Top Quotes: “The New Spaniards” — John Hooper
Introduction
“‘Spain’, according to the projects chief co-ordinator, Professor Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan, ‘shows the largest differences between the basic values of the younger and older generations among the more than 80 countries surveyed. Those differences help explain why José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his government, who have a predominantly young voter base, have put such an emphasis on social reform since coming to power in 2004, to the point that Spain is increasingly being talked of as a future ‘Sweden of the Mediterranean.’”
“Pardamaza is a village 250 miles north of Madrid. All but the last twenty miles from the capital can be driven on a motorway. Pardamaza first got electric street lighting in 2004. Its inhabitants did not have electricity of any sort until 1996.”
“The average height of the ground is greater than in any European country except Switzerland. If you look at a relief map you will see that, with the exception of the Guadalquivir and Ebro valleys and a relatively narrow coastal strip, the whole of Spain is upland. The meseta varies in altitude from 2,000–3,000 feet as one craggy mountain range succeeds another. This gives to it one of its most distinctive characteristics — the almost painful brightness of the light.”
The 20th Century
“During the Second World War, Spain had remained technically neutral while actively favouring the Axis. At the end of the war she found herself in an acutely uncomfortable position. Unlike Britain and France, she was not entitled to the rewards of victory. Unlike Germany and Italy, she was not at risk from the encroaching power of the Soviet Union. The Allies therefore had no incentive for giving Spain aid and a very good reason for denying it to her. In fact, they went even further than that and actually punished the Spaniards for having been taken over by a right-wing dictator. In December 1946 the newly created United Nations passed a resolution recommending a trade boycott of Spain. Coming on top of the deprivations brought about by the civil war, which had cut real income per capita to nineteenth-century levels, the boycott was a disaster — not so much perhaps because of its direct effects, but because it made it unthinkable that Spain should benefit from the Marshall Plan for aid to Europe which got under way six months later.
All the European nations suffered deprivation in the post-war era, but Spain, where the late forties are known as the years of hunger, suffered more than most. In the cities, cats and dogs disappeared from the streets, having either starved to death or been eaten. In the countryside, the poorer peasants lived off boiled grass and weeds. Cigarettes were sold one at a time. The electricity in Barcelona was switched on for only three or four hours a day and trams and trolleybuses in Madrid stopped for an hour in the morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon to conserve energy. But for the loans granted by the Argentine dictator, General Perón, it is possible that there would have been a full-scale famine.
The UN-sponsored blockade was lifted in 1950, but the Falangists’ insular and ineffective doctrines continued to hold sway. For this, Spain was to pay dearly. In spite of the Falangists’ exaltation of the rural economy, agricultural output fell to a level even lower than at the end of the civil war. Industry, immured from the outside world by a wall of tariffs and quotas, unable to buy the foreign technology it needed to modernize or to seek out new markets for its goods, bound on all sides by government regulations, could only grow at a painfully slow pace. National income did not regain its pre-civil-war level until 1951 and it was not until 1954 that the average income returned to the point it had reached in 1936. In the early fifties an attempt was made to ease trade restrictions and stimulate private enterprise, but although it eventually succeeded in boosting industry it opened up a trade gap that rapidly absorbed the country’s foreign reserves. In the meantime, bungling in other areas of the economy led to bursts of rip-roaring inflation.
To the villagers in the poorer parts of Spain — and particularly Andalusia which had been the scene of desperate poverty even before the civil war — the deprivations of the post-war era were the final straw. Individuals, families and in some cases entire villages packed up their belongings and headed for the industrial centres of the north — Barcelona, Bilbao, Oviedo and Saragossa — and for Madrid which, with the deliberate encouragement of a regime which feared the economic prowess of the Basques and Catalans, had ceased to be a purely administrative capital. Once they reached the cities the migrants settled like besieging armies on the outskirts. With nowhere else to live, they built chabolas or barracas (shacks) out of whatever they could scavenge — some breeze blocks from a building site, an unwanted door, a few empty cans and boxes and a sheet of corrugated iron or two to serve as a roof, weighted down with lots of heavy stones to make sure it did not blow away. The shacks were suffocatingly hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter. None had running water, so there was no question of sewerage. Since the shantytowns had sprung up without official permission it was usually several years before the municipal authorities got around to supplying them with electricity, let alone the more sophisticated amenities such as refuse collection or access roads. With grim humour, one of the shanty towns outside Barcelona was nicknamed ‘Dallas — Frontier City’.
The whole idea of migration to the cities ran counter to the Falangist dream of a populous countryside inhabited by peasant farmers each owning a modest but adequate plot of land. At first the authorities tried to put a stop to the exodus by force. Policemen were sent to the railway stations with orders to collar anyone with a dark complexion and a battered suitease and put him on the next train out of town. But it was like trying to turn the tide. In any case, migrants already living in the shanty towns saw in it a way of returning home for a holiday courtesy of the government — all they needed to do was put on their scruffiest clothes, travel a few miles out of town and catch a train coming up from the south.
The authorities later turned to a more sophisticated and successful approach, which was to limit the number of shacks by licensing those that had already been built and giving them numbered plaques. Those that did not have a plaque were liable to be torn down by the teams of municipal workmen — the dreaded piquetes which usually arrived in the middle of the morning or afternoon when the men of the shantytowns were out working, or looking for work. Although the number of licences had to be increased bit by bit, the system made the building of a shack such a hazardous enterprise that their numbers started to stabilize towards the end of the fifties.
By then Franco’s regime was virtually bankrupt. The foreign exchange account was in the red, inflation was heading into double figures and there were serious signs of unrest among both students and workers for the first time since the civil war. It took a long time to persuade Franco that a radical change was required.”
“The short-term aim was to tackle inflation and redress the balance of payments. The long-term objective was to free the economy from the restrictions that had been placed on it by the Falangists. The so-called Stabilization Plan introduced in July 1959 was intended to achieve the first of these goals. Public spending was cut, credit was curbed, wages were frozen, overtime was restricted and the peseta devalued. The Plan achieved what was expected of it. Prices levelled out and the deficit in the balance of payments was transformed into a surplus by the end of the following year. But the cost in human misery was considerable since real earnings were slashed. As a result, many Spaniards set off to find work abroad. Measures to liberalize the economy, and thus achieve the second of the technocrats’ goals, were introduced over a longer period beginning at the time of the Stabilization Plan. Spain was opened up to foreign investment, much of the red tape binding industry was cut away, restrictions were lifted on imports and incentives were offered for exports.
The performance of the economy during the years that followed was dramatic. Between 1961 and 1973, a period often referred to as the anos de desarrollo or years of development, the economy grew at 7 per cent a year faster than any in the non-communist world except Japan’s. Average annual income quadrupled and as early as 1963 or 1964 — the exact moment is disputed — it passed the $500 mark, removing Spain from the ranks of the developing nations as defined by the UN. By the time Spain’s ‘economic miracle’ had ended, it was the world’s ninth industrial power and the wealth generated by its progress had led to substantial improvements in the standard of living.
