SPAIN NEEDS TO REDISCOVER HER ENTREPRENEUR
By Joe Haslam I
first heard the phrase “the situation is critical, but not serious” to describe the Irish rugby team in the aftermath of another abject performance in the pre professional era. I’ve heard Australians say much the same thing about hot water and a frog. Put in boiling water and it will jump out, put in cold water, heat slowly and it will be cooked to death. I tell both of these stories when the subject of unemployment in Spain comes up. Every month the numbers get worse and in the case of youth unemployment are now approaching 50%, well in excess of the rates that toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. Can this go on?
Not unrelated is the touchy subject of the so-called PIGS, a derogatory term Bond traders certainly use to contrast the profligate southern European economies with those more prudent to the north. As an Irishman living in Spain, the distinction leaves me conflicted. Very quickly after I came to live here six years ago, I realised the benefits of asserting a southern European identity. The idea of the Irish as the “Mediterraneans of the North” was an usually a winning intro and one I readily made use of despite my own doubts that there very much to it. One of the benefits it gave me, was an acceptance in both camps. The Spanish as well as the Italians, Greeks, Portuguese were comfortable to criticize Anglo-Saxon directness in my presence while those from the UK, Germany and even the Americans were sure I shared their frustrations at those work-shy Med Sea pedestrians.
In recent months, this once spirited debate has lost much of its good humour. To quote Blackadder, “This is a crisis. A large crisis. In fact, if you got a moment, it’s a twelve-story crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on the roof, saying ‘This Is a Large Crisis’. In a nutshell, the northern Europeans have lent too much and the Southern Europeans have borrowed too much.
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The northerners want the southern Europeans to become more productive and grow their way out of debt. and the southern europeans want debt forgiveness and to reschedule. Neither side is happy with the situation but instead of leadership and a search for common ground all we seem to get is “whataboutery”
Certainly viewed from my perch in central Madrid, the argument that southern europe is profligate, pedestrian or unproductive is weak. What about our world leading football teams, our fast trains and our well capitalised banks? Zara dress the Duchess of Cambridge the UK Prime Ministers wife. We run your airports, we train your chefs. Why that’s ridiculous! Spain had a housing boom just like the UK and the US. It is global factors that not local ones that affect the price of money. We are not like the ungovernable Italians, those tax dodging Greeks or that place I’ve never actually been to (Portugal).
So what is Spain, what was Spain and most importantly of all what will be Spain? I said I’d better ask some people. First up, from the generation who came after “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”, someone very much representative of The New Spain. An MIT graduate, has lived in many countries and as comfortable talking about Wall Street as a life in a pueblo. He made two interesting points. First Spain, he said, was until recently a nation of renters and small business owners “We have overshot now to become a owner occupiers and employees” but argued that this is not how you should see the Spanish character.
Spain, he reminded me, once had an empire. Emigrants went to the Americas and made their fortune in difficult circumstances. There are Spaniards who are successful all over the world including at the highest levels of business. In the right circumstances, the Spanish can be competitive, risk taking and innovative. Maybe we have lost it but there is an entrepreneur gene in there somewhere.
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