Integrating Southern Europe

EC Expansion and the Transnationalization of Spain

Otto Holman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134803569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Integrating Southern Europe presents a stimulating comparative analysis of the position of Spain within the European Community and within the global economy. It combines a historical perspective with an analysis of the process of the democratization in Southern Europe and of Spain's increasingly trans-European outlook.

Part I

Theoretical perspective

1

Introduction

Global political economy and the transition to modernity

INTRODUCTION

In retrospect, the study of International Relations (IR) as a scientific discipline has long been characterized by a subdivision into two main areas, especially after World War II: first, the causes of war and conditions of peace; and, second, the international causes of persistent underdevelopment and the exogenous conditions of (economic) growth and (socio-political) modernization. These two fields have been inextricably linked as regards content and global scale ever since the beginnings of European expansion in the sixteenth century, but they have only been treated in conjunction sporadically in textbooks, research projects, or academic publications. In fact, in mainstream IR theory foreign policy relations and international power politics were causally separated from international economic relations and unequal development, and (international) power was separated from (domestic) production.

However, in the course of the 1970s and 1980s growing evidence of the fundamental interrelation between domestic and global developments, and between global political and economic structures, made it mandatory to rethink the basic premises of traditional IR theory. This has been clearly illustrated recently by the concurrence of the global economic crisis of the last two decades and the crisis and eventual demise of the bipolar system of superpower politics, resulting in an unprecedented renaissance of liberal economic and political values.

At the political level, the obvious manifestation of this process of liberalization is the shift from authoritarianism to formal political democracy in a number of developing countries, a process which began in Southern Europe in the 1970s, followed by Latin America in the 1980s. This worldwide process of democratization spread to Eastern Europe in the early 1990s.

This book is the end result of a period of cumulative study of the process of socio-economic and political modernization in Southern Europe. It covers a period of more than a decade in which changing spheres of interest, subjects of research and theoretical perspectives of the author reasonably reflect the abovementioned alterations in the broader field of IR theory. An initial interest in the history of Spain, and particularly its long-term decline from global power to a position on the European periphery, culminated in a special focus on developments in the first half of this century: the loss of its colonies in 1898; the period of economic and political isolation in the ensuing period; the failed attempt to establish a democratic political system during the so-called Second Republic (1931– 1936); the rise of Spanish fascism; and the domestic causes and consequences of the Spanish Civil War. The subject of research then shifted from the 1930s to the 1970s: why was the transition to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 so successful and relatively smooth until 1982, while it had been brutally aborted less than forty years before? It soon became clear that the answer to this question was to be found in the transformative impact that the Franquist dictatorship had had on Spanish society. However, since the study of this period (1939–1975) was initially confined to domestic developments, and international causes were viewed mainly from a traditional state-centric perspective, the answer to this question could only be partial at this stage of the ongoing research.

It was only after the range of this study had been extended to include Portugal and Greece that the need for an alternative theoretical approach became urgent. During the past thirty years, these three countries have shown some remarkable similarities in the timing and content of the processes by which each has experienced an accelerated integration into the European, and world, capitalist system. First, Spain, Portugal and Greece experienced high growth rates in the 1960s and early 1970s, as a result of both economic liberalization and a shift in economic policy. Consequently, these countries increased their shares of total world exports and imports and total production, and narrowed the gap between them and the industrialized countries with respect to GNP per capita.

Second, socio-political developments in Spain, Portugal and Greece in the late 1960s and 1970s were characterized by a process that has been called ‘the crisis of the dictatorships’—a movement in the direction of less authoritarian governments—that reached its climax in all three countries at the same time, in the years 1974 and 1975. The subsequent periods of transition were very much the same in each country.

Third, the installation of socialist-led governments in these countries represented a legitimization of the parliamentary socialist alternative for the first time in their histories. The way this happened, especially in Spain and Greece, was illustrative of the way in which not only the three societies but also the socialist parties had changed since the formal establishment of democratic rule. It seemed to be accurate in this context to interpret socialism in Southern Europe not only as a result of the distinct processes of economic and socio-political transition towards the social system dominant in North-West Europe, but also as a political tendency and movement which itself was subject to fundamental changes.

