Diego Velazquez’s series of portraits of Philip IV, when placed side by side, almost look like the mise-en-scène of Spanish imperial decline. As Philip IV transforms from cherub-cheeked youth to wizened elder statesman, it’s as if Velazquez inadvertently created a multi-picture memento mori to both the man and the empire he (mis)ruled. Political projects—however vast, ambitious, or well-meaning—are as much the fruit of the mind as the cartesian “I” who wills them into being. Neither is eternal. Both pass to dust.
When I saw pictures of how the presidency aged Presidents George W. Bush and then Obama, I often thought back to Philip IV, Spain’s penultimate Habsburg monarch and the last one to preside over a world in which Catholic Habsburg hegemony over Europe still seemed like a possibility, even if a far-fetched one. As Americans, we are generally—or were, until multiculturalism invaded history along with every other humanities discipline—more well-versed in the Anglo-American narrative of modernity, one in which Protestant Europe in general and England and its parvenu love child with lady liberty in particular made a mad dash to the present independent of the continent’s more benighted backwaters, especially to the south. Irrespective of this statement’s historical veracity, however, Philip IV’s Spain speaks to us from a juncture in history that is both undeniably foreign and uncannily familiar.
Seventeenth century Spain is one of history’s more ostentatious and luxuriant contradictions—a gorgeous oxymoron. Its artistic Golden Age (“Siglo de Oro”) which peaked in the 1600s, produced such canonical figures of Western culture as the novelist Miguel de Cervantes, painter Diego Velazquez, playwright Lope de Vega, and the poet Luis de Gongora; at the same time, this era of cultural fluorescence in the literary and visual arts also marked the empire’s irreversible decline from threatening, aspirant hegemon of Europe to a middling, second-rate power. As distant as the reign of Philip IV may seem and as abstruse its juxtaposition of cultural ascendancy and political decline, his almost half-century on the throne (1621-1665) imparts lessons for those willing to listen.
Henry Kissinger and Charles Hill, among others, have pointed to the importance of seventeenth-century Europe as the staging ground for a paradigm shift in political theory and, ultimately, historical praxis. The shift was from the dynastic and religious imperatives of universal monarchy and empire to the more circumscribed dominion and pragmatic objectives of the nascent secular state. Jean Bodin, author of political treatises put on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Catholic Church, had recently articulated the concept of state sovereignty as distinct from royal or religious authority. Whether or not Philip IV and his closest advisor, royal favorite the Count-Duke of Olivares, understood this emerging difference between national and imperial interest is not entirely clear; but then again, we may say the same thing of American foreign policy from 1989 to the present.
The historical backdrop which gave rise to the state-empire distinction was the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), a conflict which began as an internal conflict within the Holy Roman Empire between the Catholic Habsburg emperor and Protestant Czech rebels. Eventually power blocs formed, with the Spanish Habsburgs coming to the aid of their Austrian relative, Emperor Ferdinand. Spain’s interests in Habsburg victory were familial (through the common blood line of both royal houses and the “honor” or “reputation” at stake in the conflict), religious (through the defeat of Protestant heretics) and strategic (through the need to secure a land route through for troops passing through Germany to the Spanish Netherlands to suppress another set of heretics, the Dutch rebels). France, worried by possible Habsburg encirclement from the south and east, and through the strategic cunning of Cardinal Richelieu, did the unthinkable, going against their coreligionists. In the words of Charles Hill:
That [the Thirty Years’ War] was a war between the Holy Roman Empire and states, and states were new. They had come forward in northern Italy in the Renaissance and now they were taking hold in what we think of as a state-sized entity. The Netherlands and Sweden and France were among these. … France was both an empire and a state—and the key was when [Cardinal] Richelieu took France to the side of the states, which was shocking because France was Catholic and the empire was Catholic and the states were Protestant.
Richeleiu had the perspicacity to see that the needs of the French state were distinct from those of universal religion and acted accordingly, bleeding Spain dry through war by proxy with Protestants in Germany and rebel Holland. To justify his strategic thinking in spite of his status as a Cardinal in the Catholic Church he is reported to have said “Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter. The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never.” Such thinking was anathema to the “anti-Machiavellian” and Catholic school of European political philosophy—embraced by the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs—which argued that religion and politics were indissolubly bound and that a king would be better off losing his kingdom than his soul.
What does this bygone war of a bygone age have to do with America today? Henry Kissinger, among others, has argued that today’s Sunni-Shiite conflict, made all the more dangerous by a combination of oil money and religious fanaticism, is the Thirty Years’ War or our time. Liberal pieties, of course, blame American intervention in Iraq as well as “struggles for power” as opposed to religion. Both observations contain elements of truth but fail to address reality head-on. The grainy cell phone footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution, in which sectarian chanting in support of an extremist Shia cleric is audible, make clear that even if such a distinction between religion and power exists, it is as irrelevant and apropos of nothing today as such a claim would have been in Yugoslavia in the 1990s or, for that matter, Spain during the siege of Granada in 1492.
