http://europa.eu.int/comm/regional_policy/sources/docoffic/official/reports/cohesion3/cohesion3_en.htm

One additional point: Guyana and, especially, Reunion have high Gini indexes, meaning they have a lot of income and wealth inequality. Reunion in particular is notorious for having a large underclass of very poor people, a tiny group of rich people, and hardly any middle class to speak of. I don’t know what role (if any) French transfer payments play in this.

Doug M.

GDP data for these regions can be found in the third Cohesion report, published in Feb 2004, which gives the following index for GDP per head as compared to the EU average (EU 15 in 2001 = 100, Spain = 84.2, Portugal = 70.7, France = 104.8)

Madeira 78.4
Azores 55.8
Guadeloupe 60.8
Martinique 67.8
Guyana 48.2
Réunion 53.5
Canaries 79.1

All are below the EU 15 average, but Madeira is well above the Portuguese average, and the canaries do OK. The real duds are the French DOM TOMS and the Azores.

It’s worth knowing that the special Treaty status of these territories led the Regional policy commissioner in 2004 to propose that for the next EU Financial Perspective (ie next 7 years) these regions should get an extra Billion Euros, over and above normal structural fund monies, to compensate them for being “a long way from the rest of Europe” (I kid you not).

I guess it’s just a coincidence that he was French.

To nitpick, Azores and Madeira are portuguese, and of that partial list, only Canaries are Spanish. And the “six of them” are seven…

DSW

“Professional anthropologists have already postulated, in a classic work on European ethnology, that the modern day Basque people of the Pyrenees Mountains (northern Spain/southern France) speak a language inherited directly from Cro-Magnon Man (Ripley, 1899). To give a couple of illustrative examples of the reasons for the above postulation, the Basque word for knife means literally “stone that cuts,” and their word for ceiling means “top of the cavern” (Blanc, 1854).”

Curiously, I don’t know how many realise this, the ’scientific’ discovery of the Basques in the modern context (remember Spain was buried deep under Franco for a long time) dates to a post-motem carried out in a London hospital on a Spanish refugee from the Basque country during WWII where the forensic surgeon noted certain anatomical differences. This lead to a whole line of enquiry which culminates in Cavalli Sforza’s DNA work.

Thanks for this Karl Heinz, this is more or less the state-of-the-art wisdom.

At the risk of diving off into esoterica though - well we are in the ‘outermost regions - the inhabitants who were there when the Spanish arrived (basically what does ‘native’ mean here or anywhere else for that matter) seem to have spoken a language called Guanche. Now this was, as you suggested, thought to have been related to Berber, but there has been some controversy in Spain of late since historians have found in the historical record that the original Spanish who arrived needed Basques from their midst to act as interpreters, which has lead to the speculation that there is some connection between the two languages (and possibly indirectly between Basque and Berber, although I’m less sure about this).

Wikipedia has this:

“Guanche is an extinct language of the Canary Islands. Its SIL code is GNC. It has been out of use since the 16th century. Most linguists consider Guanche to be related to the Berber languages, but this is not certain.”

Describing their population as “Canarians are of mixed African and Spanish descent” is somewhat misleading. When people read African, they usually think of Black (i.e.Sub-Saharan) Africans. Doug himself fell into this trap in saying they are “Like Cubans and Puerto Ricans”. Actually, the natives of the Canaries were of North African Berber stock. Moreover, the islands have belonged to Spain for five centuries now, and they are thoroughly acculturated. Except for minor differences in dialect, Canary Islanders are indistiguishable from Mainland Spaniards.

In recent years, there has been some immigration from Sub-Saharan Africa, but this is still marginal in terms of numbers. During various times in the 20th century, Germans, English, Hindu Indians and other groups have arrived.