Spanish Debates Research Articles

Debunking mainstream anti-racism in the Spanish context: “Anti-rumour” strategies as a case of psychology-based anti-racism

Racism is hardly discussed in Spanish public debates: however, when approached through policy, it is generally understood either as violent acts committed by extremists, or as a matter of stereotypes/prejudices/lack of information about cultural Others. This article focuses on the latter understanding, as performed by Spanish “anti-rumour” strategies, a varied ensemble of initiatives aimed at dismantling stereotypes of migrants and racial minorities, mainly by encouraging better knowledge and empathy. By approaching these initiatives as a representative case of mainstream, psychology-based perspectives on anti-racism and drawing on fieldwork conducted in relevant Spanish locations, I focus on their main assumptions and theoretical/political implications. Despite the heterogeneity of such initiatives, the fieldwork analysis points to common flaws; particularly in the ways their “positive” narratives and allegedly inclusive approaches might foster narrow definitions of racism, silencing its institutional/structural/governmental dimensions and potentially normalizing racist power relations.

A Populist Experiment in Spanish Political Culture? On the Cultural Politics of Podemos

The goal of this essay is to explain Podemos's 2014 emergence in Spanish politics in terms of its contributions to a possible long-term shift in Spanish political culture. For doing that, the essay focuses not so much on the party's electoral ups and downs but on a series of main discursive lines and elements of the party's trajectory that help explain its relevance in the context of recent Spanish political and cultural history: the crisis of middle classes; the plebeian as political subject linked to an alliance between precarized middle classes and precarious working classes; plurinationality and the Spanish territorial debates; historical memory and Spanish Republicanism; and popular sovereignty.

The assembly of public trust: republicanism and the birth of political economy in eighteenth-century Spain

ABSTRACT This article studies how a plan to reinvent the Spanish parliamentary Cortes generated the growth of eighteenth-century Spanish political economy. The article sheds light on how eighteenth-century Spanish debates over investment, assemblies, and corporations recovered parliamentary ideals, envisioned corporate boards of transnational cooperation, and deliberated on the political economy of patriotism. Contrary to the dominant historiographical view, Spanish republicanism did not wane under the Bourbon Monarchy. In order to resolve the social and economic impact of dynastic crises in the Spanish Empire, political economists argued that the establishment of corporations throughout the peninsula could republicanise Spanish finances and revitalise trust in the Spanish Monarchy. The article reconsiders early modern Spain’s republican and parliamentary traditions, and suggests that eighteenth-century Spanish political economy emerged from the need to escape the cycles of dynastic crises and to put an end to ‘the fear of the new’.

The Assembly of Public Trust. Republicanism and the Birth of Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Spain

This article studies how a plan to reinvent the Spanish parliamentary Cortes generated the growth of eighteenth-century Spanish political economy. The article sheds light on how eighteenth-century Spanish debates over investment, assemblies, and corporations recovered parliamentary ideals, envisioned corporate boards of transnational cooperation, and deliberated on the political economy of patriotism. Contrary to the prevailing historiographical view, Spanish republicanism did not wane under the Bourbon Monarchy. In order to resolve the social and economic impact of dynastic crises in the Spanish Empire, political economists believed the establishment of corporations throughout the peninsula could republicanise Spanish finances and revitalise trust in the Spanish Monarchy. The article reconsiders early modern Spain’s republican and parliamentary traditions, and suggests that eighteenth-century Spanish political economy emerged from the need to escape the cycles of dynastic crises and put an end to ‘the fear of the new’.

