Turkey’s embattled prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, mired in allegations of corruption and the target of massive protests against his authoritarian rule, appears to be invincible.
Published by the European Institute of the Mediterranean.

Click to access 112-Chislett.pdf

William Chislett, corresponsal de The Times en España entre 1975 y 1978, alaba el “papel espléndido” que jugó Adolfo Suárez y cree que la Transición estuvo bien hecha. Pero también señala que en su opinión “la democracia en España era inevitable” y nunca creyó que pudiera haber una segunda Guerra Civil tras la muerte de Franco: “Era evidente que iba a iniciar una nueva etapa, lo que no se sabía era como lo haría y si habría violencia o no”. Chislett que trabajó también para el Financial Times en México y Londres es ahora es investigador del Real Instituto Elcano y ha publicado varios libros sobre España.

William Chislett asegura: “No hay duda de que sin Suárez no hubiera llegado la democracia en la forma que llegó. Hizo un papel espléndido. Fue la persona ideal para el trabajo. Yo viví esa etapa y creo son injustas las críticas que se hacen hoy a la forma en que se hizo la Transición. Es fácil criticar hoy lo que pasó hace 30 años, pero el contexto de entonces era bastante complicado y difícil.”

Pero el ex corresponsal apunta también: “Creo que la democracia era inevitable. La sociedad española estaba muchísimo más avanzada que el régimen cuando murió Franco. Había una gran distancia entre lo que pensaba la gente en la calle y lo que pensaba el régimen. Era imposible continuar el régimen. Tal vez si Carrero Blanco no hubiera sido asesinado la democracia hubiera tardado más tiempo y con más conflicto. Pero fue asesinado”.

Y añade: “Antes de la muerte de Franco había poco interés en la prensa internacional por España. Muy pocos periódicos tenían corresponsal fijo. Al morir Franco, muchos como el Financial Times abren oficina permanente aquí, porque se levantó, yo creo que bastante tontamente, la idea de que podía haber otra guerra civil. Yo nunca aposté por ese escenario. Algunos de los corresponsales que vinieron, sí. No sé si lo hicieron para hacer la noticia más dramática o si lo hicieron con toda la seriedad. Para mi era evidente que tras morir Franco, España iba a pasar a otra etapa. Nadie sabía cómo iba a pasar y si iba a pasar con o sin violencia. Los más violentos durante la Transición fueron los de ETA no la extrema derecha.”

William Chislett defiende en cualquier caso que la Transición se hizo bien: “Es muy fácil hoy en día decir que hace 30 años se tenía que haber hecho esto o lo otro. Pero yo creo que estuvo bien hecha. Se puede criticar algunos aspectos vistos desde la actualidad por ejemplo la arquitectura de las autonomías que no ha funcionado como debería o la Justicia que sigue siendo en este país lentísima. La gente de la Transición hoy reconoce que en el tema de la Justicia no hicieron lo que había que hacer, pero en temas generales fue un éxito.

http://www.radiocable.com/chislett-democracia-invitable647.html#sthash.SOGYDUdX.dpuf

The good news is that Spain has finally come out of a five-year recession that was triggered by the bursting of its property bubble. The bad news is that the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at a whopping 26%, double the European Union average.

The scale of the property madness was such that in 2006 the number of housing starts (762,214) was more than that of Germany, France, and Italy combined. This sector, to borrow the title of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, was a Chronicle of a Death Foretold. There are still an estimated more than one million new and second hand unsold homes.

The excessive concentration on the property sector, as the motor of an economy that boomed for a decade, created a lopsided economic model and fertile ground for corruption. When the sector crashed as of 2008 and house prices plummeted, 1.7 million people lost their jobs in construction out of a total of 3.7 million job losses in the last six years, households were left with mortgages they could not pay and property development companies unable to service their bank loans. This, in turn, severely weakened parts of the banking system which had to be rescued by the European Stability Mechanism with a €42 billion bailout programme. Spain exited the bail-out in January, but bad loans still account for more than 13% of total credit, up from a mere 0.7% in 2006.

Spain has emerged from recession thanks largely to an impressive export performance, achieved through an “internal devaluation” (lower unit labour costs stemming from wage cuts or a wage freeze and higher productivity). As a euro country, Spain cannot devalue. Merchandise exports rose from €160 billion in 2009 to €234 billion in 2013, an increase equivalent to more than 7% of GDP. This growth has been faster than the pace of powerhouse Germany, albeit from a smaller base. Exports of goods and services rose from 27% of GDP in 2007 to around 35% last year. The surge in exports combined with the drop in imports and a record year for tourism, with 60 million visitors, turned around the current account, which was in surplus for the first time in 27 years. In 2007, the current account recorded a deficit of 10%, the highest in relative terms among developed countries.

