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BAS editor Sander Berg

It is January, the first lesson back after Christmas. At the start of the lesson a finger
shoots up. ‘Sir, when are we going to talk about paedophilia?’

Before the Christmas holidays I had asked my Year 13 to read closely the last two
chapters of Del amor y otros demonios by Gabriel García Márquez. They had all
ostensibly read the novel in English over the summer, so in theory this should have
been a second reading, in Spanish this time. Ostensibly. In theory.

I had mentioned the problematic relationship between Delaura and Sierva María
before and I had given them a ‘trigger warning’, but it was not until they (some of
them at least) had studied the text in detail that they cottoned on to the fact that
Delaura is a 36-year old priest who falls in love (lust) with the 12-year old Sierva
María. Yes, he is three times her age and she is barely pubescent. Cringeworthy
doesn’t come close. Two of the girls in the class described how they found reading it
more uncomfortable (even) than some scenes in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her. Given the
discomfort, it is legitimate to raise the question whether we should read such novels
with our students. Short answer: yes.

We live in interesting times. Not as in the purported Chinese curse — “May you live in interesting times” — would have it, but perhaps not entirely unlike it either. In the past five years or so, secondary school students have, like their contemporaries at university, become much more agitated and assertive.

More questioning and critical, but also less tolerant – ironically – and more sensitive, more easily outraged. Questions around race and gender in particular are real tinderboxes and potentially toxic. To a large extent this critical engagement is to be welcomed as long as it reflects a serious desire to question things and everyone involved is sincerely open to dialogue.

To understand what is happening in the awkward scenes in Márquez’s novel we
need to take two steps back. For Márquez, writing in Colombia in the second half of
the 20th century, a grown man falling in lust with a teenage girl would have been less toe-curling than it is for us. Even today the legal age of consent in Colombia is only 14.

A further step back takes us to the late 18th century and the Spanish colonial
elite, where the age difference might have been even less of a problem. Still, even
with those provisos, there is no need to assume that Márquez is condoning
Delaura’s obsession with Sierva María, much less excusing it, let alone promoting
paedophilia. Delaura’s falling in lust works on a few narrative levels.

On a personal level, he blames his sudden onrush of amorous feelings on the devil; it is a demonic force that takes hold of him. Initially, he does not believe that Sierva María is possessed by the devil and wants to save her. Perhaps he suffers from saviour syndrome. But when he suddenly feels sexually aroused, he convinces himself that it is the work of the devil. Etymologically, this makes sense: Sierva is possessed by the devil (the devil has taken ownership of her) and the devil in her attacks Delaura and besieges him (the origin of the word ‘obsession’).

In fact, quite a few of our terms related to (falling in) love are taken from demonology.
We say we are bewitched, bothered and bewildered, or that someone has put a spell
on us, or encourage someone to go do that voodoo that you do so well. We also
speak of someone’s charms, say we are enchanted when we meet someone
attractive and speak of being fascinated, originally a reference to the evil eye.
Delaura, then, takes literally what we have come to see as a commonplace
metaphor. As the title of the novel has it, love is just another demon.

On a more thematic level Delaura’s obsession with Sierva María works, too. The
novel is steeped in images of decay and decadence. It paints a picture of the dying
days of the Spanish empire, with a wheezing bishop, a nymphomaniac marquesa, a
feckless marqués putrefying away in his hammock, and crumbling buildings on every
street corner. Delaura’s moral turpitude can be read as a symbol of the corrosion and
corruption of Empire and Church.

It is also possible that Márquez, hardly a friend of the Catholic Church, by describing a priest’s obsession with a pubescent girl, might be referring to the institution’s moral
bankruptcy due to its many sex scandals.

Mark Twain once reportedly quipped that the rumours about his death had been
greatly exaggerated. The same is true about the assumption that Delaura has sex
with Sierva María. Sure, there is hanky-panky, and kisses and cuddles, and lots of poetry reading, but Delaura vows to remain a virgin until the day he can elope with
Sierva María and marry her. This hardly improves matters, of course, although I find
it interesting that the same students who first glossed over the age difference on a
second reading make the false assumption that the two have sex. They went from
not seeing the egregious nature of the relationship to seeing things that aren’t there.

A further complication is that Sierva María, after much-spirited resistance, seems to
accept Delaura. Maybe it is because, apart from a short spell with her father just
before she enters the convent, he is the first white person to pay any attention to her.
Maybe she is under the spell of Garcilaso’s love poetry. Perhaps she sees him as a
kind of older brother or a surrogate father. Or perhaps she suffers from Stockholm
syndrome. Who knows?

