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The Portuguese writer and Nobel Literature laureate Jose Saramago has outraged his compatriots by urging Spain and Portugal to unite in a single country that he proposes to call "Iberia".
Portugal would not lose its identity as part of Spain, Saramago says in his provocative proposal, but would
become an additional autonomous region in a country that already enjoys greatly devolved powers.
"I believe we'll end up as one integrated country ... in which Portugal will be another province of Spain. We would continue to speak Portuguese, and write, think and feel in our own language," the writer predicts in an interview published on the front page of the Lisbon daily Diario de Noticias. Spain consists of various nationalities and languages that coexist, he says, and Portugal's position in Spain would be comparable to that of Catalonia or Galicia.
"Catalonia has its own culture, and is at the same time part of Spain, as is the Basque country and Galicia, so we wouldn't have to become Spaniards," said Saramago, 85, the first writer to receive the Nobel Literature prize for work in Portuguese.
Saramago's proposal flies in the face of the prevailing view that, rather than absorbing new territory, Spain risks splitting apart, a view he dismissed: "The only region in Spain that seeks independence is the Basque country, and no one really believes it."
His prophecy aggravates a longstanding rivalry between the Iberian neighbours who share a frontier but "turn their backs on each other", as the saying goes. Portugal predates Spain by several centuries, and dominated a world trading empire while Spain was a mere patchwork of warring kingdoms; but it still feels overshadowed by its bigger and noisier neighbour. Spain, meanwhile, tends mostly to ignore Portugal.
Saramago's prediction has, unsurprisingly, provoked Portuguese criticism. "It's very easy to hate Portugal from abroad, and more difficult to defend it from abroad, which Mr Saramago is manifestly incapable of doing," railed Antonio Martins de Cruz, a former Portuguese ambassador to Madrid.
The Portuguese have not forgiven their only Nobel laureate for abandoning his homeland. Saramago has described how he quit Portugal after the Lisbon government banned his earthily realist 1991 novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, claiming it was offensive to Catholics. He moved to Lanzarote, in the Spanish Canary Islands, with his Spanish wife, Pilar del Rio.
Saramago's fiction is an intricate combination of comic fantasy and astute political observation. The novel The Stone Raft published in 1996 tells how the Iberian peninsula breaks away from Europe and floats into the Atlantic towards South America seeking cultural identity.
He may be famed as a fabulist, but Saramago has thought out his one-nation proposal in some detail: "We wouldn't be ruled by Spaniards: there would be MPs from both countries in a single parliament representing all the political forces of Iberia. And just as in Spain where each autonomous region has its own regional parliament, we would have ours too."
- INDEPENDENT