The Making of Pombal: Speculation, Diplomacy and the Iberian Enlightenment, c.1714–1755

AbstractThis article sheds light on the influence of José de Carvajal y Lancaster's establishment of shareholder companies in Spain on the economic programme of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, better known as the Marquis of Pombal. Early eighteenth‐century Spanish debates on the capacity of shareholder companies to foster geopolitical reform informed the overlooked project of European cooperation of José de Carvajal y Lancaster. Carvalho studied and praised Carvajal's commercial reforms and understood that closer diplomatic and commercial collaboration between Spain and Britain would undermine Portugal's geopolitical interests. Carvalho's early economic schemes were thus the result, in part, of Iberian commercial emulation. The Iberian establishment of regulated and joint‐stock companies catalysed reform and reconfigured trans‐imperial commercial relations. Paradoxically, Carvajal and Carvalho's parallel views on European geopolitics, and their understanding of Enlightenment ideals, foreclosed the possibility of a Luso‐Spanish alliance.

Barbara De Cock, Profiling discourse participants. Forms and functions in Spanish conversation and debates. John Benjamins, Amsterdam-Philadelphia, 2014; 307 pp. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 246).

Se reseñó el libro: Profiling discourse participants. Forms and functions in Spanish conversation and debates.

Critique de De Cock (2014): Profiling Discourse Participants. Forms and functions in Spanish conversation and debates

Critique de De Cock (2014): Profiling Discourse Participants. Forms and functions in Spanish conversation and debates

Reading E. P. Thompson today: a view from Spain

During more than three decades, E. P. Thompson's work has been present in Spanish social history's main debates. His contributions, as well as the majority of its critiques – from the heated exchan...

The Intellectual Construction of the Fifth Empire: Legitimating the Braganza Restoration

Summary Under the Iberian Union, the Portuguese discourse on empire had been both relatively muted and intertwined with Spanish debates. The Braganza Restoration presented a radical break from this tradition. A new network of preachers, theologians and jurists from the four corners of the Portuguese empire made the case for the recovery of independence. Instead of buttressing a common moral universe and the old pan-Iberian network of higher learning, the new network focused its energies on the establishment of the particularity of the Portuguese imperial and missionary enterprises. The contribution explores the importance of networks in establishing intellectual independence and the strategies employed by the partisans of the newly independent Portugal. It was no longer good enough for Portugal to be the other Iberian empire; her very raison d'être was now to become the only Iberian empire.

Como se Cuba não existisse: observações sobre Jaime Balmes, a escravidão e o tráfico de escravos (Espanha, década de 1840)

Um momento de idealização do Antigo Regime foi fundamentalno Romantismo espanhol, especialmente naquele pensado poreclesiásticos. Isso foi sentido como algo particularmente urgente emvirtude das pressões derivadas dos tipos de relação entre igreja e Estadoencontradiços durante a primeira metade do século XIX. Neste artigo,investigam-se impactos disso nas percepções e propostas acerca daescravidão e do tráfico de escravos, assim como aspectos do impactodaqueles posicionamentos na América Latina e no Brasil, onde osproblemas ligados à escravidão e à relação entre Igreja e Estado eram ainda mais candentes.

