After a decade of massive immigration to Spain, the first stormy debate over the right of immigrants to be different has erupted.
One by one towns and cities in the region of Catalonia, including the cosmopolitan capital Barcelona, have moved to ban the burqa and niqab from public buildings. Virtually overnight, Spain’s national political forces have hopped onto a bandwagon that is as artificial as it is poignant. Artificial because the number of women who have adopted the all-covering Islamic veil is probably no greater than a few dozen. Poignant, because in Spain throughout the good-vibe era in which low-earning foreign workers fueled the property-development powerhouse of a fairy-tale economic boom, society simply ignored the need for any debate over how to relate to the immigrant influx.
The greatest proportion of Spain’s new immigrants come from Spanish-speaking, Christian Latin American countries, and here the potential for a cultural clash is limited. But the country now also plays host to 1.5 million Muslims, most of them of North African origin and only a few of whom wear the burqa or niqab.
So why has the debate sprung up now? The expansive wave of legislative initiatives which has seen local councils prohibit the all-covering veil and even led to last week’s vote in the Senate urging the government to implement a nationwide ban in all “public spaces” has highly publicized detonators. At the beginning of the year the Catalan town of Vic attempted to exclude illegal immigrants from registering on the municipal roll, thus denying them the possibility of benefiting from local services, such as health. Then came the latest in a long line of cases in which a schoolgirl wearing a hijab was excluded from her high school, where an anti-headgear rule had been introduced with the intention of preventing students from wearing baseball-style caps.
It is no coincidence that Spain has experienced the longest and most painful recession among leading European Union nations, prompting an alarming rise in unemployment toward the 20 percent mark.
During the economic boom of the last decade, Spain was not given to introspection. Whichever way you wanted to measure it – in economic, cultural and even sporting terms – the country seemed to be performing at unprecedented capacity. The complex of Franco-era backwardness was shed and Spanish success was seen to bear out all the good intentions of the transition – especially after the surprise 2004 electoral victory of Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero’s Socialist Party, which rejoiced in what it portrayed as a superior, untainted form of capitalism that was blazing a trail in the Old Continent.
As France watched its suburbs burn, progressive Spaniards looked on smugly, convinced that what was happening to the north did not affect them. Racial tension is still far from reaching France’s extremes, given Spain’s largely first-generation immigrant community. However, any decision on whether to follow the British multicultural model or France’s republican, citizen-based approach has not even been broached by Spain’s political elite.
Unlike some of its northern neighbors, Spain does not suffer from any sense of post-colonial guilt. It is also true that on the whole immigrants have not been met with cold indifference or hostility, but rather with amused curiosity. They have been viewed more as exotic symbols of fast-changing times than as a threat to established Spanish traditions. Zapatero’s administration was initially refreshing in its honest appreciation of the role of immigrant labor, and the prime minister risked political capital with the 2005 amnesty, in which over half a million illegal workers gained their papers.
Yet the Socialist government has also invested precious little in ensuring that integration is a success, complacently trusting in the needs of the economy to provide the fabric of a new society. New funds for community projects were made available, but starting from zero the bar has not been raised very high. Even more shocking has been the lack of concern, let alone action, prompted by the near total absence of immigrants from public life, media (much of which are under the direct control of national or regional governments), and even mainstream popular culture. The Socialist recipe has made the immigrant a daily reality, but to most people he or she remains a complete unknown.
Meanwhile in Catalonia it is election year, and burqa bashing is clearly felt to be popular, with even some Socialist councilors defying party chiefs to subscribe to such moves. The regulations are also intrinsically irrelevant, and could easily be implemented by the passing on of instructions to security staff in public buildings, without any need for an eye-catching ban.
But what about the hijab, a far more common sight on Spanish streets? Or the building of mosques? The sound of Arabic being spoken? The teaching of Islam in public schools, as the law currently caters for? With such a symbolic initiative as a burqa ban it is impossible not to sense a nod toward the rejection of Muslim Spain, which is far more meaningful an objective than the prohibition of an aberrant dress code embraced by a handful of fanatics.
It’s high time Spain woke up to the complexities of modern European society and dared to lift the veil on its own false sense of security.
James Badcock is editor of the English edition of the Spanish daily El Pais. He wrote this
commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
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