Desde la época moderna, las relaciones entre países han estado determinadas por factores comerciales, geopolíticos y militares. Los distintos Estados han recurrido a su desarrollo económico, a su fuerza armada o a las capacidades negociadoras de sus líderes para influir en otras regiones y conseguir una buena posición en el terreno internacional. De ahí que la vieja historia diplomática haya prestado mayor atención a los flujos mercantiles, al poderío bélico de cada potencia y a los contactos que mantenían sus elites políticas. Sin embargo, otros aspectos como la educación, las redes intelectuales o las transferencias de ideas desempeñaron un papel destacado en este ámbito a lo largo de la pasada centuria. En consecuencia, la historiografía especializada ha vuelto su mirada a estos elementos culturales, que han pasado a ocupar un lugar central en el relato histórico.

A principios del siglo XX, la cultura comenzó a ser un componente relevante de las relaciones internacionales. Los servicios diplomáticos de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica y de muchos países europeos se percataron de que las campañas de propaganda cultural eran muy útiles para obtener el apoyo de otras potencias o facilitar sus contactos con ellas. En este contexto, Francia y el Reino Unido fundaron corporaciones educativas que tenían una clara proyección exterior: el Institut Français (1922) y el British Council (1934). El equivalente español de estas organizaciones, el Instituto Cervantes, fue creado mucho más tarde, en 1991.

En estas páginas, hemos analizado la historia de la Anglo-Spanish Society y el papel que desempeñó en las relaciones entre el Reino Unido y España durante el siglo XX. A pesar de ser una organización apolítica, los gobiernos de ambos países trataron de controlarla porque atribuyeron cierta utilidad a la cultura en el terreno diplomático. En una primera época, esta institución sirvió a los intereses de la Foreign Office y tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, pasó a estar controlada por la Embajada española en Londres.

La historia de esta asociación es un buen ejemplo de la función que la cultura ha ejercido en el ámbito de las relaciones internacionales desde principios de la pasada centuria. Nadie discute la importancia de la labor que el Instituto Cervantes, el British Council o el Institut Français realizan en la actualidad. Estas entidades no sólo enseñan lenguas, sino que acercan mundos distintos y, en ocasiones, lejanos, llegando a cumplir una misión diplomática mayor de la que cabría suponer. Aunque los parámetros impiden una comparación seria, organismos como la Anglo-Spanish Society pueden ser considerados como precedentes de este tipo de corporaciones.

En la actualidad, los Estados han cambiado sus políticas de exteriores, incluyendo un gran número de estrategias en consonancia con un mundo globalizado. Los gobiernos son más conscientes de la relevancia que la cultura tiene en las relaciones entre países y se han dotado de varias instituciones para intervenir en el ámbito internacional. Muchas naciones tienen oficinas para promover su propia imagen o, por utilizar un término que está en boga, su marca. Sin embargo, y en un primer momento, la asociación que se analiza en estas páginas fue promovida por la Foreign Office y, aunque contaba con presencia española e hispanoamericana, estuvo controlada por los británicos.

Como hemos visto, un grupo de británicos creó la Anglo-Spanish Society durante la Gran Guerra para contribuir a la consecución de los objetivos estratégicos y comerciales de su gobierno. Eso sí, esta sociedad sólo sirvió parcialmente a esos intereses, ya que, aunque fue ideada para hacer frente al influjo alemán sobre la opinión pública española, su incidencia en España fue escasa. Con su fundación también se perseguía mejorar las relaciones mercantiles con los países hispanoamericanos.

Antes del siglo XX, las relaciones hispano-británicas estuvieron determinadas por estereotipos malintencionados, como la Leyenda Negra o la Pérfida Albión. Estas opiniones adversas tenían su origen en los enfrentamientos que los monarcas ingleses e hispánicos mantuvieron por cuestiones religiosas, comerciales o de otra índole desde la Edad Moderna. Lejos de desaparecer como lágrimas en la lluvia, estas imágenes de enemistad resistieron el paso del tiempo, llegando a coexistir con otras más positivas que surgieron progresivamente en época contemporánea.

