Patrick Camiller

Spanish Socialism in the Atlantic Order

In March 1986, the first popular referendum on a military alliance in history was held in Spain. The ruling Socialist Party (PSOE)committed only four years earlier to withdrawal from NATOcampaigned for Spanish integration into 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 moral discredit, make its position virtually impregnable in the elections scheduled for autumn of this year. Today Spanish Socialism enjoys a political supremacy which, with the exception of PASOK in Greece, has no parallel among the neo-socialist parties of Southern Europe that have also risen to governmental power in the past decade. In France, the Mitterrand term has dwindled to a presidential hold-over, evacuated of political substance, as the Right has regained a large sociological majority and control of the Assembly. In Italy, Craxi has put his premiership to good personal profit, and somewhat strengthened his party; but the PSI remains greatly outnumbered by Christian
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Democrats and Communists alike, a hinge-formation for possible coalitions rather than a dominant force in its own right. In Portugal, the PSP has suffered heavy electoral losses and finds itself in opposition for the first time in ten yearsSoares squeaking into the presidency only by grace of the last-minute support of a PCP that has always detested him. Compared with these experiences at their height, the PSOE victory in 1982 was on a qualitatively different scale and seems capable of being repeated, if only in parliamentary terms, four years later. What are the reasons for this preeminence of Hispanic socialism? How is it related to the legacy of Francos dictatorship? What has been the record of the Socialist Party in office? The purpose of this article is to offer an analytic balance-sheet that will provide some answer to these questions. The historical portents did not look favourable for the PSOE when Francos legions marched into Barcelona in the spring of 1939. Quite apart from the disaster of military defeat itself, by the end of the Civil War two decades of wrenching political turns and internecine strife had left the PSOE in a state of exhaustion from which it seemed unlikely ever to recover. During the twenties, when the anarchist and Communist movements were subject to intense repression, the PSOE and its UGT union federation had consolidated their position as the majority force of the Spanish labour movement, thriving on the indulgence of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and participating at top level in its institutional structures. The fall of the military regime in 1930 ushered in a period of equally unproblematic collaboration with the bourgeois republicans. But then in 193334, as European labour was reeling from ignominious defeats in the German and Austrian heartlands of Social Democracy, the principal fraction of Spanish Socialism tore itself away from traditions of passive accommodation and charted a course of revolutionary struggle. The sexagenarian workers leader Largo Caballero, whose previous career had been in the mould of, at best, a Spanish Lassalle, boldly placed himself at the head of the deep mass radicalization. Yet the Spanish Lenin, as he became affectionately if not altogether seriously known, had neither the theoretical nor the political resources to fashion the PSOE into a flexible instrument of a coherent revolutionary policy. The Asturias Rising of October 1934 was not followed through elsewhere in the country and went down to rapid defeat; while in the Revolution of July 1936 to May 1937, the Caballerist Socialists gradually lost all sense of direction as they fell under the constrictive pressure of the Communist Party. The last two years of the Second Republic would be dominated by an alliance between the Stalinized Comintern and Neg rns right-wing Socialists, who shared a ruthless determination to marginalize the other forces of the Left within the beleaguered state. Another thirty years were to pass before the PSOE again showed real signs of life. As European fascism collapsed between 1943 and 1945, the emigr leaders placed all their hopes in an extension of Allied political or even military action to the Iberian peninsula. However, the overwhelming priority in London and Washington at that time was to prevent an anti-capitalist dnouement to the war in Europe, and once
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its links with Nazi Germany had been broken the Franco regime appeared less as a problem than as a prop for the new Atlantic order. Similarly, the PSOEs strategic overtures to the royalists were confounded in 1947 when the dictator proclaimed Spain a monarchy, with himself as Regent for life. Lacking confidence in its own capacity for effective political intervention, unable to achieve the most elementary generational renewal, the exiled leadership under Rodolfo Llopis gradually withdrew into the cold war shell that was assumed by European Social Democracy as a whole, with the exception of the PSI. While the Communist Party rebuilt an organizational structure within Spain, energetically involving itself in such struggles as the 1956 university revolt, Llopis and his associates in Toulouse grew increasingly remote fromindeed, often morbidly suspicious ofthe opposition forces that were emerging among the working class and intelligentsia.
Formation of the New Party

It is thus not surprising that the radicalism of the early sixties, where it was not directly influenced by the Communists, tended to pass through the various Catholic Action groups that sprang up in response to the Second Vatican Council and the new Christian militancy in Latin America. This was particularly the case in the traditional PSOE bastion of Andalusia, where the syndicalist MOAC (Catholic Action Labour Brotherhood), its youth wing the JOC, and the university-based Frente de Liberacin Popular enjoyed a degree of official toleration and support from sections of the clergy. It was in 1963 that a 21-year-old student, Felipe Gonzlez, who had become active in this milieu without ever joining its organizations, first encountered a grouping of Socialist students at Seville University, themselves virtually unknown to the PSOE leadership. However, it would be some time before he established formal relations. After graduating in 1965, he received a grant from the West German Episcopate to continue his studies in Louvain. Here, in an atmosphere then far from congenial for a Spaniard, Gonzlez became acquainted with elements of socialist theory and the practice of Belgian Social Democracy. But the deepest impression during that year seems to have been made by the treatment to which his fellow-countrymen were subjected. A large number of bars in Brussels, he wrote home, had an announcement: No entry for Spaniards, Africans and North Africans . . . The railway stations are packed with Spaniards who spend hour upon hour in a state of disorientation. Theyre not shown the slightest consideration and are in the saddest human and spiritual misery.1 Over the next twenty years this formative experience, in which economic and national oppression were so closely intermingled, would be progressively emptied of social content and condensed into a single political ambition: to make Spain a West European nation, just like the rest. Upon his return to Seville in 1966, Gonzlez immediately applied to join 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, Barcelona 1978, p. 60.

became a kind of Party centre for the region. One of the leading members of the local Socialist group was a talented young theatre producer, Alfonso Guerranow vice-premier in the PSOE governmentwho first made contact with the emigrs at a Party school in Toulouse in 1966. His own subsequent relationship with Gonzlez, recounted in a number of uninhibited interviews, has been a significant factor in the development of a personalist regime in the Party. For Guerra, a man of great energy and skill in organization and partial argument, appears to have concluded at a very early date that Gonzlezs charismatic personality was the key to future success, incomparably more weighty than any programme and worth the sacrifice of many a political principle to be maintained. The sevillanos made a dramatic debut in the central affairs of the Party when Gonzlez attended a meeting of the National Committee in Bayonne in July 1969. A firm link was established there with two other key actors in the process of internal renewal: Nicolas Redondo, the Asturian leader of the UGT; and Enrique Mgica, a Madrid-educated ex-Communist lawyer and son of a liberal capitalist from the Basque country. Together with Guerra they prepared for the 24th PSOE Congress, held in Toulouse in 1970, where the forces of the interior succeeded in gaining full control over their own organizational structure and in committing the emigr apparatus to take responsibility for their actions inside the country. Although Llopis remained secretary-general, a kind of dual power now developed within the Party, so that the initiative in calling the next congress in August 1972 came from an informal group of ten that included Gonzlez, Redondo, Mgica and Pablo Castellano, another lawyer and head of the small Madrid organization. Sensing the decisive shift, Llopis refused to attend the congress and issued a stream of accusations, typical of the closed world of exile politics, that the Party was being hijacked by Francoist and Communist infiltrators. But in effect the PSOE was now in the hands of renovadores, and at the 26th Congress in 1974 Gonzlez was elected the new secretarygeneral through a process of elimination. At this time the Partys total membership stood at no more than four thousand. Throughout the period of internal upheaval a quite considerable role had been played by the parties of the Socialist International (SI), which were determined to nurture a modern social-democratic party in Spain that would be capable of effectively challenging the Communists in the coming crisis of Francoism. The first serious attempt by the West German SPD to bypass Toulouse came in 1965 when an emissary of the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung, Robert Lambert, made contact with a former professor at Madrid University, Enrique Tierno, who had just been dismissed for participating in a wave of public actions against government policies. Tierno, a somewhat maverick politician with a long record of independent initiatives, tried to win SPD backing for various projects. However, he appears to have passed himself off as a leading member or representative of the Socialist Party, and was promptly expelled when this information reached the Madrid leadership. Tierno and his associates continued to press their claim in SI circles and in 1973 fused with Llopiss rump historic PSOE. But by then the social8

democratic parties of Western Europe, acting through the SPDs Hans Matthffer, had virtually decided to recognize the new leadership, and in 1974 a monthly flow of funds came on stream from Bonn that would enable the Gonzlez PSOE, after Francos death in November 1975, to enter the transition with an impressive network of local offices throughout Spain.2
No Accommodation to Capitalism

