Impressions on re-entry

We landed at Logan Airport on October 9, just over two years since we had left the States for Spain. And then on the 14th we got to Newark Airport and New York City, which had been our home for the previous 30 years or more. Nothing seems to have changed. It feels like it always did, but maybe a little better because we're older and freer and because the weather has been so exceptionally good. We plan to be here until December 14, when we return to Madrid and then to our new home in Carboneras, Spain (for pix, see blog below for October 13).

We had lots of reasons to return. We have to get our possessions (mostly books) out of storage and decide which to ship to Spain and which to give away, arrange for the shipping, settle some accounts (financial, not personal grudges), apply for official Spanish residency (you have to do it from your home country), and see old friends. And we just wanted to renew the feel for the place and get a sense of what's happening in this country in this year of turmoil and, for us Obama supporters, exceptional hope. And of course to vote. The reason for going first to Boston was the 45th reunion of my Harvard graduation class. That's Harvard Square in the photo above. In better shape but still recognizable as the place I used to cross a dozen times a day 49 to 45 years ago.

Our Harvard and Radcliffe re-uners all lodged at a beach-side resort inn in North Falmouth on Cape Cod, close to Woods Hole which I'd never before seen. This was a very gentle way to return to the U.S. The trees were all turning beautiful colors, the Atlantic air had an enlivening smell, the New Englanders were all full of smiles and greeted strangers with a bright "Good morning" of "Afternoon" as the case called for. The area felt much as it did when I first arrived at Harvard 49 years ago, only without all the freshman anxiety. I saw many good friends from the past and made a few new ones, and also we got to spend some time with my older son and his family, in nearby Walpole. Then on to the Big Apple, for more serious affairs.

The news from Wall Street (not to mention from Afghanistan, Guantánamo and many other places) has been alarming, but our on-the-ground experience so far has been altogether normal, calm and pleasant. The subway is still ugly, noisy and crowded, but efficient. The people all involved in their personal projects but quick to respond to any new interruption -- much quicker than, say, people normally in Carboneras. We like New York culture, that quickness, that ability to turn one's attention to a new event, quickly appraise a situation and react and, unless it's really exceptional (9/11, for example), immediately drop it and turn one's attention to something else. It's what we expect in big cities, including Madrid or Buenos Aires, but here people are especially quick. Not necessarily smarter than smaller town people, just quicker to react and -- a true virtue -- quicker to drop something that doesn't deserve more attention. In Carboneras (pop. 7000), as in many other small towns I've known in the U.S. and in Latin America, nobody ever drops anything, no matter how trivial, hanging on to grudges and remembered favors for years or even generations. People seem always to be looking back instead of to where they're going. Maybe because they don't think of themselves as going anywhere. Here, it's "What have you done for me lately?" Or more accurately, "What are you going to do for me now -- or what can I do for you?"

So why, you ask, do we choose to live in Carboneras? Because it is so comfortable, comforting even. Not just the climate and the sound of the waves (we're on the edge of the Mediterranean), but also because the slower pace of life has its virtues. People don't respond to you instantly, and they also don't turn away from you to some other matter instantly. Slow to accept, but also caring and concerned once they've made the attachment. And by now, after two years of continuous residence, following earlier extended stays, we have become very strongly attached to many people there. We know their children's names, ages and interests (and are careful to get appropriate birthday and First Communion gifts), their own concerns and desires, and we get together with many of them just for the pleasure of it and not for any business or professional concern, far more frequently than we ever did with friends in New York.

And when we feel an urge for the hecticness of urban life, we can always go to Madrid, just under 600 km. away, where we have a tiny apartment right in the center. It's not New York, but it too has busy people, full cultural agendas (with theaters and concerts much more affordable than in NYC), and a highly varied multi-ethnic population (Africans, East Europeans, Latin Americans et al.) with their varied cuisines and rhythms and dress.

But now we're in New York City and looking to take full advantage of its opportunities in these two months, not just to settle our pending affairs (old business) but also to advance our writing and intellectual projects (facing forward, into the future). Susana has to prepare a lecture she's scheduled to give a week from Monday at Notre Dame University and I have to finish the re-write of the novel I've had underway for a long time. And we both have to make progress on the book we have under contract on the history of the built environment (architecture and urbanism) in Latin America. The bookstores and the New York Public Library will be a big help here. So now that we are settled into the apartment we've rented on the Upper East Side, and have got our Internet connection adequately established, we have to get to work. And of course, see old friends, and shows (last night we saw the Icelandic circus version of Woyzeck at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a wildly inappropriate, amusing and terrifying version of Georg Büchner’s surreal tragedy which deserves a separate blog), and galleries, and generally have a good urban New York time.

Algarrobico & the perils of decentralization

In his latest blog entry, Winnipeg-based urbanist Christopher Leo asks, URBAN GROWTH AND MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE: ARE STRONGER LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ALWAYS THE ANSWER? Here Chris examines examples of successful planning in Ontario that challenge his usual enthusiasm for decentralization.

As I told him, I'm glad to see that he continues to rethink his positions, keeping from getting locked in a box of his own devising. Anyone who has been watching urban misdevelopment in Spain is aware of the perils of extreme decentralization of authority. In our immediate vicinity, our little town (pop. 7000) of Carboneras has been making national headlines over a hotel allegedly (and I believe in fact) constructed on protected parkland and onto the supposedly protected coast. Aspects of approval authority are split among municipality, provincial government (in this case, province of Almería), and the Junta, or regional government, of Andalucía (a region covering seven provinces including Almería), above all of which is the national government and its several, sometimes bickering, ministries.

Here in Carboneras, town hall appears to have fiddled with the map of the park boundaries so as to evade regulations, with the connivance of the provincial government, and granted all the necessary permits for a hotel developer (including participation of George Soros) to build the monster. What was in it for the locals was, first, opening up more of the surrounding parkland to their own development projects (hotels, golf courses in this waterless land, luxury summer homes), and secondly (useful for political purposes) the employment opportunities the new hotel would supposedly bring (the wives of fishermen could become chambermaids), as well as the shorter-term building contracts of local companies. So they tore into the mountain and built the multistoried hotel on Algarrobico beach, practically up to the water line.

Only Greenpeace and a local pro-ecology group raised a cry while this thing was going up. Finally, when the structure was all up and they were just finishing the interiors, planning to open for business this past summer, the central government took notice. In a whole series of court decisions (each one challenged and requiring a new hearing) the whole operation has been declared illegal, the junta (Andalucian regional government) swallowed its embarrassment and demanded the thing be torn down, and found provisions in Spanish law saying they did not have to compensate the builders because their permits (never before challenged by the junta) were all illegal. Carboneras town hall, the mayor in particular, refuses to admit defeat however and they and the developers are still mounting challenges.

For a video of the Greenpeace action (12 August 2007) where they painted the word "Illegal" (ilegal in Spanish) on the façade of the hotel, see this article in El Mundo.

On a personal note, Susana & I are now in New York City, until Dec. 14, so I'll be reporting from here when I get a chance. The interruption of my blogging was due mainly to having to give all our attention to finishing the building project in Carboneras (see previous blog for photos) and getting ready for this trip.

Our castle in Spain

Buzón

Our 8-unit condominium, designed by Susana Torre with the collaboration of Carboneras architects DA-3 Estudio (Carmen Alcaide, Paco Caparrós and Enrique Bejines), is now (nearly) completed. Click on image to see 17 photos taken last week by Chantal Le Lièvre.

Shh! Don't think about the colossus

The crash of the construction industry with its bankruptcies and now soaring unemployment, the air disaster in Barajas last month (where we lost a good friend), the absurd and cruel distortions of the judicial system (people kept in prison because the judge forgot they were there, others never sent there although they were condemned and go out to commit more crimes, the divvying up of judicial slots to party loyalists), the constant arrivals of half-dead, and sometimes dead, would-be immigrants on the coasts -- Spaniards have a lot to think about these days. But there is one very big thing that they have been trying not to think about for nearly 70 years. And if, by misfortune or carelessness, they did think about it, they were afraid to mention it. Now -- seemingly all of a sudden -- people are daring to speak, mass graves are being dug open and analyzed and those long-silenced events are being treated as news, and to lots of Spaniards the wartime and post-war atrocities of Francisco Franco's troops, allies and government are news.

What took so long? Fear works, as we've seen in post-war Germany, post-dictatorship Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and other places. It works to silence people, sometimes because the trauma of extreme violence has left them in a state of semi-shock, unable to pronounce the horrible truth even to their own children; and sometimes because of fear of the consequences to those children if others know what happened to their parents. It has worked more thoroughly for longer in Spain than in those other countries, because the Franco fear regime lasted so much longer, almost 40 years: from the first massacres on June 18, 1936, until some months after the death of the monster in November 1975.

"Don't mention that! You'll just open old wounds!" protests Rajoy, leader of the Partido Popular. No, say the survivors and grandchildren of the massacred, our wounds have never healed and never will until we know just what happened to our loved ones and where their remains are now. It's a lot like Srebrenica, multiplied many times all over the map of Spain. Today's El País includes such a map, showing the location of known mass graves. Presumably there are many others yet to be discovered. The sons, daughters and grandchildren, plus other truthseekers -- including prominent historians and novelists like Dulce Chacón, Manuel Rivas and others -- have been pushing for years for an accounting, have coaxed terrified oldsters to murmur their horrid memories, and have formed associations pressuring local, regional and the national institutions for their records. Now finally a judge, Baltasar Garzón, after pursuing Pinochet, the Argentine generals and other miscreants abroad, has ordered the armed forces, the police and the Catholic Church (which knows more than it lets on) to open its archives.

If you want a comprehensive story of the Spanish Civil War, with a balanced treatment of the atrocities on both sides and ample demonstration that the White Terror was many times more brutal than the Red Terror, not just in numbers of victims but in the deliberate cruelty, you could do worse than read Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain. I may have more to say about this book later. Especially important is his argument about the role of the Communists -- the Republic could not have survived without them, but also could not survive with them in the leadership.

Illustration: El coloso, long attributed to Francisco Goya but now thought to be by another hand.

An American in Carboneras

Watching the amazing and stirring Obama campaign from this little town in southern Spain has made me reflect once again on what it means to me, as someone who has been intensely interested and active in U.S. politics, to be living at this moment so far from my homeland. So, what can I do from here?

First, a bit of personal political history. I've been involved in political organizing since high school 50 years ago (I graduated in 1959), when I used the history club to set up public fora on issues including recognizing the People's Republic of China (a very touchy subject in those days). Later I was president of the Socialist Club at Harvard, organizing fora, debates, film showings (Sergei Eisenstein and others), and demos. And in the years since college, I've used my writings as well as various organizational efforts to "raise consciousness" and push events toward greater equality of opportunity.

But that was then. I was much younger (and more naïve), working in places (universities mostly) where I could reach students and others in personal face-to-face contact, and in an epoch where access to other (non f2f) communications were pretty much limited to print (ditto machines, mimeographs, offset if we were lucky) and sometimes radio (on underfunded, low-power stations). The other approach, harder to achieve and much more rewarding, was to get published in larger circulation periodicals or books.

Now I am who I am, a wiser (I hope) and much more fully trained sociologist, living in a small place far from the center of U.S. politics, in an era with Internet communications, including new forms invented every week (see blog below, on "knols"). So I think it is at least possible for me to be as involved politically as ever, even from here. I don't have f2f contact with American voters, but I do have as much technical access as anybody. And U.S. politics no longer belong exclusively to U.S. citizens. Spaniards, French, Germans, Iraqis, Pakistanis and others don't get to vote in the United States in the formal sense of entering a voting booth and pulling a lever, but in mass demonstrations, opinion polls and other ways, they do "vote" in the basic meaning of that word, to "express a preference for a candidate or a proposed solution of an issue." (Etymology: Middle English (Scots), from Latin votum vow, wish — more at vow) And because our world is now so interconnected, any sensible politician will heed that vote.

All this reflection has led me to a new view of my country and its enormous power. The U.S.A. is commonly viewed as a purveyor of globalization, which of course it is, but more importantly, it is globalization's most extremely developed product. It is the most successful of the dozens of countries, all but Australia in the Western Hemisphere, refashioned from native peoples and native materials by successive waves of immigrants. The U.S., Brazil, and the others are "New Worlds" set in motion and built by forces from all of the old ones, those places where custom and tradition had more nearly congealed and opportunities for innovation were stunted. Of all of the New Worlds, the United States is where the collective force of all humanity has come together most densely and has been producing what up to now has been the greatest energy.

Much of that energy has been foolishly spent in the past eight years, but even in its Bush-whacked condition the U.S. still projects great power, partly from inertia (the power, economic, military and cultural, accumulated in years before) and partly because the country still receives power from abroad in many ways, including investments, immigration, and imitation. As we critics often say, the U.S. is undoubtedly a large part of the problems of globalization, from global warming and pollution to high food and petroleum prices, cultural banality to terrorism. But it is also, and for the same reasons, our best hope for solutions. This is something that Obama seems to understand very clearly, which is why so many people in Germany and other countries are "voting" for him in whatever ways they can. Obama has reawakened enthusiasm for the world-healing potential of American power. And that's why I'll do whatever I can, even from here in Carboneras, to encourage my compatriots to cast official, legally recognized ballots for him.

Photo: A few Obama voters in Berlin. From the NYT.

