{"id":34585,"date":"2017-10-04T12:30:10","date_gmt":"2017-10-04T01:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=34585"},"modified":"2017-10-04T11:50:28","modified_gmt":"2017-10-04T00:50:28","slug":"the-resilience-of-spanish-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-resilience-of-spanish-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"The resilience of Spanish democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

The idea that \u2018Spain is different\u2019 drove generations of romantic travelers across the Pyrenees to see for themselves, their imaginations stirred by visions of vibrant women and charming bandits. But Spain is no longer just the defiant fist on the hip of Bizet\u2019s cigar-making Carmen. Despite the attention now focused on the Catalonia region\u2019s secession bid, Spain now stands out among Western democracies in a few critical\u2014and positive\u2014ways.<\/p>\n

Spain\u2019s unique character can be seen in its response to terrorist attacks. In the United Kingdom, the 2005 London bombings resulted in additional legal curbs on individual and group liberties. Likewise, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States drove a series of changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans, not to mention the Global War on Terror, which continues to wreak havoc in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

By contrast, after the March 11, 2004, bombings of Madrid\u2019s train system, which left nearly 200 dead, an \u2018alliance of civilisations\u2019 arose in Spain to disarm extremism by building bridges with Islam. This tolerant attitude towards the country\u2019s Muslim minority endures to this day, despite another attack in August, on La Rambla, in the heart of Barcelona.<\/p>\n

It also seems to be reflected in Spanish politics. While recent elections in virtually all other European countries have featured strong showings by far-right populists\u2014Germany\u2019s Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland<\/em> (AfD) being the latest to make major gains\u2014Spain (and neighbouring Portugal) have remained seemingly immune.<\/p>\n

Today, Spain enjoys considerable economic dynamism, with one of the highest growth rates in Europe. But, in recent years, it has suffered economic pain and skyrocketing unemployment, which reached 27% in 2013. According to conventional wisdom, the combination of economic hardship and immigration is a recipe for Euroskepticism and xenophobia.<\/p>\n

Yet neither of the two major political forces that have emerged in Spain in recent years, Ciudadanos and Podemos, has so much as a whiff of right-wing authoritarian tendencies, or anti-European bombast. Indeed, Ciudadanos is a centrist, business-friendly party; Podemos represents discontented urban middle-class youth with a left-leaning ideological profile. Both are vocally anti-racist and pro-immigrant.<\/p>\n

Spain\u2019s resilience to far-right populism probably has deep historical roots. The country took shape during the Middle Ages in a dialectical process of interfaith relations, and its integration into the European Union stemmed from an overwhelming consensus on the need to suppress the ghosts of Francisco Franco\u2019s dictatorship, following his death in 1975.<\/p>\n

Of course, the memory of dictatorship does not always suppress nostalgia for quasi-fascist experiments. Recollections of military rule in the 1970s haven\u2019t curbed the rise of the far-right Golden Dawn in Greece; nor has the memory of Admiral Miklos Horthy\u2019s quasi-fascist regime in interwar and World War II-era Hungary impeded support for Viktor Orb\u00e1n\u2019s illiberal, xenophobic regime. In France, Marine Le Pen\u2019s National Front is the child of the Vichy experiment, and in Germany, the AfD has overcome the legacy of Hitler.<\/p>\n

The absence of such political nostalgia in Spain may be explained partly by the fact that a brutal three-year civil war preceded the establishment of Franco\u2019s dictatorship in 1939. That experience nurtured a strong pacifist sentiment among the Spanish public, which endures to this day. Some 90% of Spaniards<\/a>\u2014more than any other Western population\u2014opposed the Iraq War, which their government supported.<\/p>\n

Spain\u2019s unique resistance to right-wing populist forces may also reflect the nature of Spain\u2019s transition to democracy after Franco\u2019s death. Conservative groupings, whose origins lay in Francoism, actually served as vital building blocks of Spain\u2019s democracy. Some, like the now-ruling People\u2019s Party (PP), have over time shifted towards the center to become more typical conservative European parties, much like the UK\u2019s Conservatives or Germany\u2019s Christian Democratic Union.<\/p>\n

Crucially, the PP has made this move without losing voters who lean further to the right\u2014the kind of voters who presumably would lead a backlash of right-wing populism. This differs sharply from the experience of the 1930s, when moderates\u2019 failure to attract a large enough share of the Spanish right fueled deepening polarisation and, ultimately, civil war.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that Spain is a utopia of social unity. On the contrary, the country is now confronted with a major challenge, as domestic forces\u2014in particular, the would-be separatists of Catalonia\u2019s autonomous regional government\u2014attempt to dismember the country. Yet the PP has staunchly defended Spanish unity, dismissing Catalonia\u2019s independence referendum as unconstitutional and deploying police to stop the vote from taking place (at times in lamentably brutal ways).<\/p>\n

The message is clear: the conflict in Spain is among natives, not against non-natives. And, indeed, though immigrants represent about 10% of Spain\u2019s population, immigration is simply not a contentious issue anywhere in the country\u2014perhaps partly because a large share come from Latin America, and thus share cultural and linguistic traits with indigenous Spaniards. The absence of any backlash against the one-third of Spain\u2019s immigrants who are Romanians and Moroccans probably reflects their low visibility in society.<\/p>\n

Even as other European conservatives have flirted with anti-immigrant posturing in an attempt to stave off populist threats, Spain\u2019s PP has done no such thing. Meanwhile, its European credentials are strong. In a country where, according to an Elcano\/Demos study<\/a>, only 10% of the population would want to leave the EU\u2014compared with 22% in France and 45% in the UK\u2014this is unlikely to change.<\/p>\n

For Europeans, Spain now represents a different kind of fantasy than in days past. It demonstrates that, even as a country\u2019s ethnic composition changes, as it faces terrorist attacks and a deep recession, it can resist the siren song of extremism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The idea that \u2018Spain is different\u2019 drove generations of romantic travelers across the Pyrenees to see for themselves, their imaginations stirred by visions of vibrant women and charming bandits. But Spain is no longer just …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":484,"featured_media":34586,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[106,1025,1734,2036],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe resilience of Spanish democracy | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-resilience-of-spanish-democracy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The resilience of Spanish democracy | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The idea that \u2018Spain is different\u2019 drove generations of romantic travelers across the Pyrenees to see for themselves, their imaginations stirred by visions of vibrant women and charming bandits. 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