Spain is not different

A conventional great nation

The following article is a response to ‘Spain as a wretched concept’, May 2024 (Volume VIII).

‘We ask the King our Lord to see fit to fill the treasuries, housed in the Communities, in which the income of these kingdoms is held, that they may be defended, expanded, and redeemed; for it is not right for His Caesarian Majesty to spend the income of these kingdoms on his other lordships.’

[From a polemic lamenting Charles V’s use of Spanish funds in Germany, as well as his appointment of Flemish notables to Spanish offices: ‘Not racist. Just don’t like them. Keep ‘em out. Simple as.’]

The First Modern Nation-State

The reader will be surprised to find that being a Spanish nationalist, I do not intend to insist on Spain’s exceptionality, but on its general alignment with the formerly great nations of Western Europe. I am responding to ‘Spain as a wretched concept’, whose writer, likely Portuguese or possibly an eccentric Galician nationalist, insists on the unique disunity of one of Europe’s oldest nations. I do not mean to say that Spain is not special or great, only that it is a nation in the conventional sense.

I cannot trace this distinctive acrimony in my country, the first to find the state capacity to govern a transatlantic empire more or less competently, dispatching not only ravenous conquerors, but settlers, judges, and civil servants, too. England achieved its full spiritual, territorial, and legal unity at the close of the Hundred Years’ War, roughly at the same time as Spain, but its empire was at first the result of men whose individual efforts were often maligned by the state. Portugal had a state-led empire, but its aims were exceedingly mercantile and more circumscribed.

Spain’s appetites were vaster. Almost immediately, it incorporated its American possessions into the Crown of Castile, declaring them inalienable. A mandarinate soon emerged, variously educated at the ancient universities of Alcalá, Salamanca, etc., and the new Imperial College of Madrid. Taxes were assessed. Trade regulations were imposed. Ministers were appointed. Realpolitik reigned, admittedly combined with a Catholic zeal that has already been sufficiently studied — Spain, like the United States today, sought to maintain its rules-based international order. Spanish arrogance and self-assurance irritated the rest of Europe, with Charles V, a Fleming by birth and upbringing, eventually adopting the Spanish chauvinism of the Castilian comuneros he sentenced to death at the beginning of his reign.

These all characterise a modern state. Spengler, whom I do not read uncritically, expressed this in more romantic terms:

‘With the advent of the Spanish-Gothic spirit of the Baroque, a severe and impressive style of living spread throughout the Western European world. The Spaniard sensed within himself a great mission — not an ego but an id. He was either a soldier or a priest. He served either God or his king. In fact, it was not until the rise of Prussia that such a stringent and submissive ideal was again embraced. Prussians ought to have recognized familiar traits of character in the Duke of Alba, the man with an incomparable sense of duty. The Spanish and the Prussians are the only peoples who rose up against Napoleon. What we call the modern state was created in the Escorial. All the techniques of modern statesmanship had their origin in Madrid: national and dynastic politics on the grand scale, cabinet diplomacy, the use of war as a deliberate and calculated move in the intricate chess game of grand strategy. Bismarck was the last of the Spanish-style statesmen.’ (from ‘Prussianism and Socialism’)

It is possible to know what left the Port of Valencia and how many quintals of Puerto Rican ginger arrived in Seville because everything was recorded. It is relatively simple for a Spaniard, or a Latin American Creole, to study his genealogy because vital records have been preserved with remarkable care. Palaeography aside, it is trivial to read my fifteenth-century Basque ancestors’ lawsuits, wills, and land transfers.

These are all the workings of a modern state. In Spain’s case, the state did not make the nation, but it moulded its contours. Its ineluctable presence was not always a good thing; in fact, it was often a very bad thing. The Spanish state has at times been overbearing, crushing individual initiative and enterprise; it has at times, as tends to be the case with powerful nations, placed foreign foederati’s interests ahead of its own. This does not, I think, justify its dissolution, any more than the existence of grooming gangs serves as grounds for the immediate repeal of the Acts of Union.

Saintly Spain, Oriental Spain

Before Deano discovered summers in Tenerife, and before Sophie moved to Barcelona — or perhaps Málaga — to work remotely, foreigners have sought to imagine a Spain that does not exist.

