The National Navel-Gazing Pastime

Much as it is said that the main Spanish national pastime is tax evasion, this overlooks one that is altogether more abstract than forgetting to charge IVA or simply forgetting the small matter of several thousand euros that came to be stashed under the bed or occasionally buried in the garden. The Spanish are masters of the navel-gazing art. A natural exuberance, one attributed to the Spanish by patronising foreigners prone to only wish to observe a particular trait, conflicts with introspection and self-examination, but such exuberance, which manifests itself at fiesta time or on every occasion when Spain wins an international football tournament, is part of this analytical anal retentiveness. How can a country with such vibrancy and vitality be at the same time so dysfunctional and so insignificant?

In fact, the exuberance hides all manner of sins. An excuse to party or to go to the playa delays to the point of stasis real action to tackle realities. The decadence of fiesta and a further decadence of greed and looking after number one and number one alone have been centuries-old palliatives for coping with what first brought Spain into international disrepute and then into the long decline of irrelevance.

Once the world's most powerful and wealthiest nation, Spain's fall was predicated on vested interests and on a lack of interest in development. Unlike other colonial powers, it merely took rather than gave, it didn't seek to commercially engage with its new world or to truly establish institutions (other than religious ones), and so ultimately empire withered away. The rich were interested only in getting richer rather than contributing, and so it was with other sectors of society, the Church, for instance.

Such an explanation for Spain's decline is an old one. José Ortega y Gasset, one of Spain's greatest thinkers, was banging on about all this decades ago. Yet the narrative has remained largely unaltered, and Spanish navel-gazing is still fixed on how Spain managed to so spectacularly throw it all away from the late sixteenth century onwards and on how the same dynamics behind imperial failure keep repeating themselves.

For centuries, Spain has been at war with itself (metaphorically if not actually in battle), rarely enjoying settled, lengthy periods of stability. Most of the twentieth century was one such time of turmoil, and its legacy most definitely endures. A lack of continuity has been Spain's lot, and rather than a national amnesia post-Franco, the memories are strong, far too strong. Spain is a country constantly looking over its shoulder to the past, believing that the old discontinuities will return. The memory of Franco consumes virtually everything in today's Spain.

In truth, these discontinuities have never gone away; they have merely been, for the past thirty odd years, hidden under the beds along with the undeclared stashes of those who still look after number one and number one alone. And despite the arrival of democracy, or possibly because of it, the divisions are as they have long been. These are divisions which are regional and linguistic, divisions which set republic against monarchy, secularism against Catholicism, divisions between the general public and politicians who are viewed with suspicion and enormous distrust, divisions caused by endemic corruption and nepotism. And yet, these divisions are treated with a shrug of societal apathy and resignation and the resort to the decadence of fiesta as a means of reconciling them. This is how things are, but they are also how things were. Exactly the same was true of the early 1930s.

Spain's entrance into the international community, confirmed by European acceptance in the mid-80s, should have brought about fundamental change. Or so it would have been hoped. For a brief time, an old glory reminiscent of the years of the rivers of gold in the sixteenth century returned, but it has been an illusory glory. Spain stays at the periphery. It is of international significance only because it demands so much foreign attention for the wrong reasons and because it keeps winning at football. Its dysfunctionalism is inbred, the progeny of its past and of the birth of the more recent. The latest navel-gazing has turned its attention to the 1978 Constitution, itself a job lot of lofty idealism that was designed to create national unity and to establish checks and balances, objectives that have been only partially achieved.

The navel-gazing extends to the regions. In the Balearics, the people are asked whether they feel Spanish, Balearic, Mallorcan, sympathetic to the Catalan Lands. This constant inquisition serves simply to convey an impression of identity confusion, a consequence of the age-old discontinuities.

The Constitution may in fact be part of the problem in that it granted woolly regional autonomy. The arguments over regionalism and over separatism are the result of the Constitution's good intentions, but these intentions have only led to more introspection. Who are the Spanish (or not) and what do they really want (or not)?


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