Recruiting

It seems common-sensical that knowledge industries of any kind shouldn't limit their hiring to local candidates. Those raised and trained elsewhere bring the benefits of training which may be different and better; they may also bring knowledge of languages and so of the bodies of knowledge available in those languages. I recently spent time at a well-endowed US university year, working under an Australian, sub-letting from an Irishman and then from a Canadian who both worked for the same institution. The more cosmopolitan the field of study, the more international the workforce: thus, among the fifty or so tenured or tenure-track staff in Economics at the same university, there's a Greek, a Canadian, an Icelander, three Germans, a Chinese woman, a Chilean, a Brazilian, four Italians, two Belarussians, three Japanese, a Frenchman, a Turk, an Argentine, a New Zealander, an Englishman, and an Indian. That university is private and blessed with hotlines to US visa offices, as I know from personal experience. As an comparative exercise, it might make more sense to look at large, publicly funded universities in second cities, like Birmingham in the UK and Montreal in Canada. Here's a link to a list of U of Birmingham Economics faculty, where you'll find a Dane, an Italian, and at least two Indians; and to a similar list for the Department of Economics at McGill University in Montreal, home to a Spaniard, a Moroccan, a Scot, an Englishman, a Japanese, five Americans, an Australian, a Dutchman, a Thai, and a Chinese man. How does this compare with the largest institution in the Catalan university system, the huge Universitat de Barcelona? To be fair, the UB has more faculty in Economics that any of the three examples in the US, the UK and Canada. For the sake of comparison, then, I've chosen the most international (in subject matter, at least) of their Economics departments, which teaches economic policy and the structure of the world economy. The staff list is here.

Notice anything? CVs are not listed (they're likewise absent from the Department's home page), so we have to go on names and surnames. That said, the list looks very local. One staff member out of forty-eight does not have two surnames. She is a visiting professor. Otherwise, it looks a lot like a closed shop.

(Not all Barcelona universities recruit quite as locally as the UB: the UPF's Economics department is fairly international in provenance and training. )

Universities are not free to hire anyone with a PhD: candidates for full, permanent posts must have been vetted by a public agency in charge of assessing academic output. The process takes six months. More about that tomorrow.

Heritage Language Classes

This post is unfair.

When I came to Spain, talk of immigration actually meant talk of emigration: of internal migration, especially in the 1960s, of Spanish guest workers in Germany, Republican exiles in France or Mexico, and economic migrants to Argentina or Chile. Now immigration means newcomers to Spain, who make up about 12% of the population. Immigrants brings skills that exporters need. By speaking Russian, Chinese, Polish, or Urdu to their children, they are passing on language skills and cosmopolitanism. Those skills are desperately needed. Language teaching is poor in Spain, and attitudes towards language learning contradictory (as reported in the following story from last Friday's La Vanguardia):

About six years ago I met a highly educated Russian woman at a central Barcelona playground. She was speaking to her daughter, who might have been four, in lightly accented but fluent Catalan. (Her Catalan was better than the Catalan premier's, but that's another post.) She told me that she'd been told, by a teacher at a public school, to give up speaking to her daughter in Russian. Her daughter will have no access to the Russian language in the public educational system until she enters university.

Here comes the unfair part. In polities whose experience of immigration is long and intense, policy makers know enough to use public schools to preserve immigrant languages. Heritage language teaching, as its known, can mean a dual-language school-day in New York, in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean and French. In Toronto, free after-school classes are on offer in fifty languages, from Danish and Armenian to Marathi and Yiddish. Is it fair to ask Barcelona to mimic New York and Toronto? I suppose not, but it is necessary. If Catalan policy makers wake up to the potential of their young charges in time, the Catalan economy will stand a better chance of finding its niches and prospering. If they allow their teachers to discourage trilingualism and do nothing to raise awareness of the importance of heritage languages, a vital opportunity will have been lost.

Recommended

Three related pieces: in the Economist, "Why is Spain so Corrupt?"; in El País, "Por qué hay tanta corrupción en España," of which the former is a gloss, by the political scientist Victor Lapuente Giné; and a short opinion piece in today's Vanguardia by Jordia Barbeta on the parliamentary representation of those Catalans who have been without electricity since last Monday's snowfall. Barbeta points out that the snowed-in towns have no effective voice in Barcelona or Madrid because they are without local representation. Barbeta doesn't suggest scrapping proportional representation as practised in Spain; I do.

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.