¿Qué hace un inglés con pinta de pirata, de Vikingo, promoviendo la figura de Arturo Barea y, además, con un deplorable acento, a pesar de mis muchos años viviendo en España?

Yo cubrí la Transición española para The Times de Londres entre 1975 y 1978 y regresé a Madrid de forma permanente en 1986 y con otra vida, después de ser corresponsal en México seis años y dos en Londres para el Financial Times.

Me considero un hispanista comprometido en la tradición de los llamados curiosos impertinentes. Trabajo para el Real Instituto Elcano.

En 2010 encontré la lápida deteriorada de Barea en el pueblo de Faringdon en la campiña de Oxford (mi ciudad natal) que restauré junto con unos amigos y admiradores del escritor, y en 2013 pusimos una placa sobre la fachada de su pub favorito.

Todas las obras de Barea, incluyendo la Forja, fueron publicadas en inglés antes que en español, traducidos por su mujer Ilsa, salvo un librito de cuentos en 1938. Y dio 800 charlas durante 17 años para el servicio de la BBC para Latinoamérica bajo el seudónimo “Juan de Castilla”.

Salvo una calle con su nombre en Badajoz, donde nació, y en el pueblo de Novés, Toledo, donde vivió en 1935, Barea no está recordado en España, y mucho menos en Madrid donde pasó casi toda su vida antes de exiliarse. Barea está mejor recordado en su país de exilio que en su país de origen, y no me parece justo.

Nuestra iniciativa no pretende quitar un nombre para poner otro, ni modificar el mapa de Lavapiés, lleno de historia, sino incluir en su memoria a uno de sus hijos y uno de los que hizo el mejor retrato humano y social del barrio en el siglo XX.

Ojala que ustedes decidan asignar una placa en honor de Barea sobre la fachada de las Escuelas Pías en Lavapiés donde el escritor estudiaba hasta los 13 años.

Espero que nuestra iniciativa cuente con todo su apoyo.

Spain’s economic woes have not prevented the country from maintaining its global presence. The country remained in 12th position out of 90 countries in the 2015 Elcano Global Presence Index and with a slightly higher score.
http://www.blog.rielcano.org/en/spain-holds-firm-in-the-elcano-global-presence-index-despite-economic-crisis/

You don’t get to choose your parents. I, and I am sure I also speak for my brother, always felt that we very lucky with ours. You will notice that I speak of our father and my mother and not just our mother whose life we are celebrating today. Our father died 32 years ago and was cremated here, so I thought it appropriate to say something about both of them.

Both of them were liberal and tolerant in the best sense, inculcating these values in us along with a sense of responsibility for one’s actions, and supportive at various stages of our lives. This may have had something to do with their own lives. My father fought in the First World War (aged 21 he was at the battle of the Somme) and my mother was born during that terrible conflict. In April 1948 they both left their marriages of many years, neither of which were happy ones, and eloped from the north of England to Oxford. My father’s departure at the age of 55 made the front page of The Daily Mail, with the headline “Colonel quits home and £5,000 jobs”. He was a well-known local figure as clerk to the magistrates in Barrow in Furness and Ulverston, partner in a law firm and Deputy-Lieutenant of Lancashire. Apparently he was headed for a knighthood.

Our parents married in 1960, after my father’s wife died. Simon and I were born in 1951 and 1953, respectively. My mother had changed her surname by deed pool so that our birth certificates would show her name as Chislett. These were brave things to do at that time: commonplace today.

The third published volume of the diaries of Nella Last – best known for the film Housewife 49 starring Victoria Wood – about life in Barrow in Furness during and after World War Two records the following: “Anybody I met downtown seemed agog with the gramophone broadcast by William Chislett who went off with a married woman and now keeps a bookshop in Oxford. It was a nine day’s sensation and sides were taken.”

Their first house in Oxford was on Yarnells Hill, where Sonia’s parents also lived. My mother taught her to tie her shoelaces. When Sonia would walk down the hill to see her, my father would announce: “Here comes your little friend.”

When my father’s first wife discovered they had moved to Shillingford in the early 1950s she maliciously told the local Women’s Institute of my mother’s circumstances, making life uncomfortable for them in the village for a while.

Their marriage was a very happy one, and something of a model for me, and it also changed the views of my Uncle Arthur –my mother’s brother – on marriage. Their father, my grandfather, was abusive toward his wife and neglected his children. My mother’s first marriage was probably due to her wanting to leave home.

Our mother had a wonderful joie de vivre. Her love of cooking became legendary among some of my friends from Abingdon School who would come for Sunday lunch, often roast beef and Yorkshire pudding followed by lemon meringue pie or trifle liberally laced with sherry.

She and my father had a kind of house rule that they would not have a drink until 6pm, which, at times, led them both to cast glances at the clock (which I have at home in Madrid), perhaps in the hope that this would make time speed up.

After our father died in 1984 she stayed on in Woodstock Close at the top of Woodstock Road. She was very independent-minded and had a busy social life, going on cruises including to the Philippines and on one of them only got off the ship once and that was to buy The Telegraph in Menorca. She also used to buy the Daily Mail on Saturdays but she insisted it was ONLY for the TV pages.

A decade or so later – always wanting to be in total control of her life and enjoying good health – she moved of her own will into sheltered accommodation at Wyndham House in Plantation Road where she turned a small flat into probably one of the most elegant rooms in Oxford. She was very happy there and would invite in friends.

On one occasion she telephoned a friend and said, “Do you know, I’ve no white wine in the flat – I’ve asked Simon to pick up another case – so I’ve had to drink champagne all week.”

Always smartly turned out and with what I would call a regal air, one day a taxi driver in Oxford asked her if she minded that he complemented her on her appearance as she reminded him of the Queen. She told him he was not the first person to say this. She did in fact look a little like Her Majesty. In some family circles, she was known as “the duchess”.

At the age of 97, when it was clear she was unable to look after herself, Simon and Tessa arranged for her to go to Chervill Cottage residential home at Brighthampton, where she celebrated her 100th birthday, and then, when that place closed, to Rosebank in Bampton. She would have been 101 on May 28. Simon cleverly arranged her room at Chervill Cottage in such a fashion – with the same paintings and some of the furniture – that to begin with she thought she was still at Wyndham House.

Simon and Tessa always gave unfailing support to her, especially in the last difficult months of her life. I have very few regrets about deciding to move back to Madrid in 1986. My mother was fond of saying that “children were only lent to you”. My main regret is that I was unable to see more of her, particularly in the last months of her life and help Simon and Tessa more.

Just as we do not get to choose our parents, so we cannot usually choose when we die. Her youngest grandson Ben, when a small boy, once announced over lunch that when death came HE was going to hide under the table. My mother would not have wanted to hide under the table. She had lived a very full and long life and stoically met her end.

Si Gran Bretaña vota el 23 de junio a favor de abandonar la Unión Europea (UE), yo, y aproximadamente otros 1,3 millones de los llamados expatriados que viven en países de la UE, podríamos convertirnos en inmigrantes ilegales a no ser que el Gobierno británico mantenga algún tipo de acuerdo de libre circulación de personas con el bloque que ha dejado.

Vivo en Madrid desde 1986, lo que – para echar sal en la posible herida – me impide votar en el referéndum, ya que solo pueden hacerlo los que llevan viviendo menos de 15 años en el extranjero. Un grupo de británicos que lleva más tiempo viviendo en la UE interpuso recientemente una demanda contra el Gobierno británico ante el Tribunal Supremo en Londres aduciendo que se les ha privado injustamente de su derecho al voto. Estas personas afirman que son “británicos en Europa” que ejercen su derecho a la libertad de movimientos en la UE para vivir y trabajar en Europa y que “no son expatriados”. Yo también me considero un británico en Europa.

El principal destino en la UE para los británicos que viven fuera de su país es España (más de 300.000), muchos de los cuales son jubilados. La consecuencia de una salida de Reino Unido de la UE es que podríamos encontrarnos con que nuestro derecho continuado a trabajar, a residir, a poseer propiedades en España y a acceder a servicios públicos como los tratamientos médicos ya no estaría automáticamente garantizado. He cotizado tanto en el sistema español de Seguridad Social como en el británico, a diferencia de los jubilados que solo cotizaron en el sistema británico, por lo que, al menos, no deberían negarme la atención sanitaria.

