The New Spaniards

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Encontré el libro casi escondido bajo una mesa enorme situada en el centro de la sala de la librería. Imagino que no sabrían cómo ubicarlo en los estantes de literatura en otros idiomas, quizás porque no se trata de literatura sino más bien de historia. Al igual que con los vinos las librerías en mi país tan sólo se ocupan de lo producido en el país. Otros idiomas, otros sabores, no son tan apreciados.

Tengo ya muchos otros libros en lista de espera y sin embargo no pude resistirme con éste. Lo ví cuando ya casi estaba a punto de salir de la librería; me llamó la atención cuando lanzaba una ojeada panorámica a las estanterías que tabicaban la sala. Lo hojeé y comencé a leerlo.

En un principio me pareció una guía turística. Los colores chillones de la portada, la tipografía del título sugerían algo diferente a lo que encontré al hojear sus páginas. En seguida me atrapó: serio, sencillo de leer pero sobre todo se trata de un libro escrito por un no español acerca de los cambios políticos, económicos y sociales que se han producido en España desde la transición democrática.

En fin, la edición viste de modo muy digno el mensaje que el autor quiere lanzar acerca de los "nuevos" españoles:

"A number of Spain's contemporary creative talents have been captivated by melodrama and kitsch; entranced by the outlandish and the outrageous. It is a fascination that has deep roots in Spain's cultural history: Spanish baroque, Gaudi's modernism, Dalí's surrealism, and the tremendismo to be found in the work of novelists like Cela have all involved taking a good idea one step - or many more - beyond what good taste might deem to be prudent."

Tras una primera parte en la que analiza los cambios políticos acaecidos en la España de la transición hasta los atentados del 11M en Madrid entra de lleno en el análisis de las costumbres.

Hooper desvela el gran error de la Iglesia española al no haberse convertido cuando podía en la Iglesia de todos los españoles sino de una parte de ellos:

"[...] is seen by many as [...] an institution reflecting the outlook of only one half of Spanish society."

los cambios en el rol de la mujer:

"Women have begun to assume new responsibilities in society, yes. But in addition to, rather than in place of, the ones they already had. To a greater extent than most of their European counterparts, they are trying to fulfil three roles at once -those of partner, mother and wage-earner."

los nuevos puntos de vista acerca de la sexualidad, siempre con una finísima capacidad de análisis:

[sobre la importancia de la prostitución] If anything, it is indicative of how little -or rather, how slowly- things have changed in Spaniard's private lives. The resort to prostitution is more indicative of repression in society than liberation."

Un ejemplo muy ilustrativo de lo maduro que resulta el análisis de Hooper es su capítulo sobre la familia:

"The reliance Latins place on the family has sometimes been criticized as a weakness rather than a strength. [...] The family has nevertheless played an invaluable role in Spain in recent times. It has helped mitigate the crisis of values in society caused by the transition from dictatorship to democracy and the decline in influence of the Roman Catholic Church. What is more, in a country whose economy has been consistently unable to generate enough jobs, family solidarity has made up for many of the shortcomings of a modest welfare system and prevented high unemployment becoming a source of political instability."

[...] What has happened over recent decades is that the nuclear family has shrunk in one direction while expanding in another. On the one hand, contemporary Spaniards are increasingly reluctant to share their homes with elderly parents. Not so very long ago, it was the norm.

[...] Spain has become a society of stay-at-home offspring.

[...] This dramatic rise is conventionally explained in economic terms. [Pero la tesis de Hooper es que responde a dos factores diferentes:] One is that parents and children in Latin countries get on pretty well.. [...] there has never been anything like the drastic generational conflicts that split Anglo-Saxon societies back in the fifties and sixties of the last century. [...] The notion that bad and wild equals independent equals admirable is one that just does not square with the Latin, family-based value system. The other factor is [...] that most of today's Spanish parents take a vastly more tolerant approach to sex than did their own, and that has removed an important incentive for leaving home."

