A Glory Seldom Seen: Spain : A Nation Recovers Its Open, Democratic Tradition

One decade after Franco’s death and half a century after the Spanish Civil War began on July 16, 1936, Spain is an effervescent, up-and-coming European democracy. Yet centuries of misrepresentation and Hispanophobia did not prepare us for what is now happening here.

I remember having lunch in Paris with the French author and former minister of culture, Andre Malraux, the day Franco died, on Nov. 20, 1975. Along with writers such as Pablo Neruda and Stephen Spencer, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and Octavio Paz, Malraux had actively espoused the cause of the Spanish Republic during the bloody Civil War that ended in 1939. Spain, Malraux now said, was essentially an anarchist country; Franco had held the lid on the boiling caldron for 35 years; now anarchy would reassert itself and a blood bath would ensue.

I am happy to report that the great author of “Man’s Fate” has been proved wrong. He, too, would undoubtedly have been happy: Malraux did not desire what he feared.

Perhaps no other country in Europe has been, to such a degree, the victim of foreign perceptions. There is the Spain of the “Black Legend”--Inquisition, intolerance, counterreformation--promoted by the synonymity of Protestantism and modernism. There is the Spain of English travelers and French romantics: bullfights, flamenco and Carmen. There is the Spain of Hemingway’s sanguinary tourism. And there is the Mother Spain as seen by her colonial offspring in the Americas: the ambiguous Spain of the cruel conquistador and the saintly friar.

When, in his “Memoirs,” Giacomo Casanova exclaimed that “the lethargy” of Spain would only be cured by some kind of “catastrophe,” most Spanish Americans, on the eve of independence, would have agreed with the Venetian rake. For or against Spain: The issue divided us throughout the 19th Century. If you were modern-minded, you were a Hispanophobe. If backward-looking, you were certain to be a Hispanophile. Up to my own generation, a double caricature of Spain imposed itself on us in Mexico: The Spaniard was either the vicious conqueror branding slaves and raping Indian women (much as Diego Rivera painted Cortez in the murals of the National Palace in Mexico City) or he was the greedy immigrant, the gachupin, wearing a black beret, selling sardines and sleeping atop the counter of his grocery store.

The Spanish Civil War changed that simplistic perception forever. That most generous of Mexican presidents, Lazaro Cardenas, received almost 200,000 refugees from Franco’s Spain. These men and women represented the flower of modern Spanish culture: poets and film makers, architects and philosophers, publishers and critics, lawyers and doctors. They revitalized our culture, they renewed our universities, they established our modern publishing houses. They taught us that Spain had another tradition: a democratic tradition, which was formed throughout the Middle Ages, manifesting itself in an independent judiciary, town-hall meetings and charters of municipal freedoms throughout Aragon and Castille. The movement of the Castillian communities was crushed by Charles V in 1521, but sprung back during the Napoleonic wars: Spain gave herself Europe’s first liberal constitution in Cadiz in 1812.

Democratic renewal was again the basis of the cultural flowering that began in 1898, the date of Spain’s final loss of empire at the hands of the United States. The cultural and democratic process then led to the Spanish Republic proclaimed in 1931 and finally defeated by Franco’s Fascism in 1939. Great names appear in this era of Spanish Renaissance: Miguel de Unamuno, Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan, Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Bunuel.

This is the open and democratic tradition that is now being consolidated in Spain. Spanish democracy does not come out of the blue: It is Spain’s other tradition. Yet a paradox lingers in the international mind: How could this young and vigorous democracy arise from the decadence of a prolonged Fascist dictatorship? The answer, I believe, lies in both the mediate tradition of Spain’s interrupted democratic trends, and in the more immediate fact that Franco was never able to capture the culture of Spain, the way Hitler did in Germany.

I want to believe that this deeper reality is what has permitted each and every actor of Spain’s democratic rebirth to play their roles with political responsibility: from Carrillo’s Communists to Fraga’s conservatives, passing through Gonzalez’ Socialists and Suarez’s Centrists--and not forgetting the creators of Spain’s wonderfully indepenent, well-informed and creative journalism.

Alexandre Dumas’ famous dictum, “Africa begins in the Pyrenes,” is no longer true: Open to Europe, Spain has brought down the Pyrennes. Spain is not Africa, it is Europe, and we would do well to ponder the suggestion of Prof. Juan Marichal of Harvard: The Spanish Civil War was really the Battle of Spain, the first episode of Europe’s war against fascism. Spain fought for Europe. Today, Spain is, along with England, the only European democracy that can look out toward the New World as the fifth centennial of Columbus’ landing approaches. Spain can play a greater role in mitigating conflict between Latin America and the United States. It can even fill in many vacuums in current hemispheric relations.

As I traveled down Spain’s highways during the recent electoral season in June, I could not help being surprised by reoccurence of the communist symbol, the hammer and sickle, on walls and lampposts. This frightens no one. Yet such an occurrence would be impossible in the United States. Spain offers her citizens the wide spectrum of political choice that comes only from a mature, self-assured absence of paranoia.

Throughout Spanish America, we used to see Spain and say: Look at that toothless hag, sitting on the church steps, reeking of incense and urine, dressed in rags and begging alms. We shrugged in resignation. We are as we are because Spain is what she is.

No longer. Fifty years after the Battle of Spain, the lady is sleek, modern, beautiful and, we hope, willing to admit us into her bright new bedroom.