Making Democracy in Spain: Grass-Roots Struggle in the South, 1955–1975
Abstract
This book, exploring the making of democracy in Spain during the twenty long years before the death of Franco, seeks out the beginnings of democratic struggles at the grass roots of civil society. Rather than one more account of the transition to democracy in Spain, this is the story of the countless unsung heroes who prepared the political terrain of this transition. The story suggests that it was social needs and economic demands which spawned individual discontent and political dissent, but that the struggle itself required continual political organization and calculation. The book therefore explores the personal networks and political strategies which sustained the struggle, and reveals that their contribution to the making of democracy was often contradictory and always piecemeal. Democratic struggle is not defined by a single idea of democracy, but by myriad attempts to achieve more autonomous action and more effective forms of representation.
... Entre los estudios clásicos más relevantes, Landman y Carvalho (2003) mencionan el trabajo de Vanhanen (1997) sobre la distribución de los recursos de poder o el análisis de Doorenspleet (2005) sobre las dimensiones internacionales y la difusión de la democracia. Los estudios de las transiciones de España (Foweraker, 1989), Polonia (Colomer y Pascual, 1994) y Portugal (Maxwell, 1995) también son considerados estudios de caso pioneros. Además, se recogen como aportaciones cruciales las obras de O'Donnell et al. (1986), Peeler (1992 y Linz y Stepan (1996) sobre el impacto de las élites y el tipo de régimen previo, y la investigación de Bratton y Van de Valle (1997) sobre transiciones en África Subsahariana. ...
Los procesos de democratización constituyen un objeto de atención relevante para la política comparada. Sin embargo, las propuestas de carácter transnacional que confrontan casos de diferentes áreas atendiendo a la sensibilidad contextual son todavía escasas y las investigaciones comparadas basadas en enfoques de métodos mixtos (QCA) son muy excepcionales. Estos métodos presentan ciertas ventajas tanto conceptuales como metodológicas. Por un lado, la región adquiere relevancia como criterio ordenador y no como elemento explicativo. Por otro lado, ayudan a evaluar teorías previamente aplicadas a ciertos contextos regionales o locales. Este enfoque mixto es altamente adaptable a los estudios sobre cambio político, y es especial-mente útil para los estudios comparados. Así, permite la descripción contextual de los países; favorece la clasificación; posibilita la evaluación de teorías previas, y facilita la comparación. No obstante, la mayoría de las publicaciones QCA se orientan a la evaluación de teorías clásicas y no tienen en cuenta la asimetría de los procesos de cambio político. A este respecto, esta nota de investigación aconseja distinguir entre los tipos de cambio político e incluir nuevas condi-ciones que solo han sido cubiertas desde los análisis intrarregionales y los estudios de caso sobre la región del Norte de África y Oriente Próximo (MENA).
Inhabitants of the rural world in Spain have generally been attributed higher levels of political apathy and acquiescence towards the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975); but they did not always, nor did most of them, remain passive. The objective of this article is to demystify and reassess the role of the rural world in democratization processes of the 1960s and 1970s in Spain, a period of deterioration in the relationship between the state and the civil society. By looking at episodes of conflict in two of the most dynamic spheres of rural life at that time, the workplace and the Church, we argue that rural society engaged in a democratic learning process through the articulation of protest. The research relies on diverse sources such as letters from people in several eastern Andalusian towns in the provinces of Jaén, Málaga, Granada and Almería along with records from the clandestine Communist Party radio station La Pirenaica, which are available in the AHPCE. We also include the activity reports of clergy from Andalusian dioceses, generated by the Ministry of Information and Tourism, and the annual reports of Civil Governors, both of which are conserved in the state archives (AGA).
