Camiller_SpanishSocialist

8/13/2019 Camiller_SpanishSocialist

1/32

Patrick Camiller

In March 1986, the first popular referendum on a military alliance in history

was held in Spain. The ruling Socialist Party (PSOE)committed only fouryears earlier to withdrawal from NATOcampaigned for Spanish integrationinto the Atlantic Alliance, deploying a massive battery of official manipulation,threats and promises to pressure the country into accepting its volte-face.The PSOEs eventual success in this enterprise, at whatever cost in moraldiscredit, make its position virtually impregnable in the elections scheduledfor autumn of this year. Today Spanish Socialism enjoys a political supremacywhich, with the exception of PASOK in Greece, has no parallel among the

neo-socialist parties of Southern Europe that have also risen to governmentalpower in the past decade. In France, the Mitterrand term has dwindled to apresidential hold-over, evacuated of political substance, as the Right hasregained a large sociological majority and control of the Assembly. InItaly, Craxi has put his premiership to good personal profit, and somewhatstrengthened his party; but the PSI remains greatly outnumbered by Christian

Spanish Socialism in the Atlantic Order

5


2/32

Democrats and Communists alike, a hinge-formation for possiblecoalitions rather than a dominant force in its own right. In Portugal,the PSP has suffered heavy electoral losses and finds itself in oppositionfor the first time in ten yearsSoares squeaking into the presidencyonly by grace of the last-minute support of a PCP that has alwaysdetested him. Compared with these experiences at their height, the PSOEvictory in 1982 was on a qualitatively different scale and seems capable

of being repeated, if only in parliamentary terms, four years later. Whatare the reasons for this preeminence of Hispanic socialism? How is itrelated to the legacy of Francos dictatorship? What has been the recordof the Socialist Party in office? The purpose of this article is tooffer an analytic balance-sheet that will provide some answer to thesequestions.

The historical portents did not look favourable for the PSOE whenFrancos legions marched into Barcelona in the spring of 1939. Quite

apart from the disaster of military defeat itself, by the end of the CivilWar two decades of wrenching political turns and internecine strife hadleft the PSOE in a state of exhaustion from which it seemed unlikelyever to recover. During the twenties, when the anarchist and Communistmovements were subject to intense repression, the PSOE and its UGTunion federation had consolidated their position as the majority forceof the Spanish labour movement, thriving on the indulgence of thePrimo de Rivera dictatorship and participating at top level in itsinstitutional structures. The fall of the military regime in 1930 usheredin a period of equally unproblematic collaboration with the bourgeois

republicans. But then in 193334, as European labour was reeling fromignominious defeats in the German and Austrian heartlands of SocialDemocracy, the principal fraction of Spanish Socialism tore itself awayfrom traditions of passive accommodation and charted a course ofrevolutionary struggle. The sexagenarian workers leader Largo Cabal-lero, whose previous career had been in the mould of, at best, aSpanish Lassalle, boldly placed himself at the head of the deep massradicalization. Yet the Spanish Lenin, as he became affectionately ifnot altogether seriously known, had neither the theoretical nor thepolitical resources to fashion the PSOE into a flexible instrument of acoherent revolutionary policy. The Asturias Rising of October 1934was not followed through elsewhere in the country and went down torapid defeat; while in the Revolution of July 1936 to May 1937, theCaballerist Socialists gradually lost all sense of direction as they fellunder the constrictive pressure of the Communist Party. The last twoyears of the Second Republic would be dominated by an alliance betweenthe Stalinized Comintern and Neg rns right-wing Socialists, who shareda ruthless determination to marginalize the other forces of the Leftwithin the beleaguered state.

Another thirty years were to pass before the PSOE again showed realsigns of life. As European fascism collapsed between 1943 and 1945,the emigr leaders placed all their hopes in an extension of Alliedpolitical or even military action to the Iberian peninsula. However, theoverwhelming priority in London and Washington at that time was toprevent an anti-capitalist dnouement to the war in Europe, and once

6


3/32

its links with Nazi Germany had been broken the Franco regimeappeared less as a problem than as a prop for the new Atlantic order.Similarly, the PSOEs strategic overtures to the royalists were confoundedin 1947 when the dictator proclaimed Spain a monarchy, with himselfas Regent for life. Lacking confidence in its own capacity for effectivepolitical intervention, unable to achieve the most elementary gener-ational renewal, the exiled leadership under Rodolfo Llopis gradually

withdrew into the cold war shell that was assumed by European SocialDemocracy as a whole, with the exception of the PSI. While theCommunist Party rebuilt an organizational structure within Spain,energetically involving itself in such struggles as the 1956 universityrevolt, Llopis and his associates in Toulouse grew increasingly remotefromindeed, often morbidly suspicious ofthe opposition forces thatwere emerging among the working class and intelligentsia.

Formation of the New Party

It is thus not surprising that the radicalism of the early sixties, whereit was not directly influenced by the Communists, tended to pass throughthe various Catholic Action groups that sprang up in response to theSecond Vatican Council and the new Christian militancy in LatinAmerica. This was particularly the case in the traditional PSOE bastionof Andalusia, where the syndicalist MOAC (Catholic Action LabourBrotherhood), its youth wing the JOC, and the university-based Frentede Liberacin Popular enjoyed a degree of official toleration and supportfrom sections of the clergy. It was in 1963 that a 21-year-old student,

Felipe Gonzlez, who had become active in this milieu without everjoining its organizations, first encountered a grouping of Socialiststudents at Seville University, themselves virtually unknown to thePSOE leadership. However, it would be some time before he establishedformal relations. After graduating in 1965, he received a grant from theWest German Episcopate to continue his studies in Louvain. Here, inan atmosphere then far from congenial for a Spaniard, Gonzlez becameacquainted with elements of socialist theory and the practice of BelgianSocial Democracy. But the deepest impression during that year seemsto have been made by the treatment to which his fellow-countrymenwere subjected. A large number of bars in Brussels, he wrote home,had an announcement: No entry for Spaniards, Africans and NorthAfricans . . . The railway stations are packed with Spaniards who spendhour upon hour in a state of disorientation. Theyre not shown theslightest consideration and are in the saddest human and spiritualmisery.1 Over the next twenty years this formative experience, in whicheconomic and national oppression were so closely intermingled, wouldbe progressively emptied of social content and condensed into a singlepolitical ambition: to make Spain a West European nation, just like the

rest.

Upon his return to Seville in 1966, Gonzlez immediately applied tojoin the PSOE and went on to found a practice of labour lawyers that

1 Antonio Guerra, Notas para una biografia, in Felipe Gonzlez, Socialismo es Libertad, Barcelona1978, p. 60.

7


4/32

became a kind of Party centre for the region. One of the leadingmembers of the local Socialist group was a talented young theatreproducer, Alfonso Guerranow vice-premier in the PSOE govern-mentwho first made contact with the emigrs at a Party school inToulouse in 1966. His own subsequent relationship with Gonzlez,recounted in a number of uninhibited interviews, has been a significantfactor in the development of a personalist regime in the Party. For

Guerra, a man of great energy and skill in organization and partialargument, appears to have concluded at a very early date that Gonzlezscharismatic personality was the key to future success, incomparablymore weighty than any programme and worth the sacrifice of many apolitical principle to be maintained.

Thesevillanos made a dramatic debut in the central affairs of the Partywhen Gonzlez attended a meeting of the National Committee inBayonne in July 1969. A firm link was established there with two other

key actors in the process of internal renewal: Nicolas Redondo, theAsturian leader of the UGT; and Enrique Mgica, a Madrid-educatedex-Communist lawyer and son of a liberal capitalist from the Basquecountry. Together with Guerra they prepared for the 24th PSOE Con-gress, held in Toulouse in 1970, where the forces of the interiorsucceeded in gaining full control over their own organizational structureand in committing the emigr apparatus to take responsibility for theiractions inside the country. Although Llopis remained secretary-general,a kind of dual power now developed within the Party, so that theinitiative in calling the next congress in August 1972 came from an

informal group of ten that included Gonzlez, Redondo, Mgica andPablo Castellano, another lawyer and head of the small Madrid organiz-ation. Sensing the decisive shift, Llopis refused to attend the congressand issued a stream of accusations, typical of the closed world of exilepolitics, that the Party was being hijacked by Francoist and Communistinfiltrators. But in effect the PSOE was now in the hands of renovadores,and at the 26th Congress in 1974 Gonzlez was elected the new secretary-general through a process of elimination. At this time the Partys totalmembership stood at no more than four thousand.