Spaniards had a better diet. They ate less bread, fewer potatoes and more meat, fish and dairy products. During the sixties, the number of homes with a washing-machine rose from 19 per cent to 52 per cent, and the proportion with a refrigerator leapt from 4 per cent to 66 per cent. When the boom started only one in every hundred Spaniards owned a car; by the time it ended the figure was one in ten. Telephones ceased to be the prerogative of offices, factories and a few wealthy or influential individuals, and became commonplace in private homes — a fact that had a considerable impact on relations between the sexes, which was in turn mirrored in the pop songs of the day. The number of university students tripled, and by the early seventies the infant mortality rate in Spain was lower than in Britain or the United States.
It should be pointed out, though, that one reason why the proportionate increases in all areas were so impressive was that the starting-points were so low. Even in 1973 per capita income was still lower than in Ireland, less than half the average for the countries of what was then the EEC and less than a third of the average in the United States.”
“Immediately after the 1979 election, Suárez set up a new Ministry of Territorial Administration whose principal task was to oversee the transfer of power to the regions. The granting of home rule to Basques and Catalans was achieved with speed and generosity. Both communities gained control of education and won the right to set up their own police forces and radio and television stations. The first elections to the new Basque and Catalan assemblies were held the following year. The two statutes, known as the statutes of Guernica and Sau, were overwhelmingly endorsed at referendums held in October 1979 and came into effect two months later.
Galicia’s home-rule statute, the statute of Santiago, gave the Galicians powers that were almost as extensive as those granted to the Basques and Catalans. However, when it was submitted to a referendum in December 1980, less than 30 per cent of the Galician electorate turned out to vote and of those who did so almost one in five voted ‘no.’”
“By early 1981 a group of senior officers had persuaded themselves that the country faced political and economic turmoil and that the unity of Spain, whose preservation had been entrusted to the armed forces by the constitution, was at risk from the government’s regional policy.
On the afternoon of 23 February, a lieutenant-colonel in the Civil Guard, Antonio Tejero Molina, who had been demoted for his part in the 1978 plot, marched into Congress with a detachment of his men and proceeded to hold almost every politician of note in Spain at gunpoint for the best part of twenty-four hours. Tejero was what he appeared to be — a naive fanatic. But he was merely the puppet of more senior officers — in particular, the commander of the Motorized Division at Valencia, Lieutenant-General Jaime Milans del Bosch, and a former military instructor and personal secretary to the King, Major-General Alfonso Armada. The coup was cut short mainly because of Juan Carlos’s quick wits and steady nerve. Using a specially designed communications centre which he had had installed at the palace to enable him to talk directly to the country’s eleven captains-general, he assured them that Tejero’s action did not — as the plotters were claiming — have his backing. Any captain-general who showed signs of wavering was commanded to obey.
The abortive coup persuaded the incoming government to try to appease the military. The army was given a token role in the troublesome Basque country and plans for reform in a number of areas were either diluted or abandoned. Perhaps inevitably, regional policy was the principal casualty.
In July 1982, the UCD and PSOE signed an agreement setting limits to the decentralization process. It stipulated that, with the exception of Andalusia, which was already so far down the road mapped out by article 151 that it was pointless to try to do anything about it, the regions which had yet to be granted a statute should attain home rule in the normal way. What is more, it was agreed that none of them should get more than the minimum powers set out in the constitution. Any other powers granted during the negotiation of the statute would have to be listed under a separate heading and put into cold storage for at least three years from the date the statute came into effect. The only exceptions to this rule were the Canary Islands and Valencia, for which special laws would be passed giving them rather greater powers than the others, and Navarre which — uniquely — had enjoyed a kind of autonomy under Franco and merely required a law to update its existing arrangements. In just over four years, one of the most centralized nations on earth had been carved into seventeen semi-autonomous administrative units, each with its own flag and capital.”
“Despite the drive towards homogeneity after the coup, the most striking aspect of the new system was the degree to which the powers granted to the autonomous governments varied from region to region. Yet if one were to award points to each of them on the basis of their historical, cultural and linguistic singularity, as well as their degree of enthusiasm for home rule, the result might well be a ranking which would correspond to that of their relative autonomy — the Basques and Catalans pre-eminent, followed at a short distance by the Galicians and Andalusians, and at a longer distance by the Canarians, Valencians and Navarrese, with the rest an equal last.”
“Francoism has not survived as a political movement. And since the history taught in schools usually ends with the civil war, a lot of younger Spaniards have only the haziest idea of who he was. A number of schoolchildren interviewed on radio for a programme in 1992 to mark the centenary of his birth were under the impression Franco had belonged to the then governing party, the PSOE.”
“Many of its distinguishing traits are the result of its having been ruled by one man, not for five or ten or even twenty years, but for thirty-six. Franco’s signature can still be read all over the country he ruled. Spain is unique in being the only country in Europe which developed into a technologically advanced society under the aegis of an ultra-right-wing dictatorship. Ordinary Spaniards first acquired prosperity in a society in which taxes were low, but in which they were expected to buy their own houses, provide for their own futures and pay for their own health care; a society in which trade unions, collective bargaining and strikes were all illegal.
The Opus Dei technocrats who masterminded Spain’s economic ‘take-off did not perhaps succeed in replacing altogether the Spaniards’ traditional disdain for labour with a new — Catholic, rather than Protestant — work ethic. The two attitudes can be seen in daily conflict. But they certainly did succeed in superimposing the one on the other, and in infusing society with an element of the ‘stand on your own two feet’ ethos.
Spaniards tend not to expect from the state the sort of cushioning which is regarded as normal in the rest of Western Europe.”
“It was by no means unavoidable that notorious torturers from the Franco era should have been allowed to remain in the police and, in some cases, climb to the highest levels in the service. Nor was it unavoidable that journalists who once profited handsomely from their collaboration with the Franco regime should have been allowed to carry on seamlessly to become commentators and editors, only too ready to offer their views on how best to run a democracy.”
Contemporary Issues
“It was not until 1988 that taxpayers were asked to decide whether they wanted a share of their contribution to be given to the Church or spent on ‘objectives of social interest’ (i.e. charities). But the share — 0.5239 per cent — was based on an estimate of the percentage of total revenue that would be needed to equal what the Church had received from the state in the year before the new arrangements were introduced. Therefore, only if every single taxpayer opted for the Church would the sum initially allocated to the bishops constitute the resources of similar quantity the state had promised.
In the event, 35 per cent marked their forms in favour of the Church and 12 per cent in favour of the ‘objectives of social interest. But since the government promptly made the total up to the 14,000 million pesetas the Church could have expected to receive had nothing been changed, the whole exercise was pointless. It still is, because while the deadline for the transition from stage one to stage two was postponed, the deadline for the transition to full self-financing was simply ignored.
A Church which has been formally disestablished thus continues to receive a sizeable amount from government funds under a deal that was meant to have become obsolete in 1986. And every year Spaniards go through the same illogical ritual, earmarking funds for the Church, often unaware that it makes no difference to how much the Church will receive.
One effect of this is that Spain’s atheists, Protestants, Jews and Moslems are still having to pay for the upkeep of a religion they do not share. To compensate, the government has undertaken to provide funds to other faiths too, but it means that, rather than shed its obligations to one religion, the new Spain has assumed responsibility for several.”
