[The European Conservative] Land of Upsets and Upheavals

A new book surveying Spain’s political and economic turmoil calls for a national reawakening.

Spain: The Trials and Triumphs of a Modern European Country. By Michael Reid. Yale University Press; 345 pages; $29.99.

Can psychoanalysis illuminate the fate of nations? In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud theorized that the more a collective possesses common traits, the likelier its members will be hypersensitive to minor contrasts, obscuring those commonalities beneath petty feuds. This “narcissism of small differences” is what’s sapping the potential of Spain, argues Michael Reid in an incisive new book. A longtime Madrid correspondent for The Economist, Reid stands athwart a long tradition of British hispanists who saw the country as “a mirror onto which projecting their visions and fantasies”, sensing in its every hiccup a legacy of the 1936–39 Civil War and Franco’s ensuing 40-year rule. Reid rejects this reductionism, claiming Spain “isn’t burdened by an atavistic exceptionalism nor by Franco’s ghost”. Instead, Spain (2023) lays the ailments of secessionism and economic sclerosis at the feet of geography and political stalemate. Cue Freud, the nation is undergoing a “fissiparous trend”, dixit Reid, whereby sectarian divisions are “fetishized even where they scarcely exist”. While European integration was long the go-to panacea to “paper over national discord”, Spain’s only alternative now is to source a new momentum from the well of national cohesion. Otherwise, Reid’s prognosis is stark: “Spain risks gradually coming apart, for lack of glue”.

Continue reading the entire book review at The European Conservative here.