These are all nuanced questions, but then again, in the world as in good literature,
things are always more nuanced, never black and white. And that is why we need to
read novels like Del amor y otros demonios with our students. What better lesson in
the value of close reading and asking challenging questions and coming up with
nuanced and sometimes uncomfortable answers? What better way to get into a
different, even alien, mindset? We must also guide them and teach them how to
channel their immediate reactions, make them go beyond their initial discomfort and
cringe to take a step back and ask: what is this scene doing here? What does it
mean? What are some of its potential explanations and interpretations? But equally:
to what extent is the scene problematic? What prejudices does it show? What does
that tell us about the time and place in which the novel was set or written? If we cannot read works that challenge us and offer us a vision of the world or a description of events that we find difficult to digest, what, one should ask, are we left with?

In these fractious times, these challenging times, it behoves us teachers to continue to read and discuss ‘difficult’ texts. These can be Canonical, but there are plenty of
other works out there that are worth reading, and it is important to hear different
voices and learn about a wide variety of experiences. Except that we should not expect these works to be plain sailing, unproblematic and in complete agreement with what we already think and believe. We should leave our echo chambers and bubbles and zones of comfort sometimes and venture out into the wide and wonderful world called literature.

BAS editor Robin Wallis bids farewell to the Hispanists’ friend.

The Pre-U syllabus, first taught in 2008, ends its 15-year run this summer.

“It’ll be missed in Modern Languages, above all else,” one headteacher laments. Those accustomed to the challenge and scope of Pre-U share his regret. “The new A-level is so much more boring – my own students have already said so, quite literally,” one head of department ruefully told us. “So we’ll continue teaching the Pre-U content, adding in A-level exam technique at the end of the course.”

And so the cycle begun in 2008 comes full circle. At that time I enrolled my students for Pre-U because it appeared to offer a continuation of the largely satisfactory pre-2008 A-level syllabus. It seemed to me that the 99.9% of ML departments that in 2008 signed up to the new A-level were the ones making the change, even if they told themselves otherwise. In terms of content, there was more continuity in the Pre-U, but most schools worried at the idea of a qualification not called A-level.

So what did the 2008 change in A-level syllabus entail? For many Modern Languages teachers, it represented a dramatic lowering of expectations about what students could achieve. 

For example, the outgoing A-level syllabus had allowed students to choose any topic rooted in the Target Language (TL) culture for their speaking exam presentation and written coursework. By contrast, the new A-level required them to focus on general topics unrelated to the TL culture – infamously, in one sample speaking test, body piercings and tattoos. 

The pre-2008 A-level’s 1,500-word coursework assignment, which rewarded analytical skills, was replaced by a sub-section of the writing paper that required a 250-word answer to a general question along the lines of ‘Write about a character in the novel/play/film you have studied’. (The decision to drop coursework was a Qualifications Agency directive to both A-level and Pre-U exam boards.)

Teachers speculated at the time that the change in A-level was an anti-elitist manoeuvre by the authorities that regulate exam boards. The message seemed to be that if students were lucky enough to have teachers with expertise in film/literature/history etc it gave them an unfair advantage. Likewise, if teachers had been privileged enough to spend time in the TL country, the exam content should ensure that their students did not gain an unfair advantage as a result.

The upshot was that the content of ML A-level courses was reduced to ‘social science-lite’, ie teachers and students discussing or writing about (in the target language) their general opinions on issues such as piercings, social media, bicycle lanes… without any specialist understanding of these phenomena. By contrast, Pre-U Spanish students were studying – according to their interests, and those of their teachers – topics such as the Colombian drugs trade, the films of Almodóvar, the Castro regime, Moorish architecture, Goya, etc. 

Another attraction of the Pre-U was that, with its relatively small cohorts of candidates (never more than 300 a year in Spanish), the marking was widely seen as more reliable than that of A-level.

Although the original impetus for Pre-U came from academically ambitious schools wanting greater challenge for their students, the Cambridge exam board that took on the project was careful to ensure equivalence between A-level and the new qualification. Pre-U’s richer course content meant that at least 37.5% of the marks were awarded for cultural content, which gave weaker linguists a firmer foothold on the syllabus. The challenge for them was getting the right verb endings and adjective agreements. When it came to learning about, eg, ecotourism in Costa Rica or Spain’s Transition to democracy, the gap between weaker and stronger linguists narrowed. The result was often encouraging results for the ‘weaker’ pupils in their final exams. The most gifted pupils also benefitted from having their prowess more clearly recognised in the 9-tier Pre-U grade scale than was possible in A-level’s 6 tiers.