The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus

The title phrase, “The Discovery of Mankind,” is glossed in David Abulafia’s preface to refer to Christian Europeans’ gradual experience of the variety and range of human activity and expression “in the age of Columbus,” an age that turns out to have lasted nearly two centuries. The European “discovery of mankind” was a long, and arguably still incomplete, process, but Abulafia’s book focuses rather on the immediate “shock of discovery” (p. xv), a topic he rather oddly thinks has received much less attention than the intellectual adjustments that followed. The book finishes in 1520, well before even the great Spanish debates about the nature of American Indians. It begins in 1341 in order to give full and proper weight to the accounts of European encounters with Canary Islanders in the section “Eastern Horizons: The Peoples, Islands, and Shores of the Eastern Atlantic,” which is followed by equivalent “Western Horizons” and “Southern Horizons.” This provides the book with a cogent organization, even though African encounters are given short shrift and Mexico gets two pointless pages.The Discovery of Mankind demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of narrative history. A large amount of primary and secondary material is skillfully synthesized in 22 chapters to produce a very readable narrative. The author’s impressive background in Mediterranean history allows him to embed his story with confidence in its larger European context, drawing on materials in several languages. Though pitched at a general readership, the book has a firm scholarly basis and a discreet but full scholarly apparatus (only marred by its unprofessional index). The difficulties begin with trying to match the narrative approach to the book’s announced theme. The focus on the immediacy of contact inevitably means that Abulafia is heavily reliant on eyewitness accounts. He is well aware of the textual controversies surrounding many of these accounts — from Las Casas’s summary of Columbus’s journal to the attempts to reconstruct Ramón Pané’s Relación from its Italian translation — which he summarizes succinctly and accurately. But, with the exception of Bartolomé de las Casas, the writers who pondered the implications of the European discoveries were not those on the colonial front line: seven pages at the end of the book finally address “The Renaissance Discovery of Man,” but the narrative impulse soon reasserts itself over any temptation to offer analysis, with a subheading announcing that “The Encounters Continue” (p. 310).For the most part, The Discovery of Mankind is written in an urbane tone that falters only when it comes to Abulafia’s impatience with the literary scholars who have trespassed into the area of Atlantic encounters with their “post-modernist” and “post-colonialist” approaches; here the author shows little patience and even less understanding as he offers travesties of these arguments. As so often when historians approach Columbus in the Caribbean, much of the discussion focuses on the old chestnut of cannibalism. Abulafia pronounces himself “convinced there were cannibals in the Caribbean” (p. xvi), a conviction reiterated more frequently and more forcefully than the significance of the topic itself would warrant, which leads one to suspect an investment of a different kind.In fact, perhaps surprisingly after this prefatorial show of conviction, Abulafia is properly skeptical of Columbus’s interpretations of what he saw and thought he was told on his first two voyages through the Caribbean. Drawing more than he realizes from deluded postcolonial critics, Abulafia constantly makes the valid point that Columbus was determined to draw a line between “good” Indians and “bad” Indians. Unfortunately the narrative impetus never allows him time to stop to consider just why this division was so important to Columbus, nor to reflect on the fact that it was the “good” Indians who actually wielded power in the Caribbean and whom Columbus proceeded to displace. And least of all does he ponder the peculiarity of Columbus’s binary determination turning out, at least as Abulafia tells it, to match exactly the situation existing in the Carib-bean. Perhaps not surprisingly, for all his heralded conviction, Abulafia can offer no incontrovertible evidence that there were cannibals in the Caribbean, only incontrovertible evidence of how quickly Columbus and his colleagues such as Dr. Chanca moved to interpret ambivalent evidence, such as the presence of bones in huts, as incontrovertible proof of the existence of a people called Caribs, who ate people.

Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Medicine and religion in Enlightenment Europe, The History of Medicine in Context, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, pp. ix, 267, illus, £55.00 (hardcover 978-0-7546-5638-8).

Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Medicine and religion in Enlightenment Europe, The History of Medicine in Context, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, pp. ix, 267, illus, £55.00 (hardcover 978-0-7546-5638-8).

United in Diversity? Asymmetry in Indian Federalism

Many studies highlight constitutional asymmetry as a desirable feature of federal systems in multinational countries. This article looks at India which, mainly because of the special provisions for Kashmir in the 1950 constitution and the status of newer small states in the north-east, is generally described as asymmetrically federal. I show that, while India exhibits considerable de facto asymmetry, asymmetry in the constitutional powers granted to individual states has (i) not been important for India's ability to ‘hold together’ as often assumed and (ii) not entailed special protection of cultural or national minorities. I thus cast doubt on the normative political philosophy, particularly informed by Canadian and Spanish debates, that advances the idea of asymmetrical federalism as a model of governance in potentially divided societies.

