Although we believe that democratic transition and democratic consolidation
are closely interconnected processes, we also believe that social scientists can and
should strive to be as explicit as possible as to whether a transition is complete and
whether a particular political system is or is not a consolidated democracy . In part
2 we argue that not only have Spain, Portugal, and Greece completed democratic
transitions, all three have become consolidated democracies . Since there are many
studies of the southern European transitions, but relatively few of consolidation
per se, we pay particular attention in our studies of southern European countries
to how uncertain and even difficult transitions became consolidated democracies .
6
The Paradigmatic Case of
Reforma Pactada-Ruptura Pactada:
Spain
TH E RE I S G Ro W I N G consensus that the Spanish transition is in many ways
the paradigmatic case for the study of patted democratic transition and rapid
democratic consolidation, much as the Weimar Republic became paradigmatic
for the study of democratic breakdown .' A number of factors contribute to the
special (if not actually always paradigmatic) status of Spain in the transition literature.
Foremost is the fact that it was one of the first in the cycle of what Samuel
Huntington calls the "third wave" of democratic transitions, and it therefore influenced
thinking in many countries that would later undertake similar difficult
tasks. It was also, in contrast to many transitions, one in which the authoritarian
regime had not faced defeat or near-defeat in war, as was the case in Portugal and
1. The bibliography on the Spanish transition is the most extensive of any of the cases we consider in
this book. An essential source is José Félix Tezanos, Ramón Cotarelo, and Andrés de Blas, eds ., La transición
democrática espaňola (Madrid : Sistema,1989) . This volume includes outstanding articles by Spanish social
scientists, a very complete bibliography, an essay reviewing the different analyses of the transition, and a
chronology of the process . Also see the special issue of Sistema 68-69 (Nov. 1985), which includes a bibliographic
essay, several outstanding articles, and the responses to a questionaire by politicians and intellectuals
on their views of the transition process . An indispensible selection of articles is contained in Ramón
Cotarelo, ed., Transición polftica y consolidaci6n democrática: Espaňa (1975-1986) (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones
Sociológicas,1992) . Other valuable overviews are José Maria Maravall and Julian Santamaría,
"Political Change in Spain and the Prospects for Democracy," in Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C . Schmitter,
and Laurence Whitehead, eds ., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Southern Europe (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1986), 70-108 ; José Maria Maravall, La polftica de la transición 1975-80 (Madrid:
Taurus, 1981), which is available in English as The Transition to Democracy in Spain (London: Croom Helm,
1982); Carlos Huneeus, La Uni6n de Centro Democrático y la transición a la democácia en Espaňa (Madrid:
Centro de Investigations Sociológicas-Siglo XXI de Espaňa,1985) ; and Donald Share, The Making of Spanish
Democracy (Westport, Corn .: Praeger,1986) . A well-documented study of the period immediately before
and after the transition which pays particular attention to why key activists in the late Franco regime
came to accept a democratic transition is Charles T. Powell, "Reform versus`Ruptura' in Spain's Transition
to Democracy" (Ph.D. diss., Faculty of Modern History, Oxford University, 1989) . For parties and elections
see Richard Gunther, Giacomo Sani, and Goldie Shabad, eds ., Spain after Franco: The Making of a Competitive
Party System (Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1988) . For the role of labor, see Robert Fishman,
Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain (Ithaca : Cornell University Press,
19go). A basic source on the political attitudes of Spaniards during the transition and the first election is
Juan J. Linz, Francisco Andrés Orizo, Manuel Gómez-Reino, and Darío Vila, Informe sociológico sobre el
camóio politico en Espaňa 1975-1981 (Madrid : Fundación FOESSA, Euramérica,1982) .
88
	
Southern Europe: Completed Consolidations
Greece. Likewise, its rulers did not confront a deep economic crisis, as in Latin
America and the Communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union .
Nor was it a case in which an external factor, like the withdrawal of the support
by a hegemonic power, influenced the rulers. Rather, it was a case in which those
in power thought they could not stay in power without, given the Western European
context, excessive repression, while those challenging the regime could not
marshal, at least immediately, enough force to overthrow it, particularly in view
of the loyalty of the Armed Forces to the regime .2 In this sense Spain was a
"regime-initiated transition," although under the pressure of society.
Another reason for the admiration of many observers of the Spanish transition
to democracy has been that Spain appeared to outsiders as a highly conflictual and
potentially violent society, owing to the legacy of the civil war. However, the outsider's
view did not correspond to the facts of Spanish society in the 197os. Rather,
through the "cultural work" of civil society before the transition and the continued
cultural work of civil society and almost all elements of political society during the
transition, Spain had transformed the lessons of the civil war into a positive factor
that aided the transition. The contrast with the historical meaning of the CroatianSerbian
civil wars of the 19405 could not be more dramatic .3 To this it should be
added that Spain was the first of our examples of an attempted transition to democracy
in which problems of a multilingual and multinational state intensified
at the same time as the transition process was being initiated .
2. Ten years after the death ofFranco, a public opinion poll captured this sense of deadlock. On the one
hand only 13 percent of those polled felt that the regime could have continued without change after the
death of Franco . On the other hand, only 18 percent of those polled said that "the opposition groups were
very strong and could have overthrown the regime ."See "Actitudes y opinions de los espaňoles ante la constitución
y las institutions democráticas" (Madrid: Centro de Investigations Sociol6gicas,1985),105 . For
the changing calculations of regime forces in the 1969-75 period, see Powell, "Reform versus `Ruptur4"
15-54. For an excellent analysis of the role of the military in the same period, see Fernando Rodrigo Rodríguez,
"El camio hacia la democracia : Militares y política en la transici6n espaňola" (Ph.D diss ., Facultad
de Ciencias Políticas y Sociol6gicas, Universidad Complutense,1989), 21-72.
3. As Víctor M. Pérez-Díaz argues so well, Spain's new democratic political culture "is to a certain degree
a deliberate institutional and cultural construct . . . . This institutional effort has been considerably helped by
a cultural collective attempt, partly conscious and partly unconscious . . . . Looming large in our collective
memory of that experience we find a crucial experiment that failed : our II Republic and the Civil War of
1936-1939. . . . The moral implications of that tragic account were: the share of guilt and responsibility was
more or less evenly distributed among the contenders, since they were all to blame ." See Pérez-Díaz, "The
Emergence of Democratic Spain and the `Invention' of a Democratic Tradition" (Madrid : Institute Juan
March, June 19go, Working Paper #1), quotes &Qrn 19, 20, 21, 23. Also see his magisterial TheReturn of Civil
Society. The Emergence of Democratic Spain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) . Paloma
Aguilar Fernández, in her excellent study of Spanish textbooks, newsreels, theater, and general discourse,
documents how, in the twenty years before the death of Franco, the historical memory of the civil war had
been culturally reconstructed so that it became a building block for the effort to consolidate democracy . See
her La memoria histórica de la guerra civil espaňola (í936-1939k Un process de aprendizaje político (Madrid:
Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Ciencias Sociales,1995) . Despite the passage of more than forty years, the
most commonly used descriptions by Croats of their Serbian enemies, and vice versa, are the names of the
major contending factions in the civil war, the Croatian Ustašas and the predominantly Serbian Chetniks. See
No Banac, "Post-Communism as Post-Yugoslavism : The Yugoslav Non-revolutions of 1989-1990;' in No
Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press,1992),168-87 .
Spain 89
Another circumstance that makes the Spanish case particularly interesting is
that the authoritarian regime had lasted thirty-six years and had created a complex
institutional structure . It was not possible to use the existing institutions by filling
them with democratic content or proceeding to a restoration of the pre-dictatorship
democratic institutions, as in some Latin American cases . There was finally
a unique factor that appeared to complicate the transition, Franco's installation of
a monarchy that had a low historical legitimacy and that could easily be contested
by democrats . Today the king is often referred to as el piloto del cambio (the pilot
of change). However, it is useful to remember that, in Spain, the king by his actions
legitimated the monarchy more than the monarchy legitimated the king .4
The relatively smooth process of the Spanish transition has, a posteriori, led
many people to consider the Spanish model of political engineering as an "overdetermined"
success . Indeed, if we reduce the messy historical process, with all its
complexities, frustrations, delays and doubts, to a theoretical model, it appears to
be an elegant process, even susceptible to a game theoretical analysis In fact, the
comparison between our contemporary theoretical modeling and the inevitably
more complex experience of the process should be a warning to those who analyze
similar changes while they are still going on . It is well to remember that even
the easiest and most successful transition was lived as a precarious process constantly
requiring innovative political action.ó It is doubtful that the Spaniards
would have responded in the period 1975-77 with as great a pride about how the
transition was made as they did ten years later . Certainly, the so-called desencanto,
the disappointment or the demystification of the process and its leaders (particularly
of Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez in the late 197os and early 198os) is by now
largely forgotten, but it finds a parallel in most of the transitions in other parts of
the world. The potential threat to the transition caused by the attempted military
coup on February 23,1981 tends also to be underestimated in retrospect .?
4. For a valuable book-length treatment of the role of the king in the transition, a book that won the
Premio Espejo de Espaňa, see Charles T. Powell, EI piloto del cambio : EI rey, la monarquía y la transición a la
democracia (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta,1991) . For a discussion of the role of the king, see also Juan J . Linz,
"Innovative Leadership in the Transition to Democracy and a New Democracy: The Case of Spain," in
Gabriel Sheffer, ed ., Innovative Leadership in International Politics (Albany: State University of New York
Press,1993),141-86 .
5. See, for example, Josep M . Colomer, El arse de la manipulación política: Votaciones y teoría de juegos
en la política espaňola (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama,199o), which is an original and intelligent application
of game theory to the transition. An article based on the book is "Transitions by Agreement: Modeling
the Spanish Way," American Political Science Review (Dec.1991):1283-1302.
6. See, for example, Juan J. Linz, "Spain and Portugal: Critical Choices," in David S. Landes, ed., Critical
ChoicesforAmericans: Western Europe (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books,1977), 237-96. This essay, which
was written in 1974 and slightly revised in February 1976, reflects the uncertainties and fears at the start of
the reign of Juan Carlos I . A rereading serves to correct the image of transition as a smooth and predetermined
process that a theoretical model developed ex post facto might suggest . On the critical role leadership
played in transforming the possible into reality, see Linz, "Innovative Leadership in the Transition,'
7. There is an extensive literature on the military in the transition and on the failed coup of the 23rd of
February 1981. The Revista de investigations sociológicas 36 (Oct.-Dec.1986) is devoted to civil-military relations
and includes an article by Agustín Rodríguez Sahagun, the first civilian minister of defense under
9o
	
