Middle of the human centipede, exploiting africans and southamericans migrants while their youth flees to Germany and France
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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It's much more exploited Southern Europe than imperial power now. It's one of the "PIGS" after all. The economy's pretty shit, unemployment is high. There's a lot of Spanish migration to Germany etc. for the purpose of finding work.
It's not quite Greece, and it's more politically stable than Italy, but it's definitely not a core economic or policy driver on the level of France or Germany.
PIGS
Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain?
Do you think this puts Spain (and the other "PIGS" countries) in position to have something like anti-colonial revolutions?
Not in any traditional sense, no. Getting out from under the thumb of the EU Central Bank - exiting the Euro - will become a thing eventually, although Greece already tried to take steps in that direction and utterly failed.
Too many people here are unfortunately living in complete ignorance of the role we have in Europe, still thinking that we benefit from it and that we'll be fucked if we leave.
We might be fucked if we leave, and Turkey might even become more aggressive because of it, but we most definitely will be fucked if we stay as the slave state that we are.
It looks like remittances flowing home from workers living abroad make up a pretty substantial chunk of the Spanish economy at this point so losing free migration would hurt a lot in the short/medium run. And look at how Brexit has gone. Leaving would be a very politically risky project unless things get substantially worse somehow.
It is very politically risky, but for Greece at least, the people are going to suffer more and more while under Europe's austerity measures. I think it's better to trade a probably bad situation for one that is certain and has been like that for a lot of years.
Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be Grexit. It can start by demanding from the Eurozone to end all austerity measures without any conditions. If they refuse, it's the same result, if they accept then we'll get to finally improve as a country and maybe even benefit the rest of Europe in the long term.
they're also in the camp of greece & italy in being the hard border trying to bottle up migrants before they get to the rest of the EU. Ceuta & Melilla look like fortresses these days
If you want to talk about center-periphery relations you have to define what lens you're using and what you conceive of being central to the world order and what is peripheric to it.
In terms of military presence Spain is secondary at best when compared to what the US, and a distant second France wield but they do seem to soldiers in west africa and the middle east.
If you conceive the world order as one high tech is central, then you understand that neither Spain nor anyone in Europe is of note.
If you look at the labor relations in a world of finance capitalism, Spain benefits from Euro-adjacent exchange rates and is a small industrial country that exports cars and pharmaceuticals. It runs with tourism from EU and America rather than procuring dollars purely on commodity exports. The economy as a whole is defined as being of 'high income'.
Spain runs some international construction companies on the side but that's secondary in a world where the US chose not to engage in, where China utterly dominates and where France is the declining presence.
Intra-EU relations, Spain is one of the provinces caught up on the contradictory and half assed nature of the European project and, like most of the PIGS, was unable to just become an economic corporate pillager like Ireland did. So it's down the ladder and exploited by european finance, which is then exploited by american finance. Spain benefits from cheap labor from LatAm while sending it's relatively cheap labor to the rest of the EU.
It keeps going and I'm just spitballing here, but only to say that the question can and should be made more specific.
Well I appreciate your broad approach and looking at it from a variety of lenses. There are, as you correctly point out, many ways to analyze the imperial system, and I'd be interested in hearing about it from whatever perspectives comrades on here are knowledgeable about.