Spanish
life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
-
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
Life
in Spain:-
- And so it continues . . . Is there any official in Spain who can keep his/her hand out of the till?
- Another confrontational step has been taken by the Catalan regional government. The head of the regional police force - Los Mossos - has been replaced by a fervent nationalist. I guess this increases the chances that its officers will obey Barcelona rather than Madrid. But who knows? And then there's the national (and military) Guardia Civil above the police force. Fun and games.
- Here's an El País article - in English - on what it calls the salary trap brought about by the recent employment law reforms of the PP government.
- Here's another re-cycled list from The Local - Charming Spanish towns you might have missed.
- And yet another - 11 Spanish words English needs. Possibly. Btw . . . I think the last list was only 10. Some evidence of this comes from the (old?) URL: https://www.thelocal.es/20170718/top-ten-spanish-words-english-desperately-needs
The English Language: This article includes the sentence: The Generalitat has pursed the
Mossos to call for citizen rebellion. The verb 'pursed' is then used 2 or 3 more times. Anyone know what it means? Or what it should be? Surely can't be 'pursued'.
Below this post is the full article about the French-Anglo rivalry I cited yesterday. And a review of the book from The Times. The author - RT Howard - is said to be a francophile . . .
Here in Galicia, 20% of trials are said to be cancelled because of the non-appearance of witnesses, the accused or even the lawyer for the defence. This can't help efficiency. On the theme of local courts, ours in Pontevedra was rather shocked last week to hear one of our big narcotráficos say to a witness that her 'day would come'. He then went on to ask: What I have done didn't do much harm. Why should I apologise? And to say that he knew of bribes paid by his fellow traders to the politicians who formed the predecessor of the current PP party. I'm sure he does.
On a smaller crime scale, a local man arrested for illegally practising as a dentist[sic!] also confessed to having operated as an unlicensed taxi-driver. Nothing if not versatile, then.
Finally . . . If you were thinking of buying a cheap granite house up in our mountains, you've probably missed the boat. We have 1,700 defunct villages, in which the top price for a house not so long ago was a mere €40,000. But, with the end of La Crisis, this has now reached €200,000. Somewhere.
Today's cartoon:-
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| The wife and I had a holiday here once, before the war. course, we didn't have the tank with us that time. |
ARTICLE
The French are jealous
of Brexit. They don't have enough history to do the same RT Howard
Always highly symbolic
of our sense of nation, the English Channel today represents an
ever-widening political chasm. On the one hand, Theresa May has
pledged to honour the outcome of last year’s referendum and restore
Britain’s role as an independent nation-state.
But in Paris on May
7, President Emmanuel Macron celebrated his election victory to
the sound of the EU anthem, instead of the Marseillaise, and has
subsequently advocated deeper EU integration.
What lies at the heart
of these radically opposed visions? Answering this is paramount as
clouds grow darker over the Brexit negotiations and political storms
gather.
An important part of
the answer is that it is much easier for the average Frenchman to
surrender his sovereignty to Brussels than for his British
counterpart. This is because our own institutions have deeper origins
and therefore command a greater allegiance: they not only have a much
longer ancestry but they are inseparable from our evolution as a
nation.
It is easy to forget
that France’s political and constitutional institutions are
relatively recent inventions, concocted only in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
The convulsions of
revolution in 1789 ruptured the historic link between the French
nation and its institutions, and France has subsequently endured a
series of constitutional experiments, many of which have been
short-lived and unsuccessful.
Its current
constitution, the Fifth Republic, was established only in 1958, and
its ongoing 59-year lifespan shows, by French standards, a relative
longevity.
Our own nation,
however, was spared the trauma of revolution and therefore became
indistinguishable from its traditional institutions.
Both parliament and the
monarchy have an ancient lineage, originating in the ancient
constitution of Saxon times that was later cherished by
parliamentarians such as Sir Edward Coke. This then evolved into the
constitutional settlement of 1688 that has survived fundamentally
intact to this day.
There is no clearer
contrast between the two countries than the role of our respective
national parliaments.
In France, prior to the
revolution, a national representative body met only in 1614 and 1789.
Subsequently , France’s national assembly had only a very
restricted electorate and, for many citizens, local elections seemed
much more important than national ones.
Until the advent of the
Third Republic in 1870, it was constantly threatened and undermined
by such dangers as plebiscite, plenary powers and vote-rigging.
Even then, true power
often rested with unelected bureaucrats who provided some rocks of
stability in France’s rough seas of semi-constant political chaos.
But wherever exactly
these origins are traced back to, the cross-Channel contrast with the
artificiality of French constitutional institutions is clear: with
"unchangeable constancy", in Edmund Burke’s phrase,
our own parliament has exercised its sovereign will across the ages
with a consistency that others have been denied.
Parliament, like the
White Cliffs of Dover, is an unmistakable and unique sign of our
nationhood.
By contrast, the
relative superficiality of France’s institutions manifests itself
in all manner of ways: historically, the French have shown a more
marked tendency for revolution and anarchism, not the rule of law;
for "activism" rather than dialogue; for military
coups – real as in 1851 or planned as in 1961 – instead
of negotiation; and for extremism over moderation. There are no such
parallels in our own island story.
This means that the
French can today much more easily surrender their institutions to
Brussels: should we do so, then we assign much more of ourselves,
even our whole identity as a nation, than they.