Throughout the period of internal upheaval a quite considerable rolehad been played by the parties of the Socialist International (SI), whichwere determined to nurture a modern social-democratic party in Spainthat would be capable of effectively challenging the Communists in thecoming crisis of Francoism. The first serious attempt by the WestGerman SPD to bypass Toulouse came in 1965 when an emissary of theFriedrich-Ebert Stiftung, Robert Lambert, made contact with a formerprofessor at Madrid University, Enrique Tierno, who had just beendismissed for participating in a wave of public actions against govern-

ment policies. Tierno, a somewhat maverick politician with a longrecord of independent initiatives, tried to win SPD backing for variousprojects. However, he appears to have passed himself off as a leadingmember or representative of the Socialist Party, and was promptlyexpelled when this information reached the Madrid leadership. Tiernoand his associates continued to press their claim in SI circles and in 1973fused with Llopiss rump historic PSOE. But by then the social-

8


5/32

democratic parties of Western Europe, acting through the SPDs HansMatthffer, had virtually decided to recognize the new leadership, andin 1974 a monthly flow of funds came on stream from Bonn that wouldenable the Gonzlez PSOE, after Francos death in November 1975, toenter the transition with an impressive network of local offices through-out Spain.2

No Accommodation to Capitalism

Despite this pointed Northern patronage, the PSOE adopted a newprogramme at its 27th Congress of December 1976, the first held inSpain since the Civil War, which seemed to define it as the most radicalSocialist party in Europea class party with a mass character, Marxistand democratic. Rejecting any path of accommodation to capitalism,the programme envisaged the taking of political and economic power,the socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchangeby the working class. Of course such formulations of the final goal hadonce been the standard, raising no eyebrows among the continentalparties of social democracy. But this was now seventeen years afterBad Godesberg had brought programme into line with practice andenshrined a most extensive accommodation to capitalism as the modelfor European Socialism. The Gonzlez team, deeply indebted to theSPD for material and political aid, had never shown any commitmentto a Marxist inflection of the Partys ideology and strategy. Why, then,this language of the 27th Congress?

It should be remembered that in December 1976 the legislation ofpolitical parties was still two months away, and that negotiations withthe reformistfranquista Adolfo Surez had yet to begin in earnest. Formuch of the year a stonewalling conservative bunker had kept alive inthe Left its declared objective of a decisive break or ruptura with theinherited political order, leading to the formation of a provisionalgovernment and the convocation of a constituent assembly. NearbyPortugal had just demonstrated in 197475 that a situation of fundamen-tal political instability readily fuels the social aspirations of the working-class masses, raising major ambiguities about the direction of the regime

that will eventually emerge from the crisis. The PSOE itself was by nomeans immune from such pressures, particularly since it had onlyrecently completed its own renewal and had been recruiting from radicallayers similar to those swelling the ranks of the Communist Party andthe far left. For the Gonzlez leadership, moreover, as in their own wayfor the Mitterrand Socialists in France, the Partys prospects cruciallydepended upon the political rivalry with forces to its left. The dynamicthrust of the PCE, which was not yet compromised by day-to-daycollaboration with the bourgeois parties, left the felipistas with little

choice for the moment but to swim with the tide. Expectations thatFrancos passing would introduce a radical overturn had, in fact, beenwidespread on the left in the early seventies. Yet neither the ruptura

2 Undaunted, Tierno went on to found an independent Partido Socialista Popular, which won 4.5 percent of the vote in 1977 before re-merging with the PSOE in 1978. Tiernos recent death in January1986, shortly after the replacement of his close collaborator Fernando Morn as PSOE foreign minister,has brought this chapter of Spanish Socialism to a close.

9


6/32

democrtica nor the outright revolutionary situation predicted on thefurther flanks of the Socialist and Communist movements was to berealized after the death of the dictator. The transition, so nervouslydiscussed and anticipated, was smoothly conducted and controlled fromabove. Since the contemporary character and fortunes of the PSOE havetheir origins in this period, it is important to ask: what made it possiblefor Adolfo Surez, a career functionary in Francos National Movement,

to achieve such a decorous end to forty years of military-policerepression.

The key to Surezs accomplishments is to be found in the record ofFrancos long regime itself, which proved to be far more astute andsuccessful than other European dictatorships of the twentieth centuryin preserving the conditions of its survival while transforming the basesof its rule. Born out of the emergency of a Popular Front government,Francos historic mission was to crush the violent working-class andpeasant turbulence that posed a clear danger to the very existence of

the Spanish bourgeois and landowning classes. Above and beyond everyregional, social and ideological division, the defence of private propertywas the driving force which unified the Nationalist crusade. Thispurpose was common to Portuguese and Italian fascism as well. Whatcame to distinguish the Spanish variant, as it was slowly modulated bythe Caudillo, were two things. Firstly, although German pressuresecured rudimentary Spanish participation in the Axis war effort, Francothereafter kept rigorously out of foreign or colonial adventures, of thekind that brought down not only his original sponsors of 1936 but also

the Greek Junta and, less directly, the Portuguese dictatorship. The quietcession of Spanish Morocco in 1956 and Ifni in 1969 was emblematic inthis respect. Secondly, and more fundamentally, whereas Salazars rulewas notable for a marked, virtually deliberate slowness of growthconsecrated by a social and financial ideology that valued stability ofmores, and of money, above all other considerationsthe franquistaregime actively presided over the most sustained and explosive expan-sion of any Atlantic capitalist economy from the late fifties onwards.Tourism, emigrant remittances and cheap labour were the motor of asurge of accumulation which broke every European record and utterly

changed the structures of the society that had once thrown up therevolutionary challenges of the Second Republic.3 Between 1962 and1975, GNP grew at an average rate of seven per cent a year, asindustrialization swept away most of the old rural order. A nation thatwas still over forty-per-cent peasant in 1959 saw the workforce on theland drop to less than twenty per cent two decades later. Per capitaincome increased ten times over in the same period, shooting up from$300 to $3000 a year.4 However unevenly distributedand distributionof income was grossly skewedthe benefits of this headlong advancetowards North European patterns of occupation and consumption couldnot but produce a political configuration quite different from that ofthe April Revolution in Portugal as the days of the regime neared theirend. Popular anger and impatience at the oppressive police machinery,

3 For a stock-taking at the end of the sixties, see Richard Soler, The New Spain, NLR 58, NovemberDecember 1969, pp. 1015.4Jos Mar a Maravall, La pol tica de la transicin, Madrid 1985, p. 68.

10


7/32

the lack of elementary rights of suffrage or association, naturally con-tinued to be wide and deep. But vast numbers of Spaniards had gainedfrom the material transformations wrought by the long capitalist boom,so that rejection of the political order no longer necessarily spilled overinto radical questioning of the socio-economic order. For the leadingechelons of big business, as for the bulk of the new middle classeswhich had multiplied during the years of growth, Spain appeared safer

for capitalism than it had ever done before. The political scaffoldingthat had both concealed and allowed the construction of a stabler socialedifice was an anachronism that could now be dismantled.

The Labour Challenge

Yet few within the ranks of the possessors could be absolutely confidentof the immediate future when Franco expired. The industrial workingclass of the seventies was much better off than its predecessor of thethirties. But it was also twice as numerousnow comprising some 37

per cent of the active populationand far from docile. Industrial unresthad been steadily mounting, spurred by the combination of tight labourmarkets and absence of political rights. Some 1.5 million working hourswere lost in strikes in 1966. By 1970 the figure had reached 8.7 million,and by 1975 14.5 million. Then, in the first year after Francos death,Spanish labour rose to the highest level of militancy in the continent:in 1976, 150 million working hours were lost in disputes, the greatmajority of them politically inspired.5 If such was the situation in thefactories, the position of the exile parties offered little direct reassuranceeither. Both the PSOE and PCEthe traditional spectre of the SpanishRightwere committed to rupture with the whole institutional legacyof Francoism, the former even seeming to menace sweeping programmesof socialization. In short, there existed no predictable or reliable channelsfor containing the potential aspirations and energies of the masses, oncepolice controls were lifted. Moreover in one region, Euzkadi, the armedresistance of the nationalist ETA had set a disturbing example for therest of the country and spectacularly intervened in central political affairswith the assassination of Francos chosen successor, Admiral CarreroBlanco, in 1973.

Nevertheless, amidst these uncertainties, the front-line sections of Span-ish capital were in no doubt that a Euromodernization of the countryspolitical structures was not only a desirable but an inevitable conse-quence of the profound social changes that had taken place since theCivil War. Well before the turmoil of 1976, the industrial workforcehad become increasingly unionized in the Workers Commissions andthe UGT, which were now central to shopfloor wage-bargaining andindeed often courted by employers anxious to secure productivityagreements. For the banks and big business, the only alternative to a

subordinate integration of labour into national politics would have beena Pinochet-style decapitation of the workers movement for anothergenerationa course that Spains insertion into the European economy,including the vital tourist trade, rendered all but unthinkable. Thecrucial objective, then, symbolized in the drive for EEC membership,

5 Ibid., p. 27.

11


8/32

was to strengthen the Spanish economy and polity through participationin the bourgeois-democratic order of Western Europe, and to effect thetransition in such a way that the flow-tide of working-class radicalismwould not leave a permanent mark on any new political settlement.

