Carving up the world

 “We’ll break our trip for one night in Tordesillas,” I was told as we drove out towards Cantabria, in Northern Spain, for a holiday with family.

Tordesillas: a fine place to break a long journey

I had no objection, especially as I understood it was a fine place to visit. It wasn’t till quite some time after we’d got there that I realised that the name of the place should have rung a bell, though it hadn’t. It was the site of a pretty significant incident, and I like to think I know about the history of such events.

It was galling that I hadn’t spotted it at once.

This was the place where the two leading powers of Europe of the time decide to carve up the world between them. 

In today’s Europe, it’s hard to think that it was those two nations that led the way, but that was the way things were back in 1494. Portugal was the first European nation to have started building an overseas Empire. And, just recently, Spain had sent Christopher Columbus out westward across the Atlantic in search of a new route to India. What he actually came across was the colossal double-continent in the way, the lands we now know as the Americas. That had happened only two years earlier: as we all learn as kids, in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

On his return, he called in on Lisbon first and let the Portuguese king, John II, know about his discoveries. Which rather put the cat among the pigeons. After all, the Portuguese had a decree of the Pope, no less, saying that any lands ‘discovered’ south of the Canaries, would be theirs.

Because, of course, the Pope had every authority to make such a dispensation. And the people who actually lived in those places had obviously not discovered them, until Europeans got there.

“Hey, guys,” the new arrivals would say, “consider yourselves discovered.”

“What a relief,” the locals must have replied, “it was such a bore being undiscovered and not really counting for anything in the world.”

Or possibly not.

So here was the upstart Spain – and not even all of Spain, but just one of its two Kingdoms, Castile – poking around in what was obviously south of the Canaries and therefore clearly Portuguese.

The result was the meeting in Tordesillas. On the one hand, there was Isabel Queen of Castile, with her husband, Ferdinand King of Aragon, together the so-called Catholic monarchs of Spain. On the other hand, there was John II of Portugal. Both sides were accompanied by significant people supporting them, but not significant enough for me to remember their names or anything about them.

The decision was to split the world between Spain and Portugal. Any new lands ‘discovered’ to the west of a line of longitude running 270 leagues west of the islands of the Azores would be Spanish, anything east of it Spanish. That wasn’t particularly clear, since no one really agreed how long a league was, nor where in the Azores the measurement should be made from, but hey, it was good enough. It meant that most of what we now know as Eastern Brazil would be Portuguese, which is why modern Brazil speaks its version of that language, while the rest of what was to become Latin America would be Spanish.

Just over ten years later, the Pope endorsed the agreement, giving it divine authority. Or so everyone involved imagined. Or pretended to imagine. 

Ten or so years after that there was a debate about whether the dividing line continued all the way around the world, splitting Asia too between those powers. Further negotiations led to a new division out there as well.

The importance of all these decisions left me a little dumbfounded at not remembering any of it until I saw the monument in the city celebrating the event. That taught me a salutary lesson on how much history I simply don’t know, or have forgotten.

Monument to the Treaty and its main signatories

After all, it was a significant event, what with its papal endorsement and everything. Though perhaps more for what it left out than what it included.

For instance, it only involved Spain and Portugal among the European nations. Portugal was already a declining force. England and Holland were beginning to show the first stirrings of ambition. Meanwhile, there was a rising power that was already snapping at Spain’s heels and destined ultimately to overtake it, in the form of France. None of those nations were mentioned in the Treaty. Not even the Pope’s blessing was going to make those nations keen on accepting a partition of the world between two of their rivals.

Besides, less than a quarter of a century after the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Reformation would split Europe into Catholic and Protestant states. Protestants felt under no obligation whatever to accept the Pope’s authority on any of these matters. So, while Spain and Portugal more or less stuck to the Treaty, everyone else pretty much stuck two fingers up to it.

But, significant though all that is, it leaves out the most striking aspect of all in the grand negotiations at Tordesillas.

They made absolutely not mention whatever of the people who might actually be living in the lands these great powers were carving up between them. The ‘discovered’ people had no say in the negotiations, no rights confirmed by the treaty. Spain and Portugal were given possession of ‘new lands’, but those already living there were given possession of none, least of all their own.

No wonder we’re still having to say ‘Black Lives Matter’ five centuries later.

That aspect was far more eloquently captured by a street mural we came across in the city, than by any monument to the Treaty.

Spain and Portugal carving up the world. While an ‘Indian’ weeps at the rape of her lands

Should we fear Tsipras bearing gifts?

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, the old saying has it. Though what Virgil actually wrote – timeo Danaos et dona ferentes – translates more closely as “I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts.”

The Greeks brought us a gift on Sunday, and it’s certainly dangerous. Will Alexis Tsipras, the new Prime Minister, succeed in his bid to free his compatriots of the scourge of austerity while staying in the EU and even the Eurozone? Or will he throw the whole continent into instability and further crisis?

