Feeling Good To Be Spanish? Part 1

culture

Feeling good to be Spanish? Part 1

In a two-part series, Luc Ciotkowski investigates why national pride has been accompanied for many with shame and how far recent sporting triumphs have gone to healing the cracks. WORDS by Luc Ciotkowski

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he glorious triumphs of Spain at Euro 2008, Rafa Nadal’s victories at RolandGarros and Wimbledon, Sastre’s performance on the Tour de France and the heroics of Spain’s olympians have most other nationalities envious, but are the Spaniards feeling good about being Spanish? The separatist and regionalist divisions that currently exist in Spain are much Rafa Nadal publicised. However, if we’re going to answer the question of whether the Spanish feel united again, we must ask if they ever really felt united in the first place. To do that, we need to have a little look at history. Spain started to be modern Spain when Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon unified the crowns of their kingdoms. Together, as the Catholic Monarchs, they emptied the last of the Moors out the peninsula, banished the Jews, set up the Spanish Inquisition and had the stroke of luck that Columbus found them a new continent full of riches. Catalonia belonged to the Crown of Aragon, which over time very much became the junior partner in the union with Castile. Castile imposed itself more on the reconquered south and Seville was happy to be the only authorised trading port with the Americas. Throughout the Golden Era of the 16th and 17th centuries, Barcelona saw its importance decline as trade moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic while Castilian Spanish became the preferred tongue

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of the empire over all the other Iberian languages. A very important thing to bear in mind during this time, though, was that the different regions were actually separate kingdoms, principalities or counties, bound to the Spanish crown, but with quite extensive self-governing charters called fueros. While these regional powers were gradually dismantled, the Basque Country kept its fueros and Basques began to see them as rights rather than privileges. The start of the 19th century was a spectacularly rubbish time for Spain to get invaded by France, but they did. Although the first effective application of guerrilla warfare helped the Spanish to unite in ridding Spain of the Bonapartes, Spaniards quickly realised they were utterly divided on how a new independent Spain should be. A decade later, Spain’s empire was all but wiped out and Ferdinand VII taking back absolute power for the monarchy was making the country’s political landscape look very fragile. Before his death, Ferdinand changed Spain’s laws of succession, which had before made it impossible for any female heir to ascend to the throne if there were any living male heir, so that his daughter, Isabella, could become queen instead of the crown going to his brother Carlos. Spain’s traditionalists and staunch Catholics sided with Carlos and Carlism was born. The rest of the century saw the Carlist civil wars rip deep divisions between the

Spanish, and the belated arrival of the Industrial Revolution in Spain brought with it the new political ideologies of Socialism, Communism and Anarchism. By the end of the century, pretty much everyone in Spain was an ’-ist’ of some kind. The driving forces in Spain’s Industrial Revolution were Catalonia (textile industry and trade centre) and the Basque Country (heavy industries: iron and coal mining, ship building). It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Catalan and Basque industrial preeminence in the late 19th century and early 20th century in shaping today’s political climate in those regions. At this stage, we have to note that a sense of nationalism was not as keenly developed as in other European countries; whether in Aragon, Catalonia, Extremadura or Andalucia, people’s first affinity was to the pueblo. The Catalan nationalist/ regionalist movement grew from the burgeoning middle class of workshop/factory owners and merchants and was more to do with perceived excessive control and taxation from Madrid than anything else. The Basque movement, however, was fuelled by cultural and racial issues more than economic ones. What had always been a rural region with a deeply traditional and religious people, was quickly becoming an industrial centre with mass immigration from other parts of Spain and all the ‘ungodliness’ typical of the new industrial towns and cities. The self-gov-

erning powers that the Basque Country had always enjoyed had been revoked due to their support of the Carlist side during the Carlist Wars. The founder of the Basque Nationalist Party, Sabino Arana, campaigned for support under the slogan “God and self-government”. Arana was responsible for designing the Basque national flag (with his brother), reviving the long in-decline Basque language and Neo-Darwinist rants which wouldn’t have looked out of place in Nazi Germany, like this one:

“A great number of them[non-Basque Spaniards] seem to be undeniable testimony of Darwin’s theory, since rather than men they resemble apes, rather less beastly than gorillas: do not search in their faces for the expression of human intelligence nor of any virtue; their eyes only reveal idiocy and brutishness.” However, Arana’s ‘racial purity’ fears struck a chord with the Basques who felt threatened by the arrival of so many maketos (non-Basque Spanish). Indeed, ’ungodliness’ was growing all the time all over Spain as the influence and power of the Church fuelled resentment of it. A short-lived First Republic gave an addictive taster to liberalminded Spaniards before the Bourbon monarchy was restored. Army generals had taken to stepping in and seizing control of the government whenever things got shaky and, to avoid this, the conservative Cánovas del Castillo devised a system of election rigging, designed to keep everyone happy. Conservatives swapped power with progressives every four years, something which destroyed parliament’s last shred of credibility among the people. Cánovas de Castillo was assassinated while serving as prime minister in 1897, his killer was an Italian anarchist. This turmoil would be dwarfed a year later, though, when Spain’s self-image would hit an all-time low.

TO BE CONTINUED...

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