Southern Europe: Completed Consolidations
Finally, the Moncloa Pact has become a standard reference in discussions of the
role of pacts in stabilizing transition processes . All too often, however, it is forgotten
that the pact constructed in the prime minister's residence called Moncloa,
was not a social pact between trade unions and employers' organizations, but a
political pact. Adolfo Suárez called the Moncloa meetings, because he wanted to
involve political society, and in particular all the parties who after the first free
elections had representatives in the Spanish legislature, in negotiations among
themselves. Between the Moncloa meetings, the parties consulted with their key
constituents in civil society. (Suárez considered this link between political society
and civil society particularly crucial in the case of the Communist Party and the
trade unions.) Only after these extensive negotiations was the Moncloa political
pact formally voted upon in a solemn session of the Cortes .$ The resolution approving
the Moncloa Pact was passed with one vote against by the lower house
and with three votes against and two abstentions in the Senate.
We have emphasized these facts before entering into an analysis of our variables
because, while we believe our variables to be extremely important, we do not
want ourselves or the reader to fall into the trap of believing that the Spanish transition
was overdetermined to be successful or that the political engineers at all
times followed a rational model. With these important caveats in mind, how does
Spain relate to the variables we discussed in Part I?
From the perspective of the tasks a country must address before it can complete
a transition and consolidate democracy, Spain began in a comparatively
privileged position . Indeed, from the perspective of Table 4 .3, the only task that
was immediately urgent in November 1975, when Franco died, was the creation of
political institutions with autonomy and support . Given this situation, it is now
becoming fashionable to see the Spanish consolidation as being almost inevitable,
given its supportive socioeconomic and geopolitical context . We believe that such
an unexamined opinion not only leads to a serious misinterpretation of the actual
process of democratic transition and consolidation in Spain but also contributes
to the dangerous lack of attention to how the transition was actually prepared
and how the successful execution of this plan later made it easier to handle
Suárez, another by the first socialist defense minister, Narcis Serra, as well as papers by social scientists, public
opinion data, and book reviews . The complexity and psychology underlying desencanto is beautifully explored
in Albert O. Hirschman's chapter, "On Disappointment," in his book Shifting Involvements: Private
Interest and Public Action (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1982), 9-24•
8. This account of the political process of the Moncloa Pact is based largely on an interview carried out
by Alfred Stepan with Adolfo Suárez on May 24, 199o . Suárez says he initially considered making the stabilization
plan an executive decision but rapidly realized it would be more legitimate and more effective if he
could arrive at an agreement with the political parties . This complex consensual process within political society,
which was a hallmark of the Spanish transition, was, as we shall see, virtually completely absent in the
major Argentine and pre-Plan Real Brazilian stabilization plans, which were drawn up in secret by the president
and his closest advisors and announced to a shocked nation on television without ever having been
discussed in the legislatures . For the relationship between the Communist and Socialist parties, the unions,
and the Moncloa Pact, see Fishman, Working Class Organization and Democracy, 17,18o, 215-26 .
Spain 91
Spain's stateness problem and in fact to consolidate democracy . Let us turn, therefore,
to how the transition was actually crafted .
CRAFTING THE SPANISH TRANSITION
The Spanish transition had to deal with a problem recurrent in other later
transitions: how to dismantle the nondemocratic regime and its institutions and
to gain democratic legitimacy based in elections in order to confront the many
problems faced by the society . In contrast to the military regimes in Greece and
Latin America (with the partial exception of Chile and Brazil), Franco's civilian
and authoritarian regime had built a complete institutional and constitutional
structure. The Francoite institutions, with their official single party and their corporatist
Cortes (parliament), could by no stretch of the imagination be made serviceable
to democracy by filling them with democratically elected personnel, as
many believed could be done with the formally ultrademocratic constitutions of
the Eastern European Communist regimes. Those Francoite institutions had to
go, but the option of a revolutionary overthrow-the rupture demanded by the
opposition-was not really feasible (as the Spanish Communist Party leadership
acknowledged later), given the overall climate of public opinion and in particular
the support the regime had in the armed forces .9 An unconstitutional declaration
by the king to abrogate the Franco constitution, with the support of some radical
groups in the armed forces (the small minority inspired by the Portuguese golperevolution),
was out of the question. So, from the beginning, within the regime,
there was thought given to the possibility of using the legality of the Franco Fundamental
Laws and the corporatist Cortes to change the regime constitutionally,
against the spirit and intent of those laws . A lot of thinking and debate and some
unsuccessful starts went into the efforts that finally yielded the Law for Political
Reform. The need for legal "backward legitimation," to use Guiseppe di Palma's
9. The first thesis of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) at its IX Party Congress in February 1978 was
devoted to explaining why the combination of reformist pressures emanating from the regime and the opposition,
as well as international pressures, "obliged the PCE to nuance its ruptural theses ." For the full text
seeMundo Obrero, Madrid (Feb. 2,1978),1 .
However, as late as 1981, according to the Fishman study, not an insignificant number of the working
class leaders at the plant level in Madrid and Barcelona believed that "because of indecision and the errors
of many leaders of the opposition, a historic opportunity was lost to create a more advanced democracy on
the basis of popular mobilizations and a political ruptura ." In Barcelona 68 percent of the leaders identified
with Comisiones Obreras (the Communist Union) felt that way compared to 40 percent in Madrid.
Among those of the socialist UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores), there were 31 percent and 23 percent
in Barcelona and Madrid, respectively, who believed that ruptura would have been possible . Among all the
324 workers' representatives interviewed, 39 percent believed in the possibility of the ruptura, while 57 percent
felt that "the balance of forces at the time of the political transition did not permit the step to democracy
by ruptura, and the leaders of the left did well in changing strategy to facilitate the reforms which led
to democracy." This was the opinion of the majority of UGT representatives in Barcelona (66 percent),
Madrid (72 percent), and the Comisiones Obreras in Madrid (55 percent) and only 30 percent in Barcelona .
The above data are from Fishman, Working Class Organization and Democracy, 144 .
92
	
Southern Europe. Completed Consolidations
phrase, was based on the fact that the king had sworn to defend those laws, that
his authority was derived from them, that the government in charge had been appointed
according to them, and that the obedience of the armed forces could only
be assured if the change took place in that way. 10 The fear of a vacuum of authority,
of a sudden transfer of power to the then quite radical opposition
forces-foremost the nationalists in the periphery and the Spanish Communist
Party and the trade union movements controlled by it-was unthinkable without
the risk of involution or political repression . The reformers thus had to act cautiously,
and their instrument was legal reform, making possible a democratically
elected body that could deal with the many problems on the horizon, including
stateness problems and an incipient economic crisis . It also was essential to avoid
a separate and open debate about the monarchy, which did not enjoy particularly
strong legitimacy.
The way chosen was to convince the Cortes-the legislature created and partly
appointed by Franco-to allow the creation of a fundamentally different type of
legislative body after open and free elections with the participation of political
parties. That is what was achieved by the Law for Political Reform and its subsequent
approval by referendum. I I The equivalent in the USSR would have involved
Gorbachev convincing the Communist Party and the legislative organs of
the complex constitutional structure of the Soviet Union to allow multiparty,
freely contested elections for a parliament of the union which would then have
the duty and power to form the government . Failing this, there should at least be
a union-wide, direct multiparty competitive election for a president of the Soviet
Union. As we shall see, as long as the Soviet Union existed, nothing close to such
elections ever happened. How was it actually accomplished in Spain? No one can
ignore the structurally favorable conditions in Spain, but there can be no doubt
that this particularly successful transition owes much to agency.
A more detailed analysis of leadership during the democratic transition would
pay considerable attention to the moderating role of the king, the constructive
leadership of Santiago Carrillo (the leader of the Spanish Communist Party), the
10 . The concept of backward legitimation was first developed by Giuseppe di Palma in his "Founding
Coalitions in Southern Europe : Legitimacy and Hegemony," Government and Opposition 15 (1980):162-89.
11 . On the "law for political reform," see Pablo Lucas Verdú, La octavo ley fundamental, with a foreword
by Enrique Tierno (Madrid: Tecnos,1976), and Antonio Hernández Gil, El cambio politico espaňol y la constitución
(Barcelona : Planeta,1981) . Some readers might feel that we unfairly privilege in our analysis the
role of the main actors in the regime or the opposition. We want to emphasize here the important role of
ordinary citizens in generating a crisis of the regime . They often take risks in their opposition and struggle
against the regime . They also generate pressures on regime actors to initiate a transition (sometimes
thereby avoiding regime collapse) . However, in the case of Spain, in support of our approach we have data
from a survey shortly after the approval of the Law for Political Reform asking respondents to whom they
attributed the positive aspects of the change : 26 percent chose the government, 23 percent the king, 20 percent
Prime Minister Suárez, 8 percent the parties of the opposition, 3 percent the Cortes, 21 percent the people
and the citizens in general, while 6 percent said there was nothing good and 9 percent did not answer .
See Linz et. al., Informe sociológico sobre el cambio politico, p.119.
Spain 93
prudence of Cardinal Tarancón (the leader of the Spanish Catholic Church), the
support and courage of General Gutiérrez Mellado (the chief of staff to the Spanish
Army), the political astuteness of Josep Tarradellas (the exiled leader of the
Catalan regional government), the parliamentary negotiating abilities of Torcuato
Fernández Miranda, and the cooperation of the conservative leader Manuel
Fraga, to mention just a few of the figures involved . In the short space available,
we cannot do justice to all these actors and organizations . We would, however, like
to call particular attention to the innovative leadership of Adolfo Suárez . We will
pay particular attention to how he formulated the key issues of democracy in two
of his most politically influential speeches (which, unfortunately, have never been
translated into English) . As we shall see, for Suárez, the holding of elections was
the essence of his task . He was right . Elections are crucial to the democratizing
process of dismantling and disempowering the old regime . They are even more
crucial to the installation, legitimation, and empowerment of a new democratic
regime. While the specifcities of this process will vary from polity to polity, we
believe that in some of the countries we discuss later-most dramatically the USSR
and later Russia-leaders missed opportunities to advance this power erosion/power
creation process, with deleterious results for democracy and state capacity.
In the first of two influential speeches, Adolfo Suárez, then speaking as the
minister-secretary general of the almost defunct official single party, the Movimiento,
in the first royal cabinet, made a complex appeal to the corporatist Francocontrolled
Cortes that liberalization and eventually democratization was necessary.
12 It was the beginning of five months of argumentation . Suárez began by
referring to "the democratic monarch's" support for reform . He went on to argue
that, given the socioeconomic developments under Franco, the government
should take the next step in political reform by allowing free political association .
"I think that our historic task . . . is very simple : to finish the work [started by
Franco] . . . . The government, the legitimate manager of this historic moment, has
the responsibility to put into motion the mechanism necessary for the definite
consolidation of a modern democracy." He stressed that changes in Spanish society
had contributed to a new pluralism, a pluralism which had already assumed,
de facto, political forms .
The point of departure [ofthe proposed political reform of a law legalizing political association]
is the recognition of the pluralism of our society. Ifthis society is plural, we cannot allow
ourselves the luxury of ignoring it. . . . Ifwe contemplate the national reality with a minimum
of sincerity, we have to acknowledge that in addition to this theoretical pluralism, there already
exist organized forces . We would entrench ourselves into an absurd blindness ifwe refuse to see
this. These forces, call them parties or not, now exist as a public fact . . . . The aims of parties are
12. Many analysts of the Spanish transition believe that this speech was instrumental in the king's
selection of the young Adolfo Suárez to succeed the floundering Arias Navarro as prime minister. Maravall
and Santamaría argue that Arias "never accepted the idea of transforming the inherited regime into a pluralist
democracy." See Maravall and Santamaría, "Political Change in Spain," 81 .
94
	