“As they drive around Spain, tourists are often puzzled to see buildings at the side of the road whose outlines are picked out in vividly coloured neon strip-lighting. These occasional bursts of gaiety are all the more incongruous because they usually adorn rather grim-looking houses, standing alone in the middle of the countryside. Outside, there will always be a car park, and sometimes it will be packed with vehicles. The buildings are roadside brothels. Inside, the motorist will find a bar crammed with heavily made-up señoritas who will be only too willing to join him for a drink and, at the right price, accompany him upstairs or wherever the bedrooms are to be found. Other, similar, though slightly less eye-catching, ‘clubs’ are to be found in every large Spanish town, often on the same street or in the same district.
According to the Civil Guard there are about 1,000 of these bares de alterne in Spain and in 2001 some of their owners formed an association, known by its initials as ANELA, to represent their interests and press for regulation of the sex industry. Prostitution is not illegal in Spain, but pimping and coercing women into prostitution are. ANELA says its members simply provide sex workers with the facilities with which to carry on their profession. They make their money, not from a share of the prostitutes earnings, but from admission charges, the selling of drinks and the hiring of rooms.”
“A survey by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) in 2004 found that 27 per cent of the men it interviewed, who were between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine, acknowledged having had sex with a prostitute. This was by far the highest figure in any European country. One in fourteen Spanish males said he had visited a prostitute in the previous year.”
“It is reckoned that between 70 and 80 per cent of all the prostitutes in Spain are foreigners, and that at least half are in the country illegally. Several town and city councils have quietly undertaken rehabilitation programmes, sometimes offering Spanish ex-prostitutes jobs, most commonly as gardeners.”
“The Church was apparently unconvinced that the Francoist authorities were sufficiently rigorous in their approach; four years later it set up its own Oficina Nacional Permanente de Vigilancia de Espectáculos, whose officials watched the films passed by the Junta after they had been censored and gave them a rating on a scale that went from one (‘suitable for children’) to four (‘gravely dangerous’). Although it had no official standing, the Church’s ‘moral classification’ was invariably printed alongside each film in the listings section of the newspapers.
But not even that was enough to satisfy the more zealous members of the clergy. Sometimes, after one of those ‘gravely dangerous’ films had slipped through the net, parish priests would take it on themselves to put up a notice in the foyer of the local cinema which said: ‘Those who watch today’s programme are committing mortal sin.’ One bishop, outraged by the authorization of a film to which he objected, went so far as to arrange for groups of pious ladies from Acción Católica to wait at the entrance of the cinema. Whenever someone approached the box office, the leader would cry out: ‘Say an Our Father for the soul of this sinner!’ and the others would fall to their knees in prayer. It cut down the audiences no end.”
“The legislation that really caught international attention was that which made Spain only the third country in the world to institute gay marriage. A law passed in June 2005 gave homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexual ones, including the right to adopt. The move reflected a shift in public attitudes towards gay people that, typically of modern Spain, has been as rapid as it was radical.”
“It has been said that towards the end of Franco’s rule the only European country in which there was a comparable degree of institutionalized discrimination against married women was Turkey, and that on several counts the status of wives in Turkey was actually higher. The assumptions underlying the Spanish civil code were summed up in article 57: ‘The husband must protect his wife and she must obey her husband. At the crux of their legal relationship was the concept of permiso marital (marital permission). Without her husband’s agreement, a wife could not embark on any sort of activity outside the home. She could not take a job, start a business or open a bank account. She could not initiate legal proceedings, enter into contracts, or buy and sell goods. She could not even undertake a journey of any length without her husband’s approval.
Under the Spanish system, the property owned by a married couple is divided into three categories: that which the husband has brought into the marriage, that which the wife has brought into the marriage and that which they have acquired since (their so-called bienes gananciales). But whereas the man did not need his wife’s permission before selling, lending or mortgaging the property he had brought into the marriage, she required his for a similar transaction. Not only that, but the wife had no control whatsoever over their bienes gananciales, even when she had been partly — or entirely — responsible for earning them. As if that were not enough, the wife did not have proper control over her children either, because, unlike the husband, she did not enjoy what was called the patria potestad or paternal authority.
Leaving the family home for even a few days constituted the offence of desertion, which meant — among other things — that battered wives could not take refuge in the homes of their friends or relatives without putting themselves on the wrong side of the law. And although adultery by either sex was a crime, punishable by between six months and six years in prison, there were different criteria for men and women. Adultery by a woman was a crime whatever the circumstances, but adultery by a man only constituted an offence if he committed it in the family home, or if he was living with his mistress, or if his adulterous behaviour was public knowledge.
The first significant reform of this system was approved shortly before Franco died. In 1975 Spain abolished permiso marital — fifty-six years after Italy and thirty-seven years after France. The laws against adultery were revoked in 1978 and those articles of the civil code which put women at such a disadvantage with regard to their children and the family finances were replaced in 1981.”
“By the start of the academic year 1987–8, there were more female than male students in Spain’s universities. In 1981, women had accounted for less than a quarter of the total active population. By 1991, they accounted for a third.
Women worked their way to positions of prominence in every walk of life, including even bullfighting. In 1993, Cristina Sánchez, a former hairdresser, became the first woman (in modern times at least) to kill all six bulls in a corrida.
Almost as striking was the incorporation of women into Spain’s military, and paramilitary, services. The first Civil Guards to wear skirts entered service in 1989, having begun their training a year earlier — at the same time as the military academies opened their doors to women seeking to enter the non-combatant branches of the armed forces as NCOs or officers. It was not until the following year that the government permitted women to apply for admittance to the fighting units — and only then at the insistence of a schoolgirl. Ana Moreno, from Denia on the east coast, had been inspired by a teacher, a retired pilot, to dream of becoming one herself. At the age of seventeen, she wrote asking to enter the Military Aviation Academy at San Javier in Murcia; in reply, she had a letter telling her there was no law to say she could. Taking the attitude that there was no law to say that she could not, she appealed to the courts and in 1988 the High Court in Madrid ruled that her case was a violation of the constitution which guarantees equality of the sexes. It took a year for the government to issue a decree to regularize the situation, but in 1989 women who wanted to join fighting units were allowed to sit the common entrance examination for Spain’s three military academies.”
“The arrival of vast numbers of women in the labour market has transformed the Spanish language. Because women had never before occupied certain jobs, the words used to describe those jobs existed only with masculine endings. So the choice has been between inventing new words with feminine endings, and using the existing masculine noun with a feminine article.
The dilemma is still unresolved. It is now agreed that a woman who belongs to the cabinet is una ministra, but a female doctor is una medico. Most people referred to Cristina Sánchez as la torera, yet she herself preferred to be known as la torero. For the most part, practice has actually gone further than would seem necessary. Words ending in ‘e’, which were never gender-specific, have also been changed. Usually, ‘the boss’ — if a woman — is not la jefe, but la jefa.
One battle in which Spaniards do not have to engage is whether a wife should use her own or her husband’s name: it has always been customary for married women to retain their surnames. However, Spanish women are still hampered by the rigid division of their numbers into señoras and señoritas, nor is there an obvious Spanish equivalent of Ms.”
