The Ice Flow

By Red Sox Steve

Each week, I'm taking a fresh look at a European country, trying to do what we do in all our endeavors here: provide data-driven analysis. Last week, we took a look at Italy, and I don't know about you but I learned a lot. World War II proved to be a major inflection point in the nation's 20th century history, giving the world the Italy we have today.

This week, I want to take a look at Spain. Spain is, in many ways, a very different country than it was even 40 years ago. Spain is also influenced by a religious movement that dates back centuries and is weighed down by a separatist movement that dates back millennia. Let's have a look at one, and then a look at another, before examining the Spain we know in 2009.

From about 750 until the time of the Crusades, Spain, as well as much of the world from North Africa, through Asia Minor to India and China was dominated by Islam. In the 7th century, the Muslims conquered Palestine, continued moving west, and didn't look back until Christianity forced Islam back to the east. Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258, which, along with many other contributing factors had contributed to the decline of Islam's widespread influence in the region.

What the spread of Islam fostered through that time, however, was the spread of modernity: Muslim scholars created the fields of optics, chemistry, and geography; a uniformity of law was spread through the region, and commerce was safely conducted from the Iberian peninsula, through northern Africa, and into central Asia. The spread of new ideas based on science rather than religion, reason rather than power, and freedom over feudalism would not be experienced again until centuries later.

The Crusades, along with changes in Islamic culture began to reduce Islam's influence in the region. By 1063, Pope Alexander II had given his blessing to Christian warriors pushing the Moors (Muslims) out of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and back to the east. By 1492, the last of the Muslim strongholds in Spain, Granada, had fallen, and the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were united to form the Kingdom of Spain.

Thousands of years ago, when the first humans had occupied continental Europe, a genetically and geographically isolated peoples occupied the land starting at the Bay of Biscay, and running east along the Pyrenees mountains. These people were known as the Basques. Looking at a map of Europe today, the Basques occupy provinces surrounding the Pyrenees mountains, in both Spain and France. They are largely maritime and agrarian, and have been attempting to maintain an independent society and form of government free of the rule of Spain and France for hundreds of years.

Basque society has been isolated from the outside world since, probably, the beginning :). Their language is Euskera, which bears no linguistic resemblance to any European languages, while their physiological disposition to Rh(neg) blood type is one that can only be genetically inherited in societies which essentially remain isolated from the outside world. These two characteristics are superficially applicable, at best, however, the Basques certainly believe that their own independence is best for them, and it is their desire for an independent nation, and the way they go about asserting it, which is a threat to the stability of Spain.

We've got to fast forward, however, to the 20th century, in order to flesh out the Spain we are living with in 2009. Alfonso XIII ruled Spain until the constitutional monarchy was supplanted by the military rule of Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923. The government had lurched far to the right, but was bankrupted, which forced Alfonso XIII to abdicate the throne and Rivera to resign by 1931. From 1931 to 1936, Spanish rule swayed from left to right and back numerous times, ultimately giving way to the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco from 1936 until his death in 1975.

In 1937, while Spain was still in the midst of civil war, Franco's nationalist movement was able to conquer the Basque region. In April, Hitler's German air force bombed Guernika, a Basque city in the northern part of their region, and with the assistance of soldiers provided by Mussolini, Franco was able to take Bilbao the Basque capital, and Madrid. The after-effects of a brutal civil war and the oppressive rule of General Franco continue to plague Spain even today - many hundreds of thousands were killed, have gone missing, or were imprisoned, traumatizing generations of Spaniards. On Nov. 20, 1975, Generallisimo (caudillo, or, "strongman") Francisco Franco died, and King Juan Carlos appointed Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez to lead Spain into the democratic era which exists in Spain today.

In 1976, the first free elections since the beginning of the Franco era were held. The first democratic government was formed by the Union of the Democratic Centre (UDC), a coalition of parties from both the moderate left and right: liberals, social democrats, Christian democrats and conservatives. By 1978, a referendum was passed that approved a new constitution, decisively repealing many laws passed during the Franco regime. Suarez resigned in early 1981, and was replaced by Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo. Sotelo was, in spite of an attempted coup (partly due to Basque terrorist attacks) able to hold onto power from February 1981 until December 1982, when the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) led by Felipe González, came into power. The 1982 victory was overwhelming by Spanish standards - González stayed in power until 1996, providing Spain with its first steady, democratic rule in the post-Franco era.

When the UDC disintegrated after its loss in 1982, the opposition party moved farther to the right, forming the Popular Alliance (now the Popular Party, PP). One of its members, an inspector from Madrid whose father and grandfather was closely associated with General Franco, was elected to Parliament for the first time in 1982 - a 29 year old named Jose Maria Aznar. Aznar, denouncing Franco, and moving up the ranks of the PP since first holding office, was appointed head of the party in 1989. As a result of declining ability of PSOE to fend off scandal after scandal, and the momentum the PP had gained in prior elections, Aznar was elected Prime Minister in 1996, and remained in power until 2004.

The Basque movement against the Spanish government has been fierce and consistent. They have used military activities to assert their own independence and have been a constant threat to any foreign invader since the Crusades. In 1959, the Basques formed the Euzkadi Ta Azkatasuna (ETA, Basque for Basque Homeland and Freedom) which continues to carry out attacks on Spanish government officials and citizens to this day. After Franco's death, the Basques petitioned the new government for autonomy, and the first Basque parliament was elected in 1980. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Basques, through the ETA, have been a threat to the democratically elected government of Spain and its peoples. In 1979 a bomb was planted at the Madrid airport, killing scores of civilians; In 1980, 118 people were killed by terrorist attack; in 1981 the chief engineer of the Lemoniz nuclear power plant was kidnapped and subsequently murdered; In 1995 Jose Maria Aznar's armored car prevented him from being assassinated by an ETA bomb. The Basques, through fear and military-style attacks on civilians and political officials, threaten the stability of Spanish democracy today.

March 11, 2004: 4 trains approaching Madrid are simultaneously bombed by terrorists, killing over 200 people and injuring many others. The Aznar government, looking forward to re-election that same week, sought to blame the ETA for the bombing, capitalizing on its popular hard-line stance against the Basque movement. This proved ineffective, as the responsibility for the bombings actually lay with a group that had ties Al-Qaeda; it was also proven that the Aznar government (in seeking to align itself with the US led "war on terror") withheld information to the fact. Later that week, the incumbent Aznar was removed and succeeded by the socialist PSOE, led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

More recently, life has proven difficult for Zapatero and the PSOE. In May 2007, local council elections gave the Popular Party (PP) its first nationwide victory in seven years and ETA’s new political wing, Acción Nacionalista Vasca (ANV), won 7.4% of the Basque vote. In March 2008, the PSOE secured a majority over the PP but is still 7 seats shy of an absolute parliamentary majority. In October 2008, the Basque regional parliament sought to support a referendum on the right to self-determination, however Spain's Supreme Court ruled that such a referendum was unconstitutional in September 2008.

Spain is making a difficult transition from dictatorship to a democracy, while having to contend with groups that threaten to take the region backward. While it is clear that the Spanish people have repudiated any relationship with the global war on terror, it is difficult to measure the impact that the Basque movement has on Spain's political stability, but hard to deny there is an impact. What impresses me is that although it is one of the world's youngest democracies, it has quickly moved from a fascist dictatorship to a secular, representative democracy, while still having to contend with internal extremist movements that threaten the entire nation. Holding high expectations for Spain's role in the 21st century is justifiable, however we must recognize the extent to which these outside groups weigh down Spain's progress in concluding it has a long way to go toward's stability.