Herein, perhaps, lay the seeds of Pre-U’s eventual downfall.  Cambridge promoted the idea that the D1 grade allowed the very top tier of students to score higher than the highest grade available at A-level. However, university admissions tutors refused to allow students who happened to be at Pre-U schools to use this to their advantage. In admissions terms, the D1 fell flat. 

So too did the notion of the ‘Pre-U diploma’, ie three subjects taken at either Pre-U or A-level, ‘sandwiched’ between the Pre-U novelties of an Independent Research Project (IRP) and a ‘Global Perspectives’ qualification.  Although the latter caught on at a number of schools, its requirements were quirky, to the extent that, at some centres, it damaged confidence in the wider Pre-U qualification. The IRP likewise looked more convoluted than extended essay options offered at A-level and IB. Nor did it help that Pre-U’s one-year ‘Short Course’ (AS equivalent) in ML was withdrawn after a few years, causing some schools to abandon Pre-U.

Then there was the marketing. During the early years of Pre-U it was common to hear discussion in the news media about the failings of the A-level syllabuses. Such perceptions created, you would think, a perfect opportunity for Cambridge to promote the Pre-U to appeal to a wider audience. Yet barely a peep was heard in the media about Pre-U, and the marketing effort to schools and teachers was far from convincing.  (Cambridge’s perceived lack of support for ML teachers was one reason for the creation of this Bulletin, which was partly intended to make up for the shortfall.) 

Given this apparent timidity, Pre-U became a target for critics. Journalists questioned its fairness and modus operandi, not least when rogue teacher-examiners at a couple of schools abused their positions. The ensuing scandal forced Cambridge to introduce more involved and costlier security protocols, thus eroding Pre-U’s financial viability.

No doubt these factors weighed heavily when decisions were made about Pre-U’s future and the decision was taken to close it down.  The official reason, however, was that the new A-level syllabus coming into force in the 2020s had restored many features of the pre-2008 A-level and Pre-U, such as a linear course with a good range of films and literary texts. With A-levels restored to their former pedigree, the theory went, there was no longer a need for Pre-U.

For ML, there remains a gap between the quality of Pre-U and that of the new A-level.  Teachers have highlighted specific shortcomings of the A-level. One head of ML describes the speaking exam as “both prescriptive and vague, with teachers unable to offer any concrete assistance – the worst of both worlds”. Many also regret the abolition of the English-language essay on literature, which encouraged a more penetrating analysis of the texts and was strong preparation for university courses where essays are written in English. Another head of ML remarks that “Pre-U students found the comparative study of two or three works in Paper 4 intellectually motivating – a forerunner of the skills needed in higher education. Sadly, the new A-level lacks this.”

To my mind, Pre-U showed that the more confidence a syllabus places in the students’ capacity to tackle mature themes, the more those students will raise their game. High expectations led to high scores. Schools with a cautious, conservative culture used the excuse that ‘our pupils couldn’t cope with Pre-U’, when they in fact meant ‘our teachers don’t think they’re up to teaching it’. Fortunate the students and teachers who backed themselves to meet the challenge.

Perhaps the most telling endorsement of the Pre-U programme for me was that almost half my Year 13 Pre-U students chose to continue Spanish at university. Pre-U had made Spanish an integral part of their academic maturity and nourishment. We salute its founders. Long may the spirit of Pre-U live on in all who took part in the course. 

And good luck to those sitting the last Pre-U exams this summer.

BAS editor Helen Laurenson

May 2023 saw a veritable double whammy of Spanish and Latin American cantautores in London, with the Uruguayan Jorge Drexler appearing at the Barbican Hall eight years after the success of his performance at the Union Chapel, Islington, and el flaco himself, Joaquín Sabina, back in the Royal Albert Hall after a six-year interval.

Drexler’s links with Sabina run deep. It was the Spanish cantautor who saw the then medical doctor perform in a dive in Montevideo almost thirty years ago, and who subsequently encouraged him to try his luck in Madrid in 1995. Despite being introduced to an illustrious musical circle, including Víctor Manuel, Ana Belén and Ketama, Drexler started from zero in Spain – ‘recorrí el país con mi Renault Clio y dos músicos uruguayos, tocaba en salas de 60 personas’.