Despite this pointed Northern patronage, the PSOE adopted a new programme at its 27th Congress of December 1976, the first held in Spain since the Civil War, which seemed to define it as the most radical Socialist party in Europea class party with a mass character, Marxist and 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 exchange by the working class. Of course such formulations of the final goal had once been the standard, raising no eyebrows among the continental parties of social democracy. But this was now seventeen years after Bad Godesberg had brought programme into line with practice and enshrined a most extensive accommodation to capitalism as the model for European Socialism. The Gonzlez team, deeply indebted to the SPD for material and political aid, had never shown any commitment to 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 of political parties was still two months away, and that negotiations with the reformist franquista Adolfo Surez had yet to begin in earnest. For much of the year a stonewalling conservative bunker had kept alive in the Left its declared objective of a decisive break or ruptura with the inherited political order, leading to the formation of a provisional government and the convocation of a constituent assembly. Nearby Portugal had just demonstrated in 197475 that a situation of fundamental political instability readily fuels the social aspirations of the workingclass masses, raising major ambiguities about the direction of the regime that will eventually emerge from the crisis. The PSOE itself was by no means immune from such pressures, particularly since it had only recently completed its own renewal and had been recruiting from radical layers similar to those swelling the ranks of the Communist Party and the far left. For the Gonzlez leadership, moreover, as in their own way for the Mitterrand Socialists in France, the Partys prospects crucially depended upon the political rivalry with forces to its left. The dynamic thrust of the PCE, which was not yet compromised by day-to-day collaboration with the bourgeois parties, left the felipistas with little choice for the moment but to swim with the tide. Expectations that Francos passing would introduce a radical overturn had, in fact, been widespread 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 per cent of the vote in 1977 before re-merging with the PSOE in 1978. Tiernos recent death in January 1986, shortly after the replacement of his close collaborator Fernando Morn as PSOE foreign minister, has brought this chapter of Spanish Socialism to a close.

democrtica nor the outright revolutionary situation predicted on the further flanks of the Socialist and Communist movements was to be realized after the death of the dictator. The transition, so nervously discussed and anticipated, was smoothly conducted and controlled from above. Since the contemporary character and fortunes of the PSOE have their origins in this period, it is important to ask: what made it possible for Adolfo Surez, a career functionary in Francos National Movement, to achieve such a decorous end to forty years of military-police repression. The key to Surezs accomplishments is to be found in the record of Francos long regime itself, which proved to be far more astute and successful than other European dictatorships of the twentieth century in preserving the conditions of its survival while transforming the bases of its rule. Born out of the emergency of a Popular Front government, Francos historic mission was to crush the violent working-class and peasant turbulence that posed a clear danger to the very existence of the Spanish bourgeois and landowning classes. Above and beyond every regional, social and ideological division, the defence of private property was the driving force which unified the Nationalist crusade. This purpose was common to Portuguese and Italian fascism as well. What came to distinguish the Spanish variant, as it was slowly modulated by the Caudillo, were two things. Firstly, although German pressure secured rudimentary Spanish participation in the Axis war effort, Franco thereafter kept rigorously out of foreign or colonial adventures, of the kind that brought down not only his original sponsors of 1936 but also the Greek Junta and, less directly, the Portuguese dictatorship. The quiet cession of Spanish Morocco in 1956 and Ifni in 1969 was emblematic in this respect. Secondly, and more fundamentally, whereas Salazars rule was notable for a marked, virtually deliberate slowness of growth consecrated by a social and financial ideology that valued stability of mores, and of money, above all other considerationsthe franquista regime actively presided over the most sustained and explosive expansion of any Atlantic capitalist economy from the late fifties onwards. Tourism, emigrant remittances and cheap labour were the motor of a surge of accumulation which broke every European record and utterly changed the structures of the society that had once thrown up the revolutionary challenges of the Second Republic.3 Between 1962 and 1975, GNP grew at an average rate of seven per cent a year, as industrialization swept away most of the old rural order. A nation that was still over forty-per-cent peasant in 1959 saw the workforce on the land drop to less than twenty per cent two decades later. Per capita income increased ten times over in the same period, shooting up from $300 to $3000 a year.4 However unevenly distributedand distribution of income was grossly skewedthe benefits of this headlong advance towards North European patterns of occupation and consumption could not but produce a political configuration quite different from that of the April Revolution in Portugal as the days of the regime neared their end. 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, November December 1969, pp. 1015. 4 Jos Mar a Maravall, La pol tica de la transicin, Madrid 1985, p. 68.

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the lack of elementary rights of suffrage or association, naturally continued to be wide and deep. But vast numbers of Spaniards had gained from the material transformations wrought by the long capitalist boom, so that rejection of the political order no longer necessarily spilled over into radical questioning of the socio-economic order. For the leading echelons of big business, as for the bulk of the new middle classes which had multiplied during the years of growth, Spain appeared safer for capitalism than it had ever done before. The political scaffolding that had both concealed and allowed the construction of a stabler social edifice was an anachronism that could now be dismantled.
The Labour Challenge

Yet few within the ranks of the possessors could be absolutely confident of the immediate future when Franco expired. The industrial working class of the seventies was much better off than its predecessor of the thirties. But it was also twice as numerousnow comprising some 37 per cent of the active populationand far from docile. Industrial unrest had been steadily mounting, spurred by the combination of tight labour markets and absence of political rights. Some 1.5 million working hours were 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 great majority of them politically inspired.5 If such was the situation in the factories, the position of the exile parties offered little direct reassurance either. Both the PSOE and PCEthe traditional spectre of the Spanish Rightwere committed to rupture with the whole institutional legacy of Francoism, the former even seeming to menace sweeping programmes of socialization. In short, there existed no predictable or reliable channels for containing the potential aspirations and energies of the masses, once police controls were lifted. Moreover in one region, Euzkadi, the armed resistance of the nationalist ETA had set a disturbing example for the rest of the country and spectacularly intervened in central political affairs with the assassination of Francos chosen successor, Admiral Carrero Blanco, in 1973. Nevertheless, amidst these uncertainties, the front-line sections of Spanish capital were in no doubt that a Euromodernization of the countrys political structures was not only a desirable but an inevitable consequence of the profound social changes that had taken place since the Civil War. Well before the turmoil of 1976, the industrial workforce had become increasingly unionized in the Workers Commissions and the UGT, which were now central to shopfloor wage-bargaining and indeed often courted by employers anxious to secure productivity agreements. For the banks and big business, the only alternative to a subordinate integration of labour into national politics would have been a Pinochet-style decapitation of the workers movement for another generationa course that Spains insertion into the European economy, including the vital tourist trade, rendered all but unthinkable. The crucial objective, then, symbolized in the drive for EEC membership,
5

Ibid., p. 27.

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was to strengthen the Spanish economy and polity through participation in the bourgeois-democratic order of Western Europe, and to effect the transition in such a way that the flow-tide of working-class radicalism would not leave a permanent mark on any new political settlement. It was this task that Adolfo Surez would fulfil with consummate ability in the next three years. Appointed premier by King Juan Carlos in the summer of 1976, when mere use of the mailed fist had become unworkable after the massacres in Vitoria and Montejurra, Surez had first to win over the mainstream official Right to political reform and then in 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 Nationalist forces which won the Civil War always remained far more heteroclite in outlook and origin than the fascist fronts in Germany, Italy and Portugal. As monarchists, carlists, falangists, catholics and career officers jostled for position, acquiring relative dominance at various junctures in the forties and fifties, no thoroughgoing organizational or political unification ever occurred below the person of the Caudillo himself. By the time of the post-war boom, this mixed establishment allowed the entry of quite new elements into the regimeabove all, the Opus Dei technocrats who managed Spains economic liberalization in the sixties. The result was a growth of informal or semi-formal opposition groups within the Spanish bourgeoisie, whose personnel was not separated by hard-and-fast lines of division from that of the regime itselfleading members often taking up posts in the state apparatus, while former state functionaries could cross over to these outlying frondes. The regime was thus surrounded by an indeterminate buffer zone extending into more or less liberal or enlightened bourgeois circles in civil society.6 The dictatorship was, in this sense, never an isolated fortress within Spanish societythe very term bunker, reserved for its most unyielding sector, tacitly points up the mesh of connections between the rest of the administration and the capitalist public sphere it had helped to bring into being. Here lay the secret of much of Surezs initial breakthrough. He was able to construct, quickly and easily, a Cabinet containing leading figures from the buffer zone who simultaneously represented guarantees of continuity with the past and promises of a normalized futuremainly self-styled Reformists and Christian Democrats. A Law of Political Reform, introducing universal suffrage, was then pushed through a recalcitrant Cortes and ratified by referendum in December 1976. Legalization of non-Communist political parties followed in February 1977, and the dissolution of the National Movement in April. However, the success of Surezs projectand the overall credentials of the new orderevidently also required the legalization of the PCE. This step was hard for the army to swallow, but Surez met less resistance than he had expected and was able to carry it through in April 1977, once the 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 La Union de Centro Democrtico y la transicin a la democracia en Espaa, Madrid 1985, pp. 2732a fundamental work for this period.

