National Trauma and Political Landscapes

Introduction

I wish to thank María-José Blanco and Luis Palacios for inviting me to contribute to the bilingual, English-Spanish edition of Contexts. I am a Spanish-born and de facto British-Spanish citizen, as I have lived and worked in London for the last 38 years.

London is my main home, a place to which I am deeply connected, as it is here where I became a full adult, established a family, and developed my career and networks. I am grateful for all the good things I have received from British society, including its empirical tradition, its well-structured organisational life and (why not?) its gracious courtesy and politeness. This facilitating environment has helped me keep growing.

Spain is also my home, a fascinating and Quixotesque country to which I am deeply related: over there, I was raised, experienced love for the first time, discovered humanist and existential traditions, and learnt to be passionate about life. It is always important to be connected to one’s roots in one way or another, to be aware of where we come from so we can be clearer about where we would like to go.

On my arrival in London as a postgraduate medical student to train in child and adolescent psychiatry, I was privileged to meet and learn from John Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1988) and to have him as my supervisor and mentor at the Tavistock Clinic, during the last six years of his prolific life. From him, I learned that attachment makes life more meaningful, as one of the three pillars of human existence and survival, together with food and sexuality.

I was also fortunate to train as a group analyst, which provided me with a highly democratic approach to therapy and with a good understanding of the group nature of humanity. Group Analysis is not only a form of psychotherapy, but also a creative and democratic way of understanding humankind and mind, interpersonal and group relations, and world events.

When I reached the top of my profession and became Head of Medical Psychotherapy Services in Brent, my team and I were able to develop a group-analytic culture to assessment, management and treatment, for which we had to explore the individual and group attachment history of our patients, as well as their group identities and social circumstances. And we came to the conclusion that there cannot be secure individual attachment without group attachment.

As I gradually matured as a person, a professional and a citizen, I increasingly developed a group-analytic perspective that goes beyond the consulting room, to explore and address issues in the political and social arena.

In this article, I shall critically explore two major events and processes; one occurred in Spain in the distant past, the other in the UK recently. Both made me study and reflect upon possible influences of unresolved traumatic experiences on politics and on democracy. Indeed, the personal is political and the group is political.

When I was 24

The news froze my heart. It was 23 February 1981, a date I do not wish to remember. I couldn’t believe what I was watching on the BBC: Lieutenant Colonel Tejero and his henchmen assaulting the Spanish Parliament in Madrid!

I was on vacation in Brighton (in the south coast of England) doing a crash course in English at Inlingua, as part of a plan to move to London for my specialist psychiatric training, having recently qualified as a medical doctor in Spain. I was 24 and the only Spaniard in a group of young professionals at this language school.

My classmates and the teachers bombarded me with questions about the coup. I didn’t know what or how to respond; I was feeling shocked and ashamed of my country of birth. I knew I would not go back to Spain, in the circumstances, and felt deeply saddened that I may not see family and friends for a long while.

Eventually, with a twist of pain on my face, I said to the group that I would not return to Spain under another dictatorship. The director of the language school called me to his office and advised that I should reconsidered such a drastic decision:

“Arturo, be pragmatic. If you go back to Spain, as a thriving junior doctor, they won’t get you.”

Having survived General Franco’s dictatorship, which had arrested some of my emotional development during the first 18 years of my life, I thought the director missed the point. However, I had a strange feeling that there was some double meaning in his remark and that, perhaps, he was teasing me. Certainly, part of me perceived him as slightly humorous, as if the coup were not serious enough.

Listening later to the BBC world service on the radio, I was relieved to learn that King Juan Carlos, with his brave intervention on Spanish TV, poured oil on troubled waters and decisively helped abort the coup. Yes, of course, he risked his own head. But, unlike King Charles I of England in 1649, he survived and his country with him. Juan Carlos was portrayed as a hero, and I freely associated that with the lyrics of a 1977 track from the mercurial music icon David Bowie:

“We can be heroes, just for one day.”

Indeed, ex-King Juan Carlos is now a villain and an embarrassment to his country for alleged corruption. In the current circumstances and on the wake of the 40^th anniversary of the attempted coup this year, a theory that he was a conspirator has been resurrected.

However, distinguished historians like Ángel Viñas (2019) and Paul Preston (2019) have stated that such a theory does not make sense. It would have been a suicidal act on his part. There was no civilian support for the coup. And the overwhelming victory of the Socialist Party in the 1982 general election showed that democracy in Spain was irreversible.

Looking back, Juan Carlos had employed considerable skill, tact and charm, towards restoring democracy in the previous five years. He found his way to dismiss the Francoist Arias Navarro as Prime Minister and to appoint Adolfo Suárez, a reasonably acceptable reformer who legalised political parties, including the communist party, held elections and introduced a constitution (massively approved by the people in a referendum) that gave real power to parliament.