His latest appearance in London came at a very different stage of his career, as he rode the success of his 14^th studio album, Tinta y Tiempo, which in 2022 won seven Latin Grammy Awards – a healthy crop in comparison with the four awarded to Rosalía.

Drexler is perhaps best known for his song ‘Al otro lado del río’ from the 2004 film Diarios de motocicleta. Walter Salles, the film’s director, commissioned him to write the music. Drexler says ‘leí el guión a las ocho de la noche. Me fui a dormir temprano y soñé con la canción. Me desperté y la escribí prácticamente desde la cama’.

In an interview in La Nación, he attributes its success to the scene in the film where Ernesto (aka Che) Guevara crosses the river to the Leper Colony: ‘sentí que esa escena donde Ernesto cruzaba el río sintetizaba el leitmotif de la película y del personaje histórico. Que no todo está perdido. De remar en conjunto hacia un mundo utópico, que es el del otro lado’.

The lyrics are simple but present a clear sense of universal solidarity and hope:

                                    Clavo mi remo en el agua,

                                    Llevo tu remo en el mío,

                                    Creo que he visto una luz,

                                    Al otro lado del río.

                                    …

                                    Yo muy serio voy remando

                                    Muy adentro sonrío

                                    Creo que he visto una luz

                                    Al otro lado del río.

                                    …

Sobre todo creo que

                                    No todo está perdido

                                    Tanta lágrima, tanta lágrima

                                    Y yo, soy un vaso vacío

Son of a German Jewish doctor who fled to Uruguay in 1939 and a lapsed Catholic mother, Drexler has always considered himself, if not an outsider, a fluid mix of cultures and influences. ‘Yo soy un híbrido [y] cuando eres un híbrido te cuesta mucho más aceptar las categorías […] y la realidad es infinitamente densa cuanto más te acercas a una persona’.  

He recoils from being labelled un cantautor (singer-songwriter): ‘no me gusta [el término]. Para mí, que vivo de las palabras, cantautor es una conjunción, como choripán, que nunca entendí muy bien’.  His 2017 Ted Talk, ‘Poetry, Music and Identity’, reveals the evident literary process in his composition. Despite his protestations to the contrary – ‘pero eso no quiere decir que no me guste la canción de autor. Me gusta más cancionista, que es el que hace canciones’ – there is a clear intertextuality present in his works, and a poetic rigour. In May 2022, on his return to the Gran Rex Theatre Buenos Aires after a long absence, he revealed in an interview with La Nación, ‘Estoy en dos o tres chats de decimistas. Gente que escribe décimas con mucha capacidad y erudición. Escribimos sonetos, décimas, sextinas y villanelas. Más culto no puede ser.’

Challenged by ‘su maestro y amigo’ Joaquín Sabina in 2002 to write lyrics in ‘décimas’, starting with the lines written by Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio, ‘Yo soy un moro judío, / que vive con los cristianos, / no sé qué Dios es el mío, / ni cuáles son mis hermanos’, Drexler’s eventual song, ‘La Milonga del Moro Judío’, epitomises his approach to interculturality.  He recently sang it with a Palestinian singer in Mexico and is in the process of recording a version with an Israeli singer.

As well as shying away from the term cantautor, Drexler is reluctant to be labelled a ‘Latin singer’, given the diverse nuances of musical production across South America. ‘I love the extrovert and happy music of Colombia and Panama,’ he remarks. ‘In Uruguay and Argentina we are melancholic and intellectual’. He describes his 2014 album Bailar en la Cueva as ‘an attempt to kill what Uruguay’s dictatorship left in me 30 years earlier. What I couldn’t do in my youth, dance and be happy, I’m doing now’.

Drexler started his professional life practising medicine, like his father, an ear, nose and throat specialist. Music was initially what Drexler did on the side after clinic, until eventually dismaying his father by taking it up full time. In an interview with Latinolife, Drexler states, ‘working in a hospital, dealing with situations of healing and suffering, joy and pain, power and impotence, taught me a lot about relationships and people, and influenced my lyrics and my performances’. 

