We do not know. Because we are Spanish, we do not have a good idea of ourselves, like any other country in the world.
Do you remember that book by Boadella and Sánchez-Dragó entitled: ‘If he speaks well of Spain, he is not Spanish’? Well, we dare not speak for ourselves as a community. In order to speak with knowledge, it is necessary that the principle be well known. Spanish wells are to be sought for centuries.
Since we are completely illiterate in our history, we do not find that when the sun did not set on the Spanish Empire, the common people did not have better living conditions than other European countries. Nor have we learned that the Industrial Revolution improved the European economy, and perhaps somewhat, the standard of living. With nuanced situations, for example, the British people, as Dickens recounted, were troubled. In Spain there was a clear case of indolence. One of the causes of our civil war.
Desolation flooded the Spanish economy in the postwar period, which was not at all helped by the environment of World War II and the subsequent boycott of the French government. Only in the fifties, with technocratic officials, did the standard of living begin to improve. Then the Spain of the sixteenth century. It is clear that in 1975, when Franco died, Spain was no longer the poor cousin of Europe that it had been for centuries.
But none of this would have been possible without the incredible solidarity and capacity for pain of the Spanish people, who knew how to continue in that line with democracy, which finally prepared the entrepreneurial spirit that was already residing in the dangerous colonies of the Americas. .
With all the difficulties that we faced in the 20th century – here we did not have a marshal’s plan – we never left the Spanish, not even now with the pandemic and post-pandemic. If there are difficulties in finding a decent job, young people (especially university students) emigrate today as they did decades ago. Now the Spaniards are working, boss or not, all over the world. The Spaniard today fears nothing, he adapts to everything. We are the ones who are most adapted to new technologies. And this is because starting from the bottom you don’t have to carry the burden of having to destroy it, because it wasn’t worth it. Spain today is a country with a young and dynamic mind. As the inhabitants We are soft to the max.