Gypsies

In last Sunday's El País a Gypsy was featured on both the front page of the newspaper and the cover of the Sunday magazine, in two unrelated stories of people who had become accidental spokespersons, one in Spain and the other in Italy. One was Juan José Cortés (in center of photo at left, with his father and one of his brothers), a clothing merchant and Pentecostal minister in Huelva, Spain, who has become a prominent critic of the Spanish justice system, since his little daughter Mari Luz was murdered by a pervert who should have been in prison (but the judge, overworked or just distracted, had neglected to effect the sentence).

The other was 12-year old Rebecca Covaciu, originally from Rumania, who with her family had been chased from one end of Italy to the other, from Milan to Naples and finally to a secluded and secret rural area near Naples, provided by an anonymous Italian family who had read or seen on TV the family's tribulations.

The very articulate and determined Cortés was profiled and interviewed in the Sunday magazine, refused to make an issue of his ethnicity. He had never felt discriminated as a Gypsy, he said, though he thought that perhaps the Gypsies had "marginalized" themselves (by not participating fully in Spanish civil society). He himself has joined the Partido Socialista (an unusual step for a Gypsy), though he has no intention of running for office.

Rebecca's story is much sadder. She and her little brother were beaten by thugs simply for being foreign Gypsies, and when her father went to denounce the beating, he was beaten by the police -- who, it turned out, were the very same men who, in civilian clothes, had beaten the children.

Gypsies in Spain don't suffer anything like the official discrimination encouraged by the Berlusconi government in Italy, which wants to fingerprint them all and herd them into ghettos. But Gypsies, here known as gitanos, are viewed with a mix of suspicion and admiration. The common view is that they are mostly petty thieves, unreliable and disinclined to steady work -- although every Spanish payo (the Gypsy word for non-Gypsies) I know recognizes that there are exceptions.

The negative stereotype is no doubt exaggerated, but there are real problems. In Andalucía, where more than half of Spanish Gypsies live, seven out of ten children drop out before completing primary school, which makes it harder when they reach adulthood to find steady work. Almost half of those who do work (48%) are self-employed, far fewer than Spanish payos. (Actualidad Étnica) Why do the kids drop out? My guess is that in many cases they feel unwelcome in school, and have few role models in their community to encourage them to continue. And similar factors -- negative attitudes of employers, inadequate preparation and low expectations of job-seekers -- certainly account for the poor employment levels. But if anyone doubts gitano capacities to acquire the needed skills and make good, check out the impressive video of Acceder, an "affirmative action program" that has had great success in preparing gitanos in interview as well as work skills and getting tens of thousands placed in good, skilled jobs throughout Spain.

The admiration is for their lively, rebellious spirit, whose greatest expression is in their music, especially flamenco dance, guitar and percussion of palmas or cajón.

I've been puzzled by this strong Spanish ambivalence toward people that I have a hard time distinguishing from everybody else. Payos insist that they can recognize a gitano when they see one. I don't know. Most of them look like other Spaniards to me (check out the BBC's photos of European Gypsies in Testimonios : Los gitanos "europeos", to see if you can identify them). They are believed to have originated in Northwest India, and yes, there are some Spanish Gypsies who look to me more like Pakistanis or Indians. The flamenco singer Diego "El Cigala", for example. But in the many generations since they first appeared in Spain in the early 15th century, they have mixed their genes with the local population so that in most cases (at least for me) its hard to tell, and except when performing, they dress like everybody else. Foreign Gypsies, mostly from Rumania or ex-Yugoslavia, are more identifiable -- they often don't speak good Spanish, travel in bunches and dress very colorfully. These foreigners, especially the conspicuous beggars, can be an embarrassment to the more assimilated Spanish Gypsies.

Anyway, the question comes up because there are several gitano families here in Carboneras, whom I'm learning to identify as I get to know them. They are clustered in particular sections of town, and those I recognize are either manual laborers or unemployed -- I suppose there must be some with white-collar and even executive positions, but then they cease to be visible as Gypsies. And the other reason for my interest is the stirring flamenco music --where many (though by no means all) of the outstanding performers are, or pretend to be, Gypsies. And I'm one of a little group of guys who get together to try to perform it and improve our playing, every Saturday at midday. Some of the guys I practice with may really be Gypsies. The others, like Federico García Lorca in his Romancero gitano, are admirers or wannabes.

Carboneras

Here's a good collection of images of the village we live in. A long way from our previous home, in Manhattan.

Spanish crosswinds

Surprisingly after last March's national elections it was the winners -- the Partido socialista (PSOE)-- who appeared to be in disarray, while the losers -- the Partido popular (PP)-- were finally gaining strength. For the first time ever in his political career, PP president Mariano Rajoy got a higher public approval rating than José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, PSOE party leader and president of the government. But the parties' relative positions continue to shift, in interesting ways. For the next four years I expect to see a much more plural politics, where the governing PSOE will need more tactical alliances with other parties, including possibly the PP, in order to get any legislation through.

During the last legislature (2004-2008), the economy was booming and the PSOE government introduced reforms that had wide popular support. (Gay marriage, gender parity in business and government, benefits for families taking care of disabled members, etc.) Meanwhile, the opposition PP was making itself obnoxious and even frightening, taking extreme right-wing positions based on a rhetoric of obvious falsehoods (wild conspiracy theories to explain their 2004 loss). Thus the other parties (Izquierda Unida and the generally left-leaning regionalists and nationalists) almost always voted with the PSOE, giving it an effective majority.

Now the economy is in what the government has finally admitted is a "crisis": the collapse of housing construction and sales has caused record unemployment and business failures, at the same time that rocketing petroleum prices are bankrupting truckers and making everything more costly, and the two forces together are diminishing government revenue (tax collection) and increasing expenses (to cover the unemployed, etc.) The government had a nice surplus in March, but was unprepared for a recession of this magnitude and for months seemed to have no answer except to counsel patience, that things would get better -- but now it doesn't look like they will any time soon, and the "kitty" is fast emptying. Thus, the PSOE needs the support of the other parties more than ever, and has to work harder and make more concessions to keep its alliances.

Meanwhile PP leader Mariano Rajoy surprised everybody by using his defeat to clean house and move to the center, making the PP a much less frightening alternative. Most commentators expected Rajoy to be much weakened after his defeat in March, and possibly even to be replaced. Instead, at the recent party congress in Valencia he not only got himself re-elected, but also replaced the hard-liners (Acebes and Zaplana, most notably) with a new cast of attractive and skillful younger women, and declared over and over again that his was a party of the "center", even distancing himself from his predecessor and former patron, the truly scary and cynical José María Aznar.

But in the PP the "center" is precarious; the right-wingers are still powerful in Madrid and other regions and will keep pushing to defend what Aznar calls the party's "principles" -- a collection of prejudices including alignment with the Catholic Church hierarchy, hostility to immigrants, and defense of private profit over public welfare (e.g., money and other breaks for private hospitals and schools while the public ones are starved for funds).

Meanwhile, at the PSOE's own party congress, the leadership has been forced by their own militants to edge backwards, resisting every step, toward the left. The main issues are women's rights, especially a uniform abortion law, and real separation of Church and State -- which is what the Constitution proclaims, but in fact Spanish taxpayers are still paying the Bishops' Conference €153,100,000 for salaries of Catholic bishops and priests, plus the salaries of the Church's own religion teachers in public schools, Catholic chaplains in the Armed Forces, and much more -- all as a result of Church-State accords signed in 1979. The PSOE leadership now says that they will try to get rid of the crucifixes in state ceremonies, but at least for now won't seek to revise those 1979 accords. But they may be forced by their own party members and other parties to move farther.

Where the PSOE is taking anything but a progressive stance is on immigration. The government is going along with the new European Union rules, permitting detention of undocumented immigrants for up to 18 months, even if they have committed no infraction other than illegal entry. The government is facing a lot of criticism for this from its own partisans and from its usual allies on the left, but the international pressures (Sarkozy et al.) for the moment seem to be stronger.

Image: Two PP women, Madrid region president Esperanza Aguirre and María Dolores Cospedal, Rajoy's pick as General Secretary of the party, in a 2007 photo; as representatives of opposing tendencies, they may not be so cozy now. Photo from Stralunato.

Madrid notes.

Yesterday for the first time we drove to Madrid (we usually take the train, but track work is interrupting service), about 600 kilometers from Carboneras, which in our Smart For Two means only 45 liters of gasoline, so the shock of the record-high price (over €1.25 a liter for 95 octane) was puny compared to what it means for truckers and fishermen, both of whom are on or about to go on strike in many parts of Spain. The fishermen are caught between two big problems: the high price of gasoil, and the low price that the big buyers are paying for their product (plus that other problem that they prefer to ignore, the declining availability due to over-fishing). They are demanding that the government do something, and want to make consumers suffer (by shortages of goods that are not shipped) so that they will pressure the government, but what the government can do is not much. Fuel taxes in Spain are already much lower than in most of the rest of the European Union, and Spain has little to say about the price of imported oil. Long-run remedies (e.g., converting to other forms of fuel or changing the ways goods are transported) will be very long run and fiercely resisted by those with a stake in the present way of doing things. So the big truckers strike scheduled for tomorrow is just a futile expression of frustration.

Which reminds us of other futile outburst of frustration, where anger and violence have been directed at irrelevant targets. And that brings to mind the show we saw today at the Musel del Prado, Goya in Times of War.

It covers Goya's many genres from 1794 to 1820, but the highlights are the two large, famous canvases of "The 2nd of May, 1808" and "The 3rd of May, 1808," given special attention on the 200th anniversary of those bloody events in Madrid. On the second of May the common people and especially the poor rose up in a furious attack on the troops loyal to the French king, José Bonaparte (Napoleon's brother); on the third, those forces of order responded with brutal reprisals. Goya's paintings cry out against the irrational violence of both days -- wild and uncontrolled in the first scene, cruelly disciplined in the second. They are wonderful, frightening paintings, now meticulously repaired from the damage they suffered when they had to be evacuated from the bombings by Nationalist (and German and Italian) forces during the Spanish Civil War, another example of great destructive rage directed against the wrong targets. On the 2nd of May, killing French soldiers was not going to reduce hunger in Madrid; and the reprisals on the 3rd weren't going to help, either.

Goya knew about the horrors of war, which he portrayed in series of drawings and engravings. Makes us think of Baghdad.

Anyway, all these things are far more serious than the transport strike is likely to be, though who knows -- such deliberate disruptions of normal life can go wildly out of control, escalating to enormous violence.

I'm outta here!

Like the dark guy with the horns in the picture, I'm getting out of the bullring. Last October I promised an essay here on Spain every week, originally on Fridays and later on Sundays, just as though I were still a working journalist getting paid to meet deadlines. It was kind of fun as an experiment, and maybe good discipline, even though I was late a couple of times, and last week missed altogether. Now after about two dozen of of those almost-weekly essays, I've managed to touch most of the topics in Spain that most puzzled me and I'm releasing myself from that commitment. From now on, back to occasional reflections, on Spain or other things, as they occur to me and I have the time to develop them.

But first, a note on things to watch for in this country. The recently re-elected socialist government has had enormous luck in facing such stupendously clumsy opposition on the right and disorganization of the smaller forces to its left (especially the internecine battles of IU), but sooner or later the Partido Popular or some successor is going to pull itself together to attack its real vulnerabilities. First of all, the huge and sudden plunge in the construction industry and everything related, producing what the government calls a "profound deceleration" rather than a “crisis” -- but means record unemployment and mortgage rates. Not the government's fault, but it is their responsibility, and the “deceleration” may be deeper and longer than they're prepared for. And the other obvious vulnerability: the Partido Socialista Obrero is currently the only left party in power in Europe (unless you consider Gordon Brown "left," and consider England "Europe" -- but let's be serious).

To see all the original blog entries on Spain, back to 2003, click on the keyword "Spain" below.

Gender in Spain and Italy

Here's a very good BBC article by Danny Wood contrasting Spain's and Italy's gender policies: Diverging paths on gender equality.

One quibble, though, with the phrase, “Spain - the land that coined the word "macho" -”. The Spanish word macho (from Latin masculus, masculine) has always meant a male animal, usually a mule. It's application to overbearing male humans seems to have started in Mexico, and has only in recent years become widespread in Spain. Its introduction is a sign of moral progress: if people earlier didn't have a specific word for this behavior, it was because they didn't see it as a problem.

Uprooted

This week on my birthday, April 3, El País reported that Spain "will need 157,000 immigrant workers a year until 2020". This week in Madrid we saw two foreign films highlighting radically different aspects of the disruptive effects of global migration. The first was Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite (2007) -- literally, "On the Other Side" (oddly translated "On the Edge of Heaven" in the English version), a moving, ambiguous story about suffering and reconciliation of Turks in Germany and Germans in Turkey. There are no really evil people here, just people who hurt (and even kill) others without intending to. Akin extracts marvelous performances from his cast.

Auf der anderen Seite -- that is, on the other side is the evil system exploiting the desperation and vulnerabilities of migrants, exposed in Ken Loach's powerful fictionalized exposé, It's a Free World. Angie, a high-energy single mother who unfairly loses her job at a labor-contracting agency, decides to start her own agency and discovers, first, by playing fairly she can't win competing with the guys who operate illegally, and, secondly, that there are big rewards and little risk for going illegal herself -- hiring workers without papers and then, when convenient, faling to pay them. This is a classic tragedy, in which a victim of the exploiters who starts out with a lot of sympathy for the Poles, South Americans, Iranians and other foreign job-seekers, becomes herself a heartless exploiter of immigrant labor.