Southern Europe: Completed Consolidations
specific and not the least of them is to assume power . So, if the road is not opened by the legality
which is being proposed by the state itself, there will only be an apparent peace, below which
will germinate the seeds of subversion .
Suárez went on to say that political pacts were being discussed, but he astutely
raised the question as to how democratic political representatives could be created
to participate in such pacts: "With whom should they [the government]
make the pact?" Suárez immediately gave his answer : "Only after elections will
there be valid interlocutors and legitimated agents ."13 On July 1, 1976 Prime Minister
Arias Navarro was forced to resign and Adolfo Suárez was appointed Prime
Minister.
The institutionalization of a democratic process was still very much in doubt
at the time of the appointment of Suárez . In many democratic transitions the
constitution of the old regime remains in force and inhibits or delays democratic
renewal. In Spain the Cortes could have been such a structure . Suárez's seemingly
impossible task was to convince the Cortes to vote for a Law for Political Reform
that in essence would result in the Cortes' own disappearance . If he could not
convince the Cortes, he would have to risk a constitutional confrontation of uncertain
consequences for democratic legitimacy (as occurred with Yeltsin's conflict
with the Russian parliament in 1993) or accept the Cortes' ability to paralyze
the changes needed for democratic transition.
Suárez approached this problem by carefully drafting and negotiating a text of
the democratizing Law for Political Reform . Before he submitted the text to the
Cortes for the process of legal approval, he went on national television and made
his second historic speech. In this speech to the nation, Suárez implicitly warned
the Cortes that without new constitutional norms there could be social conflict :
"The absence of rules leads to `ad-hockery' and can lead to anarchy." He also urged
the Cortes to avoid conflict by letting the people express their will . He told the nation
he was confident that the Cortes would perform this historic task . He then
made the crucial step from liberalization to democratization . He advocated free
and open elections and set a date . "I have said the word elections and in essence
this is the key to the proposal. The [proposed] constitutional modification will
permit the [new] Cortes to be elected by direct, secret, and universal suffrage as
soon as possible and, in all events, before June of 1977. In this manner the people
will participate in the construction of their own future since they will express
themselves, they will elect their representatives, and these representatives will
make the decisions over the questions that affect the national community ." For
Adolfo Suárez the fundamental task was to manage to make the forces present on
13. All of these quotations are our translations from the speech Adolfo Suárez made to the Cortes on
June 9,1976, in defense of the Law for Political Association . The full text of his speech and the law are found
in the pamphlet released by Editions del Movimiento in Madrid (1976), entitled "El Derecho de Asociación
Política," 9-28 .
Spain
	
95
the street and in civil society participate in the political system without his abdication
of his own powers until after the elections . While acknowledging the prestige
of opposition groups and leaders, he reiterated his argument that only elections
would determine with whom to negotiate . For Suárez it would be via
elections that "political groups that today voluntarily present themselves publicly
as protagonists (and they are significant and respectable but lack a popular mandate)
will come to be representatives of the people ."
Suárez made an indirect appeal to the corporatist Cortes that it would be ethically
and historically correct to vote themselves out of existence by allowing free
elections. He also assured the nation there would be no power vacuum and that
the rule of law would prevail . "The government is convinced that the institutions
[of the Franco regime] will understand the need for this reform and will support
the direct appeal to the people whom these institutions themselves serve . There
cannot be and there will not be a constitutional vacuum, and even less a vacuum
of legality. Such a vacuum cannot emerge because Spain is a State of Law which is
based on the primacy of the law."
Suárez then went on to argue that only if the state was restructured and filled
with a new democratic power would it be strong enough to address the country's
social and economic agenda and its looming stateness problem. For Suárez, the
sequence of reform thus had to start with political reform. "When the people have
made their voice heard, then there can be resolved other great political problems
with the authority which will come from electoral representation. Then issues like
institutionalization of the regions, within the permanent unity of Spain, can be
approached ." For Suárez, political reform was a precondition of economic reform.
"As long as political unknowns [ incógnitas] hang over the country, there
cannot be either economic reactivation or stability ." He concluded by conveying
a sense of hope and implying that the Cortes should allow the people to decide .
"The future is not written because only the people can write it ."14
On the day before the vote, many close observers were not certain that the Law
for Political Reform would be passed . However, Suárez and the movement toward
democratization had gained such momentum that the Cortes passed the law by a
margin of425 affirmative votes against 59 negative votes.15 Subsequently, the Law
for Political Reform was submitted to a referendum on December 15,1978. With a
strong 77% turnout, it was approved by 94% of those voting .
After the referendum's overwhelming endorsement of the Law for Political Reform,
the process of dismantling the authoritarian structure and allowing democratic
power gains accelerated . The referendum increased Suárez's power and his
14. See Pablo Lucas Verdú, La octavo ley fundamental, which contains the full texts of the law (103-8)
and of the speech by Suárez to the nation (109-19), from which we have translated excerpts .
15 . Juan J. Linz was present in the Cortes for the entire debate and the first vote . This 366-vote margin
on November 18,1976 represented a íz1-vote increase over the favorable vote for the much less controversial
liberalizing Law for Political Association, held on June 9,1976 .
96
	
Southern Europe: Completed Consolidations
ability to enter into negotiations to create an inclusive political society . Suárez first
met the opposition formally on December 23,1976, only eight days after the referendum,
although in the summer of 1976 he had informally met twice with the
Socialist Party leader, Felipe González, and other opposition leaders . Suárez met
informally with the leader of the Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo, in January
1977, soon after Carrillo left jail. On April 9,1977, Suárez successfully took the dangerous
step, considering hard-line resistence, of legalizing the Communist Party.
The first parliamentary election was held on June 15, 1977. The parliament produced
by the election drafted a constitution, which was approved in a referendum
on December 6,1978. The process we have just described illustrates the complex
interaction between legality, legitimacy, and power and the importance of timing
in transitions.16
THE LEGALIZATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY :
AN EXCURSUS ON INCLUSIONARY CHOICES
Once the general principle of a freely elected legislature had been accepted,
the most difficult and dangerous decision Suárez faced was whether to legalize the
Communist Party of Spain (PCE) . Decades of anti-Communist propaganda, suspicions
about the Communists' ambitions, and worries about the party's diffuse
strength throughout society provided a context in which the right, and especially
the military, might well have been mobilized against the transition. Even among
the reformers there were those who argued for postponing the legalization of the
Communist Party until after the first free elections .
The question of legalization was, however, an issue affecting the inclusiveness
of contestation, an essential element of democracy, and therefore the credibility
of the Spanish regime's democratizing effort. In addition, the obvious presence of
a strong Communist Party, in terms of activists and sympathizers, inevitably created
the dilemmas of the cost of repression versus the cost of toleration . In his
television address justifying the legalization, Suárez put the issue clearly before
the people:
The rejection [of the request of legalization] would not be consistent with the reality that the
Communist Party exists and is organized . The struggle against it could only be carried out by
repression .
Not only am I not Communist, but I reject strongly its ideology, as it is rejected by the other
members of my cabinet . But I am a democrat, and sincerely democratic . Therefore I think that
our people are sufficiently mature . . . to assimilate their own pluralism .
16. On the role of timing in regime changes, see Juan J. Linz, "Ill fattore tempo nei mutamenti di
regime," Teoria política u, no. 1 (1986) 3-47•
Spain
	
