Nationalism as an infantile disease
I was a young economist at the International Monetary Fund in the mid-1980s, working on the IMF’s Spanish economic team. A group of us would travel to Madrid periodically to consult with the government on their economic policies and to issue reports that identified the main economic challenges facing the authorities and to take a thorough look at what was being done to address them. The early part of that decade had not been an easy period for Spain. Major sectors of the economy (e.g. steel, shipbuilding) were in crisis due to the emergence of lower cost producers in other parts of the world. Economic growth had been anemic and the rate of unemployment was one of the highest in Europe. By the time I joined the Spanish team in 1985 there was a serious program of economic reforms underway that sought to prepare the Spanish economy for its forthcoming entry into the European Community, as it was then called. What impressed me the most during these visits was the extent to which the