“China is willing to work with Spain to take Prime Minister Sanchez’s visit to China as an opportunity to further deepen strategic mutual trust, intensify exchanges and cooperation, strengthen multilateral coordination, and push bilateral relations to new heights,” said the spokesperson, Mao Ning.
Why is Spain so based? They are obviously still neoliberals, but they do seem to be going against the grain.
Is there any material reason?
It’s one fallen empire recognising another on its way down. The brits would be the same if they could come to terms with being the withered husk of their past self
I think the nature and demise of Spain’s empire is key. It was a massive, globe spanning empire with control of vast silver and gold - almost none of which remained in Spain. The Spanish Empire was stuck on a debt treadmill whereby other European powers hoovered up all that gold. Merchant cities in Italy and early capitalists in the Low Countries and England were huge beneficiaries of all that American gold and silver the Spaniards stole.
That meant the Empire was never capable of doing productive capital reinvestment back into the metropole. It never really got to industrialize and build the productive capacity to challenge the rising capitalist empires. By the end of the 19th century, it was hopelessly outmatched militarily, economically, and industrially by those capitalist empires and didn’t get to meaningfully participate in their imperial competition.
Spain didn’t develop a large industrial proletariat and mostly remained an underdeveloped agricultural peasant economy even into the 19th century. When the revolution failed, fascist Spain was backwards compared to the big European powers and sat on the geographic abd political periphery of the imperial core.
Spain has just never had the same skin in the imperial capitalist game as the major White Empires.
Another important thing to add that Spain was a late addition to the Western Empire, so it still has maneuvering power to be independent.
The Spanish-American War caused many spaniards, specially those on the left, to distrust or hate the US. Even Franco used to support Cuba during the Cold War just to mess with the US.
Sánchez in particular is hoovering up votes from the radical coalition to his left as they tear themselves apart, and he’s always been about the big-dick, high-stakes plays. Important to remember that there has always been a significant anti-NATO block on the Spanish left. Joining in the first place was seen as a significant compromise by Gonzalez.
More materially, Spain spent the last few decades building out infrastructure to the point that they now have excellent infrastructure themselves, and Spanish infrastructure corps are huge players internationally. This, combined with their role as a shipping gateway to Europe, creates an incentive to seek relationships outside of Europe/US.
Germany has always been against this — remember their constant carping about “fiscal responsibility” after the financial crash — because what they want from Spain is a cheap holiday destination, not another European power center. So Spain is often best served by going against European strategy.
EDIT - there’s another thing that I don’t see mentioned much: Spain has a huge Chinese population!
Not a lot of people know this, but i think Spain probably has better infrastructure than Germany at this point. Certainly they have way more high speed rail. And i seriously doubt it runs as poorly as the German rail system.
Well, they’ve recently privatized some of the services, followed by the inevitable train crash, but yeah.
Another thing they do incredibly well is broadband. Basically every town here has had Gbps fibre optic for like a decade at this point.
The sad thing is, that many Spanish people don’t recognize these achievements — they assume that Germany or the UK must be better 🤷
So jealous. German internet infrastructure at this point is notorious for probably being among the absolute worst in Europe. Expensive, slow as shit and the coverage is horrible if you’re not in a city. Every time i go to Romania i get so angry at how much faster and cheaper the internet is there.
Internalized inferiority complexes are awful. I see this same mentality all the time in Eastern Europe.
I suspect it has something to do with the ethnic cleansing campaign the US is waging against Spanish speakers.
Spain and Ireland are the only two countries in Western Europe with even a modicum of a soul remaining
I think it’s two things: 1) they have a set of relatively robust social programs that are extremely popular because they provide direct material benefits to people, and because of that firsthand exposure they’re opposed to others being deprived of it, and 2) they had a failed fascist dictatorship in close enough in recent history that they’re less likely to buy into those ideas.