Whilst his switch to music was not entirely unsuccessful in Spain, the 1990s scene, with the Spice Girls and the Back Street Boys, was not immediately propitious. His third album, Frontera, did not sell well in Spain, but was an immediate hit in Argentina and Uruguay, ‘y ahí de golpe me volví una especie de símbolo de una generación, el tipo que mezcla folklore tipo Atahualpa Yupanqui con Beck’.

In the interim, Drexler co-wrote music for Rosario Flores, Pablo Milanés and Ana Torroja. In 2005, ‘Al otro lado del río’ won the Oscar for Best Song. Drexler himself was not allowed to perform the song at the ceremony as he was relatively unknown: Antonio Banderas and Carlos Santana were chosen instead.

Winning an Oscar at the age of 41 – the first ever for a song not sung in English – exemplifies the long road taken by Drexler, who remains philosophical and sanguine in his approach to both music and life: ‘a mí lo que me interesan son los procesos…’.

Find out more about Jorge Drexler:

Jorge Drexler: la crisis que lo paralizó, la neofobia y las dos “revoluciones” que tuvo en su vida – LA NACION

Jorge Drexler: Grammy Preview 2023 – Rolling Stone

Jorge Drexler: Poetry, music and identity (with English subtitles) | TED – YouTube

BAS editor Francisco Compán

Avalada por una larga lista de premios como el Globo de Oro o el Óscar a la mejor película de habla no inglesa, Mar adentro es una de esas obras que no deja indiferente a la audiencia por sus grandes dosis de humanidad. En palabras del propio Amenábar, director de la película: “Se trata de un viaje, un viaje a la vida y a la muerte, un viaje a Galicia, al mar y al mundo interior de Ramón Sampedro”.

El estreno de Mar adentro hace ya dieciocho años reactivó el debate sobre la eutanasia para los que ya se habían olvidado de la muerte de Ramón Sampedro en 1998, e introdujo a aquellos que no conocían su trágica historia a un debate socio-político que parece haber sido legitimado por la aprobación de la Ley Orgánica sobre la eutanasia que entró en vigor en junio de 2021. La  aprobación de la ley con 202 votos a favor, 141 en contra y dos abstenciones, y promovida por el gobierno de coalición, convirtió a España en el quinto país del mundo en regular la eutanasia.

El guión de la película está basado en la vida de Ramón Sampedro, marino y escritor gallego que se quedó tetrapléjico al tirarse de cabeza al agua en la playa de As Fumas, Galicia, en 1968, al chocar contra una roca, rompiéndose la séptima vértebra. El argumento se centra en la lucha de Ramón para terminar con su vida de una manera digna e incluye, como es de esperar, elementos y personajes ficticios para proteger la identidad de las personas que le ayudaron a conseguir su meta.

A los 55 años y tras haber pasado casi 30 postrado en una cama, Ramón ya había solicitado la eutanasia a los tribunales, siendo el primer ciudadano español en hacerlo. Es en este momento en el que Amenábar retoma la historia, recurriendo a numerosas escenas retrospectivas para ilustrar el conflicto personal de un Ramón Sampedro que había sido abandonado por las autoridades. Sin embargo, el apoyo de su entorno de amigos y familiares le llevó a aparecer en reportajes de televisión y otros medios, creando así un debate social y político sobre las implicaciones de vivir con minusvalías, además de cuestionar las leyes que prohibían la eutanasia en un país laico pero todavía con fuertes influencias de la Iglesia Católica.

La película se centra esencialmente en dos espacios, ambos significativos para Ramón. Su habitación en una humilde casa rural gallega es un espacio interior íntimo que representa su minusvalía y su frustración física, que contrasta con los espectaculares espacios abiertos que combinan mar y montaña, y que la cámara nos muestra a vista de pájaro. Estos espacios exteriores representan la memoria del pasado de Ramón antes del accidente y la liberación después su muerte.    

La ventana de la habitación de Ramón se convierte así en un símbolo esencial en la película al representar la frontera entre su minusvalía y su mente liberada. Amenábar omite hacer excesiva referencia a las dificultades físicas que Ramón experimenta y se enfoca en las frustraciones producidas por su familia, amigos e incluso por los jueces, en aquellos momentos en los que sus deseos no pueden hacerse realidad.

Quizá una de las escenas más memorables del largometraje sea el momento en el que la imaginación de Ramón viaja hasta la mar sobrevolando valles y montañas cuando Gené, trabajadora social y amiga de Ramón, le invita a recordar su pasado previo al accidente como parte de su terapia. Sin embargo, el único camino hacia la redención pasa por la muerte y la eliminación del cuerpo en el que vive atrapado. Sin duda, este es el aspecto más controvertido de la película ya que el protagonista rechaza explorar estrategias que le lleven a aceptar su estado físico y extender su vida, y opta por buscar la manera de terminarla dignamente.