“In an effort to reverse the trend, an MP introduced a clause into the 2005 divorce law putting pressure on men — or at least those who had a register office wedding — to do more of the household chores. The legislation altered the civil marriage ceremony so that it now includes an undertaking by the groom to do his share. And if he does not then, if the marriage fails, it will count against him in the divorce court. Judges will have the power to order that men who refused to do their part be given less frequent access to their children.”
“The Organizatión Nacional de Ciegos Españoles (ONCE) was created by General Franco’s Nationalist government in 1938 to provide employment for the blind, whose numbers had been swollen by the civil war. As a way of financing it, Franco agreed to an idea that had first been tried out during the Second Republic when blind people had banded together to organize local raffles. The new, provincially based, daily lotteries were exempted from tax (which was the least the authorities could do, since ONCE was relieving the state of what would otherwise have been a considerable financial burden). The blind man or woman, standing on a corner, draped with strips (tiras) of lottery tickets and crying ‘Iguales para hoy” — soon became an integral part of Spanish street life. The Cupón pro-ciegos did what was expected of it and in 1950 ONCE was able to set up a proper welfare system for its members.”
“The impression throughout the eighties was that ‘anything goes.’ Spain’s Socialist administration, it should not be forgotten, was the first in Europe to be recruited almost entirely from the generation of 68. One of its earliest measures, in the year after coming to office, was to legalize the consumption of narcotics both in public and private. It was not until 1992 that the government modified its policy and made public, but not private, consumption an offence.
From time to time, in the years before the ban was re-imposed, you could be sitting in an up-market restaurant and a client would finish lunch or dinner and light up a spliff as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”
“The West African territory of Río Muni and the island of Fernando Po jointly gained their independence as Equatorial Guinea in 1968.”
“If you leave out Russia, the only countries in Europe bigger than Spain are France and Ukraine. It is very nearly half as large again as Germany and, at slightly less than 200,000 square miles, or rather more than 500,000 square kilometres, it is almost twice the size of Italy and four times the size of England. Yet, throughout its history, Spain’s population has been modest. As a result, it was — and is — a country of widely spaced communities. Since earliest times, their isolation from one another has been made more acute by a dearth of navigable rivers. Moreover, because of the poverty which was Spain’s lot, road and rail links developed only very slowly. For example, it was not until 1974, when the puente aéreo — the air shuttle between Madrid and Barcelona — was opened, that one could travel between the country’s two largest cities with ease. Right up until the late seventies, when a lengthy stretch of motorway was built, it took about nine hours of solid driving to cover the 630 kilometres (390 miles) by car.”
“The first Moslem incursion into Iberia was in 710, when a small reconnaissance force landed at the southernmost point of the peninsula. The following year a former slave, a Berber by the name of Tariq ibn-Ziyad, led an army of about 7,000 ashore at a point close to the huge rock which dominates the entrance to the Mediterranean (the Moslems named the rock Jabal Tariq, or Tariq’s Mount, and eventually clumsy Christian tongues changed it to Gibraltar). It took no more than two years for Tariq’s small force to subdue the whole of what is now Spain and Portugal. But after crossing the Pyrenees and penetrating to the very heart of France, where they were defeated by the Franks, the Moslems withdrew into the southern three-quarters of the Iberian peninsula.”
“The arrival of the Moslems also put paid to any hope of a single language. Cut off from one another in the mountainous north and brought into much closer con- tact with the languages of the pre-Roman peoples who lived there than would otherwise have been the case, the descendants of the Latin-speaking refugees who had fled from Tariq’s conquering army evolved no fewer than five separate new languages — Galician, Bable (the language of Asturias), Castilian, Aragónese and Catalan.
In the south, the Christians living under Moslem rule developed yet another tongue — Mozarabic. With the exception of Mozarabic, all these languages have survived to the present day, although Bable and Aragonese are nowadays spoken by only a tiny number of people, most of whom live in remote areas. Together with Basque and such curious linguistic relics as Aranés (a variety of Gascon Provençal, which is spoken in the Arán Valley of northern Catalonia), they constitute a rich heritage and a source of persistent friction. Today more than a quarter of Spain’s inhabitants speak a vernacular language in addition to, or instead of, the official language of the state.”
“The annexation of the Canary Islands, which had never formed part of the Moslem domains, was undertaken exclusively by and for the Crown of Castile. The language and culture of the native inhabitants, the Guanches, were both eventually destroyed. But the pacification of the islands, which was not completed until the end of the fifteenth century.”
“The members of the royal families of the three other kingdoms — Portugal, Castile and Aragón — had so often intermarried that it became inevitable that sooner or later two of these states would be united by inheritance. In the event it was later rather than sooner; it was only in 1474, when the ineffectual Enrique IV of Castile died without leaving a son, that the opportunity arose. The two claimants to his throne were Isabel, his half-sister, and Juana, the woman he claimed was his daughter, but who was alleged by opponents to be the illegitimate offspring of an affair between Enrique’s wife and a courtier. The nub of the matter was that Juana was married to Afonso V of Portugal while Isabel was the wife of Fernando, heir to the throne of Aragón. Whichever of these two won the throne would determine whether the peninsula was to be dominated by an alliance between Castile and Portugal or one between Castile and Aragón. It took a war to settle the issue. But by 1479 — the year in which Fernando succeeded to the throne of Aragón — Isabel’s forces had overcome Juanas. Technically, Castile and Aragón remained separate. Under the agreement worked out between Fernando and Isabel each was to reign as sole monarch in his or her own country while ranking as no more than a consort in the realm of the other. But in practice Isabel concerned herself with the domestic affairs of both countries, while her husband looked after their foreign affairs.
One of Isabel and Fernando’s most celebrated joint ventures was the ten-year campaign that culminated in the surrender in 1492 of the Kingdom of Granada — the last Moslem stronghold on the peninsula. The fall of Granada marked the end of the reconquista. It had lasted for almost 800 years and it had had a profound effect on the characters of both the Spanish and the Portuguese, although — as more than one historian has pointed out the fact that Portugal was fully reconquered more than 200 years before Spain meant the reconquista left a much greater impression on the latter than on the former.”
“Spaniards who speak one of the other languages tend to believe that Castilian gained its ascendancy by dint of force — by conquest in medieval times and by repression and coercion more recently. This is only partly true. An equally important reason for its expansion has been that it is a superbly efficient means of communication which, whenever it has come into contact with another language, has tended to be adopted solely on its merits. In the centre of the country, it had made inroads into the Kingdoms of León to the west and Aragón to the east, displacing Bable and Aragonese respectively, long before Castile acquired any political clout in either area. Its linguistic excellence also won it a foothold in the Basque country centuries before anyone tried to force the Basques to abandon their native tongue. It was undeniably force of arms that allowed it to spread through Andalusia. But it is significant that when Castilian clashed head-on with Catalan in Murcia, following a campaign in which the Castilians and the Catalans both took part, it was Castilian — sprinkled here and there with Catalan words and phrases — that emerged as the language of the region.”