It was this task that Adolfo Surez would fulfil with consummate abilityin the next three years. Appointed premier by King Juan Carlos in the

summer of 1976, when mere use of the mailed fist had become unwork-able after the massacres in Vitoria and Montejurra, Surez had first towin over the mainstream official Right to political reform and thenin a second stageto impose its agenda on the mass workers parties.He was aided in this process by the peculiarly hybrid character of the

franquista regime itself, of which he had been a familiar. The Nationalistforces which won the Civil War always remained far more heteroclitein outlook and origin than the fascist fronts in Germany, Italy andPortugal. As monarchists, carlists, falangists, catholics and career officersjostled for position, acquiring relative dominance at various junctures

in the forties and fifties, no thoroughgoing organizational or politicalunification ever occurred below the person of the Caudillo himself. Bythe time of the post-war boom, this mixed establishment allowed theentry of quite new elements into the regimeabove all, the Opus Deitechnocrats who managed Spains economic liberalization in the sixties.The result was a growth of informal or semi-formal opposition groupswithin the Spanish bourgeoisie, whose personnel was not separated byhard-and-fast lines of division from that of the regime itselfleadingmembers often taking up posts in the state apparatus, while former state

functionaries could cross over to these outlyingfrondes. The regime wasthus surrounded by an indeterminate buffer zone extending into moreor less liberal or enlightened bourgeois circles in civil society.6 Thedictatorship was, in this sense, never an isolated fortress within Spanishsocietythe very term bunker, reserved for its most unyielding sector,tacitly points up the mesh of connections between the rest of theadministration and the capitalist public sphere it had helped to bringinto being.

Here lay the secret of much of Surezs initial breakthrough. He was

able to construct, quickly and easily, a Cabinet containing leading figuresfrom the buffer zone who simultaneously represented guarantees ofcontinuity with the past and promises of a normalized futuremainlyself-styled Reformists and Christian Democrats. A Law of PoliticalReform, introducing universal suffrage, was then pushed through arecalcitrant Cortes and ratified by referendum in December 1976. Legaliz-ation of non-Communist political parties followed in February 1977,and the dissolution of the National Movement in April. However, thesuccess of Surezs projectand the overall credentials of the neworderevidently also required the legalization of the PCE. This step

was hard for the army to swallow, but Surez met less resistance thanhe had expected and was able to carry it through in April 1977, oncethe Communist leadership had agreed to accept the Bourbon dynasty

6 The notion of a buffer zone is shrewdly developed by the Chilean analyst Carlos Huneeus in LaUnion de Centro Democrtico y la transicin a la democracia en Espaa, Madrid 1985, pp. 2732afundamental work for this period.

12


9/32

and to abjure the banner and cause of the Republic. In July the Corteswas dissolved and general elections staged, on the basis of an electoralsystem bent to over-represent the less urbanized provinces which hadbeen the strongholds of the CEDA Right in the Second RepublicSor a,for example, had one deputy per 34,000 voters against Madrids oneper 136,000and designed to grant a large premium to the biggestparty. Surezs newly created Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD),

with 35 per cent of the vote, took 47 per cent of the seats in the newAssembly. This triumph of political artifice was then completed withthe Moncloa Pact of October 1977, which tied down trade unionfreedom of action in exchange for pledges of welfare and other reforms,and finally with the adoption of a new Constitution in early 1978.

A Free-Enterprise Monarchy

Within a little over a year, Surez had smoothly piloted the fascist stateto a soft landing on the plains of a more or less conventional bourgeois

democracy. He had done so while maintaining a nearly perfect continuityof personnel in the upper reaches of the civil service, judiciary andarmed forces, except where it had been necessary to find posts for formerbureaucrats of the defunct vertical syndicates. The new Constitutionsanctified the principle of private property, recognized the armys rolein protecting the constitutional order and laid down the obligation forany government to maintain relations of cooperation with the Church.Topping the whole edifice was an unelected monarch who had beengiven the power to command the army, select governments and ulti-mately to veto legislation. Such was the mess of pottage for which theinsurgent and republican birthright of the Spanish labour movementwas given up by the leaders of the Socialist and Communist opposition.For in effect, once the reformist course had won the day in the politicalestablishment, the PSOE and PCE leaderships simply decided to fall inwith its scope and timing. The Communists, despite their lower electoralsupport, played a more central role in this process, both because theirhistorical record identified them in popular eyes as the main potentialsource of resolute struggle for democracy, and because they had agreater capacity for independent action in the shape of their larger,

more militant membership and their control of the Workers Com-missions. The political capitulation of the two main parties of the Leftbefore Surezs handiwork was justified on the grounds of the over-riding need for a liberal-democratic regime in Spain, after the tyrannyof the past forty years, and the claim that any unwillingness to acceptthe terms stipulated by Francos heirs would risk military interventionand the cancellation of all prospects of civil liberties. In other words,there was no other responsible or realistic course that the PSOE and PCEcould have taken.

Such arguments were plainly spurious, as even observers sympatheticto Surezs aims have not failed to note.7 It is true, of course, that the197679 transition instituted a regime of political democracy, howeverlimited, in which the working-class parties enjoyed invaluable rights.

7 See, for example, Raymond Carr and Juan Pablo Fusi,Spain: Dictatorship to Democracy, London 1981,pp. 2267two authors who are above suspicion of any ultra-left enthusiasm.

13


10/32

Many a far-left group paid the price of marginalization and internalcrisis for its failure to recognize the importance of democratic struggles,or to appreciate that a left-wing programme had to address itselfcentrally to the popular thirst for political freedoms and protection fromarbitrary rule. In the Europe of the late seventies, the very capacity ofan anti-capitalist Left in Spain to win mass support for revolutionarysocial change depended upon the way in which it intervened in the

process of political transition. But if the storming of the Winter Palacewas not a viable alternative to Surezs reform project, nor was theLefts only other option to place itself meekly at the service of thepolitical and economic strategy of big capital. The simple fact is thateven on the ground of bourgeois-democratic right, the Left had everyinterest in challenging Surezs reformist credentials on the national andinternational arena, every opportunity to argue and campaign for anelectoral-constitutional outcome that was not so formally weightedagainst labour. The first condition for such a course was a minimal unityof the LeftGonzlezs anti-Communist manoeuvres and Carrillosegregious overtures to Surez were a godsend to the hard-pressedbourgeois camp. If the Communists and Socialists had jointly refusedto acquiesce in the electoral gerrymandering, the conservative Consti-tution and the monarchical form of state, they would at least haveexerted strong pressure on the Right to accept real compromises ratherthan the pious phrases about social justice that adorn the Constitution.Since the authoritarian Right had neither the political will nor themedium-range capacity to settle matters by a show of force, a unitedLeft could have had every expectation of winning a referendum contest

between clearly posed constitutional alternatives, and thus of powerfullyreinforcing its own position within Spanish society.

For the classical Marxist tradition, the democratic republic was theterrain on which the class struggle could eventually be waged to avictorious conclusion; for the PSOE and PCE leaderships in the lateseventies, the free-enterprise monarchy set the parameters for anepochal reconciliation of class interests. Beyond the supposed trade-offbetween wage restraint and reforms in social security and the stateapparatus, the essential function of the famous UCDPCEPSOE Moncloa

Accords of late 1977 was precisely to express this renunciation ofhegemonic ambitions by the labour movement. Big capital could hardlyhave wished for a clearer or more rapid vindication of its strategy ofreplacing the institutional trappings of Francoism. The level of strikes,which had been the highest in Europe, soon fell towards the WestGerman norm of the time; and unemployment began soaring to unpre-cedented levels as employers took advantage of trade-union flexibilityto circumvent the job-protection legislation introduced in the earlyyears of the dictatorship. Santiago Carrillo was left to praise the MoncloaAccords as the acme of enlightened class cooperation, providing a

model for years to come. The PSOE, though equally complicit, preferredto adopt a lower profile and to wait for the unnatural situation tounravel. Throughout much of 1977 and 1978 Surez skilfully cultivatedan image of discreet understanding between the UCD and the PCE, whileCarrillo ventilated vainglorious and ludicrous visions of an epoch ofcollaboration between the bourgeois and workers parties that wouldcarry Spain to the very threshold of socialism. For its part, the Gonzlez

14


11/32

leadership of the PSOE kept its sights fixed on a German type of politicalsystem in which the Socialists and the Centre would loyally alternate inthe roles of government and opposition. In the meantime, it could wellallow Carrillo his hour in the sun setting the pace for the successivecompromises of the Left.

The End of Pactismo

Three months after a referendum had approved the new constitution,rounding off the period of transition, Surez called new elections forMarch 1979. On the very eve of the ballot, he then turned on his loyalSocialist and Communist allies of the previous three years, warning ofthe menace their Marxist affiliations allegedly posed to the democraticorder and the sanctity of the family. The aim and effect of this volte-face have often been misinterpreted, sometimes in a quite wilful spirit,and so it is worth considering it in a little detail. Table One provides a

useful reference, both here and for the subsequent discussion of thePSOE victory in 1982.

Table One. Evolution of the Vote and Seat Distribution in Elections to the Congress ofDeputies, 19771982.

Votes (%) Seats (%)1977 1979 1982 1977 1979 1982

UCD 34.8 35.0 6.8 47.1 48.0 3.4AP 8.4 5.8 26.5 4.6 2.6 30.3CDS 2.9 0.6

PSOE 29.4 30.4 48.4 33.7 34.6 57.7PCE 9.3 10.7 4.0 5.7 6.6 1.1PSP 4.5 1.1 CiU 3.7 2.6 3.7 3.1 2.3 3.4PNV 1.7 1.5 1.9 2.3 2.0 2.3Others 8.2 14.0 5.8 2.3 4.0 1.1

Source: Calculated from Ministry of Interior figures, as reproduced in J. M.Maravall and J. Santamar a, La transicin politica en Espaa, Sistema,November 1985, pp. 97, 118. It has not been possible to give a consistentbreakdown of the figure for other parties, which conceals some not insignificant

results such as the 3.1 per cent for five far-left groups in 1977.