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and to abjure the banner and cause of the Republic. In July the Cortes was dissolved and general elections staged, on the basis of an electoral system bent to over-represent the less urbanized provinces which had been the strongholds of the CEDA Right in the Second RepublicSor a, for example, had one deputy per 34,000 voters against Madrids one per 136,000and designed to grant a large premium to the biggest party. 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 new Assembly. This triumph of political artifice was then completed with the Moncloa Pact of October 1977, which tied down trade union freedom 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 state to a soft landing on the plains of a more or less conventional bourgeois democracy. He had done so while maintaining a nearly perfect continuity of personnel in the upper reaches of the civil service, judiciary and armed forces, except where it had been necessary to find posts for former bureaucrats of the defunct vertical syndicates. The new Constitution sanctified the principle of private property, recognized the armys role in protecting the constitutional order and laid down the obligation for any government to maintain relations of cooperation with the Church. Topping the whole edifice was an unelected monarch who had been given the power to command the army, select governments and ultimately to veto legislation. Such was the mess of pottage for which the insurgent and republican birthright of the Spanish labour movement was given up by the leaders of the Socialist and Communist opposition. For in effect, once the reformist course had won the day in the political establishment, the PSOE and PCE leaderships simply decided to fall in with its scope and timing. The Communists, despite their lower electoral support, played a more central role in this process, both because their historical record identified them in popular eyes as the main potential source of resolute struggle for democracy, and because they had a greater capacity for independent action in the shape of their larger, more militant membership and their control of the Workers Commissions. The political capitulation of the two main parties of the Left before Surezs handiwork was justified on the grounds of the overriding need for a liberal-democratic regime in Spain, after the tyranny of the past forty years, and the claim that any unwillingness to accept the terms stipulated by Francos heirs would risk military intervention and the cancellation of all prospects of civil liberties. In other words, there was no other responsible or realistic course that the PSOE and PCE could have taken. Such arguments were plainly spurious, as even observers sympathetic to Surezs aims have not failed to note.7 It is true, of course, that the 197679 transition instituted a regime of political democracy, however limited, 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.

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Many a far-left group paid the price of marginalization and internal crisis for its failure to recognize the importance of democratic struggles, or to appreciate that a left-wing programme had to address itself centrally to the popular thirst for political freedoms and protection from arbitrary rule. In the Europe of the late seventies, the very capacity of an anti-capitalist Left in Spain to win mass support for revolutionary social change depended upon the way in which it intervened in the process of political transition. But if the storming of the Winter Palace was not a viable alternative to Surezs reform project, nor was the Lefts only other option to place itself meekly at the service of the political and economic strategy of big capital. The simple fact is that even on the ground of bourgeois-democratic right, the Left had every interest in challenging Surezs reformist credentials on the national and international arena, every opportunity to argue and campaign for an electoral-constitutional outcome that was not so formally weighted against labour. The first condition for such a course was a minimal unity of the LeftGonzlezs anti-Communist manoeuvres and Carrillos egregious overtures to Surez were a godsend to the hard-pressed bourgeois camp. If the Communists and Socialists had jointly refused to acquiesce in the electoral gerrymandering, the conservative Constitution and the monarchical form of state, they would at least have exerted strong pressure on the Right to accept real compromises rather than the pious phrases about social justice that adorn the Constitution. Since the authoritarian Right had neither the political will nor the medium-range capacity to settle matters by a show of force, a united Left could have had every expectation of winning a referendum contest between clearly posed constitutional alternatives, and thus of powerfully reinforcing its own position within Spanish society. For the classical Marxist tradition, the democratic republic was the terrain on which the class struggle could eventually be waged to a victorious conclusion; for the PSOE and PCE leaderships in the late seventies, the free-enterprise monarchy set the parameters for an epochal reconciliation of class interests. Beyond the supposed trade-off between wage restraint and reforms in social security and the state apparatus, the essential function of the famous UCDPCEPSOE Moncloa Accords of late 1977 was precisely to express this renunciation of hegemonic ambitions by the labour movement. Big capital could hardly have wished for a clearer or more rapid vindication of its strategy of replacing the institutional trappings of Francoism. The level of strikes, which had been the highest in Europe, soon fell towards the West German norm of the time; and unemployment began soaring to unprecedented levels as employers took advantage of trade-union flexibility to circumvent the job-protection legislation introduced in the early years of the dictatorship. Santiago Carrillo was left to praise the Moncloa Accords as the acme of enlightened class cooperation, providing a model for years to come. The PSOE, though equally complicit, preferred to adopt a lower profile and to wait for the unnatural situation to unravel. Throughout much of 1977 and 1978 Surez skilfully cultivated an image of discreet understanding between the UCD and the PCE, while Carrillo ventilated vainglorious and ludicrous visions of an epoch of collaboration between the bourgeois and workers parties that would carry Spain to the very threshold of socialism. For its part, the Gonzlez
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leadership of the PSOE kept its sights fixed on a German type of political system in which the Socialists and the Centre would loyally alternate in the roles of government and opposition. In the meantime, it could well allow Carrillo his hour in the sun setting the pace for the successive compromises 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 for March 1979. On the very eve of the ballot, he then turned on his loyal Socialist and Communist allies of the previous three years, warning of the menace their Marxist affiliations allegedly posed to the democratic order and the sanctity of the family. The aim and effect of this volteface 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 the PSOE victory in 1982.
Table One. Evolution of the Vote and Seat Distribution Deputies, 19771982. Votes (%) 1977 1979 1982 UCD 34.8 35.0 6.8 AP 8.4 5.8 26.5 CDS 2.9 PSOE 29.4 30.4 48.4 PCE 9.3 10.7 4.0 PSP 4.5 CiU 3.7 2.6 3.7 PNV 1.7 1.5 1.9 Others 8.2 14.0 5.8 in Elections to the Congress of Seats (%) 1979 48.0 2.6 34.6 6.6 2.3 2.0 4.0

1977 47.1 4.6 33.7 5.7 1.1 3.1 2.3 2.3

1982 3.4 30.3 0.6 57.7 1.1 3.4 2.3 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 consistent breakdown 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 Social Centre, the party founded by Adolfo Surez in 1982 after his break from the UCD; CiU: Convergencia i Uni, the main bourgeois-nationalist party in Catalonia; PNV: the Basque Nationalist Party.

Having masterfully superintended the transition, Surez saw the principal task of the 1979 elections as the consolidation of the UCD as the dominant bourgeois party, pursuing an active class policy without encumbrance from the left or right. The period of collaboration with the PSOE and PCE had been enormously productive both in drawing the teeth of working-class radicalism and in isolating the right-wing opponents of political reform. But whatever Surezs own attitude may have been, the notables of the UCD had never imagined that a pact with the workers parties could form a stable and dependable basis for
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bourgeois rule. The red-baiting campaign of March 1979 therefore served two purposes: to draw an unambiguous line under the pactista experience; and to absorb into the UCD some of the bourgeois and pettybourgeois support that had fixed on the hard-right Popular Alliance (AP) led by Francos one-time minister of the interior, Manuel Fraga. These aims were largely achieved. Nevertheless, contrary to a widespread belief, 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 of the vote, while the combined UCD/AP total slipped from 43.2 per cent in 1977 to 40.8 per cent in 1979. As to the Socialist Party, the election results do not bear out the argument that its vote suffered from Surezs red scare. Certainly there was no cause for satisfaction, for although the PSOE progressed from 29.4 per cent in 1977 to 30.4 per cent in 1979, it had meanwhile fused with Tiernos PSP which had won a further 4.5 per cent in 1977. However, the provinces where the UCD propaganda might have been expected to make some inroadsfor example, the underdeveloped and unurbanized Estremadurawere precisely those where the historically low PSOE vote showed a general progression.8 A number of traditional Andalusian 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-led modernization, to attract the more advanced elements in rural UCD fiefdoms, while the strongly Socialist parts of the country, disoriented by the spirit of Moncloa, tended to mark time in the contest with the Right. Left-wing forces in the PSOE argued that a return to radical traditions, including some form of collaboration with the Communists, offered the possibility of renewed advance. The municipal elections of April 1979, when joint PSOEPCE lists won a majority in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia and 27 of the 50 provincial capitals, seemed to point forcefully in this direction. But the very movement towards left unity, with an accompanying radicalization of the Party rank and file, set the alarm bells ringing at PSOE headquartersand no doubt also in Bonn, Washington and other NATO capitals. The GonzlezGuerra leadership decided that the time had come to reverse the programmatic orientation of 1976, and the 28th Congress of May 1979 was the scene of a historic confrontation within the Party. Maintaining with scant evidence that the PSOEs Marxist image was an electoral millstone, ever liable to be used against it by enemies on the right, Gonzlez and his confederates proposed 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, countered with a vigorous attack on the opportunist course of leadership policy 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 fifteen provinces with the lowest PSOE vote registered a marked advance on 1977 varying from 0.4 per cent in La Corua to 10.1 per cent in Lerida. See the table in J. F. Tezanos, Continuidad y cambio en el socialismo espaol, Sistema, November 1985, p. 51.

