Tremlett Giles - España: A Brief History of Spain

We could choose any moment just before a football match featuring Spains national team but let us start with the 2010 World Cup final at the Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa. The game will end in victory thanks to an extra-time goal by Andrs Iniesta, provoking an outpouring of national jubilation and pride. La Roja The Reds were the champions of the world. In soccer-mad Spain, there was euphoria.

Before the match started, however, television viewers around the world were puzzled. When the national anthems were played, the Netherlands players shouted out the words to The Wilhelmus, which is said to date back to 1572 and commemorates William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule. They sang about their countrys guiltless blood, faithful warriors and steadfast hearts. In contrast, Iniesta, Xavi, Puyol and the Spanish squad merely hummed. Their national anthem has no words. Why is this? Because Spaniards disagree so profoundly about their own history that they dare not put words to it. They cannot conjure up that treacly mixture of geography, history, folklore and bombast that is the essence of such anthems. National pride cannot be put to words.

Spain has no national story that it can celebrate in comfort. That makes it almost unique. Other nations build narratives based on history, myth and saccharine sentimentality. Some, like Germany, add historical guilt, or responsibility. These narratives are rarely factually honest but channel a peoples emotional attachment to nation. At its best, this creates community. At its worst, it causes war.

Andrs Iniesta scores the winning goal for Spain in the 2010 World Cup football tournament in South Africa. Spaniards were proud, though disagreements over history meant they had no words for their national anthem.

Cameron Spencer/Getty Images.

Either way, such stories eventually form part of history itself, since the way people see themselves shapes their actions. Ardent Spanish nationalists claim they inhabit the oldest nation on earth. That is wrong, but there is no doubt that Spain has existed more or less in its current geographical format for longer than most countries. So why the difficulty with a national narrative? This short history argues that disagreement about the past is, in itself, part of that narrative. Spain, in other words, has struggled constantly to fuse together a fractured soul.

I am a British-born, recently nationalized new Spaniard, still imbued with a converts enthusiasm (rather like the conversos to Christianity who appear later in this book), but this is not an attempt to supply Spains missing national story. I will, however, challenge simple stereotypes (including some beloved by Spaniards themselves) about a people deemed passionate, hot-tempered, party-loving, lazy, Quixotic or violent except where those views have helped to shape history itself.

The Iberian Peninsula which Spain shares with Portugal stands on three of Europes most significant geographical frontiers. Two of these are clear on any atlas: the first separates the Mediterranean from the Atlantic; and the second divides Europe from Africa. The third frontier is only revealed when we draw onto our atlas the circular winds and currents of the Atlantic Ocean. Where Romans saw the worlds western edge at Finisterre on Spains north-western Atlantic coast, those winds and currents actually link Europe to the American continent. That is how Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas and could return to explain what he had done. It is also why Spain (or, rather, Castile the most powerful of the kingdoms that eventually formed a single country) conquered so much of it, creating the worlds first global empire in the sixteenth century.

Spains position on Europes south-western corner, then, exposes it to cultural, political and actual winds from all quadrants. Africa is a mere nine miles away to the south across the Strait of Gibraltar, clearly visible from the wind-surfing beaches of Tarifa. The Mediterranean a vast and ancient community of its own connects it to the cultures of Phoenicians, Greeks, Jews, Carthaginians and Romans as well as to the Arab and Muslim lands of the Near East or the Maghreb. In the north, the Pyrenees mountains anchor it to Western Europe. The Atlantic and Mediterranean coastal paths on either side of those mountains have allowed species, cultures, trade, trends and peoples to flow north and south.

Although Spanish history is full of attempts to resist foreign influences or outright invasions, these often failed. Opposition gave way to assimilation. Romans, Visigoths, Christians, Muslim Moors and Jews in Spain were frequently, in fact, neither invaders nor foreigners. They were native Spaniards whose families became religious or cultural converts or had lived there for many generations.

Men from the Russian steppe were among the first to arrive from the north and the only ones to provoke genetic turmoil, since they mostly wiped out autochthonous males between 2500 and 2000 BC. Berber Muslims invaded almost the entire country in the eighth century AD. Sun-seeking twentieth-century European tourists in their cars, planes and caravans became another sort of invader, bringing change to Spains culture, social mores and politics. Migrants from Latin America added another twist to the story at the beginning of the twenty-first century, reversing a centuries-old trend in the opposite direction.

Spain is both a cornerstone of Europe and one of its great pivots. At times, like a weathercock, the direction it takes is dictated by external forces. Storms blow in (Romans, Visigoths, Christianity, Islam, Habsburg monarchs, American silver, Bonapartes armies, bikini-clad tourists), and Spain changes. At other times, it grasps the mechanism that controls the swivel to shape not just its own political and cultural destiny, but that of Europe or other parts of the world.