This key difference
between Britain and France illustrates the flawed foundations of the
European federal project: how can different countries, with such
varied traditions, move at the same relentless pace away from their
particular and familiar institutions?
If Brussels want to
enhance its powers and more closely integrate the EU’s member
states, then it will continue to need real historical sensitivity.
But it is also a
reminder of what can sometimes lie at the very heart of Europhilia:
out of envy, some Europhiles might want to subvert another country’s
traditional institutions by subjecting them to the new structures of
European Union.
It is no coincidence
that the French nation was built upon a collective fear, resentment
and jealousy of "Perfidious Albion", and that today the
success and longevity of our institutions continues to arouse the
admiration and envy of many French citizens.
By recognizing this, we
get a bit closer to understanding why some Frenchmen, including
Emmanuel Macron and Michel Barnier, were so enraged to see Britain
vote to leave the EU and why they now seem to want to wreck Britain.
REVIEW
Power and Glory:
France’s Secret Wars with Britain and America 1945-2016 RT
Howard
“We are doing no good here,” said Lord Beaverbrook to Winston Churchill as they stood in a garden in France in 1940 while the panzers drew near. “Let’s get along home.”
The anecdote is told by
one of Britain’s great Francophiles, Major-General Edward Spears,
but it captures the distrust and fear of betrayal that has haunted
relations between France and the “Anglo-Saxons” for eight
decades.
Such is the theme of
Power and Glory, which RT Howard, an intelligence specialist, bills
as the untold story of “secret wars” between France and its
supposed British and American allies from 1945 until today. It was
written before the Brexit vote, but it would be an excellent primer
for anyone intent on pursuing negotiations with the French and the
rest of Europe to the point of mutual destruction.
In the author’s
telling, France was so traumatised by defeat in 1940, and by the
subsequent loss of its colonial empire, that its leaders saw
conspiracies everywhere and fought dirty to save their global status,
unable to make any moral distinction between their enemies and their
friends. From this flowed a catalogue of scandal, shame and failure,
some relevant today, the rest long forgotten.
The book opens with a
massacre in Damascus in 1945, when Syrians rose against colonial
rule. The French fought back with shot and shell, but, to their fury,
the British intervened, with American backing, to stop it. The
faithless Anglo-Saxons were “plotting” to do France down.
A saner view holds that
such idiotic repression destroyed moderate nationalism and brought to
power the criminals in the Syrian Ba’ath Party. Would history be
cleaner if French colonialism had had its way?
The “savage war of
peace” in Algeria suggests not. The French killed 10 locals for
every white person murdered in an outrage at the market town of Sètif
in 1945, an irrevocable act of hatred. Decades after Algerian
independence, race war still smoulders in the suburbs of Paris.
Worst was the loss of
France’s empire in the east, blamed by the French on a lack of
allied support in the decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu, in the
northwest of Indochina, in 1954. This world-changing victory for Ho
Chi Minh led to the long American war in Vietnam, with the French as
cynical spectators.
Marshal Jean de Lattre
de Tassigny, a war hero, said that defeat in Indochina would be the
end of France as a great power. He was right, and in its decline
nowhere could French and Anglo-Saxon interests coexist without covert
battles, the author believes.
Howard tells a rattling
tale, full of slapstick and bloodshed, of how France played a losing
hand with grim determination. One chapter, straight from the pages of
Graham Greene, recounts a duel between British spies and French
officials in postwar Madagascar, peopled by mobs, rabble-rousers,
stupid administrators and purblind expatriates.
The mess foreshadowed a
great game in Africa. The rivals courted different dictators and set
off tribal wars. Their competitive hunt for resources was often
masked as a battle against communism. It is not an edifying story and
it is enough to mention some countries involved: Congo, Rwanda,
Nigeria, Gabon, Ivory Coast — a list of lamentation that speaks for
itself.
The author is good on
the vying power centres in Paris. Inside the Elysée, presidents from
Charles de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac each had their shadowy “Mr
Africa” who had carte blanche to push French interests. Other
players scrabbling for overseas influence were the ministries of
foreign affairs and defence, the giant state-owned arms and energy
firms, the overseas development agency and the ineffable agents of
the (ever-besieged) French language and culture.
Howard’s chapter on
the Falklands War, while acknowledging the Sunday Times exposé of
French technical help to Argentina, is a thorough dissection of how
these interest groups almost prevailed over François Mitterrand’s
pledge of support to Margaret Thatcher. The author cites a telegram
from Sir John Fretwell, the British ambassador in Paris, warning that
“the [French] arms lobby” wanted sales to Argentina of their
Super Etendard jets and Exocet missiles at any price.
And while Britain was
vulnerable, Whitehall officials found that Mitterrand “chose to
move against us quite ruthlessly in the Community” and gratuitously
threatened a crisis over British membership in Europe. Brexit
negotiators take note.
Like Beaverbrook, the
author is not inclined to give France the benefit of the doubt. I am
not so sure. In hindsight, de Gaulle’s reason for saying “non”
to British entry to the EEC in 1963 (Britain was insular, maritime
and distinctive, he said) looks wise.
If you read the memoirs
of Spears and of Anthony Eden, another Francophile, or the war
diaries of de Gaulle, or even the diaries of Jacques Attali, who
worked for Mitterrand, a more nuanced picture emerges of Anglo-French
ties. It is of two old countries entwined and divided by history,
trade and intelligence, who stumble, yet stay standing, in a world
darkened by barbarism.
But perhaps that is not
a message that is apt for our times.
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