“The goal had always been — and remained — the reunification of the whole of Iberia, and that was not achieved until 1580 when Carlos’s son, Felipe II, annexed Portugal after its king had died on a madcap expedition to North Africa, leaving behind him no obvious heir. What then happened was that the process of unification suffered a reverse — as it had many times in the past. This time it was not the result of a will, but a war. In 1640, the Catalans and the Portuguese, both of whom had been chafing at Castile’s insensitive centralism, rebelled against Madrid. The Catalans were finally beaten into submission in 1659, but the Portuguese survived as a separate nation, ruled by a new dynasty, and in 1665 they confirmed their independence by defeating the Spaniards at the Battle of Montes Claros.
Spain and Portugal were never again to reunite, although the dream of reunification through a loose confederation of the traditional regions was to persist until the twentieth century. That the six states which emerged in the north of the peninsula should have evolved into two nations — one of them made up of five of those states and the other consisting of the remaining one — was a matter of the purest chance. Had a battle here or there gone the other way; had this or that son not died in infancy; had this or that mother not perished in child-birth, the division might have been altogether different.”
“Several regions enjoyed political faculties and economic privileges that seriously limited the power of the central government and made the construction of a modern state virtually impossible.
The choice of Madrid as the capital was a response to the problems this created. Until the sixteenth century, the Spanish court had moved from place to place. But in 1561 Felipe II decided that the machinery of government ought to have a permanent home. In an effort not to boost the power and status of any one region, he hit on the idea of putting his court in the geographical centre of the peninsula. Madrid is almost totally devoid of natural advantages. It does not have a harbour. It does not stand by the shores of a lake or at the meeting-place of two rivers. The reason why human beings settled there is because of an escarpment that offers commanding views across the surrounding plain. Throughout the Middle Ages the military importance of that escarpment made Madrid a valuable prize for Moors and Christians alike. But with the end of the reconquista, the town would almost certainly have withered into insignificance had it not been for Felipe’s initiative. Like Abuja or Brasilia, Madrid is an ‘artificial’ rather than an ‘organic’ capital, and until recently it did not have much of a hold over the country’s affections.”
“As Spain entered the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the central government had succeeded in alienating precisely those regions — Catalonia and the Basque country — where conditions existed, or were about to develop, that would foster the growth of modern nationalism. In the first place, the Basques and Catalans each had a language and culture of their own (this factor alone was sufficient to stimulate the growth of a modest nationalist movement in Galicia). Secondly, these two parts of Spain were the first to become industrialized and were therefore the earliest to nurture a substantial middle class of the kind which, in many parts of the world, has been eager to support nationalist aspirations. Among the Basque and Catalan middle classes, a sentimental hankering after traditional values mingled with a feeling of superiority with regard to the hated Castilians. This feeling stemmed largely from the quite reasonable belief that Madrid was incapable of understanding the problems of advanced industrial societies such as theirs. But it was also in part the result of an instinctive desire to dissociate themselves from Spain’s decline, the scale of which was to be made embarrassingly obvious by Spain’s defeat at the hands of the United States in 1898.
Unfortunately for Madrid, both the Basques and Catalans live hard by the two main routes into France and in each case there are people who speak the same language as they do on the other side of the border. Rebel Basques and Catalans from Spain have never found it difficult to find refuge or supplies in France, especially since it has often proved convenient for Paris to turn a blind eye to the activities of the Basques and Catalans under French rule, as a means of undermining whoever was in power in Madrid.
The defeat of Carlism put paid to any chance that regional aspirations might be fulfilled by the accession of an absolute monarch. From then on, the best hopes of the Basques and Catalans lay with the overthrow of the liberal monarchy by opponents at the other end of the political spectrum. Spanish radicals had already developed an affection for federalism which came to the fore when they ruled the country for less than a year during the First Republic (1873–4). When the monarchy was once again overthrown in 1931, the pressure for home rule was immense. The Catalans were granted a Statute of Autonomy in 1932 and the Basques and the Galicians were on the verge of gaining a limited form of home rule when civil war broke out again in 1936.
Although General Franco and his allies described themselves as Nationalists, what they meant was that they were Spanish nationalists — wholly opposed to the regional nationalism which they regarded as one of the principal reasons for the turmoil that had bedevilled the Second Republic. During the early years of the dictatorship, not only was it forbidden to teach vernacular languages but serious efforts were made to stop people from speaking them. They could not be used on official premises or at official functions. Stickers were even put up in telephone booths telling callers that they had to conduct their conversations in Castilian or — to use the parlance of the regime — ‘speak Christian.’ A ban on the publication of books in vernacular languages did not last long, but a similar prohibition on their use in the press, and on radio and television, remained in force until after Franco’s death.
Indeed, such was the intransigence of Franco’s centralism that it succeeded in creating regionalist groups in areas such as Estremadura and Murcia where no one had previously questioned their Spanishness. Not perhaps surprisingly, it was nationalism in its most radical and violent form which ensured that Franco’s style of government would not survive him. In 1972, his Prime Minister and chosen successor, Admiral Carrero Blanco, was blown to pieces by terrorists drawn from among the most fiercely independent minority of all — the Basques.”
“The absence from Basque folklore of any sort of migration legend, when combined with the linguistic and serological evidence, would seem to suggest that the Basques have lived where they are now to be found since the Stone Age. Secure in a homeland of steep-sided hills and valleys, much of which was covered in dense forest, they seem to have had only the most limited contact with the peoples who entered Europe two millennia before Christ and who brought with them their Indo-European languages and their distinctive blood group distribution, characterized by a high proportion of B and Rh+.”
“The collapse of Roman rule marked the last time that all Basques were subject to the same administration, although that is not to say that the Basques on both sides of the Pyrenees had formed a single administrative entity either before or during Roman rule. After the legions departed, it was left to the Romans’ ‘barbarian’ successors to try to impose their will on the area — the Franks strove to control an area roughly corresponding to the modern French Basque country and the northern part of Navarre, while the Visigoths attempted to govern what is now Guipúzcoa, Biscay and Alava.”
“The ETA and its supporters were able to draw additional strength from the onset of recession in the late seventies. Its effects were particularly savage in the Basque country. This was partly because of the region’s dependence on uncompetitive ‘rust-belt’ industries, but also partly and ironically — because ETA’s own activities were deterring investment. Between 1973 and 1979, Biscay and Guipúzcoa dropped from first and third place on the table of income per capita to ninth and sixth place respectively.
In retrospect, it can be seen that the late seventies and early eighties were ETA’s heyday. Its bloodiest year was 1980, when it was responsible for the deaths of 118 people. Since then, various factors have combined to reduce the level of violence — the winding-up of ETA-pm, growing cooperation between the Spanish and French governments, especially since Spain joined France in the European Union, and — partly because of that — increasingly effective police work.
In 1992, ETA was dealt the severest blow it had ever suffered with the arrest in France of its entire leadership. The organization has never truly recovered.”
