the times and of the designers of the New World Order who, by means of such a conception, intend the compulsive homogenization carried to the spiritual, cultural and juridical plane.

This compels me to address the topic which I now present to your consideration, which I ventured to title in a rather suggestive way, 'The New Law, the New World Order, and the Cultural Revolution' which have a close relationship among themselves and share a deep de-Christianizing disposition, and thus are dissolving of the Hispanic traditions.


(to be continued)

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