Giles Tremlett - Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past

It is now early 2012 and a mixture of fear and vertigo has set in. Spain, once more, is moving quickly but no one quite knows where to or who, exactly, is making the decisions as the global economy goes through a powerful readjustment. In a globalised world, indeed, it is not just harder to discern what forces are at work in Spain. It also becomes harder to pick out the essential characteristics of a country that has become less hermetic and more varied in its own cultural and ethnic make-up since I first started working on this book.

Originally I had thought of trying to rewrite or, at least, update, each and every chapter, but I soon realised that was impossible. Ghosts of Spain describes a moment in Spanish history and in my personal experience of my adopted country and to rewrite it would mean starting again from scratch. But much has changed in the half-dozen years since the first edition was published and I am pleased to have the opportunity to bring readers up to date. It is a chance, amongst other things, to fill in some holes from the first edition and to add clarification or correct small, but annoying , mistakes where necessary. That means the original text has been retouched in just a few points, while an extra chapter carries the story up to today a time when Spains economy is, once more, in trouble and Spaniards as a whole are deeply anxious about their future.

The extra chapter replaces the epilogues written for the US edition and the UK paperback, updating a whole raft of themes from the early chapters, be they Spains ongoing battle with its own history , the battle against corruption or the death throes of Basque separatist terrorist group ETA. They also deal with issues that have much to say about Spains future and which, while hindsight tells me they were in front of my nose while I was writing the first edition, only the passage of time has allowed me to approach in a coherent and, I hope, meaningful fashion. The two main issues are the new Spaniards who poured into the country over the first decade of the twenty-first century a time when only the United States rivalled Spain as a destination for migrants to the developed world and the fall into dramatic economic decline and recession. Both issues are connected, and both have also required Spaniards to take a fresh look at themselves and ask what sort of a country they are now trying to construct.

There is now talk of a lost decade in which Spain will remain frozen, or even go backwards, while it tries to work through current problems. By the time this book is published, indeed, Spain may have been forced to drop the euro currency that has formed such an important part of its twenty-first-century identity. If not, it will certainly be in the middle of a titanic struggle to reduce its budget deficit and remain inside a euro zone dominated by Germany and France. The pessimism of ngel Ganivet, the man who spoke of Spain as a cage full of madmen, and others may soon reappear. This writer, however, continues to insist that a brighter future awaits. If there is one thing Spaniards have proven over the past four decades, it is their ability to ride change. The appearance of five million new Spaniards migrants who have arrived over the past decade with a keen desire to improve their lives works in favour of that, though only if Spaniards avoid the simplistic trap of racism. So, too, does the essential stability of Spains political system currently so dramatically different to those of other southern European countries like Italy, Portugal or Greece.

Madrid, 5 January 2012