Spain is the Problem, Europe the Solution’: Economic Models, Labour Organization and the Hope for a Better Future

Abstract

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (2004 [1916]) coined a sentence that was to become a leitmotiv in the process of Spain’s integration into the European Community: ‘Spain is the problem, Europe the solution. ’ In 2006, for example, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Spain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) , the sociologist Emilio Lamo de Espinosa, then Director of the Think Tank Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales y Estratégicos, after referring to Ortega’s original statement, added: The desire to Europeanize Spain, that is, to modernize it and move with the times, was not so much one of several elements in the political project of contemporary Spain, but its central core, the best summary, a project that brought together equally the left and the right, center and periphery, rich and poor. To Europeanize was to modernize and to modernize was to change. … Our Europeanism was incoming...