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Gonzlez, exploiting his own cult to the full, employed the tried-andtested device of resigning as general secretary to throw the critics onto the defensive. It was a dramatic but hardly risky gesture. For the opposition signally lackedindeed, scarcely aspired tothe ideological and organizational coherence of an alternative leadership. Nor did the representatives of the SPD and SI leave room for doubt that their political and 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 Gonzlezs bosom-comrade Guerra, turned the situation around by introducing a new system whereby congress delegations were selected en bloc at regional level rather than by local branches. This allowed the maximum pressure to be concentrated at strategic points, and in a few cases of recalcitrance the regional congresses could be suspended for alleged irregularities. Thus, when an extraordinary national congress convened at the end of September, not the slightest echo could be heard of the May revolt as the delegates voted by acclamation for Gonzlezs reappointment. Careful preparations had ensured that Marxism would not disturb the proceedings: it would be conceded a place in the Partys ideogramme, but with no greater privilege than more exotic variants of committed Christian socialism, or socialism springing out of anthropological positions of an ecological, Krausian or humanist kind.10 Such openness did not, however, extend to more profane matters. The main work of the congress was to sweep every last cr tico from the Party Executive, which has subsequently exhibited a degree of monolithism with few parallels in Western Europe. Although a loosely organized PSOE Left has continued to exist in the shape of the Izquierda Socialista, and to produce often valuable critiques of government policy, it has never again dented the supremacy of the felipistas over the Partys internal life.11
Crisis on the Right

At the same time, the UCD was beginning to show early signs of that dizzying 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 seats in parliament. There were a number of dimensions to this breakdown, some of a circumstantial or even personal nature, but the most important involved structural features of the Spanish political scene which continue to operate to this day. Founded a month before the June 1977 ballot, the UCD was initially conceived 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 Liberals to regionally based formations in Murcia, Galicia, the Canaries and
See R. de la Cierva, Historia del socialismo en Espaa, 18791983, Barcelona 1983, p. 263. J. L. Cebrins interview with Gonzlez in El Pa s, 14 June 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 cited in the preceding note.
10 9

17

Estremadura. Many of these had already functioned as a kind of democratic showcase under the Franco regime, never sinking roots beyond a tiny stratum of local notables. For the most part they were devoid of the electoral machinery, or even the elementary self-assurance, necessary to make an impact in the arena of bourgeois-democratic politics. Faced with the prospect of oblivion in the 1977 elections, they therefore opted to throw in their lot with the old layer of state bureaucrats with which they had grown familiar in the sixties and early seventies. On their side, the franquistas needed the modern-sounding names of the proto-UCD parties in order to cover their tracks before the electorate. But being also aware that they alone could provide the nerve-centre and charismatic persona for the campaign, they were able to divide up the list in such a way that they received a third of the UCD seats in the first parliament of the transition. Immediately thereafter, Surez embarked upon an ambitious project to turn the UCD into a centralized political party with a unified membership structurea project 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 to break the back of the UCD. So long as the Constitution debate closed the ranks against the Popular Alliance, Surez was able to exercise firm control and to paper over any cracks that appeared in the facade. But once the constitutional referendum and the March 1979 elections had relieved the pressure from the right, the full force of centrifugal tendencies began to reassert itself. Surez realized that if the UCD was to establish itself as a hegemonic party in the country, and not just as a rigged 48 per cent bloc of seats in parliament, the facts of electoral competition with the PSOE now dictated a shift to the left on such issues as divorce, fiscal reform or modernization of the state apparatus. The very composition of the UCD, however, as well as the conservative dispositions of many of its key supporters, stood in the way of this grand design. Surez was not deterred. Both political calculation and personal inclination determined this trained administrator to press ahead. The first plank was tax reform. Under Franco Spain had one of the most notoriously inequitable and ineffective fiscal systems in Europe. Surez pushed through the first graduated income tax in the countrys history, and somewhat increased other charges on rentier and entrepreneurial wealth. Though far from radical by North European standards, indeed still leaving a constant deficit in public revenues to be covered by emissions from the Bank of Spain, this measure won him the enduring hostility of Spanish employers. The formation of a Spanish equivalent of the CBIthe CEOEwas their response. Business antagonism to Surez was strengthened by the rather mild dose of inflation of these years, judged too lenient to wage-earners by the employers. Divorce was a second divisive issue. Illegal under Franco, it continued to arouse obstinate opposition among notables within the Cortes attached to traditional Catholic values, and concerned to insulate particularly the rural population from the rising tide of secularism. After much internal jockeying Surezs government did pass divorce legislation that was among the most progressive in Europe, but at the price of a revolt by a sizeable section of UCD deputies.
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Meanwhile, the nature and extent of the autonomy to be granted to historically dissident regions of the country was proving a third area of acute tension within the UCD, as in Spanish politics at large. Here too Surez showed himself resolute and dexterous, negotiating accords with Basque and Catalan nationalists that gave relatively wide powers of selfgovernmentagainst the opposition of centralizers in his own party and Fragas Popular Alliance. The passing of the Basque Statute did not satisfy ETA, however, and the level of violence increased in its wake. Conservative resistance to regional devolution thereupon hardened, while the two examples of it already ceded had a snowball effect in 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 him only 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 statebuilder and broker were not matched by abilities as either a party leader or a parliamentary tribune. Fanned by personal rivalries and the conceit of local oligarchies, divisions over policy intensified in the UCD, fatally undermining Surezs project of forging a unified centre party. Surez himself made little attempt to create a modern mass-membership organization, or even a personalized political machine, often remaining aloof from the factional disputes within the party. His appearances in the Cortes were sparse and unimpressive, and his liaison with the Palace declinedno doubt reflecting a private opinion of the dim calibre of his deputies and sovereign alike. The result was his increasing isolation at the summit of the state, while intrigue and manoeuvre ran riot among the assorted barons of the UCD. The Cabinet itself became a focus of permanent instability, as ministries were shuffled between rapacious contenders for office and influence. In these conditions Surez appeared to lose his sense of direction and to lapse into apathy. By the spring of 1981 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 for the eclipse of the UCD. In Western Europe there are really only two examples of a dominant bourgeois party of secular origin. The Conservatives in Britain are, of course, the oldest and most successful. Gaullism in France is a much more recent creation, which has never had the same monopoly of representation on the Right; the RPR today shares its electorate with the much more amorphous UDF. Scandinavia lacks any conservative ascendancy. Elsewhere, in Austria, West Germany, the Low Countries and Italy, it is Catholicism that has typically cemented the foundations of modern bourgeois politics. In the early seventies Spain was widely thought to be a future candidate for this pattern and a number of formative currents in the UCD, including the highly influential Tacito group, designated themselves as Christian Democratic. It is probably fair to say that the central ideological contingent within the UCD was always more or less vaguely Christian Democratic in inspiration. But wherever its lines be drawn, it was never hegemonic
19

over the party as a whole. Surez himself was of a decidedly lay bent, as the divorce issue showed; and many of his ministers defined themselves as Social Democrats or Liberals. The rapid disintegration of the UCD (triggered by one of its Catholic factions) was thus, by way of contrast, to throw into sharp relief the absence of a broad and vigorous Spanish Christian Democracy. Why did a society traditionally famed for the force of reactionary bigotry and Catholic fanaticism so signally fail to generate its own DC? Part of the answer is that, since the 19th century, Catholicism itself has never been as pervasive as in Italy, while popular and liberal aversion to clerical culture has been correspondingly stronger. Furthermore, the Spanish Church of the late 1970s was not only more controversial but also more divided an institution than its Italian counterpart of the late 1940s and 1950s. Its hierarchy had been intimately associated with Franco, who had the right of nomination to bishoprics, and some of its prelates outdid the Caudillo himself in gnarled repressive zeal. But its middle ranks were affected by the Second Vatican Council, and some of the lower clergy by progressive nationalist (in Euzkadi) or even socialist ideas. The Church as a whole anyway lacked the tradition of voluntary mass associations of the laity so characteristic of Italy.12 It was thus in no position to intervene monolithically in the fluid postFranco scene. An uneasy hierarchy proved reluctant to tie itself too closely to specific political organizations, preferring to diversify its leverage on the social questions that really concerned it. But this leverage itself had been greatly weakened by the cultural secularization attendant on the long boom, and the revolts of the late sixties and seventies. The historical moment of 19451950when the DC, MRP and CDU took such abundant root in the soil of continental anti-communism and provincial pietyhad passed. There could be no Hispanic repetition of this experience. But in its absence, the UCD lacked any compelling ideological identity or organizational dynamic. Its miscellaneity condemned it to a short life. There was a further obstacle to its consolidation, howeverone that also presents itself to successor formations today. The oldest and strongest centres of a true industrial and commercial bourgeoisie in Spain have been located on the geographical periphery, in the Basque lands and Catalonia. Under normal conditions, these would have represented the heartlands of capitalist hegemony in the state as a whole the regions which historically enjoyed the largest concentrations of industry, the highest per capita income, and the densest strata of intermediate classes (above all, a numerous and articulate petty-bourgeoisie) between capital and labour. But in Spain, they have been precisely 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 dictatorship over these provinces had ended, was the re-emergence of nationalist parties 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 Christian Democracy in Spain: op. cit., pp. 175190. There was no Spanish counterpart of the Partito Popolare in the twenties.

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CiU are not comparable in all respectsboth class configuration and linguistic situation differing significantly in Euzkadi and Catalonia, in ways vividly described by Ronald Fraser in these pages some years ago13but in the framework of Spanish politics as a whole, their structural role is very similar. Both are genuine mass organizations, with a large inter-class membership and wide cultural penumbra. Each is securely 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 member of the European Christian Democratic Union. The CiU is less overtly clerical in connection, but its leader Pujol makes no secret of his attachment to the Church. These, in other words, are the nearest things to real Christian Democratic parties in Spainjust as one might expect, as organic expressions of proud local possessing classes. But their very strength has so far been a net subtraction from the total potential strikingpower of the Spanish Centre and Right, as the natural bastions of a self-confident bourgeois politics have become jutting redoubts for the most part turned against it. The first clear sign of what this would mean came with the regional elections which followed Surezs negotiation of autonomy statutes for Euzkadi and Catalonia in March 1980. The UCD suffered complete humiliation at the hands of both bourgeoisnationalist parties, ending up in fifth position in the Basque country and fourth in Catalonia.

