Màrius’s World

This article is also available in Catalan with more details provided related to Catalan language, it can be found here.

Last Tuesday, November 11, Màrius, my son, came into the world at the Verge de la Cinta Hospital in Tortosa, a hospital which is part of Catalonia’s public healthcare system.

To commemorate this event, I wanted to record in writing those international hits as well as the relevant data of the last quarter of 2025, in which he was born, that I believe will be relevant in the coming years.

Màrius was born into a stable social and political context in Europe, which allowed for mobility across the continent. I am not certain whether it would have been possible to meet his mother, a Lithuanian, maintain a long-distance relationship with her for a year, and then facilitate her subsequent arrival as an EU immigrant in Catalonia without the mechanisms provided by the European Union. Perhaps I would have met her anyway, and she might still have settled here, albeit with more bureaucratic obstacles, but what I question is whether I would have traveled to Lithuania, where I met her, without the open borders of the Schengen Area, without the common market that facilitated, for example, low-cost flights, or without the Erasmus program, which sparked my interest in meeting people from other European countries.

All of this world, as I see it, is now at risk. When I began writing this article, just over 24 hours had passed since billionaire Elon Musk, owner of the social network X and the world’s richest man, called for the abolition of the European Union, out of anger at the EU’s decision to fine him heavily because X fails to comply with European regulations, specifically the Digital Services Act, marking the first DSA sanction imposed on a large company since its implementation.

Subsequently, the US President, Donald Trump, made public the United States’ national security strategy, in which he made it clear that he no longer shared the same values with Europe and guided US foreign policy purely by geostrategic interest. Of all the criticisms he made, one is particularly relevant: he asserted that the European Union undermines the political freedom and sovereignty of its member states. As if that were not enough, a few weeks later, the US administration decided to bar entry to the US for former European Commissioner Thierry Breton and other European officials responsible for content moderation on X, a decision more reminiscent of Putin’s Russia, which bars European Union politicians from entering Russia, than of a country that had hitherto been an ally.

All of this places us in a scenario very different from what we have experienced and enjoyed over the past 50 years or more. To understand where we are today and where we were in the past, I will compare data from the two countries to which Màrius is connected: Spain, specifically Catalonia, and Lithuania. Regarding Spain, I will focus particularly on the situation at the time of the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, and for Lithuania, I will examine socio-economic evolution since the days of the Baltic Way in 1989, when the country sought to reclaim its freedom from Soviet occupiers.

The newspaper El País published, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death on November 20, 20 charts explaining how Spain has changed since then. I will focus on the data I consider most relevant. Despite the events of October 2017 in Catalonia, Spain is a reference country for rights and freedoms, according to scholars from the V-Dem project. Spain is also a healthier country: in 1975, four years before I was born, life expectancy was 73.5 years, while in 2024 it had risen to 84 years, according to the National Institute of Statistics. Worldwide, only four countries currently have higher life expectancy: Japan, South Korea, Andorra, and Switzerland. However, this increase has been accompanied by a drastic decline in birth rates: people over 65, who represented 10% of the population in 1975, now account for 20%. Spain is also wealthier, with GDP per capita having doubled since 1975, although growth stalled during the 2008 crisis and the 2020 pandemic. Currently, economic growth parallels employment growth, standing out within the eurozone, but this growth has not been accompanied by a reduction in inequality: the Gini index today is similar to that of 1980, around 0.32. Spain is also better educated: since the 1970s, the proportion of adults with higher education has risen from 6% to 31%. It is also more egalitarian, with more women working, 46% of women are employed or seeking work, and 44% of deputies in the Spanish Congress are women. Spain is also more urbanized, experiencing depopulation in rural areas, including in Catalonia, where socio-demographic dynamics differ markedly between the coastal strip from Tarragona to Girona, including the Barcelona metropolitan area, and the interior regions. But of all the data provided by El País, the most concerning to me is that a quarter of young Spaniards consider that, under certain circumstances, an authoritarian regime is preferable to democracy, and almost half are unaware of how poet Federico García Lorca died (He died shot by Francoist troops somewhere near Granada in 1936).

Focusing on Catalonia, one of the main topics of conversation in November and early December 2025 was the territorially disaggregated results of the language use survey for Catalonia for 2023.

In my view, since the population most sensitive to the national question in Catalonia has long been aware that independence is no longer the majority position, neither in Parliament nor in opinion polls, the debate over language has become a focal point for concerns about the direction of Catalan identity.

The serious situation of the Catalan language is linked to a demographic phenomenon increasingly noted in the media: the falling birth rate in Catalonia. In 2024, Catalonia recorded around 1.08 children per woman, a figure that has been declining for 15 years. The decline in natural growth has created a deficit that can only be offset by substantial immigration, unmatched in other neighboring European territories, a phenomenon that began around 2000 and has remained stable. Thus, in 2024, 25% of Catalonia’s population was born outside Spain, compared to only 5% 25 years earlier.

This influx of population has created complex challenges, affecting not only linguistic and cultural integration but also housing and public services. However, studies indicate that given Catalonia’s labor-intensive production system, dependent on low-skilled labor, we cannot forgo immigrant labor if we wish to continue economic growth.

Regarding Lithuania, the transition to its current situation began 15 years later than in Spain. While changes in Spain started after Franco’s death in 1975, the turning point in Lithuania occurred between 1989 and 1991, during the events of the Singing Revolution, which I document in my book La Via Bàltica, published by Saldonar in 2022.

If Spain’s changes have been spectacular, Lithuania’s have been no less so. A 2024 LSE blog article, marking 20 years since Lithuania joined the EU, showed that of all Central and Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004, Lithuania experienced the fastest economic convergence with the EU average, measured in GDP per capita at purchasing power parity. In 2021, amid the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, some media reported that Lithuania had even temporarily surpassed Spain in GDP per capita.

On the negative side, Lithuania exhibits significant disparities in living standards, particularly between the capital, Vilnius, with its high concentration of wealth and attraction of immigrants in recent years, and the rest of the country, where demographic data indicate a continuous population decline.

However, the main cloud over Lithuania, as with all Eastern European EU countries, is the Russian expansionist threat, which could intensify depending on how the current conflict in Ukraine, triggered by Russia’s invasion in February 2022, unfolds. The US administration is distancing itself, leaving the European Union to bear the brunt of defending Ukraine, a supranational institution designed to project soft power, not serve as a military power. Even if Russia withdrew from Ukraine, a hybrid threat, manifested through continuous disinformation campaigns from Moscow, would remain unless political changes occur in the country that are currently unforeseeable.

I have written this article in a deliberately disordered way, without the usual bullet points I often use and giving my opinion here and there, to show that it is not AI-generated. I have also omitted references for the data presented for the same reason. This article has no purpose other than to take a snapshot of the world into which Màrius was born. I may make later amendments. Last edited: December 26, 2025.