Loach has done a tremendous job. But there are still other "other sides" to this story, and we'll keep trying to relate them. Maybe there are some things we can do, as ordinary citizens pressuring governments and companies, to ease the constant churning of families from poorer to more promising lands.

(For more on immigration in Spain, see the many articles from El País at La inmigración en España.)

Catching up on continuing issues

I'm in Madrid this week, again using the connection available to anyone at the Casa Encendida, where things have been -- well, if not exactly "encendidas" (burning), at least hopping, literally. A rock-rap group was performing, and the main hall was filled with people about a third my age, jumping up and down along with the band. It was fun to see such enthusiasm.

I promised a couple of weeks ago to give some thought to two persistent issues in Spain: violence against women, and the peculiarities of the housing crisis, or more accurately, crises (plural), because several different things are at work here.

I start from two assumptions, one modern and the other very ancient. The modern one, still resisted by theocrats and other believers in magic, is that "Everything is the way it is because it got that way." (Which I got from biologist D'Arcy Thompson via Daniel Dennett.) Like Charles Darwin and every other serious scientist since him, I am firmly convinced of this.

The older assumption is that everything is connected to everything else. The connections may be distractingly trivial (the butterfly's wing in one place and a traffic accident somewhere else, for example), but for large-scale social phenomena, probably useful.

Saying that women in Spain get beat up or killed by their partners because Spanish men are especially "machista" (an argument you sometimes hear) doesn't explain anything. Even if it were true, that is, if Spanish men were especially prone to such violence (which they aren't: check out the UN International Violence Against Women Survey), we'd have to ask, What made them that way? And in fact, about half the men involved aren't even Spanish but immigrants from as far away as Russia, or Bolivia, or Morocco, or the Ukraine. So how did THEY get that way?

Part of the answer is no doubt the stress on traditional family structures and expectations that occur in immigration. Great article on this: "No reconocí a mis hijos, ni ellos a mí" by J. J. Áznarez.

Casa Encendida is about to close down my computer (time's up), so I'll leave it at that for now. Thanks. More on this later. Hasta luego. I still owe you a comment on the housing problems, too.

Historical v. sociological imaginations

I've been reading Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (London: Phoenix, 2006), and just got through the intro and Part I, “Old Spain and the Second Republic”. It's a marvelously clear, though overly concise, account of some of the key events and for this reason will be an excellent starting point for anyone new to the subject and a good refresher for those who already know some of it. There is much to praise here -- but still, it left me unsatisfied. It doesn't really explain why things happened they way they did. And I think this has to do with the hidden, unasked questions that a more sociologically-minded author would make explicit.

The first question is, what are the criteria for selecting certain events and ignoring others? This is a big book (479 pages plus intro, notes, maps, index, etc.), but it can't tell us everything and if it did it would be no more useful than the mapamundi that Borges imagined, of exactly the same dimensions as the territory it mapped. For example, why tell us about the anarchist rising and subsequent massacre at Casas Viejas, in Cádiz (1933)? And not about, for example, the traveling puppet theater and variety performances organized by Federico García Lorca and his associates as part of the cultural awakening of the same stratum of angry, ignorant peasants who were massacred at Casas Viejas? The first mention of García Lorca in this book is his murder (1936), but great upheavals are made up of more than violence and political maneuverings. The cultural changes during the first, left-liberal government of the Republic (1931-34), especially the increasing political and civil consciousness of many women, had a lot to do with the repression during the second, right-wing government of the Republic (1934-36) and the intensity of political conflict in the months between the election of a new, further left government (January 1936) and the rising of Franco and other generals (July 1936).

The second question is really another way of putting the first one: How do we think certain kinds of events affect others? What sorts of cultural phenomena could explain, for example, the extremely inflammatory rhetoric of Calvo Sotelo (on the right) or Largo Caballero on the left? For example, what were the imagined audiences for each one? History? A close circle of sycophants?

I don't really fault Beevor for not posing these questions. He has done what he saw as his job, of telling the overtly political events as clearly as possible. This gives us a good basis for working out the next part of the job, forming and testing hypotheses that may better explain the events and so help us understand other phenomena that may or may not be comparable (factional conflict in Iraq today, for example).

The disunited left

Domingo de Ramos (Palm Sunday) is a day for pageantry. Colorful costumes, processions, elaborate tronos (“thrones” shouldered by a dozen or more marchers and bearing the Virgin or other saintly figures) in a tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, when (we assume) people actually believed in that stuff. This year, it comes as Spain is still trying to assimilate the results of last Sunday's election, which brought mixed effects for another tradition in Spain, at least as old, of rebellion against the combined powers of Church and State. The Socialists (Partido socialista obrero español, PSOE) won enough seats to govern comfortably, but Izquierda Unida (IU, "United Left"), heirs of Spain's Communists, all but disappeared from congress.

At its peak, in 1996, IU won 2,639,774 votes, 10.54% of the total, and 21 seats in congress, making it a major bloc. Last Sunday it got only 963,040 votes, a mere 3.8% of the total, and only 2 congressional seats -- a disaster for the group. Without a minimum of 5 deputies (which they had 2004-2008), IU no longer constitutes a parliamentary "group" with the right to question the president of the government in parliamentary debates.

A large part of IU's difficulty is the electoral system, analyzed here two weeks ago, which makes it almost impossible for a third party that is national, not regional, to win any seats in small provinces (even if they get substantial votes). A second part is the increasing polarization in Spain, the division into two giant parties: PP on the right, PSOE on the left. Because IU sympathizers (especially in the smaller provinces) know that IU candidates can't win, they either stay home or vote PSOE to keep the rightists out. And the third cause is IU's own turbulent, erratic and less-than-united history.

The Partido comunista de España (PCE) was a powerful clandestine force against Franco and came out strong after the dictator's death in 1975. The party was legalized and in 1977 won 1,709,890 votes, over 9% and in 1979 1,938,487 votes, 10.77% of the total. But the sweeping success of the renewed PSOE under Felipe González in 1982 won away more than half its electorate, which dropped to 846,515 votes that year, just 4.02% of the total. To fight back, in 1986 the PCE gathered half a dozen smaller left parties to form IU in 1986, opposed to the PSOE government's decision to join NATO.

The new formation's success contributed to its downfall. The IU's big share of the left vote in 1996 contributed to the defeat of the socialists and the victory of the PP under José María Aznar. IU voters who had thought they were pressuring the Socialists to move further left, found instead that they had allowed the election of a government that increased the power of the Catholic Church, privatized essential industries (including electric power and telephone) to allow private enrichment, cut social programs, and pursued a foreign policy that turned its back on Latin America would eventually follow the U.S. into its war in Iraq.

The next election, 2000, about 1.4 million of those IU voters either stayed home or voted for the PSOE. The IU vote dropped from 10.5% (with 21 deputies) to 5.45% (8 deputies) and has continued to slide. The other parties that had been parts of the original coalition dropped out, leaving the PCE and independents, who blamed each other for the losses. This year the infighting even led to a split in the IU in Valencia, causing it to lose its sole deputy in that province.

Does it matter? I think it does, because the IU represents a substantial body of opinion in Spain, more than its roughly 4% of the vote -- which is itself substantial, nearly a million voters. And the combination of a skewed electoral system, bad strategic decisions a dozen years ago, and continued infighting leaves those voters unrepresented. Can they save and renew IU? Even the IU's biggest vote-getter and sole mayor of a major city, Rosa Aguilar of Córdoba, is doubtful. Can they form a new, truly "united" left party? Almost impossible under the present electoral system, and with a rightwing party so threateningly close to power. Or can they do what many leftists have tried to do in the U.S., work from within the major, less offensive party, in this case the PSOE? That seems like the most viable path for now.

Other events that merit analysis:

> Three more women were murdered by their partners or ex-partners this week, reminding us of the huge problem of violence and other abuse directed against women. See Nearly 2 million women suffer some sort of abuse in Spain (in Spanish)

> An extremely conservative, extremely Catholic young hotshot politician, former lieutenant governor of Palma (PP, of course), was caught by anti-corruption police (looking for money laundering) after spending neary 50,000€ on a city credit card in gay brothels. Reminds us of a certain recent governor of New York -- with two big differences. First, the New York governor was spending his own money, and second, in Spain the courts decided NOT to publicize this until AFTER the election so as not to affect the campaign.

> Spain's peculiar housing crisis. Stay tuned.

Spain: Election results

It's over -- the big election in Spain -- and the Socialist Party has won big. Not the absolute majority they were hoping for (176 of 350 diputados in parliament), but close. The Partido Popular got more than it deserved (increasing their representation from 148 to something over 150 -- votes are still being counted as I write this), but mainly its very clumsy and self-sabotaging campaign was more help to the Socialists than to themselves. My hunch is that the PP's most fearsome allies, ex-president José María Aznar and Cardinal Rouco, were so scary that they stimulated a lot of the undecided to go to the polls just to keep them out.

"Spain is breaking apart" cried PP leaders, as they tried to mobilize the rest of Spain against Catalonia. "The economy is collapsing" -- when Spain's growth rate is among the highest in Europe and half the PP's own mayors are in jail or in court for corruption. "Zapatero has reduced Spain to global irrelevance"-- as though standing in Bush's shadow (under Aznar) had made the country more important. "The Socialists are destroying the family" -- because they protect rights to abortion and homosexual marriage. And then, from the PP's allies in the Church, the terrible threat of "laicizing" Spain -- separating State from Church.

As an American president famously said, You can't fool all the people all the time.

More when we know more. As I said, they're still counting the votes at this moment, about 10:30 p.m. here in Spain.

La historia de ETA (El Mundo)
Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (GAL) - Wikipedia

Two campaigns: Spain & the U.S.

Spaniards, like people everywhere, are intently watching the presidential campaign in the U.S., trying to understand it and to guess what if any consequences the victory of one candidate rather than another might have for them. But they are even more stirred, agitated and irritated by Spain's own campaign for the national elections scheduled for next Sunday, March 9, whose likely consequences are more immediate and much clearer.

Any superficial resemblances between the two campaigns are due to the globalization of electoral techniques, most of them invented in recent years in the U.S. but now widely imitated in Mexico, Guatemala, Ukraine and other places. They include attack ads on TV, the use of SMS and Internet to create rapid rallies, the color coordination and choreography of banners and chants at those rallies for television, the instigation of bloggers and radio talk-show hosts to launch unprovable accusations against opponents, and insistent use of a few carefully chosen photos of the party's leader.

But the real dynamics of political mobilization (often mistaken for the democratic process) are radically different, because the issues, the social history and constitutional system in each of these countries are different. Here I'll try to understand the peculiarities of the Spanish process and how it came about.

In the rocky period known as "the Transition" when Spain was struggling to create a new society after the death of Francisco Franco (November, 1975), conservatives were hysterically fearful that their ancient enemies, the Communist Party and the revived and renewed Partido Socialista, would win open elections and burn their churches, nationalize their property and otherwise make their lives miserable. These people were too many and too well organized --- for example in the armed forces and in church organizations -- to be ignored. Outside of the ideological Right, minority nationalities (including but not limited to the Catalans, Basques and Gallegos) and rural provinces with small populations feared that their rights would be ignored in outright majority rule. A third fear, widely shared by people of varying ideologies, was that with so many new parties contending for power, the system would be as unstable as Italy, and worse, that the instablity would invite a new military coup.

The compromise worked out in 1977 and institutionalized in the 1978 constitution was designed to guarantee representation for even the least populous districts and to exaggerate the winning party's share of power, to ensure that it had sufficient seats to resist threats of "no confidence" votes.

It is a parliamentary system in which no one votes for president. Although portraits of Mariano Rajoy, leader of the Partido Popular (the largest party of the opposition), José Rodríguez Zapatero, leader of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español and incumbent President of the Government, and Gaspar Llamazares of Izquierda Unida appear throughout Spain in every available space, their names will appear on the ballot only in Madrid -- as candidates for diputado, not presidente.

In each electoral district, people vote for candidates for diputado (member of parliament), from the list of candidates presented by each party. The elected deputies -- a total of 350, a number that has been constant since 1978 -- then vote on which of them will become presidente del gobierno. If one party wins a majority of deputies, its leader becomes presidente del gobierno and it forms the government. More often (as in the last election, 2004), no party wins an absolute majority, so the party with the most deputies (in 2004 that was the Socialists) must enter into agreement with smaller parties to get their vote (and usually make programmatic concessions or include the smaller party's members in the government). It is not possible in Spain (as is currently the situation in the U.S.) for the president to be of one party and the legislature of another -- whichever party (or coalition of parties) has the most deputies, chooses the president.

So far, no problem. The problem comes in the way those deputies are elected, which gives exaggerated weight to small provinces and grossly underrepresents the smaller parties.