A lo largo del siglo XIX, varios acontecimientos pusieron en cuestión esa rivalidad del pasado y dieron lugar a un escenario de entendimiento e incluso de admiración mutua. La Guerra de la Independencia y la resistencia de la población frente a la ocupación francesa provocaron una “hispanofilia súbita” en Albión que derivó en una “revisión completa” de la Leyenda Negra. A partir de entonces, esa oscura y negativa percepción convivió en Gran Bretaña con otras imágenes de los españoles que, si bien eran más románticas y atrayentes, no dejaron de ser idealizadas.

Otros dos procesos históricos afectaron a la percepción que se tenía de España en aquellas islas. El primero fue generado por la vuelta al trono de Fernando VII en 1823, que obligó a numerosos políticos e intelectuales españoles a exiliarse en Londres. Estos refugiados desarrollaron actividades literarias en la capital inglesa que acercaron a los londinenses a la cultura hispánica. El segundo fue el constante flujo de viajeros y escritores británicos que visitaban la Península Ibérica: Lord Byron, George Borrow o Richard Ford. En resumen, la guerra, los exiliados liberales y el movimiento romántico permitieron que una idea diferente de los españoles fuera extendiéndose por Gran Bretaña.

Asimismo, la mayoría de las colonias que España tenía en América alcanzó su independencia en el primer tercio del siglo XIX. Estos movimientos emancipadores fueron apoyados por los británicos, que aprovecharon la coyuntura para intensificar su actividad política y comercial en la zona. A finales de aquella centuria, numerosas empresas anglosajonas se instalaron en algunos países de Hispanoamérica, explotando sus recursos mineros, controlando su transporte naviero, construyendo sus infraestructuras y creando sus sectores financieros.

Introduction

‘Mestizaje’ and ‘creolization’ are parallel and competing terms. Both refer to processes and discourses of mixture, racial and cultural, emanating from colonial encounters in the Americas. Moreover, mestizaje also refers to nineteenth- and twentieth-century political projects with varying degrees of institutionalization. Mestizaje is an ambitious idea that aims to represent the inauguration of modernity to which the contact between Europe, America, Asia and Africa gave precedent. It is, simultaneously, a living and shifting process of racial miscegenation, cultural transformation and nation-building. Mestizaje has moved beyond the realm of linguistics, culture and identity of creolization, to include a top-down official political dimension that has rewritten national histories in order to cohere nation states in Latin America.

The focus of this chapter is not to make yet another rhetorical comparison of the differences or similarities of each term and propose either a new term or emphasize the benefits or disadvantages of creolization against mestizaje or vice versa (Kraidy, 2005; Cohen and Toninato, 2010; Baron and Cara, 2011; Lionnet and Shi, 2011). While we favor mestizaje as it speaks to the Latin American context and at least parts of the Caribbean experience, we want to concentrate on the consequences of official processes of institutionalization of mixture and offer this analysis to the propagators of a political project of European creolization.

However, there are four assumptions around both terms that are worth clarifying. First, we are particularly interested in exposing Europe to the Mexican experience of mestizaje as in both contexts we are dealing with local practices, identities and histories constantly encountering migrating peoples from all over the globe. This is because, on the one hand, creolization can be limiting. Creolization focuses on African and European presences on Caribbean soil creating a distinctive colonial and postcolonial ‘third space’ (Hall, 2010). It presupposes a land empty of the Indigenous population and does not include a history of Asian indentureship. Both these latter groups figure far less in Anglophone and Francophone theorizations of creolization than the master European and African signifiers. On the other hand, historically, mestizaje concerns the interaction between Europeans and Africans with the local Amerindian peoples (in a simultaneous Iberian dialogue with Asia, see Gruzinski 2002; 2010).

Después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, las relaciones hispanobritánicas no pasaban por su mejor momento. A pesar de su teórica neutralidad, la España de Franco había respaldado al ejército alemán mediante el envío de la División Azul y se había alineado ideológicamente con el Estado fascista italiano. De ahí que la victoria de los aliados en 1945 condenara al régimen dictatorial español a un aislamiento diplomático que era claramente perjudicial para su futuro. En 1946, los gobiernos de Francia, de los Estados Unidos y del Reino Unido certificaban que España no podía ingresar en la ONU, dando lugar a un bloqueo internacional que sólo comenzó a romperse a principios de la década de 1950.

