Too Many Interests

Herzogenaurach is a small town in Bavaria. Its population is around 23,000 (for four years, I was one of them). It is a town whose documented origins can be traced to the start of the eleventh century, so it has some history on its side. But there again, so do many towns and cities in Germany. This history would not mark it out as being anywhere remarkable. Indeed, apart from those who live in the Mittelfranken region of Bavaria, it would be a town that few Germans (or others) would have heard of, were it not for sportswear. This small town, remarkably enough, is home to both Adidas and Puma, the companies formed by the rival Dassler brothers, Adolf and Rudolf. It is a small town which also boasts the headquarters of one of Europe's largest family-owned technology companies, Schaeffler AG, and the factory which made this company what it is, that of the INA bearings manufacturer.

As you might imagine, it is a town which is dominated by two families. I knew some of them. Well, they were rather hard not to know. Despite this domination, despite the way in which the Dassler family had divided and despite a fair smattering of internal politicking that I was aware of at INA, I cannot recall ever having heard a bad word said about either of the families or of their members. There were certainly never any jibes of a "mafia" kind.

This word, "mafia", is liberally used in Mallorca. Only rarely is it appropriate: a Russian mafia on Mallorca is (was?) an isolated example of accuracy. No, it is a term which is applied to dominating families or businesses (and normally they are the same thing), especially at local levels. It can also be applied - and is - to what amount to no more than cliques. It is a word, therefore, which doesn't have any real meaning, so often is it used.

Nevertheless, there is the well-known saying about Mallorca, that it is "Sicily without the guns" (a variant on which is without the deaths). This is an allusion to rivalries and to dominance. So-called mafias run towns in Mallorca, and those of us who live in these towns generally know full well who they are. There are also, supposedly, political mafias, though the PSOE politician, Pilar Costa, has discovered that it isn't a wise thing to start brandishing the mafia word and directing it at individuals: the Partido Popular's José María Rodríguez has taken her to court for having compared him to a mafia don.

Rodríguez's manor is Palma, but the mafias which we hear about are the small town ones and especially those of the resorts, where it is usually clear who the dominant are and for whom many a bad word can be uttered, including the mafia word, even if it is erroneous and simple shorthand for power.

Dominant business (and political) interests often go hand in hand, and the worst consequence of this is the naked corruption that has only recently truly started to be exposed in Mallorca, but such interests do not inevitably have to mean that great numbers of citizens look upon them with contempt, anger or just resignation. This is not how it was in Herzogenaurach, for example, and it will not be the same in other places where dominant interests act in a positive way in creating not only employment but also contented and harmonious local societies and citizenships. Of course, comparing Mallorca's resorts with a German town might seem farfetched, and it would be except for the fact that by making this comparison, one is also assessing different social models: one which has the interests of the many at its heart and one which most certainly doesn't.

Is this simply an observation of a contrast between northern and southern European perspectives? For Mallorca, one could probably say also much of the rest of Spain, Italy, Greece. For Germany, one could also say the Netherlands, Scandinavia, even Britain perhaps. But the contrast can be a stark one. The dominant interests in the resorts act in their own interests. No one else's. There is little sense of the common good or of social responsibility. It's why the dominant resorts can be reviled; why they are referred to as mafias. But this breeds a general culture of everyman for himself and hang the rest; hence, you get and have ever more self interests, which are further fostered by a political culture that appears not to understand the meaning of consensus, unlike, for example, Germany.

At the weekend there was a report about a resort in the Spanish press. Its final words were "there are too many interests". You can probably guess the resort and what was being written about. It's not going to change, because the culture won't change and the social model won't change. There will always be the mafias.