97
I do not think that our people want to find itself fatally obliged to see our jails full of people for
ideological reasons. I think that in a democracy we must all be vigilant of ourselves, we must all
be witnesses and judges of our public actions . We have to instore the respect for legal minorities.
Among the rights and duties of living together is the acceptance of the opponent (adversario).
If one has to confront him, one has to do it in civilized competition. Sincerely, is it not
preferable to count in the ballot boxes what otherwise we would have to measure on the poor
basis of unrest in the streets? 17
This crucial decision ended any doubts about the sincerity of Suárez's personal
commitment to democracy, and Suárez seized the occasion of his television address
to announce his candidacy in the elections. The decision to legalize the
Communist Party was extremely dangerous, as was shown by the hostile responses
of some key military leaders and even of some of the important politicians who
had supported the transition . For example, Suárez's announcement provoked the
resignation of the minister of the navy, who had to be replaced by a retired admiral
because no active duty admiral would assume the post. Suárez's announcement
also spurred a unanimous declaration of the Army Supreme Council that
"legalization of the Communist Party has produced general repugnance in all the
units of the army." However, despite a more intemperate earlier document that
had been leaked, they also concluded that, "in consideration of higher national
interests, the [council] accepts with discipline the fait accompli [hecho consumado]
." 18 Suárez's difficult choice proved decisive in assuring the moderate
Euro-Communist posture of the Spanish Communist Party and its leader Santiago
Carrillo and thus made a vital contribution to the eventual success of the
Spanish transition.
We will not enter into a lengthy argument, but obviously for democracy it is a
critical choice whether to make an inclusionary decision to allow all political
forces to participate in the political process or to make an exclusionary decision
to exact rules against parties that might, in the view of one or another important
sector of the regime or society, be perceived as threatening to them or to democracy.
We shall also not enter into the important normative debate as to whether
democracy has the right to limit participation in the "democratic game" only to
those committed to playing by democratic rules . We would like, however, to be explicit
about two empirical implications of an inclusionary choice . Both were
adeptly alluded to in the above speech by Suárez . First, the decision to allow participation
allows the objective counting in votes of a possible extremist movement's
support which would weaken any excess claims to diffuse societal support
which could be made if it were prohibited. Second, if extremist parties are out-
17. This and other Suárez speeches in the critical 1976-78 period are found in Adolfo Suárez González,
Un nuevo horizonte para Espaňa : Discursos del Presidents del Gobierno 1976-1978 (Madrid: Imprenta del Boletín
Oficial del Estado,1978) .
18. For an excellent discussion of the tense situation in the military after the legalization of the Communist
Party, see Rodrigo, "El camino hacia la democracia," 185-94, quote from p .191.
98
	
Southern Europe: Completed Consolidations
lawed, the democratic regime is involved in jailing, on potential ideological as opposed
to actual behavioral grounds, citizens who belong to state-declared illegal
organizations.
This does not mean that democrats should be passive against antidemocratic
forces. Democrats can oppose and attempt politically to isolate ideological extremists
and to jail them if they actually use violence to advance their ideas. Above
all, democrats must avoid any semiloyal collaboration with antidemocratic forces .
The Communist Party of Spain loyally contributed to the transition to and
consolidation of democracy in Spain . However, the normative and empirical issues
raised in 1977 were still salient in Spain in the 199os. The Herri Batasuna
(HB), a party that advocates independence and revolutionary change in the
Basque Country, does not hide its sympathy and even indirect support for ETA
terrorists. However, rightly in our view, given the theoretical and empirical arguments
we have advanced, HB has not been outlawed . Indeed, HB has been successful
in electing some representatives and officials . But, fundamentally, it has
been politically isolated.
Empirically, for the effort to consolidate democracy, the advantage to Spain of
having allowed even explicitly antidemocratic extremists to participate in elections
becomes apparent when we analyze some key cases . For example, in the 1979
second general elections in Spain, Fuerza Nueva, a neofascist group, campaigned
actively throughout the country, claiming to speak for the values of the past and
attempting to agglutinate antiregime forces . But, Fuerza Nueva won only 2.1 percent
of the total vote, elected only one deputy, and disintegrated as a political
force soon after the 1979 election. Even more dramatically, the courts allowed
Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero Molina, one of the February 1981 coup organizers,
to run the party Solidaridad Espaňola from his jail cell in the 1982 general
elections. Once again the claim was that he was representing strong currents of
opposition against the direction of the transition . Tejero's party received less than
30,000 (0.13 percent) of the total votes, thereby objectively "counting," to use
Suárez's word, the absolute rejection of the putschists by the electorate .
Democracy does not mean that every citizen supports democracy, nor that
antidemocrats should not enjoy democratic freedoms for legal and nonviolent
acitivities. Violent activities should certainly be punished using legal means (although
even some democrats may, in their frustration with terrorism, condone
illegal reprisals) . The defense of democracy is the duty of democratic parties and
leaders and ultimately of the voters, making possible government by democrats .
STATENESS PROBLEMS AND THEIR DEMOCRATIC RESTRUCTURING
If Spain had been a relatively homogeneous nation-state, like Portugal, Greece,
and the Latin American cases we will discuss, the Spanish transition to democracy
Spain
	
99
would probably have been completed with the approval of the constitution . However,
the strong nationalist feelings in Catalonia and the Basque Country raised
problems of stateness. The Catalan and Basque nationalisms were not perceived
as central to most of those who wrote about the Spanish transition process . However,
the crisis of other multinational states highlights the significance of the steps
Spain took to manage its stateness problem, steps which deserve separate attention.
It is our contention that Spain was able to manage its stateness problem by
successful devolution only because it had first created, by the process we have just
analyzed, legitimate state power with the authority and capacity to restructure the
polity.
In our judgment, when Spain began its transition, the variable that potentially
presented the most dangerous complication for both democratic transition and
democratic consolidation was stateness . Because stateness was so critical and because,
unlike Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, it was handled so well in Spain, we
will analyze it in particular detail, both for the light it sheds on the Spanish transition
and also for the theoretical implications it has for transitions in heterogeneous
states with important regional, cultural and national differences, such as
Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, and Nigeria.
When Spain began the process of democratization, the potential for a dangerous
stateness problem indeed existed. The most important indicator was that terrorist
violence of the nationalist Basque organization ETA (Euskadi to Askatasuna-Euskadi
and Freedom) between 1960 and the year of Franco's death, 1975,
had caused forty-three deaths . In 1978, the year the constitution was approved,
deaths had escalated to sixty-five . There were seventy-eight deaths in 1979 and
ninety-six in 1980, the year of the first new regional elections that led to a major
devolution of power. 19 This armed violence created the very real potential of military
opposition to the democratic transition and consolidation because, while
not one army officer was killed during the Basque insurgency in 1968-75 under
Franco, or in the 1975-77 transition period, in the postelectoral period of democratic
rule between 1978 and 1983, thirty-seven army officers died due to Basque
nationalist violence.20
Yet, surprisingly, despite the deaths of military officers and the inevitable difficulties
of creating Spain's quasi-federal state, none of the important statewide
interest groups or parties engaged in system blame . Adversity was not deliberately
used to delegitimate either the fledgling democratic regime or the new constitutional
structures that departed from Spain's traditional unitary state organization.
In our judgment the main reason for this lack of system blame was Spain's
19. See Fernando Reinares, "Sociogénesis y evolución del terrorismo en Espaňa," in Salvador Giner, ed.,
Espaňa sociedad y política (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1990),353-96. See especially the table on p. 390, with bibliographic
references .
20. Ibid. Also see Francisco J. Llera, Los vascos y la política. El proceso politico vasco : Elecciones, partidos
y opinión pública y legitimación en el Pafs Vasco,1977-1992 (Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco,1994) .
100
	