Having said that, it is also important to remember that, in order to wear the crown, Juan Carlos had also condoned Franco’s dictatorship for many years – and his grandfather King Alfonso XIII had unequivocally supported a military dictatorship in the 1920s, before being dethroned by the Spanish Second Republic in 1931.

All these events were no doubt part of Juan Carlos’s internal world. I gather he must have suffered some degree of psychological damage and, perhaps, he may have been prepared to do almost anything, in order to survive. I wonder about the possible wounds on his psyche, after the separation from his parents and primary attachment figures, as a young child, in order to be educated as a prince and future King by Francoist handlers…

And I can’t help thinking that, in the above context, and during the 1956 Easter holiday in Portugal, two princes of Spain went into a bedroom with a loaded gun. Only one came out alive. Juan Carlos was 18 at the time, and his brother Alfonso was 14. Who pulled the trigger?

We may never know, unless Juan Carlos decided to make a disclosure or a deathbed confession. The official version of the Francoist regime and of the Royal Household was (and still is) that, as Prince Alfonso was cleaning a revolver with his brother, a shot went off which hit him in the forehead and killed him within a few minutes. How on earth can someone be cleaning a gun which is loaded?

The Francoist regime did not investigate the circumstances of Alfonso’s death, and the tragic event was quickly buried under the carpet. The shooting was also played down in the media, as a chance accident. However, fratricide is not an uncommon occurrence; as a psychiatrist, I have to ask myself about the possible role that past trauma and sibling rivalry might have unconsciously played in the mind of Juan Carlos behind closed doors.

Whatever may have really happened, Juan Carlos must have felt profoundly traumatised by the death of his younger and only brother. Was he really ever able to get over it? I can hypothesise that the tragedy has been the elephant in his mental room, whilst he gradually developed a keen interest in killing elephants at his luxury (and romantic) safari breaks. But that is another story.

When I am 64

I can confidently state that Brexit is the most depressing political event I have directly witnessed in my adult life. So far, I have been unable to identify anything sane or beneficial for ordinary people in the United Kingdom (UK) coming out of this dubious political process – despite the fact that British democracy is one of the oldest and most advanced parliamentary democracies in the world.

By and large, Brexit has been defined as a liberation from the oppressive and undemocratic European Union (EU), and as a moment of democratic truth, above all by those who supported it (Barnett, 2018).

The conservative MP Rachel Maclean went further than that and described the Brexit process as “the greatest democratic exercise in British history” (Maclean, 2019). Other authors have pointed out that the referendum was a populist moment – conspicuously exploited by an elite conservative ruling class, who made massive donations to the Brexit cause (Clegg, 2017).

Of course, Brexit thinking and feeling did not appear overnight but evolved from complex large-group and global-group dynamics, linked to a constellation of historical and cultural contributing factors. Among these, during the Brexit referendum campaign, research consistently found immigration to be the public’s number-one issue of concern. The migratory crisis reactivated English nationalism and dreams about absolute imperial sovereignty (Esler, 2019).

These combined factors had a pernicious influence on how the franchise was defined under the strong pressure of the pro-Brexit (and largely xenophobic) lobby within the Conservative Party, which held a parliamentary majority (Ezquerro, 2019, 2020).

The democratic quality of the June 2016 referendum was taken for granted and, indeed, the Brexit mandate has been based on the will of 51.9% of the voters, which represent just 26% of the UK population. On a rigorous scrutiny, however, the referendum failed key tests on democratic legitimacy, such as human rights and the definition of the franchise.

The UK Referendum Act 2015 intentionally excluded 3.3 million settled EU citizens, permanent residents in the UK, from the franchise. They were deliberately segregated and excluded from exercising a democratic right (Goodhart, 2017). They were treated as an unintegrated stranger group, as a feared foreign body, despite the fact that so many of them have contributed to British society for 20, 30, 40, 50 years or more.

This carefully calculated exclusion of an entire group of people has been largely taken as a non-event by the British press, let alone the Government; which resonates with the exclusion of women, slaves, ethnic minorities and illiterate or disabled people over centuries of defective and discriminatory democracy.

As a group analyst, I also have to say that the insidious marginalization of fully-settled EU citizens in the UK conflicts with a group-analytic ethos that is profoundly integrative, inclusive and democratic at its core. I cannot possibly be a bystander and remain silent; it would be a way of colluding with a pact of forgetting. It is necessary to go beyond the comfort of the group-analytic circle (small, medium or large) and to raise serious questions about the democratic legitimacy of the Brexit referendum.

