Spain: A Unique History

Chapter 4: Spain and the West

4 Spain and the West 81 Whereas “identity” has become a matter of controversy for Spaniards only comparatively recently, the identity , character, or image of Spain has been a polemical issue outside of Spain for nearly half a millennium. The Black Legend found its earliest expression in Italy at the close of the fifteenth century and would later be cultivated with especial fervor by the Dutch and the English. Italian detractors liked to denounce the Spanish as a bastard blend of Moors and Jews, not proper Christians or even Europeans; conversely , the principal northern libelers of the Spanish postulated a hyper-Catholic identity of unique sadism and malevolence, a few echoes of which persist today. Stereotypes concerning the Spanish shifted emphasis and content several times between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the notion of “romantic Spain” developed, it also portrayed the Spanish as extremely different, but now as a uniquely pre-modern people motivated by honor, personal courage, and an archaic style of life, as distinct from materialism and achievement, a semi-”oriental” people strongly configured by North Africa and the Middle East. Residues of this idea linger down to the present. The only other major European people who have become the object of equivalent attitudes are the Russians, for whom identity became a very major issue again in the 1990s, just as it had become for Spaniards.1 In Russia, however, nationalism has won out, whereas a unique aspect of modern Spanish culture is the extent to which the Black Legend has been internalized by the Spanish themselves. Since 1985 Europe has become a kind of panacea, almost what the anthropologists would call a “cargo cult” for Spaniards, and there is no denying that membership in the European Union has been economically beneficial for Spain, at least until the recession of 2008. An underlying feature of such attitudes has had to do with what is often considered to be the non-Western or extra-European identity of the country and its culture. To what extent can this be justified by empirical analysis, as distinct from subjective political, cultural, or ideological projections? Hispania was clearly a normal and integral part of the Roman empire—the “West” (or, more precisely, partial pre-West) of its time. The main parts of Roman Hispania, Bética (the south), and the Tarraconensis (the northeast) were among the most Romanized and Latinized parts of the empire, producing several emperors (while none came from Gaul). Indeed, Hispania played an important role in sustaining the “Latinity” of the empire, or, more precisely, of its western half, against the Greek and east Mediterranean identity of the eastern half. The Visigothic kingdom eventually took shape as the heir of Rome, at least according to its self-conception. The religious and cultural identity that it developed as a “Catholic kingdom” was by the seventh century proclaimed as the quintessence of Western Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Visigothic Spania maintained a cultural life second only to that of Italy and played a leading role in ecclesiastical development, despite the marked decline of the Roman world from the fifth century on. That decline was not exactly “the first decline of the West,” as Julián Marías puts it, since Rome was only the predecessor of Western civilization, but its decline marked a kind of cultural and civilizational catastrophe that could be only very partially averted in Visigothic Spania. Out of the ashes of the empire (whose end was never fully accepted for another half millennium) there arose “Europe,” as the term eventually came to be used, in the form of the Germanic kingdoms, which began to shift the weight of affairs more and more decisively toward the north.2 This became fundamental for the history of the former Hispania, whose greater world for a millennium and more had consisted of the Mediterranean, an orientation toward the east (and to a minor degree toward the south) that from the late fifth century on would be replaced by an orientation increasingly toward the north. Visigothic dominion had originally been established north of the Pyrenees, and even as Leovigildo centered the new kingdom in the peninsula, Septimania in southwestern France remained part of it. Both politico-military competition and Spain and the West 82 general relations with the Frankish kingdom were closer than relations with Italy and Rome. Visigothic Spania in fact seemed by the seventh century to represent the...