“By the middle of the fourteenth century the Catalan— Aragonese confederation ruled not only the Balearic Islands and the city and region of Valencia, but also Sardinia, Corsica and much of present-day Greece. A member of its royal family sat on the throne of Sicily and it controlled the gold trade with the Sudan. Today the world has all but forgotten Catalonia’s golden age, but the memory of her power and influence lives on in the folk-sayings of the Mediterranean. In Sicily, recalcitrant children are told to ‘do what I say or I’ll call the Catalans’ and in Thrace you can do no worse than to wish on your enemy ‘the Catalan vengeance’. A number of naval and financial terms in Castilian derive from Catalan, including probably the word peseta.
A banking collapse in 1381 caused by the cost of financing too many imperial wars, the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the loss of the gold trade sent Barcelona into decline even before the discovery of America shifted the geographical advantage from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.”
“The virtual absence of violent nationalism meant that the inhabitants of Catalonia were not subjected to the same relentless oppression that helped to homogenize the population of the Basque country, and so the differences between ‘native’ and ‘immigrant’ were not erased — or disguised — in Catalonia to the same extent as in the Basque country.”
“Catalan is to be seen on road and street signs throughout the Principality (and increasingly in the Balearic Islands and Valencia as well). It can be heard on radio and television. Catalans are free to publish newspapers and magazines in their mother tongue. And the vast majority of their children are nowadays not only taught Catalan, but taught in Catalan.
The 2001 census indicated that the number of Catalan-speakers in Catalonia itself had risen to 76 per cent from around 60 per cent at the time of General Franco’s death. In both the other main Catalan-speaking areas within Spain, however, the proportion appeared to have fallen — from 55 per cent to 50 per cent in Valencia and from 75 per cent to 60 per cent in the Balearic Islands.
However, the number of people who could understand Catalan had risen dramatically over the same period in all three areas. It was up from 80 per cent to fully 97 per cent in the Principality, from 70 to 89 per cent in Valencia and from 80 to 95 per cent in the Balearic Islands. Even so, the figures tend to understate the scale of the changes that have taken place since the return of democracy. An entire generation that is more than simply bilingual has already emerged from schools in Catalonia.”
“The last great famine was in 1853–4, but Galicia remained the scene of considerable hardship. It became the poorest of Spain’s seventeen Autonomous Communities and, until just a few years ago, it was not at all uncommon in the inland provinces of Lugo and Orense (Ourense) to see old women trudging along country lanes laden down like pack animals with crops or kindling.”
“The Galicians’ frustration at being tied to a Crown whose interests were not their own manifested itself at a very early stage in uprisings organized by the nobility, and it is against this background of discontent within the region that the discovery of St James’s tomb ought perhaps to be seen.
According to legend, it was found by a shepherd in a field to which he was guided by a star. The field became the site of a cathedral and of a city which took the name of Sant Iago (St. James) de Campus Stellae (of the field of the star). An alternative etymology is offered by the fact that St James’s supposed tomb lies in what had previously been a burial ground. Compostela, according to this view, derives from composta (burial ground) plus the diminutive -ela.
At all events, the discovery provided the Asturian monarchy and its successors with a reason — or perhaps a pretext — for showering gifts and privileges on the town which grew up around the tomb. Right up until the nineteenth century the Spanish monarch paid an annual sum to the city, called the voto de Santiago, ostensibly in return for the saint’s patronage. The effect was to create within a potentially turbulent province a city with every reason to support the central government.
As early as the fourteenth century, the Galicians were left without any representation in the Cortes. They played no part in the Mesta, the sheep-farming cartel whose influence brought such benefit to the farmers of the meseta, or in the trade with the Americas which was bestowed on the Andalusians, or in the industrial revolutions that transformed the Catalan and Basque provinces. Instead, they became a favourite target for steep taxes and military levies.
The railway from Madrid did not reach Galicia until 1883 and as the region entered the twentieth century its only industries, apart from the naval dockyard at La Bazán founded in the eighteenth century, were a modest textile industry in Corunna, a few tobacco-manufacturing and food-processing businesses and some canning. Typically, the cans came from elsewhere. The region was perhaps entitled to expect preferential treatment from Franco, who was himself a Galician from El Ferrol. But although the region undoubtedly benefited from the general increase in living standards throughout Spain during the años de desarrollo, during which period it acquired some important new factories (notably the Citroên plant at Vigo), the main change was a more efficient exploitation of the region’s natural resources — hydroelectricity and timber. As recently as 1989, 34 per cent of the population still worked on the land — by far the highest proportion in any region of Spain.
Galicia’s agriculture, moreover, was woefully backward. Unlike most of the other peoples of early northern Spain, the Galicians had been unable to relieve the pressure of population growth by mass migration southwards. The Asturians were able to spread into León and ultimately Estremadura. The Basques and Cantabrians were able to spread into Castile and ultimately Andalusia. The Aragonese and the Catalans had Valencia.But Galicia’s southward expansion was blocked by the creation of Portugal, a state with which Galicians had no political ties. The only other people who found themselves in this predicament were the Navarrese. But unlike Galicia, which was bounded by the sea, Navarre could and did expand northwards.
Hemmed in on all sides, the Galicians had no option but to divide the same amount of land into smaller and smaller plots. The majority of farmers came to own only tiny amounts of land consisting of several isolated patches. Time was wasted travelling between plots, land was wasted beneath the walls that separated one plot from another, and the size of the holdings and the variety of the crops frequently made the introduction of machinery uneconomic. It was not very different from strip-farming in the Middle Ages. Indeed, the Galician peasantry had until the twentieth century to pay feudal dues called foros — long after other such medieval legacies had disappeared from the rest of the country.”
“To an even greater extent than in the Basque country, women have traditionally enjoyed a high standing in society and a generous measure of influence. Galicia’s national hero is a woman — María Pita, who distinguished herself by her bravery during the English siege of Corunna in 1586; and several of the region’s most prominent intellectuals — the poet Rosalía de Castro, the novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán and the penal reformer Concepción Arenal — have been women. It could be just another legacy of the matriarchal society which existed in northern Spain in pre-Roman times. But it must also owe something to the fact that women in Galicia, for hundreds of years, assumed responsibilities which in other societies were taken on by the men, simply. because their menfolk were away in other parts of the country, at sea or abroad.”
“For almost two centuries, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, after the restrictions on settlement in the New World were lifted, a steady stream of Galicians set off to find a new life in Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Cuba and the other states of Latin America. Such was their desperation — or innocence — that in the 1850s, after the Caribbean plantation-owners had been forced to free their slaves, a Cuban of Galician extraction was able to find some 2,000 of his countrymen to take their places. In much of South America, gallego is synonymous with ‘Spaniard’. Perhaps the most famous contemporary descendant of Galician immigrants is Fidel Castro, whose surname derives from the Galician word for a Celtic hill-fort.”
“A form of galego littered with Castilianisms, known as castrapo, is widely spoken in the bigger cities on the coast.”
“It is arguably the part of Spain where Castilian Spanish is least widely spoken. But whether what is spoken instead is truly a language, or merely a dialect, is open to debate. At all events, the 2001 census showed that more than 99 per cent of the population said they understood galego and 91 per cent said they knew how to speak it.
In both cases, the figures were higher than for Catalan in any of the Catalan-speaking territories and far higher than for Basque in the Basque country.”
