Thoughts from Galicia: 5.9.17

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.

- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain. 

If you've arrived here because of an interest in Galicia or Pontevedra, see my web page here.

Life in Spain

• Yesterday, I tried to get a digital signature for accessing Spanish state internet sites. This would, in theory, save me trips to government offices and to banks (income tax and car fines). But it seems this can only be done via Microsoft's Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox browsers. Or not at all if you use a Mac. If anyone has a better experience, please advise.
• I commented to a visitor yesterday that it surprised me that Spanish drivers never honk their horns when another driver - usually to chat to someone on the pavement - holds up the traffic for some time. This might be because doing so is one of Spain's innumerable driving offences. It has to be said, though, that if you delay more than a microsecond from moving on when a traffic light turns green, there'll always be a brief beep.
• While investigating the digital signature application procedure, I read that Expired ID cards are not accepted anywhere, even if they are only one day out of date and the photograph is still a faithful likeness of the holder. Not my experience, of course. I've been using mine for 6 years now and, as I've said, only a notary has rejected it. But I probably would use my driving licence for the Guardia Civil. Or, rather, i do . . .
• As for renewing ID cards, this can be an annoying experience, at least in some parts of Spain,

He might not be Banksy but Galicia does have at least one internationally famous graffiti artist - Nano4814. Who hails from Vigo and attended the Bellas Artes institution here in Pontevedra. You can read about him here and here. I suspect the residents of Vigo (pop. c. 250,000) would be a tad upset at seeing their city described as a 'small town'.

I cited a comment on the tech giants yesterday. Here's someone on the threat to democracy he believes they pose.

At the end of this post this an article which dismisses the canard that Brexit voters were indulging in a bit of nostalgia for the British empire. The real problem, he insists, is EU imperialism.

Here's one of a series of spots from TurGalicia. These are usually in Gallego or Spanish but this one is in English. As ever, they couldn't afford a native speaker to comment on the text. So, we get the  phrase Give me feasts, instead of Give me fiestas. Not to mention Give me . . 

Possibly one of the better political forecasts: Erich von Ludendorff to Paul von Hindenburg on Adolf Hitler being named Chancellor of Germany on January 30 1933: You have delivered up our holy German fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done. Or possibly not, as some historians understandably claim the letter is a forgery.

As I frequently say to visitors, the best quality of granite - the bedrock of Galicia - is that it can easily be restored to its original pristine condition. As this foto clearly demonstrates:-

Often the colour will be a beautifully mellow yellow. Rather like the stone of the Cotswolds in England.

Today's cartoon:-

Just the outline, Fergies.

THE ARTICLE

Europe’s imperial ambitions led to Brexit: Nigel Biggar: Regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford

Dismissing older Leave voters as nostalgic for empire overlooks the role of EU integrationism

Brexit is the fault of our romantic attachment to the British empire, says Vince Cable. Writing recently, the leader of the Liberal Democrats judged that the vote to leave the European Union was caused by the old “imposing a worldview coloured by nostalgia for an imperial past on a younger generation”.

Sir Vince, like many Remainers who subscribe to this view, is both wrong and right: wrong that imperial nostalgia swung the vote, but right that empire had something to do with it.

It’s true that leading Brexiteers envisioned a resumption of pre-EU trading relations with the English-speaking world. But the reasons that campaigners give are one thing, the reasons people have for supporting them quite another. There’s no evidence that Leavers were moved by a desire to wind back the clock. There’s plenty of evidence that they were mainly moved by contemporary worries about the scale of immigration and irritation at European judicial interference.

Empire did have something to do with it. But it wasn’t the British version; rather, it was the one that European integrationists are intent on building. Let’s be clear: there’s nothing wrong with that as such. Empires are morally ambiguous, just like nation states. The British empire presided over the annihilation of Tasmanian aboriginals in the early 19th century. However, it also suppressed the Atlantic and African slave trades for more than 100 years after 1807 and it was the only power in the field against European fascism from May 1940 to June 1941. And as we contemplate Israel-Palestine, along with the agony of Syria, a certain imperial nostalgia for the Pax Ottomanica is surely forgivable.

But is it really apt to stick the label “imperial” on the project of the EU? Yes, because it aspires to create a multinational state with sufficient centralised power to hold its own against other global giants such as the US and China. Also because, while it now helps to keep the peace, it was nevertheless born out of conquest: the very condition of its possibility was the military defeat of Germany by the Allies in 1945 and their imposition of regime change.

Moreover, if the dominant powers of the EU don’t threaten violence against the weaker ones, they do coerce. During the recent financial crisis Germany, which calls the shots in Europe, forced Greece to adopt a policy of austerity. It also imposed a government of technocrats on Italy. It may have been bloodless and it might have been justified but it was force and it was resented as such.

This brings us to the point where the imperial nature of the EU bears upon the Brexit vote. One of the classic challenges facing any empire is how to strengthen central cohesion while accommodating the varying needs and customs of the periphery. In the decades around 1900 British imperialists such as Alfred Milner worried about how to maintain British power in the face of the rise of the US and Germany. In response they sought to forge the “white dominions” (Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) into an imperial federation with an imperial parliament. But the centre could not hold: the dominions weren’t willing to surrender their hard-won national autonomy and fall into a tighter imperial embrace.

A century later, European integrationists worry about Europe’s declining global power. So they’re in a hurry to forge the nation-states of the EU into a pan-European bloc. Hence the imprudence of launching the euro in advance of the political will to create the central institutions necessary for its proper functioning, and then expanding the eurozone to include national economies with shaky public finances. The predicted result has been a financial crisis and a deflationary remedy imposed by the northern centre on the southern periphery, which has served to stoke nationalist resentment.

Because it kept its own currency, the UK has been spared that irritation. But it has suffered others, including judicial overreach. According to Richard Ekins, head of Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project, and the EU legal expert Gunnar Beck, the European Court of Justice is not an impartial arbiter of European law but an instrument of the imperial goal of “ever-closer union”. In the name of that purpose, it has overriden the wording of the legal text of international treaties: for example, in extending the right to benefits of EU migrant workers. Such presumptuousness undermines trust between the EU and its member states by removing confidence that the union will be bound by the stated terms of treaties. It also undermines domestic confidence in national government by exposing its impotence to uphold the democratic will expressed in parliamentary decisions.

For the British, the greatest irritation has been caused by the EU’s “fourth freedom” of movement. More about promoting European citizenship than enabling the free market, this has increased UK immigration on an unprecedented scale since the late 1990s. A major effect has been to discourage British employers from training unskilled Britons by providing them with a ready pool of labour. In refusing to compromise and allow greater national control over immigration, the EU has withheld from the British government an important tool for reversing this trend and addressing the plight of its poorest citizens.

So, no, Sir Vince, Brexit wasn’t caused by the delusion of older Britons’ imperial nostalgia. It was caused by the impatience, highhandedness and inflexibility of European imperial ambition.