Existe una considerable incertidumbre sobre lo que nos pasará. ¿Significará el hecho de que vivíamos en España (o en otros países de la UE) cuando se produjo la salida de Reino Unido de la UE que hemos obtenido unos “derechos adquiridos” de acuerdo con el derecho internacional? En otras palabras, ¿los que ya hubiesen ejercido su derecho a vivir en Estados de la UE antes de la salida de Reino Unido mantendrán ese derecho después de la salida? Según la biblioteca del Parlamento británico, que proporciona información imparcial, “la retirada de un tratado exime a las partes de cualquier obligación futura entre ellas, pero no afecta a los derechos u obligaciones adquiridos de acuerdo con él antes de la retirada”. Pero los países de la UE, enfurecidos por la marcha de Reino Unido, podrían decidir vengarse y presionarnos, por ejemplo, obligando a los propietarios extranjeros de casas a pagar más impuestos.

Mi decisión de marcharme de Reino Unido a los 35 años fue una decisión muy consciente. Aborrecía vivir en una isla y la actitud patriotera y antieuropea. El país me fascinó (en la tradición de los “curiosos impertinentes”) desde que informé sobre la transición a la democracia en España como corresponsal de The Times (1975-78). En 1976, mi mujer y yo compramos una casa en ruinas en un pueblo de la provincia de Cuenca, que se convirtió en un microcosmos de los profundos cambios que se estaban produciendo y que seguimos teniendo. Mientras trabajaba para el Financial Times (1978-84), me mudé a México desde España y después a Londres (1984-86); me sentía como un extranjero en mi propio país. Por entonces mi mujer y yo habíamos adoptado a dos niños mexicanos. Nuestro deseo de que fuesen bilingües (mucho más que sus padres adoptivos) fue una de las muchas razones por las que volvimos de forma permanente a Madrid en 1986, lo que pudimos hacer gracias a que tanto España como Reino Unido eran miembros de la UE, un maravilloso concepto cualesquiera que sean sus defectos. Como dice la expresión inglesa, el hogar está dónde esté el corazón. La UE me permitió lograr esto. Ahora la situación podría cambiar, e incluso si no lo hace, he decidido que si Reino Unido abandona la UE solicitaré la nacionalidad española para darle totalmente la espalda a mi país de nacimiento y en reconocimiento a todo lo que ha hecho España por mí profesional, personal y emocionalmente.

Por razones muy, muy diferentes, seguiría el ejemplo del escritor Arturo Barea, uno de mis héroes, cuya lápida conmemorativa en el cementerio de la localidad de Faringdon, en la campiña de Oxford, ayudé a restaurar. Barea huyó de la Guerra Civil española y pasó los últimos 18 años de su vida en Inglaterra. Amaba al país al que se exilió, como yo amo al mío, aunque yo no me considero un exiliado, y se convirtió en ciudadano británico en 1948. Quizás no sea el único que pretenda cambiar su nacionalidad.

http://www.abc.es

If Britain votes on 23 June to leave the European Union I, and an estimated 1.3 million other so called expats living in EU countries, could find ourselves becoming illegal immigrants unless the UK government maintains some form of free movement agreement with the bloc it has exited.

I have lived in Madrid since 1986, which – adding insult to potential injury – disqualifies me from voting in the referendum as only those who have lived for less than 15 years abroad can do so. A group of Britons who have lived abroad for longer recently presented a legal challenge against the UK government in the High Court in London on the grounds that they have been wrongly disenfranchised. These individuals say they are “Britons in Europe” using their EU freedom movement of rights to live and work in Europe and “are not expats.” I, too, regard, myself as a Briton in Europe.

The top destination in the EU for Britons living outside their own country is Spain (more than 300,000), many of them retirees. As a result of Brexit, we could find our continued right to work, reside and own property in Spain and to access public services such as medical treatment is no longer automatically guaranteed. I have paid into both the British and the Spanish Social Security systems, unlike those retirees who paid into just the British system, so health care, at least, should not be denied to me.

There is considerable uncertainty over what will happen to us. Will the fact that we lived in Spain (or other EU countries) at the time of Brexit mean that we would have obtained “acquired rights” under international law? In other words, those who have already exercised their right to live in EU states BEFORE Brexit would keep that right AFTER Brexit. According to the library of the British parliament, which provides impartial information, “withdrawing from a treaty releases the parties from any future obligations to each other, but does not affect any rights or obligations acquired under it before withdrawal.” But EU countries, angered by Britain exiting, could decide to be vindictive and put pressure on us by, for example, making foreign homeowners pay more tax.

My decision to leave the UK at the age of 35 was a very conscious one. I hated living on an island and the “little Englander” attitude. Having covered Spain’s transition to democracy as a correspondent of The Times (1975-78), the country fascinated me (in the tradition of the curiosos impertinentes). My wife and I bought a ruin of a house in a village in the province of Cuenca in 1976, which became a microcosm of the profound changes taking place and which we still have. When I moved from Spain to Mexico for the Financial Times (1978-84) and then to London (1984-86) I felt like a foreigner in my own country. By then my wife and I had adopted two Mexican boys. Our desire for them to be bi-lingual (much more so than their adopted parents) was one of many reasons for returning permanently to Madrid in 1986, which we were able to do thanks to both Spain and the UK being members of the EU, a marvellous concept whatever its defects. In the words of the English expression, home is where the heart is. The EU allowed me to achieve this.

Now the situation could change, and even if it does not, I have decided that if Britain leaves the EU I will seek Spanish nationality in order to turn my back completely on my country of birth and in recognition of all that Spain has done for me professionally, personally and emotionally.

For very very different reasons, I would follow the example of the writer Arturo Barea, one of my heroes whose commemorative stone in the cemetery of the town of Faringdon in the county of Oxford I helped to restore. Barea fled the Spanish civil war and spent the last 18 years of his life in England. He loved the country of his exile, just as I love mine, though I do not consider myself to be in exile, and became a British citizen in 1948. Perhaps I will not be alone in seeking to change my nationality.

Click to access 26-29-ENTREVISTA-CHISLETT.pdf

Eighty years ago this July right-wing officers under General Franco rose against the democratically-elected Popular Front government that was elected after King Alfonso XIII went into exile in 1931 and the Second Republic was declared. The coup failed and the government was unable to stamp it out. The prolongation of these two failures was a three-year Civil War, simplistically seen as a prelude to the ideological battles of the Second World War between fascism, communism, and democracy but much more a particularly Spanish conflict.

Around 200,000 died at the battle fronts and a further 150,000 were murdered extra-judicially or executed after flimsy legal processes by the Nationalists (the rebels), 20,000 of them after the Civil War ended, and 50,000 in the Republican-held areas during the conflict. More than 250,000 went into permanent exile. Some of these people then went on to fight in the French resistance during World War II and ended up in concentration camps, most notably Mauthausen-Gusen, where around 5,000 of them died.

The civil war, which escalated into an international conflict, because of the aid provided to Franco by Hitler and Mussolini and to the Republican government by the Soviet Union, reverberated around the world, including in Oxfordshire from where some 31 individuals went to Spain to fight for the cause of the Republic in the 60,000-strong International Brigades, six of whom were killed, or served in medical units. As the excellent book “No Other Way”, published last year by the Oxford International Brigade Memorial Committee, also points out homes established in the area cared for hundreds of Basque refugee children, and Oxford itself was a centre for activism in support of the Spanish Republic, both among the university’s radicalised students and the working class community associated with the Morris car factory. My father-in-law was a student at the University at that time and wrote two articles in the Isis magazine in 1938, which were rather sympathetic to Franco to the chagrin of my wife.

Arturo Barea, one of the great chroniclers of the first 40 years of 20th century Spain, died in exile not far from here in Faringdon in 1957. Barea, author of the autobiographical trilogy The Forging of a Rebel, lived on the edge of Buscot Park for the last 10 years of his life in a house provided for him by the second Lord Faringdon. Some Basque children, part of a contingent of 6,000 shipped to the UK after the aerial bombing of Guernica in 1937, also lived at Buscot Park. The lord was an effete Old Etonian Marxist, who would preface his remarks in the House of Lords with ‘My Dears’ rather than ‘My Lords.’ He had converted his Rolls Royce into an ambulance and joined a British field hospital on the Aragón front in the Spanish Civil War.

