I do not recall which thinker once said “Blessed are
the countries whose history is boring”, but it seems to me he was right. Painfully
right, even. Unfortunately, I live in a country with a very entertaining history.
For the last two months already, Spain has been in the
international news, and not in a nice way, due to the woes that have befallen
upon one of its most important regions, Catalonia.
Let's begin with a very brief history lesson: what we now call
Spain (and Portugal) was part of the Western Roman provinces which fell to the barbarian
invasions in the early fifth century AD. After roughly three hundred years of Visigoth
rule, Muslim invaders from Northern Africa conquered most of what is now Spain
and ruled it for hundreds of years (the further South you go, the longer Muslim
dominion lasted).
Different Christian kingdoms grew in what is now
Northern Spain and pushed down South in a movement called “the Reconquering” (Reconquista), which only finished in
1492 with the conquest of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom by Isabel and
Ferdinand, “the Catholic Kings”.
(The Alhambra, the palace of the Muslim Kings in Granada)
Isabel and Ferdinand were rulers of the two most
important Christian kingdoms: Castile and Aragon, which were temporarily joined
by their marital union. However, due to the way they married their children
with different European monarchs, and even more due to a series of quite
coincidental deaths, everything ended with their grandson, Charles I of Spain,
as king not only of all the different Spanish kingdoms, but of the Netherlands,
half of Italy, Austria, and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Charles I’s descendants were “kings of Spain” and
regarded as such by the rest of Europe, but “Spain” between 1500-1700 was a
country still made up of the different medieval kingdoms of yore (again, namely
Castile and Aragon) each with their “Parliaments” (Cortes), with the king being, if not the only common bond, the most
important by far. To make things more complicated, the Crown of Aragon was a
conjunction of different territories, each with its own Cortes. Catalonia was one of these territories.
Spain kings' aspirations to universal (and Catholic)
dominion, financed by the gold of newly discovered America, embroiled the
country in a series of European wars against England, France, the Ottoman
Empire, and the protestant feudal lords of Germany, which went more or less
well during the sixteenth century and increasingly worse during the seventeenth
century.
The American gold was not enough to pay for the
constant wars and the Spanish kings desperately tried to find new sources of
revenue and soldiers (Castile had withstood the majority of the burden during
the sixteenth century). One of the main targets of the King´s ministers
(including the most famous one, the Count-Duke of Olivares) was the Crown of
Aragon, which reacted in strong opposition to new taxes and levies. The
Catalonian Cortes in particular, were
adamant in their refusal to pay.
(The Count-Duke of Olivares, by Velazquez)
A new war between France and Spain began in 1635. The
Spanish army moved to defend Catalonia, but the lack of barracks and of
adequate feeding for the troops provoked increasing abuses from the Spanish army
and pent-up anger, especially in the rural areas.
Finally, a peasant uprising in 1640 ended up with the
Catalonian institutions accepting the French king as its sovereign (after a
very brief Catalan Republic). French domination was, however, worse than the
presence of the Spanish army had been and Catalonian institutions accepted the
Spanish king again in 1652.
On 1700 the Spanish king Charles II died childless and
in his last will designated Philip of Anjou, the grandson of the King of France
(Louis XIV, the Sun King) as legitimate heir. King Philip V swore over the
Constitutions of the different Spanish kingdoms, but several European nations
(England and the Netherlands in particular) became extremely scared at the
prospect of a France-Spain union and launched a European war (the war of
Spanish Succession), trying to crown the brother of the Austrian emperor (Archduke
Charles) as king of Spain.
(Philip V and the Archduke Charles)
The kingdom of Castile supported Philip, but the Crown
of Aragon (wary of Philip V trying to import absolutist tendencies from France) supported Charles. After more than a decade of European warfare, King
Philip V was accepted by the European countries as King of Spain, but at the cost of the loss of
absolutely all Spanish European possessions. Philip punished the kingdoms of
the Crown of Aragon for taking the side of his enemies with the suppression of its “Cortes” and attempted to rule as an absolute monarch, in the mold
of his grandfather as king of what now was “Spain”.
The creation of the notion of a “Spanish nation” was
greatly helped by the increasing cohesion and prosperity of the country during
the eighteenth century, and even more by an extremely disruptive event: the
Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808, which unified the Spanish people in
repulse of a common enemy (interestingly enough, the two most important events
of the war were the sieges of Zaragoza and Girona, two cities belonging to the
old Crown of Aragon).
However, while other European nations such as Great
Britain and France gained a great impulse throughout the nineteenth century due
to its imperial expansion and general prosperity, and yet other countries like Germany and Italy managed to unify during the same era, the Spanish nineteenth century began with
the disastrous loss of most of the colonial empire, was punctuated by several
civil wars and military coups throughout the century and ended with a
humiliating defeat against the United States and the loss of the final colonies
in 1898.
These series of events generated two focus of unrest
in Northern Spain: the Basque country, which took the losing side in the dynastic
civil wars of the nineteenth century, and Catalonia, both of which began to
demand more self-government at the end of that century, thinking that maybe it
would be better to detach from such a failed country. Not coincidentally, both
were regions in which a different language, other than Spanish, was also
spoken.
The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of
increasing turmoil in Spain, culminating in a military dictatorship in 1923,
the downfall of the monarchy and the proclamation of a Republic in 1931 and,
finally, a failed coup d’ Etat in 1936, which led to a horrific Civil War,
which lasted three years and remains the most written about subject by world historians.
As a result of the war, hundreds of thousands died and
fled the country. General Franco ruled the country until 1975, with two very
well defined periods: 1939-1957, years in which Spain was extremely poor and
internationally isolated, and 1957-1975, a period in which Spain had the second
fastest growing economy in the world, only after Japan, once Franco was
convinced by a bunch of economists that Spain had to open itself to the world
by using the only real raw material it had: sunny weather.
The death of Franco led to the restoration of the
Monarchy, and to what can only be defined as the most successful period in the
history of Spain: the “Transition to Democracy” (transición a la democracia), five magical years in which King John
Charles I and particularly his Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez managed to
transform a dictatorship into a democratic country, through a series of
extremely bold reforms (legalization of the Spanish Communist Party and trade
unions, free elections, amnesty for the crimes of the Civil War, approval of a
democratic Constitution and of self-government for the Spanish regions), and surviving another botched coup d' Etat in 1981.
Suárez (left) trying to save his Defence minister Gutierrez Mellado during the 1981 coup d' Etat.
The entry of Spain on the European Union in 1986 and
the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992 were rightly seen by Spaniards and by the
whole world as the validation of the country and as the end to the vision of
Spain as an exotic land with a penchant for bullfighting and civil warring.
Unfortunately, the Great Recession which began in 2008,
combined with a series of corruption scandals which have grievously harmed
citizens’ trust in institutions have once again put our future in jeopardy. The
Catalonian plight is only the most acute expression of this newest self-confidence
crisis.
(To be continued)
