Can psychoanalysis illuminate the fate of nations? In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud theorized that the more a collective possesses common traits, the likelier its members will be hypersensitive to minor contrasts, obscuring those commonalities beneath petty feuds. This “narcissism of small differences” is what’s sapping the national potential of Spain, argues Michael Reid in an incisive new book. A longtime Madrid correspondent for The Economist, Reid stands athwart a long tradition of British Hispanists who saw the country as “a mirror, an often distorted one, onto which observers have projected their own visions and fantasies,” sensing in its every hiccup a legacy of the 1936-39 Civil War and Franco’s ensuing 40-year rule. Reid rejects this reductionism, claiming that Spain “is not burdened by an atavistic exceptionalism nor by Franco’s ghost”. Instead, Spain: The Trials and Triumphs of a Modern European Country (2023) lays the ailments of secessionism and economic sclerosis at the feet of geography and political stalemate. Cue Freud, the nation is undergoing a “fissiparous trend,” says Reid, whereby sectarian divisions are fetishized “even where they scarcely exist.” While European integration was long the go-to panacea to “paper over national discord,” Spain’s only alternative now is to source a new momentum from the well of national cohesion. Otherwise, Reid’s prognosis is stark: “Spain risks gradually coming apart, for lack of glue.”
His account is circuitously unchronological. After surveying the 1978 post-Franco transition and the Catalan quagmire, he steps back into a historical sketch of “why Spain is not France,” or how the centrifugal energies of regionalism have shaped Spain into a semi-federal mosaic of culturally distinct statelets, unlike its centralized northern neighbor. Spain’s geography, writes Reid, “delayed the emergence of a national market,” and thus a national identity. With Castille walled off by ridges from the coasts and the industrial revolution arriving belatedly in the late 19th century, the state lacked the means to engage in real nation building. This deficit scuttled the centralizing designs of the Bourbons, who in the 18th century disengaged from their Habsburg predecessors’ foreign wars to refocus towards state formation. The lag was exacerbated by Charles IV’s loss of Spain’s fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, and by the gradual loss of its American colonies throughout the 1820s. Amidst this pre-industrial void, Reid tells us, the War of Independence (1807-14) against Napoleon’s invading armies had a decisive effect in shaping Spanish identity. In 1812, Europe’s Whiggish constitution was adopted in Cádiz, launching a century-long saga of strife between its liberal backers and the legitimist Carlists. Reid here stresses a paradox: whereas regionalism is today largely a progressive cause, at the time it was markedly reactionary.
He then dispels the notion that Spain is ‘inhibited’ in dealing with its history, yet devotes a whole chapter to that alleged inhibition. Franco’s exhumation from the Valley of the Fallen last year evinced a “lack of unanimity,” he writes, showing that Spain “has yet to agree on the past.” But while Spaniards may harbor conflicting memories of the war and Franco’s rule, Reid gestures towards an implicit consensus underlying their divisions. The Second Republic was hardly the democratic beacon it was made out to be, for when a centrist party won in 1934, “the Left responded with a call for revolution.” Neither were the warring republicans foot soldiers of freedom: “Just as Franco and the Falange did in their part of Spain, left-wing activists imposed a reign of terror in their zone.” Franco’s rule was “obscurantist” yet hardly worse than the likeliest counterfactual. His repression was far from a “Spanish holocaust”: “Had the Republic won with Soviet aid, Spain would almost certainly have suffered a communist regime, just as Eastern Europe did after 1945.” Franco was “a fascist of convenience,” swiftly discarding Falangism and autarky in favor of technocracy and openness in the mid-’50s. As for the transition, Reid praises its architects for avoiding “transitional justice,” which would have mired the country in endless cycles of score-settling. He exposes last year’s “law of democratic memory” as an Orwellian “attempt to rewrite history for political ends.” Memory should be left up to individuals, insists Reid—not to the state.
Earlier in the book, Reid surveys the 40-year sojourn of democratic Spain and concludes that sometime around Al-Qaeda’s 2004 terror attack on Madrid’s Atocha station, which killed 200 people, the system underwent a great “unraveling,” with the transition’s “consensual approach” breaking down. By then, Spain had outdone itself since Franco’s death. Upon 40 years of “backward exceptionalism” under his sway, the constitutionalists had struck “broad and durable agreements” in 1978. Not only were the two halves of Spain reconciled in a “pact of forgetting” hailed as a model in Latin America and Asia, but a modern welfare state on par with Europe had also emerged, leading Reid to title one of his chapters “Scandinavia in the sun?” After Adolfo Suárez’s center-right UCD, Spain elected a party in 1982 that had been illegal only ten years prior: Felipe González’s PSOE. By the mid-1980s, it was hosting global summits and joining multilateral bodies like the EU and NATO. On the pretext of aligning with the U.S., González’s successor, José María Aznar, ensnared the country in an endless Iraq war unpopular with 90% of Spaniards. By the time Zapatero waited on the sidelines to succeed him, the damage had been done. The 2004 attacks “injected lasting poison into the political system, with both the main parties accusing the other of playing dirty” (the PP, for instance, long claimed the Basque ETA was the real attacker).