Unemployment is the most pressing problem. The depth of the jobs’ crisis is such that Spain, which represents 11% of the euro zone’s economy and has a population of 47 million, has almost 6 million unemployed (around one-third of the zone’s total jobless), whereas Germany (population 82 million and 30% of the GDP) has only 2.8 million jobless (15% of the zone’s total). Germany’s jobless rate is at its lowest since the country’s reunification, while Spain’s is at its highest level ever.

Young Spanish adults, particularly the better qualified, are increasingly moving abroad in search of a job, though not in the scale suggested by the Spanish media which gives the impression there is a massive exodus and brain drain. One thing is the large flow of those who go abroad, especially to Germany, and return after a couple of months; another the permanent stock of Spaniards abroad (those who stay beyond a certain amount of time), which is surprisingly small. According to research conducted by the Elcano Royal Institute, Spain’s main think tank, between January 2009 and January 2013, the worst years of Spain’s recession, the stock of Spaniards who resided abroad increased in net terms by a mere 40,000, which is less than 0.1% of Spain’s population, to 1.9 million. These figures are based on official Spanish statistics cross-checked with data in the countries where Spaniards reside. The number of Spaniards living abroad is less than one-third the size of Spain’s foreign-born population of 6.4 million (13.2% of the total population). Immigrants in Spain are returning to their country of origin, particularly Latin Americans.

Spain’s crisis has also resulted in a long overdue crackdown on corruption. There are around 800 cases under investigation, most of them involving politicians and their business associates. Spain was ranked 40th out of 177 countries in the 2013 corruption perceptions ranking by the Berlin-based Transparency International, down from 30th place in 2012. Its score of 59 was six points lower. The nearer to 100, the cleaner the country. Spain was the second-biggest loser of points, and only topped by war-torn Syria. The country is in for a long haul.
https://blog.oup.com/2014/03/spain-economic-future/

This book illuminates, among other things, one of the least-known periods of Spain’s turbulent 20th century history – the repressive aftermath of the country’s Civil War in 1936-39, after the victory of General Franco. It is not one that will appeal to the faint-hearted. Yet it is an engrossing read.

The provocative title, which raised eyebrows when the book was published in Spain in 2011, is questionable. There were plenty of horrifying incidents on both the Nationalist and Republican sides that recall Francisco de Goya’s shocking series of prints, The Disasters of War, but the criminal and vindictive actions pale in comparison with the magnitude of the Nazi Holocaust.

Nevertheless, Paul Preston, an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics and leading historian of 20th century Spain, contends that no other word aptly conveys the scale of the Spanish tragedy comprising the Civil War, its aftermath and the Franco dictatorship. This is, in part, because of the anti-Semitic discourse on Franco’s side: Republicans had to be exterminated as they were instruments of a “Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic” conspiracy.

Professor Preston puts the number of those who were killed in battle during the three-year war at 200,000, after Nationalist military rebels rose against the democratically elected Republican government in 1936. A further 150,000 were killed by the Nationalists after various flimsy legal processes (20,000 of them after the Civil War ended in 1939) and an additional 50,000 in the Republican-held areas. Thousands more died after the war of disease and hunger in prisons and concentration camps.

Victims in the Republican zone were documented by the state investigation, known as the Causa General, set up in 1940, but the atrocities committed on the other side did not really come light until after Franco died in 1975, in a flood of books and, more recently, exhumations of mass graves around the country.

There was no Truth Commission after Franco’s death along the lines of Chile or South Africa. Post-Franco politicians of all colours tacitly agreed to avoid a reckoning, in order to smooth the transition to democracy under the so-called Pacto de Olvido (the Pact of Forgetting). In he past decade, however, various groups, often led by the relatives of Republican victims, have unearthed the past – often literally.

Professor Preston, who does not hide his loathing of the rebels and empathy with the Left, argues, with impressive detail, that the much greater repression in the Nationalist zones was largely planned and institutionalized, while that in the Republican areas was mainly spontaneous and in response to the threat from the much better armed and trained Francoist forces.

One of the worst atrocities on the Nationalist side was the massacre, soon after the war started, of more than 1,000 prisoners, mainly civilians, herded into the bull ring in Badajoz.