Fourth, and closely related to the previous point, it was striking that these ‘socialist’ changes were characterized not by spectacular social reforms but, rather, by the moderate impact that they had on socioeconomic policy. The way in which these parties have played a leading role in the so-called ‘internalization of international austerity’ is astonishing. The latter phenomenon is apparently to be explained by reference both to internal power structures, the basis on which these governments have obtained their political legitimacy, and to the restraints that the capitalist world economy imposes on these countries.

Finally, in the field of foreign policy the post-authoritarian governments in Spain, Portugal and Greece were progressively oriented to Western Europe, with formal membership of the Common Market as an ultimate goal. This aspect of their development explicitly contained the combination of the two processes of industrialization and ‘social-democratization’. In fact, at this stage of the research it appeared that a comparative analysis of the political and socioeconomic developments in Spain, Portugal and Greece would have to take the European aspirations of these countries as a primary, albeit implicit, point of departure.

In comparing these different processes of modernization, democratization, and internationalization two important questions come to mind: to what extent are the transitions to democracy in the three Southern European countries interrelated, and can they be explained on common grounds, both in terms of timing and content? This introductory chapter attempts to explain the similarities between Spain, Portugal and Greece from a global perspective. In doing so, and in transcending the rigid power politics approach inherent to mainstream IR theory, stress will be laid on the transnational dynamics of global (and European) integration and its class content, seen from the perspective of the postwar globalization of capitalist relations. In fact, it will be claimed that an answer to the above questions is not possible without reference to the fundamental changes at the level of production, in the field of power relations, and in the ideological sphere. Such an integrated approach, which aims at bridging the gap between structure and agency, as well as at transcending the so-called level of analysis problem and the ongoing question of external versus internal determination, may provide the beginnings of an understanding of global processes. It is the analysis of concrete post-World War II processes, of which the transnationalization of production is certainly one of the most important, that enables us to transcend the theoretical and methodological problems related to, for instance, the neo-realist approach. In particular, the tenacious view that the nation-state is still the basic, if not the only, actor in international relations must be questioned.

In order to understand social change in one particular region or country, one has to grasp the dynamics of social and political action within the context of state structures, on the one hand, and the dynamics of state action within the context of world order structures, on the other. In order to come to terms with this double movement, the power of transnational capital in both its behavioural and structural form is proposed here as a mediating force (see Gill and Law 1989; Gill 1990). Before proceeding to elaborate on what we call the transnational perspective in IR theory, we will review part of the relevant literature that has tried to explain socio-economic modernization and political transition in Southern Europe from an international perspective. We will mainly focus on the so-called interstate dependency approach (here represented by the work of Nicos Poulantzas and Alain Lipietz). The next section presents an alternative approach. One of the constituent parts of what we will call Atlantic (or international) Fordism, i.e. the internationalization of productive capital, has fundamentally changed the global context in which national governments and social actors are operating. Particularly after this system of Atlantic Fordism entered a severe crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, and in a setting of global neo-liberalism, the rising power of internationally mobile capital has become the primary factor in explaining global, regional, and national dynamics, and has revealed the weakness of approaches which are still based on a traditional, state-centric perspective.

This section introduces a second mediating concept, the notion of comprehensive concepts of control. This offers us insight into how to integrate the levels of material forces, institutional ensembles, and ideologies, in both a national and a transnational setting. In the context of a continuing process of internationalization of capital, concepts of control eventually transcend national frontiers, cementing a cohesion between social and political forces on an increasingly transnational basis. It will be argued that the integration of Spain, Portugal, and Greece in the global network of transnational production has made these countries, and individual capital based in them, part and parcel of globally operative processes of class formation and increasingly transnational state-civil society configurations.