El Ramón real lo intentó todo y se le negó la eutanasia una y otra vez. Exhausto por las batallas legales decidió tomar las riendas y quitarse la vida, lo que logró el 12 de enero de 1998. La complejidad de la tarea involucró hasta un total de once personas, cada una de las cuales tenía una labor concreta. Todas las tareas eran perfectamente legales por separado, pero en conjunto facilitaron la eutanasia de Ramón. Cuando los forenses encontraron rastros de cianuro potásico en su cuerpo, la policía detuvo a Ramona Maneiro, Rosa en la película, pero el meticuloso plan evitó que las pruebas la incriminaran.

Lo que no reflejó el excepcional filme de Amenábar fue la posterior campaña de firmas recogidas durante el mismo año 1998 y que fueron entregadas en el juzgado de Ribeira, en las que gente de toda España aseguraba haber ayudado a morir a Ramón Sampedro. El secretario de la organización Derecho a Morir Dignamente en Galicia, calificó las 14.000 firmas recogidas como un “legado histórico” y sin duda contribuyeron a fomentar el debate social a nivel nacional. A pesar de esto, siete años después, una vez el delito ya había prescrito, fue la misma Ramona la que admitió haber suministrado el cianuro y haber realizado la grabación en la que Ramón ingirió el veneno.

BAS editor William Chislett

Spain’s transition to democracy after dictator Franco’s death in 1975 and the country’s profound political, economic, social and demographic transformation are widely regarded as a model of their kind. However, the country today does not function as it should or could, argues Michael Reid cogently in his recent book, Spain: The Trials and Triumphs of a Modern European Country (Yale University Press).

As befits a long-time writer and editor at The Economist, including a recent stint as the Spain correspondent (2016-21) and for many more years author of the Bello column on Latin America, the book is tightly and elegantly written, insightful, wide-ranging, and with a deep sense of history. Reid first came to Spain in 1971 as an Oxford University student and either directly or from afar has been a close observer of the country ever since.

In some aspects, such as same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia and, most recently, menstrual leave, Spain has been in the vanguard. In other areas the country has stood still for the past decade, hampered by deep political polarisation and fragmentation. As Reid points out, Spain is not alone among democracies (the UK is a prime case) in suffering from ‘hubris, austerity, populism, polarisation, poor leadership and the struggle to adapt to a rapidly changing world of globalisation and technological change’. Spain’s ills, he says, are not ‘principally due to any original sin surrounding the birth of its democracy’ and it is not ‘burdened by an atavistic exceptionalism nor by Franco’s ghost’.

Spain’s unravelling can be dated to 2008 (some put it further back) with the bursting of a massive property bubble, followed by a major banking crisis, years of recession, a new mould of politics, as of 2015, with the emergence of disruptive parties on the hard right (VOX) and hard left (Unidas Podemos) which eroded the essentially two-party system of the Popular Party and the Socialists of the previous 33 years, and the unconstitutional referendum on Catalan independence in 2017.

It used to be said ad nauseam, particularly by liberals during the Franco regime (1939-75), that the answer to Spain’s ills lay in José Ortega y Gasset’s famous dictum of 1910: ‘Spain is the problem, Europe is the solution’. But this is no longer so: Spain joined the EEC in 1986, which anchored democracy, and has done very well from membership, notably in the field of funds that have transformed the infrastructure.

The solution to today’s ills lies squarely with a political class that is sadly far more polarised than society as a whole (the admirable consensus spirit of the transition years is long gone). The deep partisan divide prevents even minimum agreements on issues for the good of the country, such as education (eight reforms in 40 years and none of them based on consensus) and likewise on the pay-as-you-go pensions system. Spain needs ongoing reform and not a tearing up of the 1978 Constitution, which in 2025 will be the oldest in Spain’s history, surpassing the one between 1876 and 1923.

Two of the book’s 10 chapters are devoted to Catalonia. One charts how the illegal referendum came about in 2017 and the other looks at the region’s history and its false claims to statehood. Reid is good at contextualising. For example, he reminds us that Spain’s constitutional protection of the nation’s territorial integrity is the norm in continental Europe (the US, also, does not allow secession), while Article 155 of the constitution activated by Mariano Rajoy, the Popular Party Prime Minister at the time of the referendum, to suspend Catalan autonomy and impose direct rule is similar to Article 37 of Germany’s Basic Law.