Note: AP: Popular Alliance, led by Manuel Fraga; CDS: Democratic SocialCentre, the party founded by Adolfo Surez in 1982 after his break from theUCD; CiU: Convergencia i Uni, the main bourgeois-nationalist party inCatalonia; PNV: the Basque Nationalist Party.

Having masterfully superintended the transition, Surez saw the princi-pal task of the 1979 elections as the consolidation of the UCD as the

dominant bourgeois party, pursuing an active class policy withoutencumbrance from the left or right. The period of collaboration withthe PSOE and PCE had been enormously productive both in drawingthe teeth of working-class radicalism and in isolating the right-wingopponents of political reform. But whatever Surezs own attitude mayhave been, the notables of the UCD had never imagined that a pact withthe workers parties could form a stable and dependable basis for

15


12/32

bourgeois rule. The red-baiting campaign of March 1979 thereforeserved two purposes: to draw an unambiguous line under the pactistaexperience; and to absorb into the UCD some of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois support that had fixed on the hard-right Popular Alliance (AP)led by Francos one-time minister of the interior, Manuel Fraga. Theseaims were largely achieved. Nevertheless, contrary to a widespreadbelief, the 1979 elections did not mark an advance for the bourgeois

Right as a whole. Indeed, the UCD merely held steady at 35 per cent ofthe vote, while the combined UCD/AP total slipped from 43.2 per centin 1977 to 40.8 per cent in 1979.

As to the Socialist Party, the election results do not bear out theargument that its vote suffered from Surezs red scare. Certainly therewas no cause for satisfaction, for although the PSOE progressed from29.4 per cent in 1977 to 30.4 per cent in 1979, it had meanwhile fusedwith Tiernos PSP which had won a further 4.5 per cent in 1977.However, the provinces where the UCD propaganda might have beenexpected to make some inroadsfor example, the underdeveloped andunurbanized Estremadurawere precisely those where the historicallylow PSOE vote showed a general progression.8 A number of traditionalAndalusian bastions of Spanish Socialism, on the other handCadiz,Malaga, Seville, Cordobarecorded a sharp drop in PSOE support.Although the variations are too wide to permit a uniform conclusion,there was a clear tendency for the PSOE, as an agency of urban-ledmodernization, to attract the more advanced elements in rural UCDfiefdoms, while the strongly Socialist parts of the country, disoriented

by the spirit of Moncloa, tended to mark time in the contest with theRight.

Left-wing forces in the PSOE argued that a return to radical traditions,including some form of collaboration with the Communists, offered thepossibility of renewed advance. The municipal elections of April 1979,when joint PSOEPCE lists won a majority in Madrid, Barcelona andValencia and 27 of the 50 provincial capitals, seemed to point forcefullyin this direction. But the very movement towards left unity, with anaccompanying radicalization of the Party rank and file, set the alarm

bells ringing at PSOE headquartersand no doubt also in Bonn, Washing-ton and other NATO capitals. The GonzlezGuerra leadership decidedthat the time had come to reverse the programmatic orientation of1976, and the 28th Congress of May 1979 was the scene of a historicconfrontation within the Party. Maintaining with scant evidence thatthe PSOEs Marxist image was an electoral millstone, ever liable to beused against it by enemies on the right, Gonzlez and his confederatesproposed the deletion of references to Marxism in the Party platform.A group of left-wingers around Francisco Bustelo and Luis Gmez

Llorente, supported by the Party traditionalist Pablo Castellano, coun-tered with a vigorous attack on the opportunist course of leadershippolicy and won a convincing majority against the tabled changes. Then

8 If we leave aside the Basque country, where special factors were in play, thirteen of the fifteenprovinces with the lowest PSOE vote registered a marked advance on 1977 varying from 0.4 per centin La Corua to 10.1 per cent in Lerida. See the table in J. F. Tezanos, Continuidad y cambio en elsocialismo espaol,Sistema, November 1985, p. 51.

16


13/32

Gonzlez, exploiting his own cult to the full, employed the tried-and-tested device of resigning as general secretary to throw the critics ontothe defensive. It was a dramatic but hardly risky gesture. For theopposition signally lackedindeed, scarcely aspired tothe ideologicaland organizational coherence of an alternative leadership. Nor did therepresentatives of the SPD and SI leave room for doubt that their politicaland financial resources had been invested in Felipes charisma and would

not be available to any old leaders the party might happen to choose.9

In the course of the summer the PSOE apparatus, dynamized by Gonz-lezs bosom-comrade Guerra, turned the situation around by introducinga new system whereby congress delegations were selected en bloc atregional level rather than by local branches. This allowed the maximumpressure to be concentrated at strategic points, and in a few cases ofrecalcitrance the regional congresses could be suspended for allegedirregularities. Thus, when an extraordinary national congress convenedat the end of September, not the slightest echo could be heard ofthe May revolt as the delegates voted by acclamation for Gonzlezsreappointment. Careful preparations had ensured that Marxism wouldnot disturb the proceedings: it would be conceded a place in the Partysideogramme, but with no greater privilege than more exotic variantsof committed Christian socialism, or socialism springing out of anthro-pological positions of an ecological, Krausian or humanist kind.10

Such openness did not, however, extend to more profane matters. Themain work of the congress was to sweep every last cr tico from the PartyExecutive, which has subsequently exhibited a degree of monolithism

with few parallels in Western Europe. Although a loosely organizedPSOE Left has continued to exist in the shape of the Izquierda Socialista,and to produce often valuable critiques of government policy, it hasnever again dented the supremacy of the felipistas over the Partysinternal life.11

Crisis on the Right

At the same time, the UCD was beginning to show early signs of thatdizzying crisis which would lead to its collapse at the polls in 1982,

when it won no more than seven per cent of the vote and eleven seatsin parliament. There were a number of dimensions to this breakdown,some of a circumstantial or even personal nature, but the most importantinvolved structural features of the Spanish political scene which continueto operate to this day.

Founded a month before the June 1977 ballot, the UCD was initiallyconceived as little more than an electoral alliance between Surezs

franquista reformists and a galaxy of fourteen minor parties ranging

from Christian, Popular or Social Democrats through Social Liberalsto regionally based formations in Murcia, Galicia, the Canaries and

9 See R. de la Cierva, Historia del socialismo en Espaa, 18791983, Barcelona 1983, p. 263.10J. L. Cebrins interview with Gonzlez in El Pa s,14June 1979, quoted from A. G. Santesmases,Evolucin ideolgica del socialismo en la Espaa actual, Sistema, November 1985, p. 67.11 For a recent analysis by a supporter of the Izquierda Socialista, see the article by Santesmases citedin the preceding note.

17


14/32

Estremadura. Many of these had already functioned as a kind ofdemocratic showcase under the Franco regime, never sinking rootsbeyond a tiny stratum of local notables. For the most part they weredevoid of the electoral machinery, or even the elementary self-assurance,necessary to make an impact in the arena of bourgeois-democraticpolitics. Faced with the prospect of oblivion in the 1977 elections, theytherefore opted to throw in their lot with the old layer of state

bureaucrats with which they had grown familiar in the sixties and earlyseventies. On their side, the franquistas needed the modern-soundingnames of the proto-UCD parties in order to cover their tracks beforethe electorate. But being also aware that they alone could provide thenerve-centre and charismatic persona for the campaign, they were ableto divide up the list in such a way that they received a third of the UCDseats in the first parliament of the transition. Immediately thereafter,Surez embarked upon an ambitious project to turn the UCD into acentralized political party with a unified membership structurea pro-ject which, after serious resistance from some of the constituent sectors,eventually came to fruition in the autumn of 1978.

As it turned out, this drive to force the pace of homogenization was tobreak the back of the UCD. So long as the Constitution debate closedthe ranks against the Popular Alliance, Surez was able to exercise firmcontrol and to paper over any cracks that appeared in the facade. Butonce the constitutional referendum and the March 1979 elections hadrelieved the pressure from the right, the full force of centrifugaltendencies began to reassert itself. Surez realized that if the UCD wasto establish itself as a hegemonic party in the country, and not just asa rigged 48 per cent bloc of seats in parliament, the facts of electoralcompetition with the PSOE now dictated a shift to the left on suchissues as divorce, fiscal reform or modernization of the state apparatus.The very composition of the UCD, however, as well as the conservativedispositions of many of its key supporters, stood in the way of thisgrand design. Surez was not deterred. Both political calculation andpersonal inclination determined this trained administrator to press ahead.

The first plank was tax reform. Under Franco Spain had one of themost notoriously inequitable and ineffective fiscal systems in Europe.Surez pushed through the first graduated income tax in the countryshistory, and somewhat increased other charges on rentier and entrepren-eurial wealth. Though far from radical by North European standards,indeed still leaving a constant deficit in public revenues to be coveredby emissions from the Bank of Spain, this measure won him theenduring hostility of Spanish employers. The formation of a Spanishequivalent of the CBIthe CEOEwas their response. Business antagon-ism to Surez was strengthened by the rather mild dose of inflation ofthese years, judged too lenient to wage-earners by the employers.