By the turn of the year, the party was in virtual fission and Surez was on the point of resigning as prime minister. Within the next twelve months fifteen Social Democratic deputies had exited from the UCD, in many cases finding their way into the new-style PSOE. They were followed by Surez himself, who withdrew to form a Democratic Social Centre that would win no more than a minuscule 2.9 per cent of the vote in the autumn 1982 elections, and by right-wing Christian and Popular Democrats moving into the orbit of Fragas Popular Alliance. Meanwhile another ex-franquista, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, had taken over the leadership of the UCD in February 1981, but his efforts to freeze the crisis by means of lowest-common-denominator politics merely left him 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 burst into the Cortes and attempted to rally the camp of reaction. His show of force was in fact no more than a primitive gamble, based on the assumption that for the ruling powers in Spain the only immediate alternative to a stable government of the parliamentary Right was a military pronunciamiento. Big capital, the ultimate driving force behind the transition, had no wish to abandon Euromodernization of the political structure, while only the most incompetent of generals would have followed an adventure that had neither a coherent programme of action nor any visible sign of support in society. The royal non placet brought the spectacle to an end within twenty-four hours, as anyone of sanity, let alone a new king anxious to prove his credentials, would have 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.

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Socialist Party promptly fell over themselves in gratitude, as if they had been waiting for just such a cue to abandon their final reservations about the monarchy in a ceremonial act of fealty. The 23rd of February 1981 conclusively demonstrated that the premodern social and ecclesiastical forces which had underpinned the Civil War regime were no longer available to provide a significant base for a military dictatorship. This is not to say that the army could never again play a direct role in imposing an authoritarian solution, nor that the Spanish Left does not need to take serious account of this danger in its strategic thinking. But in this respect, too, the problems posed in Spain are increasingly similar to those in other West European countries, where decades of bourgeois democracy have not removed the ultimate possibility of military intervention in support of the civil poweror, to put it more plainly, in support of capitalist social domination. To ignore this threat would clearly be foolhardy; to conjure it as the irrefutable argument against radical social change would be to shackle the labour movement to the potentially apocalyptic waggon of modern capital.
The Communist Collapse

The disintegration of the UCD on the right cleared the way for the advance of Spanish Socialism towards centre-stage. But there was another condition for this toothe simultaneous auto-destruct of the PCE 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 maintained organized resistance to the dictatorship, whose jails were filled principally with its militants. It led the largest independent trade-union network in the country, the Workers Commissions. It exercised predominant influence over the new and rebellious intelligentsia that had emerged during the 1960s. It had a mass rank-and-file which no rival could boastclaiming some 200,000 members in 1978. Yet within a few years it was in ruins: split three ways and stunted to a mere four per cent of the electorate. How did this happen? Carrillos first and fundamental blunderone of those that are worse than a crimelay in his eagerness to secure legalization of the PCE from Surez, in exchange for a radical abandonment of the partys historical identity as the fulcrum of republican resistance to the franquista dictatorship and its royal appendage. The folly of this course was soon demonstrated. In effect, the PCE leadership managed to combine gratuitous underestimation of its real potentialwhich would have forced legalization on any post-Franco government sooner or laterwith wild illusions 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 a fuite en avant of myopic opportunism, Carrillo then outdid Gonzlez in fulsome promotion of the Moncloa Pact, calling for it to be institutionalized in a government of national concentration in which the PCE would work shoulder-to-shoulder with the UCD. Such a line could only benefit the PSOE, letting it pose as both more radical in words and safer in deeds.
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Meanwhile, belying the bland Eurocommunist image that he sought outwardly, Carrillos leadership within the Party was a roughneck autocracy under which the newer generations, recruited from the resistance within the country, increasingly chafed. In July 1981 a group of renovators attempted to democratize the internal regime at the Partys 10th Congress, and were promptly purged. Organizational tension soon intersected with regional frictions, as the Basque and Catalan affiliates of the PCE strove to assert their autonomy from the centre. In the autumn of 1981, a majority of the Central Committee of the Basque Party revolted against Carrillo, and was expelled. Soon after fell the hammer-blow of the 1982 elections, which prompted many of Carrillos erstwhile supporters to rebel against his personalism. Obliged to make a tactical withdrawal, Carrillo installed a young Asturian miner, Gerardo Iglesias, whom he reckoned to control, as secretary-general in his stead. But the understudy turned usurper and swung over to the line of renewal against Carrillo. The veteran Ignacio Gallego had meanwhile led a secession to form an ultra-orthodox PCPE, mainly based in Catalonia. Then Carrillo himself mutinied against the new official leadership, walking out with significant support in Madrid and Valencia. The result is three separate organizations today, each denouncing the other and all claiming the same heritage.14 A leaden popular discredit now covers this whole experience. Eurocommunism was little enough of a recipe for political success in Italy or France, but nowhere was its price so high as in Spain. This was chiefly because its implementation there involved a much more drastic and demoralizing break with cadre traditionsboth recent and revolutionary, in the underground. But it was also because the PCE had no layer of homogenized collective leadership such as that which has steered the PCI through its vicissitudes since the sixties. Carrillo was a promontory within his organization in a way that Marchais or Berlinguer was not. The discrepancy between democratic ideology and bureaucratic practice was thus much more sharply felt inside the PCE, and there was little time for generational or regional annealing once the fatal consequences of 1977 set in. Even now, these have probably not all played themselves out. For whatever the historical limitations of the PCE, even in its best days under Franco, the moral immolation of the party to a realpolitik of perfect futility and an inner regime of unworkable diktat was a disaster for the Spanish labour movement. One obvious result was that the 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 most decisive in the history of European Socialism, and more generally of European parliamentarism. With 10,127,392 votes, or 48.4 per cent, the Socialists scored nearly double the total of their closest rival, the Popular Alliance, and profited from the biased electoral system of representation to secure 57.7 per cent of the seats in the Congress of Deputies. Unlike in 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 of Spanish Communism, NLR 147.

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in the historic centres of Andalusia: the vote in Cadiz soared from 30.2 per cent in 1979 to 63.8 per cent in 1982, while in Granada, which had exceptionally already registered a small gain in 1979, the PSOE total climbed further from 35.8 per cent to 57.9 per cent. But in some of the least pro-Socialist rural provinces of Castille and Galicia, the percentage rise was no less dramatic (from 17.9 per cent to 38.4 per cent in La Corua, for instance). Only in the Basque heartlands of Guipuzcoa and Biscay, and in parts of Catalonia, did the increase fall below ten per cent. According to post-election surveys conducted in December 1982, between 55 and 61.8 per cent of PSOE voters were housewives or economicaly inactivea category which is hard to interpret since it apparently includes not only pensioners and the unemployed but also, for example, women who do not define their situation directly in terms of their experience at work.15 Nevertheless, if one takes account of rising unemployment, the lower of the two figures is roughly comparable to the 50.2 per cent recorded in 1979, which in turn closely corresponded to the 51.4 per cent that this group represented in the same year within the Spanish population over eighteen.16 Skilled and unskilled manual workers in industry and services accounted for 17.8 per cent of the PSOE vote, only slightly above their weight in the population.17 Perhaps the most significant change since 1979 was the appearance for the first time in the sociological breakdown of the category of employers of wage-labour (empresarios con asalariados): 0.3 per cent of the total, or some thirty thousand capitalists. A historic breakthrough of these proportionsat least for the workers partieshas usually been accompanied by an important strengthening of 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 from 101,000 in 1979 to 97,000 in 1981, while the number of UGT afiliados showed a parallel decline from 1,460,000 to 1,375,000.18 If the PSOE nevertheless succeeded in almost doubling its vote between 1979 and 1982, 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 around Fraga, the Socialists found themselves virtually alone in the broad spectrum of centre-to-left politics. On the one hand, they were able to project an image of discipline and self-confidence, in stark contrast with the surrounding disorder; on the other hand, the UCDs failure to address the problem of soaring unemployment, and its drive in autumn 1981 to steamroller the country into NATO, had broadened electoral receptiveTezanos, op. cit., p. 48. 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 not fit with the others in the table on p. 49. According to Letamendia (p. 75), the corresponding figure in 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 are generally much less reliable. After the legalization of political parties in 1977, there was a very sharp rise from the 9,141 membership level of December 1976, but it is scarcely credible that the PSOE reached 150,000 in the course of 1977 (as G. K. van Beyme suggests in Political Parties in Western Democracies, Aldershot 1985, p. 206).
16 15