I organised along with a group of friends the restoration of Barea’s commemorative stone in Faringdon in 2010 and in 2013 the placing of a plaque on his favourite pub, The Volunteer, in the middle of the town. Barea’s archive is to be donated to the Bodleian Library. Moves are afoot in Madrid to place a plaque at the school where he studied and name a square after him.

You might think the Civil War had by now been forgotten. Afterall, very few combatants on either side are alive today. Anyone who let’s say was 18 when the war broke out in 1936 would today be 98. The war is deeply ingrained into Spain’s collective memory and in the minds of many families, and arouses strong emotions on either side of the conflict when publicly recalled such as, for example, when left wing politicians in cities decide to change the name of streets associated with the Franco regime or the Pope beatifies Civil War clerics murdered by those on the Republican side.

It is also recalled when families publish memorials in newspapers commemorating the anniversary of the civil war murder of loved ones: if committed on the Republican side, the text, in conservative newspapers like ABC, often proclaims “assassinated by Marxist hordes.”

I see that the planned Civil War memorial slated for St. Giles has also aroused strong emotions, to judge by letters in the local press, on aesthetic, ideological and location grounds.

In order to better understand where Spain stands today in respect of the Civil War, it is worth recalling the Franco regime’s stance toward the conflict. History is written by the victors, a quote commonly misattributed to Winston Churchill, and this was certainly the case after Franco won the war in 1939 when a dictatorship that lasted 36 years was established.

The Francoist dead had war memorials and their names carved on churches: caídos por Díos y España (‘those who fell for God and Spain’), but the Republican dead were forgotten and could not even be publicly mourned. In 1940, the Franco regime decreed the compiling of a list of killings committed by Republican loyalists, known as the Cause General (General Cause).

Far from seeking reconciliation, Franco, supported by the Roman Catholic Church which had called his uprising a ‘crusade’, carried on the repression in order to purify the country of those deemed to be its enemies.

Franco’s Law of Political Responsibilities in 1939, retroactive to October 1934, when the miners’ strike in Asturias developed into a revolutionary uprising that was brutally crushed by troops he controlled, punished ‘the guilt of those who contributed by acts or omissions to foment red subversion, to keep it alive for more than two years and thereby undermine the providential and historically inevitable triumph of the National Movement’. The law was in force until 1966.

The socialist Juan Negrín, the last prime minister of the Republic, who left Spain for France shortly before the war ended, offered his life to Franco if he agreed not to reek revenge on Republican supporters. Franco ignored the mercy plea and demanded an unconditional surrender.

Franco created a victory culture, which divided Spain into winners and losers throughout the dictatorship, and a regime based on adherents to it being favoured over non-adherents. Participation in it was reserved for adherents. The date of the coup d’etat that sparked the Civil War (July 18) and that of Franco’s victory (April 1) were turned into official commemorations and national holidays.

The poet and publisher Carlos Barral described the general acceptance of the predominant way of remembering the war in the following way in his memoir published in 1975, the year of Franco’s death:

Not only were virtue and shame imposed, and orthodox thinking and fear of God, but all record of a different life was wiped from consciousness. Nobody felt obliged to understand those who had been mistaken. All the older people I knew in those days had either lived under the wing of the Nationalist army or had suffered the unrepeatable privations and humiliations of the war. In my family any allusion to Republican relatives was scrupulously avoided: influential people who had shared our table and were now on the other side of the frontier or had committed suicide in some political prison. And everyone including the maidservants, who the day before yesterday had shouted ‘no pasaran’ (the Republican slogan), took part in the enthusiasm for the new era and wrapped themselves in the folds of delirious religiosity.

Prisoners became slave labourers: 20,000 of them worked to hew out of rock the basilica known as the Valle de los Caídos (of the Fallen), Franco’s monument to his victory, which is crowned by the world’s largest memorial cross (a whopping 152 metres).

He is buried on one side of the altar and the tomb of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange party, is on the other. The monument was inaugurated by Franco on April 1 1959, the 20th anniversary of his victory. In his speech he asked rhetorically, ‘What are the enemies of Spain?’ He answered, ‘The enemies of Spain are seven; liberalism, democracy, Judaism, the Masons, capitalism, Marxism, and separatism.’ These ‘enemies’ comprised the anti-Spain which Franco said had been conquered and defeated in the Civil War but were not dead.

Babies and young children were removed from their imprisoned mothers and had their names changed so they could be adopted by regime families. Thousands of working class children were sent to state institutions because their Republican families were considered unfit to raise them.

Spaniards could not even ask for an ensaladilla rusa (potato salad), as it referenced Russia. The name of the dish was officially changed to ensaladilla imperial, recalling the glorious days of the Spanish Empire.

The freedoms enjoyed by women during the Second Republic, including divorce and the right to vote, were reversed. The regime declared civil marriages that had taken place during the Second Republic void, thereby making thousands of children retrospectively illegitimate.

The gulf between victors and losers and the schism between public and private memory was exacerbated by the longevity of Franco’s regime.

Spanish society changed profoundly as of the 1960s as a result of very strong economic growth, the influx of tourists, industrialisation and urbanisation, but the regime’s Civil War discourse remained unchanged, even in the face of dissent in the ranks of its ally, the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, there was more freedom to publish and make films, such as Carlos Saura’s La Prima Ángelica (Cousin Angelica) in 1974 which deals with the Civil War as remembered by a child of Republican parents, although the first two versions of the script were rejected by censors. Basilio Martin Patino’s documentary Canciones para despúes de una Guerra (Songs for after a War), which depicted scenes from the Nationalist side in blue and from the Republican in Red, had to be shown in secret in 1971 and was not released until 1976, a year after Franco’s death. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, about his experiences on the Republican side, was published in Spanish in 1970 with only one passage deleted.

Opinion polls in the 1970s showed Spaniards were increasingly overcoming the divisions caused by the Civil War, paving the way for reconciliation. According to a survey in 1975, 74% of respondents wanted press freedom, 71% religious freedom (Catholicism was the state religion), and 58% trade union freedom. There was still, however, only one legal political party, the National Movement. Society was more advanced than the ossified political class.

The international context was also very different. Spain was by then firmly anchored in the Western bloc, as a result of the 1953 agreement with the United States establishing military bases in the country, and a preferential trade agreement as of 1970 with the then European Economic Community.

King Juan Carlos, Franco’s heir and the grandson of Alfonso XIII who went into exile in 1931 after municipal elections that were effectively a plebiscite on the monarchy, made it clear as soon as the dictator died that he wanted to be the ‘king of all Spaniards, without exception’.

With the exception of those at either end of the political extremes, there was no desire to open up the divisions caused by the Civil War and deliberately exacerbated during the Franco regime. Consensus, after so polarized a past, was very much the watchword between the reformist right and the non-violent left. This was epitomized by the Pacto de Olvido (literally, Pact of Forgetting), an unspoken agreement among the political elites to look ahead and not rake over the past for political gain. Looking backward could have destabilized the transition. The pact was institutionalized by the 1977 Amnesty Law, which covered all crimes of a political nature committed prior to December 1976. Amnesty and amnesia facilitated the transition.

The big difference between Spain and other dictatorships that moved to democracy in the 20th century was that the Spanish one was born out of a devastating civil war: the intimacy of civil war violence, a fratricidal conflict, the cruellest of wars, cannot be compared to that of a war between countries. None of the political parties – Socialists, Communists, liberal, conservative, regional – involved in the transition process had any interest in having the role they played during the Second Republic before the Civil War and during the War put under the microscope, as this would have opened a Pandora’s box of potentially violent consequences. All had skeletons in their cupboards.

The transition to democracy, which was engineered top down as well as bottom up, is widely regarded as successful, and became something of a role model, but the democratization was not welcomed by everyone. There were several attempts among Francoist military officers to turn back the clock in the late 1970s, but none of them got off the ground, until February 23 1981 when Colonel Antonio Tejero burst into the Spanish parliament with a group of civil guards. This coup quickly fizzled out thanks to the decisive action of King Juan Carlos who made it clear it did not enjoy his support. Had he given the coup his blessing, it would have sounded the death knell of the monarchy.