Divorce was a second divisive issue. Illegal under Franco, it continuedto arouse obstinate opposition among notables within the Cortesattached to traditional Catholic values, and concerned to insulate particu-larly the rural population from the rising tide of secularism. After muchinternal jockeying Surezs government did pass divorce legislation thatwas among the most progressive in Europe, but at the price of a revoltby a sizeable section of UCD deputies.

18


15/32

Meanwhile, the nature and extent of the autonomy to be granted tohistorically dissident regions of the country was proving a third area ofacute tension within the UCD, as in Spanish politics at large. Here tooSurez showed himself resolute and dexterous, negotiating accords withBasque and Catalan nationalists that gave relatively wide powers of self-governmentagainst the opposition of centralizers in his own partyand Fragas Popular Alliance. The passing of the Basque Statute did

not satisfy ETA, however, and the level of violence increased in itswake. Conservative resistance to regional devolution thereupon hard-ened, while the two examples of it already ceded had a snowball effectin other provinces, which were soon demanding equivalent autonomy.When Surez next reached agreement with the Andalusian authorities(led by the PSOE) for a local Statute, the UCD Council disavowed himonly to be repudiated in its turn by the partys electorate in Andalusia,which rejected its call for abstention in the ensuing referendum.

The incoherence and confusion revealed in this episode proved, in fact,

to be the turning-point for the government. Surezs skills as a state-builder and broker were not matched by abilities as either a party leaderor a parliamentary tribune. Fanned by personal rivalries and the conceitof local oligarchies, divisions over policy intensified in the UCD, fatallyundermining Surezs project of forging a unified centre party. Surezhimself made little attempt to create a modern mass-membership organiz-ation, or even a personalized political machine, often remaining alooffrom the factional disputes within the party. His appearances in theCortes were sparse and unimpressive, and his liaison with the Palace

declinedno doubt reflecting a private opinion of the dim calibre ofhis deputies and sovereign alike. The result was his increasing isolationat the summit of the state, while intrigue and manoeuvre ran riot amongthe assorted barons of the UCD. The Cabinet itself became a focus ofpermanent instability, as ministries were shuffled between rapaciouscontenders for office and influence. In these conditions Surez appearedto lose his sense of direction and to lapse into apathy. By the spring of1981 it was clearly only a matter of time before the Party broke up.

The Failure of Christian Democracy

Underlying the surface of this trajectory, there were deeper reasons forthe eclipse of the UCD. In Western Europe there are really only twoexamples of a dominant bourgeois party of secular origin. The Conserva-tives in Britain are, of course, the oldest and most successful. Gaullismin France is a much more recent creation, which has never had the samemonopoly of representation on the Right; the RPR today shares itselectorate with the much more amorphous UDF. Scandinavia lacks anyconservative ascendancy. Elsewhere, in Austria, West Germany, theLow Countries and Italy, it is Catholicism that has typically cemented

the foundations of modern bourgeois politics. In the early seventiesSpain was widely thought to be a future candidate for this patternand a number of formative currents in the UCD, including the highlyinfluential Tacito group, designated themselves as Christian Democratic.It is probably fair to say that the central ideological contingent withinthe UCD was always more or less vaguely Christian Democratic ininspiration. But wherever its lines be drawn, it was never hegemonic

19


16/32

over the party as a whole. Surez himself was of a decidedly laybent, as the divorce issue showed; and many of his ministers definedthemselves as Social Democrats or Liberals. The rapid disintegrationof the UCD (triggered by one of its Catholic factions) was thus, by wayof contrast, to throw into sharp relief the absence of a broad andvigorous Spanish Christian Democracy.

Why did a society traditionally famed for the force of reactionary bigotryand Catholic fanaticism so signally fail to generate its own DC? Partof the answer is that, since the 19th century, Catholicism itself has neverbeen as pervasive as in Italy, while popular and liberal aversion toclerical culture has been correspondingly stronger. Furthermore, theSpanish Church of the late 1970s was not only more controversial butalso more divided an institution than its Italian counterpart of the late1940s and 1950s. Its hierarchy had been intimately associated withFranco, who had the right of nomination to bishoprics, and some ofits prelates outdid the Caudillo himself in gnarled repressive zeal. Butits middle ranks were affected by the Second Vatican Council, and someof the lower clergy by progressive nationalist (in Euzkadi) or evensocialist ideas. The Church as a whole anyway lacked the tradition ofvoluntary mass associations of the laity so characteristic of Italy.12 Itwas thus in no position to intervene monolithically in the fluid post-Franco scene. An uneasy hierarchy proved reluctant to tie itself tooclosely to specific political organizations, preferring to diversify itsleverage on the social questions that really concerned it. But this leverageitself had been greatly weakened by the cultural secularization attendant

on the long boom, and the revolts of the late sixties and seventies. Thehistorical moment of 19451950when the DC, MRP and CDU tooksuch abundant root in the soil of continental anti-communism andprovincial pietyhad passed. There could be no Hispanic repetition ofthis experience. But in its absence, the UCD lacked any compellingideological identity or organizational dynamic. Its miscellaneity con-demned it to a short life.

There was a further obstacle to its consolidation, howeverone thatalso presents itself to successor formations today. The oldest and

strongest centres of a true industrial and commercial bourgeoisie inSpain have been located on the geographical periphery, in the Basquelands and Catalonia. Under normal conditions, these would have rep-resented the heartlands of capitalist hegemony in the state as a wholethe regions which historically enjoyed the largest concentrations ofindustry, the highest per capita income, and the densest strata ofintermediate classes (above all, a numerous and articulate petty-bour-geoisie) between capital and labour. But in Spain, they have beenprecisely the prime antagonists of central power, each the hearth of an

intense national sentiment at variance with Castilian rule and culture.The political consequence, once Francos especially oppressive dictator-ship over these provinces had ended, was the re-emergence of nationalistparties with commanding local authority. On the ground, the PNV and

12 This point is well made by Huneeus, in penetrating discussion of the whole question of ChristianDemocracy in Spain: op. cit., pp. 175190. There was no Spanish counterpart of thePartito Popolarein the twenties.

20


17/32

CiU are not comparable in all respectsboth class configuration andlinguistic situation differing significantly in Euzkadi and Catalonia, inways vividly described by Ronald Fraser in these pages some yearsago13but in the framework of Spanish politics as a whole, theirstructural role is very similar. Both are genuine mass organizations, witha large inter-class membership and wide cultural penumbra. Each issecurely dominated by a local bourgeoisie that is traditionally more

enlightened in outlook than elsewhere in the peninsula. Suggestively,both too are infused with Catholic spirit. The PNV is actually a memberof the European Christian Democratic Union. The CiU is less overtlyclerical in connection, but its leader Pujol makes no secret of hisattachment to the Church. These, in other words, are the nearest thingsto real Christian Democratic parties in Spainjust as one might expect,as organic expressions of proud local possessing classes. But their verystrength has so far been a netsubtraction from the total potential striking-power of the Spanish Centre and Right, as the natural bastions of aself-confident bourgeois politics have become jutting redoubts for themost part turned against it. The first clear sign of what this would meancame with the regional elections which followed Surezs negotiationof autonomy statutes for Euzkadi and Catalonia in March 1980. TheUCD suffered complete humiliation at the hands of both bourgeois-nationalist parties, ending up in fifth position in the Basque countryand fourth in Catalonia.

By the turn of the year, the party was in virtual fission and Surez wason the point of resigning as prime minister. Within the next twelvemonths fifteen Social Democratic deputies had exited from the UCD,in many cases finding their way into the new-style PSOE. They werefollowed by Surez himself, who withdrew to form a Democratic SocialCentre that would win no more than a minuscule 2.9 per cent of thevote in the autumn 1982 elections, and by right-wing Christian andPopular Democrats moving into the orbit of Fragas Popular Alliance.Meanwhile another ex-franquista, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, had takenover the leadership of the UCD in February 1981, but his efforts to freezethe crisis by means of lowest-common-denominator politics merely lefthim at the head of a party and government operating in a social vacuum.

It was to fill this vacuum, at the very time of Calvo-Sotelos investiture,that Lieutenant-Colonel Tejeros ragged band of Civil Guards burstinto the Cortes and attempted to rally the camp of reaction. His showof force was in fact no more than a primitive gamble, based on theassumption that for the ruling powers in Spain the only immediatealternative to a stable government of the parliamentary Right was amilitarypronunciamiento. Big capital, the ultimate driving force behindthe transition, had no wish to abandon Euromodernization of thepolitical structure, while only the most incompetent of generals would

have followed an adventure that had neither a coherent programme ofaction nor any visible sign of support in society. The royal non placetbrought the spectacle to an end within twenty-four hours, as anyone ofsanity, let alone a new king anxious to prove his credentials, wouldhave chosen to do under the circumstances. Yet the leaders of the

13 See Ronald Fraser, Spain on the Brink, NLR 96, MarchApril 1976, pp. 333.

21


18/32

Socialist Party promptly fell over themselves in gratitude, as if they hadbeen waiting for just such a cue to abandon their final reservationsabout the monarchy in a ceremonial act of fealty.