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ness to the PSOEs offer of moderate change. The rise in ballot participationfrom 67 per cent in 1979 to a more typical European level of 80 per cent in 1982was another major factor in the PSOE victory, as millions of new voters reinforced its domination of the centre ground. Not unnaturally, the felipistas presented October 1982 as a final vindication of the 1979 turn away from left radicalisma turn so evident that during the election campaign Adolfo Surezs bourgeois-populist CDS could demagogically, but not unreasonably, claim to be to the left of the PSOE on such policies as nationalization and state intervention in 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 than two years after Francos death, a united Left would anyway have had every chance of profiting from the break-up of the bourgeois centre. By diluting its social programme, and spurning any concessions to left unity, the Socialist leadership ensured that the 1982 victory would consolidate the PSOE as, so to speak, a left occupant of the centre, rather than extend the ideological and political positions of the Left to new sections of the population. Yet it would be wrong to underestimate the mixture of appeals which Gonzlez and his colleagues had to make to secure their triumph. Two of these, in particular, continued to sound a radical note. The first was the commitment to halve unemployment, and the second was the pledge to call a referendum on Spains membership of NATO, opposed by the Party in the Cortes and the streets alike. Among the most popular of the promises made by the PSOE, these provide the most 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 undertaking 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 election platform prominently defined the lowering of unemployment as the main challenge facing Spanish society in the next few years and the priority objective of Socialist policy. Defenders of the government have argued rather unconvincingly that the real scale of Spains economic crisis was not then apparent, and that external factors made it impossible to fulfil the commitment. Yet in the summer of 1983, when all the information must have been thoroughly digested, Guerra proudly repeated in an interview: Whatever the Cassandras may say, I can tell you that the government is prepared to confirm its promise of creating 800,000 jobs in the life of this parliament. The text continues: Guerra pointed out that it was a difficult undertaking, but we knew that when we gave it.19 Such language has, of course, been common currency among electoralist machinesalthough seasoned social-democratic politicians have usually been more wary of quoting a precise figure. But in 198283, when unemployment was rising more or less sharply throughout Western Europe, a serious programme of major job-creation could not but have
19

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

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involved a challenge to the dominant tendencies of national capital accumulation, and a search for new forms of international economic and political cooperation. Not only was such an alternative never considered; at the very time of Guerras interview, the government was developing an economic strategy whose principal aim was to foster and deepen the restructuring of big capital that was already under way. The unemployment 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 in 1985. Instead of creating 800,000 new jobs, the PSOE government has so far presided over the destruction of 484,000 more. Over half of the 1619 age group, and 38 per cent of 20 to 24-year-olds, were already without a job in 1983. There must be considerably more today who, for want of any public relief income, have to depend upon the vagaries of parental humour or to scratch around in the underground economy for 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 both countries that, whatever the long-range effects, unemployment is certain to resume its upward trend. A third of the 36,000-strong workforce in the steel sector, 6,000 of the 84,000 in the motor industry, 60 per cent of the 22,000 once fully employed in the major shipyards, half of the 12,000 jobs in the heavy electrical-equipment industry, a fifth of the textile sectors 100,000 workersthese are just some of the further redundancies envisaged or already begun under the government-backed reconversion programme.20 Even these, however, may not be enough to meet the full force of EC and world competition in the traditional sectors. For whereas Spains industrial economy already enjoyed a preferential average tariff of three per cent on its exports to the EC and thus stands to gain relatively little from membershipit will be required to phase out its own tariffs, averaging some ten per cent, on imports from the EC and to bring its other external protection into line with Community norms. At the same time, the depressed internal market and the governments promotion drive have made some of the traditional industries so dependent upon exports64.3 per cent in the case of steelthat a new world recession would threaten to drive them towards the precipice that already stares the shipbuilding sector in the face. The prospect for the old core industries, then, is one of decimation, in which the lame ducks can be sure of going under while their healthier siblings continue to struggle for survival. One of the governments direct contributions has been a privatization drive largely intended to increase the specific weight of multinational capital. The giant Rumosa company, whose nationalization on the brink of collapse in January 1983 caused some concern about the governments direction, has since been restored to profitability and handed back almost in its entirety to private capital. Meanwhile, the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI), the state holding company set up by the Franco regime, has been selling off 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.

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companies, to Volkswagen and General Motors respectively. The most prized success for government industrial strategists, however, is the recent deal between the Compan a Telefnica Nacional de Espaa and American Telephone and Telegraph. The offspring, AT and Microelectrnica de Espaa, which will produce microchips at the new Tres Cantos plant north of Madrid, corresponds to the favoured genetic structure: one parent a leading US multinational, the other a representative of Spanish monopoly capital (Telefnica being literally a private telecommunications monopoly). The role of the state is no more than befits itto donate some 11bn pesetas of the initial 35bn peseta investment. The model underlying the TelefnicaATT agreement may be replicated in other sectors, although high-tech mass production will become an increasingly competitive area in the world economy and Spains R&D weakness, for a country of its industrial weight, will make it extremely difficult to move up the technological ladder. At any event this will remain only one aspect of national economic development, to be offset, for example, against the consequences of tariff disarmament or the fact that Spains most competitive sub-sectorthe agricultural belt producing fruit, vegetables, olives and other Mediterranean products will only achieve integration into the Common Agricultural Policy in 1996. Much as in Britain in the 1960s, the world of PSOE officialdom cultivates wildly exaggerated expectations that the unseen hand of the Common 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 mass unemployment. Even without the recession widely predicted for 1987, however, there is no reason to believe that capital resources mobilized externally or internally will be sufficient to make an appreciable impact on the jobless total. On the other hand, in conventional bankers terms the PSOE government can claim to have improved the performance of Spanish capitalism. The annual growth of GDP, hovering around 2 per cent for the last three years, is close to the EC average and is projected to rise to 3.2 per cent by 1987. Inflation, whose reduction has been one of the governments main policy goals, has gradually been lowered from more than 14 per cent a year in 1982 to 8 per cent in 1985, though the introduction this year of the EC value-added tax will have inflationary consequences which, as in the case of Britain, are very difficult to predict. Perhaps the most striking feature of the PSOE years has been the major increase in exportsup 8 per cent in 1983 and 15 percent in 1984, while imports stagnated 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 oil and other imported raw materials, the export surge has yielded a balanceof-payments surplus of some $2bn and kept Spains external debt well below $30bn. Meanwhile, the government shows no sign of going beyond its mildly reflationary package of last spring, and the internal market seems unlikely to provide a major spur to capital accumulation in the period ahead.
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For Spanish labour, the present outlook is bleak indeed. Annual GDP growth of 2.5 per cent is required merely to absorb new schoolleaversa figure which, on the most optimistic projections, will only be marginally exceeded in the next few years. Since it is anticipated that a growing number of adult women, who today account for only 32.5 per cent of the working population, will also be entering the jobs market for the first time, everything points to a further rise in registered unemployment in the wake of industrial rationalization. One of the governments objectives, moreover, has been to restructure the jobs market itself, in response to the US-led assault on labour rigidities. By subsidizing redundancy payments for a number of companies and introducing a system of six-month contracts, Gonzlezs ministers have taken the first steps to create that parallel force of unprotected workers which is already such a striking feature of many West European economies. A major result has been to weaken still more the organizational strength of the union movement. During its first two years in office, the PSOE government was able to count on the support of the UGT for its continuation of wage restraint and, with certain exceptions, for its industrial reconversion programme. In May 1985, however, the federations president Nicolas Redondo caused a great stir with his denunciation of economic policy: What is certain is that this version of market economy, which is presented to us as the only one possible and the universal panacea, is bringing 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-Socialist federation, whose membership had declined by nearly a half to 700,000 since October 1982. Such sentiments, when vented by Communist or other left-wing critics, could easily be brushed aside with an appeal to the experience and scientific knowledge of ministerial office. But coming from the mouth of one of the historic PSOE leaders, they called into question they very legitimacy of the governments claim to be acting in the interests of the working class. By the end of the year, the UGT was entering into open crisis, with the banking, construction and mining 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 class union, and to introduce a rule-change at the coming congress making the union leadership subject to strict Party disciplinethereby enormously reinforcing the bureaucratic power of the GonzlezGuerra political machine. The record on partial reforms hardly provides the Gonzlez leadership with new pillars of support. The welfare statethe mainstay of Scandinavian social democracyhas been only marginally expanded in the PSOE years, and the military budget is the sole target for significant growth in the period ahead. In areas where the Church has a major vested interest, the government has proceeded with a mixture of political caution and economic austerity: a very restrictive abortion law is unlikely to transfer many terminations from London clinics to the Spanish public
21

In ABC, 10 May 1985.

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health service; while education reforms, though giving secular powers a first foothold in private or ecclesiastical schools, will do nothing to alter the balance between Church education and a state system that is starved of funds. The recent Law on Political Incompatibility, supposed to end the practice of dual job-holding by deputies and state administrators, is a further example of such compromise since it effectively excludes the autonomous regions from its ambit. As to the army, the PSOE has continued the process set in train by the Tejero putsch, pruning much of the dead wood from the higher ranks and consolidating an officer corps that is relatively modern in its lack of directly political ambitions. Any economies, however, appear quite diminutive beside the gigantic cost of investment in new equipment. The militarized Civil Guard, which bore the main responsibility for internal repression under the dictatorship, has not had the benefit of any reforms and displays an extraordinary continuity of personnel and organization with the Franco years.
Socialist Atlanticism