Southern Europe. Completed Consolidations
successful handling of its potentially grave problem of stateness via state wide
elections.
Elections, especially founding elections, help create agendas, actors, and organizations,
and, most importantly, legitimacy and power. One of our major arguments
is that, if a country has a stateness problem, it makes a critical difference
whether the first elections are statewide or regional . In Spain the first elections
were statewide, and we believe that they helped transcend Spain's stateness problem.
The first post-Franco vote, as we have seen, was the referendum to approve a
"law for political reform." This law committed the government not to any details
of political reform, but to a process of clear democratization, not just liberalization.
The second key vote, on June 15,1977, was also not merely about liberalization,
but about democratization ; it was a statewide general election to select deputies
who would create a government and draft a new constitution . Because of the
statewide stakes involved, four statewide parties conducted a campaign in all of
Spain around statewide themes, winning 319 of the 350 seats. Just as importantly,
the statewide parties campaigned very hard in areas where the potential for secession
was greatest and the history of antisystem sentiment was most deeply
rooted-the Catalan and Basque regions . While strong Catalan and Basque nationalist
parties did emerge, the four statewide parties and their regional affiliates won
67.7% of the vote in Catalonia, and 51 .4% of the vote in the Basque Country.21
The deputies and government produced by these statewide elections engaged
in prolonged public and private negotiations over the constitution and over how
to proceed on the stateness issue. A consensual constitution was finally supported
in parliament by the four major parties and the major Catalan nationalist party ;
258 of the 274 members voting gave it their approval . Spain's third general appeal
to the voters then followed, namely a referendum on the constitution, which was
approved by 87 .8% of the voters on December 1, 1978. In Catalonia the constitution
was approved by 90.4 percent of the voters. In the Basque Country 68 .8 percent
of those who voted approved the constitution, but voter turnout was only
45.5 percent, which was below the Spanish and Catalan level of 67 percent .22
Strengthened and legitimated by these three convocations of its electorate,
Spain's government and parliament began negotiations in earnest over the devolution
of power to the Catalan and Basque Country provincial representatives, who
themselves had been constituted in the aftermath of the general elections . Surrounded
by intense controversy the negotiators eventually crafted a system by
which Spain would change its historically centralized state structure for a new decentralized
one characterized by an unprecedented devolution of power to the
21. For the organization of statewide parties and the importance of the general election in transforming
the agendas of these parties, see Gunther, Sani, and Shabad, Spain after Franco, 37-177. The results of the
1977 election are found on pp . 38 and 311-
22. For details about constitutional votes see Andrea Bonime-Blanc, Spain's Transition to Democracy:
The Politics of Constitution-Making (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987) .
Spain 101
peripheral nationalist constituencies. These negotiated agreements over regional
autonomy (the Statutes of Autonomy) were submitted to Basque and Catalan
voters in October, 1979. The Catalan statute was approved by 87.9 percent and the
Basque statute by 90.3 percent of those who voted in the regions .23 The largest
and oldest Basque nationalist party (PNV), which had urged abstention on the
earlier referendum on the constitution, adjusted to the new political situation and
urged approval of the Statutes of Autonomy.24
Had the first elections in Spain been regional rather than statewide, the incentives
for the creation of Spain-wide parties and a Spain-wide agenda would have
been greatly reduced . Consequently, the statewide parties and their affiliates
would have received fewer votes .25 We also believe that, if the first elections had
been on the regional level, issues raised by nationalities would have assumed a
much more substantial and divisive role in the electoral campaign than they actually
did and the nationalist parties and their affiliates would have been more extreme.
Indeed, there is a good chance that peripheral nationalist parties and
groups would have been able to shift the discourse of the electoral campaign so
that calls for ruptura and mobilization for independence would have become predominant.26
Strengthened nationalist parties would have gravely complicated the
stateness problem in Spain . Relations between the military and the democratizing
forces of the central government would almost certainly have been put under
greater strain . In a context of heightened stateness conflict, the coup coalitiondefeated
by the king's personal intervention on February 23,1981-would probably
have emerged earlier and with greater force against a divided and less legitimate
government.
The democratic transition in Spain certainly began under favorable conditions,
but the clear commitment to democratization and countrywide elections strengthened
the legitimacy claims of the central government, helped forge links between
23. See Juan J. Linz, "De la crisis de un Estado unitario al Estado de las autonomías," in Fernando Fernández
Rodríguez, ed., La Espaňa de las autonomías (Madrid : Institute de Estudios de Administración
Local, 1985), 527-672, and Juan J. Linz, Conflicto en Euskadi (Madrid : Espasa Calpe,1986) . On the negotiation
of the Basque Autonomy Statute, see the account by two journalists, Kepa Bordegarai and Robert Pastor,
Estatuto vasco (San Sebastian: Ediciones Vascas,1979).
24. Some extreme separatist groups continued to boycott the vote on autonomy, and the overall voter
turnout was 13 percent lower than the Spanish average in the constitutional referendum ; nevertheless, the
voter turnout of 54 percent was still politically significant.
25. Even when stateness issues are not salient, regional parties in Spain tend to poll 15-25 percent better
in regional elections than they do in general elections.
26. One example of such a potential discourse was the fact that the Consejo de Fuerzas Políticas de
Cataluňa in March 1976 publicly demanded the "establishment of a provisional government of the Generalitat
that would assume power in Catalonia from the moment of the`ruptura democrática' with the commitment
to announce and hold in the shortest time possible elections to the Catalan parliament ; that government
would constitute itself on the basis of the principles that shaped the Estatuto of 1932 and as a first
step in the concrete exercise of the right of self determination ." As the former exiled leader of the Catalan
regional govenment, Josep Tarradellas, comments in his memoirs, "political verbalism was at its height'
José Tarradellas, Ja Sóc Aqui: Recuerdo de un retorno (Barcelona: Planets, 19go), diary entry of March 15,
1976, p. 4.
10 2
	
Southern Europe : Completed Consolidations
Table 6 .1 . Multiple Identities in Catalonia : 1982
Source : Juan J . Linz, "De la crisis de un estado unitario al estado de las autonomías," in Fernando Fernández Rodríguez, ed ., La
Espaňa de las autonomías(Madrid : instituto de Estudios de Administración Local, 1985) 560 .
Table 6 .2 . National Identities in Catalonia
Source: The questions on pride are from Francisco András Orizo and Alejandro Sánchez Fernández, El sistema de valors dels
Catalans (Barcelona : Institut CataI6 d'Estudis Mediterranis, 1991), 207 . The question on European unification is from "Los
Espaňoles ante el Segundo aniversario de la firma del Tratado de Adhesión de Espaňa a la Comunidad Europa" (Madrid : Centro
de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Abril 1988), 53 . This table is reproduced with permission from Juan J . Linz and Alfred Stepan,
"Political Identities and Electoral Sequences : Spain, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia," Daedalus 121 (Spring 1992): 128 .
aN/A, not available .
political society and civil society, and contributed to a new, constitutionally sanctioned
relationship between Spain's peripheral nationalisms and the central government.
Most importantly, countrywide elections restructured stateness identities
in ways that were supportive of multiple identities and democracy in Spain .
In the new democratic Spain, complementary multiple identities persist. Dual
identities in Catalonia are the norm and have never been in question (table 6.1)
Catalans now have political and cultural control over education, television and
radio, and indeed over most of the areas where Catalan nationalism had been
most repressed in the past. Catalans also participate as a regional group in the European
Community (now the European Union), a body that in some important
respects is a community of regions as much as a community of states . Finally, in
this new context, Catalans, to a greater extent than ever before, accepted their
identity as members of the Spanish state . The sequence of elections in Spain helped
constitute these mutually supportive legal and affective memberships in national
(Catalan), state (Spanish), and suprastate (European Community) polities. The
Spain
Table 6 .3 . National Identities in the Basque Country
Source . Reprinted, with permission, from Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, "Political Identities and Electoral Sequences : Spain,
the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia," Daedalus 121 (spring 1992) : 129.
N/A, not available.
overwhelming percentage of all Catalans are proud to be Catalan, proud to be
Spanish, and very supportive of joining an integrated European political community.
Table 6.2 shows these complementary multiple identities very clearly.
The Basque Country presents a more difficult political situation. While the support
for membership in a unified Europe is high, the citizenry in the Basque Country
are 40 percent less proud to be Spanish than the national average and about 30
percent less proud to be Spanish than the Catalans (table 6.3) . There is still routine
separatist violence in the Basque Country, but we believe that the overall political
situation has been ameliorated by the sequence of elections we have described . Indeed,
the Basque Country is a particularly dramatic example of how elections can
structure identities and delegitimate certain types of antistate violence .
Let us now focus explicitly on the question of how identities can be constructed
by political processes . Between 1977 and 1979 the most heated question in
Spanish politics concerned the relationship of peripheral nationalisms to the unitary
Spanish state. In this two-year period the percentage of the population in the
Basque Country who said they wanted to be independent doubled, to represent
virtually a third of the entire population . Starting from a smaller base, pro-independence
sentiment tripled in Catalonia in the same period. Obviously, if these
trends had continued for a few more years, there would have been a severe crisis
of stateness in Spain. However, once there had been a referendum on the Statutes
of Autonomy and governments had been established with Basque and Catalan
nationalist parties in office, sentiment for independence declined and later stabilized
at lower levels (figure 6 .1).
Assassinations, kidnapping and terrorism by pro-independence groups in the
Basque Country still continued after the referendum, but their political significance
changed dramatically. The terrorism of the ETA was a central factor in the
course of the democratic transition, the constitution-making period, the negotiation
and approval of the autonomy statutes, the election of the Basque parliament,
the formation of a Basque government, and the transfer of functions to the
government. At each of those points in time, it was argued that those steps would
lead to the end of terrorism; however, more often than not they coincided with an
103
Population
Identity
Both Parents
Born in Catalonia
Neither Parent
Born in Catalonia Immigrants
Entire
Sample
Catalan 13 .7 10 .7 2 .3 9 .0
More Catalan than Spanish 26 .5 12 .0 4 .2 16 .9
Equally Catalan and Spanish 48 .2 37 .5 25 .9 40 .1
More Spanish than Catalan 5 .7 10 .5 12 .6 8 .2
Spanish 5 .1 23 .7 51 .3 23 .5
No answer 0 .8 5 .7 3 .8 2 .4
(414) (69) (317) 1885)
Percentage
Survey Answer Catalans All Spain
"Proud to be Spanish" 73% 85%
"Proud to be Catalan" 82% N/Aa
In favor of the unification of Europe via the European Community 83% 76%
Percentage
Survey Answer Basque Country All Spain
"Proud to be Spanish" 44% 85%
"Proud to be Basque 69% N/Aa
In favor of the unification of Europe via the European Community 74% 76%
104
35%
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Southern Europe: Completed Consolidations
Referendum on
Devolution
1977 1978
	
