Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (105 page)

The Moncloa Pacts and their successors (the last accord was signed in 1984) worked no miracles. Thanks in part to the second oil shock, the country’s balance of payments crisis steadily worsened; many smaller firms folded, and unemployment and inflation rose in tandem, provoking a wave of strikes as well as bitter schisms within the left-wing unions and the Communist Party, reluctant to continue sharing responsibility for the social costs of democratic transition. But without the Pacts these divisions, and their social consequences, would almost certainly have been more severe still.

In the elections of October 1982, at the height of the economic difficulties, the Socialist Party won an absolute majority in the parliament and Felipe González took over as Prime Minister, a post he would hold for the next fourteen years. Suárez’s Center Democrats—who had led the transition out of Francoism—were all but eliminated from parliament, winning just two seats. The Communist Party won four, a humiliating defeat that provoked the resignation of Santiago Carrillo. Henceforth Spanish politics were to follow the pattern of the rest of western Europe, regrouping around a center-Left and a center-Right, in this case Fraga’s PopularAlliance (renamed the People’s Party in 1989) which won a surprising 26.5 percent of the vote.

The Socialist Party had campaigned on a populist and anti-capitalist program, promising among other things to preserve workers’ jobs and spending power and get Spain out of NATO. Once in power, however, González maintained policies of economic austerity, began the modernization (and later the progressive privatization) of Spanish industry and services, and in 1986 defeated many of his own supporters in a referendum on the question of NATO membership, which he now favored.
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These reversals of direction did not endear González to old-line Socialists, whose Party he was now leading away from its longstanding Marxist commitment.
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But for a politician whose core support came increasingly from men and women too young to remember the Civil War, and whose openly-avowed goal was to overcome Spain’s backwardness—the much-debated
atraso
or ‘lag’ that had afflicted the Peninsula since the end of the Golden Age—the old ideological Left was part of the problem, not the solution. In González’s estimation, Spain’s future lay not in socialism but in Europe. On January 1st 1986 Spain, accompanied by Portugal, took up full membership of the European Community.

The democratic transition of Mediterranean Europe was quite the most remarkable and unexpected development of the age. By the early eighties, Spain, Portugal and Greece had not merely undergone peaceful conversion to parliamentary democracy: in all three countries the local Socialist Party—clandestine and ostentatiously anti-capitalist just a few years earlier—was now the dominant political force, governing in effect from the center. The regimes of Salazar and Franco disappeared not just from office but from memory, as a new generation of politicians competed for the allegiance of a youthful, ‘modern’ electorate.

There were several reasons for this. One, already noted, was that in Spain in particular it was the political state, not society at large, which had fallen so very far behind. The economic development of Franco’s last decade, and the large-scale social and geographical mobility that it brought about, meant that daily life and expectations in Spain had changed far more than outside observers supposed, who still looked at the country through the prism of the years 1936-56. Young people in Mediterranean Europe did not find it difficult to adapt to social routines long familiar further north; indeed, they were already doing so before the political revolutions. Impatient to be released from the constrictions of another age, they were distinctly skeptical of the political rhetoric of Right or Left and unmoved by old loyalties. Visitors to Lisbon or Madrid in the post-transition years were consistently taken aback at the absence of any reference to the recent past, whether in politics or culture.
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The coming irrelevance of the 1930s was presciently captured in
La Guerre Est Finie
(The War Is Over
)
, Alain Resnais’s sad, elegiac film of 1966 in which the émigré Spanish Communist Diego—portrayed by the incomparable Yves Montand—travels clandestinely from Paris to Madrid, courageously conveying subversive literature and plans for a ‘workers’ uprising’ that he knows will never happen. ‘Don’t you understand?’ he tries to tell his Paris-based Party controllers, who dream of a revival of the hopes of 1936. ‘Spain has become the lyrical rallying point of the Left, a myth for veterans of past wars. Meanwhile 14 million tourists vacation in Spain every year. The reality of the world resists us.’ It is not by chance that the screenplay for the film was the work of Jorge Semprun, for many decades a clandestine Spanish Communist operative himself before quitting the Party in dismay at its blinkered nostalgia.