The 23rd of February 1981 conclusively demonstrated that the pre-modern social and ecclesiastical forces which had underpinned the CivilWar regime were no longer available to provide a significant base for

a military dictatorship. This is not to say that the army could neveragain play a direct role in imposing an authoritarian solution, nor thatthe Spanish Left does not need to take serious account of this dangerin its strategic thinking. But in this respect, too, the problems posed inSpain are increasingly similar to those in other West European countries,where decades of bourgeois democracy have not removed the ultimatepossibility of military intervention in support of the civil poweror,to put it more plainly, in support of capitalist social domination. Toignore this threat would clearly be foolhardy; to conjure it as the

irrefutable argument against radical social change would be to shacklethe labour movement to the potentially apocalyptic waggon of moderncapital.

The Communist Collapse

The disintegration of the UCD on the right cleared the way for theadvance of Spanish Socialism towards centre-stage. But there wasanother condition for this toothe simultaneous auto-destruct of thePCE to its left. Spanish Communism had entered the post-Franco epoch

with a strong hand. It was the only party to have built up and maintainedorganized resistance to the dictatorship, whose jails were filled princi-pally with its militants. It led the largest independent trade-unionnetwork in the country, the Workers Commissions. It exercised predomi-nant influence over the new and rebellious intelligentsia that hademerged during the 1960s. It had a mass rank-and-file which no rivalcould boastclaiming some 200,000 members in 1978. Yet within afew years it was in ruins: split three ways and stunted to a mere fourper cent of the electorate. How did this happen?

Carrillos first and fundamental blunderone of those that are worsethan a crimelay in his eagerness to secure legalization of the PCE fromSurez, in exchange for a radical abandonment of the partys historicalidentity as the fulcrum of republican resistance to thefranquista dictator-ship and its royal appendage. The folly of this course was soon demon-strated. In effect, the PCE leadership managed to combine gratuitousunderestimation of its real potentialwhich would have forced legaliz-ation on any post-Franco government sooner or laterwith wildillusions that it might immediately score 30 per cent of the vote once

legalized. The 1977 elections, in which the PCE got a mere 9.7 per cent,dissipated these dreams. But in afuite en avant of myopic opportunism,Carrillo then outdid Gonzlez in fulsome promotion of the MoncloaPact, calling for it to be institutionalized in a government of nationalconcentration in which the PCE would work shoulder-to-shoulder withthe UCD. Such a line could only benefit the PSOE, letting it pose as bothmore radical in words and safer in deeds.

22


19/32

Meanwhile, belying the bland Eurocommunist image that he soughtoutwardly, Carrillos leadership within the Party was a roughneckautocracy under which the newer generations, recruited from the resist-ance within the country, increasingly chafed. In July 1981 a group ofrenovators attempted to democratize the internal regime at the Partys10th Congress, and were promptly purged. Organizational tension soonintersected with regional frictions, as the Basque and Catalan affiliates

of the PCE strove to assert their autonomy from the centre. In theautumn of 1981, a majority of the Central Committee of the BasqueParty revolted against Carrillo, and was expelled. Soon after fell thehammer-blow of the 1982 elections, which prompted many of Carrilloserstwhile supporters to rebel against his personalism. Obliged to makea tactical withdrawal, Carrillo installed a young Asturian miner, GerardoIglesias, whom he reckoned to control, as secretary-general in his stead.But the understudy turned usurper and swung over to the line ofrenewal against Carrillo. The veteran Ignacio Gallego had meanwhileled a secession to form an ultra-orthodox PCPE, mainly based in Cata-lonia. Then Carrillo himself mutinied against the new official leadership,walking out with significant support in Madrid and Valencia. The resultis three separate organizations today, each denouncing the other and allclaiming the same heritage.14

A leaden popular discredit now covers this whole experience. Eurocom-munism was little enough of a recipe for political success in Italy orFrance, but nowhere was its price so high as in Spain. This was chieflybecause its implementation there involved a much more drastic and

demoralizing break with cadre traditionsboth recent and revolution-ary, in the underground. But it was also because the PCE had no layerof homogenized collective leadership such as that which has steered thePCI through its vicissitudes since the sixties. Carrillo was a promontorywithin his organization in a way that Marchais or Berlinguer was not.The discrepancy between democratic ideology and bureaucratic practicewas thus much more sharply felt inside the PCE, and there was littletime for generational or regional annealing once the fatal consequencesof 1977 set in. Even now, these have probably not all played themselvesout. For whatever the historical limitations of the PCE, even in its best

days under Franco, the moral immolation of the party to a realpolitikof perfect futility and an inner regime of unworkable diktat was adisaster for the Spanish labour movement. One obvious result was thatthe PSOE no longer had to fear sanctions to its left.

The PSOE Victory

The PSOE victory in the elections of October 1982 was one of the mostdecisive in the history of European Socialism, and more generally ofEuropean parliamentarism. With 10,127,392 votes, or 48.4 per cent, the

Socialists scored nearly double the total of their closest rival, the PopularAlliance, and profited from the biased electoral system of representationto secure 57.7 per cent of the seats in the Congress of Deputies. Unlikein 1979, their advance was particularly notable, and remarkably uniform,

14 For a somewhat more extended discussion of this process, see my review-article The Eclipse ofSpanish Communism, NLR 147.

23


20/32

in the historic centres of Andalusia: the vote in Cadiz soared from 30.2per cent in 1979 to 63.8 per cent in 1982, while in Granada, which hadexceptionally already registered a small gain in 1979, the PSOE totalclimbed further from 35.8 per cent to 57.9 per cent. But in some of theleast pro-Socialist rural provinces of Castille and Galicia, the percentagerise was no less dramatic (from 17.9 per cent to 38.4 per cent in LaCorua, for instance). Only in the Basque heartlands of Guipuzcoa and

Biscay, and in parts of Catalonia, did the increase fall below ten percent.

According to post-election surveys conducted in December 1982,between 55 and 61.8 per cent of PSOE voters were housewives oreconomicaly inactivea category which is hard to interpret since itapparently includes not only pensioners and the unemployed but also,for example, women who do not define their situation directly in termsof their experience at work.15 Nevertheless, if one takes account ofrising unemployment, the lower of the two figures is roughly comparableto the 50.2 per cent recorded in 1979, which in turn closely correspondedto the 51.4 per cent that this group represented in the same year withinthe Spanish population over eighteen.16 Skilled and unskilled manualworkers in industry and services accounted for 17.8 per cent of thePSOE vote, only slightly above their weight in the population.17 Perhapsthe most significant change since 1979 was the appearance for the firsttime in the sociological breakdown of the category of employers ofwage-labour (empresarios con asalariados): 0.3 per cent of the total, orsome thirty thousand capitalists.

A historic breakthrough of these proportionsat least for the workerspartieshas usually been accompanied by an important strengtheningof their grassroots organization and overall presence within society.This was clearly not true in the case of the PSOE. Its membership figure,already falling towards the end of the seventies, slipped back from101,000 in 1979 to 97,000 in 1981, while the number of UGTafiliadosshowed a parallel decline from 1,460,000 to 1,375,000.18 If the PSOEnevertheless succeeded in almost doubling its vote between 1979 and1982, this was due above all to the twin collapse of the PCE and UCD.

With no serious rival on its left, and with the Right regrouped aroundFraga, the Socialists found themselves virtually alone in the broadspectrum of centre-to-left politics. On the one hand, they were able toproject an image of discipline and self-confidence, in stark contrast withthe surrounding disorder; on the other hand, the UCDs failure to addressthe problem of soaring unemployment, and its drive in autumn 1981to steamroller the country into NATO, had broadened electoral receptive-

15 Tezanos, op. cit., p. 48.16 P. Letamendia,Les partis politiques en Espagne, Paris 1983, p. 75.17 Tezanos, p. 49. The figure of 29.1 per cent given on p. 48 can only be a mistake since it does notfit with the others in the table on p. 49. According to Letamendia (p. 75), the corresponding figurein 1979, before a huge rise in unemployment, had been 24.3 per cent.18 Tezanos, p. 24, quoting Congress reports. Figures for the period between 1976 and 1979 aregenerally much less reliable. After the legalization of political parties in 1977, there was a very sharprise from the 9,141 membership level of December 1976, but it is scarcely credible that the PSOEreached 150,000 in the course of 1977 (as G. K. van Beyme suggests inPolitical Parties in Western

Democracies, Aldershot 1985, p. 206).

24


21/32

ness to the PSOEs offer of moderate change. The rise in ballot partici-pationfrom 67 per cent in 1979 to a more typical European level of80 per cent in 1982was another major factor in the PSOE victory, asmillions of new voters reinforced its domination of the centre ground.

