Politics and Culture

This will be a bit of a ramble, but the point I need to make is hard to put into words.

One commonplace about cold countries is that people huddle together through the months of cold and snow. In Spain, and perhaps throughout Mediterranean Europe, people huddle together through the years of unemployment and recession. Last year the Spanish unemployment rate stood at 18%, the Catalan rate at 16%. Both have since gone up. It's common to hear talk of 20% unemployment. Youth unemployment was hovering near 40% last summer. By comparison, rates in the Netherlands and Germany have stayed under 5% and 10% respectively.

We're told that the story behind faltering or negative growth and very high unemployment is one of a boom (in property development) and bust. The Spanish economy has gone cold turkey, a junkie whose supply of junk abruptly failed. The back story, which also gets some press, is one of low productivity and slight innovation, a meagre skills base and failing or struggling schools. Yesterday my devoted reader told me that responsibility and the value of hard work are not inculcated in young people here because Spain is relatively rich, because of the nanny state, and because of that older, more comprehensive social safety net called the family. (Her unstated corollary is that parents and grandparents do work very hard and are highly responsible, in their families.) Families have kept society going: so far, we've seen few protests and little extremism. But the virtues of private life may be vices in public life. The sociability that serves families so well may not translate into good governance.

What I'm getting at is the way political institutions shape culture. In Westminster democracies and the United States the electoral process is formally a choice of individuals over other individuals; and, for good or ill, such countries are noted for their individualism. Sweden has enjoyed two centuries of free public access to information and enjoys one of the cleanest political cultures on Earth. So my question is this: how has Spain shaped itself, culturally, by instituting the systems of democratic governance under which it is now ruled, and under which it has been ruled since the end of the 1970s? Is there anything about public life as conducted under the set of rules then agreed upon that has benefited Spaniards, in their education and their attitudes, in the last thirty years? Has Spanish politics been good for the culture of Spain?