Spain: A Unique History (7 page)

The 1960s and 1970s were the only decades in which contemporary Spanish history attracted attention abroad, due to the Civil War legacy and the reputation of Spain as an "exceptional country" under the Franco regime. With modernization and the success of the democratization after Franco, this status disappeared. On the international level, interest in contemporary Spanish history dwindled altogether during the 1980s.

Conversely, for the first and only time since the Civil War, interest in current Spanish politics grew rapidly during the 1970s, peaking with the years of the democratization but also continuing to some extent into the 1980s, before dropping away with the apparently complete stabilization of the new system. During those years I played an active role in advice and commentary on Spanish politics both on the government and academic levels, for in political science there were very few scholars with any expertise on the country, so that a historian like myself was called on to do double duty as political analyst.

Interest in and speculation about the country's political future began to build slowly after the official recognition of the succession of Juan Carlos in 1969. The two questions that loomed on the horizon concerned (1) how far the next chief of state would go to encourage the introduction of democracy, and (2) whether Spanish society had been transformed to the extent that such a process could successfully be completed. The experience of the Civil War and the official doctrines of the dictatorship had developed a certain discourse about the country's "familiar demons," according to which Spaniards were culturally and psychologically unsuited for democracy. Certainly all earlier parliamentary systems had failed sooner or later, and in all but one case (the Restoration regime) sooner rather than later. Nonetheless, when I completed my treatment of broader peninsular history for the two-volume work in 1970, I pointed out the achievements of parliamentary governments in Spain's past, which seemed to suggest that a more developed society might be able to cope with democracy and also concluded that something so anachronistic as the dictatorship, even if extensively reformed, might not be able to survive very much longer. The problem was not so much that parliamentary government could not function in Spain but that the chief political actors had simply to respect the rules of the game, which had hardly been the case in most of the earlier parliamentary regimes.

During his first year as official heir apparent, Juan Carlos was inevitably very guarded in remarks about any future plans, while Franco's health remained relatively stable as of 1970 and the opposition was entirely impotent. Therefore, when the influential American journal
Foreign Affairs
asked me early in 1970 to write an article on the current political situation in Spain and its future prospects, my prognosis, too, was guarded. The resulting article, "In the Twilight of the Franco Era," noted the extensive social and economic transformation of the country, and suggested that the present system would change and evolve under Juan Carlos, but that the immediate prospects were for "continuity more than change."
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That was technically the case as of mid-1970, but the situation continued to evolve rapidly, and during the next two years Juan Carlos gave clearer signals regarding his future plans, while by 1973 Franco's health was deteriorating seriously. During these years there were several conferences and seminars in Washington on Spanish affairs, including a special seminar at the Foreign Service Institute on July 12, 1972, on the "Spanish military," focused on their likely behavior following the death of Franco. In the spring of 1975 Washington upgraded the ambassadorship to Madrid by appointing the veteran Welles Stabler, a distinguished career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state for southern Europe. I participated in the orientation seminar organized for the ambassador-designate on May 1, 1975, and was hopeful about the country's political prospects, though the new ambassador was perhaps not surprisingly apprehensive about what he would soon encounter in Madrid.

The strangest meeting in Washington on the eve of Franco's death took place on June 10, 1975, when a Left-liberal pressure group, the Fund for New Politics, collaborated with representatives of the opposition Junta Democrática to sponsor a private, nongovernmental hearing in one of the congressional meeting rooms. Approximately fifteen people participated, together with various members of the junta, ranging from Opus Dei to the Communist Party. The message of this hearing was that the U.S. government should act directly to control the Spanish military after Franco's death; if it did not, any transition to democracy would be almost inevitably thwarted. This was possibly the only time that a foreign Communist entity urged American intervention in its country's affairs.

I was the only participant who challenged this viewpoint, pointing out first that the most active member of the Junta Democrática was the Communist Party of Spain, something that had been carefully ignored in the public presentation of this hearing. I held that American intervention or pressure would not be necessary and that Juan Carlos, after succeeding Franco, would introduce effective democratization that the great majority of Spanish people would support, and that the Socialist Party could play a constructive role in representing the main forces of the Left. The analysis that I advanced concluded that the Spanish military only intervened in moments of crisis, deep division, and disruption of legality. If the democratization process maintained stability and proceeded through legal channels, the military were not likely to reverse it. This analysis proved substantially correct.
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The summer of 1975 was a grim time in Washington, as North Vietnam violated its peace agreement to launch an all-out military offensive, which resulted in the fall of South Vietnam. Communist totalitarianism was expanding not merely in southeast Asia but also in some parts of Africa, while the Portuguese Communists seemed to be gaining dominance in Lisbon and the future of Spain was in doubt. The Department of State therefore called a special conference on the prospects of "The Left in Western Europe" in June 1975. These prospects were not encouraging, since the Revolution had not yet brought democracy to Portugal, and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, at that moment perhaps Henry Kissinger's principal subordinate as assistant secretary of state, lamented that for five hundred years the Russian empire had never ceased to expand. (In fact, it would continue to expand for five years more, Soviet influence reaching its peak worldwide by 1980 with the rise of Afro-Communism and the invasion of Afghanistan.)

In Spain, however, events moved rapidly and surprisingly smoothly from the appointment of Adolfo Suárez as prime minister in July 1976.
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Shrewd and constructive political management helped to keep the military from interfering, and the Spanish democratization became something of a model, to lead the "third wave" of major twentieth-century democratizations during the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1975 and the 1980s the handful of Hispanists who dealt with politics and contemporary Spanish history were in considerable demand from various institutions and universities in the United States, so that we formed a sort of "traveling circus," which appeared with slightly varying membership in a variety of different settings.

