The Berkeley Guides:
Berkeley Guide to Europe:
Spain:
Background Information for
Spain
By Corey Nettles, Jamie Davidson, Matthew Reid, and Jessica Blatt
An exuberant liberalism characterizes the Spanish people, and the Spanish youth in particular. It is revealed in the apparent ease with which the younger generation embraces the modern, and the equanimity they display toward things that would have scandalized their parents. Though they would seem in this respect no different from youth the world over, their spirit cannot be reduced to just another attempt to define themselves by defying their parents. Rather, their fierce liberality seems a natural response to the passing of a 39-year, highly repressive fascist dictatorship; General Francisco Franco died in 1975, leaving a nation injured, but not demoralized. Franco's regime was much more than just a set of social, political, and economic arrangements; it penetrated every aspect of Spanish life from the language people spoke to their sexual morality.
Perhaps the most pronounced legacy of the Franco regime is a widespread sense that Spain got left behind as the rest of Western Europe modernized and enjoyed general prosperity in the decades following World War II. Spain did, however, achieve an "economic miracle" in the '60s, the años de desarollo (years of development). The development of tourism, especially along the coast (the Costa del Sol is Exhibit A) spawned and sustained this economic growth, though not without serious negative environmental and cultural ramifications: pollution, water scarcity, and the population's increasing abuse of alcohol and hard drugs.
Spain's imposing natural boundaries--water surrounds the country to the north and south and the rugged Pyrenees Mountains run along the border with France--often obscure the great diversity that lies within them. Once the home to Celtiberians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, and Jews, Spain has always preserved the diversity among its regions. Even with the Christians' final defeat of the Moors in 1492 and the subsequent dominance of Catholicism, Iberia remained internally incoherent, consisting of several distinct and independent kingdoms. The Catholic nation that came to be the richest and most powerful in the world was in many ways an artificial alliance, forged out of disparate kingdoms by strategic royal marriages, the expulsion of Moors and Jews, and the forceful subjection of the other kingdoms to the Crown of Castile. Seeking to strengthen this fragile unity, Franco insisted on centralization, suppressing regional languages and disparaging identities rooted in the old kingdoms. It is no wonder that in these more liberal times Spain's integral components--Basques, Catalans, Galicians, Andalusians, Aragonese, Asturians, Leonese, Navarrese, Murcians, and even Castilians--are reasserting themselves by striving for political autonomy, and reintroducing local languages in their classrooms.
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