The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition

The Spanish Model

Diego Muro, Gregorio Alonso

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415997201
• eBook ISBN: 9781136852237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Most accounts on the Spanish transition to democracy of the late 1970s are based on a false dilemma. Its simplest formulation could be: was it the pressure from below, i.e. the organized working classes, students and neighbors associations that triggered political change; or was the elite settlement reached by the regime soft-liners and the moderate sectors of the democratic opposition that established it? This new and innovative volume appraises the movement towards a more democratic Spain from a variety of important perspectives; the collection of essays sheds light on the wide range of crucial processes, institutions and actors involved in the political transformation that operated in the Spanish instance of the Third Wave of democratization.

By making comparisons to other democratic transitions, synthesizing the ideas of several leading Spanish History scholars, as well as incorporating new voices involved in creating the directions of research to come, The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition offers a thorough and vital look at this key period in contemporary Spanish history, taking stock of critical lessons to be gleaned from the Spanish Transition, and pointing the way toward its future as a democratic nation.

Part I
Politics

1
The Spanish Model Revisited

Richard Gunther

Spain‘s transition to democracy is widely regarded as having been extremely successful. In a country completely lacking a tradition of stable democratic governance, it culminated in the establishment of a consolidated democracy that has taken its place within the mainstream of Western democratic systems. This important development has attracted the attention of many social scientists and has served as the focus of an impressive volume of scholarly publications.¹

Many have claimed that certain characteristics of the process of regime change contributed to this successful outcome. Indeed, Hungarian and Polish political elites directly copied certain of these procedural features in their own democratization processes, in particular, the holding of roundtable negotiations among representatives of the outgoing political elite and of opposition groups. Among transitologists, “The Spanish model” is generally regarded as the quintessential “pacted” transition, or, in the terms that Higley and I have used, of “elite settlement.” Indeed, I titled my chapter in our book (Higley and Gunther 1992) “The Very Model of the Modern Elite Settlement.”²

With the passage of three decades, as well as the completion of the “third wave” of democratization processes around the world, a reexamination of the Spanish transition is most timely. Not only are we now capable of examining the long-term consequences of this type of regime transformation (which has been the subject of a lively discourse among students of democratization over the past two decades), but we can compare those long-term outcomes with those of other regime transitions that followed different trajectories.

This chapter will begin with a reexamination of important aspects of the Spanish transition to democracy, as well as an overview of various hypotheses concerning how those features affected the democratization process over the long term. It will then examine some of the long-term impacts of these characteristics. In doing so, the discriminant validity of these causal claims will be assessed by comparing the Spanish transition with some others that had very different outcomes.

This analytical exercise will be framed by a very common hypothesis among students of democratic transitions, and especially among Latin Americanists. They contend that “pacted” transitions will lead to “frozen” democracies, many of whose characteristics will diminish the quality of democracy in important ways. This negative outcome, they assert, is the consequence of the corporatist, exclusionary and undemocratic character of pacts. O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986, 37) define a pact as:

an explicit, but not always publicly explicated or justified agreement among a select set of actors which seeks to define (or, better, to redefine) rules governing the exercise of power on the basis of mutual guarantees for the “vital interests” of those entering into it.

They add:

Pacts move the polity toward democracy by undemocratic means. They are typically negotiated among a small number of participants representing established … groups or institutions; they tend to reduce competitiveness as well as conflict; they seek to limit accountability to wider publics; they attempt to control the agenda of policy concerns; and they deliberately distort the principle of citizen equality. (38)

Two excellent recent articles, by Bonnie Field (2006) and Omar Encarnación (2005), summarized various dimensions of these hypotheses. Field cites works by Terry Karl (1987, 1990), Frances Hagopian (1990, 1992) and Adam Przeworski (1991) in which it is asserted that “pacted transitions” result in corporatist or consociational democracies in which party competition is constrained by collusion among political elites who had been the authors of the foundational pacts. Encarnación further notes that Karl argued that they would stall social and economic progress, that Hagopian claimed that they would foster clientelism and corruption and that Przeworski asserted that they would limit political competition and access to the policy arena.

Field and Encarnación both argue that it is a mistake to establish simplistic typologies of regime transitions (such as “pacted” versus “unpacted”), and that the long-term qualitative characteristics of democratic regimes are the product of a broader variety of factors that often interact with each other. I wholeheartedly agree with this approach. Indeed, the first section of this chapter will explore a number of dimensions of regime transformation in Spain that cannot be easily captured by the simple pacted/non-pacted dichotomy. I will conclude that Spanish democracy cannot be regarded as “frozen,” and that its pacted transition has not had significant negative consequences. However, I will also argue that there are some surprisingly durable impacts of the form of transition to democracy in Spain, and that most of these do not fit with the basic thrust of the “freezing” hypothesis.

Before we examine evidence relating to the freezing hypothesis, we must identify the distinguishing characteristics of the Spanish transition to democracy. In brief, it was “pacted transition” that culminated in an “elite settlement” of several historically divisive issues and in the establishment of a consolidated democracy.³ But there are also important features that are not neatly captured by the pacted/non-pacted dichotomy.