Without any meaningful debate or explanation, non-British Commonwealth citizens were allowed to vote in the referendum but non-British EU citizens were not (with the exception of nationals from Ireland, Malta and Cyprus), in what appeared to follow a kind of old British Empire mentality.

Overall, the eligibility rules were similar to the rules applying to UK general elections. But not quite: Members of the House of Lords as well as Gibraltarians and some other Commonwealth citizens, who cannot vote at the general election, were purposely added to the electorate in the 2015 Referendum Act. Interestingly, more than one million British citizens living abroad for 15 years or more were not allowed to vote, as they were assumed to have broken their attachment to British society or to be sufficiently detached from it.

In terms of logical and consistent thinking, it should have at least followed, EU citizens living in the UK for 15 years or more must have had enough of an attachment to British society for their right to vote to be respected. But no, they were disenfranchised as a matter of fact – regardless of the commitment they had shown to British society as permanent residents.

But, hang on a minute; surely, you can’t have it both ways. To which the brains of the Referendum Act responded that, indeed, they would have it both ways; why not? Democracy: what democracy?

Analysis of the referendum results, trying to keep the whole political community in mind, has been infrequent. Moore (2016) has been one of the few exceptions. In How Britain voted at the EU referendum, he looked into the results (as obtained by YouGov following the actual vote) and explored some of the variables that related to education, gender and age groups.

According to Moore (2016), it is revealing that 64% of people over 65 voted in favour of Brexit, while 71% of young people between the ages of 18 and 25 voted to stay in the EU. There was another split in terms of educational attainment: 70% of voters with only GCSEs (basic secondary education) or lower voted Leave, while 68% of voters with a university degree and 90% of British academics voted Remain. Interestingly, the majority of women (who are generally more sensible than men) voted Remain.

Furthermore, Kaldor (2016) questioned the referendum principle of deciding on a simple majority. According to her, in most democratic countries with a written constitution, changes of this magnitude require a bigger and more qualified majority as well as the agreement of the regions.

It is salient that the majority of UK distinct polities voted Remain by huge percentages: 96% in Gibraltar, 62% in Scotland, 60% in London, 56% in Northern Ireland. Leave only won in England (53%) and in Wales (52%).

However, the case of Wales has a curious twist: although 52% voted Leave, the majority of the native Welsh population voted Remain. The explanation is that about a quarter of the population is English-born (having settled in Wales over the years, often after retirement) and voted Leave massively. Brexit is fundamentally an English, rather than British, coup (Barnett, 2019).

Remarkably, the EU turned a blind eye to the removal of the legitimate voting rights of its citizens. In 1993, the Maastricht Treaty had created a common European citizenship, which granted a new political and legal status – and was incorporated into UK law. The legal principle (corroborated in the 2009 Lisbon Treaty) says that EU citizens have full and equal rights, and shall not be discriminated against on grounds of nationality, in any of the member states (Hobolt and de Vries, 2016).

Freedom of movement and establishment became one of the cornerstones of the EU: those citizens who permanently move to another country within the EU have a right to be treated as equals to the native citizens of the host country – without having to naturalise or to acquire a new nationality (Schmidt, 2012; Kröger, 2019).

The Scottish Independence Referendum Act 2013 did respect this right (EU citizens were included in the franchise); the UK Referendum Act 2015 did not. This resulted in an irreparable damage: EU citizenship was not converted into full legal and political membership – and freedom of movement was unlawfully maligned.

The massive and unjustifiable disenfranchisement of EU citizens in the Brexit referendum does not correspond to that which should be expected from a society that prides itself on being democratically mature, inclusive and fair-minded.

Brexit uncovered that, in contempt of the laws, millions of people were treated as non-full members of British society, since they were obligated to perform all the duties but unable to exercise all the rights. This dynamic of group exclusion has been described by different political analysts in different ways: partial citizenship (Milanovic, 2018), invisible citizenship (Heyvaert, 2018), precarious citizenship (Jablonowski, 2019) and citizens of no-where (Delesalle, 2018).

The day-to-day reality is that EU citizens settled in the UK are an essential part of British society, as they contribute with their work, their creativity and their taxes to its welfare and prosperity. However, the 2015 Referendum Act employed a group dynamic of mistrust and rejection of the stranger group, and ignored fundamental principles of group membership and of group attachment. To put it mildly, that was a democratic irregularity; which is also foreign to group-analytic values and culture.

Strangely enough, in parallel with the segregation of EU citizens, there was a selective exclusion of British citizens residing abroad coupled with a selective inclusion of non-British citizens from Commonwealth countries. This resulted in a paradoxical definition of the franchise, which could be seen as under-inclusive and over-inclusive at the same time. The UK Referendum Act 2015 followed neither a straightforward citizenship-basis nor a residence-basis. Like other miscarriages in the history of democracy, that was an arbitrary anomaly which cannot be justified in terms of democratic legitimacy.

