Spain’s Immigration Policy Shift: A Cultural Dilemma
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez revealed plans to legalize 500,000 immigrants, creating quite a stir in the political landscape. This decision brings to mind Spain’s long history, from the Reconquista against North African Muslims to decades under Francisco Franco’s rule aimed at staving off communism. Yet, despite such efforts, Spain seems to be following the trend of other Western nations toward more open borders.
The lingering question is: If liberal ideologies weaken states, why do they appear to dominate the Western world’s most powerful nations?
Many might argue that people tend to be a bit lazy, selfish, and impulsive. Historically, successful societies emerged through a series of deliberate, time-focused actions designed to overcome the darker sides of human nature. These lessons, often challenging to pass down, are woven into civilizational traditions and institutions, becoming almost invisible norms for those who live by them. People generally can’t envision living differently.
This rich tapestry of tradition and folklore does well to instill virtues that uphold a society, but it complicates relations with others. Often, even the citizens within a culture struggle to articulate these behaviors. The efficiency of their own systems can ironically make them quite challenging to translate or implement elsewhere.
As civilizations evolved and shifted, they often lost touch with the very traditions and values that defined them.
Smaller, tightly-knit communities offer advantages but typically struggle against their larger counterparts. The sheer power of economies of scale suggests that small societies need to learn cooperation to stay competitive. Ultimately, larger civilizations with greater resources and partnerships tend to dominate, regardless of how virtuous a smaller community might be. This is where liberal approaches come into play.
Classical liberalism, unlike today’s version of democracy, aimed to promote the expansion of civilization. Religious practices, customs, and other elements were too bound to specific cultures for effective cross-border collaboration. In some instances, differences were so pronounced that they led to conflict. To foster cooperation, the foundations for local collaboration had to be removed from culturally entrenched contexts and placed in neutral territories where diverse groups could interact.
Liberalism offered a new structure that allowed various nations to engage in trade and exchanges by identifying the behaviors that fostered collaboration. A common moral baseline became established, facilitating mutual understanding through business contracts, treaties, and trade agreements. Instead of waging wars, societies with divergent lifestyles found ways to trade and form constructive partnerships. This led to the rise of capitalism, significantly boosting wealth and living standards.
While the gains from this cooperation are evident, challenges also arose. As nations opened up economically, they continued to hold onto a strong cultural identity. However, as interactions within the new liberal framework increased, ruling classes began to communicate more with each other rather than with their own cultural networks.
The ability to thrive within this liberal structure brought wealth and status, leading societies to prioritize such benefits over their traditional values. The momentum gradually shifted from cultural preservation to engaging with the global liberal order.
As civilizations altered their focus, they began to lose the folklore, traditions, and even religions that once defined them. Although they gained military and economic superiority, they sacrificed a critical aspect of their identity and community ties in the process. A minimal set of moral standards might have sufficed for trading goods, but it proved inadequate for maintaining the cohesion that binds societies.
This erosion of identity sparked significant consequences. Elites started viewing their citizens more as interchangeable economic units than as family members with inherent obligations. Every individual became just another cog in the productivity machine. This shift is reflected in Spain’s increasingly problematic immigration policies. Under this liberal global framework, the idea of cultural identity becomes almost irrelevant.
Liberalism was once celebrated for its miraculous ability to enable growth and wealth generation. Nevertheless, as the foundation of traditional identities cracked, the same forces that propelled civilization forward began to expose its fragility. The unfolding dynamics within the Western liberal order point towards inevitable repercussions from the foundational shifts we have embraced, changes that will be costly to address.
