The state of the Spanish State

Unchanging nation

Casla is rightly insistent that the idea of the nation was a 19th-century invention and scorns the Francoist claim, echoed by right-wingers since, from José María Aznar to Santiago Abascal, that Spain has been a single, great and Catholic nation since 1492 and even, in some overheated minds, since Roman times. He explains how real history involved “religious diversity, unlikely alliances and mercenaries on all sides”, but the invented past presents Spain as a “historically immutable reality” (p.31).

On this Achilles’ heel, Casla sees no solution: he believes that Spanish nationalists and the minority nations will just have to inhabit the same state while being more tolerant on both sides. It is a rather weak conclusion to his sharp analysis of the propaganda use of the resistance to the Romans of Numancia in the second century BC; or of the mayor of Móstoles declaring war on Napoleon in 1808; or of how “Reconquista”, used to describe the expulsion of the alien Moors, is a staple of PP and Vox election speeches. Casla does not countenance independence as a more feasible solution than ’tolerance’.

I would take issue with him on one important point: he sees the rise of Spanish nationalism in the 19th century as a ’mournful and hurt’ response to Basque and Catalan nationalisms (p. 30). Surely it is the reverse, certainly in the case of Catalonia, whose nationalism took off in the 1830s as a response to centuries of suffocating pressure by the State, most dramatically by Olivares in 1640-1641 and Felipe V in 1714. This said, his summary of the recent Catalan independence movement is clear and useful (pp.40-51).

No welfare

The second Achilles’ heel is Franco’s legacy. Casla is charitable with the agreements of the 1970s Transition, believing that they should now be renegotiated, but in the real circumstances of the time were about as good as could have been attained. The 1977 Amnesty Law was a false step in that it pardoned the dictatorship’s torturers, not just their victims. The ’Pact of Silence’ (not ’of Forgetting’, he argues, for no-one forgot) endangers democracy because it reduces awareness of past crimes. He highlights the deficiencies of the 2007 Ley de Memoria Histórica. He summarises neatly (pp.89-91) how the dictator Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in London inspired a new generation of Spaniards to tackle unresolved issues rooted in their own dictatorship.

Casla’s third Achilles’ heel is the lack of a Welfare State. While in Europe welfare provision improved in the 30 years of growing prosperity after 1945, in Spain Franco ruled. Then, in the new democracy, the advent of neo-liberalism left no time and space to develop a full-blown Welfare State. It is an enticing general argument, but missing from the account is that Felipe González could have done a whole lot more in his years of absolute majorities in the 1980s. The destruction of jobs under the banner of modernisation was not inevitable, but a political choice. Casla also analyses the housing crisis, based on the passion of all governments since the 1950s to encourage home ownership. Though presented as a route to working-class prosperity, recent years have shown that it leads to mass homelessness.

The Catholic Church’s notorious alliance with Franco and several centuries of supporting the most reactionary politics are also explained. Even this most intractable Achilles’ heel can change, Casla believes. He points to the Basque Church that opposed Franco, the worker-priests of the 1960s and Cardinal Tarancón’s opposition to the dictatorship in the 1970s. However, as he himself intimates, in recent years a weakened Church hierarchy is again vociferously intervening in politics, demonstrating in the streets against abortion, LGBT+ rights or gay marriage.

Remarkably, given his sober analysis of Spain’s ills, Casla is optimistic, arguing in his final chapter that ’Vulnerabilities Need Not Be Weaknesses’. Successive governments’ refusal to do anything serious to combat climate change, the mass poverty he himself charts or the rise of fascism, along with the crises of legitimacy affecting the judiciary, monarchy, political parties etc., make it hard to share his optimism. Spain and Its Achilles’ Heels offers no solutions apart from unlikely tolerance and hope (the last, so they say, to be lost), but it is an acute and entertaining introduction to the Spanish State and its structural weaknesses.