By 1979 Felipe González had moderated both the Marxist doctrines and the political tactics of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE — Spanish Socialist Worker's Party), which not only abandoned its peculiar concept of direct action it had thought compatible with the parliamentary democracy (which it now espoused) but also accepted the principles of European social democracy, as distinct from "socialism." All this was enormously helpful, indeed indispensable, to the consolidation of democracy in Spain. The major point on which the Socialists refused to change was their neutrality in the Cold War. Neutrality vis-à-vis the Soviet Union had never been the position of some of the older leaders, such as Indalecio Prieto, but the González group that had taken over the party in 1973 claimed that the Cold War had had the effect of prolonging the Franco regime (which to some extent was correct). To declare neutrality in the worldwide contest, which in Europe was now a clear-cut struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, seemed strange for a party insisting on its own democratic credentials. Nevertheless, ambiguity had been a persistent feature of the history of Spanish Socialism, and in this area drew an official statement of gratitude from the Soviet government, not the sort of congratulations that a newly democratic party would normally want to have.

The U.S. government and some of its west European counterparts became eager to have a newly democratic Spain enter NATO, the chief political obstacle to which was now the opposition of the Socialist Party. To try to overcome this, Washington and its NATO allies organized a meeting with representatives of the major Spanish parties at Ditchley Park (an old residence of the Dukes of Marlborough) not far from Oxford on the weekend of March 15-17, 1978. On the morning of the first full day, Gen. Alexander Haig, then commander of the NATO forces, arrived by helicopter on the large front lawn to address the group. These efforts were unsuccessful as far as the Socialists were concerned. I was seated throughout beside Luis Yáñez, the gynecologist from Seville who at that moment played a major role in the PSOE leadership. He was affable but noncommittal, and Socialist resistance on this issue would continue for six more years, until the decisive change in 1984 when González conducted his famous volte-face and referendum on NATO.

For me personally the major Spanish political event of 1978 was the first congress of the Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD), held in Madrid in October. The party leaders invited three American senators to attend, but the congress took place in the middle of the campaigning for the American elections, and none of the senators could be present. The UCD also invited me, and I became, in effect, the American representative. I was seated in the front row in the visitors' section, beside foreign dignitaries who in some cases had been chiefs of government or heads of state. Margaret Thatcher attended and gave a speech. Hugh Thomas came with Thatcher's entourage as advisor and introduced me to her, only six months before she was to win her first parliamentary elections.

I thoroughly enjoyed the congress, and realized that it would constitute the height of my otherwise nonexistent political career. Unión de Centro Democrático was the only Spanish political organization with which I have ever felt thoroughly identified, its role in the establishment of Spanish democracy being absolutely fundamental, given the limitations of the Right on the one hand and the confusions of the Socialists on the other. It never became a tightly structured and fully unified party and did not always enjoy the best leadership, but for five years its role was crucial, and in the twenty-first century I would dedicate my book
The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933-1936
(2005) to Suárez and his colleagues in recognition of their decisive accomplishments, succeeding where the Second Republic had failed.

Since the 1970s I had progressively divided my time more and more between work on Spain and the comparative analysis of contemporary European history. This involved two dimensions: (1) continuation of the work on Portugal, and (2) the study of "generic fascism," the latter involving more activity than the former. Portuguese history had received a little more attention in the United States when a number of Hispanists, together with one or two Spanish scholars teaching in the country, formed the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (SSPHS) in 1969-70. The society would play a major role in stimulating and focusing research on Iberian history from that point on, and also in furthering scholarly ties between historians in Spain and the United States, but the attention that it could give to Portugal would obviously be limited.

An opportunity to develop a major focus on Portugal suddenly emerged at the University of Wisconsin in the spring of 1972, when I found that the university's West European Studies Program had a little money remaining in its budget at the end of the academic year. I proposed the immediate convening of a small conference to form a group for the study of contemporary Portugal. This was approved, and I invited the only five North American colleagues I could find who were doing work on contemporary Portugal in history and the social sciences. Thus in June 1972 in Madison we formed the International Conference Group on Portugal (ICGP), the first such entity anywhere outside Portugal, with the exception of literary studies. Douglas Wheeler of the University of New Hampshire became the secretary of the conference group and its indispensable leader for more than three decades. The ICGP would play a pioneering role, sponsoring a long series of conferences, publications, and eventually its own journal, the
Portuguese Studies Review
. Nonetheless, when it held its first full conference at the University of New Hampshire in October 1973, six months before the outbreak of the Portuguese Revolution, that event was not predicted by a single participant. So much for the capacity for prediction on the part of the social sciences.

By the 1980s it was observed that the era had passed in which foreign Hispanists might play a dominant role in the historiography dealing with contemporary Spain, given the democratization of the country and the great expansion of research and publication by Spanish historians, more interested in contemporary history than in any other period. This was obviously the case, the special role of Hispanists being most relevant amid the particular conditions of the 1950s and 1960s.

In normal circumstances, then, does the Hispanist still have any special function or fill an important role in Spanish historiography? His most significant contribution probably does not come from being a research scholar. That would have been the case only during the dictatorship, when Spanish historians themselves could not undertake and publish research in certain areas. The most important contribution probably stems from the ability to provide a broader critical and comparative perspective, something that Spanish historians themselves have been learning to do only within the past decade or so, and then only to a limited degree. Current Spanish historiography still has a profound tendency toward self-absorption though, happily, there are some notable exceptions. To that extent, it is important for all countries to have foreign scholars study, analyze, and write their histories, not primarily to add data — although that is occasionally importantbut above all to provide a broader, sometimes more objective, perspective. Research monographs have been important, but the broader and more comparative dimension has probably been the more significant aspect.