There was nothing resembling a Truth and Reconciliation Commission along the lines of the one set up in Chile shortly after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990. Spain was the only case of a country that had moved to democracy in the 20th century not to have undertaken any kind of self-examination at state level of the crimes committed by the dictatorship that preceded democracy.

Viewed from today, with a consolidated democracy in Spain, albeit it with defects, that might seem the wrong decision. At the time, it was in my view the correct one.

At the grassroots and local levels, however, the amnesty law did not prevent the early opening of mass graves of Republican supporters executed during and after the Civil War, nor the payment of pensions to former Republican military and police officers. Likewise, it could not stem the publication of many memoirs and novels and serious historical research on the war and its aftermath.

There was an explosion of works of history that minutely reconstructed the repression on a province by province basis. By the end of the 1990s about 60% had been researched to some degree.

Felipe González, the Socialist prime minister between late 1982 and 1996, recounts how General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, the chief of staff of the army and deputy prime minister under Adolfo Suárez, the prime minister between 1976 and 1981, told him before he won the 1982 election that if the Socialists came to power (remember they were the losers in the Civil War) ‘they would be wise not to dig up the Civil War’ because ‘beneath the ashes, burning embers remained.’ One thing was private individuals looking discreetly for their loves ones; another thing was the government getting involved.

The Pact of Forgetting began to be chipped away in the 1990s. The Socialists lost to the conservative Popular Party in the 1996 election, and the PP – a party that includes the political descendants of Franco – was returned to power in 2000 with an absolute majority for the first time. Parliament received a range of initiatives from the left and the Basque and Catalan nationalist parties to condemn the Civil War and the Franco regime. The past became a political issue.

Although the PP felt there was no need to recover the memory of the past, it signed up to a vague common declaration condemning the Civil War and the dictatorship in the hope that this would put a stop to further parliamentary initiatives for specific measures to be adopted. It did not. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist leader as of 2000, made the ‘recovery of historical memory’ part of his electoral programme in the 2004 election and won. By then there was also considerable pressure from grassroots organisations, particularly the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, which was established in 2000.

Both Zapatero and Emilio Silva, the president of the Association, had personal reasons for pushing the memory agenda. It is the grandchildren that are behind this movement. Zapatero’s paternal grandfather, a Republican captain, was executed by Nationalists a month after the Civil War started, while Silva’s grandfather was killed in October 1936 by Francoist vigilantes. Silva’s grandmother, although fully aware of her husband’s fate, never told any of her six children what had happened. The roadside grave containing the remains of Silva’s grandfather and another 13 victims became the Association’s flagship case and was taken to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. As a result, the grave was exhumed in October 2000, and in May 2004 Silva’s grandfather became the first Civil War victim to have his identity confirmed by a DNA test.

The largest mass grave is at the San Rafael cemetery, Malaga, where more than 4,000 people were executed without trial between 1936 and 1955. A mausoleum in the shape of a pyramid has been built as a memorial, with the names of 2,840 documented people.

In 2007, in what might be described as a belated attempt at ‘post-transitional justice’, the Spanish parliament passed the controversial Law of Historical Memory, which was bitterly opposed by the Popular Party and Spain’s Roman Catholic Church. Where there had been in the first post-Franco years consensus not to instrumentalise the past politically, engage in identity politics, open up old wounds or create new ones, there was now division.

The Socialist leadership, with no direct memories or experience of the Civil War or the Franco regime, unlike the leadership when the party was in power between 1982 and 1996, felt the time had come to honour all the victims of the conflict and the dictatorship. It believed the country’s democracy was sufficiently mature to handle the unfinished business of the transition.

The Law of Historical Memory formally condemned the Franco regime as ‘illegitimate’ but it did not nullify the verdicts of those sentenced by Francoist tribunals, including the kangaroo courts created after the end of the civil war in 1939, nor did it repeal the 1977 Amnesty Law. The Historical memory Law banned public symbols commemorating Franco and his allies; urged the Roman Catholic Church to remove plaques on churches bearing the Falangist equivalent of the swastika – its emblem of the yoke and arrows – that remembered those who had ‘fallen for God and Spain’; and prohibited commemorative events such as those at the Valley of the Fallen monument. There is still a plaque on the church in the village in the province of Cuenca where I have a home. The law also called for the Valley of the Fallen – which contains the dead of both sides but can in no way be called a site of reconciliation – to become a place of commemoration. The state also created funds to finance the exhumation of mass graves.

The shift in attitudes was partly prompted by the attempt in 1998 by Baltazar Garzón, a maverick investigative magistrate much given to self-promotion, to extradite Chile’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, a self-confessed admirer of Franco, for the deaths and alleged torture of several Spanish citizens. Garzón’s move laid Spain open to the charge of hypocrisy, since no official from the dictatorship had been held to account.

In 2008 Garzón declared the acts of repression committed by the Franco dictatorship to be crimes against humanity and began an investigation into cases of illegal detention and forced disappearances, involving the deaths of more than 114,000 people, committed between 1936 and 1951. This prompted a far-right group Manos Limpias (Clean Hands) to bring legal action against Garzón on the grounds that he had knowingly overstepped his authority, in particular by contravening the 1977 amnesty law that covers crimes perpetuated during the Civil War and the dictatorship.

In 2008, the UN Human Rights Committee called on Spain to repeal the amnesty law and to ensure that its courts did not apply limitation periods to crimes against humanity. Garzón was cleared of overstepping the mark in 2012, by which time the conservative Popular Party was back in power, but he was found to have over reached himself in another case.

Also controversial was the entry on Franco in the printed dictionary of national biography published in 2011 by the Royal Academy of History, which described his regime as ‘authoritarian, but not totalitarian’ and did not call him a dictator. The text, which provoked a row on a sectarian basis, was written by the octogenarian professor Luis Suárez, a senior figure in the Brotherhood of the Valley of the Fallen. Changes were made to the online version.

Little was done to facilitate the work of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory during the second Popular Party government between 2000 and 2004. The central government devolved the question of funds to Spain’s regional governments, many of which were run by the PP and opposed the unearthing of mass graves. While denying funds to the Association, this government offered economic support to Spaniards seeking information about relatives who belonged to the fascist Blue Division that fought with the Germans on the Russian Front in the Second World War, and repatriated in 2003 the bodies of some of those who were killed. Some 45,000 Spaniards either volunteered or were conscripted by Franco into the Blue Division, about 5,000 of whom were killed in fighting.

Emotions have also been aroused by the Catholic Church’s continuous beatification of clerics murdered during the Civil War. The Church has still not atoned for its role in the war, which it blessed as a ‘crusade.’ In the latest mass in 2013, attended by the Popular Party’s interior and justice ministers, Pope Francis beatified over 500 clerics. Anticlerical violence on the Republican side resulted in the killing of 13 bishops and 6,832 priests, nuns, monks, and other religious personnel compared to around 900 clerics murdered during the French Revolution. Historians call this the largest clerical bloodletting in the history of the Christian Church.

While the Church has honoured the clergy who died at the hands of Republicans, the few who were killed by Franco’s Nationalists were officially ignored until 2009 when the bishop of Vitoria, the capital of the Basque Country, held a service to remember 14 pro-Republic priests who were killed by Franco’s forces.

An ongoing movement among the left has been to change the names of the remaining streets and squares that commemorate the Franco regime. In the latest decision, the leftist city government of Madrid, which replaced the long-ruling Popular Party municipal government last May, is to change the name of 30 streets and squares that commemorate the Franco regime, many of them named after generals who took part in the 1936 uprising. The plan, approved by the local parliament, will also rename Plaza Arriba España (Onwards Spain Square), a Franco-era salute, as well as Calle de los Caídos de la División Azul (The fallen of the Blue Division street).

This decision on the 30 streets was followed by the leaking of a much larger list of 256 so-called Francoist streets, bearing the names of civilians and military men, which had been drawn up by a group of historians at Madrid’s Complutense University apparently at the request of the leftist Madrid Town Hall. Among the 256 were the surrealist painter Salvador Dali and several well-known poets and writers including, amazingly, Pedro Muñoz Seca, who was one of those executed in the Paracuellos massacre in 1936 by Republican NOT FRANCO supporters. Also on the list are the famous bullfighter Manolete and the footballer Santiago Bernabéu, after whom the Real Madrid stadium is named. The proposal to remove these names from streets, shelved as a result of a political row, shows the absurd and extreme lengths to which such initiatives can go.