En línea con este análisis la violencia doméstica no es, para Hooper, un fenómeno más o menos desarrollado en la sociedad española pero:

"[...] for years -for centuries, indeed- it has been more or less taboo to interfere in family affairs."

La afirmación:

"Their seemingly instinctive enthusiasm for whatever is bold, strong and decisive has bedevilled their history, turning it into a succession of abrupt changes in direction."

puede resultar extraña pero creo que define muy bien el carácter general de los españoles. En la misma línea:

"I doubt if Spaniards are inherently more racist than anyone else, and indeed the answers they give to pollsters have long suggested that they are actually less prejudiced than other Europeans. They themselves tend to feel that that is because of their own relatively recent experience of emigration; that it makes them more understanding of other who have decided to leave their homelands and families in search of a better life."

Donde más desarrolla su análisis de la España actual es al hablar del "Estado de las Autonomías" y de las fuerzas centrífugas que existen en España. Para Hooper:

"To some extent, the strength of regional feeling is simply a manifestation of the Mediterranean tendency to subjetiveness. Southern Europeans, far more than northern Europeans, tend to favour whoever is closest to them, physically or socially, regardless of their merits. This is why face-to-face contact is so important in business dealings and why favouritism towards friends and relatives is so common. The same, I think, applies to places. [...] Traditionally, a Spaniard's greatest affection has always been reserved for his or her native town or district, [...] patria chica"

A medida que avanza el libro el análisis de Estado, la economía y la sociedad se hace más fino:

"Spain remains a country of huge imbalances. [...] Within the big cities themselves, there are equally immense disparities between some of the working-class suburbs and inner-city, 'old money' districts like. [...] This is to some extent because Spain is a comparative newcomer among the world's developed economies."

"... but politically and financially health care is by far the most important aspect of Spain's estado de las autonomías [...] How the regional politicians administer their health services will, to a very large extent, decide whether Spain's experiment in decentralization comes to be viewed as a success or failure.
[...] The cash they receive for health care comes from an overall, national budget that is determined in Madrid. How much each region gets depends partly on the size of its population and partly on how many people there are on its territory over the age of sixty-five."
[...] The autonomous governments face quite a daunting task in convincing the public it is better off with regionally administered health services, because in the few years that it existed Spain's Sistema Nacional de Salud set high standards."

Un aspecto que no podía faltar es la "titulitis" que tanto padecemos en mi generación:

"[...] degrees are seen as badges of social achievement, of prosperity and the cultura that is felt to be its necessary accompaniment."

... O la burbuja inmobiliaria:

"[...] the aim of the technocrats who dominated government thinking from 1957 onwards was to create an economically advanced but politically conservative society in Spain, and one of the keys to this was to encourage property ownership. There is nothing like having to meet monthly mortgage payments for deterring people from going on strike and, in a broader sense, property ownership gives people a stake in the prosperity and stability of the society in which they live."

"The problem was not the high rate of home-ownership as such, but rather the low availability of rental accommodation that it implied. The shortage of flats and houses to let was getting in the way of a reduction in unemployment because it was discouraging people from looking for work outside their region of origin. [It] was likewise making it more difficult for the rapidly growing number of immigrants to integrate into society. And it was an important reason why so many young Spaniards were staying at home for much longer than had been usual in the past. This in turn had consequences for the birth-rate. It meant that they were finding partners later in life and having fewer children. The fact that so many Spanish young people lived with their parents also curbed their propensity to chalenge the ideas of their elders, with implications for the degree of creativity in a society which, like others in the developed workd, was increasingly dependent on innovation."

... así por ejemplo:

"[...] more and more working-class youngsters have found their way into journalism. But they nevertheless bring with them an intellectual's interpretation of its nature and purpose. And the continue to regard themselves as members of the intelligentsia, whose mission is to write for other members of the intelligentsia in the sort of terminology both parties understandl Spanish journalists do not choose to write for their readers in the language of everyday speech [...]"