On the Republican side, Professor Preston deals in greater detail than anyone before on the specific role of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, in the Civil War, particularly in the mass execution at Paracuellos of hundreds of imprisoned civilian and military supporters of Franco.

The Spanish communist leader Santiago Carrillo, councillor for public order in Madrid at the time, always claimed he personally had nothing to do with organising the killings. Professor Preston believes otherwise, citing his working relationship with Josif Grigulevich, a sinister undercover NKVD agent and later the godfather of one of Carrillo’s sons. The NKVD was also involved in the assassination of the Catalan Trotskyist leader Andreu Nin.

One of the main victims of the Civil War was the Catholic Church as a result of intense anti-clerical violence against an institution that supported the status quo. The Church blessed Franco’s uprising, calling it a crusade and reducing the conflict to a black-and-white struggle between good and evil.

Thirteen bishops and 6,832 priests, nuns, monks, and other religious personnel were murdered compared to around 900 clerics during the French Revolution. Historians have called this the largest clerical bloodletting in the history of the Christian Church.

The consequences of Spain’s fratricidal conflict still reverberate bitterly today. This book will help readers understand why.

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2014/7-march/reviews/reading-groups/remembering-this-bloodbath

Public event at Williams College, Williamstown, US, March 5.
https://calendar.williams.edu/event/whats_up_with_spain#.UwDPiUJdXwc

Rightly sensitive about national stereotypes, including the Black Legend, William Chislett has produced a concise yet nuanced account of the history of Spain for an Oxford University Press series. The Franco regime may have exhibited many of the traits that reinforced perceptions about the extent of bigotry and cruelty in Spain, but as Chislett also observes, the political term “liberal” was first coined to describe the remarkably progressive (though short-lived) Cádiz constitution of 1812.

Chislett was Financial Times correspondent in Madrid during the democratic transition of the 1970s. His account spans the arrival of the Moors to the economic crash from which Spain is still reeling. Structured around a series of leading questions – “What was the Disaster of 1898?” or “What was the economic legacy of the Civil War?” – the format has a whiff of the school textbook about it, redeemed by Chislett’s energetic style and eye for the telling anecdote.

A recurring trend, seen in various contexts from the seventeenth-century Golden Age to the property boom of 1994–2008, has been a reluctance to invest in human capital. Chislett succinctly shows how the nineteenth-century Carlist wars spawned a political culture that weakened Spain’s civil society during the decades that followed. In addressing the slide into conflict in 1936, Chislett avoids military history,chronicling instead the tragic collapse of the political centre ground

Even-handed on the atrocities of either side, he nevertheless refers only to the total figures for wartime executions cited by Paul Preston in The Spanish Holocaust (reviewed in the TLS , September 7, 2012).A broader overview of this disputed area would have been welcome.

For all the admiration Chislett bestows on Spain’s democratic transition, he notes a failure to tackle judicial reform, and the abiding challenges posed by regional nationalisms. A contemporary “black legend” about Spain is that its
desire for a united territory encapsulates a reactionary mindset. Throughout, Chislett reveals how extreme localism could be just as retrograde, whether in the 1870s or the 1930s. As the Catalonia–Spain debate becomes ever more polarized, such insights are all the more welcome.
JULIUS PURCELL

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/

http://nuevayork.cervantes.es/FichasCultura/Ficha93055_27_2.htm

Interview on National Public Radio.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/02/06/272478159/a-fairy-tale-gone-wrong-spains-princess-accused-of-fraud?ft=3&f=

My letter in The Economist.

SIR – Your article about the rebalancing of relations between Spain and Latin America (“Shoe on the other foot”, January 25th) reminded me of the saying in the 1960s that when General Motors sneezed, America caught a cold.
What comes around, goes around.

ww.economist.com/news/letters/21595385-climate-change-turkey-housing-hospices-asia-sex-and-public-life-renewable-energy-spain

Más de tres años después de abrir el último capítulo de su interminable proceso de adhesión a la UE, Turquía ha abierto finalmente otro, pero hay cuatro medidas del Gobierno de raíces islamistas de Recep Tayyip Erdogan que chocan claramente con la vocación europea.

