Michael Reid, a former Spain correspondent of The Economist, considers the problems afflicting the country
Yale University Press; 320 pages; $30 and £18.9915 years have been tumultuous for many European countries.
In so doing, he tackles a host of issues, ranging from immigration, the environment and the abandonment of rural areas to women’s rights and the family, the decline of, the crisis of Catholicism, the media and corruption. The upshot is a lively, highly informative and nuanced portrait of contemporary Spain. It fills a huge void in English-language books on the country; future writers will be much indebted to it.
The greatest political tremor to hit Spain since the global financial crisis of 2007-09 has been the bid for independence of Catalan nationalists. During the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1970s, and in the decades thereafter, Catalans were overwhelmingly supportive of regional devolution. All that changed with the mauling of the Catalan statute—which gave the territory greater autonomy and defined it as a “nation”—by the constitutional court in 2010.
As the author points out, foreigners have tended to romanticise the Catalan struggle, but the separatists have proved “rigid and intolerant”, even “racist”. The Catalan conundrum is inextricably linked to one of the principal unresolved issues of the transition: the regional autonomous communities.
This writer does not share Mr Reid’s gloomy prognosis that “if the country cannot find a path of political renewal, the permanence of its achievements will be in doubt”, as the constitutionalists far outweigh the anti-constitutionalists and the extreme left and right appear to be in decline. The labour law of 2022, which reduces the number of part-time jobs and provides greater security, shows that significant reform is possible after all.
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