Napoleon spoke of a backward country of priests and friars; it was this Spain, led by the liberals who would later dissolve the monasteries, that dealt him his first defeat — at Bailén, when Wellington was yet to enter Spain. In War and Peace, Balashov almost arrives at this point in a conversation with Napoleon, although one can forgive Tolstoy for neglecting to mention Mendizábal’s ecclesiastical confiscations.

The other imagined Spain is the Moorish Spain of Washington Irving, who sought minarets and muezzins where there were none. This was impossible because of an eminently modern man, the Duke of Lerma, who expelled the Moriscos in yet another demonstration of imperial efficiency and modern state capacity. This had the fortunate effect of ensuring that Andalusians remain genetically closer to Norwegians than to the Moroccans a mere eight miles across the Strait of Gibraltar. Were he alive today, Lerma’s Twitter timeline would consist of a laconic bio — ‘Hispanofuturist’ — and AI-generated remigration memes.

At its peak, then, Spain was a land not only of warriors and priests, but of dutiful functionaries, too. The dour, solemn Philip II was an office worker; he spent his days at his desk, reading every state paper left on it. He wore his era’s business suit, hence Luigi Barzini’s view of the Habsburg Spanish courtier as the precursor to the English gentleman; the bearer of sombre modernity against the lively Renaissance:

‘The Spaniards had become the dominant power in Europe. That year, Charles V came to Bologna to be crowned both king of Italy and Roman emperor by the Pope and to pose for a portrait by Titian. He and his retinue paraded on horseback through the city streets. The gay Italians, dressed in silks of all colours, brocades, velvets, and damasks, cheered their guests and tossed flowers from balconies hung with multicoloured clothes and tapestries. All the unsmiling Spanish dignitaries, as pale as El Greco saints, wore black with white ruffled collars. A few months later, the Italians, most of them, wore black too, as if to show their sorrow for the end of the Renaissance and the loss of their liberties and joy of life.’ (‘The Europeans’)

It was Philip, more an administrator than a warrior, who looked askance at the ‘Conquest’ of the New World, instead opting to label it the ‘peopling and pacification of the Indies’.

In sum, Spain is modern. It is not a Mediterranean Afghanistan of warring tribes. Its empire, unlike that of the Mongols, did not emerge from the most putrid obscurity. National unity was achieved early on, if occasionally punctuated by the upheavals visited upon every European nation. Yes, peasants babbled in different dialects, sometimes entirely different languages, but they largely conceived of themselves as Spaniards; even Portugal’s national poet, Camões, who also wrote in Castilian, speaks of the Portuguese as a ‘hero-band’ from ‘Hispanian bounds’.

The Idea of Spain

Spain is a very old nation. If France was born with Clovis’ conversion in 508, Spain was born in 587, with Reccared’s apostasy from the Goths’ Arianism in favour of his Ibero-Roman compatriots’ Catholicism. Even so, legal unity had been achieved under Reccared’s father, Liuvigild, who enacted the Codex Revisus.

I am arrogant, but not as much as the Chinese, so I will not speak of a nearly 1500-year-old Spain. It is nonetheless difficult not to see a sort of proto-nationalism in Isidore of Seville’s ode to his fatherland:

‘You are, O Spain, sacred and ever-blessed mother of princes and peoples, the most beautiful of all lands which stretch from the West to India. By right you are now queen of all the provinces, from whom not only the West but also the East are lent their light. You are the glory and ornament of the world, the most illustrious portion of the earth, in which the glorious fecundity of the Getic people rejoices much and abundantly flourishes.

[...]

Thus rightly did golden Rome, the head of nations, once desire you, and although the same Romulaean virtue, first victorious, betrothed you to itself, at last, nevertheless, the most flourishing nation of the Goths, after many victories in the world, eagerly captured and loved you, and enjoys you up to the present, amidst royal insignias and abundant wealth, secure in the felicity of empire.’ (‘Historia de regibus Gothorum, Vandalorum et Suevorum’)

The Reconquista itself was a complex process. Internecine quarrels sometimes worked against the Christian princes, but the ‘recovery of Spain’ was a conscious goal. When James I the Conqueror, King of Aragón, justified his aid in the conquest of Murcia, which was granted to the Crown of Castile at no cost, he said:

‘We have done it, firstly, for God; secondly, to save Spain; and thirdly, that you and We may enjoy such high dignity and such a good name. Spain is saved for you and Us.’ (‘Llibre dels fets’, James I’s autobiography)

Upon the Conquest of Granada, Antonio de Nebrija, the grammarian who began Castilian’s standardisation, told the Catholic Kings, ‘All Spain is now restored’ (De bello granatensi).