Spain is divided into 52 congressional districts (circunscripciones), the 50 provinces plus the two urban enclaves in Africa, Ceuta and Melilla. These are very unequal in population, but each province gets two deputies automatically just for being a province (Ceuta and Melilla get one each). Thus 102 parliamentary seats (out of the 350 total) are assigned without regard to the population they represent. Only the remaining 248 parliamentary seats are assigned according to population. The number may vary slightly from election to election, as relative population shifts. In 2004 the Community of Madrid, with over 6 million inhabitants, had a total of 35 deputies (2 for its territory plus 33 as its proportion of the 248 other seats), and Barcelona, the second largest, with a population of 5.3 million, had 31 (2 + 29). The nine smallest provinces, with populations ranging from only 93,593 (Soria) up to 220,000 (Huesca) had 3 diputados each (2 + 1). Thus a vote in Soria (3 seats divided by 93,500) is weighted roughly 6 times as heavily as a vote in Madrid (35 seats divided by 6 million) or Barcelona (31 seats divided by 5.3 million).

The system is further skewed by the way votes are translated into parliamentary seats. To ensure that the party with the most votes could form a stable government, the makers of the 1978 constitution adopted a complicated system invented by a Belgian mathematician, Victor d'Hondt (1841-1901), which overweights the larger votes. (For an explanation, see D'Hondt Method - Wikipedia).

The Partido Popular has an especially strong following in the least populous, most conservative provinces; in all but 1 of the 9 smallest, the PP won 2 of the 3 available seats in 2004 and the PSOE picked up the remaining seat. (The exception was Huesca, where proportions were reversed). Thus: (1) by winning more seats in the little provinces where votes are most heavily weighted, the Partido Popular needs fewer votes per deputy than the PSOE, and both parties (PP & PSOE) need fewer votes per deputy than any of the smaller competing parties. In 2004, the PSOE won 42.6% of the votes and almost 47% of the seats (164 deputies), but the disproportion for the PP was greater: 37.7% of the votes, but 42.3% of the seats (148 deputies). The third largest vote-getter, Izquierda Unida, with 5% of the votes, but none of the smaller provinces, took only 5 seats, slightly over 1%. (2) To win a seat in a province with 5 or fewer representatives, you need at least 20% of the votes, or 25% if there are only 4 deputies, etc., whereas in Madrid or Barcelona you can get elected with about 3%. This puts the third largest party, Izquierda Unida, at a great disadvantage, because its supporters don't reach 20% anywhere. Nationwide, in 2004 IU won 5% of the votes, but instead of 17 deputies (5% of 350), won only 5 seats: 2 each in Barcelona and Madrid, plus 1 in Valencia (the next largest province, with 16 deputies). (3) Regional, ethnic-based parties do better with fewer votes than the IU because their supporters are more concentrated geographically and can win even in some of the constituencies with as few as 6 representatives, as well as in the larger cities of their regions. Thus the conservative Catalonian party CiU (Convergència i Unió), with only 3.2% of the votes, won 10 seats in 2004. The Basque national party PNV, with only 1.6% of the votes, got 7 seats.

This is why Gaspar Llamazares, leader of Izquierda Unida, complains that his party (whose supporters are widespread, not concentrated in any one electoral district) needs three times as many votes to get the same number of parliamentary seats, and demands a reform of the electoral law. (See Gaspar Llamazares responde). It is also why he is not likely to get it -- the two largest parties, which would have to agree to any reform, are doing just fine the way things are. It's not fair, but that's the way it is.

A qualification: not so tactical

Yesterday I wrote of Spain's Partido Popular that it "is mainly a tactical alliance for winning elections, sort of like other parties we know." That is, an organization where opportunity to win political power trumps ideology.

Not so fast. The party's biggest vote-getter, Madrid Mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, has been excluded from the PP's electoral lists in a very public humiliation (orchestrated by his biggest in-party rival, Madrid region president Esperanza Aguirre) and is having to defend himself against attacks by the PPs favorite radio commentator, who in his program on the bishops' radio station COPE has repeatedly called him "traitor," an infiltrator from the Socialists, and a man who cares nothing about the victims of the 2004 Atocha train station bombing, etc.

The PP's putative leader, Mariano Rajoy, boasts of his and his party's "common sense," which would seem to imply pragmatism. His "common sense" consists of smiling blandly while harder-liners in his party tear each other apart. So I have to revise my original statement:

The Partido Popular is mainly a very loose tactical alliance among diverse factions pretending to agree on principles but actually seeking power for their own regional, ideological, or old-boy networks; the alliance functions only when the various factional bosses can see "there's something in it for me."

Claiming the soul of Spain

My apologies for failing to deliver last week’s scheduled essay on Spain – other things came up that had to take priority. To compensate, today I offer not two essays, but one on two aspects of the intense contest for the elections scheduled for March 9. The right-wing Partido Popular is still behind in the polls, but rapidly gaining ground on the governing Socialists. And they (the PP) will stop at nothing to gain a few more percentage points, exploiting every stratagem and, of course, misrepresenting everything (quite a lot, in fact) that the Socialist government has accomplished in this legislature.

The first dramatic new twist has been the Catholic Church’s vigorous irruption into the campaign on the side of the PP, creating dilemmas for both sides. The second is the Partido Popular’s latest stratagem to steal votes from the Socialist Party base, its (so-far, verbal) assault on immigrants.

First, a quick historical summary to understand who the players are.

Spain, at the beginning of the 20th century one of Western Europe’s most backward countries, began its exuberant entry into the modern world in 1931. That was when the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), after half a century of struggle, and its allies, including the newer Communist Party and most liberal intellectuals, won elections and proclaimed the Second Republic – i.e., a democratic polity without a king. Democracy, land-reform, equal rights for women, and modern secular education were among the novelties, mobilizing workers, peasants and urban middle-class people who never before had had much to say about how they were governed. The Civil War (1936-39) and the triumph of Francisco Franco’s falangistas undid all of that, and Franco’s regime tried to set the country back into the structures of domination of the 19th and even earlier centuries. It was only after his death in 1975 that the process could begin again. After a confused and highly conflictive interim, a revived and invigorated PSOE led by Felipe González swept the first democratic national elections. González was re-elected President of the Government for four terms (1982-1996), usually by wide margins.

Meanwhile, the conservative opposition regrouped as the “Alianza Popular” which later transformed itself into the Partido Popular. It was not really “popular,” that is, of the common people, the working-class majority. Rather it included military officers trained in Franco-ist authoritarianism, organizations of civilian fascists and racists nostalgic for the old Franco regime, forward-thinking and even liberal entrepreneurs who considered socialism bad for business (especially their business), conservative Catholics who associated socialism with persecution of the Church, and all those opposed to one or another of the Socialist government’s many social reforms, whether in labor, gender, pedagogical or regional autonomy issues. From the beginning, the only things that held this disparate group together were opposition to the Socialists (but for the most varied and contradictory reasons) and the desire for power – that is, the Party is mainly a tactical alliance for winning elections, sort of like other parties we know.

The PP has always been hampered by its own in-fighting and by the bad reputation of some of its elements, but finally, in 1996, after a scandal involving secret police operations against the Basque ETA, it got its chance and won national election. Its leader, José María Aznar, even won re-election in 2000, serving until 2004. In that year, after massive protests against his involvement of Spain in Bush’s war in Iraq, followed by widespread disgust over government deceptions about the bloody bombing of the Atocha train station (see my article, Historic reversal: Bombs & ballots in Spain), the PP lost and the PSOE, now led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, returned to power.

I’m reminding us of this history so that we keep in mind that the PSOE is a very deeply-rooted Spanish party, with a history of trade union and even military combativeness and commanding the loyalties of a very large part of the Spanish population, in every province. The PP, which claims to represent the most ancient Spanish values, is barely 25 years old and is still mostly an alliance of political opportunists, outright fascists, entrenched and corrupt local political bosses, and that dwindling minority of Spaniards who take the Church’s word as Holy Gospel. For example, in Murcia, 14 of the 19 or so mayors on trial for corruption (requalifying unqualifiable land as "urbanizable" for juicy kickbacks from real estate developers) are members of the PP; the Socialists have a few bad apples, too, very few, considering the temptations available to mayors in Spain's frenzied development boom. For the PP mayors, kick-backs and perks seem to be the norm and the reason for running for office. But all that is old news. For the past few months, the PP has begun to act like a Vatican front organization.

The Spanish bishops' outright denunciation of one political party -- the Socialists, of course -- and impassioned declarations that if you vote for it, you are not a good Catholic, has created quite a stir and lots of funny cartoons. The PSOE reacted indignantly, but on second thought, may not really mind. It's the other guys, the PP, who look embarassed by this unsolicited endorsement. They want the hard-core Catholic vote, but they can't afford to look like a hard-core Catholic party, because that will scare away more people than it attracts.

Does Europe have a soul? And is Spain its special guardian, against the threats of foreign doctrines and foreign peoples?

The honchos of Spain’s PP seem to think so. Although in campaign speeches they fudge the theology (to win the national elections on March 9, they will need many votes of non- Catholics), they hint broadly that Europe’s soul is God-given and that Spain is where it lives in purest form. And the big threat is all those foreigners.

In summary, PP presidential candidate Mariano Rajoy has announced that if elected (Heaven forfend!), he will demand that prospective immigrants sign a "contract" that they will obey all Spanish laws, strive to learn the language, and adopt "Spanish customs." The first is institutionally superfluous -- everybody is Spain is already required to obey the law, though not everybody does, and those who don't are as likely to be Spaniards as foreigners. The second, learning the language, is also unnecessary; those immigrants come here to make a living, and they know that to do that they have to speak Spanish, or in Catalunya, Spanish and Catalan. And the last point, adopting "Spanish customs," has been a source of great hilarity and more cartoons (see above, by Peridis). Which Spanish customs? immigrant workers ask. Knocking off work early, spitting on the floor, midday siestas? (Actually, spitting here isn't all that common, but if it happens at all some of the immigrants find it especially repulsive).

Then last night Rajoy dropped another bomb, or let loose another peo (fart): he would take away the right of homosexual couples to adopt children. That right was granted by the legislature and is now Spanish law. This is the first time since Franco that a major politician has proposed eliminating already instituted rights.

If Spain does have a soul, it has one in the same sense that you and I have one: not something eternal and given by some deity with designs of his/its own, but a character, a way of thinking, a set of responses that help us deal with everything we have to deal with. A "self," as discussed in earlier notes here. And in Spain, both parties are parts of that self, and the PSOE is the better part. Boy, I hope they win. It's important not just for Spain, but all of Europe --especially as an example of enlightened immigration policy, gender equality, sexual orientation equality, workers' rights. I hope the rose in the fist wins against the cardinal's mitre and the whip.

The view from here

The world looks different from this little town in Spain than it did from New York, where I lived for more than 25 years. Especially, America looks different -- the U.S. of A. and all the other countries of that hemisphere.

To start with, the U.S. electoral process is hard to explain to Spaniards. How is it that that whole huge country can sustain a campaign of so many months, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people and costing millions or even billions of dollars, just so that the parties can choose their presidential candidates? Especially when, after all, there are only two parties, which should make things simpler than here. And why is that? Why has no third party emerged or survived, and why are there no important regional parties? The answers must be historical, geographical and legal, but back in the U.S., few of us ever raise the questions. I think they are things we should be asking ourselves -- there are alternative systems, representing a much wider range of views.

The campaign process fascinates Spaniards because so much here and everywhere else in the world seems to hang on the outcome. Or maybe not, because there's no guarantee that the next U.S. president, whoever he or she may be, will do anything about the most grievous of the problems created by his/her predecessors -- except probably closing down Guantánamo prison camp, as an embarrassment, though possibly continuing the tortures and abuses in other sites.

Hillary or Barack? my Spanish friends ask me. Gee, I don't know -- either one would open up the democratic process in the U.S., and that would be good. But how much difference will it make to the rest of the world? Nobody among the candidates has a convincing proposal for ending the war and undoing the damage to Iraq, and none even hints at a rational, comprehensive Mideast policy including a firm attitude toward Israel, such as cutting off support until that country begins obeying international law. And the lack of such a policy is a major stimulus (though not the only one) to the turmoil and violence spilling out from that region to Spain, Belgium, France, the U.K. and elsewhere.

The bizarre and complicated pre-presidential campaign in selected states of the United States seems likely to affect lives of everybody else, in some ways. But nobody knows how or -- except for voters in those selected states -- can do much about it. In a presidential system, the chief executive can get away with just about anything (invasions, wire-tapping, secret or overt funding of favored causes) as long as it doesn't affect the most powerful vested interests. That kind of power far beyond the country's borders seems really frightening, especially to people who don't even have the privilege of voting in the U.S. People who do have the privilege should be frightened, too.

The other parts of America also look different from here -- the parts that speak Spanish or Portuguese. Spain has complicated but basically good relations with those countries, most of the time, and takes them much more seriously than does the government of the U.S. For generations, migration flowed from peninsular Spain to those ex-colonies, where opportunities seemed much greater. Since the restoration of democracy in Spain and the 1982 constitution, that flow has been reversed -- because the economy has grown and civil rights have become much more secure than in much of Latin America. Spanish companies are heavily invested in every Latin American country, and the Spanish governments, national and regional, grant extensive aid in many of them.

But then, after looking from here at the globe, I turn back to Spain and see that a lot of what gets the media and some voters most excited is overblown. ETA terrorism is a real problem, but not one that deserves so much more press than the far graver threat of Islamist terrorism, which is international but includes Spanish institutions among its targets. The Islamists have killed many more Spaniards lately (Atocha, Casablanca), but the Basque ETA is useful in divisive politics -- the PP accuses the governing PSOE of being soft on ETA; focusing on Al Qaeda might foster national unity, which doesn't sell papers or mobilize party voters.