The book has some telling personal anecdotes. When covering Catalonia’s independence movement, Reid found it hard to keep a straight face when hearing officials from the regional government ‘solemnly compare Catalonia with war-ravaged Kosovo or Lithuania as it emerged from Soviet totalitarianism’. Nevertheless, he recognises that for several centuries Catalonia was treated in ‘heavy-handed and oppressive ways’ by successive governments, including the excessively violent police response to those who voted in the illegal referendum. ‘The rest of Spain needs to accept that Catalanism is a valid sentiment, and not inherently subversive’. The pardons for the jailed secessionists were necessary.

The Catalan government’s control over education (subjects are predominantly taught in Catalan) fosters an atmosphere sympathetic to secession, as does the biased coverage of the nationalist cause by TV3, a public television channel in Catalan. Catalonia, with its own language, has a good claim, however, to be a cultural nation, but as Reid points out the world has some 6,000 languages but only around 200 nation-states.

A truly federal system in Spain, not the re-centralisation sought by VOX, by clearly demarking powers and rules for resolving disputes would go a long way toward ending the permanent tug-of-war over powers between some regions and the national government. For this to happen, the Senate, a largely purposeless and toothless body and a retirement home for midlevel politicians, needs to be turned into a chamber representing the regions.

Another toothless body that needs to be reformed, and which Reid does not mention, is the Tribunal de Cuentas, the body responsible for auditing public sector accounts and scrutinising those of political parties. Its 12 members are appointed by parliament with a majority of 3/5 for nine years, effectively enabling politicians to colonise it. Given that a lot of Spain’s corruption is related in one way or another to the financing of political parties, a much more effective, proactive and independent tribunal would go some way toward mitigating this problem.

The tribunal’s reports on parties’ financial statements are published with considerable delays of up to five years, which makes it difficult for the judicial system to conduct any monitoring since most infractions of the regulations discovered are by then prescribed under the statute of limitations (five years for very serious offences, three for serious and two for minor ones). The report covering 2017 was published in February 2022.

Spain has far too many politicians. Estimates puts the number at between 300,000 and 400,000 based on the four levels of government (unique in the EU): central, regional, municipal and the provincial diputaciones. Up to 20,000 public service jobs are discretionary political appointments who can be hired or got rid of at the whim of political masters. Spain is one of the very few OECD countries where all or a high proportion of positions change systematically in the top two echelons of senior civil servants (D1 and D2 levels) after the election of a new government.

More internal democracy in political parties, something accentuated by the ‘closed’ as opposed to the ‘open’ list electoral system in which voters can only choose a party as a whole rather than a particular candidate (political leaders decide where to place candidates on the list) would reduce the disconnect between the political class and the public. The higher up a person is on the list, the better the chances of being elected. Closed party lists give excessive power to a party’s apparatus at the expense of accountability, stifle independent and minority opinion within the party’s ranks and tend to make MPs sycophantic. As Alfonso Guerra, a former Socialist Deputy Prime Minister (1982-91) who kept an iron grip on the party, said, quoting the Mexican labour leader Fidel Velázquez: ‘Move and you’re out of the photograph’.

Reid sees the plight of young adults as perhaps the biggest problem facing the country. The intergenerational gap is particularly acute in Spain. Unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 in the dysfunctional labour market is still stubbornly high at close to 30% (it peaked at 57% in 2013) and without substantial family support getting on the property ladder, in a country where most people are owner-occupiers, is a largely unfulfilled dream for many. But for the thankfully still strong Spanish family network, the bedrock of society, the patience of these people might already have snapped.

Older generations, in comparison, are relatively well looked after by the welfare state. The state pension system, however, looks unsustainable in its current form. Life expectancy is one of the highest in the world, pensions are relatively generous (well above the OECD average based on the percentage of average earnings). The baby boom happened later in Spain (between the late 1950s and the late 1970s) and will swell the number of pensioners. It remains to be seen whether the reforms announced this month will make the system more sustainable.

Reid’s book deserves to last as long as his favourite tree in Madrid’s Retiro park (one of the book’s dedicatees): a Mexican conifer (ahuehuete).

This article is an abridged version of the one published on 28 March 2023 by the Elcano Royal Institute.