Hasta que se produjo el ingreso de España en las Naciones Unidas en 1955 y desde antes del final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la estrategia de Franco estuvo centrada en alejarse del apoyo dado a Hitler, lo que llevó a Ramón Serrano Suñer y a otros camisas azules del régimen a desaparecer de la primera línea política. En el contexto de bloqueo diplomático que España atravesaba, el gobierno franquista estuvo muy interesado en apoyar a cualquier institución que contribuyera a cambiar su dramática posición internacional en el periodo posbélico. Huelga decir que los intentos de reorganización de la Anglo-Spanish Society, cuya mediación era más necesaria que nunca, fueron muy bien vistos por las autoridades españolas.

Así fue. En la inmediata posguerra, se constituyó una pequeña agrupación en Londres que fue conocida como “Friendship with Spain” y que trató de sustituir a la sociedad que Henry Thomas y Edward Wilson habían suprimido en 1947. Sin embargo, esta nueva organización también se disolvió y pasó el testigo a otra más duradera que comenzó a gestarse en 1950: The Anglo-Spanish League of Friendship (que si bien tenía diferente nombre, contaba con los mismos promotores). Aunque esta última asociación nacía con un espíritu independiente, acabó entrando en la órbita de la Embajada de España en el Reino Unido. La diplomacia española creyó que la Liga era un medio inmejorable para hacer propaganda del régimen de Franco en territorio británico, pero estas intenciones chocaron con el apoliticismo de sus fundadores.

Introduction

This chapter examines the ways in which migrant Caribbean diasporas inscribe critical paradoxes of migrancy and citizenship in contemporary Europe, concentrating on displaced inhabitants of French Caribbean overseas departments who were made citizens of France in 1946. The resulting diasporic intersections give rise to critical transformations of Frenchness and Caribbeanness engendered by the pressing presence in the metropoles of communities spawned by these migration-based demographic shifts. This French Caribbean-derived metropolitan community has become virtually 1 percent of the French hexagonal population, and their cultural and identitarian hybridities increasingly destabilize our current notions of nationality and belonging.

At the 2007 conference ‘Creolizing Europe’ at the University of Manchester, I worked through the notion of creolization to discuss the project I was then working on, the Maison des civilisations et de l'unité réunionnaise (MCUR), a museum that was scheduled to open in Reunion Island. Rewriting this contribution, with the distance that a series of events has produced, I approach the question differently. Indeed, in the meantime, there was an important crisis in the French overseas departments and the museum project I had worked on was brutally stopped. In December 2008 and January 2009, there were strikes throughout the French ‘outre-mer.’ The most important one happened in Guadeloupe under the leadership of a new public figure, Elie Domota, who was able to articulate the society's long discontent and to mobilize practically the entire population with the movement, Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon (LKP), an alliance of unions, associations, artists, and intellectuals. The strikes constituted the greatest mobilization since the 1970s and many intellectuals participated in the debates. History did not seem to stammer, it looked as if there was hope. Ideas developed by anticolonial thinkers and activists in the French post-colonies, by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant on economic exploitation, alienation and postcoloniality were reinterpreted in the light of social, cultural and economic mutations although the territories were still caught in the web of dependencies on France and the continuous absence of real power of decision, the impotence of local politicians, the lack of justice, the rate of youth unemployment. The États généraux de l'outre-mer (EGOM) – a large consultation initiated by the French government – and local political contradictions impeded the momentum of a new postcolonial political movement, one that sought to imagine what kind of relationship could be possible between postcolonial territories and the French Republic.

Introduction

Its reputation once based on its image as a thriving industrial center, Manchester, England has become just as well known for giving rise to punk and ‘new wave’ music in the 1980s and for being the post-millennial, commercial epicenter of gay life in the north-west of England. In 2003, Manchester was deemed the most ‘bohemian’ and ‘creative’ city, according to the ‘Boho (or Bohemian) Britain Index’ of forty UK cities. The Boho Index uses three indices – ethnic diversity, proportion of gay residents, and number of patent applications per head – as key indicators of the city's economic health, and Manchester scores high in all these areas. For instance, the city is home to a number of higher educational institutions, including Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and the University of Manchester, the largest university in the United Kingdom. Moreover, Manchester's Gay Village, named for its many gay bars, shops and restaurants, enabled it to become the first British city to host Europride in 2003. Finally, Manchester has a diverse ethnic population, evidenced most conspicuously in the commercialized spaces of Chinatown and the Curry Mile, an area of the city named for its large number of South Asian restaurants and shops.