Behind ETA is the whole "nationalism" question, which seems archaic -- Do Basques or Catalans really want to become an independent new country in Europe? What would either of them gain, in terms of rights or economic benefits or anything else, in a Europe with a common currency and where national borders are becoming less and less relevant? As for the Basques, could they even really become a single, new independent country? For example, could the French Basques get along with the Spanish ones, or the sophisticated urbanites of Bilbao with the their rural countrymen? And could they even agree on what language, or which dialect of Basque, to use? What would they do about the very large non-Basque population of the so-called Basque Country? And so on -- questions that could only be settled by patient negotiations, not by bombs, kale borroka (street violence) or assassinations. Or by outlawing political parties.

And then there's "the Church" (because in Spain, there's only one billing itself as "the true Church"). Why does anybody pay attention to a group of robed fanatics so terrified by sex that they insist that their savior was born to a virgin? But those self-repressed men in purple have managed to infect others with their fears and close down perfectly legal abortion clinics in the past few weeks, creating enormous problems for hundreds of women. Some of those women have made their own internationalist response: they've maxed out their credit cards to flee to France, where the hospitals treat them courteously and professionally in the national health service.

Fish story

Yesterday a man handed me two fish. He was on his bicycle and I was walking to buy the paper, but it was nearly 2, when morning ends in Carboneras, and the shop owner had already closed up to go home to fix dinner. The fish were fresh, staring up from the basket of the bicycle. "Cook them a la plancha," he said. "Sorry I don't have a bag -- but you're going home, right? Just carry them in your hand."

I was mighty pleased to receive them, even though I don't even know what species they are and I wasn't sure how to clean them. Nobody who saw me thought it the least odd that I was carrying two red-scaled fish.

This is Carboneras. In a city, I probably wouldn't know somebody who worked counting and baling fish in the port. Here, though, almost all the social currents intersect and sometimes create new eddies. In this case, we'd come together in our library reading club and public recitations as "personas libro" -- my fish friend does very good versions of Lorca. And we know each other well enough to know what to do or say that will please. In much of Spain, life is like that -- communal, where (as a Nigerian friend described life in Africa) "everybody's business is everybody's business." Madrid is different, but not entirely different, I think. In the busy business sections of the city, and in the areas devoted to the tourist trade, and the shopping areas, contacts are impersonal and often brusque. In the more stable neighborhoods, where people see the same people day after day, we at least pretend to keep the small town courtesies, but it takes more effort to keep the eddies whirling.

And then there is that other river, mysterious and mighty, flowing through Madrid and disturbing all the other currents. But it's time to dam this metaphor. It's just that the national political currents, pardon me, I mean forces, are pushing in such a woeful direction, toward privatizing everything and destroying what remains of community, that I wanted to take about something else. Like my friend's gift of the fish. [I learned on Monday that they were besugo a la pinta.]

The rose and the cross

To understand the rage of the Catholic bishops against the "radical laicism"of the Socialist government of Spain, you have to look at their precipitous fall from the power they exercised only 40 years ago. To understand the pusillanimity of the Socialist response, you have to look at the continuing erosion of what used to be the Party's base.

Spanish habits, desires and world-views, like those everywhere else in the world today, are changing too rapidly for the old institutions -- churches, parties, trade unions, etc. -- to contain them. The new organizational forms are multiplying as suddenly as the windmills of La Mancha in the 17th century, and the priests and politicos of today, like Don Quijote then, see them as monsters.

In the Spain governed by Francisco Franco, when there was only one Church and the schools taught that patriotism, religion and obedience to the caudillo were all the same thing, something like 98% of the people declared themselves to be Catholics. It was almost impossible to get married outside of the church -- to do so, a couple would have to demonstrate that they were not Catholics, or if they had been baptised, make a formal declaration of apostasy, and you can imagine how that would be seen. There was no divorce, of course. And no right to abortion, or even contraception, or even sex instruction.

As recently as 1998, 83.5% of Spaniards still said they considered themselves Catholic -- a huge drop from just 10 years before. By 2007, the figure had fallen to 77%. And vocations are way down. A cheery Catholic statistician pointed out that the news wasn't all bad, that there are still 10 million who go to mass at least once in a while. "In Spain there's no other social phenomenon as big as this, not even football!" he declared. (I'm not making this up. See Crisis de vocaciones en España.) Maybe. But fans of fútbol are a lot more enthusiastic. More than half (56.2%) of those self-declared Spanish Catholics tell researchers they never go to mass, and only 17% say they go only occasionally. So I don't know where they get that 10 million figure.

Most significant: 46% of Spaniards between 15 and 24 years old describe themselves as agnostics, atheists or indifferent to religion, only 10% say they are practicing Catholics and 39% nonpracticing Catholics.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the Partido Socialista Obrero have nothing to do with this phenomenon, except that they are trying (weakly) to catch up with it. And as the Church decays, the PSOE has no attractive alternative. The old discipline of the socialist trade unions, fighting for workers' dignity, is barely a memory. It's globalization, stupid! It's the Internet and all the other communications with a wider world, the shifting (and in some areas disapppearing) job market, a turmoil where priests offer no certainties and your family, church and school connections offer you no job security. Those 15-24 year olds know that they're on their own.

The PSOE at least seems to be aware of the problem, and some of its people are trying to redefine their socialism as increasing opportunities for youth. But the government has made such drastic concessions to the vociferous church hierarchy -- continuing to finance religous education in public schools and even increasing the state contribution to financing the church itself, failing to follow through on defense of the right of abortion -- that it is having difficulty keeping any youth loyalty. The Cardinals, meanwhile, egged on by the German pope, are howling in the rhetoric of the by-gone fascist era, but nobody but the PSOE (in their own time warp) and a fraction of those ten million mass-attenders wants to pay them much attention.

España se seculariza, El País, 10 de enero de 2008
Parties & church in Spain

Coming up: Church & party in Spain

It's been a complicated week, in my life as well as in Spain's. We just got back to Carboneras and my home Internet connection on Wednesday, after 2 very busy weeks in Madrid. And meanwhile, the hierarchs of the Spanish Catholic Church launched a surprise offensive on the Socialist government, which has gone to great lengths to appease them. Excessive lengths, in my opinion. The State still subsidizes the Church, and pays the salaries of military chaplains and religion teachers in public schools who are hired and fired by the bishops. And despite all this, at a huge rally in Madrid the day before New Year's Eve, supposedly to defend "the family," Cardinal Agustín García-Gasco thundered that "Radical laicism [i.e., the threatened separation of Church and State] is leading to the dissolution of democracy!"

Democracy? What does the all-male dominated, vertically commanded Church with its infallible pope know about democracy? This cluster of cardinals is taking a stand to the right of Pope Benedict, and openly siding with the conservative Popular Party. But rather than take pot-shots at purple-clad targets, I want to investigate these serious social questions:

What is causing this sudden ecclesiastic politicization? An upcoming election within the Church for control of the Bishops Conference is one vector, intersecting with the also proximate national elections (announced for March) for civil authorities, but mere coincidence (or contemporaneity) doesn't explain what is making certain cardinals so belligerent.

A second question is: How serious is all this going to be politically? Do the cardinals really control very many votes in contemporary Spain?

And we must also ask what it is about "laicism", homosexual unions and abortion that gets Spanish clergy so much more outraged than their counterparts in other European countries. Of even whether those are the real issues, or rather the public relations front to cover a more serious fear of the Spanish clergy: the threatened loss of their privileged institutional status and financing in a Church-State concordat still in effect since the Franco years.

I don't promise to answer all these questions, but simply to reframe them as hypotheses that can be proven or disproven. They are important for understanding Spain, and Spain is important for understanding the world.

Happy Winter Solstice to All!

My apologies for missing my latest self-imposed Friday deadline for an update on Spain. Things were just too chaotic last week, in our personal lives more than in Spain. For starters, Saturday Dec. 15 we rushed to Madrid in disorderly fashion (the refrigerator door fell off while we were cleaning our apartment, my external hard-drive went into infinite spin when I tried to back up my laptop, the train we were scheduled to take from Almería to Madrid had been canceled due to a track defect), so I got here without my laptop. Then, the apartment we had planned to move into wasn't really completed so we had to stay in a hotel with limited Internet access. The Madrid apartment is really tiny but very well located, right next to the Reina Sofía museum and very near the Atocha train station; it will be our urban pied-a-terre, while the main house (still not finished) will be in Carboneras. We're moved into the apartment now, and expect the final work to be completed today, and just this morning we discovered this wonderful Madrid institution, a cultural center with exhibitions and other activities and rooms where anyone can use computers or sit and study, absolutely free. It's called La Casa Encendida, an obra social of the savings bank Caja Madrid. "Obra social" -- there must be a common expression like that in English. Here it means an activity for community benefit. In Spain, savings banks (unlike the other banks such as BBVA) all have "obra social" as their chief mission -- their gains must go into such projects rather than as dividends to shareholders. Good system.

As I implied above, the week in Spain as a whole was much less chaotic than in our personal lives. The Socialist government even managed to get its budget approved in Congress at the last minute! This involved a lot of negotiation and patience with all the smaller parties and the one big opposition party, so it's further evidence of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's abilities as a political operative.

I hope to have something more substantive to say about events here this coming Friday. And now that I've discovered the resources of the Casa Encendida, I'll be able to post. Till then, Happy Winter Solstice!

(By the way, does anybody know why the early Christians, trying to peg their holiday to the pagan festival that everybody was already celebrating, missed by 3 days? The solstice is December 22, I believe. How could they get that wrong?

Hasta pronto.

Sociology of the Spanish "Right" - to come

Apologies. My intention is to examine the patterns of irrational discourse that characterize the Spanish "right," which will first require analyzing what holds its components together. (There is irrational discourse on the "left" as well, but in Spain that's not the big threat and therefore its analysis can wait.) This is a puzzle, because the big crowds that the Partido Popular musters for its noisy demonstrations include a range of people who ordinarily wouldn't even be able to talk to one another: barely literate fascist thugs, a few university faculty, rigidly schooled priests and bishops, accountants and other mid-level functionaries, rentiers, and -- a characteristically Spanish social group -- people we might call "career victims". I mean by that people who, after suffering some terrible loss to terrorist violence (such as personal injury or the death of a spouse, child or other relative), have organized their lives around that event. Some of those active in organizations of terrorist victims strike me as very admirable, politically responsible actors. Others -- well, despite what the Greek dramatists said, there's no scientific basis to believe that suffering necessarily leads to wisdom.

However my thoughts right now are too complex (which is perhaps no more than a self-flattering way to say "confused") to be of any use to anyone else. I've been reading Bourdieu, Touraine & others, looking for categories to examine and explain these things, and hope soon to be able clarify at least what the lines of inquiry should be. But not in time for my Friday blog. And it's already Saturday morning here in Spain! Hasta pronto.

The pain in Spain: fighting against progress

So far I've been focusing here on the Spanish left. But the real problem is the Spanish right. According to all opinion polls, the left draws the sympathies of a sizeable majority, and the Partido socialista obrero español (PSOE) has been the governing party for 20 of the past 25 years, achieving much in economic development, the growth of per capita income, and human rights legislation. But it has had to fight every step of the way, and its hold on power is precarious. The problem, of course, is the peculiar character of the Spanish right.

Spanish conservatives are not merely pro-business "liberals," as that word is used in Spain. "Liberal" here means defender of the free-market before other more social interests, and thus implies merciless capitalist exploitation -- which in the 19th century was equated with "Progress" (see last week's blog). The core of the Spanish right is far more conservative than that: not 19th century, which was far too dangerously enlightened (Darwin et al.), but reaching back to 1492. That was the year that Spanish intolerance reached unprecedented levels, with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from the newly united kingdom. It was also the year that Queen Isabel sent Columbus on his adventure to find the Indies, the year that Antonio de Nebrija presented the Catholic Monarchs with the first grammar of the Castilian (now called "Spanish") language (“Language has always been the companion of empire,” he explained in his introduction), and the year the price of gold reached its all-time historical high. A very good time for empire and a moment the Spanish right would like to freeze.

Spain did not invent intolerance (remember Samson's attempted genocide of the Philistines), but its monarch and clergy did invent institutions and even a special vocabulary for it. Our words "race" (in the sense of a subspecies of humans) and "caste" both have Spanish origins. The main institution was the Inquisition, an instrument for squashing innovation so effective that Spain -- once the greatest power in Europe -- stagnated as Holland, France and especially England advanced technically and comercially and soon had taken all Spain's possessions in the Old World (the Low Countries, Naples, etc.) and most of its wealth from the New. Popular resistence to such repression never ceased, causing the Inquisition to be abolished repeatedly, but repeatedly it returned along with the reactionaries who resumed power after every crisis. Abolished in 1808, it was reintroduced in 1814 after the defeat of Napoleon, then abolished again in 1820, restored again in 1823, and not abolished definitively until 1834. The progressive 19th century of the rest of Europe never had a chance in Spain. And though it did not carry that name, something very like the Inquisition was reinstituted by Francisco Franco (1939-75), as the Catholic Church became in effect (again) an arm of the state.