Reid argues that Spain went south in the following two decades: a global recession was amplified by the bursting of an unhealthy housing bubble, leading to a dearth of opportunities for the young, some of whom had been egged on to trade school for the scaffolding while others trained arduously for non-existent jobs (“a waste of human potential and a policy failure”). Through something like Peter Turchin’s “elite overproduction,” these underemployed, over-educated young Spaniards responded by subjecting the 1978 institutions to greater scrutiny, whilst secessionist sentiment festered, and new parties disrupted the old status quo. Reid is a tad too kind with the leader who utterly failed to contain the recession: “Zapatero’s Spain was in part a victim of the EU authorities’ zeal to defend their still fledgling currency with austerity.” He is right, however, that Spain’s eventual recovery owed much to the liberalizing reforms of his successor, Mariano Rajoy. Reid argues that the economy is where Spain’s future will be decided: “the implicit social contract between generations is fraying,” and that is “the biggest problem facing the country.” This is despite—perhaps even exacerbated by—Spain’s formidably peaceful handling of numerous other issues (“remarkable if still incomplete”), from gender equality to environmentalism, from secularization to mass migration, and everything in between.
As for democracy, Reid argues that the transition’s architects overlearnt the lessons of the Second Republic, placing stability “above all other considerations, including the accountability of government.” This came to a head in the May 15th, 2012, mass protests that culminated in the takeover of Madrid’s Puerta del Sol by thousands of indignados protesting not just bank bailouts in the recession’s wake but also persistent corruption within the major parties. Reid rationalizes this by claiming a lot of it is correlated with “the cost of campaigns”, which sounds like thinly-veiled advice to overhaul Spain’s electoral system in favor of a U.S. model, where donations fund races. The demands of the indignados remain for Reid “unanswered,” with sleazy local bosses not liable for rank malfeasance. “The most visible legacies of 15M were polarization”—which has not abated amidst the fracturing of the party landscape but indeed been aggravated by it—as well as “crispación,” by which he refers to the fact that “the politicians often seemed to be talking at each other in an echo chamber, rather than to the country.” The non-political institutions of state are not exempt from this ire. Reid conveys a general sentiment when he writes that King Juan Carlos, who would be succeeded by his son Felipe in 2014 amidst ongoing scandals, “never grasped that his role required his behavior to be exemplary and deprived him of the right to a private life.”
When tackling Catalonia—the book’s nucleus—Reid’s account is again non-linear, for better reasons: he addresses the 2017 referendum first, followed by an account of its historical background. His conclusion again gestures towards a common ground that both sides refuse to see: “Spain needs to accept that Catalanism is a valid sentiment, not inherently subversive.” The way it was pursued in the past decade is an infamy, however, with secessionism toying with “racist suprematism” and its narrative having “a flimsy relationship to historical fact.” Reid is referring to the fanatical fuite en avant leading up to the 2017 illegal plebiscite on secession, the fallout of which played out in the courts until PM Pedro Sánchez handed out pardons to the architects of that drive last year. Although Reid deems that a “bold move,” he overturns the narrative that Sánchez was intending to bolster. Far from a majoritarian craving for self-determination, he writes that “only a small minority of Catalans ever yearned for independence,” unsettling the case for a vote in the first place. Madrid, however, played its cards unwisely. It was negligent in facing up to “lapp[ing] up with little questioning” the secessionists’ claims, whilst “the scenes of police wielding truncheons against defenseless resisters were a propaganda disaster for Spanish democracy” (could they have acted otherwise?).
Reid grasps that the battleground for Spain’s future stretches beyond referendums and into education (he claims that accepting Catalan’s dominance is a small price for keeping the region in). But he fails to see that secessionism has seeped into the air in more threatening and underappreciated ways, making life immeasurably harder for unionists. This “rigid and intolerant” pulse cannot be dealt with other than through the firmest response, which PM Sánchez is unwilling (perhaps unable) to dispense, given his subservience to separatists of all stripes. A similar injustice has played out in the Basque Country, where “an organisation like ETA that claimed to be a left-wing opponent of the Franco regime should end up practising the closest thing to fascism.” ETA’s violence became a “self-sustaining end in itself,” and its quest for power has been met with the leniency of our electoral system, which has welcomed former terrorists into politics. Spaniards gearing up to vote in regional races in late May learnt last week that 44 former ETA terrorists featured in the ballots of what Reid claims is ETA’s “successor party,” EH Bildu. If anything, this proves that a segment of Spanish society—the Left’s leaders, if not their voters—has been too quick to paper over the difference between lawful politics and violence. That doesn’t seem like the “narcissism of small differences,” but rather the opposite.