Conquest and English Legal Identity in Renaissance Ireland

Like the Spanish administrators of the American territories, English administrators of Ireland attempted to impose their own native legal system on the Irish inhabitants. Nonetheless, important differences existed between the two kingdoms' legal approaches to their respective colonial contexts. Because Spanish jurisprudence was allied with universalist Catholic doctrine and was officially based on Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis (the ancient Roman legal code which had close affinities to natural law discourse), Spanish administrators expected New World inhabitants to accept what they considered to be the values that were inherent in Spanish law.1 In contrast English common law had its roots not in natural law but in the peculiar customs of the English people. Thus, while the Spanish were able to claim that they were replacing unnatural Indian customs with a legal system rooted in universal natural law, the English were attempting to reform what they considered to be the unnatural practices of the Irish by imposing a legal system defined by its insularity and its peculiar affinity with English institutions.2 In this essay I show that Renaissance ethnographies on Ireland by such English administrators of Ireland as Edmund Spenser, Sir John Davies, and Fynes Moryson are fractured by a conflict between a commitment to natural-law theory, which had its origin in continental writings, and a corresponding commitment to the native English tradition of common law. I examine how works by Spenser, Davies, and Moryson dealt with this conflict within their collective project of articulating a legal justification and strategy for the pacification of Ireland.Despite reports throughout Europe of Spanish-perpetrated cruelty throughout the Americas, the idea that war or conquest could be just or even charitable when prosecuted against oppression originated within the Catholic tradition of scholastic just-war theory.3 Many of the sixteenth-century writers who were writing about war and conquest in legal or ethical terms were Spanish or continental theologians who had attempted to evaluate Spanish imperial policy in the New World. On the one side were such figures as the Scottish theologian John Major and Spanish historian Juan Gines de Sepulveda, both of whom had justified Spanish conquest and treatment of the Indians using arguments based on the foundation of natural law.4 On the other side were those who had, on similar terms, voiced criticisms of the which Spanish forces were inflicting on the Indians. Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de las Casas were certainly the most notable Spanish writers who favored more ethical treatment of New World inhabitants.5 Other prominent defenders of Indian rights were Domingo de Soto and Melchor Cano.6 Whether directly or through intermediaries, the ideas of many of these writers permeated the ideological fabric of England.Sir Fulke Greville's famous statement about Sir Philip Sidney's goal of fostering alliances with New World inhabitants in order to overthrow the Spanish authorities included an awareness of the inhuman cruelties of the Spanish forces, an awareness that probably originated in the English translation of Las Casas 's Brevissima relation de la destrucyion de las Indias (1552).7 Beyond this significant text, however, there were others. One important book that captured the ideas of the early Spanish debates on the ethics and justice of the New World conquests was Antonio de Guevara's Relax de principes (1529), a work twice translated into English during the sixteenth century.8 The third book of the Relax de principes, which treats the princely virtues of justice, peace, and magnificence, contains several sections that together constitute a polemic against violent imperialism and unjust conquest. In one notable episode Guevara employs the example of ancient Roman imperialism to produce a veiled critique of the injustices which Spain had committed against New World polities. …

Gabriel Miró's "El abuelo del rey" and the Politics of Spain

The texts of Gabriel Miro have often been set in a geographical, a paisajista, context. They have also been given universalist readings. But though they have from the start been enmeshed in the great Spanish debates between left and right, there has been less interest in readings that insert them into history, or any broad political context. Rafael Bosch made an important start in 1970 in the first volume of his La novela espanola del siglo XX, but while his Lukacsian approach is valuably provocative, his reading of particular texts can be disappointingly crude. Thus, of Las cerezas del cementerio he writes: ‘La muerte de su protagonista es un mero simbolo distorsionado de la extincion de su clase.’1 And in a more extended comment on the Oleza novels, full of ideas, he reads the bishop as an entirely negative figure, stylistically turned into an object. Thus Miro becomes the acusador de las causas de esta deshumanizacion de la vida, producida en una sociedad atrasada y semialdeana cuando las antiguas estr...