Primero, como miembro de la OTAN desde 1952, la decisión de comprarle un sistema de defensa de largo alcance a una empresa china sancionada por infringir la ley de no proliferación que se aplica a Irán, Corea del Norte y Siria ha escandalizado a Washington y a Bruselas. Segundo, Erdogan ha pedido al presidente ruso, Vladimir Putin, que Turquía (miembro de la Unión Aduanera de la UE desde 1996) pueda formar parte de la Organización de Cooperación de Shanghái. Tercero, el partido gobernante, Justicia y Desarrollo (en el poder desde 2002), ha dejado de ser un observador en el Partido Popular Europeo, organización de centro-derecha que constituye el grupo más numeroso del Parlamento Europeo (el Partido Popular forma parte de él, al igual que 18 de los 27 jefes de Estado y de Gobierno de la UE), y se ha unido a la euroescéptica Grupo de Conservadores y Reformistas Europeos. Carl Bildt, el ministro de Asuntos Exteriores sueco, que está a favor de que Turquía se convierta en miembro de pleno derecho, ha tachado la acción de “profundamente estúpida”. Y cuarto, Erdogan sigue adelante con su programa político socialmente conservador; con su última intrusión en la vida privada de los ciudadanos, pretende acabar con los pisos mixtos de estudiantes universitarios que hay fuera de los campus.

Además, el “problema de Chipre” sigue sin resolverse. El presidente Nicos Anastasiades y el dirigente turcochipriota Dervis Erioglu se reunieron a finales del noviembre en Línea Verde de separación creada en 1974 tras la invasión turca de la isla, pero no lograron ponerse de acuerdo ni siquiera para emitir una declaración conjunta que reactivase las negociaciones sobre la reunificación de Chipre, que llevan 18 meses en un punto muerto.

Resolver este conflicto no es un requisito para que Turquía se una a la UE, aunque sí que Ankara abra sus puertos y aeropuertos al tráfico griegochipriota, pero no cabe duda de la buena voluntad que generaría un acuerdo de reunificación fructífero. Como consecuencia de la negativa por parte de Erdogan a aplicar el Protocolo de Ankara de 2005 y ampliar la unión aduanera hasta Chipre, miembro de la UE desde 2004 (y por tanto reconocer la República de Chipre), ocho de los 35 capítulos siguen bloqueados por la Comisión Europea. Otros capítulos están bloqueados por Chipre y Francia. Solo se han abierto 14 capítulos en ocho años para negociar el acceso y uno se ha cerrado temporalmente.

Turquía se está revelando como un eje energético importante para la UE. Si Ankara y Nicosia pudieran resolver todas sus diferencias, no solo se aceleraría la entrada de Turquía en la UE, sino que ello significaría que las importantes reservas de gas descubiertas en 2011 en el Mediterráneo Oriental, en el Campo de Afrodita (cerca del igualmente importante Campo de Leviatán de Israel), podrían exportarse a Turquía y luego a una Europa igualmente muy necesitada de energía. Un gasoducto hasta Turquía sería la solución más barata y fácil, pero mientras las tropas turcas sigan ocupando un tercio de la isla, eso no sucederá. Un gasoducto entre Israel y Turquía también es una quimera. La retórica de Erdogan, en ocasiones de tintes antisemitas, sigue enfureciendo al Gobierno de Israel.

Y por si esto fuera poco, la política exterior turca de “cero problemas con sus vecinos” está hecha pedazos. En el último ejemplo de esto, el embajador de Turquía en Egipto fue expulsado en noviembre como consecuencia del continuo apoyo por parte de Ergogan hacia el depuesto expresidente Mohamed Morsi, líder de la Hermandad Musulmana. Para hacerse una idea de lo excepcional que es este suceso, piensen en el hecho de que El Cairo nunca ha expulsado al embajador de Israel, ni siquiera durante épocas de gran tensión como la segunda intifada.

Mientras tanto, la libertad de prensa en Turquía sigue tremendamente coartada, con más de 60 personas encarceladas, muchas en virtud de una ley antiterrorista muy restrictiva pensada principalmente para los kurdos. Cuando hace poco asistí a una conferencia en Estambul, un periodista turca me buscó para contarme en voz baja que no podía ejercer libremente su profesión, y no era un activista kurdo.

El tortuoso proceso de adhesión de Turquía a la UE vuelve a estar encarrilado, pero el Gobierno insiste en tomar caminos que constituyen un obstáculo para la vocación europea del país y Erdogan sigue siendo una figura que genera distanciamiento y polarización.

http://kioskoymas.abc.es/noticias/opinion/20131228/abcp-turquia-paso-adelante-atras-20131228.html