As many foreign policy realists have pointed out, what benefit does America stand to gain from choosing sides in a sectarian quagmire of epic proportions last seen in Europe three and a half centuries or more ago? In a post-W. Bush GOP no longer enamored of America’s secular mission to proselytize the world to the civil religion of democracy, how does America benefit from a Sunni-dominated, or for that matter a Shiite-dominated, Middle East? Are the madrassas and austere Wahhabism of the Saudis—which they themselves fund and spread to the world—really any more in the American interest than the Islamist millenarism of the Ayatollah?
Spanish leaders Philip IV and the Count-Duke of Olivares, instead of opting for the dispassionate realism of Richelieu, chose the globalism of its day—religion and reputation. Instead of cleaning house domestically on the Iberian Peninsula, Philip IV’s regime staked its claims to greatness on defending Catholicism abroad in Germany and Calvinist Holland for fear that strategic retrenchment would sully the family name and the religion it claimed to defend. By the time twin outbreaks of rebellion against Spanish Habsburg rule occurred in then Spanish controlled Portugal and Catalan Barcelona, Spain was in a fight not just for its international prestige, but to preserve its own hard-won territorial integrity—integrity gained after centuries of war against Muslim invaders.
One has to wonder if the election of President Trump on an “America first” platform, or for that matter the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd protests, the creation of an “autonomous zone” in Seattle, or the Capital Riots are not cues missed by America’s political class. The message: avoid elusive goals abroad—however righteous they may seem or, for that matter, be—and instead try cleaning house domestically.
The Count-Duke of Olivares’ plan to streamline and reform Spanish finances and taxation, standardize its legal system and equally distribute the burden of national defense through a “Union of Arms,” was never implemented in large part due to the distraction of endless war and its reverses in Germany and the Low Countries. There’s no national good will to be squandered or exploited when it doesn’t exist in the first place and America, like Spain in the 1630s and 40s, could use the goodwill generated by a peace dividend. Complete withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and disengagement from the Saudi-Iranian sectarian power struggle would go a long way towards helping America get its own domestic house in order.
Imperial Spain was brought down by its involvement in the Thirty Years’ War and America could be—to a great extent already has been—diminished by involvement in the Middle East’s version of the same. It’s a conflict that Saudis and Iranians, Sunnis and Shiites, must solve for themselves. America cannot impose religious pluralism or Sunni hegemony in the Arab world any more than Spain could impose religious uniformity across Central Europe. An Arab Muslim “Peace of Westphalia” in which religious warfare is declared obsolete and imams and clerics are relegated as bystanders to foreign policy the same way a defanged papacy largely was post-1648, is a moment that the Arab world must bring about on its own. It cannot be imposed from without.
While the actions of Philip IV and his Count-Duke may seem inevitable in hindsight, many voices in the wilderness, many Isaiah’s and Jonah’s, were clamoring, particularly in the cultural sphere, for repentance and conversion. Golden Age Spain had a whole genre of reformist voices which had begun, in an incipient form of nationalism, to argue for domestic reform of the Spanish nation. The authors of said genre were known as arbitristas and many of their unheeded warnings bear uncanny resemblance to the arbitristas of our present day—particularly in the budding national conservative movement embodied by Yoram Hazony and others.
Arbitristas for instance, condemned rural depopulation and the exodus to Spanish cities, arguing instead for policies that would return the urban poor to the land to till the soil and ease the tax burden on small farmers. They derided the leisure and debt-fueled consumption of the noble class—by this time largely absentee landlords—for exploiting high rents to lead lives of luxury in the city, entirely disconnected from their chivalric and agrarian roots in the land.
I can’t help but ponder the possibility, as union leaders in Los Angeles and elsewhere perpetually defer returning to the classroom, if America is not captive to its own Cronus Complex, mortgaging the future of our youth at the expense of the status quo. Teachers’ jobs and the health of some are preserved in the present; but what debt is being accrued to the future? What will the repo man be forced to collect as payment from the clutches of a generation of adults who, in many cases already in struggling schools, went uneducated for an entire year? What scars will our national psyche bear as a result of “distance learning” privileging the interests of the last great labor aristocracy of our country, the public sector unions? Perhaps, as a consolation, America’s unarrested decline will at least yield something great in the way of the cultural and artistic production of Golden Age Spain. But I wouldn’t count on it.