“In 2006, it was reckoned that Spain’s immigrant population had reached 3.7 million people, or 8.4 per cent of the whole population. That was higher than the EU average and, proportionally, more than in France. But what really made Spain exceptional was the speed with which its sizeable immigrant community had come into being. It had quadrupled in size since 2000. Until the mid-1980s, indeed, Spain’s cultural and religious makeup was still much as it had been for almost five centuries.”
“The first Gypsies arrived in Spain in the early fifteenth century. There is evidence that they were initially well received, possibly because they claimed — or were taken to be pilgrims. But they soon fell foul of the growing enthusiasm for an ethnically homogenous state. By 1499, Fernando and Isabel were ordering the expulsion of the ‘Egyptians who go wandering about our realms’. Any found without a job or a trade after sixty days would be liable to 100 lashes.
Over the next three centuries, numerous efforts were made to force the Roma to conform or leave — much the same choice that had been presented to the Jews and Moslems. Legislation was enacted forbidding Gypsies to use their language, known as caló, join guilds, hold public office and even marry among themselves. But it was all to no avail, and the fact that the Roma stayed in Spain in such numbers would seem to indicate that bouts of fierce repression alternated with long periods of resigned inaction.
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the situation of Spain’s Gypsies began to change. The liberal Constitution of Cádiz of 1812 recognized them for the first time as Spanish citizens and, though prejudice and discrimination continued, the country’s lawmakers stopped enacting coercive legislation. At the same time, Roma, particularly in Andalusia and Estremadura, began to find roles for themselves in the rural economy, mostly as blacksmiths and horse traders. Many gave up the nomadic life and became fully integrated into local society. Some found their way to the cities, and entire barrios like Triana in Seville and Santiago in Jerez became predominantly Gypsy. The growth in popularity of flamenco music enhanced the status of Romani culture.”
“What brought it to an end was the progressive mechanization of the Spanish countryside, which made redundant both the Romas favoured rural professions. A lot of Gypsies drifted into the cities from the countryside and settled in shanty towns on the outskirts. So too, of course, did millions of payos (non-Gypsies). But whereas most of the payos moved on to a better and more prosperous life, the calés (Gypsies) did not. In the mid-1970s, a book-length study of the Roma who lived in the Madrid shanty towns found that, contrary to legend, the proportion of Roma who worked was as high as in the rest of the population. However, Gypsies tended to work shorter hours, they were more likely to have more than one profession, and the proportion of working women was much higher in the Roma community. Part of the year was often spent harvesting, but the chief normal source of livelihood was scrap dealing, followed by street vending. Only 1.3 per cent of the capital’s Gypsies at that time made their living by begging.”
Conclusion
“Since the coming of democracy, individual local authorities in many parts of Spain had made determined efforts to ensure that the Gypsies in their area were given access to proper schooling and housing. Their efforts frequently encountered determined opposition from the payo majority and, on occasions, it degenerated into violent protests. In 1988, the central government stepped in to launch a Progmma de Desarrollo Gitano (Programme for Gypsy Development), which was intended, among other things, to facilitate access to the many welfare benefits and services to which the Roma were entitled.
By the mid-1980s, when Spain joined the EU, it was an anomaly in the European context. It was culturally highly diverse. There were the Basques, the Catalans, the Galicians and at least half a million Roma. Yet Spain had almost no foreigners. The only immigrant community of any size was made up of sub-Saharan Africans who had been recruited to work on the farms of the Maresme, a predominantly agricultural area along the coast north of Barcelona. The word inmigrante was still used mainly to describe a Spaniard who had moved from the countryside to the town two or three decades earlier. And racismo meant prejudice against Gypsies.”
“In the big cities, the demand for cheap domestic labour was attracting growing numbers of Latin Americans. The earliest substantial community came from the Dominican Republic. The Dominicans often took jobs as nannies and gardeners in the more prosperous suburbs. In 1992, a Dominican, Lucrecia Pérez, had the sad distinction of becoming the first person to die in modern Spain as a result of anti-immigrant violence. She was killed when gunmen stormed an immigrant squat in the prosperous Madrid suburb of Aravaca.
The authorities had anticipated the problems of illegal immigration with a seemingly draconian law, passed in 1985 which said that any foreigner found without the required documents was subject to deportation within seventy-two hours and without a right of appeal.
But, as is so often the case in southern Europe, appearance and reality were two different things. The problem was one of identification. Before deporting someone, it was necessary to know where they came from, and if they had torn up their papers on arrival, that — in many cases — was impossible. Moroccans and other North Africans could often be speedily identified and returned. But the sub-Saharan Africans, who were being detained in growing numbers, usually presented an insuperable problem. Politicians announced, and journalists reported, substantial figures for the number of ‘expulsions.’ But what was actually happening was that the immigrants concerned were being served with expulsion orders and then let go. Once freed, they joined the swelling ranks of the earliest sin papeles. In 1986, the Socialists declared the first of many amnesties enabling immigrants already in Spain to legalize their situation.
If all this sounds like a rather half-hearted policy for stemming immigration, then it needs to be stressed that the official attitude was profoundly ambivalent. On the one hand, no one could openly condone illegal entry. On the other hand, there was no realistic way in which poor, non-EU citizens could enter legally, and it was increasingly clear to politicians and officials that immigration could be beneficial to a country like Spain with an ultra-low birth-rate.”
“José Maria Aznar’s government tightened up surveillance of the Straits of Gibraltar by, among other things, building a line of watchtowers along the coast. But the effect was to divert African emigration away from the Mediterranean and towards the Atlantic. Increasing numbers of migrants began arriving in the Canary Islands, particularly Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. What is more, the numbers arriving from Africa were soon outstripped by those coming in by other routes. Huge numbers of Latin Americans, particularly Ecuadorians, who did not need a visa, were entering Spain by plane and simply overstaying. At the same time, immigrants from Romania and countries further afield, including China, were getting through the EU’s eastern frontier and making their way across the continent. As a result of the so-called Schengen agreement, which Spain signed, the EU had been largely free of internal border controls since 1995.
It was not until 2000 that the Aznar government managed to steer a comprehensive new immigration act through parliament. The new law came into effect after two vast regularization processes that saw some 380,000 immigrants obtain their papers, and was meant to put a stop to illegal entries once and for all. It gave those who had become legally resident in the country all the benefits to which Spanish nationals were entitled and set up a quota system so that a small number of immigrants could in future enter the country in an orderly fashion.
But the illegal immigrants were a different matter altogether. They were banned from joining trade unions, holding public assemblies and going on strike. The new law denied them access to the housing aid and free schooling they had enjoyed up until then. And it also gave the government the power, not just to order, but to effect, the deportation of illegal immigrants. Once again, however, there was a gap between what was proclaimed and what actually happened. Indeed, there were several.
The quota system failed miserably. Employers found it much easier to hire workers ‘on the black.’ The act kept open a loophole whereby immigrants could still get access to health care by registering with their local authority. And, once again, tens of thousands of expulsions were ordered but not carried out.