Spanish trade unions reflect the particular historical development before and during the transition to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975. A legacy of deep regional, ideological and political cleavages still marks Spanish unionism today. Additionally, belated and uneven industrial development added to the fragmented organizational structure and low level of union membership. Until the civil war (1936–39), Spanish unions were weakly organized and ideologically divided between moderates in favour of institutional participation and those committed to a revolutionary strategy of ‘direct action’. The authoritarian dictatorship under Franco (1939–75) that followed the defeat of the Republicans suppressed free unions, but semi-clandestine decentralized groupings, largely as part of worker commissions, emerged in the 1950s. During the transition to democracy, union membership first soared due to political mobilization, and Spain re-established democratic institutions, pluralist labour relations, and works councils through an historic interparty pact. However, Spanish unions remained divided by ideological and political alignments. In particular, Communist-led and Socialist-led union movements became main competitors, while some smaller regional, independent and anarchist unions co-exist. After ending a period of social concertation, the two main union movements de-emphasized their party links and joint action in opposition to the Socialist government policies of fiscal austerity and labour market flexiblization. As a re-established democracy, Spain has joined the European Union and has modernized its industrial structure, but mass unemployment remains a major challenge.
European integration and the impact of the Maastricht Treaty raise a range of issues. The emergence of a coordinated economic and political space in Europe continues to depend on the political calculations and strategies that exist at the level of the nation state. In Spain, economic and social regulation in the last two decades has depended crucially on the utilization and reinterpretation of European policy developments. Maastricht not only provides a range of policy constraints but also provides a key point of reference for the development of economic and social regulation. Hence, there are ideological and political mechanisms that need to be explained if the actual impact and politics of Maastricht, along with the broader issue of integration, are to be fully comprehended. This chapter first of all outlines the broader framework of Spanish engagement with the EU. The quest for further integration and the concept of ‘Europeanization’ are explained from the point of view of Spanish developments. The chapter then points to the difficulties that have arisen as a consequence of the emerging European discourse of deregulation within the Spanish system, which has evolved in a complex manner and lacks the stability and coherence of northern European systems of regulation.
The transition and subsequent consolidation of countries that move from an authoritarian to a democratic regime have been widely explained by factors such as the international environment, economic conditions, political culture, institutions, and most prominently, elite behavior.1 But although elites can make decisions about the institutional, political, and economic future of a country in transition, they cannot guarantee that those decisions will be implemented or supported by the populace, or that the incipient democratic system will stabilize. What is frequently neglected in these elite-centered accounts of democratic transitions, then, is civil society and its links to elites.
Purpose
The relative absence of worker occupations in recent years in a context of major restructuring and unemployment has raised issues in Spain as to the changing nature of specific forms of direct action. This paper seeks to argue that it is important, in the case of Spain, to discuss how worker occupations have been changing and developing over time if the changing pattern, character and impact of worker unrest and direct action is to be understood.
Design/methodology/approach
The research materials for this paper are based on a series of meetings and interviews with union officers and activists that draw on various projects on union development in Spain during the years 1983‐1988, 2000‐2002 and 2009‐2010, and the study of a range of secondary texts.
Findings
The paper suggests that, as well as discussing questions of motives, whether economic or political, accounting for the socio‐economic context and the changing nature of the workforce in terms of its degree of concentration, the changing nature of labour market stability, and the relationship of workers to “stable” workplaces and work is required. Additionally, there is a need to account for how workers reference and recall (or not) previous modes of mobilising and actions.
Practical implications
Discussing worker occupations should involve issues of political purpose, economic context, the changing nature of work and workers, and the role of memory and historical framing if an appreciation of their varying nature and presence within the landscape of labour relations is to be made. Hence, a multi‐dimensional understanding of the context of worker action is required.
Social implications
The implications of the paper are that conflict of work needs to be understood in broader terms, and that worker related activities can be highly innovative.
Originality/value
The paper examines union and worker responses to the current recession in Spain and focuses on the role and context of unofficial approaches, especially worker occupations, to the changing workplace.
Any analysis of workforce flexibility within particular countries needs to take account not only of the character of industrial relations and union organization at workplace and company levels, but also of how actions at those levels are influenced by broader regulatory arrangements covering employment and work practices. In other words, to avoid the over-simplifications and over-generalizations which much of the flexibility debate has in the past been (correctly) accused of and to expand the analysis offered by the relatively broad-brush, multi-country studies, it is necessary to locate issues of flexibility more securely within both existing national regulatory and institutional frameworks, and also to take account of patterns of union organization and job regulation at the local level, and the ways unions and workforces have responded to (and at times even shaped) different flexibility initiatives by employers. By analysing different types of enterprise in Spain and the United Kingdom, this article seeks to illustrate the role and significance of these factors for the particular development of workforce flexibility in the two countries.