Tsipras of Syriza: bearing a gift, to be feared – or welcomed?

We simply don’t know. But one thing we learned from the weekend election is that if you create sufficient despair in a people, with a prospect only of more suffering ahead, they will ultimately vote for a change whatever the risks may be. Again and again, I’ve heard Greek voters telling journalists, “in winter, I can’t afford to heat.” 

Why would anyone put up with that indefinitely?

And it would indeed be indefinite. There’s no prospect of Greek recovery yet. The economy has shrunk by a quarter since the international financial collapse of 2008. It is growing now if you ignore the burden of debt repayment, but in the case of Greece, that’s not something you can ignore. The austerity Greeks have suffered for five years has only led to a crippling debt mountain which is beginning to fall due for payment, promising only more dreary pain ahead.

The answer proposed by the EU and the previous Greek government is more austerity. More, in other words, of precisely the same remedy that has failed so far and led to the despair so many feel. More of a remedy which we’ve known, since Keynes, isn’t going to work.

He called it the paradox of thrift. When in debt, the standard reasoning goes, you need to save money to pay off what you owe. That works fine at the level of the individual. But at the level of a nation, it’s a disaster. If we’re all spending less, the economy contracts. People lose their jobs. They stop paying taxes. Government revenues fall. Debts climb.

That’s what’s happened in Greece. It’s happened in Britain too. We’ve had five years of austerity policies. The health service is screaming in pain. Social care has been cut massively at a time when people hope it might take some of the strain off the NHS. Libraries are closing. The education service, for which the government likes to claim all sorts of success, is failing to turn out skilled labour so that the building industry isn’t able to gear up to the challenges ahead – and the housing crisis intensifies.

Meanwhile, the poor are being put to the rack like their Greek counterparts. The unemployed and sick, naturally, but even the working poor whose praises the government likes to sing: tax credits for low earners have been eliminated, assistance for young children gone, assistance from local authorities cut back as those authorities are starved of funding.

Meanwhile, as Polly Toynbee points out, at the opposite end of scale, the top 1% of earners, have done well from austerity – just like their counterparts in Greece. In the run up to the election on 7 May, the Conservative Party is explicitly promising more of the same: cuts that will take state spending down to the level of the 1930s, but £7 billion of tax cuts for the wealthiest.

So what gift have the Greeks given us? A model. An example we might care to follow. An illustration of the fact that one can say no, demand that the wealthy nations help the poorer with a more open hand, and that even within a nation, the rich can shoulder more of the burden to free the poor from some of the suffering.

But we’re told to fear the Greeks with their gifts. Certainly, there’s no guarantee Tsipras will be able to pull off his trick. And if the move to question the received wisdom of the self-serving Right is limited to the south of the continent – perhaps Spain and Portugal alongside Greece – while the wealthier North holds firm, there’s little likelihood that the movement will lead on to success.

But if the rest of us also learn to say no, and if we find leaders prepared to say no with us, the election of Tsipras may turn into a turning point that can transform our lives throughout Europe.

In which case we should all welcome the gifts the Greeks are bearing. Even if they are a little fearsome.

Taking steps to ensure a successful holiday

Back at work after a memorable break in Portugal in Spain.

As I pointed out before, I really enjoyed Portugal. However, one of the things that made the place so charming was that it was so hilly – you get some breathtaking views, but at the cost of breath-shortening climbs. Right from the start, in Lisbon. Flights of steps everywhere. 

Lisbon: getting us in the mood for steps

‘Hilly place,’ I commented at one point, as I paused just before the top of a particularly gruelling climb.

‘Can’t hide anything from you,’ remarked my son Nicky.

Now that’s one of my favourite lines, so getting it thrown back in my face like that underlined one of the less agreeable aspects of ageing parenthood: eventually your kids take over from you and give you as good as they ever got. I used to have a monopoly on cynicism in family, and it’s chastening to have to share it.

Steps in the Moorish castle in Sintra.
Smartarse in the foreground

Funny thing is, the stairs seemed to be everywhere we went in Portugal. Lisbon. Sintra. Lagos. Glorious sights, back-breaking climbs. I increasingly thought of the trip as the ‘step holiday’.

Oh, no. Not again.
Near Lagos. No, not that one. It's in Africa.

Still, the country was worth it. Wonderful place. We’ll have to go back. 

Funnily enough, previously I’d wanted to go to another country first. Another country I’d never visited: Russia. Not quite the same weather as Portugal, I understand, but the languages - don't they sound so similar? ‘Sh’ and ‘awl’ everywhere, all dark ‘l’s and palatisation. I was very tempted to visit another country with such smooth sounds.

But now I’m less keen. Not sure I can handle all those steppes. 

