Opinion Sur
The Spanish crisis has become a faithful mirror for a greater crisis: the European crisis. The ghost of disintegration hunts both. ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ That is how Leo Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina begins. In Europe, the Greek crisis is different from Portugal’s, and this is in turn differentiated from the Irish crisis, or the Italian crisis. But the crisis in Spain is a mirror for the European crisis. I will explain why.
Spain, just like the rest of Europe, is composed of disparate regions: some have a robust economy; others, a weak economy. The single currency, the Euro, masked for more than a decade the profound differences between the center and the periphery, between fiscal seriousness and ‘Let’s party!’ The single currency was, for the weakest, ‘easy money’. Money, loans at extremely low interest rates, was flowing, which allowed them to finance speculation (especially in real estate) and deranged projects. Anyone travelling to Spain can verify that regions that were once poor have been crowded by new houses and that in remote places there stand projects as mammoth as useless, promoted by local politicians and regional banks –the now unfortunate savings banks. The tourist will see new airports where no plane has yet landed, monumental structures whose function remains unknown, highways from nothing to nowhere, and beautiful bridges connecting already connected shores. Today many of those regions are bankrupt and ask the central government for charity, which in turn borrows money from investors at extremely high rates, or by default, from the European Central Bank. The beautiful houses are empty, their mortgages unpaid, and ghost neighborhoods and towns are multiplied. Looking back the visitor will realize that the Spanish prosperity of the past years has been a regrettable quixotic charade.
In Madrid, the central government is trapped in a vise: on the one hand it is clenched by ‘the markets’ of our global world (meaning, foreign investors); on the other, it is pressured by the regions (who have gained autonomy) – the wealthy as well as the poor. These last are in desperate need of help. The others are tempted by separatism, decoupling from the central government and ignoring their sisters in need. The Basque country is in a healthier fiscal situation, mostly because it collects its own taxes and does not contribute directly to the central treasury. The Catalonian people, who finance that treasury without getting proportional benefits in turn, want to break free of the central State as the Basques did, since if they continue as they are, they are in fact subsidizing the weak peripheral regions. On its part, the government of Madrid wants to impose its centralizing will upon the regions; redistributing benefits from the most prosperous regions towards the poorest, in exchange for greater ‘austerity’, as a gesture of appeasement to foreign lenders. This policy –Mariano Rajoy’s- generates suspicion among everyone within Spain, without fully convincing ‘the markets’. Furthermore, his policy only manages to exacerbate the depression in the regions, increases tax burdens, impoverishes the people and promotes unemployment, which has become specially for the young a tremendous drama (between 16 and 24 year olds, the unemployment rate has surpassed 50%). The single currency –the euro – does nothing but deepen the tensions. Not being able to devalue their own currency (the ancient peseta) Spain has no choice other than the so called ‘domestic devaluation’ which is nothing else than the drastic reduction of people’s incomes, both direct (wages) and indirect (social benefits).
The situation presented here is clearly unsustainable from three points of view: economic, social and politic. Regarding the economic aspect, the weight of the debt increases (while collected revenues decrease) and economic activity finds itself in free fall. As for the social aspect, unemployment is so dreadful that the population is reacting with more and more aggressive forms of protest, occupying sites and estates in the south of the country (same way it happened in Catalonia before the Civil War), with the wicked inversion of the intergenerational relation (I will provide an example of this), and with the eternal escape valve, which is emigration. Overall, Spain has become a country that is falling to pieces, whose population has lost all hope, where qualified youngsters leave and those who stay return to their parents’ and grandparents’ houses, where they live of the (progressively leaner) pensions of the elderly. A single piece of information is more than enough to prove it: the Spanish retirement homes are emptying nowadays, since families bring the elders back into their homes in order for all of them to live –variegated and impoverished- of the elders’ retirement pension.
Under these circumstances, why continue with a single country? If Basques and Catalonians are tempted to ‘flee’ Spain in an ‘every man for himself’ situation, are they not under the same temptation of ‘fleeing’ Europe Germany is? And the other weaker regions, what is it in it for them by staying linked to an oppressive central State that does not provide the conditions for a recovery? A country and a continent that were once proud of themselves march today towards their own death.
In his essay La España Invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain), the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset traced the Spanish singularity back to a long coming decadence that started in 1580. Ortega wondered why there were separatisms, regionalisms and nationalisms that sought an ethnic and territorial secession in the 20’s of the past century in Spain. The precondition to arrive at an answer lays in recognizing the lack of a totalizing agent that allowed them to outline a national program. This ‘will-promoting project’ was precisely the imperial Spanish project: ‘the union is forged to launch the Spanish energy to the four winds, to flood the planet, to create an even wider empire. The inevitable condition to form the peninsular union is the imperial projection beyond the peninsula itself: the national dogma is a synonym for international policy. Centuries later, without an empire and after forty years of dictatorship, the European project gave Spain a new boost. The European Union was very helpful in the transition towards democracy but above all it put a hold on the Spanish secular tendency towards fragmentation. The current European crisis, which is making Europe an invertebrate zone, will exacerbate the regional fragmentation in the Iberian Peninsula once more.
‘Whilst Spain had companies to develop and a purpose for a life in common was connected to the peninsular coexistence’ claimed Ortega, national union was sustained. However, as of 1580 a long process of decadence and disintegration begun which Ortega considered to be the advance of particularism, meaning an increase in the autonomy of those involved and a decrease in their ability to picture themselves as constituent bodies of a higher structure. The particularism is evidenced regionally in the Basque and Catalonian nationalisms, but also between the layers of society: classes and unions. Whether it is in politic or social terms, particularism has determined that Spain is, ‘rather than a nation, a series of airtight compartments’.
In the late capitalism’s current crisis, it is no longer Europe that is saving Spain, but Spain announcing Europe’s relapse into particularistic fragments.