These people were not military people and had no more blood on their hands than the majority of those who fought for the Republic; they either fought on the Nationalist side, often because the war found them in a Nationalist zone and they had no other option (the same happened for many Republicans), rose to prominence during the dictatorship and were thus seen as upholders of the regime or simply accommodated themselves to it. In Manolete’s case, his ‘crime’ seems to have been to have been killed in the bullring in 1947 and to have received three days of national mourning on the orders of Franco.

In January, volunteers began the first exhumation of a civil war victim under a court order since Franco’s death in 1975. Timoteo Mendiete was placed in a mass grave on the edge of the Guadalajara cemetery. His daughter, now 90, fought for years to have the grave examined. She travelled to Argentina in search of justice – it was a Buenos Aires judge, investigating crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime, who requested the exhumation, and a court in Spain agreed to the dig.

The Popular Party government between December 2011 and December 2015 left the 2007 historical memory law dead in the water by eliminating the budget for it in 2013. It stood at €6.2 million in 2011, the last year of the Socialist government, and was reduced to €2.5 million in 2012, the first year of the Popular Party government, As well as ideological factors, the government, wrestling with recession and high unemployment, felt there were more pressing priorities for the limited funds at its disposal.

The UN Committee on Human Rights and Torture admonished Spain in 2009 when it noted that the 1977 Amnesty Law was inapplicable as a statute of limitations against the investigation and trial of these crimes. In 2013, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances called on Spain to do more to establish the fate and whereabouts of persons disappeared during the Civil War and the Franco regime, as it is a signatory to the Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances.
There has been an outpouring of Republican memory, but Spain is still finding it difficult, compared to other countries, most notably Germany, to confront its past.

There is nothing in Spain remotely resembling the German Historical Museum in Berlin which sets out 2,000 years of history through 8,000 objects that tell stories of political events, confrontations and social, economic and philosophical events in German and English, let alone museum coverage in Madrid of the Civil War. Such representations are found at the periphery, most notably in Guernica in the Basque Country or on a small scale in places like Cartagena which has a civil war shelters museum. Guernica has the nearest thing to a modern civil war exhibition. The ancient town, immortalised by Picasso’s mural-size painting, was mercilessly bombed by German and Italian aircraft in 1937.

While there is still a deep cleavage between the right and the left over how to treat the civil war, and new divisions have appeared, particularly between Catalan nationalists pushing for independence and the central government, Spain has changed beyond recognition in the last 80 years. Here are some random statistics comparing 1960 with today; figures from the end of the Civil War in 1939 hardly exist. Sixty-eight million tourists came to Spain last year compared to six in 1960, agriculture accounts for 3% of the economy as against 27%, there are close to 500 cars per 1,000 population (10 in 1960). Per capita income has risen from $250 to $24,000: it was $33,000 in 2007 before the country’s deep recession from which the country is finally beginning to recover.

Spain has the third largest high-speed rail network after China, the seventh longest life expectancy (higher than Britain) and a dozen of its companies are leading players in the global economy including Santander, the third largest bank in the UK for mortgages, the second largest in the euro zone and with the largest franchise in Latin America. How many of you know that Heathrow is owned by a consortium led by a Spanish company?

Franco famously said that he had left his regime and its institutions ‘tied up, and well tied up.’ The knots were unravelled successfully and peacefully to enable the transition to democracy, using, moreover, the Franco regime’s institutions and constitutional procedures. One, however, has proven to be very difficult and sensitive, and that is what to do with the contentious Valley of the Fallen, which in no way can be called a site of reconciliation. It is true that the mass tombs hold the dead of both sides, around 40,000. But the Republican dead were brought there without consulting their families, and in some cases against the express wishes of relatives. Why would a Republican want to be buried in a tomb so laden with Francoist and fascist imagery?

The previous Socialist government appointed a commission of experts in 2011 to draw up proposals for the site including removing Franco’s grave from the basilica and burying him elsewhere. The PP won the election at the end of that year and shelved the document, on the grounds that any change needed a consensus, something which has been elusive, but which now, in Spain’s new political circumstances, might be possible.

The inconclusive election last December 20 produced a very fragmented parliament, as a result of the anti-austerity Podemos and the centrist Ciudadanos winning seats for the first time and ending the domination of the Popular Party and the Socialists, the two parties that have alternated in power since 1982.

The greater plurality in parliament, with the emergence of Podemos, born out of the 2011 grass roots movement of los indignados (the indignant ones), and of Ciudadanos could make it easier to finally reach a consensus on how to deal with the conflict and the Franco dictatorship. These two parties captured between them the largest chunk of voters under the age of 35 and hence are the grandchildren of those who fought in the Civil War.

None of the parties gained anywhere near an absolute majority. Spain is still without a proper government almost four months after the election, but it still has a long way to go to match Belgium which a couple of years ago needed 541 days to form a new government.

If the parties cannot form a government by May 2 King Felipe will dissolve parliament and call a new election, probably to be held on June 26, which could very well produce almost the same results.

Pedro Sánchez, the Socialist leader, twice failed last month to secure sufficient backing in parliament to become prime minister of a minority government together with Ciudadanos. The 131 votes cast in his favour – 90 Socialists, 40 from Ciudadanos and one from a regional party in the Canary Islands – was far from a governing majority of 176 of the 350 seats in parliament.
Sánchez needed the Popular Party or Podemos to abstain, but they both voted against him.

The Popular Party, with 123 seats, far fewer than its absolute majority of 186 in 2011, is adamant that as the most voted party it must lead any coalition, while Podemos, with 69 seats, 27 of which are held by its regional allies, has several ‘red lines’ for forming or backing a Socialist-led government including a referendum on independence for Catalonia, which the Socialists, PP and Ciudadanos reject.

In my view the best option for the good of the country would be a German style grand coalition of the Popular Party, the Socialists and Ciudadanos, but no one wants to get into bed with the Popular Party as it is very tainted by numerous cases of corruption and has zero credibility to get to grips with this cancer in the Spanish body politic. Even the royal family is embroiled in a corruption case.

Such a coalition could be in office for some two years, during which it would reform the 1978 constitution, defuse the burning issue of independence for Catalonia, depoliticise the judiciary and some institutions and then hold a new election.
It could also dust off the plan on what to do with the Valley of the Fallen and finally turn it into a centre on the Civil War and the Franco regime that hopefully even schoolchildren would be capable of understanding.

The European Council of Ministers took a momentous decision and opened accession negotiations with Turkey in October 2005, but progress since then has been painfully slow. Only 14 of the 33 chapters of the acquis that require negotiations have been opened in more than 10 years and just one (science and research) provisionally closed.

The country, which stands at the epicentre of the divide between an increasingly unstable Europe and an ever more conflictive Middle East, had been knocking at the EU’s door since 1963 when it became an associate member of the then European Economic Community. In 1996, Turkey became the first and so far the only non-EU member to form a Customs Union with the EU for industrial goods and processed agricultural products.

Turkey’s accession process is in a category of its own –very different to that of other applicants– because it is said to be ‘too big, too poor and too Muslim’. There is no reason why the country’s size, its predominantly Muslim religion and economic underdevelopment in the impoverished south-east, should be in themselves stumbling blocks on the road to accession. Turkey’s population of 76 million is slightly more than the combined populations of the 10 Eastern and Central European countries plus Cyprus that joined the European Union in 2004.

Turkey’s per capita income in 2014 (the latest year available) was 53% of the EU average compared to 109% for the UK. Ten years earlier it was only 39% as against the UK’s 125%, showing that over a decade Turkey has become in relative terms substantially richer, as a result of very strong growth, while the UK has become poorer.

Opposition to Turkey’s full EU membership, particularly in Germany and France, has intensified with the recent avalanche of migrants into the EU although significantly Turks are not among those seeking to enter the Union illegally. Indeed, Turks already in the EU have been returning to their country for several years, something not widely known, as Turkey has become richer.

The country’s special case was implicitly made clear in the negotiating framework when the green light was given to open the accession process. This enables the EU to determine opening and closing benchmarks for every chapter, in addition to long transition periods, derogations, permanent safeguard measures and grey areas like the EU’s ‘absorption capacity’. And there is no guarantee, unlike that which existed for all the other candidate countries, that completion of the accession process automatically brings with it full membership. Turkey’s accession process is not an irreversible one in which Turkey’s membership perspective becomes gradually clearer. Ankara, with some justification, accuses the EU of double standards.

