Updated:26/05/2022 02:16h
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The idea of the Black Legend, understood as an international conspiracy against Spain, does not please the Hispanist Henry Kamen (Rangoon, Burma). He seems to him a way of throwing balls out on the part of a national intelligentsia with a tendency to martyr itself without anyone’s help. In the pages of his new book, ‘Defending Spain’ (Espasa), the Briton claims the large number of foreigners who served and admired Spain, while trying to show that, at least since the 16th century, at the height of the imperial boom, there is a large number of Spaniards repeating the same words about national failure and exaggerating the disasters above the victories. If someone has been throwing stones at the Spanish past for centuries, it is the Spaniards themselves…
“I would excuse the Spaniards as guilty of this victimization and would rather blame intellectual groups, a minority, which has distorted the way of being and studying the history of the country,” explains Kamen, an author who is always difficult to classify in a current or a historiographical school. He is interested in controversy, being contrary and disarming national myths at any price. However, he is also very critical of the harmful topics that persecute the Spanish and the belief, encouraged by certain ideological currents, that the country’s history is an anomaly.
In the pages of the book, a history of Spain connected with the world is presented, standardized, compared, where it is denied, for example, that the capture of Granada was a national crusade, but, rather, a multinational company where thousands of English and even Muslim combatants took part from the Christians, or that the conquest of America was an exclusively Castilian operation.
-You assure that Spain needs defense, but not against foreigners, but from the nationals themselves.
-Since the beginning of the 20th century there has been a certain tendency, especially nationalist, to underline the weaknesses of Spain and to attribute the defects to hostility on the part of foreigners. This negative, victimizing and pessimistic philosophy is found in Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset and many others who wrote articles on the subject. In this book I wanted to underline the positive aspects of Spain’s position internationally, a nation that cultivated friends and allies in both war and peace. In other words, part of the historical role of Spain, beyond the aspects that historians always studied before wars and other nonsense, was to collaborate with other nations. We must leave behind the picture of a Spain that was always in a position of inferiority and hostility with the world, because it is false.
-Spanish history places more emphasis on the contributions of those born in the country than those from abroad, but that also happens in other countries, right?
-Totally agree. One of the things that I wanted to underline is that international collaboration is the secret of a country’s success. If we take the example of England, the English always made analogies with their own successes, but the reality is that many of the things they achieved were with the help of others. The same happens with the Spanish, where the first colonization of the Canary Islands was thanks to the majority participation of the Portuguese. And also in the New World, which was also full of Portuguese and Italian bankers. In other words, it is not just a Spanish event, not even a Castilian event, but a fact of many people.
-Why does Spain have this obsession with its defeats and exaggerating its disasters?
– I would excuse the Spanish as being guilty of this victimization and would rather blame intellectual groups and others that have distorted the way of being and of studying the history of their country. A victimhood that is very present among journalists and other intellectuals of the early twentieth century.
–Why do these intellectuals indulge so much in pain and defeat?
-I can’t talk much about it because I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that the Spanish, for reasons that I really don’t understand, have been more prone to this victimization than intellectuals from other countries. We do not find, for example, such a pessimistic school among French intellectuals or in England. The English, perhaps thanks to their successes in the Empire, had much more optimism than pessimism.
–Why do you deny the existence of a Spanish Black Legend?
-I wanted to avoid this line of introduction because for me and for almost all historians today the Black Legend does not exist. It is a fiction invented by a group of journalists at the beginning of the 20th century, among whose authors the most notable is Julián Juderías. It is true that there are negative topics about Spain that are very current, but curiously I, who have studied what was already said in the 16th and 17th centuries, have verified that even then affirmations were repeated in the country itself about the defects of Spain , its failures, its supposed disasters… And one wonders, when reading these texts, how that man can write those words when he belonged to one of the most successful countries in the world. They always saw success as the beginning of failure. I can not explain; for other countries did not have this tendency during their time of imperial expansion.
-You defend that this defeatist tendency is related to the economic weakness of the country, why?
-The Spanish pessimism comes from the recognition that the country depended on other countries, that is, from the collaboration with others to achieve many of its achievements. Without other countries, the Spanish had difficulty establishing their control over their own destiny. Upon getting the riches, gold and silver from America, the Spanish discovered that almost all the gold and silver went to other countries. Why? Because the French and English controlled the trade. Despite this economic weakness of Spain, which was a rather poor country, it became a very successful case in modern times. Thanks to this situation, a certain pessimism entered the writings of all times.
– Did this extreme self-criticism also have positive things?
-Well, positive, I don’t know… But it is true that the debate on the rights of the Indians that took place in the 16th century was not carried out by foreigners criticizing the Spanish, but rather it was a war between the Spanish intellectuals themselves with positions different. Spain’s imperial experience was so complex that it opened up these debates.
-A phrase that is repeated a lot in Spain even today is that it missed the train of modernity. When and why did it happen?
-I haven’t spent time thinking about it, but it’s true, especially if it applies to science. However, it is not the only country that failed in the sciences at a certain point in time. We have the same situation in Italy or Germany, where before the 19th century they were not very successful in this field, or in exploration, or in almost anything. It seems to me that we must have a more international perspective and compare Spain with other countries to see what happened in each case. In this way we will arrive at the solution that really all the countries have had the same type of reaction, the same type of problem, the same type of failures… Spain is no exception. It has had flaws in certain aspects of its evolution, but the same can be said of other countries, which have lost the direction of their train.
–Do Spaniards look at their navel too much?
–Yes, yes, the famous navel-gazing of the Spanish. But saying it is not easy to explain why this would be a feature only of the Spanish… It happens in other countries. In this, the Russian mentality is very similar to the Spanish mentality. For Russians, Russia is the only reality in the universe. And at certain times the Spaniards thought that way too.
– Is a country more open to foreign influences than is usually studied?
-Perhaps there was hostility from outside at some point in the sixteenth century, but later we have a quite different situation: friendship, collaboration, dynastic marriages. There was even the strange situation of Protestant armies fighting for Spain against France or a Dutch fleet fighting on their behalf. In order to have a more balanced view of Spain’s historical experience, the country must be placed within the real context of its time. Not thinking only of the 16th century, but of all times. And give more importance to collaboration as a factor in the evolution of Spain. What will foreigners find in Spain that excites them enough to dedicate their lives? Moreover, what am I doing living in Spain?
-If the Black Legend does not exist, how is it explained that many topics, coming from the propaganda that was used in the 16th century about Spain, continue to be studied in schools in America or in schools in Catalonia?
-You have to discard those words of Black Legend. Because it never existed. If the countries of Hispanic America have presented a certain vision of their past, it is because they need to build a solid image of what they were. To evolve, these countries have to invent their own vision of the past. That’s why the president of Mexico is always spouting poison, saying these things about the colonial past… It can’t be helped. It is a distortion that happens in all countries and we have to tolerate it to a certain extent. In Catalonia, at least two or three writers are dedicated to falsifying and distorting the history of the relationship between this region and the rest of Spain. But they have to because the nationalists have no other recourse. In any case, there is no good historiography of Spain, neither here nor in America, to counteract it.
–So, what is the solution? Give more voice to historians?
-It could be, but it is also a matter of reforming the entire education system, especially at the university level. Research into the past at the university must be promoted more. I’ll give you an example, the great problem of the depopulation of the continent of America in colonial times was studied for the first time by Americans from the University of California. Until then, not a single Spanish study had addressed such an important issue. We have to reform higher education to start looking at other horizons, other ways of focusing on the past.
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