Foreign policy is fundamentally an extension of domestic policy. A movement or government which perceives its own society as a reality to be transformed will seek alliances and points of support among new social forces on the international arena, while a leadership which accepts the structures of its own country as so many immutable facts will inevitably tend to preserve its inherited insertion into the world political order. This may well seem a commonplace observationone that doubtless needs to be carefully nuanced in concrete analysisbut it bears repeating today in face of fashionable theories according to which national interests are unique meta-political entities shaping human agency.22 If they appear as suchif, for example, French Socialists see the force de frappe as an intrinsic part of the national identitythis tells us far more about their own projective conservatism than about any objective political reality. In 1976 the 27th Congress of the PSOE declared: A socialist Spain conscious of its international responsibilitiesa Spain with clear objectives for aiding all progressive nations, with a policy of active neutrality that goes beyond the false USSRUSA opposition . . . will undoubtedly be a crucial element in the necessary overcoming of capitalism on a world scale . . . Freedom, peace, justice and progress will only be fully achieved with the world triumph of socialism.23 These formulations may lack precision, but the continuum is clear enough; no accommodation to capitalism within Spain, the overcoming of capitalism on a world scale. During the seventies, Party leaders continued to explore the possibility of a neutral Spanish foreign policy, opposing any clear commitment to NATO, stressing Spains Mediterranean role and entering into contact through Yugoslavia with the Non-aligned Movement. This was not, of course, an altogether novel departure: the UCD had still not taken a firm decision on NATO; and Francos foreign ministers them22

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

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selves, confronted with the hostility of several West European countries, had often toyed with the idea of a link-up with Gaullist France to establish a joint military presence in the Mediterranean. Positions only began to harden in 1981 when Calvo-Sotelos UCD government, in a rare display of initiative, created a fait accompli by negotiating Spains rapid entry into the political structure of NATO, with the eventual aim of full military integration. What lay behind this move? Spain had long been an important link in the US military chain encircling the Soviet Union. The Madrid Pact signed by Eisenhower and Franco in 1953 provided for the establishment of American air bases at Torrejn (near Madrid), Zaragoza and Moron, and a giant naval complex at Rota near Cadiz. The function of this network, which was completed between 1957 and 1959 and complemented by a host of other facilities, was fourfold: to extend the operational range of Strategic Air Command; to offer a relatively secure bridgehead for the ferrying of US troops to the European (or Middle Eastern) front in the event of war; to sustain the activities of the Sixth Fleet 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 did Gadafys closure of Wheelus in Libya. At no point did the bilateral nature of the Madrid accords actually impair wider NATO planning. Nevertheless, the treaty with Spain did not represent an optimal arrangement for Washington. There were two main reasons for this. In 1963 and again in 1968, Franco bargained hard over the terms of its renewal, demanding financial and diplomatic concessions from the US which suggested that it would always remain open to a Spanish government to disturb the balance of what it might regard as largely, if not solely, a business arrangement. Moreover, under Franco the Spanish armed forces were organized, equipped and deployed for the purposes of internal repressionon a parsimonious budget, at a very low level of military technologyso that the manpower reserves of Western Europes fifth largest country were practically useless for any NATO grand design. Full integration into NATO, involving both stabilization and modernization of Spains strategic contribution was obviously preferable. But both Francos own isolationism, and Benelux and Scandinavian objections to the admission of his dictatorship to the Atlantic Alliance, prevented this. The advent of parliamentary democracy in Madrid lifted these obstacles. Entry into NATO now formed a natural part of the overall drive for a Euromodernization of Spain sought by big business and mainstream bourgeois opinion, while at the same time it fitted admirably into the option to rekindle the Cold War taken at the Brussels meeting of NATO which launched the Euromissile programme in late 1979. As the Calvo-Sotelo Cabinet pushed membership of NATO through the Cortes, the PSOE launched a vigorous campaignas did Communists and other forces on the leftthat helped to sway Spanish public opinion. Whereas in 1979 polls showed that 58 per cent of Spaniards still had no definite view and only 15 per cent were mildly or strongly against,
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those opposed to Spanish entry into NATO had risen to 43 per cent by September 1981.24 But once the PSOE had won the elections of 1982, the very success of this campaign probably increased pressure from Washington on the new Gonzlez government to make a volte-face, in order to prevent the consolidation of a huge anti-Atlanticist majority. At all events it soon became clear that the PSOE was taking another tack. At first it was suggested that although the government was not in principle favourable to Spains membership, nor could it lightly countenance withdrawal; then it was put out that whereas Spains joining NATO had, according to PSOE calculations, upset the balance between the blocs, Spains leaving it would have an even more destabilizing effect on EastWest relations. Such successive changes of ideological stance were accompanied by practical steps that eventually went beyond the dossiers left over from the Calvo-Sotelo government itself. Spanish military expenditure climbed rapidly under the PSOE Defence Minister Narc s Serra, absorbing a much larger share of the budget than under Franco. After two years of firm prodding, enthused the Economist in November 1985, the army is looking trimmer, more professional and better organized and equipped to do its NATO job of helping to defend Europes southern flank from the Canaries to Turkey.25 Seventy-two F-18a aircraft are now under order from the United States; a USdesigned aircraft carrier, the Principe de Asturias, is being built under licence, to be equipped with AU-8b jump-jets and anti-submarine helicopters, with a second carrier in the offing; and a sizeable rapid deployment force is being assembled for eventual use in Mediterranean operations. While plunging Spain into the arms race at home, Felipe Gonzlez travelled to Bonn to announce full support for the stationing of Cruise and Pershing II missiles on European soil. By this timeMarch 1983 Socialist language had become plainer and more familiar: Spains national interests imperiously required it to play its part in the NATO defence of the West; the PSOE had been mistaken to imagine there was any alternative. For above all, according to government spokesmen, Spains entry into the EEC was indissociable from its participation in NATO. Once, the PSOE had insisted that to relate the two things to each other is simply wrong in principle. To horse-trade in public about such basic decisions shows a singular lack of political and diplomatic senseit is a way of tricking the people.26 Now, with complete contempt for its own population, not to speak of obvious facts of the international scene, the Gonzlez regime started to claim that NATO and EEC were to all intents and purposes one. Spaniards were evidently expected to be unaware that Ireland is not a member of NATO, nor Turkey, Canada or the United States of the EEC; and that Sweden and Austria, incidentallythe regulative models of so much PSOE discoursebelong to neither the one nor the other. Official propaganda constantly strove to convert any understandable popular desire to
Survey data of the Centro de Investigaciones Sociolgicas. See Angel Vias, Coordenados de la politica de seguridad espaola, Leviatn 17, autumn 1984, p. 13. 25 The Economist, 2329 November 1985. 26 See the official PSOE pamphlet Cincuenta preguntas sobre la OTAN, Madrid 1981, quoted here from the lengthy extract in ABC, 8 December 1985, p. 26.
24

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overcome the countrys relative isolation from the life of the continent into acceptance of the menial subordination of Spain into the Atlantic Alliance. The Gonzlez leaderships own conviction of this necessity that Spanish re-entry into Europe can only mean embracing the status of a political and military suburb of Northern capitalismbetrays a deep and disturbing sense of national inferiority, a feeling that as a relatively underdeveloped late-comer Spain can have no pretensions but to fall in with a process whose rhythm and direction are determined elsewhere.
The Referendum Campaign