1979 1980
	
1981
	
1982
CaLalonia
País Vasco - Navarra
Fig. 6.1. Percentage of the Population Wanting Independence in Catalonia and
País Vasco-Navarra before and after the 1979 Referendum on Devolution of
Power to the Automonías .
Source: Juan J . Linz and Alfred Stepan, "Political Identities and Electoral Sequences : Spain, the Soviet
Union, and Yugoslavia," Daedalus 121, no . 2 (Spring 1992): 130 . Reprinted with permission from
Daedalus. This table is based on the data originally produced in Juan J . Linz, "De la crisis de un Estado
unitario al Estado de las autonomías," in Fernando Fernández Rodríguez, ad ., La Esoaňa de las
autonomies (Madrid: Institute de Estudios de Administración Local, 1985), 587 .
upsurge of terrorist casualties . Terrorism has not disappeared with the consolidation
of Spanish democracy and the consolidation of Basque institutions and self-
government.
Does this mean that the steps in the solution of the stateness problem-the existence
of peripheral nationalisms-have failed? There is evidence (which we cannot
discuss here in full detail) that this is not the case. Terrorism, from having a
central importance, has become a tragic aspect of life, mostly in the Basque country,
but that cannot destabilize Spanish democracy. The attempt on the life of the
leader of the opposition Partido Popular, José Maria Aznar, in 1995 provoked
Spain 105
unanimous condemnation . Terrorism has today its own dynamics, with only minority
support in the Basque population .
The public opinion data show basic changes in the attitudes of the Basque population
toward ETA, but the comparison of attitudes over time is complicated by
some changes in question formulation and the different proportions of "no opinion"and
"don't know" (due probably to the practices of the different polling organizations).
With this in mind we want to note that in 1979 only 5 percent saw
ETA as "criminals" ; by 1989,16 percent did so. In 1979,17.1 percent saw ETA as patriots;
by 1989, only 5 percent saw them as patriots. In the course of a decade of
democracy, the proportion saying that ETA were "idealists" dropped from 33 percent
to 18 percent; the ambiguous answer "manipulated" dropped from 29 percent
to 11 percent; while that of "madmen" increased from 8 percent to 16 percent.
Many of those changes were due to larger numbers of don't know and no answers,
from 8 percent to 34 percent-reflecting perhaps a tiredness of the whole issuebut
that does deflect from the fact that the number of those expressing support
by defining ETA as "patriots" and those condemning them as "criminals" have
changed.
Another set of data covering several years from 1981 to 1989 shows that, in 1981,
8 percent gave ETA their "full support" ; in 1989 the figure was 3 percent. Those
agreeing with ETA goals but not the means went from 3 percent in 1981 to 9 percent
in 1989 . Most importantly, the percentage of respondents expressing "total
rejection" went from 23 percent in 1981 to 45 percent in 1989, with 48 percent "don't
know, no answer" in 1981 and only 16 percent "don't know, no answer" in 1989 .27
The comparison of data by party voted between 1979 and 1986 shows that,
among those supporting the Socialists (PSOE) the percentage answering "patriots"
or "idealists" dropped from 46 percent to 1o percent and the percentage giving
negative answers ("madmen" or "criminals") rose from 47 percent to 74 percent .
Most significantly, this "identity delegitimization" occurred even among the voters
of the main nationalist party, the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), where the
percentage of positive answers dropped from 40 percent to 16 percent. Even
among the voters of Herri Batasuna, the positive responses weakened, from 6o
percent saying "patriots" to 31 percent, while more said "idealists," 25 percent in
1979 and 40 percent in 1986.28
27. For an analysis of the Basque data and a more extensive discussion of democratic politics in the context
of political violence, see Goldie Shabad and Francisco J . Llera,"Political Violence in a Democratic State :
Basque Terrorism in Spain," in Martha Crenshaw, ed. Terrorism in Context (University Park, Penn . : Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1995), 4to--69 ; Llera, Los vascos y la política and Linz, Conflicto en Euskadi, 698.
28. Shabad and Llera, "Political Violence ." Unfortunately, the comparison of attitudes concerning independence
between 1979 and 1989 is not fully possible, since the alternative answer"indifferent" was introduced
in 1989. However, those expressing "great desire" or "fairly large desire" for independence constituted 36 percent
in 1979 and 31 percent in 1989. Those reporting a desire that was "fairly small," respectively, 15 percent and
8 percent; "very small" were 12 percent and 7 percent ; and "none," 29 percent and 19 percent. Offering the alternative
"indifferent"allowed 19 percent not to make a choice. In addition, the number of "no answers" increased
from 7 percent to 18 percent (probably because of the different practices of the survey organizations) .
106
	
Southern Europe: Completed Consolidations
For Basque nationalists (probably like most nationalists throughout the world),
the goal of an independent nation-state will never disappear. But the intensity of
that desire and the political means used to advance that desire can and have
changed. Accommodation to a democratic multinational state is possible, as the
pattern of Spanish-Basque politics of the last two decades shows .
These developments have largely stabilized the multiple levels of identity (the
important number of those who feel their Basque identity as well as a Spanish
identity) and limited the polarization of the two communities . They also have stabilized
the initially strong and growing desire for independence . Not that such a
desire has disappeared, although it is increasingly stated as a symbolic long-term
goal, while politics, government, and elections take place within the redefined
Spanish state. Those developments have also made possible in the Basque country
the delegitimation and political isolation of the ETA terrorists . Although
Basque political killings continue, they no longer threaten to bring down the
democratic government .
The crisis of Spanish stateness has been contained, initially due to the choice
of electoral sequence. As we shall see when we discuss the stateness issue in the Soviet
Union and Yugoslavia, the electoral sequence in these two countries was profoundly
different, and it exacerbated the stateness problem that both countries already
had due to their Soviet-style federal constitutions and historical memories.
We do not want to overstate the significance of holding first a general electionin
which statewide parties competed in the whole country and which also gave a
democratic legitimation to the nationalist parties-in the successful resolution of
the problem of Spanish stateness in a critical moment . Without all of the subsequent
steps taken (the decrees on the pre-autonomies in the fall of 1977, the 1978
constitution, and the approval of the Estatutos in 1979), the problem could have
continued being an obstacle to full consolidation of Spanish democracy . We do
not say either that the nation-building efforts in the periphery are not problematic,
in the sense we have already discussed in chapter 2, in the multilingual Catalan
and Basque societies . What we do say is that the postponement of full devolution
until after the approval of a Spanish constitution in 1978, the negotiation of
the Autonomy Statutes, and their popular legitimation in a referendum allowed a
much less conflictual and more institutional recognition of nationalist aspirations
and the creation of a new and different state .
Using the definition of democratic transition advanced earlier, we maintain
that the Spanish transition began with the death of Franco on November 20,1975
and was completed at the latest on October 25,1979, when the Basque and Catalan
referendums on regional autonomy were held . A case could, of course, be made
that the transition was completed when the principle of government accountability
to the parliament was established formally in November 1977 or when the new
democratic constitution was approved in the referendum on December 6, 1978.
However, we believe that only after the Basque and Catalan regional autonomy for-
Spain
mule had been negotiated and voted upon did Spain meet our three requirements
for a completed transition: a government was in office that was the result of a free
and popular vote, the government had sovereign authority to generate policies,
and the government did not de jure have to share power with other bodies . Until
this point there had been some doubt about whether the military would successfully
challenge the government's sovereign right to negotiate and generate new
policies in the highly controversial area of regional politics . Furthermore, the legitimacy
of a democratically elected government, if it had not solved these problems
of regionalization, might have been questioned because the government
could have been seen as displaying excessive continuity with the Franquist regime.
EXCURSUS ON VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRATIZATION
It is difficult to assess the importance of political violence in the struggle for
democracy. In the cases included in our work, the regimes were not overthrown
by armed popular movements, guerrillas, or terrorists, if we ignore the confusing
events in Romania . The "liberation by golpe" of the Portuguese Captains is an altogether
different case . However, the case of Spain involves the violence of the
ETA, which certainly did not lead to the Spanish transition but contributed to the
crisis of Franco's regime . The assassination of his premier, Luis Carrero Blanco, in
December 1973 was an important event whose political implications for the
regime and change after the death of Franco will continue to be debated . It has
been argued that, if Luis Carrero Blanco had been prime minister when Franco
died, the resistance of the "bunker" [the hard line] would have been greater and
the transition probably would have been much different and more difficult . Some
facts are clear. ETA violence was a serious problem. Its repression contributed to
the international delegitimation of the Franco regime. But the scale of violence
reached its height in 1978-8o during the approval of the Constitution, the second
free election, the negotiation of Basque autonomy with Basque moderate politicians,
and the first election for the Basque regional parliament.
However, the sympathy for or tolerant attitude toward the ETA of much of the
opposition during this whole period and the ambiguous attitude of the French
government toward ETA members operating in France allowed the ETA to play a
disturbing and frustrating role in the new democracy . Although politically increasingly
isolated, ETA violence led the Socialist democratic government to condone-we
do not know exactly to what extent-illegal actions against the ETA .
This is a case in which a democratic government acted in ways that blemished its
civil rights record.29 This has, years later in 1995, contributed to a serious crisis of
confidence in the government.
29 . As Linz has pointed out, democratic governments are most likely to violate the law and commit
human rights abuses in cases where terrorism is combined with nationalistic, linguistic, or religious de-
107
108
	
