Can Spain’s Europhilism last?

‘Suppose a man be carried, whilst fast asleep, into a room where there is a person he longs to see and speak with; and be there locked fast in … he awakes, and is glad to find himself in so desirable company, which he stays willingly in … I ask, is not this stay voluntary? I think nobody will doubt it: and yet, being locked fast in, it is evident … he has not freedom to be gone.’

Happy in a room he cannot leave, the man John Locke imagined during his musings on free will might almost be a metaphor for contemporary Spain in the European Union. Awakening from the long sleep of Franco’s dictatorship, the Spanish people were delighted to find themselves in the EU where they had always wanted to be and where their country is now locked fast into the Eurozone.

So far the worryingly slow, EU-coordinated vaccine rollout has done little to shake confidence in the European project; AstraZeneca, not Brussels, is getting most of the blame.