Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (104 page)

Nor could the Spanish authorities forgo the cooperation and skills of a growing urban work force. They were thus constrained to concede the
de facto
emergence of a labor movement, overwhelmingly based in Catalonia and the heavy industries of the Basque region. Together with the unofficial unions formed by public employees, banking staff and other expanding white-collar occupations, this semi-clandestine network of workers’ and employees’ representatives could call upon nearly a decade of organization and experience by the time Franco died.

Labor protest in Spain, however, was kept firmly confined to bread and butter issues. By its last years, Franco’s regime—rather like that of János Kádár in Hungary—depended not on open and violent repression but rather upon a sort of enforced passive acceptance, a decades-long de-politicization of the culture. Student protesters, who since 1956 had been seeking greater campus autonomy and a relaxing of moral codes and other restrictions, were accorded a certain liberty to organize and protest within strictly circumscribed boundaries; they could even count upon some sympathy from the regime’s internal critics—reform-minded Catholics and disappointed ‘social-Falangists’ among others. But all active expressions of sympathy or collaboration across sectors—with striking miners, for example—were strictly off limits.
²²⁵
The same applied to the regime’s adult critics.

Indeed,
all
properly political opinions were kept firmly under wraps, and independent political parties were banned. Until 1967 the country lacked even a constitution, and such rights and procedures as existed were largely window dressing for the benefit of Spain’s Western partners. Officially a ‘regent’ for the suspended monarchy, Franco had anointed the young Juan Carlos—grandson of Spain’s last king—to succeed him in due course, but for most observers the question of the monarchy played little part in Spanish affairs. Even the Church, still a major presence in the daily life of many Spaniards, played only a limited role in public policy.

Spain’s traditional role as a bulwark of Christian civilization against materialism and atheism was a staple of the primary-school curriculum; but the Catholic hierarchy itself (unlike the modernizing ‘crypto monks’ of Opus Dei) was kept well away from the reins of power, in marked contrast to the neo-Crusading ‘National Catholicism’ spirit of the regime’s first decade.
²²⁶
In June 1968, bowing to modern reality, Franco conceded for the first time the principle of religious freedom, allowing Spaniards openly to worship at a church of their choosing. But by then religion itself was entering upon a long decline: in a country that could boast over 8,000 seminarists at the start of the Sixties, there were less than 2,000 twelve years later. Between 1966 and 1975 one third of all Spain’s Jesuits left the Order.

The military, too, was kept at a careful distance. Having himself come to power by a military coup, Franco understood very well the risks of alienating a military caste that had inherited an over-developed sense of its responsibility for the preservation of the Spanish state and its traditional values. Throughout the post-war years the Spanish Army was cosseted and flattered. Its victory in the Civil War was celebrated annually in the streets of major cities, its losses ostentatiously memorialized in the monumental Valley of The Fallen, completed in September 1959. Ranks and decorations multiplied: by the time the regime fell there were 300 generals, and the ratio of officers to other ranks was 1:11, the highest in Europe. In 1967, an Institutional Law of the State made the armed forces formally responsible for guaranteeing the nation’s unity and territorial integrity and defending ‘the institutional system’.

In practice, though, the armed forces had become superfluous. Franco had for decades preserved his military from any foreign or colonial wars. Unlike the French or Portuguese armies, they suffered no humiliating defeats or forced retreats. Spain faced no military threats, and its domestic security was handled by police, gendarmes and special units formed to fight terrorists—real and imaginary. The army, largely confined to a ceremonial role, had become risk averse; its traditional conservatism was expressed increasingly in enthusiasm for the return of the monarchy, an identification that was to prove ironically beneficial in the nation’s transition to democracy.

The affairs of the country were run by a restricted network of lawyers, Catholic professors and civil servants, many of them with active interests in the private companies favoured by their policies. But because formal political opposition was banned, it was from inside these same ruling circles—rather than amongst an intelligentsia whose leading lights remained in exile—that reforming ideas and pressure for change would come, prompted by frustration at local inefficiency, foreign criticism or the example of Vatican II.