In its strategic plan for the city center for the 2004–2007 period, Manchester City Council proudly boasts that Manchester topped the list of the Boho Index in 2003 (Manchester City Council and Manchester City Centre Management Company Ltd, 2003, 6). Urban geographer Steve Quilley (91) further notes that since at least the early 1990s those involved in ‘all aspects of urban regeneration’ adhered to a ‘Manchester script’ that characterized the city as ‘post-modern, post-industrial and cosmopolitan’. As I have argued elsewhere (Patel, 2009), the aforementioned Curry Mile is relatively absent visually and textually in the city's marketing in comparison to the Gay Village. The two spaces are produced as mutually exclusive not only by the city's marketing but the marketing of the restaurants and bars of the two spaces, as well. The Gay Village is given a ‘gay’ (white, middleclass and male) identity, while the Curry Mile is given an ‘ethnic’ (South Asian and heterosexual) one.

Introduction

The notion of creolization explores cultural and linguistic mixing that stems from the encounters of cultures in the same location. It is usually taken to refer to historical colonial and postcolonial experiences in the Caribbean and Latin America. The historical experience and contemporary legacy of creolization in Latin America and the Caribbean is intricately bound up with slavery, settler colonialism, racialized and gendered violence. While the question of how far the term can be applied to other social, geographic and historical contexts is contested (Hannerz, 2002; Hall, 2003a; 2003b; Palmié, 2006; Knorr, 2010), I take some inspiration from the analytical aspects of the concept for exploring the European context of the early twenty-first century. Creolization as transculturation produces an ‘indigenous vernacular space, marked by the fusion of cultural elements drawn from all originating cultures, but resulting in a configuration in which these elements, though never equal, can no longer be disaggregated […] but have been permanently “translated”’ (Hall, 2003a, 31). One analytic aspect of the concept of creolization that I am particularly interested in here is the way in which cultural mixing is understood as productive of notions of belonging to the new locality: ‘creolization was always linked with indigenization’ (Knorr, 2010, 733). While Knorr suggests that creolization encompasses both ethnic and trans-ethnic identifications, and therefore tends to be inclusive (737), I deviate from Knorr who argues for reserving the notion of creolization only for the constitution of finite, distinct, Creole ethnic groups. Instead, the analytic potential of the concept of creolization is that it challenges assumptions of ethnic and cultural boundedness (Hall, 2003a; 2003b). Hannerz (2002, 14) proposes that the concept of creolization is particularly suited to ‘integrate cultural with social analysis’. However, when exploring the concept of creolization in the context of migration to Europe, it is important to be clear that any appreciation of the productive, culturally and socially democratizing aspects of creolization cannot be abstracted from the realities of oppression, violence and genocide.

What follows is a proposal of creolity rather than kinship as a model for comparativist practice. The original proposal was made to Professor Wai Chi Dimock, whose paper is discussed in the body of the chapter. I am a Europeanist (as is Professor Dimock), and I was thinking of Dante and Latin when I crafted this proposal rather than Caribbean-based creolization theory. Having said that, such theory has much to tell us about Dante and Latin itself as well as how it is that a world system such as knowledge, can be altered through the insertion of the question of ‘Creolizing Europe’.

Why should these thoughts be at all useful in thinking of ‘Creolizing Europe’ today? First, because in Dante's understanding of popular Italian as varieties of Creole and his choice of an aristocratic (‘curial’) political Creole as ‘Italian’ we can situate our own project of Creolizing Europe within the beginnings of European nationalisms and nation states. Second, through literature's capacity to inaugurate an ‘experience of the impossible’ (both Freud and Derrida insisted on this, in different ways), our general discussion may give us a way of thinking outside of the requirements of activism in terms of indentitarian politics which tend towards essentialization rather than thinking and acting beyond this in terms of Glissantian creolity.

