The Rise of Euroskepticism: Europe and Its Critics in Spanish Culture by Luis Martín-Estudillo

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Rise of Euroskepticism: Europe and Its Critics in Spanish Culture by Luis Martín-Estudillo Carlos Varón González Martín-Estudillo, Luis. The Rise of Euroskepticism: Europe and Its Critics in Spanish Culture. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2018. 256 pp. Grounding its analysis on a wide range of works and documents, Luis Martín-Estudillo's The Rise of Euroskepticism: Europe and Its Critics in Spanish Culture shows that there is a particular structure of feeling cropping up in the long aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis (which the book itself may be part of). He proves that, for Spanish culture, Europe and its Others are multifarious entities, constituting a complex, and at times contradictory, set of ideas, convictions, goals, geopolitical articulations, and, most importantly, affective dispositions. By carefully considering a selection of representative cultural products, Euroskepticism teases out a genealogy of modern Spanish critiques of the signifier Europe, narrowing down its many signifieds. Throughout the book, Martín-Estudillo traces its modern history to the beginning of the twentieth century, although he occasionally follows concepts back to early modern culture as well. In delineating its critique, the book helps to better define Europe as a transnational project, and to determine how its political agents can become more critically engaged. First, Martín-Estudillo's book describes a particular questioning of Europe's normative ascendance in the Spanish imaginary following experiences of exiles: as Martín-Estudillo shows, Unamuno, and then María Zambrano, Josep Ferrater Mora, and Max Aub, all canonical, if singular, intellectuals, think of Europe as the cipher of a valuable yet self-destructive optimism regarding rationality, technology, and progress, an optimism that inevitably falls prey to its own internal logic. For these authors, Spain's (self-)perceived flaws, its irrationality, its affective excess, and its idealism, could be weaponized to counter modern European nihilist, rationalist authoritarianism. On the flip side of the coin, the second chapter traces the slow opening of Spain to Europe during the long Francoist dictatorship. Contrary to popular opinion, this opening didn't mean the undermining of Francoism but rather a changing understanding of Europe within it. It started with the fascist dream of a "New Europe" (led by Germany, Italy, Spain), at times dangerously real, at times melancholically delirious, as exemplified by Ernesto Giménez Caballero and a young Dionisio Ridruejo. About twenty years later, a considerably different dream had replaced that one: the libidinal (and libidinous) identification of Europe with a consumerist two-way street. First, abroad, young Spaniards started to covet a feminized European Other, coextensive with popular culture (the novísimos poets); [End Page 628] second, the fictional seduction of European tourists at home stands and overcompensates for Spanish inadequacies (in novels by Antonio Azcona and Francisco Umbral). As shown in the third chapter, by the 1990s, political and cultural consensus regarding Europe (at least in public discourse) had become predominant. However, a combination of anxiety over Spain's difference and the ways in which it prevented full integration (Els Joglars, Julián Marías), a mobilized historical trauma as proof of identity (Jorge Semprún), and a redoubting of neoliberal European homogenization (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Juan Mayorga) gradually led to new forms of skepticism. Precisely at the time when Europeanness was most celebrated as proof of Spain's heralded normality, these authors voiced different concerns. Rather than a desire for Europe (fearful or not), they were moved by concern at the evidence that Spain now belonged to Europe as an institutional framework. Chapter four poses the European failure to meet the ethical demand to tend for the vulnerable Other. Then, it points to the elusive inquiry into whatever European identity may be. As Martín-Estudillo shows, in all cases, it is the trope of physical movement toward and within (never away from) Europe, as well as different forms of migration and travel, that drive this reflection. Visual and digital art by Valeriano López, poetry by Mercedes Cebrián, and Jordi Puntí's narratives all point toward a normative, and as of yet unaccomplished, project of inclusion and cosmopolitan mobility. Finally, chapter five traces the reopening of a North...