This article focuses on two interrelated, but relatively ignored, factors in the Spanish transition to democracy (1975–78): first, the most important political mobilizations of the period in which the people demanded an amnesty for the political prisoners of the dictatorship; second, the presence of a collective memory of the Spanish civil war (1936–39), whose repetition was now to be avoided at all costs. It argues that the many collective actions that took place in Spain in favour of an amnesty were, to a great extent, inspired by a widespread desire for reconciliation among Spaniards. Spanish society had suffered a deep split as a consequence of the civil war and, because of the presence of the Francoist regime, no symbolic measures to reach national reconciliation had taken place. The climate generated by the often violent confrontations between police and demonstrators (and not only during demonstrations in favour of the amnesty), and the number of resulting deaths and injuries, made the people remember the serious problems of public order that had confronted the Second Republic (1931–36), whose collapse marked the beginning of the Spanish civil war. These factors help explain why the main political parties of the left felt the need to contain the very mobilization process that they had helped to create. The generous amnesty of October 1977, passed by a democratically elected parliament, was interpreted as the symbolic overcoming of the division among Spaniards that resulted from the dramatic civil confrontation of the 1930s.
Abstract — This article looks at the role of NGOs in social service delivery in Latin America and questions some of the assumptions which are often made about their abilities. Following the implementation of the neo-liberal model, increased conditionality has been placed on economic assistance. This has created a new role for NGOs, whereby they are harnessed by states in order to secure effective implementation of reform packages. In the process many NGOs and their own agendas become distorted. The paper discusses the political implications of this new role for NGOs and goes on to conclude that, given the nature of the democratisation process in Latin America, and the accompanying economic model, expectations regarding NGO potential for grassroots empowerment have been over-optimistic.
This article sets out the overlapping political and cultural roots of an innovative farming co-operative in Andalusia, one composed of both ex-labourers and small farmers. One strand of values involves the realization of a food chain in which no capitalist enterprise can extract profit from their labours: this, together with various conceptions of personal and local autonomy, shapes much of their practice of organic farming. Nevertheless, their labour has to generate an acceptable livelihood through selling food in an environment dominated by large-scale commercial agriculture in both the ‘conventional’ and ‘organic’ sectors. The article explains how they achieve this by building ties with consumers around a variety of shared values. This focus on the particularities of a radical food movement sheds light on many larger issues, both the nature of markets and competition in the dominant economy, and the debates about organic certification and ‘conventionalization’.
Spain was one of the countries at the heart of the work of Manuel Castells due to its history of urban struggles and labour–urban based alliances. It formed one of the key examples of city movements and the democratisation of urban spaces. The 1960s and 1970s were seen to throw up a range of new types of urban mobilisation and engagement—in part based on issues of internal migration and its urban and employment impact. With the changes in Spain during the late 1970s and 1980s—which were economic, political and social—this dimension of urban politics steadily fell away, although Spain continued to exhibit unique organisational forms at the level of the local state and local civil society. Civic politics were linked to local associations in a curious way, but the extent of mobilisation had changed due to the steady institutionalisation of urban and labour movements (and a weakening of their relations). However, this civic dimension began to re-emerge with the strong wave of immigration after the mid 1990s when, from being a country with one of the lowest levels of first-generation immigrants, it has become the European country with one of the highest. The paper focuses on the way migrant organisations and trade unions have organised in relation to migrants in the labour market. It shows how the legacy of previous mobilisations and structures continues to provide a framework for the politics and inclusion of migrant communities. However, it also argues that much of the new urban politics of migration has been influenced by a service delivery—leading to a similar set of outcomes that faced the indigenous urban movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This is of theoretical significance to how we see network and urban politics in relation to unions and employment relations.
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