Franco finally died on November 20th 1975, aged 82. Refusing to the end to consider any serious liberalizations or transfer of authority, he had already outlived his usefulness even to his own supporters, many of whom sympathized with demonstrators who earlier in the year had demanded a lifting of restrictions on the press and political associations. The transition to democracy was thus managed from within the ranks of Franco’s own ministers and appointees, which helps account for its speed and success. In the initial stages of Spain’s exit from Francoism the traditional forces of democratic change in Spain—liberals, Socialists, Communists, trade unions—played a subordinate role.

Two days after Franco died, Juan Carlos was crowned king. Initially he kept on Carlos Arias Navarro, Franco’s last Prime Minister, together with his cabinet colleagues, the better to reassure the army and others that there would be no sudden breach with the past. But in April 1976 Arias incurred royal disfavor when he clamped down on the newly-formed Democratic Coordination, a coalition of still-unauthorized parties of the Left, and arrested its leaders. Within two months the king had replaced Arias with one of his own ministers, Adolfo Suárez González.

At forty four, Suárez was a typical late-Franco era technocrat; indeed, he had served for one year as the head of the Caudillo’s own Falangist National Movement. Suárez proved a remarkably astute choice. He formed a new political party, the Center Democratic Union (UCD) and set about persuading the sitting Francoist assembly to accept a national referendum on political reform—essentially, to approve the introduction of universal suffrage and a bi-cameral parliament. Wrong-footed by someone they had supposed to be one of their own, the Francoist old guard agreed—and the referendum passed, on December 15th 1976, with over 94 percent in favor.

In February 1977 Suárez authorized the return of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), the country’s oldest political organization, now led by the young Felipe González Márquez from Seville, active in the clandestine movement since his early twenties. At the same time trade unions were legalized and accorded the right to strike. On April 1st Suárez banned and dismantled the National Movement he had once led; a week later he legalized the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), led by Santiago Carrillo and already committed (in striking contrast to its Portuguese comrades) to operating within the confines of a transition to parliamentary democracy.
²²⁷

In June 1977 elections were held to form a Constituent Assembly with the task of writing a new Constitution. The election—the first in Spain since 1936—produced a plurality for Suárez’s UCD, which won 165 seats in the Cortes; the second-placed party, González’s Socialists, managed just 121, all the other contenders between them taking just 67.
²²⁸
In many ways this was the best possible outcome: Suárez’s victory reassured conservatives (most of whom had voted for him) that there would be no sharp lurch to the Left, while the absence of a clear majority obliged him to work with Left-wing deputies who thus shared responsibility for the new Constitution that the new Assembly was to draft.

This Constitution (duly confirmed in a second referendum in December 1978) was in most respects quite conventional. Spain was to be a parliamentary monarchy; there was to be no official religion (though in a calculated concession to the Church, Catholicism was recognized as a ‘social fact’); the voting age was reduced to eighteen; and the death penalty was abolished. But in a major break with the recent past, the Assembly wrote into Spain’s new laws a right of autonomy for the country’s historic regions, notably Catalonia and the Basque country.

Article Two of the Constitution affirmed ‘the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation, common and indivisible
patria
of all Spaniards’, but went on to ‘recognize and guarantee the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions that compose it and the solidarity among them all.’ The subsequent Statutes of Autonomy acknowledged the ancient fact of linguistic variety and regional sentiment within Spain’s hitherto ultra-centralized state; they also recognized the disproportionate demographic significance of Catalonia in particular, and the depth of autonomist sentiment in the Basque country and Catalonia alike. But what was granted some Spaniards could hardly be withheld from others. Within four years Spain was to be divided into seventeen self-administering regions, each with its own flag and capital city. Not just Catalans and Basques, but Galicians, Andalusians, Canaries, Valencians, Navarrese and many others were to be recognized as distinct and separate.
¹⁵

Under the new constitution, however, Madrid retained responsibility for defense, justice and foreign affairs, an unacceptable compromise for Basque nationalists especially. As we have seen, ETA had deliberately stepped up its campaign of violence and assassinations in the months when the new constitution was under discussion, targeting policemen and soldiers in the hope of provoking a backlash and bringing down a democratic process that seemed increasingly likely to weaken the extremists’ case.