INTERSTATE DEPENDENCY AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE CRISIS OF FORDISM¹

In discussing the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Southern Europe in the 1970s, we are not only in search of a model that offers ‘a clear criterion of historically significant events’ (Bhaskar 1979:47), viz. those that initiate or constitute ruptures in political regimes. In explaining social change, we must go beyond questions as to what the change or what history is about, and focus on how real historical change takes place. In other words, apart from a criterion for the significance of particular events, we need a conceptualization which helps us to understand at least theoretically why these significant events come about.

If society is to be regarded as ‘an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions which individuals reproduce or transform, but which would not exist unless they did so’ (Bhaskar 1979:45–46),² then it is most likely that there are fundamental contradictions between different structures, practices and conventions within the totality of society, constituting opposite moments of the same process, and, subsequently, conflicts between different groups or individuals. For instance, every society contains a very important conflict between those individuals who want to reproduce society and those who want to transform it. Moreover, if we assume the hierarchical ordering of different structures, practices and conventions, it may happen that individuals act at the same time within different social structures which are not necessarily complementary. So, groups or individuals may transform particular structures while reproducing other structures through the same social activity and at the same time. In a similar way, an individual's activity within a particular structure may conflict with his position and interests within a larger structure. Finally, the following question is of crucial importance: why do some people reproduce or transform society more than others? Obviously, the answer to this question has something to do with the distribution of the structural conditions of social action, but it is also concerned, and to the same extent, with action itself. What is at stake here is the distribution of material capabilities and power, and, for that matter, the relation between economics and politics, between society and the state, between dominant and dominated classes, and between social classes as related to a particular mode of production and domination, on the one hand, and the state apparatuses, on the other.

What does this all boil down to? In a preliminary way, the conclusion can be that social change cannot be explained by reference to either individualist/voluntarist or collectivist/determinist conceptions. In order to avoid structure/agency dichotomies, and to refrain from interpretations of history as mere contingency, we here propose the notion of the power of capital, in both its structural and behavioural forms (Gill and Law 1989: 480).³ Production and power, or rather, the distribution of material capabilities and the articulation of social and political power at the level of the state, are the primary factors in explaining social change. This is because the unequal distribution of material capabilities and power is itself subject to human agency (and hence subject to continuous reproduction and transformation), and, in generating contradictions and conflicts, to historical change. In the same way, the structural and behavioural power of capital is subject to changes over time. It is our contention here that in particular the contradictions and conflicts resulting from capital-labour relations, relations between sections of the bourgeoisie, and state-civil society relations are essential in explaining social change.

If we assume that national societies are social systems which are not (or, at least, no longer) characterized by the ‘fact that life within it is largely selfcontained, and that the dynamics of its development are largely internal’ (Wallerstein 1974:347), we must conclude that the external impact on internal structure/agency relations, and vice versa, becomes an essential component in explaining social change. What we apparently need, then, is a model of the activity of states which can be applied both to the relation between national states and the global economic system, i.e., between political action at the national and international level and economic structures at the global level, and to the relation between individual citizens (e.g. politicians, bureaucrats or individual representatives of national bourgeoisies) and the state. In this sense, individual states operate outwardly as actors and inwardly as objective structures. To put it another way, the global system as a social structure is constituted by the action of individual states at the international level, and yet at the same time it is the very medium of this constitution. On the other hand, the state as a social structure is constituted by human agency, and yet at the same time it is the very medium of this constitution. This confronts us, however, with a new problem: how to analyse the interrelation between national societies (as the outcome of human agency) and the global system (as the outcome of ‘state’ agency). The double role or function of individual states makes them apparently unique in relation to other social actors which operate exclusively at the national level, e.g. national trade unions and employers’ organizations. Apart from the fact that this statement is very near to a state-centric approach to international relations, however, it does not offer a suitable solution to the problem of external versus internal determination in the first place. Indeed, it does not explain how real historical change at the global level takes place; it does not help us to understand why historically significant events come about; it does not account for contradictions between world order structures, practices and conventions, or for conflicts between different states or groups of states; it says nothing about the conflicts between those international actors who want to reproduce ‘world society’ and those who want to transform it; and, finally, it does not answer the question why certain states (or international actors) reproduce or transform world society more than others.