It must be a Glissantian creolity though that acknowledges the place of capital and class in any theorization as well as a particular view of imperialism. I stumbled on the idea that imperialism was an ‘enabling violation’ at least thirty years ago. Subsequent work willy-nilly located our class, now global, as the beneficiary, not only by birth, but other circumstances as well. I have never been able to think of descriptive arguments for counter- or alternative-modernities as anything but specific to this amorphous ‘class’. Globality and the creolity which this necessitates can save us if we assert that everything now is what ‘modern’ (not counter-, not alternative-) is, and live up to the task of disciplinary revision. This task is not an easy or straightforward one but we must remember that not every ‘European’ invented the steam engine, not every ‘American’ the telephone.

My late wife Marina and I joined the Anglo Spanish Society over forty years ago, when Sir Peter Allen was Chairman. He had been Chief Executive of ICI and was married to the elegant and charming Consuelo Allen, whose family owned the glamorous Embassy Café in Madrid. I became a member of the Council. In those days our Society's main event was a ball held mostly at the Grosvenor House Grand Ball Room in Park Lane. It was a major event in the social calendar attracting between six hundred and a thousand punters. Often Royalty were present. I can remember Prince Edward attending with Princess Elena of Spain and on another occasion Princess Alexandra and her husband, Sir Angus Ogilvy. When the ball took place at Syon House, Prince Charles and Lady Diana graced the occasion.

During the reign of Sir John Russell as Chairman a trip to Madrid was organised by the redoubtable Sheila Stewart, who was a loyal member of the Council of the Society for many years. It was a highly successful venture and included an audience with King Juan Carlos at the Oriente Palace. We were requested to form a square in the audience salon before the King processed around the room shaking hands with all of us one by one before delivering his welcoming address.

Over the years I recall various social events organised by Lady Parker and Lady Lindsay respectively. There was a private viewing at the Royal Academy with suitable live background music and alcoholic encouragement. Then there was another spectacular private viewing at the National Gallery of Spanish sculpture in wood, which Jimmy Burns Marañón arranged after a suitable breakfast at the Garrick Club. I was fortunate to see the exhibition again at the Museo National de Escultura in Valladolid.

While José Puig de Bellacasa was in post as Spanish Ambassador to the Court of St James, a friend of mine, Alan Davis, because a High Sheriff of the City of London, when there were rumors of a proposed state visit to the UK by the King and Queen of Spain.

While anthropologists and cultural historians have related ‘creolization’ to processes of transformation produced by colonial rule, slavery and agrarian capitalism (Mintz, 1996; 2008; 2010; Stewart, 2007), other scholars have explored creolization as an expression of global cultural mixing or as a theoretical proposal reaching beyond the Caribbean region (Cohen, 2007; Cohen and Toninato, 2010; El-Tayeb, 2011, 2014; Gowricharn, 2006; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010, 2011; Hannerz, 1987, 1992, 1996, 2002; Lionnet and Shih, 2011; Mudimbe-Boyl, 2002; Pratt and Rosello, 2007). However, the decolonial epistemological contribution of Caribbean intellectuals (Balutansky and Sourieau, 1998; Britton, 1999; Forsdick and Murphy, 2009; Nesbitt, 2013) – such as C.L.R. James (Balutansky, 1997; King, 2001), Frantz Fanon (1967), Lewis R. Gordon (1997), Eric Williams (1994), Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1971), Walter Rodney (1969), Marcus Garvey (2005), Sylvia Wynter (1989), Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant (1990), Stuart Hall (2003) and particularly Édouard Glissant (1996) – in conceptualizing ‘creolization’ in political, economic, cultural and theoretical terms, has been underestimated in these writings.