Indeed, the framework and subsequent declarations by some EU leaders have strengthened the feeling that the EU wants a ‘special partnership’ for Turkey and not full membership.

Nevertheless, a new if ambiguous reality has been established for Turkey which was accepted by sceptics such as Wilfried Martens, the chairman and co-founder of the conservative European People’s Party, the largest party in the European Parliament. In 1997 Martens cast doubts on Turkey’s accession. After negotiations began in 2005 he saw in it ‘a unique opportunity, as great as making peace between France and Germany after the War, or as reunifying Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. These talks begin a dialogue between Christians and Muslims which could signal an extraordinary new beginning for the world as a whole’.

The accession negotiations, however, have not laid to rest the issue of whether Turkey is really part of Europe, despite joining the Council of Europe in 1949, being a founding member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1961, the club of developed economies, and becoming a NATO ally in 1952 (with the second-largest standing military force after the US). Turkey also participates in the Eurovision song contest.

Three-quarters of foreign direct investment in Turkey comes from the EU, and the country is the EU’s sixth-largest trading partner. Some 55% of European economic legislation is reflected in corresponding Turkish law, and entrepreneurs employ 600,000 workers inside the EU. Were the many Turks employed in the German car industry to down tools and go on strike, production would ground to a halt.

When Turkey became an associate member of the European Economic Community in 1963, there was no doubt in the mind of Professor Walter Hallstein, the then President of the European Commission, on this issue. ‘Turkey is part of Europe’, he declared. ‘This is the ultimate meaning of what we are doing today. It confirms in incomparably topical form a truth that is more than the summary expression of a geographical concept or of a historical fact that has held good for several centuries’.

The EU itself seemed to rebuff the geographical argument with the accession of Cyprus in 2004 (most of which is east of Ankara). As school children we learned that throughout the 19th century the Ottoman Empire, with Turkey at its heart, was known as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ not the ‘Sick Man of Asia.’

The problem is that Turkey is imperfectly European (Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor author of the Clash of Civilisations, called it a “torn country”). Unlike Australia, America and Africa, Europe does not really have clear cut geographical boundaries and a good deal of uniformity. The Ural mountains, the Caucasus and the Caspian sea are generally regarded as the traditional boundaries, but Europe is also part of the Eurasian landmass. Europe’s southern border – Spain – would appear to be clear since the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492, but the eastern and western frontiers are more problematic. History has seen continual changes in Europe’s eastern frontiers.

The Oxford historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto in an essay entitled A European Civilization: Is There Any Such Thing? said Europe is an elastic concept and a “club to which selection is by self-assignation”, and “if we are to give it a future, we must begin by admitting that it does not already exist”.

The acceptance of Turkey into the EU would probably open a Pandora’s Box of requests from other countries to join. With Turkey inside the Union, it would be difficult to reject Georgia and Armenia. Not only are they much smaller countries, but, unlike Turkey, they have a strong and specifically Christian identity. And if they applied, there is no doubt that Azerbaijan would also want to join. And why should the people of Belarus, Ukraine and Moldovia be less entitled to a European standard of living than those of Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria, which joined in 2004. And what about Russia?

It is one of the paradoxes that it was not the political heirs of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the enlightened founder of Turkey’s secular republic in 1923, on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and for whom France was the maxim expression of civilization, who started EU accession negotiations but the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) of the increasingly autocratic Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The AKP was founded in 2001 and won a landslide victory in the 2002 parliamentary election and has been in power ever since. Its victory followed seven coalition governments between 1991 and 1999.

Atatürk got rid of the sultanate (the sultan was the absolute ruler) and the caliphate, introduced civil, commercial and penal codes based on European models, as well as western dress for men and women, and gave the vote to women (in 1934, only six years after women in Britain over the age of 21 got the vote).

The AKP was initially reformist, particularly defanging the powerful military, the arbiter of political life, which intervened directly in politics three times between 1960 and 1980 and in 1997 shut down the ruling Islamist Welfare party (a precursor of the AKP) without seizing power. The military has long seen itself as the ‘guardian of Turkish democracy’ and the defender of the rigidly secular state created by Atatürk.

The National Security Council, which represented an institutionalisation of the military’s influence over politics and acted as a kind of shadow government, has been under civilian control since 2004 and the military is no longer represented on the Higher Education Board, which oversees the administration of universities, or on the Radio and Television Council. Officers have also been brought to trial in civilian courts for allegedly plotting to overthrow the AKP government.

Curbing the power and influence of the military was a key driver for Erdogan to push for Turkey to start EU accession. It was very much in the interests of the AKP’s Islamist agenda given the military’s anathema of anything that smacks of political Islam.

Erdoğan also did more in his first years in office for the Kurds, who constitute 15% to 20% of the 76 million population. They were gradually granted greater cultural rights. Kurdish-language private schools, television and radio broadcasts were legalised, and limited time on state TV. Not that long ago the mere act of speaking Kurdish could expose one to criminal charges of being a ‘separatist’: the National Security Court, for example, handed four musicians prison sentences for singing in Kurdish at a wedding reception.

Twelve acquis chapters for EU accession were opened between 2006 and 2009 but only two since then, underscoring the extent to which the pace of reform has decelerated. The blame for this lies on both sides.

By making Turkey a special case, albeit for understandable reasons, given the complexity of the issue and the lack of a unanimous stance among EU countries, reinforced by the absence of an unequivocal commitment that Turkey will be accepted as a member once the accession process is completed, the incentive for reform has been weakened and with it the EU’s transformative power.

EU conditionality (the use of ‘carrots’ and ‘sticks’) was effective in 1999-2005 as Turkey got itself into shape to become a candidate country and saw the incentive to do so, but the EU no longer has any leverage. As there is no certainty of a reward at the end of the accession process (ie, full EU membership), Erdoğan who became the first directly elected President in 2014 after serving as Prime Minister for 11 years, feels under no pressure to move decisively and so proceeds at its own pace, dictated by the domestic political climate and his own electoral interests. Unlike Spain, my country of adoption, which joined the EU in the 1986, Turkey’s government is not pursuing democratic reforms because they are good in themselves but as a means to an end.

The AKP began as a broad mosque party, attracting wide support from many different segments of society. It galvanised the disparate opposition to the so called the entrenched deep state and to the endless bickering coalition governments, particularly in the more pious Anatolian heartlands, but also among secular, liberal voters.

The social-democratic Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition and founded by Atatürk, is stuck in the past, while the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) rabidly waves the national flag, which Erdogan has also taken up.

The protracted EU accession process, however, has not dented support among Turks for EU membership, which has been on the rise since 2013 after falling. Expectations, however, that Turkey will eventually become a full member –as opposed to support for the EU– have decreased.

The increased support for EU membership comes at a time when the economy is flagging after a period of stellar growth and the quality of Turkey’s democracy leaves a lot to be desired. This suggests that Turks see Europe as the solution for their problems.

Early in his career Erdogan made a telling remark. Democracy is like a train, he said; you get off once you have reached your destination. Judging by events in recent months, Turkey’s president may be getting close to that goal.

The Cyprus issue
On the international front, the main stumbling block to progress in EU accession is Cyprus, as Turkey has still failed to implement the 2005 Additional Protocol to the Ankara Agreement and extend its Customs Union with the EU by opening its ports and airports to Greek-Cypriot traffic, and thus recognise the Republic of Cyprus which joined the EU in 2004.

As a result, the European Commission suspended at the end of 2006 the opening of eight chapters related to the Customs Union and announced that no more chapters would be provisionally closed until Turkey had fulfilled its commitment.

Ankara wants the EU to implement the decision of the Council of Ministers, taken in April 2004, to end the isolation of the internationally unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), created after Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974. The promise was made two days after Turkish Cypriots voted in favour of the Annan Plan to reunify the island (rejected by Greek Cypriots). Cyprus joined the EU on 1 May 2004 (the writ of EU law does not run in the Turkish part of Cyprus) and since then has blocked the direct trade regulation needed to lift tariffs on goods.

Cyprus and France have also unilaterally blocked the opening of certain chapters.

