Running, jumping, climbing trees…

Published in Madrid, April 2008

Twenty first century women

Glancing through the window of her office, in the centre of Madrid’s Azca business district, Rosa Morales feels a swoop of pride as she sees the city evolving around her. She is twenty nine and has worked for the same company since leaving university. She loves her job; it is engaging and affords her the opportunity to travel across Spain and Europe where at times she practises her English and her French.

She is paid relatively well and recently she upgraded to an almost-new Seat, whose silver finish often sparkles in the summer sun. At weekends, she still meets with school friends, more out of routine than effort and when she has an extended period of free time, she drifts away to the family village, leaving the roar of Madrid well behind.

Amongst the perennial issues that are at the heart of political discussion today; terrorism, global warming and an increasingly wobbly economic landscape, is another, aggravated by hundreds of young Spanish women like Rosa. Successful, educated and fuelled with career aspirations and the pursuit of individual goals; the moment when they will sentar la cabeza (settle down) has been postponed, for some of them, indefinitely. For the Spanish government, Rosa Morales is a problem child. The country needs more children, and the new generation of Spanish women have very different priorities.

At the start of the twentieth century, the Spanish population was hovering at around 19 million people. 100 years later that number had more than doubled, principally due to the population boom of the 1960s and 1970s. However, since then, the birth rate has stalled and spluttered and the nation’s demographic anxieties have become acute. Spain now has one of the world’s lowest birth rates, with only 1.37 children being born per woman, only marginally better than that of Japan.

The extended Spanish family

It takes a knowledge of Spain’s history to fully appreciate how this situation has arisen. In just two generations, the role of women in Spanish society has altered without precedent. In a flicker of time real and exciting opportunities now exist for Spanish women outside the boundaries of the family.

During much of the twentieth century, this was not the case: Spain was synonymous with large, extended family groups; the use of contraceptives and abortion were illegal; divorces were forbidden and women needed their father’s or husband’s sponsorship to work, open a bank account or apply for a passport. At this time, families raising more than four children were awarded financially by the government, whilst each year 50 ‘exemplary women’ were awarded specially minted medals by high ranking party officials for producing large families of up to 18 children.

The changes that have swept through Spanish society since then have been as dramatic as they have been successful. The Economist recently rated Spain as being tenth in its quality of life index, far above countries such as the US or the UK. More Spaniards than ever before are travelling the world, are speaking foreign languages, are getting involved with international business and are becoming millionaires. The fallout is, however, that at home there is a growing sense of anxiety amongst politicians, who believe that Spain’s worryingly low birth rate demands immediate attention.

Shortly after the turn of the century, the then prime minister of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar, urged families on national television to have more babies, “For the sake of the nation”. If they could have responded as one, they may have told him that they were busy with their careers; that they couldn’t afford a house, let alone a child or, quite simply, that they were too busy indulging in the hedonistic escapes of early twenty first century life.

One child and two salaries

From an economic point of view, they may well have a good point. House prices for the average Spaniard remain unrealistically high, whilst, conversely, salaries can be modest. This worrying juxtaposition leaves many young Spaniards living at home with their parents much longer than in most other European countries. Put crudely, for a generation of mileuristas (people earning around 1000€ a month), having a child is simply not economically viable.

The Spanish sociologist Carmen Braña brushed upon this point, noting how, “You need at least two salaries to bring up a child”. Others have pointed their finger at Spain’s lack of any real family planning policy – one commentator wryly remarked that you would need to have 57 children in Spain to enjoy the same economic benefits as having a family of three children in Luxembourg.

The current prime minister, Jose Rodriguez Zapatero, who is often derided for overlooking these issues whilst affording more time to push through his agenda of liberal reforms, decided to engage with this issue last summer, he pushed a bill through parliament that awarded almost 3,500€ to couples producing a first child. He said, “This is a move to boost births and support families, Spain needs more children”; the opposing Popular Party claimed that he was indulging more in a spot of petty electioneering than genuine policy making. The conservative newspaper ABC argued that, “Nobody is going to turn their nose up at 3,500€, but surely many parents would prefer subsidised nurseries or dental care”.

Whilst the issue of Spain’s low birth rate ebbs gently around the political landscape, perhaps a more significant and ominous concern is forming: mass immigration. According to official statistics, there were 4,145,000 foreign residents in Spain at the start of 2007, a number that has been rising with growing speed, year on year, for the last decade. This number includes about half a million Moroccans, half a million Ecuadorians and significant numbers of Colombians and Romanians. Another, more transient yet still significant, group of Brits, Irish, North Americans and Scandinavians is also becoming increasingly prominent across the whole of Spain.

The demographic shift

In mathematical terms, this wave of mass immigration settles Spain’s population anxieties in one sweep. In 2003, Spain realised its most significant leap in population since the 1960s, with the influx of immigrants cited as the primary contributing factor. But for a country such as Spain, is this an adequate and sustainable solution to the problem?

During much of the twentieth century, Spain remained racially homogenous, as many of her European peers developed into multicultural societies. Whilst in Britain, individuals from all corners of the crumbling empire were arriving on the shores in the wake of the Second World War; Spain was operating some of the fiercest immigration policies on the continent. Now, after more than a decade of the first modern mass immigration into the country, Spain is staring an identity crisis in the eyeball.

It seems likely that during the next decade Spanish society will undergo a radical and permanent cultural shift. How it reacts, or better interacts, with this cultural shift is yet to be seen, but once you establish that there is going to be a significant demographic change, it does generate some absorbing questions. Will we start to see hybrid Spanish cultures emerging? How will these immigrants erode Spain’s well developed sense of regional identity? And, could this mean that in the future, the ethnic Spaniard may become just as rare as the Iberian lynx?