Not unnaturally, thefelipistas presented October 1982 as a final vindi-cation of the 1979 turn away from left radicalisma turn so evident

that during the election campaign Adolfo Surezs bourgeois-populistCDS could demagogically, but not unreasonably, claim to be to the leftof the PSOE on such policies as nationalization and state interventionin the economy. It might be argued, however, that since the PSOE/PSP,PCE and far-left vote already totalled 46.3 per cent in 1977, less thantwo years after Francos death, a united Left would anyway have hadevery chance of profiting from the break-up of the bourgeois centre.By diluting its social programme, and spurning any concessions to leftunity, the Socialist leadership ensured that the 1982 victory wouldconsolidate the PSOE as, so to speak, a left occupant of the centre, ratherthan extend the ideological and political positions of the Left to newsections of the population. Yet it would be wrong to underestimate themixture of appeals which Gonzlez and his colleagues had to make tosecure their triumph. Two of these, in particular, continued to sound aradical note. The first was the commitment to halve unemployment, andthe second was the pledge to call a referendum on Spains membership ofNATO, opposed by the Party in the Cortes and the streets alike. Amongthe most popular of the promises made by the PSOE, these provide themost telling bench-marks to measure its evolution in power.

The Economic Record

What has been the performance, then, of the Socialist Party in office?Any assessment of its economic record must start from its clear undertak-ing in 1982 to create 800,000 jobs. This was not, it should be stressed,a casual remark delivered in the heat of hustings rhetoric: the electionplatform prominently defined the lowering of unemployment as themain challenge facing Spanish society in the next few years and thepriority objective of Socialist policy. Defenders of the government

have argued rather unconvincingly that the real scale of Spains econ-omic crisis was not then apparent, and that external factors made itimpossible to fulfil the commitment. Yet in the summer of 1983, whenall the information must have been thoroughly digested, Guerra proudlyrepeated in an interview: Whatever the Cassandras may say, I can tellyou that the government is prepared to confirm its promise of creating800,000 jobs in the life of this parliament. The text continues: Guerrapointed out that it was a difficult undertaking, but we knew that whenwe gave it.19

Such language has, of course, been common currency among electoralistmachinesalthough seasoned social-democratic politicians have usuallybeen more wary of quoting a precise figure. But in 198283, whenunemployment was rising more or less sharply throughout WesternEurope, a serious programme of major job-creation could not but have

19 M. Fernandez-Braso, Conversaciones con Alfonso Guerra, Barcelona 1983, p. 196.

25


22/32

involved a challenge to the dominant tendencies of national capitalaccumulation, and a search for new forms of international economicand political cooperation. Not only was such an alternative neverconsidered; at the very time of Guerras interview, the government wasdeveloping an economic strategy whose principal aim was to foster anddeepen the restructuring of big capital that was already under way. Theunemployment figures have therefore continued their inexorable rise:

from 4.9 per cent in 1976 to 17.0 per cent in 1982 and 22 per cent in1985. Instead of creating 800,000 new jobs, the PSOE government hasso far presided over the destruction of 484,000 more. Over half of the1619 age group, and 38 per cent of 20 to 24-year-olds, were alreadywithout a job in 1983. There must be considerably more today who,for want of any public relief income, have to depend upon the vagariesof parental humour or to scratch around in the underground economyfor the bare necessities of life.

On 1 January 1986, Spain and Portugal finally joined what is now

known as the European Community (EC), on terms so severe for bothcountries that, whatever the long-range effects, unemployment is certainto resume its upward trend. A third of the 36,000-strong workforce inthe steel sector, 6,000 of the 84,000 in the motor industry, 60 per centof the 22,000 once fully employed in the major shipyards, half of the12,000 jobs in the heavy electrical-equipment industry, a fifth of thetextile sectors 100,000 workersthese are just some of the furtherredundancies envisaged or already begun under the government-backedreconversion programme.20 Even these, however, may not be enough

to meet the full force of EC and world competition in the traditionalsectors. For whereas Spains industrial economy already enjoyed apreferential average tariff of three per cent on its exports to the ECand thus stands to gain relatively little from membershipit will berequired to phase out its own tariffs, averaging some ten per cent, onimports from the EC and to bring its other external protection into linewith Community norms. At the same time, the depressed internalmarket and the governments promotion drive have made some of thetraditional industries so dependent upon exports64.3 per cent in thecase of steelthat a new world recession would threaten to drive them

towards the precipice that already stares the shipbuilding sector in theface.

The prospect for the old core industries, then, is one of decimation, inwhich the lame ducks can be sure of going under while their healthiersiblings continue to struggle for survival. One of the governmentsdirect contributions has been a privatization drive largely intended toincrease the specific weight of multinational capital. The giant Rumosacompany, whose nationalization on the brink of collapse in January1983 caused some concern about the governments direction, has since

been restored to profitability and handed back almost in its entirety toprivate capital. Meanwhile, the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI),the state holding company set up by the Franco regime, has been sellingoff vast assets in a wide range of industries, from textiles to tourism,including a 51 per cent share in the key SEAT and ENASA motor

20 See the sector-by-sector survey in the Financial Times,20 January 1986, pp. VVIII.

26


23/32

companies, to Volkswagen and General Motors respectively. The mostprized success for government industrial strategists, however, is therecent deal between the Compan a Telefnica Nacional de Espaa andAmerican Telephone and Telegraph. The offspring, AT and Microelec-trnica de Espaa, which will produce microchips at the new TresCantos plant north of Madrid, corresponds to the favoured geneticstructure: one parent a leading US multinational, the other a representa-

tive of Spanish monopoly capital (Telefnica being literally a privatetelecommunications monopoly). The role of the state is no more thanbefits itto donate some 11bn pesetas of the initial 35bn pesetainvestment.

The model underlying the TelefnicaATT agreement may be replicatedin other sectors, although high-tech mass production will become anincreasingly competitive area in the world economy and Spains R&Dweakness, for a country of its industrial weight, will make it extremely

difficult to move up the technological ladder. At any event this willremain only one aspect of national economic development, to be offset,for example, against the consequences of tariff disarmament or thefact that Spains most competitive sub-sectorthe agricultural beltproducing fruit, vegetables, olives and other Mediterranean productswill only achieve integration into the Common Agricultural Policy in1996. Much as in Britain in the 1960s, the world of PSOE officialdomcultivates wildly exaggerated expectations that the unseen hand of theCommon Market, together with an idealized technological revolution,will revitalize the Spanish economy, raise it to the level of the most

advanced member-countries and solve the problem of chronic massunemployment. Even without the recession widely predicted for 1987,however, there is no reason to believe that capital resources mobilizedexternally or internally will be sufficient to make an appreciable impacton the jobless total.

On the other hand, in conventional bankers terms the PSOE governmentcan claim to have improved the performance of Spanish capitalism. Theannual growth of GDP, hovering around 2 per cent for the last three

years, is close to theEC

average and is projected to rise to 3.2 per centby 1987. Inflation, whose reduction has been one of the governmentsmain policy goals, has gradually been lowered from more than 14 percent a year in 1982 to 8 per cent in 1985, though the introduction thisyear of the EC value-added tax will have inflationary consequenceswhich, as in the case of Britain, are very difficult to predict. Perhapsthe most striking feature of the PSOE years has been the major increasein exportsup 8 per cent in 1983 and 15 percent in 1984, while importsstagnated at

0.3 per cent and 1 per cent respectively. Last year witnessed

a certain stabilization in this area, with exports rising by 2 per cent and

imports by 2.5 per cent. But combined with the falling prices for oiland other imported raw materials, the export surge has yielded a balance-of-payments surplus of some $2bn and kept Spains external debt wellbelow $30bn. Meanwhile, the government shows no sign of goingbeyond its mildly reflationary package of last spring, and the internalmarket seems unlikely to provide a major spur to capital accumulationin the period ahead.

27


24/32

For Spanish labour, the present outlook is bleak indeed. Annual GDPgrowth of 2.5 per cent is required merely to absorb new school-leaversa figure which, on the most optimistic projections, will only bemarginally exceeded in the next few years. Since it is anticipated that agrowing number of adult women, who today account for only 32.5 percent of the working population, will also be entering the jobs marketfor the first time, everything points to a further rise in registered

unemployment in the wake of industrial rationalization. One of thegovernments objectives, moreover, has been to restructure the jobsmarket itself, in response to the US-led assault on labour rigidities. Bysubsidizing redundancy payments for a number of companies andintroducing a system of six-month contracts, Gonzlezs ministers havetaken the first steps to create that parallel force of unprotected workerswhich is already such a striking feature of many West Europeaneconomies. A major result has been to weaken still more the organiz-ational strength of the union movement.

During its first two years in office, the PSOE government was able tocount on the support of the UGT for its continuation of wage restraintand, with certain exceptions, for its industrial reconversion pro-gramme. In May 1985, however, the federations president NicolasRedondo caused a great stir with his denunciation of economic policy:What is certain is that this version of market economy, which ispresented to us as the only one possible and the universal panacea, isbringing to our country nothing other than greater unemployment,greater inequality and greater poverty.21 Redondo was at last giving

expression to widespread discontent in the overwhelmingly pro-Socialistfederation, whose membership had declined by nearly a half to 700,000since October 1982. Such sentiments, when vented by Communist orother left-wing critics, could easily be brushed aside with an appeal tothe experience and scientific knowledge of ministerial office. But comingfrom the mouth of one of the historic PSOE leaders, they called intoquestion they very legitimacy of the governments claim to be actingin the interests of the working class. By the end of the year, the UGTwas entering into open crisis, with the banking, construction andmining sections mobilized against attack from forces close to the

PSOE Executive. The latter, it seems, is organizing to modify the(anachronistic) characterization of the UGT as a revolutionary classunion, and to introduce a rule-change at the coming congress makingthe union leadership subject to strict Party disciplinethereby enor-mously reinforcing the bureaucratic power of the GonzlezGuerrapolitical machine.