Although reunification of Cyprus is not in itself a sine qua non for EU membership, unlike Ankara’s obligation to fully implement its Customs Union, a deal would go a long way toward enhancing Turkey’s EU prospects and creating a more favourable climate.

The chances for reunification look better than they have for a good number of years, following the landslide victory last April of the more consensual Mustafa Akıncı as President of the TRNC. Both Akıncı, a former Mayor of the Turkish-Cypriot part of the capital Nicosia from 1976 to 1990, and Nicos Anastasiades, the (Greek-Cypriot) President of the Republic of Cyprus, voted in favour of reunification in the 2004 referendum.

Big challenges, however, remain, particularly the thorny issue of the property of Greek Cypriots in the TRNC and that of Turkish Cypriots in the south of the country.

A seriously flawed democracy

After taking office as president in August 2014, following 11 years as prime minister, Erdogan installed himself in a new $615 million presidential palace (with more than 1,000 rooms), which dwarfs Versailles. It has been ridiculed by the opposition as the needless extravagance of an increasingly authoritarian leader.

Erdoğan wants to replace parliamentary democracy with an executive presidency which would give him more powers, although it is already a de facto executive presidency given the way he conducts himself. As Erdogan said in a speech last year: “There is a president with de facto power, not a symbolic one. Whether one accepts it or not, Turkey’s administrative system has changed. Now what should be done is to update this de facto situation in the legal framework of the constitution.”

The AKP’s 317 seats in parliament out of a total of 550, however, fall short of the 330 needed to change the constitution.

The European Commission reports every year on the progress which Turkey has made and the areas where it needs to do better. The reports make it clear how far Turkey still has to go.

Take press freedom. Freedom House, the US-based democracy group, has rated the Turkish press as ‘not free’ since 2013, when the government suppressed mass protests. Turkey’s press freedom score dropped from 54 in 2010 to 65 in 2015 (0 = best; 100 = worst). Turkey ranks 149th among the 180 countries in the latest Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, just above the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Russia.

The state media is tightly controlled and pressure applied on private media owners with other business interests who are fearful that if they do not toe the line they will lose lucrative business deals and government advertising, or be subject to visits by tax inspectors.

The latest of many victims and the most serious is Zaman, the country’s biggest-selling newspaper, which was taken over by the authorities last month following an edict from the courts, and virtually at gunpoint. Police used tear gas as they rounded up staff. Zaman, which has an English edition, was closely linked to the influential Hizmet movement of the US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, a kind of Islamic Opus Dei (a conservative Roman Catholic organisation), which Erdogan has classified as a terrorist group aiming to overthrow his government. Under the administration appointed to run the newspaper, there has been a sea change in the editorial policy. The first edition after the seizure showed Erdogan on the front page, smiling in an article announcing a presidential reception for Women’s Day.

It was probably no coincidence that the takeover of Zaman took place while the EU was courting Ankara over measures to deal with Europe’s migrant crisis, something which I will come to later.

Gülen was once an ally of Erdogan. The Gülen network, with adherents in the police, the judiciary and the security services, worked hand in glove with Erdogan’s AKP when it came to power, particularly in curtailing the military.

A court last year cleared 236 of the more than 300 officers convicted in 2012 in the Sledgehammer trial, as some of the evidence had been fabricated.

Erdogan and Gülen fell out in 2013 after differences emerged over policies toward the Kurds, Israel and Iran, and over the proposed closure of schools controlled by the Gülenists.

In an earlier crackdown, the editor in chief of the opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet and its Ankara bureau chief were charged with espionage after the paper printed a story suggesting that the government was conniving at the supply of arms to extremist rebels in Syria. Prosecutors are demanding life sentences for the pair. Erdoğan himself is a plaintiff in the case.
When the country’s highest court ordered their release in March after three months in jail pending trial, Erdogan characteristically announced: “I do not abide by the decision or respect it.”

The thin-skinned Erdoğan sued more people in his first 18 months as president over charges of insulting the President than the number of those who were tried over the past 64 years under a notorious law for criticising Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the nation’s founder. There were 1,845 cases during that period brought against Turks for defaming Erdogan, mostly on Twitter.

Few cases led to serious punishment. In two of the more absurd incidents, a schoolteacher was sentenced to almost a year in prison for making a rude hand gesture at a political rally, and a former Miss Turkey was prosecuted for ‘insulting’ the leader by posting a satirical poem online.

Erdogan was so incensed last month by a two-minute song broadcast on a satirical show on a German TV channel which mocked him that Germany’s ambassador in Turkey was summoned to the foreign ministry and told to get it deleted from internet where it had gone viral. Accompanying footage of Angela Merkel being received by Erdoğan at his palace, are the lines: “Be nice to him since he’s holding all the cards”, in reference to the way she embraced Turkey despite deep misgivings about its human rights record in order to secure its support over the refugee crisis.

The Law on the Protection of Atatürk came into force in 1951 and is still on the statute books. The article in the constitution that criminalises insulting the President was hardly applied until Erdoğan took office. While Süleyman Demirel, President between 1993 and 2000, ignored virulent cartoons against him (he proudly collected them), Erdoğan’s lawyers have instructions to go after anyone who criticises him.

Corruption is also a big problem. Turkey’s score in the 2015 index of the Berlin-based Transparency International continued to fall (by three points to 42, where the nearer to 100 the cleaner the country). It is ranked 66th out of 167 countries; however, the country still does better than Bulgaria, an EU country which was ranked 69th with a score of 41.

The AKP has been rocked by several graft investigations. In 2013, police raided homes and confiscated some US$17.5 million in cash. Four ministers lost their posts following the probes. The sons of three of the four ministers, including Erdoğan’s son Bilal, were also allegedly implicated in the corruption investigations.

Erdoğan dismissed the graft investigation as a ‘judicial coup’ by the followers of Gülen. Prosecutors and police officers involved in the investigations were removed from their posts, and Twitter and YouTube were temporarily banned. Both corruption investigations against some 60 suspects were then dropped by the new prosecutors. The parliamentary Corruption Investigation Commission quashed the case into the ministers, as the AKP had an absolute majority in parliament.

Turkey’s elections are regarded as free and fair. There is, however, an abnormally high threshold of 10% of the national vote in order to enter the legislative body, the highest in Europe. This threshold, which hinders a more representative parliament, is a legacy of the 1980 military coup and aimed at only allowing ‘moderate’ parties into parliament. The threshold locked out a pro-Kurdish party until 2015 when the pro-Kurdish party won 13% of the vote and 80 seats in parliament.

The judiciary and the law enforcement agencies have become more politicised in recent years. The former Constitutional Court chairman Haşim Kılıç, accused politicians last year of turning the judiciary into an ‘instrument of revenge’. ‘Everybody knows the political views of judges and prosecutors, even in the remotest villages of the country, he said. ‘We cannot move forward with such a judiciary.’ Government-backed candidates last year won the majority of seats in elections for the country’s top judicial body, further tightening government control over the judiciary.

The 1982 Constitution, which came into force as a direct result of the 1980 military coup, needs to be changed. The approach so far has been piecemeal, with more than 100 amendments, but it is still too authoritarian with its emphasis on the state’s as opposed to the individual’s rights

The polarising President Erdoğan with his majoritarian concept of democracy and increasingly top-down rule has earned few friends abroad for the way his opponents are treated. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, was particularly appalled by the brutal handling of the Gezi Park protests in 2013.

Europe’s refugee crisis

Turkey and the EU are now in a new ball game as a result of the influx of migrants, mainly from war-torn Syria, into Europe via Turkey which has caused Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War Two. Last year, more than one million people entered the EU illegally by boat, mainly going from Turkey to Greece, compared to 59,000 in 2008. More than 150,000 have arrived so far this year and about 460 have died.

Most of you, I assume, remember the photo that went viral on social media last September of a little Syrian boy lying face down on a Turkish beach after he drowned, and then carried in the arms of a Turkish rescue worker.

Turkey, it has to be said, has been hugely generous to these migrants: some 2.7 million of them are living in camps in the country. In comparison, the number of migrants the UK has received is a drop in the ocean. Turkey spent some 9.5 billion euros of its own money on the migrant crisis before the agreement with the EU.