Southern Europe: Completed Consolidations
Table 6 .4 . "Democracy Is the Best Political System for a Country Like Ours," Spain 1978-1993 .
Source: This table is reproduced, with permission, from Juan J . Linz and Alfred Stepan, "Political Crafting of Democratic
Consolidation or Destruction : European and South American Comparisons," in Robert A. Pastor, ad., Democracy in the Americas :
Stopping the Pendulum (New York : Holmes and Meier, 1989), 44 . National surveys by Data S .A ., Madrid . For 1978 (July) and
1980 see J. J. Linz, M. Gómez-Reino, D. Vila, and F. A. Orizo, Informe sociológico sabre el cambio politico en Espaňa, 1975-
1981 (IV Informe FOESSA, Vol . I, Fundación FOESSA). (Madrid: Euramérica, 19811, 627-29 . For 1981, March 4 to 21 (after the
February 23 attempted coup), Cambio 16, no . 488 (April 6, 1981) : 42-45; for 1982-83, November-January, postelection survey
with the support of the Volkswagen-Stiftung, unpublished . For the study see Juan J . Linz and J . R . Montero, Crisis y cambio:
Electores y partidos an la Espaňa de los aňos ochenta (Madrid : Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1986) . For 1983 (Fall), see
J . J. Linz, "La sociedad espaňola : presence, pasado y future," in J . J . Linz, ed ., Espaňa, un presence para el future, l. La
sociedad (Madrid : Institute de Estudios Económicos, 1984), 57-95, and J. J. Linz, "Legitimacy of Democracy and the
Socioeconomic System," in Mattel Dogan, ad ., Comparing Pluralist Democracies: Strains on Legitimacy (Boulder, Colo .:
Westview Press, 1988), 65-113 . Data for 1988 and 1993 from the Centro de Documentación de Data, S .A ., Madrid . For an
important conceptual and empirical analysis, see Jose Ramon Montero and Richard Gunther, "Democratic Legitimacy in Spain,"
paper prepared for the International Political Science Association (IPSA), IVI World Congress, Berlin, August 21-25, 1994.
Here we want only to note that the terrorist struggle against a nondemocratic
government may leave a difficult legacy for a new democracy, since the terrorists
may pursue other goals than democratization and, therefore, not stop their actions
when democracy has been achieved . The assassination of one of the intellectual
leaders of the right, Senator Jaime Guzmán, in Chile after a democratic
government assumed office is another example of how such a legacy complicates
the democratic political process .
DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION
There is broad scholarly consensus that Spanish democracy was consolidated
no later than the peaceful transfer of power to the socialist opposition after the
October 1982 general elections. We accept this date. However, a case could be
made that democracy was consolidated even earlier, with the completion of the
successful trials and imprisonment of the military leaders involved in the February
23, 1981 coup attempt. It is very significant (and a startling contrast to Argentina)
that the two major leaders of the coup attempt, Colonel Tejero and General
Miláns del Bosch, were sent to jail and that there was never a politically
significant movement in the military or in civil society to grant them clemency .
In our theoretical discussion of democratic consolidation, we distinguished the
mands. See his "Types of Political Regimes and Respect for Human Rights : Historical and Cross-National
Perspectives," in Asbjorn Eide and Bernt Hagtvet, eds ., Human Rights in Perspective: A Global Assessment
(Oxford : Blackwell, 1992), 177-222, 299-310, esp. 190-93•
Spain log
Table 6 .5 . "At This Time, What Do You Think Is Best: Government Only of the UCD (The Unión de
Centro Democrático, Then the Ruling Party), a Political Party Coalition, a Civil-Military Government,
or a Military Government?" Spain 1981
(N= 1,703)
Note : The question in Spanish was : "En estos mementos, iqué tree ustel qua es el mejor: un gobierno sólo de UCD, un
gobierno de coalición entre partidos politicos, un gobierno cívico-militac o un gobierno militar?"
Source . This table is reproduced, with permission, from Linz and Stepan, "Political Crafting of Democratic Consolidation or
Destruction," 45 . Data are from a special poll carried out by Data, S .A., Madrid, Spain, between March 4 and 21, 1981, after
the putsch attempt of February 23, 1981 .
attitudes of the general citizenry from the behavior of nationally significant groups
and the constitutional reality of whether the democratic government was de jure
sovereign in the policy sphere. In the Spanish case, the first component to become
fully congruent with consolidation was public opinion . By 1978 Spanish public
opinion was strongly democratic, and it has remained so ever since (table 6.4).
Not only was Spanish public opinion strongly prodemocratic in the abstract
sense, it also overwhelmingly rejected the major possible alternative to democracy,
a military government (table 6.5).
Ten years after the death of Franco, 76 percent of the population felt pride in
the transition and only 9 percent said that the transition was not a source of pride .
This sense of pride was particularly strong on the left, where 82 percent of those
who said they would vote Communist and 88 percent of those who said they
would vote Socialist expressed pride in the transition .30
In terms of the behavior of nationally significant groups, parts of the military
spent significant resources attempting to impose conditions, by pressure and if
necessary by military force, on democratically elected governments, at least until
the failed coup in February 1981 . Some scholars, such as Paul Preston, argue that
some party activists were in sufficient contact with coup conspirators to be called,
in effect, a semiloyal opposition . However, the overwhelmingly negative reaction
to the coup expressed by the king, public opinion, and party leaders helped to establish
very clearly that the only game in town after February 1981 was a democratic
game.31
30. "Attitudes y opiniones de los espaňoles ante la constitución y las instituciones democráticas," 32-
31 . Before the coup attempt prominent politicians from a range of parties, including the Socialist Party,
engaged in semiloyal discussions with the military about a possible civil-military caretaker coalitional government.
All such ambivalent actions on the part of party activists stopped after the coup . For a discussion
of the semiloyal behavior of some politicians, see Paul Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain (London:
Methuen,1986), 16o-88, esp. 181-84.
Survey Answer 1978 1980 1981 1982-83 1983 1988 1993
"Yes" 77 69 81 74 85 87 79
"No" 15 20 13 6 10
"Depends" 12
"Other, N/A" 8 11 6 7 5
N (5,898) N/A (1,703) (5,463) (3,952) (4,548) (1,448)
Survey Answer Percentage
UCD government 27%
Coalition government 52%
Civil-military government 5%
Military government 2%
Others (no response, don't know, hard to classify) 14%
100%
110
	
Southern Europe: Completed Consolidations
The final component of democratic consolidation to be put in place was the
successful exercise by the democratic government of its right not to have its policy
power constrained by non-democratic institutions . The trials and imprisonment
of the military were complete by 1982. The trials helped to consolidate democracy
because they showed how divided and without an agenda the military
"alternative" really was . The most important hard-liners were defeated, disgraced,
and jailed. After the trials there was a "steady realization among large numbers of
officers that democracy was there to stay and that the military ought to accommodate
itself within ií ."32 Finally, after they were faced with the solid parliamentary
majority achieved by the Socialists in October 1982, "military contestation
shifted from politics to more strictly corporate concerns, and from resistance to
accommodation."33 From December 1982 until March 1991 the defense minister
of the Socialist government, Narcis Serra, the former mayor of Barcelona, designed
and implemented an imaginative and sweeping restructuring of the military,
which had begun with UCD goverments and their civilian ministers of defense.
When he left office "the once feared Poder Militar was now, in many
respects, one more branch of the state administration ."34 In terms of civil-military
theory, a democratic pattern of civil-military relations is one in which there
is low contestation by the military of the policies of the democratically elected
government and where the military accepts that they have low "prerogatives" or
reserve domains .35 For more than a decade, Spain has been in this position .
A review of the basic background variables that facilitate or impede a democratic
consolidation shows that Spain, with the important exception of the stateness
variable we have examined, began its transformation under facilitating conditions
on all the other variables . The organizational base of the authoritarian
regime was civilian or civilianized pro regime officers . Some may think of the
Franco regime as a military regime, but Franco exercised power as head of the
party as well as generalísimo of the armed forces and predominantly as chief of
state. Numerous studies of decision making in the last twenty-five years of the
Franco regime support Felipe Agiiero's judgment that "although the military in
Spain was highly present in the Franquist structures, it did not delineate or monitor
government policy or control its leader," and that "the military in Spain did
not participate in the elite nucleus that made the core decisions for the transition."36
In our judgment it is appropriate, therefore, to call the regime base in the
32. Felipe Agdero, "The Assertion of Civilian Supremacy in Post-authoritarian Contexts : Spain in Comparative
Perspective" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1991), 300.
33• Ibid., 309.
34. For an excellent discussion of the socialist reform, see ibid., 309-56. This quote is from p. 356 .
35. For a more extensive conceptual discussion of "military prerogatives" and "military contestation"
and a comparative analysis of Spain, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil, see Stepan, Rethinking Military
Politics, 93-127, esp. figure 7.3 on p.122 .
36 . Both quotes from Felipe Agdero, "The Military in the Processes of Political Democratization in
South America and South Europe : Outcomes and Initial Conditions," paper presented at the XV InternaSpain
ill
years preceding the transition a "civilianized-authoritarian regime." As we have
argued, such a base presents fewer potential obstacles to democratic transition
and consolidation than does a sultanistic base or a hierarchical military.
In Spain there were, of course, important social and political pressures for
change when Franco died. Our emphasis on the formally developed part of civil
society in Spain that in part served as a basis, cover, and support for an emerging
political society should not lead us to neglect the less organized forms of dissent
by people in demonstrations, rallies, and sympathy strikes . Some of those actions
were quite spontaneous, and certainly many of those participating did not belong
to any of the organizations initiating them .
There is, however, a very important difference between authoritarian Spain
and those regimes in Communist Europe with strong totalitarian or frozen posttotalitarian
features, such as the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and
the Baltic republics . There the weakness of civil society and political society before
the transition started and during the course of the transition made the more
spontaneous actions of citizens congregating in squares, churches, and streets
(like those in Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin, Prague, Sofia, and finally in Timisoara and
Bucharest) play a much greater role in the crisis of those regimes and their collapse
or the initiation of a transformation from above . In some of those cases,
there was a serious possibility of a violent Tiananmen Square denouement, an
outcome less likely in Spain (except perhaps in the Basque Country) due to the
mediating role of civil organizations and the leaders of an incipient political society.
The massive demonstration in Spain in February 1977, after the murder of
Communist labor lawyers-the Atocha murders-is one example ; their lying-instate
at the bar association offices in the Supreme Court building, the authorized
character of the mass demonstration, and the control of the militants by the PCE
made this an important but orderly event. In this context of heightened societal
pressure for and expectations of change, the regime's political leaders, especially
Adolfo Suárez, initiated the law for political reform and were in charge when the
first elections were held and when the constitution was drafted . Popular pressure
kept the transition going forward and contributed to the dialectic captured by the
well-known Spanish phrase reforms pactada-ruptura pactada. Nonetheless, since
the regime played a key role at all stages of the transition, it is appropriate to call
Spain a case of negotiated transition, which, consistent with our argument, is a
format that avoids most of the problems of a "provisional government'
Concerning the implication of the character of the previous nondemocratic
regime, we argued in table 4.3 that it is conceivable that in the later stages of an
authoritarian regime a country could arrive at a set of conditions vis-á-vis civil
tional Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico, September 21-23,1989,
22 and 27. For a similar argument with supporting documentation, see Rodrigo, "El camino hacia la democracia,"
21-32, and Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics, 118-21 .
112
	
