In my generation, almost every person with a liberal education had been taught two phrases. One of them was “paradigm shift.” It had been coined by Thomas Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). It was a comforting thought, usually taken to mean that smart people could always completely change the way they thought, revolutionize everyone’s lives, and keep the miracle of progress going. The other phrase was “the tragedy of the commons,” which came from a 1968 article of the same name by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, itself based upon an English economist’s 1833 essay, which had coined the term. The idea was that every individual, following his own self-interest, would seek to put more animals on a common pasture, so destroying it. To be fair, Hardin regarded this as an argument for declaring natural resources to be common resources and so preventing their ruthless exploitation. His only error was to call the exploitative way “the commons.” I said the phrase to a well-educated colleague, referring to Leitza, and he responded, without letting me finish my sentence, “Ah, the tragedy of the commons!”
In Leitza, at least, the commons was not a Hobbesian free-for-all, but a carefully and exactly delineated compact. The 2015 revision of the Ordenanza de comunales defines who can have what common rights, how they are apportioned, what price or labor may be attached to each, and what will happen if someone ignores the law. The law covers nine legal-sized, single-spaced pages.
Common land is subject to all the same pressures of greed, of scheming and finagling, of nepotism, of good-old-boy favors as is any other system of land tenure. Also, as Inaque Iriarte Gona showed clearly in his Bienes comunales y captilismo agrario en Navarra, 1855–1935, the fact that particularly in the mountainous northwest of Navarre more than 97 percent of the land was held in common well into the twentieth century did not mean that the commons was an egalitarian paradise. The people who had the larger herds tended to get the better pastures, and you could horse-trade some rights on land you did own—the trees on your property, for example—for more rights on the common pastures. The well-off tended to remain so, but the poor never froze or starved. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the United States, “It may not change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.”
When in 1855, the newly aggressive national liberal government in Spain decided to assert itself, it did so with typical bluntness. It decided to imitate the English and seize the common lands. What the English had euphemistically called “the enclosures”—where lands held in common or by religious institutions were taken for private sale—the Spanish called frankly the seizures: the desalojamientos, or literally, the “throwing off the places.” Paradoxically, however, where the English enclosures largely succeeded in privatizing the land, the Spanish, at least in Navarre, largely failed. Local authorities were reluctant even to answer the required questionnaires, and when asked questions about what land was commons and what was in private hands, they often said that they just weren’t sure.
In part, this response was intentional obfuscation, but in the main, it was an honest admission that the existing system of the commons was enormously complex. In most places, the municipality ran the commons, but in some it was instead managed by neighborhood associations. There might even be common rights on royal lands, since the kings of Navarre had given the rights to pasture, water, and wood on their land in order to attract settlers, and many of these rights were still presumed. Sometimes, a common right was only for the people of the town, but sometimes for the whole province. To this day, any citizen of Navarre has the right to take his sheep to summer pasture in the calizas atop the Sierra de Urbasa.
Not only that, private land might have commons growing on it, and commons might have privately owned things growing on it. The grass growing on privately owned land might be used as commons. (In return, the owner might get more rights to take his animals onto other common lands.) On the other hand, a person whose house adjoined a fern patch—fern paved the floors of the winter borda—might harvest the fern off the commons for two years running and then assert his right to keep taking that fern for the future. If you planted trees on common land, you might have a private right to them. Suelo y vuelo was the shorthand for this confusing situation. Just because you had a right to the ground (suelo), you didn’t necessarily have the right to what rose from it (vuelo), or vice versa. A parcel of common land might have three different people with three different rights on it: one who got the trees, one who got the ferns, and one who got the pasture. Some of these rights were subject to annual allotments among all residents. Increasingly—particularly as municipalities and the provincial government grew and required larger budgets—rights on the commons might be auctioned for a set period and the proceeds divided between the municipality and the province.
One of the central government’s arguments for the seizures was that they would allow a more rational use of the land. But where the preservation and use of the land is concerned, perhaps rational use is not always the best use. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Spanish historian Joaquin Costa argued that agriculture, pasture, and forestry were better held in common, since only in common could they respond to nature with a suppleness that would allow both communities and their land to prosper. (Hardin would not have disagreed, I think.) The complexity of the system put a brake on rapid change and gave the common owners a chance to consider well what a given use might yield.