EUROPEAN UNION: Terrorism, water, Spain

The European Union has taken action on two fronts, terrorism and water, and both involve Spain. The EU lacked foresight when it encouraged the regions within a country like Spain, even giving them a collective presence in Brussels. It is not clear whether, behind this plan, there was not, perhaps unconsciously, the intention to weaken the nation states. In any case, it encourages and even provides money for the regions to assert themselves and to demand that their local languages be given official status. Hence the rise of Basque from a peasant language to official regional status. Those who want independence have resorted to violence: the murder of innocent people, bombings and setting buses on fire. The perpetrators are utterly ruthless, and in the European parliament their Basque representatives them have engaged in shouting matches with other Spaniards, including Basques opposed to violence. The European Parliament has now voted for a European law banning terrorism so as to avoid complicated extradition procedures. We have yet to see what the effect will be.

Water is a serious issue in Spain, divided as it is into wet and dry zones. The issue came to a head with Spain's new water plan which involves bringing the water under control and sending some of it to the dry zone. Opposition came from two groups, the Aragonese and Catalans who resent any plan which comes from Madrid and, less vocally, the ecologists. The recent disastrous floods should have convinced everyone that a plan is necessary.

The ecologists have produced arguments with which I am perfectly familiar, but which do not convince me. It is an issue which has hit Stanford, where plans to use the foothills for academic development, according to the original university plan, have aroused loud opposition from people who view them as a place to walk their dogs. It is an old story. When I first came to Berkeley in 1937 the same people were objecting to the Golden Gate Bridge, which aroused my admiration. Now all Californians revere is as the symbol of the Bay Area. In the nineteenth century, Ruskin and his peers objected to railways. I assume that when the wheel was invented there were similar objections. Such extreme ecologists make the task of us moderate ecologists more difficult.

Technical opinion supports the Spanish water plan, as is evident by the EU's decision to locate in Spain its center for water research. Both of the EU's actions discussed here merit applause and, even more important, support.

The EU has just taken important steps on two fronts. Its structural stress on the regions of a country encouraged the Basques, the Corsicans and others to think that they could not obtain sovereignty, and extremists used terrorist methods,to achieve their aim: killing their critics and even innocent individuals, bombing buildings, setting fire to buses, etc-

Ronald Hilton - 10/28/00