Southern Europe. Completed Consolidations
society, constitutionalism and rule of law, the state bureaucracy, and economic
society that would be quite supportive of democratic consolidation, if there was
a democratic transition . Spain is the clearest example of the phenomenon . In the
words of Victor Pérez-Díaz, "by the time we get to the mid-70s the economic, social
and cultural institutions of Spain were already quite close to those of Western
Europe, and the cultural beliefs, normative orientation and attitudes that go with
the workings of these institutions were also close to European ones. This is one of
the reasons why the political change to democracy worked so swiftly ."37 He further
notes that, by the mid-70s (just before the transition), "Spain's economy was
a modern economy, ranking tenth among capitalist economies throughout the
world, with a large industrial sector, a booming service sector and its agriculture
undergoing rapid transformation."38 Indeed, the Spanish economy had benefited
from the overall development of Western Europe, and between 1961 and 1970 it
had a growth rate of 7.3 percent, one of the highest in the world .39 The Spanish
transition is particularly relevant to the debates about economic factors in transitions
and consolidations of new democracies . The robust economic development
in Spain in the 196os contributed indirectly to the transition by generating
a more complex and free society in which there were considerable working class
protests and strikes, first on economic issues and later on solidarity demands . In
the moment of transition, Spain's close network of organizations limited anomic
and violent action, possibly because everybody had something to lose in disorder.
However, there was no direct relationship between prolonged economic growth
and the onset of the transition nor to the specific political processes leading to democracy.
Spain had reached a level of development that should have led to democratization
quite a few years before Franco's death in 1975. The business class
did not press for change by articulating arguments that the regime had served its
function or that further development required democratization . Business did not
oppose democratization and might have even privately supported it, but business
played no active public role bringing about democracy.
Of the five arenas that were crucial for the consolidation of democracy, as argued
in chapter one, Spain began its transition with reasonable supportive con-
37. Pérez-Díaz, "Emergence of a Democratic Spain," 14 . This is true even in the area of political preferences.
For example, although, until shortly before the 1977 elections, the public recognition of leaders and
the large number of emerging parties were small, the Spaniards, even before the death of Franco and especially
after the transition began, could clearly place themselves on the left-right dimension and express their
preference for one or another of the ideological tendencies in the European political spectrum . Most
Spaniards from the daily news were quite familiar with European politics and parties . In this respect Spain
was very different from most post-totalitarian societies and particularly from the former USSR .
38.Ibid.
39• See J. M. Maravall, "Economic Reforms in New Democracies: The Southern European Experience,"
East South System Transformations, Working Paper #3 (Oct. 19go), Department of Political Science, University
of Chicago, 3 . For a more detailed evaluation of areas of economic strength and weakness of the
Franco regime in 1960-75, see José Maria Maravall, Los resultados de la democracia: Un estudio del sur y el
este de Europa (Madrid : Alianza Editorial, 1995), 61-104.
Spain 113
ditions in all of the arenas except political society . Democratic crafters and supporters
inherited a civil society already robust and reasonably differentiated, an
economic society that needed restructuring but was already institutionalized, a
state apparatus tainted with authoritarianism but usable (and certainly so by the
first democratically elected government, which came from its ranks), and a reasonably
strong recent tradition of rule of law .
Given this situation we do not feel that international influence was critical for
Spain's transition and consolidation (as we will argue it was for Portugal), but it
certainly was systematically supportive . Democracy in Spain, in fact, was already
consolidated before Spain entered the European Economic Community in 1986 .
However, the fact that the EEC was solidly democratic, and had "set up a stable
pattern of rewards and disincentives" for would-be members was helpful to
Spain's transition and consolidation .4Ó As the former Socialist Minister, José M .
Maravall, has noted, "Adolfo Suárez presented Spain's request for membership to
the EEC in 1977 and the totality of parliamentary parties supported him . It was
widely believed that international isolation and the dictatorship had been closely
connected in recent Spanish history. The European Community was seen as a
symbol of democracy and development; this symbol had been very important in
the struggle against Francoism . Joining the EEC was believed to be a decisive step
for the consolidation of democracy ."41 Foreign policies toward Spain and the prevailing
Zeitgeist in Western Europe were thus very supportive of democratic transition
and consolidation. The diffusion effect was also helpful for Spain. The 1974
Portuguese Revolution encouraged some Spanish proregime leaders to push the
democratic transition forward rather than wait for a reaction from below, and the
loss of the king's throne in Greece probably encouraged King Juan Carlos to support
a regime-led democratic transition .
The political economy of legitimacy is extremely interesting because there is absolutely
no doubt that the economic situation of Spain deteriorated sharply during
the transition and did not improve until three years afterconsolidation in 1982 .
Spanish unemployment in the early 197os under Franco was one of the lowest in
Europe, hovering around 3 percent. With the transition to democracy, unemployment
rose dramatically-in fact, Spain's 20 percent unemployment rate in the
mid-198os was the highest in Western Europe . Economic growth rates, which averaged
over 7 percent from 196o to 1974 and were among the highest in the world,
averaged only 1.7 percent between 1975 and 19854 2 The hypothesis of a tightly coupled
relationship between economic efficiency and political legitimacy would lead
40. Whitehead, "International Aspects of Democratization," 22 .
41. Maravall, "Economic Reforms in New Democracies," 16 .
42. The Spanish unemployment data are from Banco de Bilbao, Economic Research Department,
Situación: Review of the Spanish Economy, International Edition, no .1o-11,1986 . The Spanish growth rates
are derived from United Nations Statistical Yearbook, 1976, 1982, and Economic Intelligence Unit, Quarterly
Reports: Spain (2nd quarter 1986) .
114
	
Southern Europe: Completed Consolidations
us to predict a corresponding decline in the legitimacy of democracy. Although
the polls showed a sharp decline in the belief in the socioeconomic efficacy of the
regime, there was a significant increase in the number of citizens who answered
affirmatively to the question "Is democracy the best political system for a country
like ours?"43 As with the Dutch in the mid-193os, the Spanish in the 198os, despite
economic decline, struggled all the harder to make the democratic regime work
because no alternative seemed more appropriate . Helped by the fact that Spain
had started with a reasonably good economy, the sequence of reform actually followed
was first political, second social, and only third, economic .44
Our final conditioning variable is the constitution-adoption formula . In the
absence of a sultanistic background or an armed conflict within the state, a constitution
imposed by a provisional government was precluded . The relative absence
of the military in the day-to-day governing process of the old authoritarian
regime and the fact that the transition was being led by the regime's civilian leaders
meant that the military did not attempt to impose authoritarian prerogatives
or confining conditions on the constituent assembly.45 The civil war legacy, the
great socioeconomic changes since the 193os, and the fact that the Franco government
had been in power for forty years virtually precluded a restoration.
These factors, together with the constant pressure of the democratic opposition,
led the regime's leaders to adopt the free constitution-making formula . Within
this formula, Spain elected the consensual as opposed to the majoritarian style of
constitution making . The issue of consensus underlying the political process of
the transition and above all the constitution-making process was emphasized by
Suárez in a speech before the Congress of Deputies on April 5,1978 in these terms :
During a constituent process, the Government must limit the reach of its options, maintaining
the level of dissensus at levels which are not substantial, because that is the only way to avoid
what would be the most grave danger to the body politic : the nonexistence of a concord located
in the country at its roots, concerning the basic elements of national coexistence. This transitory
situation, characteristic of all constituent periods, conditions all aspects of political action.
. . . the Constitution, as an expression of national concord, must be obtained by consensus,
for which it is necessary to take into account the diverse political forces now present."46
43. We develop this argument at greater length in Stepan and Linz, "Political Crafting of Democratic Consolidation
or Destruction: European and South American Comparisons," in Robert A. Pastor, ed ., Democracy
in the Americas: Stopping the Pendulum (New York: Holmes and Meier,1989), 42-48; the quote is from p . 43.
44. The seminal work on the sequencing of reform in southern Europe is Maravall, "Economic Reforms
in New Democracies," Given the "simultaneity" problem that all post-Communist polities faced, this sequencing
was (unfortunately) not considered seriously in that region . Even in the South American countries,
the choice, everywhere but Chile, has been to address deep debt-related problems and political problems
simultaneously.
45. On this key point see the excellent dissertation by Rodrigo, "El camino hacia la democracia," 273-77.
46. The distinction between the consensual and the majoritarian styles of democratic policy making is
developed in Arend Lijphart, Democracies. Patterns of Majoritarianism and Consensus in Twenty-one Countries
(New Haven : Yale University Press, 1984),1-36 .
Spain 115
The result of the consensual approach to constitution drafting was that the
constitution was approved in the lower house by 325, with only 6 votes against and
8 abstentions. To get maximum legitimacy for the new constitution, the Spanish
leaders chose to have their collective work submitted to a constitutional referendum
where, as we saw, it obtained about 88 percent approval .47 None of the other
twelve countries we consider in this volume carried out all of these steps . Probably
the most significant consequence of the consensual process is that, ten years
after the death of Franco, 65 percent of those polled felt that the constitution "was
an accord among almost all political parties," whereas only to percent felt it was
"imposition by one party on the other." In answer to the question, "Whose ideas
prevailed in the constitution-`right,"left,"center; `everyone' or `no one in particular'?"
the answer "everyone" was agreed to by 57 percent, whereas the next
highest was the "center" with 7 percent .48 The constitution, therefore, was and is
an element of popular consensus in the new democracy.
We do not want to leave the impression that democratic consolidation in Spain
was overdetermined by our variables . We have acknowledged the delicacy of the
question of stateness, the severity of the military threat to Spanish democracy in
February 1981, and the indispensability of the skill and imagination of party leaders
and the king for success. Nevertheless, in comparative terms, Spain began the transition
with very favorable conditions. This would not have been the case had Spain
begun the transition from a totalitarian, post-totalitarian, or sultanistic base. However,
as we shall see when we examine Portugal, a transition that begins with a coup
by a nonhierarchical military confronts vastly more complicated circumstances,
even though it shares the same typological origin as an authoritarian regime .
At the time of making final revisions to our book, the Spanish government is
in the midst of a serious crisis unrelated to the transition . This crisis is due to revelations
of corruption on the part of the head of the Bank of Spain and the first
civilian and socialist head of the Guardia Civil, tolerance or support for the antiETA
terrorism of the clandestine organization called GAL (Grupos Anti-terroristas
de Liberación), the cover-up of the death of an ETA member at the hands of
the police, and widespread telephone tapping.
A mixture of complexities derived from the constructive vote of no confidence
and the interests of the Catalan party-Convergéncia i Unió-delayed dissolution
and new elections. However, no one questioned the democratic institutions,
and the response was the calling of early elections for March, 1996. In this case, the
quality of democracy does not jeopardize the consolidation of democracy ; in fact,
in this and other cases, one could argue that the relative invulnerability of democratic
institutions to bad government is proof of consolidation .
47. For the votes see Linz, "Innovative Leadership in the Transitions," 185 . On the constitution-making
process see Bonime-Blanc, Spain's Transition to Democracy .
48. "Attitudes y opiniones de los espaňoles ante la constitución," 50-51 .