Creolizing Europe aims to reverse this tendency by critically interrogating creolization (see in this volume Spivak; Hall; and Vergès) as the decolonial, rhizomatic thinking necessary for understanding the social and cultural transformations set in motion by trans/national dislocations, a Glissantian analytics of transversality and what Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2011; and in this volume) terms ‘transversal conviviality’. In this sense, Stuart Hall's chapter on ‘Créolité and the Process of Creolization’ sets out the theoretical orientation that guides this volume in his challenge to seek out creolization's applicability outside of the Caribbean. Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak's ‘World Systems and the Creole, Rethought’ also addresses the limitation in grasping the theoretical and policy implications of the proposal of creolization. Discussing creolity rather than kinship as a model for comparativist practice, Spivak suggests that we start with Dante's understanding of popular Italian as varieties of Creole and his choice of an aristocratic (‘curial’) political Creole as ‘Italian’, as this will enable us to perceive the beginnings of European nationalisms as grounded on a creolized understanding of themselves while asserting kinship. Engaging with the French-Reunion politics of remembrance, Françoise Vergès's chapter on ‘Creolization and Resistance’ discusses the persistence of politics of oblivion in the former metropoles of colonial power.

Los cambios que se produjeron al frente tanto de la Embajada española en Londres como de la Liga de la Amistad marcaron el inicio de una nueva época en la historia de la asociación. El recién nombrado presidente, John Balfour, planteó una reorganización de la institución para recuperar algunos de sus principios originales, asegurar su estabilidad financiera y limitar su campo de acción a actividades culturales y educativas.

Para ello, convocó una asamblea general que se celebró en el Challoner Club, una agrupación de hombres católicos que había Londres, el 28 de mayo de 1958. Este encuentro fue presidido por Edward Palmer, ya que Balfour estaba fuera del país. Durante la sesión, se alcanzaron varios acuerdos importantes. El primero de ellos consistía en subir las cuotas a todos los socios. A pesar de que se habían recaudado 1.220 libras en la Ball de 1957, los elevados costes de The Quarterly Journal obligaban a adoptar esta medida. La segunda decisión relevante fue la elección de los integrantes del comité ejecutivo, que incluyó a antiguos miembros del mismo y a nuevas caras. Por último, se cambiaron algunos puntos en la constitución de la Liga, la cual, a partir de entonces, pasó a llamarse The Anglo-Spanish Society. De esta forma, se recuperaba parte de la denominación originaria, ya que se suprimía la coletilla de “of the British Empire and Spanish-speaking countries”.

Esta reunión garantizó la continuidad de la sociedad y perfiló el nuevo camino que iba a emprender. En esta etapa, la asociación abandonó cualquier rasgo ideológico y se centró en promover el conocimiento del idioma y de la cultura españolas en el Reino Unido. The Quarterly Journal puso de manifiesto este viraje y empezó a prestar más atención a temas culturales. Su editor requirió la colaboración de eminentes hispanistas británicos, como la del catedrático Alexander Augustine Parker, quien publicó algún artículo en la revista. También se intensificó la relación con otras organizaciones bilaterales como The Anglo-Catalan Society, que había sido fundada en 1954 y tenía una vocación educativa muy marcada.

This carefully researched and meticulous study by Luis G. Martínez del Campo of a hundred years of the British Spanish Society is interesting on many levels.

First, the vissicitudes through which the Society passed during the 20th century – including re-branding, winding up, and then re-branding again – is a good reflection of the turmoil experienced in Europe (and indeed the wider world) during that century.

Secondly, the seemingly anecdotal inspiration that lay behind the foundation of the Society – namely the coincidence of the 3rd centenary of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes – goes to the heart of what the British Spanish Society has been, and is, about. Namely, the cultural baggage that our two countries have accumulated over the years.

Familiar names spring up again and again. Byron, George Borrow, Richard Ford, Unamuno, Dámaso Alonso, Gregorio Marañón – to mention a few figures from the past. Nor will it have escaped notice that some of the most prestigeous contemporary writers on Spain are British – Hugh Thomas, Gerald Brennan, Paul Preston, again to mention but a few.

The fact is that Britain and Spain led the two greatest Empires of the modern era. And perhaps the most important inheritance of all that is that our two languages are now the two most widely spoken languages in the free world.

And it seems to me that the real challenge for the British Spanish Society going forward lies precisely in this area.

It is now the case that English is established as the universal language. As a Brit I am both pleased and proud of that. But equally I am very aware that language carries with it a whole package of cultural values and attitudes. So, unless we want to live in a mono-cultural world, we have a duty to promote both the Spanish language and the cultural values it brings, as they are the only ones that can offer an appropriate counter-poise to an Anglo dominated world.

Hopefully this History of the first 100 years of the British Spanish Society will inspire its members to take up that challenge.