Debate: 'the Anglos caused the decline' and the syllogism of inferiority

Hispanism blames the Anglos and opens up

An empire that loses is not an inferior empire. That is the logical trap that opens the discussion: if it is enough for the Anglos to act according to their nature for Spain to end up below them, then the conclusion that imposes itself is that Spaniards would be inferior by nature. The syllogism, formulated as a provocation, has been enough for the conversation to turn into a reckoning over who is responsible for the narrative of Spanish imperial decline and for the so-called Black Legend.

The first response is blunt: the Black Legend has nothing to do with the decadence or with the fall of the empire. What is maintained is that it was the envious — Anglos, French, Dutch — who built that distorted image of Spain, not those who caused its material decline. The distinction matters: propaganda is one thing, the economy another.

Was American independence a blow or a relief?

Here the ground shifts. Against the thesis that the Anglos made the American territories independent through Freemasonry, the opposite argument appears: it was Spain that made the territories of America independent from the Anglos, and as a result the UK economy took off because those territories were anchors. American independence is read, from this perspective, not as a net loss but as the release of a burden.

The counterargument is not long in coming: the Industrial Revolution reached the whole world, but only a few countries took advantage of it. The fact that the UK did not have to invest in maintaining colonies allowed it to redirect that capital inward. And on the Spanish empire itself an uncomfortable nuance is added: Spain bled itself for centuries by expatriating trained, talented and enterprising people to develop a new continent. The empire fell; what benefited was Spain.

Short-termism and the suffrage of 1810

Another line of analysis shifts the focus from the external to the internal. The great empires thought in the long term, and that horizon was broken when in 1810 it became possible to vote in Spain: short-termism took hold, internal divisions weakened the country and bribing relevant factions of society became cheap. The world was served up on a platter to the Anglos. The farewell letter of Amadeo of Savoy is even cited as a key document of that fracture.

The response to that argument is harsh: the British economy took off because of the Industrial Revolution, not because of American independence, and no empire benefits from its own collapse. The discussion grows bitter and turns into cross-accusations of ignorance and of turncoatism.

The fifth column and the enemy within

One current holds that the decline cannot be explained without internal betrayal. A country can defeat external enemies, but not a fifth column embedded to the marrow. From this trinc a recipe bordering on the radical: execute that ruling class, seize its assets for high treason and sabotage, dissolve and prosecute the security forces and the Armed Forces for having shown, according to this thesis, that they were not at the service of the nation.

Another variant points to the aristocratic and bourgeois elites as responsible for the fall, and calls for a pending revolution that figures of opposite signs already announced. The diagnosis is repeated in different wrappings: the enemy was within.

Miscegenation as an explanation for the decline

One of the harshest theses of the exchange holds that the empire went to ruin when the Spaniards who arrived in America began to mix with populations of low IQ, while the Anglos, according to this reading, were smarter in not mixing and in bringing women from Europe. It is a statement that appears in the material without any documentary support and that the article records for what it is: an attributed opinion, not a fact.

At the opposite extreme, the empire is described as a hotchpotch of slaves and descendants mixed with the indigenous population and a few peninsular administrators, with no real control or advanced civilization. The Black Legend, from that trench, would be deserved because of the slave trade and its outsourcing to the French, the Portuguese and, later, the English after the Treaty of Utrecht.

Bourbons, geography and the Industrial Revolution

There are less epic and more material explanations. The decadence starts with the bad government of the Bourbons from 1700, the Industrial Revolution is properly British and drives English trade and navy, and geography played against the South American economy. It is also recalled that slavery was practised by everyone at that time, and that in the north of America more was done than in the south.

Against the epic of victimhood, another current defends that Hispanism seeks to rebuild the cultural and social unity of the Hispanidad, one of the high points of civilization, and that the image of retrogression is imposed from the Anglo, the French and the Lutheran. The dispute, therefore, is not about the past: it is about the present.

Corruption as a structural burden

A cross-cutting diagnosis points to excessive corruption as the underlying problem: the Anglos also steal, but with another ethic and with greater social control, while in the Hispanic sphere misappropriation would have become normalized. That weakens any system, drains resources and ends in collapse. It is not a problem of national character, but of institutions and of social tolerance of plunder.

The discussion closes, for now, with an uncomfortable observation: the Anglos have no opinion about the Spaniards; they couldn't care less. The enemy that is supposed to be omnipresent is not even looking. And there, with the initial syllogism unresolved, everything remains.