Despite all the ‘get-tough’ rhetoric, the PP’s years in office saw immigration rise on a gradually steepening curve until, in Aznar’s second government, it became vertiginous. The increase in arrivals from outside the EU was particularly marked. Over the four years to the end of 2002, the number of non-EU citizens living legally in Spain tripled. In some parts of the country, the suddenness of the increase was astonishing. In 1996, at the start of the PP era, the Valencia region, for example, had a foreign population of fewer than 15,000, or 0.4 per cent of the total, and almost all of them were Europeans. By the beginning of 2003, there were more than 440,000, or 9 per cent, and the vast majority were from outside the EU.
What makes this upsurge all the more remarkable is that it occurred at a time when unemployment in Spain, though falling, was still the highest in the EU. There were, however, several sectors in which the demand for labour was just not being met because Spaniards aspired to better-paid, and less strenuous work. They included catering, agriculture, construction and domestic service.
By far the largest single national group within Spain’s immigrant community was from Morocco. But during the second Aznar government, the biggest increases were in the numbers arriving from Latin America. By the end of the period, the Ecuadorians, Colombians and Peruvians all outnumbered the Dominicans.
Every big city now had at least one immigrant barrio. In Madrid, a quarter of the population in the Centro district was foreign and there were primary schools where 90 per cent of the children were the sons and daughters of immigrants. Out in the countryside, immigrant labour was being used to cultivate entire areas, like the 200 square miles of Almería that had been covered with plastic sheeting to create the vast hothouse that supplied much of Europe with its winter cucumbers and tomatoes.
Meanwhile, the beneficial effects of immigration were making themselves felt. Spain’s birth rate rose for the first time in many years in 2001 entirely because of its immigrant population. Eight per cent of the women who gave birth were foreigners. Two years later, the OECD noted that what legalized immigrants in Spain paid to the state was more than twice what they got back.
Yet few people outside government were aware of these facts, and it was to be wondered how long Spain could go on assimilating immigrants at this rate without a risk of severe racial tension. The EUs statistics office, Eurostat, estimated that, of the half a million immigrants entering Europe each year, slightly less than a quarter — around 115,000 — were settling in Spain. A UN study had earlier concluded that that was not nearly enough. It reckoned that as many as 200,000 immigrants a year were needed to guarantee Spain’s continued economic growth and the preservation of its welfare system.”
“Many of those now entering the country are Moslems, and Spain in 2004 was the target of a mass bombing by Islamist extremists that provided the worst possible start for a multi-ethnic society.”
“Arguably, the biggest gap in Spain’s welfare system is in the area where there has long been greatest need.Ever since the seventies, the outstanding characteristic of the economy has been an inordinately high unemployment rate. Not even the job-creation bonanza of the Aznar years succeeded in getting the rate below 10 per cent, and by the time the PP left power Spain was still the only country in the then fifteen-member EU in which it ran to double figures. It was also the one with the highest percentage of insecure jobs: much of the employment created during Aznar’s term was based on short-term contracts that allowed workers to be hired and fired with ease.
Yet barely half the unemployed were entitled to unemployment benefits. School-leavers did not qualify at all. The assumption — a very Mediterranean one — was that they could live at home, supported by their parents. To qualify for benefits, workers had to have held down a job for at least twelve months and the duration of the payments to which they were entitled varied according to how long they had been making contributions into the scheme.”
“Any Andalusian or Estremaduran who could provide evidence that he or she had worked the land for sixty days in a given year would qualify for nine months’ of special benefit, the subsidio agrario, to cover the period in which he or she was out of work. Incredible as it may seem to outsiders, the assumption was that the land in the south of Spain was incapable of providing farm-workers with more than three months’ employment in any one year.”
“As late as 1977 when the UCD took power there was a sizeable gap between the number of children between the ages of six and fourteen and the number of places for them, so that the beginning of each school year saw harrowing scenes as children and parents were turned away from schools that had either not been completed or reached saturation point.
The problem for the CD was that, at that time, some 40 per cent of the places were being provided by fee-paying private schools. This was a far larger percentage than was required by those families who actually wanted to pay for their children’s education. A lot of parents who had to pay would rather have sent their children to state schools. The authorities could claim that there were now enough — or almost enough — places to go round. But the places on offer were not, as Villar Palasi’s law required, freely available.
The Centrists’ answer to the problem was to enlarge on a solution that had already been tried out by their Francoist predecessors, which was to give money to the private schools to enable them to provide their services free. In the years immediately preceding the Socialists’ arrival in government in 1982 the increase in that part of the education budget devoted to private schooling was eight times the increase for the system as a whole. By the time the Centrists left office, only a handful of EGB schools were not receiving state aid.
The Socialists inherited a situation in which the government was paying the piper, but was unable to call the tune. It was meeting the costs of the private schools, yet it could not, for example, insist that they give preference to local children. Because of the unplanned way in which schools were built and pupils enrolled, children often had to travel long distances to get to school when there were schools in the vicinity filled with children from other parts of the city. There were children in Madrid, where the situation was particularly dire, who were spending five hours a day travelling from one side of the city to the other on buses which the government provided specifically for this purpose — 2,000 of them in the capital alone.”
“In terms of their personal finances, Spaniards have become property junkies. Americans, for example, have almost as much of their money invested in the stock market as they do in real estate. Using figures from 1998, the OECD calculated that the proportions were 20 and 21 per cent respectively. Britons had 12 per cent of their total household assets tied up in shares and 34 per cent in property. But for Spaniards the comparative figures were 9 per cent and fully 67 per cent.”
“Spain today has the highest rate of owner-occupancy in the European Union. In 1999, it was 86 per cent.”
“The museum had conjured a local tourist industry out of nothing. Ugly, rainy, post-industrial Bilbao, racked by terrorism, had always been a place that any holidaymaker with half a grain of sense would avoid. The Guggenheim’s continually changing collection of modern and contemporary art has drawn tourists to the city for the first time in its history.”
“Spain also differs from the other big nations in Europe in that most of the country did not experience an industrial revolution. One of the effects of industrialization is to bolster a sense of working-class identity by promoting the formation of trade unions and the spread of collective bargaining. In Spain, that process was largely restricted to Catalonia, Asturias and parts of the Basque country, and even in those areas it was put smartly into reverse when Franco took power, outlawed the unions and imposed a fascist notion of wage-bargaining. The Spain that eventually came out from under his shadow was one almost wholly devoid of working-class consciousness. It is particularly true of the millions who fled the countryside in the fifties and sixties. They may not be ashamed of being, or having been, poor. But the idea that poverty could in any way be a source of pride, or that wealth might be a source of shame, would strike them as just plain silly.”
“The use of the word ‘Spanish’ instead of ‘Castilian’ to describe Spain’s most widely spoken language is unfortunate in that it implies that the others (Basque, Catalan and Galician) are either un-Spanish or less Spanish. It is rather like calling English ‘British’, but with less justification since vernacular languages are far more extensively used in Spain. Hispanic Latin Americans tend to use the term castellano as much as, if not more than, español. Within Spain itself, the use of the word español rather than castellano is a recent phenomenon and one which was encouraged by the nationalistic dictatorships of Primo de Rivera and Franco.”