Portugal regrettably departed from this Union of Crowns, but it is no less true that Spaniards have conceived of themselves as Spaniards for a very long time indeed. Even the Carlists, mostly northern reactionaries who went to war against the liberal state, fought for ‘God, Fatherland, King’, in that order.

A minor, albeit noteworthy point, can be made of the fact that Spanish kings are proclaimed, not crowned. This is because the King has never been considered the Kingdom’s owner; he merely holds it in usufruct. The imitation of French absolutism could not break with this tradition. This partly explains why, when Napoleon kidnapped Ferdinand VII and placed his brother, Joseph, upon the throne, European and American Spaniards alike agreed that sovereignty had reverted to the Spanish nation.

Narcissism of Small Differences

Spanish regional differences are often deemed astoundingly important. The bien pensant foreign observer, believing himself immeasurably knowledgeable, is sometimes taught to see every autonomous community as an entirely separate country (much, it must be admitted, encouraged by certain Spaniards in this). This is frankly delusional.

Spaniards are remarkably homogeneous. With a slight exception for Basques, who have nonetheless left their genetic imprint on all ethnic Spaniards, this holds true in DNA terms. With the Reconquista, central and southern Spain were resettled from the north, with settlers migrating in a more or less straight line, leading to genetic similarities with regions located directly south. Thus, paternal lineages (Y-DNA) in Extremadura are similar to those in Asturias, which is where one would arrive if proceeding directly north. Castilian, which may be romantically deemed Romance spoken by Basques, retained Basque’s five-vowel system; it has been spoken across the country for centuries, and in certain areas, like Biscay’s Encartaciones, one cannot speak of Basque as an ancestral language. Catalonia exports more goods to Aragón, with a population of 1.3 million, than it does to France, Germany, or Italy.

Internal migration, not all of it fostered by industrialisation, makes it relatively difficult to find someone who is purely Basque, purely Catalonian, or purely Madrilenian. Small differences persist — toffs in Catalonia are slightly more understated than in Madrid, for instance — but Spaniards are, broadly speaking, identical. With the backing of my own experience (I am half-Italian), I can say they are more similar amongst themselves than Italians.

This is all to say that whilst Spanish regional divides are real, they are no greater than in France, Germany, or Italy. Little needs to be expounded on the great differences between Piedmont and Calabria, but even in a small country like Austria, one finds Burgenland, arguably a region of assimilated Slavs.

In their day-to-day lives, Spaniards live similar lives, facing similarly terrible employment prospects and similarly confiscatory taxes. Folkloric differences abound, of course, but one can usually detect a common substrate. If anything, differences are growing smaller, as the youth descend upon the country’s few productive, promising cities, where Europe’s generalised fondness for gerontocracy and legally-enforced poverty keeps them from securing mortgages. Even in Catalonia and the Basque Country, the latter a region of pensioners and New Europeans, support for independence is at all-time lows.

Union of Laws

The writer of ‘Spain as a wretched concept’ is keen on emphasising Spain’s legal heterogeneity. Navarre and the Basque Country’s special tax arrangements, extant to this day, are seen almost as bribes to ensure these regions’ begrudging toleration of the Spanish state.

Special legislation, which I disagree with, does not undo the nation; preferential laws serve as remnants, or opportunistic post hoc restorations, of mediaeval privileges, known as fueros in the Spanish tradition. These persist in Britain, too. Scots law is divorced from English law, yet few non-subversives can deny that a British nation exists. Louisiana has retained its civil law; aesthetic Gallicisms, like calling state subdivisions ‘parishes’ instead of ‘counties’, are also present, yet no one can deny that Louisiana is painfully — sordidly — American.