Concluding reflections

The Spanish Civil War was in many ways an expression of unresolved national trauma (Arias González, 2013; Viñas, 2019; Preston, 2019). Interestingly, Brexit has been conceptualised as an “all-out war” (Shipman, 2016), as a “very British civil war” (Barnett, 2019) and as the “uncivil war”. The latter is a term that was coined in a drama-film directed by Toby Haynes (2019), based on first-hand accounts from key players in the Leave and Remain camps; which showed on UK Channel 4 in early January 2019.

In some way, mutatis mutandis, Brexit resembles the English Civil War – in which families and friends found themselves split between King and Parliament, during nine years (1642-1651) of ferocious conflict, which saw King Charles I beheaded for treason. In the ongoing uncivil war, during the three years that followed the referendum, over 1.6 million relationships ended and a further million people cut off a relative or a friend because of differences over Brexit (Barnett, 2019).

Within the wider European context, the UK has had a longstanding reputation of mature parliamentary democracy. Sylvie Kauffmann, editorial director of Le Monde, had always admired British parliamentary life and considered that it

“was the very Rolls-Royce of liberal democracy” (Kauffmann, 2019).

However, as the Brexit saga unfolded, she changed her mind:

“that Rolls-Royce looks more like a dodgem” (Kauffmann, 2019).

Although Brexit is essentially an English (rather than British) coup, in terms of larger group dynamics, it can also be interpreted as a failure of the EU itself. Immigration is not only a UK problem but a gigantic ethical miscarriage of the EU as a whole. If a group of more than 500 million Europeans cannot absorb two or three million underprivileged migrants, how can the EU overcome other global group challenges?

Covid-19 and the rise of artificial intelligence are creating enormous social and economic problems – far bigger than the arrival of a few million refugees, after a desperate journey to the shores of affluent Europe, or the free movement of workers from Eastern Europe to the UK.

Indeed, the massive eastern enlargement of 2004 significantly increased inequality between member states within the EU, but the treaties allowed for long transitional arrangements to accommodate change. Isn’t it paradoxical that the UK was the only big EU country not to use the transitional-period break, but to open its labour market to Eastern Europeans seven years before the EU required it? Furthermore, in 2007, the UK pushed hard to allow Romania and Bulgaria to join the EU, initially even against the wishes of the European Commission!

As the UK gave Eastern European workers instant access, in less than four years since their accession to the EU, more than one million moved to the UK, the second wealthiest European country after Germany. The English language was indeed an additional pull factor. By the time of the 2016 Brexit referendum, there were nearly four million non-British EU citizens living in the UK (over half of them from Eastern Europe), up from less than one million before the eastern enlargement of 2004.

One of the lies of the Leave campaign for the referendum was that many of these EU migrants were coming to the UK to have access to benefits and to exploit the welfare system. The reality is quite different.

In contrast to many British retired expatriates moving to sunny Spain and other Southern European countries, often making a comprehensive use of local public health resources, the immense majority of EU migrants into the UK are young, healthy, come to work hard, pay their taxes, contribute to the local economy and support local public services.

Through a thorough piece of research, Tim Shipman (2016) found out that EU citizens contribute per year £20 billion more in taxes than they take out in benefits. The facts are clear: the overwhelming majority of EU citizens in the UK are net contributors, not freeloaders. And, yet, they were deprived of their right to cast a vote about their future, while the EU (disregarding its own treaties) was looking the other way.

We may conclude that a democratic process, such as the Brexit referendum, in which a whole group of adult citizens within the same political community are unlawfully excluded and marginalised, cannot be legitimate enough.

Conflict of interest: The author has received no money for this article, and declares no other conflict of interest apart from advocating freedom of movement and critically supporting the European Union project.

Acknowledgment: María Cañete.

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Arturo Ezquerro
Spanish-born, British consultant psychiatrist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and group analyst, who has worked in London since 1984. He is a senior assessor and trainer at the Institute of Group Analysis, and former Head of NHS Medical Psychotherapy Services in Brent. He is an honorary member of the World Association of International Studies and of the International Attachment Network, for promoting an attachment-based ethos in the study of human development, group relations and clinical work. He was supervised by John Bowlby at the Tavistock Clinic during the last six years of his life (1984-1990). He frequently collaborates with the media, and has over 80 publications in five languages, including Relatos de Apego (Psimática) and Encounters with John Bowlby: Tales of Attachment (Routledge).
arturo.ezquerro@ntlworld.com