KEY ASPECTS OF THE SPANISH TRANSITION

One factor that had a substantial impact on the Spanish transition was the type of regime that existed prior to the transition. It was an authoritarian regime, not a totalitarian, post-totalitarian or sultanistic system (Linz and Stepan 1996). Further, the Franco regime was substantially civilianized, not a military regime of either the hierarchical type (characteristic of Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in the late 1970s and early 1980s) or the nonhierarchical variety (e.g., the “colonels” regime in Greece, and the “Armed Forces Movement” that ruled Portugal following the 1974 coup). Another important characteristic of the Spanish transition that is not included within the pacted/non-pacted dichotomy was that the initial phases of this regime transformation were characterized by considerable institutional continuity, in terms of personnel and also regarding the decision-making arena and procedural rules employed during that initial phase of the transition. In short, the first substantial steps towards dismantling the Franco regime were taken under the leadership of a head of state personally chosen by Franco, within that regime’s corporatist/authoritarian institutional framework, and according to its “Fundamental Laws.” Before analyzing the nature of the pact-making process that established the current democratic regime, let us examine some of these other aspects of the Spanish transition.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FRANCO REGIME

The regime of Francisco Franco was authoritarian, and by the late 1960s, it was an increasingly “sloppy” authoritarian regime. There was no clearcut regime ideology; instead, Juan Linz ([1962] 1970) argues that a loose “mentality” of conservatism, religiosity and Spanish nationalism served as a lowest common denominator of norms and values shared by the regime’s elites. By the 1970s, there was no official party with significant mobilization potential or programmatic input into either policy making or elite recruitment (see Linz 1970; Gunther 1980). Following the dying off of nearly all of Franco’s cronies, it was a civilianized regime (see de Miguel 1975). Unlike totalitarian or post-totalitarian regimes (see Linz and Stepan 1996), there were no political commissars in the bureaucracy or judiciary or secret police widely dispersed throughout society to effectively penetrate the barrier between the public behavior and private lives of individual citizens. After 1966 there was partial liberalization that expanded freedom of expression—but in an inconsistent, confusing manner that sometimes led to reactionary crackdowns (see Linz 1973; Maravall 1978; Carr and Fusi 1979). And unlike sultanistic systems (Linz and Stepan 1996), the extended family of the dictator was not strongly embedded at the highest levels within economic or political institutions.

This gave rise to what Linz aptly described as “limited pluralism” (Linz 1970; also see Gunther 1980, 32–35). Groups growing out of segments of society that were supportive of the regime, as well as others that did not engage in what the regime regarded as illegal political activities, were largely free to organize as they saw fit and conduct their affairs without police interference. Moreover, because there was no ideology-driven campaign to remake Spanish society or forge the “new man,” regime penetration into society, and even the state administration and the judiciary, was extremely shallow. Because there was no clear, unequivocal regime stand on what was acceptable speech, there was no consistency or even coherence regarding what was to be banned. The circulation of Playboy magazine was effectively suppressed, for example, whereas the economics textbook most widely used in the training of an entire generation of economists was written by an individual named Ramón Tamames, who had been a member of the central committee of the Communist Party since 1956. And as Maravall (1978) points out, various versions of Marxism dominated political discourse on Spain’s university campuses.

By the early 1970s, the regime’s limited pluralism and the inconsistency (if not sloppiness) of its authoritarian control over increasingly alienated or hostile segments of Spanish society allowed for the reemergence in clandestinity of political parties and trade union organizations. This would affect the nature of the subsequent transition to democracy in several ways. Most importantly, it allowed for the institutionalization of political parties (including the Socialist and Communist parties) under clearly established and legitimate leaders. One of the prerequisites for successful pact making is that bargains reached among leaders of the various contending parties must be respected by their followers. The unchallenged authority of Felipe González and Santiago Carrillo that was established in pre-transition clandestinity was an important consequence of this limited pluralism and its de facto toleration of opposition points of view. So, too, was the fact that Spaniards were presented with a full range of political options in the first post-Franco democratic election as a product of this limited pluralism and the gradual reemergence of parties during the early to mid-1970s. This meant that the composition of the Congress of Deputies that assembled after the 1977 election would more or less accurately reflect the preferences of the Spanish electorate.

With the dying off of Franco’s military cronies, the state administration was increasingly “civilianized.” Military officers presided only over the three military ministries (army, navy and air), and not over such crucial departments as the Ministry of the Interior. Thus, extrication of the military from the basic structure of the state would not be a problem (as it often was in Latin America). However, the fact that the education of the officer corps included a heavy dose of antidemocratic socialization meant that, as Felipe Agüero (1995) has documented, the military elite was not initially supportive of Adolfo Suárez’s democratization and state decentralization policies. The attempted coup of February 23, 1981, clearly reflected the antidemocratic stance of some military officers. Fortunately, as will be argued in the following, the substantial (but still incomplete) consolidation of democracy by that time deprived the rebels of the civilian (and royal) support they would have needed to succeed.

INSTITUTIONAL CONTINUITY

A second important aspect of the Spanish transition that cannot be subsumed within the “pacted/non-pacted” dichotomy is the institutional continuity that characterized the early phases of regime change. Unlike in neighboring Portugal just two years earlier or subsequently in some later post-Soviet transitions, there was no abrupt collapse of authority of the outgoing regime or of state institutions. The transition did not unfold within an institutional vacuum in which restraining behavioral norms break down, and in which political elites and ordinary citizens alike might fear for their personal se...

Table of contents

• Routledge/Cañada Blanch Studies on Contemporary Spain
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Politics
• Part II Civil Society
• Part III Nationalism
• Part IV Memory
• Part V International Dimension
• Contributors
• Index