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Spain seeks its identity

by Michael Kaczmarek

On 9 March, Spain will elect a new parliament. Economic and social themes have dominated the campaign, but in fact all major issues effecting Spain are on the table.

The elections on 9 March will pit the Socialists (PSOE) under Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero against the conservative People's Party (PP) of Mariano Rajoy. The two differ on almost all basic issues. The country is embroiled in debate, but not just about campaign platforms for the future. Rather, Spain is also seeking an approach to its past – seeking its own identity.

Christopher Columbus in front of the spanish flag.
Photo: AP

It is tough to pin down the Spanish identity, as the current argument about the national anthem shows. The hymn remains without lyrics. In 2007, the Spanish Olympic Committee announced a text competition for the Royal March ("Marcha real"). But the winning text was so severely criticized in the end, that it was withdrawn in January 2008. So the Spanish anthem still has no text. British historian Henry Kamen predicted this would happen, on 18 June 2007, in El Mundo: Spain "doesn't impart the feeling of nationhood, and that makes it impossible to agree on a text for the anthem."

ETA terror

Especially in the Basque country, in Catalonia or Galicia, one finds less identification with the Spain that is ruled from Madrid. Here, people prefer to build their identity using their own past, language and culture. Their aversion for central government originates from negative experiences during the centralized Franco dictatorship (1939-1975).

This period also saw the founding of the Basque underground organisation Euskadi 'ta Askatasuna (ETA). Since 1959, Eta has used violence to fight for an autonomous "Basque country, and freedom."

Certainly Spaniards reject terrorism, but the question of how to handle ETA divides them. After all, both major parties are evaluated based on their success in combating ETA. Accordingly, the current Socialist government has held many negotiations with ETA, seeking a political solution to the conflict. A spate of deadly attacks brought those talks to a halt. The opposition denounced these failed negotiations with the terrorists as a betrayal of the victims and the people, and demanded zero tolerance. But in fact, former conservative Prime Minister José Maria Aznar himself had sought a political solution with ETA.

Whenever there is another attack, the government and opposition tend to come closer together on this topic. When two Spanish police officers were murdered in France in early December 2007, both parties called for a public mourning ceremony. La Vanguardia offered a sceptical comment, on 5 December 2007. "It hasn't been long since we heard mutual recriminations of the two major parties over their respective approaches towards the fight against terrorism. The gap between them remains too large."

Dispute over regional autonomy

In Spain's 17 regions, efforts are under way to strengthen autonomy. After the Catalans voted for a new autonomy statute in their referendum of June 2006, Leo Wieland made a critical comment on 20 June 2006 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He wrote that Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero had opened a Pandora's box, and warned against the "inner destabilization of this EU partner, with the increasing greed of tribalist local nationalists leading to an Iberian balkanization."

But the British Financial Times gave Zapatero a positive note on the same day. "José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero deserves full recognition for insisting that decentralization will actually strengthen the country, as long as it doles out power by a democratic process to those who want it."

The past unlocked

Despite all these efforts toward regional autonomy, Spaniards are for the most part in agreement in their belief in democracy. This is particularly embodied in the person of King Juan Carlos, who also serves as the guarantor of the country's political unity. Many Spaniards especially appreciate him because he stood up for democracy during the 1981 putsch attempt by Franco followers.

The relationship to the legacy of dictator Francisco Franco, who died in 1975, and the evaluation of the bloody Civil War from 1936 to 1939 are focal points in the development of a Spanish identity. To this day, more people repress the memory of Francism than face it, and it remains a sore spot in national history.

This became clear in 2006, on the 70th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, when Prime Minister Zapatero set up a history commission for examining the Spanish Civil War and initiated a memorial law for compensation to victims of the Franco regime. This prompted serious debate about the question of who bears the greatest responsibility for the Civil War. While the Socialists supported Zapatero's move, Conservatives stressed the crimes of the Republicans during the Civil War.

The ABC newspaper, which is close to the People's Party, criticized this method of dealing with the past, writing on 25 August 2006: "For today's younger generation, the main characters of the Republican epoch and the Franco period are as unimportant as history books. If you reopen old wounds now, it would seriously damage the cooperation that is built on the constitution."

But British author Antony Beevor, whose 1980s work about the Spanish Civil War - "The Battle for Spain” – now has been republished, sees no alternative to facing history. "If a country tries to avoid dealing with a difficult period in its past, by covering the wound with a bandage, there is a risk that the wound will fester,” he wrote on 26 May 2006 in the Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter.
Ultimately, the "Law for Recognition and Extension of the Rights of Victims” included Civil War victims of both parties, and was passed on 31 October 2007 by the Spanish parliament.

The influence of the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, deeply anchored in Spanish Society, took a symbolic move to clarify its position on the Spanish Civil War. A few days before the memorial law was passed, Pope Benedict XVI beatified as martyrs 498 Spanish clergy whom the Republicans murdered during the Civil War.

Journalist and author Lorenzo Mondo lauded the Pope's move "all the more, given the Zapatero's government's … memorial law meant to remember the Republican victims. A first step should be that everyone is permitted to honour their dead without being used for political purposes," he wrote on 29 October 2007 in the Italian paper La Stampa.

In the end, the Catholic Church did put its hands into the current campaign. Like the conservative opposition, it primarily criticised the Socialist government's negotiations with ETA, its family policies and its law regarding homosexual marriage. The Church got too involved in the elections, said José María Ridao on 14 January 2008 in El País: "The Church could have also carried out its crusade against earlier governments with which it had closer ties, but did not. In fact, the issues of life and family are an alibi for the Church to get what it really wants: a return of political power to the service of religion."

For his part, Spanish sociologist Salvador Giner sees the new activism of the Church as an effort to counter its loss of influence. "We don't have religion any more. We are as indifferent to the Church as to the Communist Party," he wrote on 22 February 2007 in El País. These days it's more important to know if you're a Catalan or Andalusian, he suggested. "Collective identities in Spain have been strengthened."

Room for differences

To give expression to these identities, perhaps the wordless national anthem is fitting. "An anthem with a text would mean the end of this unique, useful room for differences," wrote Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí on 15 January 2008 in El País. He explained: "If you listen in silence to the national anthem, you can better appreciate the different associations that Spaniards have with the word Spain … It can be whatever you make of it."