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Spain Regional Disparities
Spain is more a subcontinent than a country, and its
climate,
geography, and history produced a state that was little
more than
a federation of regions until Philip V, a grandson of
Louis XIV,
brought the centralization of the Bourbon monarchy to the
country
in the eighteenth century
(see Bourbon Spain
, ch. 1).
Modernday Spain contains a number of identifiable regions, each
with
its own set of cultural, economic, and political
characteristics.
In many instances, the loyalty of a population is still
primarily
to its town or region, and only secondarily to the
abstract
concept of "Spain." Administratively, Spain is organized
into
seventeen autonomous communities comprising fifty
provinces
(see
fig. 7). However, when an autonomous community is made up
of only
one province, provinccial institutions have been
transferred to
the autonomous community.
On the map, the Iberian Peninsula resembles a slightly
distorted square with the top bent toward the east and
spread
wide where it joins the rest of Europe. In the center lies
the
densely populated Spanish capital, Madrid, surrounded by
the
harsh, sparsely populated Meseta Central. King Philip II
made
Madrid the capital of Castile (Spanish, Castilla) in the
sixteenth century, partly because its remoteness made it
an
uncontroversial choice
(see Charles V and Philip II
, ch.
1). The
city, surrounded by a demographic desert, in the late
1980s was
still regarded by many Spaniards as an "artificial"
capital even
though it
had long been established as the political center of the
country.
Around the periphery of the peninsula are the peoples
that
have competed with Castilians for centuries over control
of
Iberia: in the west, the Portuguese (the only group
successful in
establishing its own state in 1640); in the northwest, the
Galicians; along the northern coast of the Bay of Biscay,
the
Asturians; and, as the coast nears France, the Basques;
along the
Pyrenees, the Navarrese and the Aragonese; in the
northeast, the
Catalans; in the east, the Valencians; and in the south,
the
Andalusians. Although most of these peoples would decline
to
identify themselves first, foremost, and solely as
"Spanish," few
of them would choose to secede from Spain. Even among
Basques,
whose separatist sentiment ran deepest in the late 1980s,
those
advocating total independence from Spain probably
comprised only
one-fifth of the ethnic Basque population. Whereas culture
provided the centrifugal force, economic ties linked the
regions
together more closely than an outsider might conclude from
their
rhetoric.
Spain's seventeen regions, defined by the 1978
Constitution
as autonomous communities, vary greatly in size and
population,
as well as in economic and political weight (see
table 4,
Appendix). For example, Andalusia (Spanish, Andalucia),
nearly
the size of Portugal, encompasses 17 percent of Spain's
land
area. The two regions carved out of sparsely populated
Castile--Castilla-La Mancha (larger than Ireland) and
Castilla y
Leon (larger than Austria)--account for 15.6 and 18.7
percent,
respectively, of Spain's total area. These three large
regions
combined account for about 52 percent of the country's
total
territory. No other autonomous region contains more than
10
percent of the total. The three richest, most densely
populated
and most heavily industrialized regions--Madrid, Catalonia
(Spanish, Cataluna; Catalan, Catalunya), and the Basque
Country
(Spanish, Pais Vasco; Basque Euskadi)--together account
for 9.3
percent of the total. The remaining 40 percent is made up
of two
medium-sized regions--Aragon (Spanish, Aragon) and
Extremadura--each of which holds 8 to 9 percent, and seven
much
smaller regions that together account for about 20 percent
of the
national territory. Regional economic disparities between
"Rich
Spain" and "Poor Spain" were also highly significant, and
they
continued to shape the country's political debate despite
a
century of efforts to redistribute the wealth of the
country.
Imagine a line drawn from about the middle of the north
coast, in
Asturias, southeastward to Madrid, and then to Valencia.
To the
north and east of the line lived the people of Rich Spain,
sometimes referred to as "Bourgeois Spain," an area
already
substantially modernized, industrialized, and urbanized,
where
the transition to an information and services economy was
already
well under way in the 1980s. To the south and west of the
line
lay Poor Spain, or "Traditional Spain," where agriculture
continued to dominate and where semi-feudal social
conditions
could still be found. To aggravate this cleavage still
further,
Rich Spain, with the exception of Madrid, tended to be
made up
disproportionately of people who felt culturally different
from
the Castilians and not really "Spanish" at all.
Indicators of economic disparity are stark reminders
that not
all Spaniards shared in the country's economic miracle.
The
autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Basque Country,
and
Madrid accounted for half of Spain's gross national
product
(GNP--see Glossary)
in the late 1980s. Income per capita was
only 55
percent of the Catalan level in Extremadura, 64 percent in
Andalusia, and 70 percent in Galicia. In Galicia, 46
percent of
the population still worked on the land; in Extremadura
and the
two Castilian regions, 30 to 34 percent did so; but in
Catalonia
and the Basque Country, only 6 percent depended on the
land for
their livelihood. In Andalusia, unemployment exceeded 30
percent;
in Aragon and in Navarre (Spanish, Navarra) it ran between
15 and
20 percent. A 1987 report by Spain's National Statistics
Institute revealed that the country's richest autonomous
community, Madrid, exceeded its poorest, Extremadura, by
wide
margins in every economic category. With the national
average
equal to zero, Madrid's standard of living measured 1.7
while
Extremadura scored -2.0; in family income, the values were
Madrid
1.0, Extremadura, -2.1; in economic development, Madrid,
1.7,
Extremadura, -2.0; and in endowment in physical and human
resources, Madrid, 1.4, Extremadura, -1.7.
Data as of December 1988
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