The record on partial reforms hardly provides the Gonzlez leadershipwith new pillars of support. The welfare statethe mainstay of Scandi-navian social democracyhas been only marginally expanded in thePSOE years, and the military budget is the sole target for significantgrowth in the period ahead. In areas where the Church has a majorvested interest, the government has proceeded with a mixture of politicalcaution and economic austerity: a very restrictive abortion law is unlikelyto transfer many terminations from London clinics to the Spanish public

21 InABC,10 May1985.

28


25/32

health service; while education reforms, though giving secular powersa first foothold in private or ecclesiastical schools, will do nothing toalter the balance between Church education and a state system that isstarved of funds. The recent Law on Political Incompatibility, supposedto end the practice of dual job-holding by deputies and state adminis-trators, is a further example of such compromise since it effectivelyexcludes the autonomous regions from its ambit. As to the army, thePSOE has continued the process set in train by the Tejero putsch,pruning much of the dead wood from the higher ranks and consolidatingan officer corps that is relatively modern in its lack of directly politicalambitions. Any economies, however, appear quite diminutive besidethe gigantic cost of investment in new equipment. The militarized CivilGuard, which bore the main responsibility for internal repression underthe dictatorship, has not had the benefit of any reforms and displays anextraordinary continuity of personnel and organization with the Francoyears.

Socialist Atlanticism

Foreign policy is fundamentally an extension of domestic policy. Amovement or government which perceives its own society as a realityto be transformed will seek alliances and points of support among newsocial forces on the international arena, while a leadership which acceptsthe structures of its own country as so many immutable facts willinevitably tend to preserve its inherited insertion into the world politicalorder. This may well seem a commonplace observationone thatdoubtless needs to be carefully nuanced in concrete analysisbut itbears repeating today in face of fashionable theories according to whichnational interests are unique meta-political entities shaping humanagency.22 If they appear as suchif, for example, French Socialists seetheforce de frappe as an intrinsic part of the national identitythis tellsus far more about their own projective conservatism than about anyobjective political reality.

In 1976 the 27th Congress of the PSOE declared: A socialist Spainconscious of its international responsibilitiesa Spain with clear objec-

tives for aiding all progressive nations, with a policy of active neutralitythat goes beyond the false USSRUSA opposition . . . will undoubtedlybe a crucial element in the necessary overcoming of capitalism on aworld scale . . . Freedom, peace, justice and progress will only be fullyachieved with the world triumph of socialism.23 These formulations maylack precision, but the continuum is clear enough; no accommodation tocapitalism within Spain, the overcoming of capitalism on a worldscale. During the seventies, Party leaders continued to explore thepossibility of a neutral Spanish foreign policy, opposing any clearcommitment to NATO, stressing Spains Mediterranean role and entering

into contact through Yugoslavia with the Non-aligned Movement. Thiswas not, of course, an altogether novel departure: the UCD had still nottaken a firm decision on NATO; and Francos foreign ministers them-

22 It is no accident that the recent works of Rgis Debray are enjoying a great vogue among SpanishSocialist intellectuals.23Programa de Transicin, quoted from Esther Barbe, Espaa y la OTAN, Barcelona 1984, p. 173.

29


26/32

selves, confronted with the hostility of several West European countries,had often toyed with the idea of a link-up with Gaullist France toestablish a joint military presence in the Mediterranean. Positions onlybegan to harden in 1981 when Calvo-Sotelos UCD government, in arare display of initiative, created a fait accompli by negotiating Spainsrapid entry into the political structure of NATO, with the eventual aimof full military integration.

What lay behind this move? Spain had long been an important link inthe US military chain encircling the Soviet Union. The Madrid Pactsigned by Eisenhower and Franco in 1953 provided for the establishmentof American air bases at Torrejn (near Madrid), Zaragoza and Moron,and a giant naval complex at Rota near Cadiz. The function of thisnetwork, which was completed between 1957 and 1959 and comp-lemented by a host of other facilities, was fourfold: to extend theoperational range of Strategic Air Command; to offer a relatively securebridgehead for the ferrying of US troops to the European (or Middle

Eastern) front in the event of war; to sustain the activities of the SixthFleet in the Mediterranean; and to assure, together with Gibraltar,control of movements through the Straits. With the passage of time,the relative significance of these aspects has often changed. In particular,the shift in emphasis in the sixties from strategic bombers to nuclear(Polaris) submarines greatly enhanced the role of the Rota base, as didGadafys closure of Wheelus in Libya. At no point did the bilateralnature of the Madrid accords actually impair wider NATO planning.Nevertheless, the treaty with Spain did not represent an optimal arrange-

ment for Washington. There were two main reasons for this. In1963

and again in 1968, Franco bargained hard over the terms of its renewal,demanding financial and diplomatic concessions from the US whichsuggested that it would always remain open to a Spanish governmentto disturb the balance of what it might regard as largely, if not solely,a business arrangement. Moreover, under Franco the Spanish armedforces were organized, equipped and deployed for the purposes ofinternal repressionon a parsimonious budget, at a very low level ofmilitary technologyso that the manpower reserves of WesternEuropes fifth largest country were practically useless for any NATO

grand design. Full integration into NATO, involving both stabilizationand modernization of Spains strategic contribution was obviouslypreferable. But both Francos own isolationism, and Benelux and Scandi-navian objections to the admission of his dictatorship to the AtlanticAlliance, prevented this. The advent of parliamentary democracy inMadrid lifted these obstacles. Entry into NATO now formed a naturalpart of the overall drive for a Euromodernization of Spain sought bybig business and mainstream bourgeois opinion, while at the same timeit fitted admirably into the option to rekindle the Cold War taken atthe Brussels meeting of NATO which launched the Euromissile pro-

gramme in late 1979.

As the Calvo-Sotelo Cabinet pushed membership of NATO through theCortes, the PSOE launched a vigorous campaignas did Communistsand other forces on the leftthat helped to sway Spanish public opinion.Whereas in 1979 polls showed that 58 per cent of Spaniards still hadno definite view and only 15 per cent were mildly or strongly against,

30


27/32

those opposed to Spanish entry into NATO had risen to 43 per cent bySeptember 1981.24 But once the PSOE had won the elections of 1982,the very success of this campaign probably increased pressure fromWashington on the new Gonzlez government to make a volte-face, inorder to prevent the consolidation of a huge anti-Atlanticist majority.At all events it soon became clear that the PSOE was taking anothertack. At first it was suggested that although the government was not

in principle favourable to Spains membership, nor could it lightlycountenance withdrawal; then it was put out that whereas Spainsjoining NATO had, according to PSOE calculations, upset the balancebetween the blocs, Spains leaving it would have an even more destabiliz-ing effect on EastWest relations. Such successive changes of ideologicalstance were accompanied by practical steps that eventually went beyondthe dossiers left over from the Calvo-Sotelo government itself. Spanishmilitary expenditure climbed rapidly under the PSOE Defence MinisterNarc s Serra, absorbing a much larger share of the budget than underFranco. After two years of firm prodding, enthused the Economist inNovember 1985, the army is looking trimmer, more professional andbetter organized and equipped to do its NATO job of helping to defendEuropes southern flank from the Canaries to Turkey.25 Seventy-twoF-18a aircraft are now under order from the United States; a US-designed aircraft carrier, the Principe de Asturias, is being built underlicence, to be equipped with AU-8b jump-jets and anti-submarinehelicopters, with a second carrier in the offing; and a sizeable rapiddeployment force is being assembled for eventual use in Mediterraneanoperations.

While plunging Spain into the arms race at home, Felipe Gonzleztravelled to Bonn to announce full support for the stationing of Cruiseand Pershing II missiles on European soil. By this timeMarch 1983Socialist language had become plainer and more familiar: Spainsnational interests imperiously required it to play its part in the NATOdefence of the West; the PSOE had been mistaken to imagine there wasany alternative. For above all, according to government spokesmen,Spains entry into the EEC was indissociable from its participation inNATO. Once, the PSOE had insisted that to relate the two things to

each other is simply wrong in principle. To horse-trade in public aboutsuch basic decisions shows a singular lack of political and diplomaticsenseit is a way of tricking the people.26 Now, with completecontempt for its own population, not to speak of obvious facts of theinternational scene, the Gonzlez regime started to claim that NATOand EEC were to all intents and purposes one. Spaniards were evidentlyexpected to be unaware that Ireland is not a member of NATO, norTurkey, Canada or the United States of the EEC; and that Swedenand Austria, incidentallythe regulative models of so much PSOEdiscoursebelong to neither the one nor the other. Official propagandaconstantly strove to convert any understandable popular desi

Date post:	04-Jun-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	jorgecierzo
View:	215 times
Download:	0 times

Camiller_SpanishSocialist

Documents