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?

Power without Scrutiny

Under its current electoral system, Spain encourages voters to do what marketing encourages them to do on their outings to hypermarkets: judge the brand, not the product. Take the Madrid Assembly, which oversees the regional government of a single Spanish province. As provinces, drawn on the map in 1833, are also Spain's electoral districts, there is a single electoral district for elections to the Madrid Assembly, and one hundred and twenty seats. Are the media, the party rank-and-file, and voters able scrutinise candidates individually? (Three major parties run three-hundred-and-sixty candidates; a fourth party is likely to do likewise in the next regional election.) Can they judge the work of regional MPs individually--judge four years of work by one hundred and twenty people?

Now imagine the region divided into one hundred and twenty seats, with a population of just under 60,000 each, using a mandated alternative vote system for both party primaries in each district and for the regional election itself. The party rank-and-file in each district would chose one individual out of however many threw in their hats; in such small districts, internal party campaigning would be quite cheap, and in any case expenditure could be limited by law to keep the process modest and fair. Electors would choose from among four major-party candidates and an unforeseeable number of minor party candidates. Each election would constitute a referendum on the continuity of the sitting member for the district after four years of legislative and advocacy work.

If it is not the point of elections to choose representatives--to choose people--we might as well adopt a virtual system, giving each party buttons to push in parliamentary votes rather than bums on seats. As it is, most of those bums are unknown to voters, and all of them are beholden more to their party bosses than to the constituents they are supposed to represent.

L'Europe n'existe pas

Do Europeans share any experiences, apart from Euro-elections (for which the turnout is always low), a song contest, the European Cup and travel? They don't share television. Digital broadcasting has meant many, many more channels. In the UK, there are nearly one hundred; in Spain and France around forty, depending on where one lives. (There had been fewer than ten free analogue broadcasters in the same markets.) Have any of the new licenses gone to channels which are European in scope, such as the Lyon-based multilingual broadcaster Euronews? Nope. Or to national public broadcasters from elsewhere in Europe, such as the BBC, Italy's RAI, or France Télévisions? Nope. Or to the international news and information brands of some of those same broadcasters, such as BBC World and France 24? Nope. So Europeans are told they should speak two languages in addition to their mother tongue, but must pay for media content in the languages they are encouraged to learn. So public-service broadcasters struggle to provide content for the new channels they have been allotted, yet the cheap alternative of simply carrying a feed from elsewhere in Europe has been passed over. And, in the symbolic realm of the channel surf, Europe does not exist.

Beat the Drum Slowly

The mayor and council of our fair city have seen fit to pay for a multimedia campaign promoting the city to itself, mentioned in my first post. The campaign has a website, www.viscabarcelona.cat. All the pictures are of young people, and the aesthetic reminds me of a twenty-something niece's Facebook page (albeit against a black background). The city is cool, the site tells us (visually, at least), because it is home to twenty-something men who leap and don't wear belts and twenty-something women whose teeth, blessed with a startling whiteness, photograph well at close quarters. The 30- and 60-second television commercials that are running, have run, or ran to reinforce the campaign I must have missed, but they live on in cyberspace. Among other features are interviews with luminaries of the local star system ("Why do you love this city so much?") and a sort of BCNtube, open to uploaded video and voting, the visible On-line Person's Approval Factor. It doesn't seem to be popular: the winning video, out of fewer than twenty, has forty-two votes.

How much did all of this cost? Apart from a city hall logo and link to the City of Barcelona homepage, the Visc(a) Barcelona site has no "Contact us" link, no postal address, no terms of use, and no statement of responsibility. Thus there's no way of knowing where to look for this expense in the city budget and it hasn't been reported.

Window Dressing

Valencia is home to the world's only museum of the Enlightenment, the Museu Valencià de la Il·lustració i la Modernitat (MuVIM). I've not been there and what I know of the exhibitions is hearsay. The museum's webpage, meant to be cool, is clumsy, but I've heard of good academic work sponsored by the MuVIM, and am glad to see the Enlightenment given a platform of any kind.

When the word 'modernity' was added to the name of the institution room was made for more than just historiography, and so the MuVIM hosts exhibitions that are not curated historiographically. For the last seven years it's hosted an annual show of press photographs sponsored by the local press club, the Unió de Periodistes Valencians. This year's show opened last Thursday. The Head of Culture for the Province of Valenica, controlled (as are the city and regional governments) by the right-0f-centre Popular Party, took exception to photographs of political fellow-travellers and issue with the inclusion of photographs of politicians in an exhibition of press photographs. He ordered the offending images removed:

They were removed. The museum's director, on leave from a university post (he holds a chair in Aesthetics), resigned; the press club removed the rest of the photographs. The catalogue of the show is available on-line in Catalan, Spanish and English. It refers to on-going investigations into cases of alleged corruption, run-of-the-mill stuff in the press, and this was a show of work by press photographers.

The irony of censorship at a museum of the Enlightenment seems not have been lost on the political class. There's a delicious quote in La Vangaurdia from the president of the Province of Valencia, so delicious, so simple and so revealing that I'll leave it in Spanish: "una cosa es la libertad de expresión y otra la libertad de opinión".

Special Pages

This morning my devoted reader pointed out that La Vanguardia began to back the city's 2022 Olympic bid just a few weeks after it was made public. When the paper was thicker and private-sector ad revenue healthier--say, in 2008--La Vanguardia was a thorn in city hall's side, running strings of features for weeks at a time highlighting problems that had arisen from, or weren't addressed by, municipal policy. It could afford to. Now it can't. The largest advertisers in today's issue of the paper are La Vanguardia itself (its marketing branch and sister businesses in the same media group) and the public sector. A six-page special report for International Women's Day, headed "Páginas especiales" and placed by the Catalan Government in collaboration with the Province of Barcelona, will have cost over 100,000 euros. (I've taken the rates from http://www.publipressmedia.com/images/

stories/medios/1/1/tarifas/LA%2520VANGUARDIA.pdf.) Most of the articles in the report aren't signed; a few of them detail policy initiatives, but most cover things La Vanguardia reports on anyway. It's tailored reporting, and would be praise-worthy in itself if it weren't tailored by the state. Will La Vanguardia bite the hand that feeds? I doubt it will more than nip.

Travails of a Party Man

Among the wonders of the party-list electoral systems is the wandering politico, freed from the burdens of rootedness and local representation. Where slates are unknown, candidates with no local connection are said to have parachuted into a race. Parachutes are used when parties want to get someone into elected office and turn to safe seat or district, banking on party loyalty to overcome the candidate's tenuous connection. I doubt the issue is ever decisive, but at least it is an issue.

In Spain, all elections are impersonal, and constituencies ideological rather than local. Thus, in city politics, there are no wards or boroughs: national parties run city-wide slates. The head of the slate is the party's mayoral candidate. In the 1999, the head of the right-of-centre People's Party's slate in the Barcelona election was Santiago Fisas, a former golf champion and local lawyer who had held two successive appointments under the same party in the Spanish government from 1996 to 1999. Fisas ran unsuccessfully for a Barcelona senate seat in 2000; by July 2002 his departure from city politics was leaked. Late in 2003 he reappeared as a regional minister in Madrid, though he had not been and never was elected to the regional assembly and had not resided in Madrid for more than four of his then fifty-five years. He's now a Euro MP in Brussels; he has asked three questions. In Spain, political careers happen first and foremost in parties, not in public.