Spain by Michael Reid: Journalist’s broad survey of a nation demolishes some enduring myths

With the possible exception of Ireland, is there any other European country that has been so mythologised as Spain? Myths abound, from the black legend that depicted Spain as a dark and cruel land, to the idea that Franco’s ghost still rules, the misty-eyed take on the Civil War, or that the Catalan independence movement is some sort of proletarian revolution.

In this meticulously researched book, Michael Reid seems to have made it his mission to systematically debunk these myths.

Reid’s book is bang up to date, taking us right up to 2022 and, given recent history, it’s no surprise that he devotes nearly a third of it to the Catalan question.

Unlike many foreign media, most egregiously the New York Times, Reid was not duped by the Catalan narrative of an oppressed people under the thumb of a semi-fascist Spanish government, with Catalan independence leaders comparing themselves to the American civil rights movement, the Jews under Hitler and, in one instance, to Anne Frank.

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“One of the more bizarre things about covering the Catalan events was to be in the prosperous, sophisticated surroundings of Barcelona and to hear officials solemnly compare Catalonia with war-ravaged Kosovo or Lithuania as it emerged from Soviet totalitarianism,” he writes. “It was hard to keep a straight face.”

He claims the former president Carles Puigdemont’s assertion that the Catalan are “a single people” is at the root of the independence movement’s failure. When you whittle down just who extreme nationalists like Puigdemont consider to be true Catalans, you’re left with around two million people out of a population of 7.5 million.

He argues that Franco shouldn’t be bracketed alongside Hitler and Mussolini, describing him as ‘a fascist of convenience rather than conviction’

It is the same two million who staged the brilliant, huge and peaceful demonstrations at the movement’s height and it’s those two million who vote for pro-independence parties. The rest of the population are the descendants of postwar Spanish immigrants or, increasingly, immigrants from elsewhere, notably Morocco, Latin America and Romania, who make up around 18 per cent. Few of them have any desire to separate from Spain.

Reid says that Puigdemont’s claim that what was at stake was democracy itself “provided a ‘progressive’, left-wing veneer to what was at bottom a right-wing movement. Independence is not, on the whole, the cause of the working class in Catalonia: polls show that its support is greater among the better-off.”

Civil war myths

However, he concedes that the politics of identity are very much in vogue, and not just in Spain, and quotes the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset who described Catalonia as a “perpetual” problem that “cannot be settled, it can only be lived with”.

The Spanish civil war continues to fascinate people on the left, in Britain in particular, and Reid casts a cold eye on some of the myths it has engendered.

“By one count, at least 40,000 books had been published about it by 2007, and plenty more have appeared since,” he writes. “According to Enrique Moradiellos, a Spanish historian, two myths have emerged around the war: the myth of the civil war as an epic and heroic conflict between good and evil, to be praised and remembered; and the myth of a tragic and collective madness that should be deplored and forgotten.”

[  Brazil, The Troubled Rise of a Global Power: Michael Reid's previous book reviewed ]

[ Ghosts of Spain reviewed ]

He argues that Franco shouldn’t be bracketed alongside Hitler and Mussolini, describing him as “a fascist of convenience rather than conviction”. Reid believes his ghost exerts little influence over Spanish institutions, although many would argue that the old guard in the military and the judiciary emerged pretty much unscathed from the transition to democracy.

Reid believes that even Vox, Spain’s far-right party, while it exhibits some nostalgia for the dictatorship, models itself more closely on Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

This is a great source book for journalists and historians, but perhaps lacks the sort of thread a general reader could pick up on

As a former Economist correspondent in Spain he has plenty to say – perhaps more than the general reader may wish to digest – on the ups and downs of the Spanish economy, but often from a macro point of view that minimises that Spain has changed from being a low-wage, low-rent economy to a low-wage, high-rent one with a large chunk of the labour force, the young in particular, condemned to precarious employment.

His chapters on the Basque conflict and the rise of the left-wing Podemos party are strong, while he takes a much more cursory look at the changing demographics in a country where there was virtually no immigration between the arrival of the Arabs in 711 and the arrival of some five million immigrants at the start of this century.

This is a great source book for journalists and historians, but perhaps lacks the sort of thread a general reader could pick up on. It tells you a lot about how Spain works – and malfunctions – but if it has a weakness, it’s that it fails to evoke what Spain is really like and why, for all its shortcomings, so many of us fall in love with the place.

Stephen Burgen is a Barcelona-based writer and journalist