Hello! My Dear Spain is in the picture! As you know I am from Spain and I feel it more as I live abroad. And as I love history as it’s part of our present too, here comes a different map of Spain.
You may know a slogan in the sixties that they used to say, ‘Spain is different’, but the response of five historians to the question “Is Spain different?”, title also to a book of essays directed by Briton Nigel Townson, a professor in the Department of History at the University Complutense of Madrid says something that I find very interesting. Convinced that “the intellectual obligation” of a historian is to “dismantle myths,” Townson addressed in this work to a “comparative view” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between Spain and surrounding countries in Europe.
According to Townson “The Spanish history is not that different at all but the exceptionalism of Spain in the last decades was based on the recognition of a chronic political instability, an economic and technological delay, a series of military disasters, and above all, the loss of the Spanish empire, in short, a feeling of inferiority” writes Townson in the book’s foreword.
That feeling of inferiority, “has been gone the last 15 or 20 years” by a combination of factors: economic growth experienced since the 60’s and has led to place Spain among the top ten economies in the world, the integration into the European Union (EU) and NATO military, and sporting success, referring to the victory of ‘The Red’ on the World Cup in South Africa. We work on it! Viva mi querida España! 🙂
I find this interesting, don’t you?