And for many Spaniards today, that is still their ideal of eternal Spain: all Catholic, all heterosexual, all speaking Castilian (and not Basque or Catalán or Gallego or Valenciano or anything else), all obedient to one temporal authority acting in the name of the supreme authority of God (the Roman Catholic God, that is -- not others are allowed). The party most rightists vote for, the misnamed Popular Party (PP), claims to be defending democracy, but its values do not derive from the people but from their constituents' vision of eternal Spain. As a recent example, the PP has blocked renewing the membership of the highest court and as many other measures as it could because it doesn't regard the party that won the elections as legitimate. In short, the PP does not regard the popular will as expressed by voting to be a source of legitimacy. The proof of its illegitimacy is that the PSOE-led government has approved same-sex marriages, recognizes the aspirations of non-Castilian-speaking regions, promotes integration of immigrants and, most damning of all, has sought to laicize education, at least partly.

The Spanish right is a minority but an extremely determined and potentially violent one. Its components include outright fascists waving Falangist banners and assaulting immigrants, an indignant clergy that denounces a course on citizenship as an attack on the Church's exclusive authority over moral values, the Church's outrageously reactionary radio network COPE (which, among other absurdities, has repeatedly called for the king's abdication on the grounds that he is too friendly to the Socialists), and an extremely vociferous organization of "victims of terrorism." The AVT represents only relatives of victims of ETA but not of 11 March 2004 (which happened on the PP government's watch) and has persuaded itself that the Socialists, just because they are Socialists, must be allies of the terrorists. And of course PP supporters also include the usual shady business interests anxious to avoid restrictions on their expoliation of the landscape, perforation of illegal wells in a thirsty country, and other abuses.

Together, they can stage very noisy, colorful demonstrations where they insult the government enthusiastically. More seriously, they have enough deputies in Congress to block any initiative requiring more than a simple majority (such as renewing the membership of the high court). And this is why the Socialist government proceeds cautiously, too cautiously for many of its potential supporters on the left. The state still subsidizes the Catholic Church out of taxes, and in addition still pays salaries for religious instruction in the public schools (students can opt out of that class, but it must be offered) while permitting Church authorities to select and fire the instructors on grounds of creed or anything else.

The Socialists are in a bind. If they try to move too fast, they will be blocked on everything. If they don't move fast enough, voters who oppose the right will stay home or will vote for one of the smaller leftist parties.

Well, I never got to it, but what I had intended to write about today was a symptom of this unending stalemate, the publication of the latest report (2006 data) of Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA. This is an international, triennial measure of 15-year old students' academic abilities in the 30 member nations of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) plus 5 non-member states. In a terrible embarrassment, Spain came out near the bottom of all the European nations in the three categories: number 32 in mathematics (of western European countries, only Portugal scored lower), 35 in reading (above Greece but below everybody else in W. Europe), and a little better in science where it was no. 31 (ahead of Lithuania, Norway and Italy). Worse, Spain's rankings in math and reading had dropped since the last report (2003 measurements). There are many reasons, of course -- there always are, and may excuses, for a failure. But a big part is due to the failure to institute any comprehensive reform of an antiquated and underfunded school system partly dominated by the clergy, and this is due to the right-left stalemate in Congress.

However, the PISA report wasn't all bad news. Some of Spain's regions, tested separately, did better than the European average, La Rioja best of all. The worst was my home region, Andalucía. Truly woeful results, explained by the Socialist regional president, Manuel Chaves, as a result of Andalucía's historical backwardness -- that is, it had been the least-developed region since Franco times. But we recall that some countries that were at least as backward back then have made far greater strides; Cuba comes to mind. And Chaves' argument doesn't explain why the results were worse in 2006 than in 2003!

But at least Spain can congratulate itself that its students score far better in math than those from countries with more wretched school systems, such as Kirgizstan (no. 57) and the United States of America (no. 35). Canada, in contrast, did very well: no. 7 in math, 4 in reading and 3 in science. Maybe those Canadian kids are brighter. Or maybe there's something wrong with public education in countries like Kirgizstan, the United States and Spain.

Which way is Left? (2) - The Spanish exception

José Vidal-Beneyto is a Spanish sociologist (b. 1929 in Valencia) long resident in France, author of a dozen or more books on mass communications and politics, and a frequent columnist in Spain's most prestigious daily El País (of which he is a co-founder). Recently (10 and 17 November) he contributed two articles lamenting the "Izquierda en desbandada" -- "The Left in a rout," routed from the battlefield by the merciless Right of global capital, consumerism and the defeatism of "There Is No Alternative." Nowhere (in his view, which is mainly of Western Europe) does the Left have a credible, coherent program able to mobilize citizenry against the terrible destruction wrought by global capitalism against the environment, human health, and personal freedoms. Britain's New Labor is reduced to vague electoral liberalism, Germany's SPD is hopelessly divided and adrift, and France's Parti socialiste is in low-intensity civil war after the debâcle of the last elections.

Because he is writing in El País one would assume he is also thinking of Spain, though the authors he cites are mostly French. However the contrast between France and Spain is more dramatic than he is willing to acknowledge. In Spain, the Left has hardly been routed by the enemy but is the national government, and its program of action is still credible enough to rally large numbers, maybe even a majority, of voters.

As in France, the Spanish Left is comprised of multiple groupings with their own histories, traditions and programs, making Left politics a matter of continuous negotiation and frequent compromise to secure a majority in Parliament or to win an election. In Spain, certainly, and in France too, I suppose, far more people identify themselves as "left" than "right," but they don't always vote the same way or even vote at all. Nevertheless the Partido Socialista Obrero Español has been able to win elections more often than any other party in post-Franco democracy: Felipe González in four successive elections (1982, 1986, 1989 and 1993) and, after a 2-term hiatus under the Right, the current government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, elected 14 March 2004. This gives the PSOE enormous authority in those negotiations with other left-leaning formations.

Opinion polls give the PSOE a continuing though narrowing lead over its main rival, the Partido Popular, for the coming (2008) elections: 39.7% to 37.4%. Whether this is enough will depend mainly on the PSOE's ability to win the votes of left-leaners who don't agree with everything they've done or even much like them. Those who think the PSOE is moving too slowly and timidly on social issues may want to vote for Izquierda Unida, whose deputies (members of parliament) would at least give conditioned support to a new Socialist government. However in IU the once-powerful Communist Party is fighting for control against non-communist radicals; the factionalism has become so ugly that IU's usual voters may just stay home. Left nationalists in Catalonia usually vote for Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Republican Left of Catalonia -- "republican" here means anti-monarchical), which is currently allied with the Socialists in both the Catalonian and national governments; but party scandals and erratic pronouncements by ERC's leaders may reduce their voter turnout, too, meaning a drop in the total left vote.

The PSOE still has two great strengths, one proactive and the other reactive. The first is the series of social measures enacted under the present government, including the legalization of homosexual marriages, the provision of sizable subsidies to assist seriously ill or disabled persons or their supporters, gender equality in elective office, pay, paternity-maternity leave etc., and other generally popular measures. The reactive strength is the strength of repulsion of the hard-right hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the ridiculous spectacle of exaggerations, outright lies, and antidemocratic political maneuvers, some of them extremely clumsy, of the so-called Popular Party. The PP's unreconstructed reactionariness may just be enough to drive those other leftists to the polls, to hold their noses and vote PSOE to keep the likes of Ángel Acebes, Eduardo Zaplana and the unspeakable Mayor Oreja out of their lives. More on that formation, the PP, in future notes. It deserves the same kind of dissection that Karl Mannheim brought to German conservatism in his 1925 study.

Spain & América, today

When people here in Carboneras, the little Andalusian town where we live, say "América" or "americano", most often they're not referring to the United States but to any of the 20+ Spanish-speaking countries of "América" -- i.e., the entire Western Hemisphere -- where many of them have relatives who emigrated in the hard, Franco years or even later, in the better years since Franco's death in 1976. Many Republicans (i.e., defenders of the Second Republic against Franco in the Spanish Civil War) found refuge in Mexico or Argentina, and smaller numbers to other Spanish-speaking lands (including Puerto Rico -- e.g., Pablo Casals). Later, in the 1950s, many went to Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay or to Portuguese-speaking Brazil, countries which then offered not only greater freedom but also far greater economic opportunities than Spain.

In more recent years, the relationship has reversed. Spain's economic growth has been phenomenal, while economic conditions in Spanish-speaking countries of America got worse and worse, and political repression drove tens of thousands into exile, many of them to Spain in the years of the Socialist government of Felipe González (1982-1996), which welcomed them. There have been periods of tension, and even today there are occasional outrageous acts of discrimination or even physical attacks on "Sudacas" (a pejorative term for South Americans), but generally Spain is still an attractive place for Latin American emigrants. Here in this little town where I live, most people (until they got to know me) have assumed I was from Argentina (it's my accent, I guess), which doesn't arouse any hostility but rather memories of distant cousins in that country.

Spain's relationships with its ex-colonies have been complicated by contradictory memories. Populist leaders in the Americas often invoke the massacres and humiliations of indigenous American peoples in the Conquest, and anti-Spanish prejudice is still cultivated in Mexico (where they call Spaniards "Gachupines"), but Mexico was also one of the countries that sent most volunteers to defend the Spanish Republic during the Civil War -- so they can't feel all that alienated from the "Madre Patria." Some countries, including Cuba, Venezuela and Argentina, all with large 20th century Spanish immigration, feel especially close to Spain. Anyway, since 1982 Spain has paid large "reparations" (though nobody calls them that) in the form of grants and loans for infrastructure and other projects, including the Junta de Andalucía's generous funding of various cultural initiatives.

So it was a big surprise, and at first seemed even a joke, when Hugo Chávez, considering himself offended by the king of Spain (who finally told him to shut up during his irrepressible interruption of Spain's president at the summit meeting in Santiago) brought up the 500-year old history of the conquest as another reason to re-evaluate the presence of Spanish companies in Spain. Spanish capitalists are not do-gooders, of course -- they're capitalists. But the Spain of half a millennium ago is not the Spain of today, and is really an essential (and currently the most prosperous) part of the larger Hispanic world, a market and (loose) political force of 550 million people.

Population of Latin America

Which way is 'Left'? Spain, France, the U.S.

Now isn't this a curious image? A weary, desperately hopeful Bush, nearly friendless in the world and with no support from either the American people or even his party, seems to be leaning on Sarkozy, who is much shorter but at the moment much sturdier. Sarkozy has announced that France will always be "a friend of the United States" and, while making no commitment to Bush's lost war in Iraq, promises to maintain troops in Afghanistan "as long as necessary."

Contrast this with a March 2003 photo of a healthier, much more confident Bush with Spain's then-president José María Aznar, who had just committed Spanish lives to Bush's Iraq adventure in exchange for a little petting. Aznar reveled in that caress in his "best friend" role in Bush's western; Sarkozy knows that this show is not John Ford but Molière, where he plays the clever scamp who happily relieves the pretentious nincompoop of a good part of his fortune.

On Wednesday we flew back from Paris to Madrid, and then on Thursday took the train to Almería, an occasion to catch up on the papers and reflect on the contrasting "Rights" and "Lefts" of Spain and France.

In Spain, the Right can't agree on what direction to take, the major party riven by in-fighting while its supposed leaders take disastrously extreme positions that even many of its usual voters find ridiculous (claiming against all evidence that Atocha train station bombings were really a Socialist plot to take power, for example). In France, it's the Left that doesn't know where it's going, or to say the same thing another way, is trying to go in all directions at once. In both cases, disorganization is both cause and consequence of being out of power.

Aznar's phony nationalism (claiming to promote the ancient values of Spain while surrendering its sovereignty to the U.S. neo-cons) turned into an electoral disaster for his Popular Party in 2003, as many Spanish conservatives now realize, but the PP leadership has been reluctant openly to disavow Aznar's odd mix of neo-liberal economics and medieval social policies. The PP factions are at war with one another (notably in Madrid, with PP Madrid Community president Esperanza Aguirre v. PP Madrid mayor Ruiz-Gallardón, and in Valencia, with former Generalitat president and now PP spokesman Eduardo Zaplana in open conflict with current Generalitat president, also PP, Camps), and has alienated its some-time allies in the other nationalist parties. In contrast, the Socialists (PSOE) now in government have been able to establish the direction of the Left, holding together (mostly) its own internal factions and keeping the support of the other parties that define themselves as Left.

Sarkozy, who is as far right as Aznar economically but not as medieval -- he doesn't openly voice nostalgia for the Reconquista (i.e., expulsion of Muslims) or the Inquisition -- is seeking to impose his vision on France's fractious Right while exploiting the notorious divisions on the Left, seducing some of the Socialist Party's best-known figures to join his government. His successes reveal the utter confusion of the Left, that famous socialists such as Kouchner et al. could think that Sarkozy's echo of Louis-Phillipe's 1840 cry "Enrichissez-vous" could be a left slogan today. Sarkozy's gestures (mostly mediatic) so far have been possible because he faces no concerted, united opposition. The big strikes scheduled for next week will be a major test.

I haven't yet got to what I wanted to talk about here, the parallel and divergent histories of the two countries' Socialist and Communist Parties, which explain a lot of what is going on now and, I think, will help us predict where and in what form the new European Left will take. But this note is already too long and it's late. Those thoughts for a future note.