In 1981 they might have succeeded. On January 29th, with economic discontent at its peak (see below) and Catalonia, the Basque region, Galicia and Andalucia all embarking upon separatist experiments in home rule, Suárez was forced to resign by his own party—resentful not at his failures (the 1979 general elections under the new constitution had produced another victory for the UCD) but at his achievements—and his autocratic management style. Before another UCD politician, Calvo Sotelo, could succeed him in office, a general strike broke out in the Basque Provinces. To its critics on the Right, democratic Spain appeared leaderless and on the verge of breaking up.

On February 23rd Lt. Colonel Antonio Tejero Molín Molina of the Civil Guard seized the Cortes at gunpoint. In a coordinated move, General Jaime Milans del Bosch, commander of the Valencia military region, declared a state of emergency and called upon the King to dissolve the Cortes and install a military government. Though in retrospect their actions appear theatrical and bumbling, Tejero and Milans del Bosch surely had tradition and precedent on their side. Moreover there was little the Cortes itself, or the various political parties and their supporters, could have done to block a military coup d’état, and the sympathies of the army itself were far from certain.
²²⁹

What determined the outcome, and the shape of subsequent Spanish history, were King Juan Carlos I’s outright rejection of the conspirators’ demands and his televised speech uncompromisingly defending the Constitution and unambiguously identifying himself and the monarchy with the country’s emerging democratic majority. Both sides were probably equally surprised by the courage of a young king who until then had lived in the shadow of his own appointment by the late dictator; but now his fate was irrevocably linked with parliamentary rule. Lacking an institution or a symbol around which to rally their forces, most of those policemen, soldiers and others nostalgic for the old regime turned away from dreams of revolt or restitution and confined themselves instead to supporting Manuel Fraga’s Popular Alliance, a newly-formed party committed to fighting ‘the most dangerous enemies of Spain: Communism and separatism’, but within the law.

The discredit that Tejero had brought on his ‘cause’ initially afforded an opportunity for the Cortes to cut the military budget and pass a long-overdue bill legalizing divorce. But the UDC majority was increasingly caught between a clericalist and nationalist Right that was unhappy at the speed of change, disturbed by regional autonomy and offended by the relaxed public morals of the new Spain, and a newly assertive Socialist Left, open to compromise on constitutional affairs but presenting a radical face to the country’s fractious labor movement and the growing number of unemployed.

As in Portugal, the political transition had come at a difficult economic moment. In large measure this was the responsibility of the last governments of the Franco era, who between 1970 and 1976 had sought to buy popularity by increasing public spending and public sector employment, subsidizing energy costs, holding back prices while letting wages rise, and paying little attention to the long term. By 1977 the consequences of this insouciance were beginning to be felt: in June of that year, at the time of the general election, inflation was running at 26 percent per annum, the state coffers (long starved by Franco’s regressive tax regime) were drying up and unemployment was entering a long upward curve. Between 1973 and 1982 the country lost an estimated 1.8 million jobs.
²³⁰

As in the short-lived Republic of the 1930s, Spain was building a democracy in the teeth of an economic recession, and there was much talk of the country going the way of Argentina, with indexed wages and government-subsidized prices degenerating into hyper-inflation. If this was averted, much of the credit must go to the signatories of the so-called Moncloa Pacts of October 1977, the first in a series of negotiated settlements in which politicians, labour leaders and employers agreed to embark upon a broad range of reforms: devaluation of the currency, an incomes policy, controls on government expenditure and structural reforms of the country’s huge and wasteful public sector.