The EU has struck a Faustian pact with Erdogan under which Turkey, in return for reducing migrant flows, receives €6 billion in funding to look after migrants, a pledge to resettle in Europe some of the Syrian refugees, an acceleration of the EU accession process with the opening of another chapter and visa liberalization for Turkish citizens visiting the Schengen open borders area of the EU by the end of June if Turkey meets all the conditions. All new irregular migrants crossing from Turkey into Greek islands will be returned to Turkey (the first shipment was made this week); and for every Syrian returned to Turkey from Greek islands, one Syrian already in Turkey will be resettled in the EU. This temporary link between resettlement and return is capped at 72,000.

The agreement with Turkey could have an impact on the UK referendum debate. It would not be surprising if the Brexit camp used visa-free travel for 75 million Turks in its campaign

It might come as something of a surprise to you to learn that Boris Johnson, leader of the Brexit campaign, used to campaign for Turkey to join the EU. That was back in 2006 in a BBC documentary in which he said he could not wait for the “great moment” when the two halves of the Roman Empire “are at last reunited in an expanded European Union. The crowning irony is those who would keep the Turks out, on the grounds that they are un-European, would thereby disbar the city that for a thousand years was the heart of the Roman Empire and which preserved our European civilisation,” he said.

Boris’s great grandfather Ali Kemal was briefly a minister in the Ottoman empire, which makes him one eighth Turkish. He was lynched by a mob in 1922 and hanged from a tree for opposing the nationalist movement fighting the Turkish War of Independence that followed the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I. Apart from the colour of Boris’s hair, he could be mistaken for a pasha.

Brussels no longer holds all the trump cards. The refugee crisis has turned the tables. Ankara is now calling the shots. Without Turkey’s help, the flow of people entering Europe cannot be reduced, and even with Turkey’s help the outcome is far from certain.

However hard Turkey may try to stem the flood of refugees, it is impossible for it to fully control the chaotic situation. Turkey has 7,200km of coastline, and unless it stations soldiers along every inch of it, it cannot prevent migrants taking to the sea and crossing into Greece, the main entry point. As one crossing point is closed down, for example that to the Greek island of Lesbos, which we have all seen on TV, another will be opened.

Turkey has the EU over a barrel, as it is Europe’s gatekeeper. Transcripts leaked to a Greek website in February before the EU summit with Turkey last month appeared to show Erdogan threatening Europe with an uncontrolled flood of refugees unless he was given money and rapid accession to the EU. Real or fabricated, and they have the ring of black propaganda, the transcripts served to expose what many Turkish democrats fear: European leaders’ criticism of Turkey’s eroded democracy is likely to be more muted in the future as they kowtow to Erdogan. EU leaders traded moral high-ground principles for realpolitik.

The Kurdish issue

The two and a half year ceasefire between the Turkish state and the insurgent Kurdistan Workers Party (known as the PKK), which followed a brutal dirty war for 28 years that killed at least 40,000 people and displaced more than 1 million, broke down last July, with a renewal of violence on both sides.

At the same time Turkey launched air strikes on PKK camps in northern Iraq following a series of attacks on its police officers and soldiers blamed on the militant group, which is classified as a terrorist organisation by the EU and the US.

The strikes were launched virtually in parallel with ones against the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), as Turkey reversed its policy and joined the US-led coalition in its fight against Isis after the group carried out a suicide bombing near the Syrian border. Turkey, however, is also targeting Syrian Kurds, although they are helping the coalition. Its army, the People’s Protection Units, controls territory along the border with Turkey. Ankara fears the creation of an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria — similar to the Kurdish region in northern Iraq — would spur the separatist ambitions of Turkey’s own Kurds. The very complex situation is a bloody mess.

Since the end of the ceasefire, more than 1,000 people, including at least 253 civilians and 376 members of the security forces, have lost their lives in southeastern Turkey alone. The climate now recalls that of the military-dominated 1990s at the height of the war with the PKK.

Conclusion

During the more than 10 years that Turkey has been negotiating its EU accession, Croatia leapfrogged over Ankara and joined the EU in 2013 after completing all the reforms needed to bring it into line with EU laws and standards. Tiny Croatia (population 4.2 million), however, cannot be put in the same category as the giant Turkey whose full membership would be a much more seismic event. Moreover, Turkey is still a very long way from meeting the conditions, particularly its seriously flawed democracy.

The European Commission promised to give a new impetus to the stalled EU accession process by opening more chapters. It agreed to open the insignificant chapter on financial and budgetary provisions.
The EU is in a bind: by any standards Turkey is in breach of the Copenhagen criteria that define whether a country is eligible to start the process to join the EU, and which it was regarded as having sufficiently fulfilled in October 2004, one year before the accession process began. And yet that process continues, albeit at a snail’s pace, for fear of alienating a country that has become crucial for Europe as a result of the migrant crisis.

Were Turkey not today such a vital country for the EU, would it be treated in the same way and less harshly criticised or would the accession process be halted until it put its house in order? I suspect the process would be suspended.

The Copenhagen criteria require that a state has the institutions to preserve democratic governance and human rights, has a functioning market economy, which Turkey does to a large extent, and accepts the obligations and intent of the EU. These criteria have nothing to do with Turkey being a Muslim country. They are the rules of the club.

The approval of all EU countries will be needed to open more chapters, which means that Cyprus, the most recalcitrant country toward Turkey, has to lift its veto otherwise there will be no progress. The president of Cyprus told Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, last month that it would not give its consent to the opening of any EU chapters with Turkey until it fulfilled its obligations. Any move to open more chapters requires the agreement of all 28 EU member states.

That said, I find it ridiculous that the EU is beholden to one country, but that is how the process works, as unanimous decisions are required to open chapters. There is a good case to be made now for using qualified majority voting, which avoids the need to find a unanimous consensus on every issue and means that a decision can instead be taken if two conditions are met: when 55% of EU member states vote in favour of a measure, and when it is supported by member states representing at least 65% of the total EU population.

Turkey’s EU membership can be seen as a rose or a thorn. Whether the country will ever fulfil all the conditions, whether once fulfilled other EU countries will unanimously accept its membership – some would hold referendums on the issue – whether, indeed, Turkey at the end of the day will want to join a Union that is in danger of crumbling is impossible to say. Let us assume in a leap of imagination and optimism that Turkey one day, far off, does join, although, given all the considerations, this is most unlikely.

For the EU, the home of secularism, letting in Turkey would prove that the Union is not a Christian club and that it is open to other cultures and religions. A Union with Turkey would be more cosmopolitan and more open-ended; as a EU member Turkey could be a beacon for the troubled Muslim world.

Turkish workers would rejuvenate the ageing European work force and thus help to maintain creaking social security systems where too few workers are supporting too many people who are retired or not working.

The rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has put Turkey at the centre of a conflict that has global consequences. Assuming the worst that this is a problem that is not going to go away, allowing Turkey to become a member would create a strong ally in the fight against Islamic terrorism in the region. As a Nato member since 1952, Turkey is already making a significant contribution to Europe’s defence and security. As a EU member, Turkey would become more of a middle eastern power.

Economically, Turkey is a vast and increasingly rich market. EU membership, added to the current customs union, would make it more attractive for EU exporters.

For Turkey, EU membership would anchor the economy into the free market system and democracy, and over the long term bring much greater prosperity. This prosperity, in turn, would reduce the country’s potential for migration to the EU, though, as I stated earlier on, the flow of Turks to Europe was reversed some years ago.

Given Turkey’s flawed democracy, the best way for the EU to engage with the country, move the EU accession along and in the process put the autocratic Erdoğan’s flagging democratic credentials to the test would be to open chapter 23 of the acquis on judicial and fundamental rights and chapter 24 on justice, security and freedoms.

It is somewhat hypocritical of the EU to criticise and rightly so Turkey’s major deficiencies in the areas of the rule of law and respect for fundamental freedoms –the core of the negotiation process– and not give it the chance to make improvements by opening these chapters.

Turkey’s EU accession bid is a long and winding road, and there is no end in sight. If I had to stick my neck out, I would say it will not reach the end of the road, and if it does it is far from certain that the EU countries which will hold national referendums on the issue will accept it as a member of the club.

http://xn--antoniomuozmolina-nxb.es/2016/03/una-leccion-de-claridad/

http://www.abc.es/economia/abci-deficit-y-futuro-pensiones-obligan-formar-gobierno-rapidez-201602291340_noticia.html