The Spanish state has historically favoured the Basque Country and Catalonia. Spanish policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries erred on the side of protectionism, subsidising industry in Bilbao and Barcelona. If the early empire tended to benefit the south, first Seville and then Cádiz, the Barcelona bourgeoisie were the prime beneficiaries of the nineteenth-century Cuban empire, and the few whites remaining in the Philippines, like the Zóbel de Ayala family, all have Basque surnames. Hermann Tertsch del Valle Lersundi, a half-Austrian Vox MEP, is the scion of a Basque family with abundant Cuban links.

Spanish Intelligentsia

It has also been argued that Spain has no native intelligentsia. Its rare sages, we are told, either languish or emigrate. Like any nation, Spain has unjustly neglected some of its prophets, but it is also the source of the School of Salamanca, which arrived at a peculiarly Catholic distillation of modernity; it has been called a sort of proto-liberalism, just as the Cortes of León have been deemed proto-parliamentary, but this is somewhat fanciful. If Spain has failed as a nation because a few clever Spaniards found fame elsewhere, then the same must be said of Britain, which lost Alexander Graham Bell to America.

Spain has always had an intelligentsia. Yes, Spanish intellectuals have tended towards pessimism, a reflection of the common Iberian predisposition to melancholy. Yet its arbitristas proposed eminently modern solutions to the state’s problems, like tariffs and industrial protection, even when such policies stood to reduce the King’s income. Many of these suggestions were heeded by the Spanish Bourbons, who, far from being French lackeys, embarked on a programme of reforms to ensure further centralisation and nationalisation, and the recovery of economic and diplomatic primacy. This partly explains the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767.

Spain’s delays in industrialising are mostly attributable to factors like excessive centralisation and insufficient private capital accumulation, but in all other regards, Spain behaved as a conventional European nation, even discovering the occasionally pernicious humanitarianism that seems to have taken hold in Europe from around 1750. If the impeachment of Warren Hastings serves as an early example of transnational liberal lawfare, the Balmis Expedition of 1803 to 1806 is perhaps the first incarnation of Médecins Sans Frontières.

The 1812 Cádiz Constitution is yet another demonstration of Spain’s normality — ‘liberal’ is a Spanish word, after all. Spanish liberals were afrancesados (Frenchified), but when Joseph Bonaparte reigned in Madrid, only a few rallied to his cause. Spanish liberals were mostly not traitors — I say mostly because San Martín and Carrera, Argentine and Chilean founding fathers, respectively, both fought against the French wearing Spanish uniforms, only to then turn on Spain in the Americas.

Regrettable Convergence

Although I have mostly focused on Spain’s normality, I cannot not hide that I also think Spain exceptional. Its empire may have peaked early, but it was glorious. It is remarkable that when in Old Havana, one can momentarily pretend to be in Iberia. The illusion is only broken by the heat and the demographic tragedy of the last century.

I hope to have presented a compelling case in this essay, rather than a long enumeration of trivia. My purpose has not only been to defend Spain’s existence, which is abundantly justified by history, but to insist on Spain’s habit of behaving as an ordinary Western power. It achieved national unity early on, with the Catholic Kings reducing the grandees’ power in favour of that of ‘neutral’ state officials, usually drawn from the lower, untitled nobility — the numerous hidalgos. It conquered, pacified, and populated the world; extracted wealth, which it then lavished upon Flanders fields; and built magnificent cities.

Throughout this great odyssey, which closed roughly two-hundred years ago, Spaniards regarded themselves as Spaniards — not merely because of their loyalty to the King, but because they could not ignore the obvious ethnic truth. Creoles, the whites of the Indies, also regarded themselves as Spaniards, with their baptismal inscriptions being deposited in parishes’ ‘Book of Spaniards’, as opposed to the ‘Book of Castes’, known in some jurisdictions as the ‘Book of Servile and Inferior Peoples’.

By now, this is all immaterial. Spain’s problems are mostly those of the rest of Europe. The solutions are identical: remigration, planning reform, pensioner dispossession, and the defunding of the Blob, which includes RTVE, the Spanish public broadcaster. Readers in the British Isles will doubtlessly notice the parallels.