Yet despite the spectacular change in its strategic options, the PSOE continued to be stuck with its promise to hold a referendum on Spanish membership of NATO. After three years of prevarication, during which Felipe Gonzlez and Alfonso Guerra must have spent long hours weighing their tactical choices, they in the end concluded that to repudiate this clear and unambiguous commitment involved too great a risk of political discredit. Despite the lack of popular enthusiasm for NATO, moreover, there were good grounds for thinking that the PSOE could force a decision in a plebiscite its way. To its right, Fragas Popular Alliance was more vociferously pro-Western than the government itself. To its left, Spanish Communism had not emulated the PCI in a Pauline conversion to Atlantic solidarity, but was so split and shrunk that it seemed to pose little political threat. Within the Socialist ranks themselves, virtually all opposition would soon be silenced, as Gonzlez announced that any Party member campaigning against the governments position would be subject to disciplinary action. The PSOE youth organization was similarly gagged, its deputies and intellectuals dragooned into conformity. With the two major political parties government and oppositionunited on the basic issue before the country, commanding eighty per cent of the Cortes, and state radio and television securely controlled by partisans of NATO, the chances of a No vote looked slender. After all, it was advocated only by what Socialist Ministers saw as a motley collection of civic nobodies. In fact, PSOE calculations came close to misfiring. The depth and breadth of hostility to NATO among ordinary Spaniards proved more resistant than expected. Popular perceptions of the world role of United States imperialism could not be shifted so easily. A collective memory still exists, well beyond the ranks of left-wing militants, that Washington was the first capital to befriend the Franco dictatorship after the war, and relieve it of international quarantine. Nor have the current counterrevolutionary interventions of the Reagan regime escaped attention; cultural ties with Latin America have elicited spontaneous sympathy with a Nicaragua pitted against US-backed contras and American warships similar to those plying the Bay of Cadiz. Distinct from these sentiments, there is also a tradition of Spanish neutrality which kept the country out of two world wars even under governments of authoritarian reaction. Some small part of the electorate of the Right itself was susceptible to this definition of national identity. The potential aspiration to a pacific and independent Spain, rather than a second-class satellite of the USA, was thus very great across the country; strongest of all in
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Catalan and Basque territories, where there is little love lost for the historic pretensions of Castilian militarism. The country-wide coordinating committee (CEOP), formed in July 1983 by a myriad of pacifist, Christian, feminist and human rights groups, together with the Communists and far-left MC and LCR, confounded official reckoning by the energy and determination with which it mobilized these feelings on a peninsular scale. Together with an ad hoc Plataforma Civica against Spains membership of NATO, it launched a massive and imaginative campaign of demonstrations and meetings, with a vivid flowering of posters, songs and slogans, which put the government on the defensive from the start. Some of the principal organizers were activists of the late-sixties generation, like the former Maoist Carlos Otamendi, but they were also able to rely on support from the Workers Commissions and from Nicolas Redondo as head of the UGT. The different wings of the Communist movement all attached prime importance to campaigning against the US bases and membership of NATO, and their press particularly of the main body of the PCEmade a valuable contribution in popularizing well-researched arguments for a neutralist alternative. This marked a happy change from the heyday of collaboration with the UCD, when the Party tacitly dropped its opposition to the bases. Meanwhile on the Right, Fraga attempted to embarrass the government by advising his followers to stand back from any involvement in the referenduma manoeuvre only partially successful, since a large number of right-wing voters failed to heed his call for abstention, whether out of international class allegiance or fear of the repercussions. In the Basque country and Catalonia, where the bourgeois-nationalist parties simply allowed their supporters a free vote, opinion divided more straightforwardly along pro-NATO and anti-NATO lines. A week away from the referendum, opinion polls still showed a majority for withdrawal. To prevent this materializing, the Gonzlez regime mustered every rhetorical and practical resource at its disposal, without shame or scruple. Mass unemployment, exclusion from Europe, technological decline, relegation to Third World status, political chaos at homeevery spectre of hazard and penury was marshalled in an ultimate bid to cajole and intimidate the electorate. The two leitmotifs of PSOE blackmail were the argument that a vote against NATO lacked any credible administration to implement it and would throw the country into turmoil; and that were it carried through, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards would lose their jobs. Television broadcasts were flagrantly manipulated to this end. Official time was allocated in proportion to party share of parliamentary seats, to confine opposition to the PCE as the lone anti-NATO voice in the Cortes. When Gerardo Iglesias attempted to introduce leading campaign activists into the debate, his request was curtly refused on the grounds that they had no representation in Spains democratic forum. The daily news programmes bore no greater relation to the division of opinion within the country, while twenty-eight million letters were sent from the Prime Minister to the electorate, and the PSOE spent at least 3 million on press and radio advertising. Gonzlez himself was media-packaged rather in the style of Reagan, issuing emollient baby-talk to the electorate that typically avoided so much as a mention of NATO. In a final televised address, amidst misty images of children playing on a beach to the sounds of a Beethoven symphony,
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he simply intoned the word peace without let, calling for good sense and moderation from the peoples of Spain. The effect of this final downpour of pressure and propaganda, however vulgar or inane, was sufficient to win the referendum for the PSOE. Many working-class voters responded to the simple appeal for party loyalty at all costs; while the rush of last-minute conversions among intellectuals, sometimes reversing their views hours before the poll, recalled in miniature something of the climate of August 1914. But despite everything, nearly seven million Spaniards stood out against the whole weight of the Western consensus and voted for their country to withdraw from the Atlantic Alliance, however euphemistically disguised. In all, opposition to membership of NATO numbered 40 per cent of those who voted, and the most advanced regions in Spain, the Basque lands and Catalonia, produced an outright majority for No. Compared with the 80,000 votes for the only forcethe PCEto the left of the PSOE in the 1982 elections, the sheer scale of the revolt against Socialist Atlanticism has been formidable.
The State of Things

In its years of office, Spanish Socialism has patently failed to honour the two most specific promises it made to the Spanish people in its years of opposition. Unemployment has risen, not fallen; NATO is now entrenched, rather than removed. Yet broken pledges do not fatally mean lost elections. For the moment the prospects of the PSOE winning again at the polls in the autumn of 1986, despite the chastening results of the referendum, still look good. There are a number of reasons for this. Economically, although the Gonzlez government has presided over unabatedly high levels of unemployment, these have not been combined with high and rising rates of inflationunlike the Labour years in Britain under WilsonCallaghan. The general decline of popular belief in any economic alternative to the status quo of capitalist recessiona pervasive feature of the West European scene in the eightieshas been marked in Spain as well, to the advantage of the PSOE. Entry into the EC, hailed as one of the outstanding successes of the government, can be presented as a symbolic compensation on the horizon. Politically, the principal boast of the Gonzlez administration is that it has consolidated democracy in Spain. This claim too has undoubted electoral resonance. The reality, of course, is that PSOE rule has chronologically coincided with the stabilization of a parliamentary order rather than being causally responsible for it. The master-builder of capitalist democracy in Spain was not Gonzlez but Surez, who organized all the really fundamental reforms of the State. In historical perspective, the PSOE administration has been by comparison an epigone regime. Even the retirement of the army to its barracksi.e., to its normal position as the guardian of last, rather than first, resort of established societywas essentially achieved with the collapse and aftermath of Tejeros coup, rather than by the personnel policies of Minister Serra. But historical judgment is one thing: contemporary association another. The PSOE has to a significant extent succeeded in identifying itself with the normalization of parliamentary routines in Spaina process that would no doubt have occurred anyway, virtually
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by definition, once the transition was over, but from which it has annexed the benefits. In one respect, if one only, the Gonzlez government has earned the reputation it assiduously fosters within the country: at ministerial level as such, PSOE rule has been strikingly stable by comparison with its UCD predecessor. Cabinet posts have become fixtures for their occupants, with a few notable exceptions, and party discipline absolute. The contrast with the roulette-wheel of appointments in Surezs days, unsettling even to loyal supporters, has been advantageous to Gonzlez. In terms of longer-range bourgeois rationality, PSOE government has not been creative, but it has been firm. As the government approaches the hustings later this year, much of its appeal will thus be not so much as an administration of reform, as one of law and order. The desire for normalcy and stability on which it can draw should not be underestimated, as its eventual victory in the NATO referendum itselflargely articulated round these themesdemonstrated. Since the Right continues to be dominated by Fraga, a Galician Strauss widely distrusted outside his own rather marginal fief, and divided from a Centre whose main strongholds are in Catalonia and the Basque country, Spanish Socialism seems likely to conquer a second term of office without much difficulty. In the spring of 1986, it may well seem that the PSOE has the chance to entrench itself in power for a whole generation. Such is the hope of many Socialist intellectuals and politicians, who dream of converting Spain into a southern Sweden or Austria in which the PSOE matches the SAP or SPs role as the indispensable political mediation between capital and labour. The comparison is a dangerous one for them, however. For the big bankers and Madrid civil servants who today work so closely with Gonzlezs ministers are no more reconciled to an epoch of PSOE rule than they were to an indefinite extension of UCD PCEPSOE collaboration in the seventies. The collapse of the UCD was, to be sure, a sobering lesson, but the difficult quest for a bourgeois successor is already gathering pace in the aftermath of the referendum. Against this, the PSOE has to content itself with a lower membership density than any other major party, of left or right, in Western Europe. A mere 1.5 per cent of Spanish Socialist voters currently belong to the party, compared with 49 per cent in Sweden (in 1979) and 30 per cent in Austria (in 1978).27 It is estimated that the aktiv comprises some 40,000 of the 154,000 membersa relatively high proportion in European termsbut a very large number of these forty thousand are officials in the local, regional and state administration. The PSOE, more than any of its large sister-parties, has become an organization of functionaries, whose primary identification is with the state apparatus, as the only instrument of implementing Party policy, and with a charismatic partyleader-cum-prime-minister at its apex. The UGT, despite colossal changes in the social structure, now has 300,000 fewer members than in 1932. The brittleness of this formation is evident, compared with the towering party machines and trade-union outworks of the social-democratic movements of Scandinavia or the German-speaking lands.
27

G. K. van Beyme, op. cit., p. 184.

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In reality, the PSOE owes much of its vitalitynot to be too quickly discountedto the vertical social promotion of the younger Spanish professionals and technicians that it represents. The average age of the Gonzlez Cabinet is the youngest in Europe: indeed, there is no other country in the West where a generational political turnover has been so swift and sweeping. A (more or less) enlightened careerism is the cement holding this layer together, giving it a kind of esprit de corps. Beneath it, and to some extent regardless of policies, the Party apparatus can still command a popular attachment to the name and memory of the PSOE. But these assetsa career open to middle-class talents, an icon from a militant pastshould not be confused with a real organizational anchorage in the working population as a whole. That the PSOE patently lacks. It could therefore prove vulnerable, not merely to any sharp downturn in economic performance, but to the kind of highly publicized corruption scandal, or creeping abuse of police powers, that is all too likely to be the result of the subjective prepotence of a second term in office. If circumstances such as these are not ultimately to benefit the Right, the reconstruction of a broad and authentic Spanish Left is now an urgent necessity. The experience of the last few months has shown how far much of Spain still is from corresponding to the PSOEs model, or mirage, of sterile Northern conformity, how great is the fund of rebelliousness, internationalism and resistance to capitalist authority among the young. Nor should one write off the reserves of class consciousness among supporters of the Socialist Party itselfreserves which, in a changed political conjuncture, could once again become a material force. For the Gonzlez leadership, however, the die is now firmly cast. Nearly a century after the revisionist controversy in the Second International, it is not just the final goal but the movement itself which counts as nothing in the practice of Spanish Socialism. The very power which fell into its hands in 1982 has become the means of rising further above mass roots and radical traditions, in pursuit of a strategic alliance with big capital. Little will remain even of this chimera when the concluding balance-sheet of the PSOE years comes to be drawn.

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