What we need, then, is an additional conceptualization which will help us to understand social change at both the global and national (or regional) levels, which transcends different levels of analysis, and which avoids the structure/agency dichotomy. In the last part of this chapter we will propose such a conceptualization by introducing the notions of the structural power of transnational capital, hegemony, and concepts of control. In doing this, we will show that the national/international dichotomy is no longer a valid one, since postwar processes of transnationalization affect not only capital-labour relations, but also state-civil society configurations.

Before entering upon this subject, let us first return to the basic point of departure: our analysis of the combined processes of modernization, democratization and internationalization in Spain, Portugal and Greece. The following section contains a survey of the most relevant literature. For the purpose of our argument, we will concentrate on two examples of the so-called interstate dependency perspective: the work of Nicos Poulantzas and of Alain Lipietz. In some ways the work of both scholars can be said to mark an advance on, for instance, the comparative politics approach to democratic transition and the world system approach,⁴ but it too has substantial limitations.

Poulantzas and the crisis of the dictatorships

One of the few studies of Southern Europe that incorporates an attempt to consider both internal and external factors in explaining similar developments and characteristics of different countries is Nicos Poulantzas’ book on the ‘crisis of the dictatorships’ in Spain, Portugal and Greece (Poulantzas 1976). Although Poulantzas insisted on the primacy of internal factors, he also used such concepts as ‘dependent industrialization’ and ‘dependent type of state’. In his opinion, Spain, Portugal and Greece stand in a relationship of dependence to the imperialist metropolises. Poulantzas’ solution to the problem of the relationship between internal and external factors is

that those coordinates of the imperialist chain that are ‘external’ to a country —the global balance of forces, the role of a particular great power, etc.— only act on the country in question by way of their internalization, i.e. by their articulation to its own specific contradictions

(ibid.: 22)

In this context, ‘internalization’ is understood as the ‘induced reproduction’ of the contradictions of imperialism. What Poulantzas calls the ‘imperialist chain’ and ‘dependency’ are two factors determining the structural, socio-political and economic transformation of Spain, Portugal and Greece in the 1970s. These countries can no longer simply be placed on the peripheral side of a traditional division between agriculture/industry in the international system. The ‘new’ dependency, as he calls it, is the result of a process of industrialization generated by foreign, international capital, which dissolves traditional economic organizations and pre-capitalist modes of production in an accelerated way.

Poulantzas tried to explain why the accelerated industrialization of Spain, Portugal and Greece had little to do with the classical image of underdevelopment. That is, the traditional idea of a class alliance between big landowners, on the one hand, and, on the other, a comprador bourgeoisie which is weakly rooted in the national economic structure and functions as a direct commercial and financial intermediary for the penetration of foreign capital, becomes modified. Alongside this comprador bourgeoisie, which is still defined as ‘that fraction whose interests are entirely subordinated to those of foreign capital, and which functions as a kind of staging-post and direct intermediary for the implantation and reproduction of foreign capital’ (ibid.: 42), an industrial, ‘domestic bourgeoisie’ has come into existence in Spain, Portugal and Greece, which is structurally subordinated to the power bloc of foreign and comprador capital, but increasingly attempts to escape from this domination by eventually entering into an alliance with the labour movement. The fall of the dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece, then, is the result of a crisis in the power bloc, weakening the position of the comprador bourgeoisie which is the main supporter of the authoritarian regime. The domestic bourgeoisie, on the other hand, successfully reinforces its position by agreeing ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Theoretical perspective
• Introduction Global political economy and the transition to modernity
• Historical perspective
• The making of contemporary Spain Socio-economic and political modernization in the twentieth century
• The Socialist decade (1982–1992)
• Operation Europe The hegemonic project of the PSOE
• The NATO referendum and beyond From great power ambition to small power reality
• Socialist economic policy and European integration The internationalization of domestic politics
• Merging into Europe Private bank capital and the Socialist government
• Conclusions and epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index