23 July 2015
Viva La Siesta! Viva La Diferencia!
by Neil Tidmarsh
Three cheers to Spain this week, for offering us weary Europeans a little respite from the gloom and doom of Greece’s never-ending Euro disaster. And let’s face it, a little goes a long way these days.
From Ador, near Valencia, comes the news that the Mayor, Joan Faus Vitoria, has introduced a compulsory three hour siesta. From 2pm to 5pm every summer afternoon, everyone takes a refreshing snooze while it’s too hot to do anything else anyway. The village is quiet, the streets are deserted. No children play outside, no loud music thumps away, no televisions blare. How very civilised.
What a welcome ray of Iberian sunlight. What a cheering breath of Valencian summer warmth. How reassuring it is to learn that it is indeed possible to belong to the eurozone but still retain one’s distinctive identity, heritage and traditions. That it is possible to hold out against the EU’s instinct to take roast beef, jamon Iberica, coq au vin, prosciutto or bratwurst and put it through the grinder to turn it into a boring, predictable, universal, nondescript, tasteless mince served without variation from the Shetlands to Sicily, from Oporto to Athens. We’ve all seen Greece being put through that grinder in recent months, and we’ve all winced at the sight of it.
Spain managed a more or less seamless transition from fascism to democracy in the late 1970’s. It joined the EEC in 1986 and was in the first wave of countries joining the eurozone in 1999. Its government proved prudent and responsible, and it wasn’t political inefficiency or corruption but the bursting of the country’s property boom that pitched it into deep recession following the credit crunch of 2008. A few years ago it looked like it would have to be bailed out by the ECB and the IMF, but it chose to push through tough reforms without them and is now being hailed as the ‘superstar economy’ of Europe. In the first quarter of this year, its growth was three times that of the UK and eighteen times that of the US. The IMF has predicted growth of 3.1% by the end of the year.
Great news. But the inevitable and worrying question is; at what cost? Has Spain had to turn itself into a uniform, nondescript Euro state cloned from some sort of meld of Germany/UK/USA? With the advent of mass tourism and foreign travel in the 1960s, Spain marketed itself with the tag “Spain is Different”. And indeed it was. It would be a tragedy if it no longer is.
That is why the news from Ador, Valencia, is so reassuring. Spain is still different. What a relief. It manages to be a leading modern economy and still value the siesta. It doesn’t need to follow the same working hours as Germany or the UK. Indeed it should not, simply because the countries are different, with very different climates. Take an afternoon swim in Edinburgh in July and you might die of hypothermia; take an afternoon jog in Seville in July and you might die of heatstroke. Besides, an afternoon nap is probably good for your productivity wherever you are. The most prolific and successful author of modern times, Stephen King – he who sneers at 1000 words a day and insists on 2000, 3000, even 4000 – has always taken an afternoon nap as part of his working routine.
Europe’s strength has always been its diversity, its wide variety of climate, geography, political organisation, language and culture in one relatively small area. It’s probably no accident that the EU’s tendency to homogenise its member states – to promote a common culture and uniform attitude – has coincided with reports of Europe’s decline on the world stage. Europe’s stock in trade – the goods that have made it such an influential corner of the globe – isn’t coal or steel or wine or milk, but ideas. And ideas are bred by diversity, by the competition, cross-fertilisation and synergy which diversity promotes. Unification has always been a double-edged sword. Two hundred years of independent and competing city states in Greece gave us Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Euclid, Archimedes, to name but a few of many; what names have two hundred years of a united modern Greek nation state given us to match them? Two hundred years of independent and competing Italian city states gave us Dante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Vasari, again to name but a few of the many who eclipse those from two centuries of the united nation state of modern Italy.
So, long live the difference, I say. Viva la diferencia! Vive la différence! The future of Europe depends on it.