...lo que yo extendería a toda una generación de universitarios a la que pertenezco. Generación de universitarios que hemos superpoblado el país convencidos de ser las lumbreras de una generación y un país para acabar dándonos de narices con la realidad: la educación es - y era - mediocre en España; no tenemos el nivel que es mínimo tener para acceder a estudios de graduado o post-graduado en Europa Occidental ni tenemos hueco en una economía incapaz de absorber a tanto "bueno para nada". El análisis sociológico de una generación frustrada tendrá que ser jugoso.

Pero, sin duda:

"... in the Spanish view of things, culture, like education, is axiomatically good.
[...] most of the country did not experience an industrial revolution. One of the effects of industrialization is to bolster a sense of working-class identity by promoting the formation of trade unions and the spread of collective bargaining.

They may not be ashamed of being, or having been, poor. But the idea that poverty could in any way be a source of pride, or that wealth might be a source of shame, would strike them as just plain silly. And, just as there is no real questionning of 'bourgeois values', nor is there any real objection to 'bourgeois culture'"

Los juicios más sopesados de Hooper se encuentran en su capítulo final, "The New Spaniards":

"If there is a criticism to be made of Spain's stable, more or less two-party politics, it is that they have become rather too bi-partisan; too rigidly divided between left and right, too toxically infused with a 'with us or against us' mentality.

[...] Attitudes in society go in cycles. The solemn preoccupations of one generation become a target of derission for the next. [...] I do not discount that a moment could be reached, perhaps, when Basque and Catalan self-government are taken for granted, at which this sort of earnestness will start to look just a little ridiculous, a bit unsophisticated and unfasionable."

Más en lo general:

"[It] is about to get tougher, and it could start to expose some of the flaws in the Spanish economy that have been disguised till now: insufficient competition, too much state intervention, and a dearth of skills in the labour force.

[...] there are also a number of habits and attitudes to be found in Spain that act as a brake on its development: and aversion to planning, unpunctuality, procrastination, and a reluctance among many subordinates to take responsibility - a trait that goes hand in hand with the compulsion among many bosses to take all but the most trivial decisions. In an age of service cultures and information technology, moreover, the difficulties a lot of Spaniards seem to have in putting themselves in the position of the other person, and dealing with people other than face to face, must also be regarded as handicaps.

Lorca's biographer, Ian Gibson, once remarked that 'the Spanish work hard, but have no work ethic'.

[...] Except among the Catalans, labour is usually regarded as a necessary evil rather than a source of pride or satisfaction. [...] Outside Catalonia, leisure tends to be seen more as a right than a privilege, and as unquestionably more worthwhile than the means of funding it.

Por último, y tocando un punto del carácter hispano que ya vio más arriba, Hooper se preocupa por nuestro "individualismo", que para los españoles significa:

"[...] putting your own interests first, and those of the rest of society nowhere."

Se trata de un individualismo que nos viste de dignidad pero que se torna en intolerancia con mucha frecuencia.

Lo que más me ha gustado del libro es, sin embargo, que da vida a una pintura completa de la España actual partiendo de los cambios económicos, políticos y sociales que se desarrollaron durante las décadas de la dictadura franquista y no remontándose de modo forzado por cualquier convención historiográfica a un pasado glorioso. Hay referencias a los cambios acaecidos en la etapa visigótica en la Península Ibérica así como a los Reyes Católicos o a la Monarquía Católica durante los siglos XVI y XVII. Pero todas estas referencias son puntuales y no resultan artificiales en su justificación. Son los cambios dirigidos por gobiernos de "tecnócratas" durante los años de desarrollo sobre un sustrato social y económico muy particular los que explican buena parte de la situación que se vive hoy en España.

Es un libro con el que uno tiene un buen punto de partida para poder ahondar en aquellos aspectos que más puedan interesar. Es una pintura fresca de la España contemporánea, algo que eché mucho de menos cuando estaba en la Universidad, por poner un ejemplo.