Spain: Movies and memories

Last night we saw one of the newest Spanish films, Las 13 rosas, a true story made into a perhaps overly sentimental film, but nevertheless effective because we recognize its truth, of both the immense human capacity for cruelty and the strength of those who resist it. In Madrid after the defeat of the Republic in 1939, thirteen very young women -- girls, really -- arrested by Franco's police for various reasons (some had been in the Socialist Youth, one had helped a Communist trade-unionist escape, and so on) were sentenced to death, along with scores of men, accused of complicity in violent acts in which they had had no part, not even remotely. As a work of art, it is far less extravagantly imagined than El laberinto del fauno, a fairy tale of Franco repression and anti-fascist partisan victory, but this film has the enormous advantage of realism: this really did happen, pretty much the way it's told. For a historic photo and a good summary of the true history of the 13 "red roses" (in Spanish), see La corta vida de trece rosas en El País, 11/12/2005.

Otherwise, the news from Spain this week is: nada. Which also happens to be the title of a very good feminist novel of those hard, early years of the Franco dictatorship: Laforet, Carmen. Nada. 1944. (Clásicos Españoles. Madrid: El País, 2004.) No news, just olds. For example, this week an unemployed Spanish youth on a Barcelona subway car screamed at, punched, pinched the breast and then kicked in the face a slender Ecuadorian girl he'd never seen before (this was all recorded on security cameras), was quickly found and arrested, and then freed by a judge; he's on the street, but the girl is now afraid to leave her house. More North Africans and sub-Saharan Africans risked their lives and many lost them in attempts to reach Spain; and Mariano Rajoy, the terminally mediocre leader of the opposition Popular Party, made another grotesquely idiotic statement, this one so clueless that the Spanish press compared him to George W. Bush (he said we shouldn't really worry about climate change, because there were bigger problems such as CO2 emissions; he said this on the same day and in the same forum where Al Gore was about to show his movie). But racism in Spain, immigrant desperation and Rajoy's idiocy are not news.

Next week I'll be in France, so I can't promise any new report on Spain. I've already touched on some of the big issues. (Click on keyword "Spain" below to see the lot.) These include two essays on immigration 2006/10/07 and 2006/9/27, plus the notes of the past three Fridays on Spain's entanglement with Bush's Iraq war and its internal "nationalisms" (2007/10/5, the overbuilding crisis and Rajoy's "Día de la Hispanidad" idiocies (2007/10/12), and "Historical Memory" of the civil war and the Franco dictatorship (2007/10/19). And my compañero Baltasar and I have written many other notes on Spain on our Spanish-language blog, which you may want to visit. Hasta pronto.

Farewell to Franco?

"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." -- attributed to Mark Twain

The Socialist government's 2005 proposal of a "Law of Historical Memory" has been a sharp poke in the myths of both sides in Spain's great Civil War of 1936-39. This is because the war and its aftermath are remembered in diametrically opposite ways by Right and Left, and because each has huge emotional and even economic investments in its version.

It's easy to see why the emotions are so involved; it's impossible to remain indifferent after looking at the photographs of combat, destruction and suffering, or the posters of the Republic (which had the best artists) or of its enemies the Nationals, or listening to radio recordings (hysterical sermons, tense bulletins, impassioned speeches) or the marches or folk songs given new, revolutionary or nationalist lyrics ("Ay, Manuela", "Los cuatro muleros/generales", etc.).

For the Falangists of the 30s and 40s and their contemporary defenders, the war against the Republic was a Crusade that saved Christian Spain from Godless Communism, and those who opposed it deserved whatever punishment they suffered. All their guys were heroes, all their fallen "martyrs."

For defenders and sympathizers of the Republic, the heroes and heroines were all on their side, defending democratic legality with the support of other heroes from all over the world in the International Brigades. Together they expanded, liberalized and de-ideologized education, extended medical service to those who had never had it, opened the vote and elective office to women, empowered trade unions and civic associations in an intense and active democracy, and made possible a great cultural flowering in drama, poetry and all the other arts. In this view, the Franco dictatorship was inhumane and antihuman, and any resistance, whether by words or bombs, was more than justified.

The two great myths were constructed to solace the survivors and descendants on both sides, ways to "make sense" of real events that were complicated and contradictory. The truth, as usual, makes less "sense": heroes viewed from another angle -- or at another moment in their history -- become monsters, and glittering ideals turn into caricatures of themselves. The Falangist Nationalists killed many more Spaniards than their foes, and did so with the aid of German Nazi and Italian Fascist troops and arms and Muslim Moorish infantry, making their "nationalism" suspect. Also, their denial of basic civil freedoms and even of food to the needy makes their version of Christianity hard to defend. But the Left also committed outrages, including the massacring of prisoners during the Falangist siege of Madrid (far fewer than the other side, but still indefensible), and arrests and killings by one leftist faction against another -- not everyone defending the Republic was a Republican, that is, a true believer in the institutions of a democratic republic.

Until Franco's death in 1976, Republican exiles in Mexico, Russia and other countries and other sympathizers constructed their memorials mainly out of words, building a library of novels, stories, plays and tracts. Those supporters of the Republic who had remained in Spain and survived hunger, imprisonment of close relatives and other humiliations, including many widows, were so traumatized that they tended to keep their memories to themselves, too ashamed or frightened to tell their grandchildren what they had seen and suffered.

The Falangist myth was much more solidly constructed. Its "historical memory" was implanted in Spain by school texts, obligatory hymn-singing in class, the renaming of streets for Falangist generals, heroic statues of Franco, and, especially, the enormous monument outside Madrid known as the "Valle de los Caídos" ("Valley of the Fallen"), constructed by Franco's prisoners of war, and dedicated to "...perpetuating the memory of the fallen of our glorious Crusade," according to the 1940 decree of its founding. And there lie the tombs of Generalísimo Francisco Franco and the founder of the Falange (Franco's fascist party), José Antonio Primo de Rivera (1903-1936), attracting commemorative ceremonies of present-day falangistas, complete with the stiff-armed salute.

Then, after the sweeping Socialist Party electoral victory in in 1982, some town governments began to commemorate Republican and other leftist heroes by putting their names on a few streets and parks. And some of the grandchildren began digging for information in archives of the dictatorship, struggling for access with curators who opened them only reluctantly and partially, and only to those who could demonstrate a personal connection to the papers sought. And with the aid of elderly peasants who now felt empowered to speak, they also began digging into the ground, uncovering unmarked mass graves of school teachers, trade-union members, town officials of the Republican period, poets and others -- even priests, killed by the Falangists for feeding or hiding suspected Republicans.

Even today the Right, including the Catholic hierarchy, wants only its own martyrs remembered, conveniently forgetting those priests slaughtered by Franco's people. And sectors of the Left will not be satisfied by anything less than thorough condemnation of the Falangist mutiny and dictatorship it established, the annulment of all summary trials that condemned opponents of Franco to prison or death, and compensation for the dictatorship's victims and their descendants -- pensions and indemnities that will run into millions of euros.

So it was an important and rather surprising achievement this week when the Socialists and other left parties gained the support of even the opposition Popular Party (which includes Franco's political heirs and other rightists) for parliament to approve legislation to open all the archives to any researcher (as in other European countries), increase indemnizations to Republican veterans and their heirs, permit the children and grandchildren of exiles to opt for Spanish nationality (which should benefit many in Latin America), and -- of greatest symbolic importance -- to redefine the Valle de los Caídos as "a memorial to all the fallen in the Civil War and to those who suffered repression" in the following years. The place will need some serious design reforms. A hammer-and-sickle beside the huge cross may be too much to ask, and a Socialist Party fist with a rose could hardly compete with either of those images. Or better yet: Just pull down the cross -- which in Spain has become a partisan banner -- and set up a representation of Spain's now-democratic constitution.

Photo, top: A crane removes the statue of Francisco Franco from the main entry to the General Military Academy of Zaragoza- EFE, from El País, 24/08/2006.

Photo, side: El Valle de los Caídos, from Falange web forum

Spain: Bubbles, bombs & bombast

It wasn't the story that got the most media attention in Spain this week, but it may be the one with the most serious long-term impact: The combined debt of builders, realtors and families for housing in this country is now as big as the entire gross domestic product of Spain! Un billón de euros -- that is, a million times a million, or what in the U.S. we call a "trillion." Which means, at current exchange rates, about one trillion four-hundred million dollars.

The double-digit yearly inflation of housing prices for the past 5 or 6 years and the mad pace of building -- 850,000 housing units last year, more than Germany and France together (and both are larger countries) -- created an economic bubble that got so big that the building & realty sector accounts now for nearly one-third (32.5%) of all outstanding bank loans, up from about 10% eight years ago. It couldn't go on indefinitely, and the mortgage crash in the U.S. (where Spanish banks had bought bonds that are now plummeting in value) has finally pricked it.

Now suddenly mortgages are more expensive, housing prices are falling, and buyers are disappearing. Realtors who had taken out big loans backed by the expected sale prices of over-valued land and buildings are defaulting. So far no major bank in Spain has come close to failing, as we saw recently in Britain (they say it's because they are more cautious in their mortgage policies), but one significant realtor, Llanera, has collapsed.

Slowdown in construction is expected to cut Spain's 2008 economic growth rate from an impressive 3.4% (predicted in May) to 2.7% (El Mundo, 3 Oct. 2007), and investment growth in construction will drop from 3.8% in 2007 to 0 -- yep, zero -- in 2008, according to the bank Caja Madrid. There go tens of thousands of the semiskilled jobs that have been filled largely by Rumanians, Lithuanians, Senegalese, and South Americans. And lots of other jobs and expectations.

Spain's rapid economic growth in recent years has been almost entirely due to the construction industry, mainly second homes for the wealthy. As economist José García Montalvo put it, "It's a disaster for the economy that a sector with such a low productivity is absorbing so much of our resources." (El País, 7 Oct.)

The building frenzy has wreaked havoc with local ecology, not to mention the scenery of the coastline covered with brick and cement hotels, apartment complexes and shopping centers. The disastrous flooding in Almuñécar less than two weeks ago, when the rain was heavy but no greater than normal, was largely due to "invasions" of riverbeds by eager builders. (The monstrous floods in Alicante today were probably aggravated by similar causes -- we should know later this week.) Almost all new building has been for high-priced second homes, most of which are empty most of the year (and when they're not, the first home is empty). Meanwhile, organizations of youth are organizing massive protests because they can't afford to buy and can't find anything to rent.

No other country in Europe has been building so much for such little purpose or with so little concern for the environment or for the social needs of its population. What has caused such a distortion of the economy? A combination of forces: an eccentric land-use policy legislated under the Aznar government (giving local governments the power to declare almost all land "urbanizable," meaning buildable), Spanish local nationalisms demanding ever more authority over land-use (and thus permitting the well-connected to make fortunes turning farmland and parkland into luxury housing), the growing prosperity of a certain class of Spaniards and the influx of well-pensioned foreigners, all seeking homes on the coast and near golf courses, and a local, city-government financing system that depends on sale of licences to builders (and thus a strong incentive to "urbanize" everything). The inertia is too strong for all the building to stop suddenly, but the slowdown will be felt.

The bombs you no doubt know about. ETA is back with a bang. It all seems so atavistic, violence for "national liberation" at a time when the nation-state is losing its relevance (see the note on Ulrich Beck, below). The problem for ETA is that, if they became a legal political movement and put Basque independence to a vote, they almost surely would lose. But that's a subject for another essay.

And bombast. Today is Spain's "national fiesta." Today, 12 October, Spaniards celebrate -- well, what, exactly? Columbus's encounter with the Arawaks in 1492 and the beginning of Spain's American empire? No, that didn't turn out all that well. Maybe the day of the Guardia Civil? Well, sort of. But really it's for Spain's patron saint, the Virgen del Pilar, who appeared atop a pillar in Zaragoza in the 13th century. Big party (military parade, appearance of all the royals with the government, and opposition leader Rajoy waving a flag to show he's more Spanish than anybody). A great occasion for attention-grabbers of all sorts, including far right-wingers who booed the president right when he and the king were honoring Spain's war dead, and in Basque country, the self-styled "Abertzale (Basque for "patriot") left" trashing everything they could in San Sebastián.

This is just a bit of what seems to me important in Spain this week. More next Friday.

Photo from today's "Desfile de la Hispanidad" in Madrid: EFE, El Mundo

This week in Spain

Cartoon by Peridis, El País 5 Oct. 2007

The fallout from "Crawford"
José María Aznar (the mustachioed face above) must have been really stung by the revelations of his private conversations with George Bush, in Crawford, Texas, on 22 Feb. 2003, just before Bush launched his "Operation Iraqi Freedom" -- transcripts that showed that he knew Bush had made the decision to invade, even while he was claiming that he and Bush and Blair were still seeking a diplomatic solution. The transcripts were unearthed by a British lawyer who passed them on to El País, which broke the story last Tuesday. (Here's Ernesto Ekaizer's original 25 Sept. front-page article, accompanied by a wonderfully goofy photo of Aznar being petted by Bush.)

The Crawford transcripts compound an enduring embarrassment to Aznar's Partido Popular, the party's responsibility for dragging the country into an unpopular and disastrous war. This famous photo of the Azores meeting with Blair, Bush and Aznar grinning about the easy victory they expected in Iraq is republished every time the Partido Popular tries to duck responsibility.