The slavery of the credit ratings

I have to say that my first visit to Portugal lived up to my warmest expectations, and I’d be more than happy to return and get to know the place better. However, a sign we saw on our last day left me feeling uneasy.  

A worrying sign of our times?
Standard and Poor's – what have you done?

Has a proud nation been reduced to reviving a shameful trade? Is this what a credit rating downgrade can do? Will it in any case be enough to haul the Portuguese out of their financial difficulties?

And a question that particularly bothers me – where do they get their stocks from?

Note, by the way, the touch of delicacy: the slave market is shut on Sunday. On the Lord’s Day, we don’t trade in human flesh. Something to admire, surely, in that nod to piety?

Postscript. On a recent News Quiz on BBC Radio 4, Jeremy Hardy commented on Standard and Poor's clean bill of health for Lehman Brothers (the bank went broke three months later). He suggested it was time to rename the credit ratings agency, ‘Substandard and Very Poor’.

Where sex is linked with obligation. And gratitude

George Orwell is perhaps the best known exponent of the idea that language can so deeply affect ideas that someone who can cut certain words out will make certain thoughts impossible. 

It’s a highly dubious proposition – after all, I’ve discovered recently in the course of some translation work, that it’s practically impossible to translate the neat French term ‘acharnement  thérapeutique’ into English, although the idea – of excessive zeal in pursuit of medical treatment of a patient who is unlikely to benefit from it – exists just as much in the English-speaking world and we can think as much about it, or as little, as the French. Lacking the expression, we just use some longer form of words that says the same thing.

Even so, there’s something extremely appealing in the concept of ‘Newspeak’ in Orwell’s 1984 with its ambition to produce a language in which it is actually impossible to think critically about the government. Appealing in the sense of ‘interesting’, that is – I'm not pretending it would be attractive to see it happen. In any case, even if it's hard to believe that it could ever be wholly possible, I can understand why it would stimulate a fine thinker writing in a world which had only been free of Hitler for two years and was still having to live with Stalin.

In any case, at a more limited level, it’s certainly true that linguistic habits can influence thought. That’s what lies behind the move towards ‘political correctness’ which isn’t entirely as laughable as its most outspoken critics suggest. There was something slightly odd about a situation where in English we had titles for women which indicated their marital status, but not for men. In my own lifetime, it has been amusing to see how the word ‘Ms’ has gone from being regarded as a laughable barbarism to being widely accepted.

Orwell - something to the idea that language affects thought?

That kind of gender-specific linguistic usage is just the kind of thing we can perhaps tackle by linguistic means. It’s particularly strong in languages that use grammatical gender, of course, a fact turned to good account by the character of Jim in Truffaut’s masterpiece Jules et Jim, when he summarises the incompatibility between France and Germany with the statement that the Moon is feminine and the Sun masculine in French, while in German it’s the other way round. Not sure how significant that really is, but in the context of the film it feels as though it ought to be.

So it’s been fascinating to discover how something as simple as gratitude is handled in Portugal. Firstly, you don’t offer thanks in this country – you declare yourself to be under an obligation. ‘Obrigado’, I would say. It’s probably quite a good way of thinking of things – gratitude is an obligation, isn’t it?

Interestingly, Danielle would have to describe herself as obrigada. Being an adjective the word agrees with the gender of the subject.

So a Portuguese woman expresses her thanks, and therefore her sense of obligation, differently from men.  Whether that means they honour their obligations differently, and whether the difference applies only to Portugal, I leave it to others, much better qualified than I am, to determine for themselves. 

Portugal struggling to cope with financial horrors

Portugal is the first named in that string of nations with the sad distinction of forming the PIIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain – because they have suffered the dismal fate of being disrespected by those fine people who form the international financial services community.

So it’s interesting to have spent a few days in Lisbon and find out just how massively spirits have been depressed by this shameful state of affairs. Fear and humiliation must inevitably be the overriding emotions of those one meets on every street corner, and indeed what do they have to smile about? Balmy temperatures, sun, picturesque views, Port wine and some great cooking – how can these begin to compensate for having one’s Standard and Poor’s rating downgraded to BBB?

A Lisbon couple struggling to come to terms with the
financial catastrophe besetting their nation

How can  one feel anything but compassion for these poor unfortunates, when one belongs, as I do, to a country still enjoying a AAA rating? Ah, sterling with its power. Oh, David Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne – such strong, sure hands on the national tiller.

The contrast between England and Portugal could hardly be more striking. Indeed the only suprise is why there are ever anything but smiling faces in London.

Postscript. A curious street sign caught my attention in Lisbon.

A hint to George Osborne?

Is the city sending a gentle hint to our Chancellor? ‘A little more largesse, George, might not be out of place?’


That would certainly be in keeping with the spirit of this generous place. Particularly addressing such a mean-minded Chancellor.