But Aznar is far from repentant. Just yesterday he delivered what El País describes as "un furibundo discurso", a hellfire and damnation tirade against the now-governing socialists and President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in particular, for "rustling through old files to find something diffamatory." Wow! Most amazing, he condemns Zapatero for getting Spain out of Iraq and ending Spain's lapdog subservience to U.S. policy. According to him, Zapatero has taken Spain out of the front ranks of international diplomacy, relegating it "once again to the corner of those countries that don't matter, the club of irrelevant countries." And this man (Aznar) presents himself as a Spanish patriot, defending Spain's integrity and sovereignty. But not, apparently, its independence.

Conflicting nationalisms
Lots of media space has been taken up by some very minor and silly outbursts in Catalonia (the burning of photographs of King Juan Carlos I by young men demanding Catalonian independence) and some potentially more serious confrontations in the Basque country, consisting of threats to the mayoress and a refusal to allow the national flag to be flown at city hall in one small Basque town where nationalists claim to belong to another, non-Spanish country. These smaller nationalisms (Basque, Catalonian, Galician -- and there are others in this very diverse country) get harder and more aggressive in reaction to the kind of Spanish patriotism that Aznar and his cronies demand and that the party's current leader, Mariano Rajoy (shown above reclining upon the "rock" of Aznar) constantly reiterates: exclusivist and denying legitimacy to some very deeply felt and long-standing traditions and loyalties to the respective "patrias chicas" (small homelands). The democratic Constitution of 1978 doesn't let the PP go as far as Franco in suppressing them, but the party has organized huge rallies against the proposed revision of Catalonia's statute of autonomy. This attitude drives many Catalans and Basques, and some Gallegos and other national groups, up their respective walls. And the predictable, if regrettable, aggressive outbursts by Catalans, in their ways, and Basques in other ways, are magnified by the PP to claim that, under the Socialists, "Spain is breaking apart." As though it were any more together when Aznar governed.

Pending issues
Many other things have occurred in Spain this week. They include events related to overbuilding, urban corruption and the crisis of the real estate industry; the huge and amazingly stupid opposition of the Catholic Church and its allies to the proposed "Education for Citizenship"; Spain's involvement and casualties in Afghanistan; the struggle over the official "Historical Memory" of the 1936-39 Civil War. But since all these are ongoing issues, I ought to be able to address them in future dispatches.

I'm going to try to put together a summary like this every week. Let me know what you think of it, and what else you'd like to know about regarding Spain.

Wind, wind, wind

Right now (a little before 9 a.m.), I'm watching the powerful effects of the windstorm from the west, sending the waves rushing over one another in direction of the Baleares (Mallorca & Menorca), whipping the palm branches and raising the sand of the beach. This is the strongest wind I've seen here. It's been much worse in the northern parts of the peninsula -- I was just looking at these photos from A Coruña (in Galicia, the northeasternmost region), Madrid and elsewhere: 20minutos.es. When it calms down a bit, I plan to walk over to our construction project, to make sure that the crane is still standing and see what else has happened.

Zorionak

For a note (in Spanish) on our visit to Bilbao and reactions to the December 30 bombing by ETA in Madrid, please see Lecturas y lectores.

Guiris and other immigrants

I had it in mind to give a full analysis of Spain's immigration dilemmas, but my buddy Baltasar made a face like Mafalda when her mother serves soup.

Balta, who is now editing our Spanish-language blog Lecturas y lectores, thinks our blogs should be amusing and snappy. In his opinion, Spain's biggest immigration problem is the invasion of the guiris -- meaning (the origin of the word is obscure) Englishmen and other northern Europeans and their kin (including North Americans) who wear ridiculous clothes, never get the jokes, and dance like the mechanical scarecrows in Grass's Dog Years. Balta has found this view of guiris partying, which he finds hilarious: YouTube - EL GUIRI

But it's another kind of immigrant that gets more attention in the Spanish news these days. These folks seem to dance even as they walk, sometimes wear colorful clothes from their homeland, and do get the jokes -- even jokes that nobody else gets. Even though a lot of what they go through to get here doesn't seem very funny. They come from Senegal, Mauritania, Mali and other countries of Africa, in cayucos (big open fishing boats used in Senegal) to the Canary Islands or in pateras (smaller open boats, often inflatable, originally used on the Spanish coast and in the Strait of Gibraltar to carry supplies to ships).

But the really big numbers of immigrants come from Eastern Europe, especially Rumania, Bulgaria and Poland, in chartered buses. And the next biggest numbers from South America, especially from Ecuador and Colombia, by plane and usually with tourist visas. Most of all of these groups (except the guiris) are looking to make a buck, bucks (or rather euros) being much more plentiful in Spain these days than in their home countries. They work in construction, in restaurants, or (especially the Africans) fishing boats, or in agriculture. Low-paid and often dangerous jobs, especially construction where rushed foremen ignore safety regulations.

And a lot --a minority surely, but a big minority -- in criminal enterprises of one sort or another. Spain is especially attractive to criminals from northern Africa (Morocco, Algeria), Eastern Europe and South America, partly for geographical reasons (as a gateway between one of these regions and the others) but more because (a) the economy is booming and (b) it floats on an ocean of black and gray money, that is, money that can't be traced. A lot of that money comes from the construction industry, where people make unregistered cash transactions to avoid heavy taxes. And a lot of the rest of it comes from prostitution rings, drug traffic and various other frauds.

So, all of that is going on, making some Spaniards rush to close the gates -- except maybe to the guiris, who spend a lot money. Spain, for over a century an exporter of migrants (first to South America, later to France, Germany and other northern countries), is suddenly the receiving country, and that's hard to get used to.

BUT closing the gates can't be done! Spain cannot physically close the oceans to the cayucos and pateras, and as a member of the European Union it can't legally close its land or airport borders to other Europeans. And for sentimental and historical reasons, it is not easy to close the borders to South Americans either.

But there is an even more serious reason why Spain can't close the gates. "Spain will need at least four million immigrants from now until 2020," headlines El País (6 October 2006: "España necesitará al menos cuatro millones de inmigrantes hasta 2020"). Without them, the country will not be able to fill the jobs it is creating. That is because the Spanish birthrate is so low ("In the 1970s we decided to stop having kids," says a Spanish demographer, referring to the lack of state support for families), and because the population is aging.

So the only viable option, if Spaniards want to preserve Spanish identity, is to make it as easy as possible for the newcomers to learn the language, accept and be protected by the laws, and to become Spaniards. It's happened before in this country, though not always peacefully: Iberians and Celts (including Basques?) were followed by Phoenicians who were followed by the Vandals and other Goths who were followed by the Berbers who were followed by the Arabs and the Jews and the Gypsies and on and on, to all the many peoples who have made modern Spain.

Chart at top of page from El País, 14 February 2000
Photo of immigrants in a cayuco from Leyendo a la sombra
Mafalda cartoon (by Quino) from historieteca.com

Politics & demography: Spain's immigration problem

Every day TV news brings images of open boats crowded with Africans arriving in the Canary Islands. Sometimes a boat is crowded with people from further away, from Pakistan. Medical, judicial and customs personnel claim to be overwhelmed by the sudden increase in these "illegal" arrivals.

The Canaries (named not for the birds but for the fierce dogs or canes that used to roam there) were conquered by Spain in the 15th century and are now -- though geographically African -- a region of Spain, like Andalucía or Catalunya. If you can reach the Canaries, you have reached the European Union, and (if the Spanish authorities don't do something about it) you face no legal impediment to traveling anywhere in the EU. The Pakistanis who arrived the other day were probably heading to the United Kingdom, the French-speaking Africans from Mali, Senegal or Mauritania are probably thinking of France or Belgium. Thus, even though most of the French-speaking magrebíes (Morrocans and Algerians from the Maghreb) and Sub-Saharan Africans remain in Spain (where jobs are relatively plentiful), Spain's problem of immigration control is Europe's problem.

Or anyway, that's what the Spanish government is arguing in the European Parliament. Spain wants help in financing helicopters, patrol boats and vigilance systems (Spain has deployed several infrared detectors of outboard motors and human body warmth, but not enough to cope with the great numbers of clandestine immigrant craft). But so far countries remote from the African coast, and especially those with "conservative" (meaning, among other things, anti-immigrant) governments insist that controlling its borders is Spain's problem. Same with Malta and Italy, the other "front line" countries targeted by would-be immigrants from the south.

But then, how can it be just Spain's problem, if there are no longer any real borders among the European countries? Spain's coasts are now the southern frontier of all of Europe. It's the age-old philosphical debate, Whose responsibility is it to see to the welfare of all?

But there are also practical questions, not philosophical so much as sociological. First, What has spurred the great increase in illegal immigration in the past five or six years? Second, is this increase a problem for the richer countries that are receiving the immigrants? And if so, what kind of problem? Economic, political, cultural? And is it a problem (or perhaps a solution) for the poorer, sending countries? And thirdly, a sociological question which is also a big political question these days, regardless of whether it is really a problem or not, can it be stopped or even significantly reduced?

Here are some hypotheses.

1 - The main causes of increased illegal immigration may be a sudden relative impoverishment of the sending countries (relative to the beckoning prosperity of Spain and its northern neighbors). We'll need to look at the economic stats of the countries that sent the most migrants to Spain last year. OR it may be the increased efficiency of underground people-exporting business. OR the active recruitment by employers in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. Likely employers include construction industry, agriculture (big employer in southern Spain), and brothels, among others. All three of these things are going on, but which are more important probaby varies by country.

These (rounded) figures are for numbers of applications for residence in Spain last year (thus, not counting the undocumented), but they may give an idea of the proportions:
AFRICA
Morocco 63,000
Algeria 8,000
Senegal 7,000
Nigeria 5,000
Mauritania 3,000

SOUTH AMERICA
Ecuador 21,000
Colombia 14,000
Brazil 3,000
Argentina 3,000

EUROPE
Rumania 9,000
Poland 4,000
Ukraine 4,000
Bulgaria 3,000

ASIA
China 10,000
Pakistan 6,000

Further thoughts to come.

(This note is two days later than promised. My apologies. Things happen.)

Back in touch!

Just a little more than an hour ago, we got our ADSL connection established in the place we're renting here in Carboneras, Spain. To celebrate, I plan to inaugurate a new series of "Letters from Spain," aimed at telling U.S. readers what I think my countrymen might want to know about the many things happening, very rapidly, in this country. Beginning next Monday, I intend to post such an essay weekly, to attract some new readers, to interest those I already have, and to come to a better understanding of Spain myself.

There are several reasons why Spanish politics and cultural dynamics should interest U.S. readers. Since 1492 the country has been the most powerful node amplifying and retransmitting currents between Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and a large part of its internal turmoil has to do with the static from all those currents. The topics I plan to take up here (one at a time or in combination) suggest how wide are the effects of Spanish political and cultural events. These topics include:

• Immigration (from Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe) and the dilemma it presents to the social equality and civil liberties agenda of the Socialist Party.
• The water crisis, and the urgency of strengthening Spain’s weak instruments for water management and conservation.
• Depradations of the consumer society: the paving of the coast and countryside and the corruption of municipal governments, more blatant here than in most places (except maybe Italy)
• Church, state and civil liberties: in the face of Catholic tradition and (possibly related) tradition of machismo, Spain is pioneering laws against domestic violence and facilitating abortion, divorce and homosexual marriage
• Confronting terrorism: ETA, Al-Qaeda, and Spanish troops in Lebanon and Afghanistan.

And much else. For starters I want to say something about immigration -- which is more of a political than a demographic problem.

But first, a clarification of an earlier note. Some of you have taken the trouble to look up this town (as I suggested) in Google Earth, and were wondering exactly where to find our building project. These are the coordinates: 37˚00'32.22" N, and 1˚53'12.12" W.

In case you were wondering

Susana and I are back in Spain, where we're building a small condominium (7 units) on the sea. We arrived last Friday, after a couple of months back in Manhattan, settling accounts and packing and trying to get some of our writing done. We've spent this week getting settled into the apartment in Carboneras that we're renting for the duration of our building project, which we expect to have completed by late fall 2007.

We got our book cases set up, and the books themselves have begun arriving (in boxes in the USPS's "M-bags", the cheapest way to ship books), so we expect next Monday to get back to our much interrupted work on our next book: a history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America (to be published by W. W. Norton once we finally get it finished). If you want to see just where we are, go to Google Earth and type in "Carboneras, Almería, Spain". The aerial photography is amazingly detailed. We can even find our construction site. Just keep going up the coast from the three ports in town (the cement factory's, Endesa's, and the fishing port), past the outcropping of beach called "La Puntica", to the NE edge of town.

Galicia: An underreported disaster

My usual accomplice and I were in Spain as the thick "black tide" of petroleum oozed over the world's richest seafood beds, on the coast of Galicia. We were on the opposite coast, the Costa del Sol facing the Mediterranean, but reading of the battle against the disaster by fishermen, women's brigades, foreign volunteers and far too few Spanish navy and army personnel (the Spanish government's response was late and inadequate, stirring the usually quiescent Gallegos to angry demonstrations). Here are photos taken by some of the "galegos" involved in the struggle. For more images and a note on the coverage, see Eva Domínguez's story from Poynteronline.