By the early Eighties the reluctance of young Spaniards in particular to dwell on the recent past was unmistakable, notably in the ostentatious rejection of old codes of public behavior: in language, in clothing, and above all in sexual
mores
. The popular films of Pedro Almodóvar offer a sort of self-conscious inversion of fifty years of fusty authoritarian rule, a potted exercise in the new counter-cultural conventions. Directed with a cunning, existentialist wink at their subject matter, they typically depict bewildered young women in sexually charged circumstances. In
Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón
(
Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap,
1980), produced just three years after the country’s first free elections, the characters laugh knowingly about ‘general erections’ and the ‘war of eroticism that is engulfing us’.

Two years later, in
Laberinto de pasiones
(‘Labyrinth of Passion’), camp terrorists and nymphomaniacs exchange scatological banter, debating at one point whether their ‘gay little affairs’ should come before or after ‘a nation’s future.’ With each film the settings become glossier, the urban locations ever more chic. By 1988, with
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios
(
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
), Almodóvar had achieved a convincing cinematic encapsulation of a hectic and self-consciously
modern
society desperately making up for lost time.
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It is all the more ironic that these changes were made possible not by cultural or political radicals and innovators but by conservative statesmen from the old regime itself. Constantine Karamanlis, António de Spínola and Adolfo Suárez—like Mikhail Gorbachev a few years later—were all characteristic products of the system they helped dismantle. Karamanlis, it is true, had been in exile during the colonels’ rule; but he was as irreproachably nationalist and narrow-minded as anyone and, furthermore, he bore direct responsibility for the tainted Greek elections of 1961 that played so central a role in discrediting the post-war system and bringing the army to power.

But it was the very reassurance that such men held out to their own constituency that allowed them to dismantle the authoritarian institutions they had once loyally served. And they, in turn, were succeeded by Socialists—Soáres, González, Papandreou—who convincingly reassured their own supporters of their unbroken radical credentials while implementing moderate and often unpopular economic policies forced upon them by circumstances. The transition, in the words of one eminent Spanish commentator, ‘required Francoists to pretend they had never been Francoists, and left-wing compromisers to pretend they were still committed to leftist principles’.
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The circumstances of the time thus obliged many to abjure virtually overnight long-held positions of principle. The familiar odour of judiciously broken promises and conveniently misplaced memories hung heavy over Mediterranean public life in these years and must go some way to explain the skeptical, apolitical mood of a new generation in all three countries. But those who clung faithfully and unrepentantly to past commitments, from Communists to Falangists, were rapidly overtaken by events. Constancy was no substitute for relevance.

Finally, Spain, Portugal and Greece were able to enter or re-enter the ‘West’ with such little difficulty, despite their self-imposed political isolation, because their foreign policies had always been compatible—indeed, aligned—with those of NATO or the EEC states. The institutions of the Cold War, not to speak of a common anti-Communism, had facilitated growing communication and collaboration between pluralist democracies and military or clericalist dictatorships. After many years spent meeting, negotiating, planning or just doing business with their unelected counterparts, North Americans and West Europeans had long ceased to take active offence at domestic arrangements in Madrid or Athens or Lisbon.

To most onlookers—including many of their local critics—the unpleasant regimes of southern Europe were thus not so much morally bankrupt as institutionally anachronistic. And, of course, their economies were in essential respects similar to those of other Western nations and already well integrated into international markets for money, goods and labour. Even Salazar’s Portugal was recognizably a part of the international system of capitalism—albeit on the wrong end of it. The emerging middle class, in Spain especially, modeled its ambitions no less than its dress upon managers, businessmen, engineers, politicians and civil servants from France or Italy or Britain. For all their backwardness, the societies of Mediterranean Europe already belonged in a world they now aspired to join on equal terms, and the transition out of authoritarian rule was above all facilitated by the opportunity afforded them to do so. Their élites, who had once faced resolutely backward, now looked north. Geography, it appeared, had triumphed over history.

Between 1973 and 1986 the European Community passed through one of its periodic bursts of activism and expansion, what one historian has called its ‘sequence of irregular big bangs.’ French President Georges Pompidou, released by De Gaulle’s death from the mortgage of his patron’s disapproval—and more than a little perturbed, as we have seen, by the strategic implications of Willy Brandt’s new
Ostpolitik
—made it clear that he would welcome Great Britain’s membership of the EC. In January 1972, in Brussels, the EC formally approved the accession of Britain, Ireland, Denmark and Norway, to take effect a year later.

The successful British application was the work of the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath, the only British political leader since World War Two unambiguously and enthusiastically in favor of joining his nation’s fate to that of its continental neighbors. When the Labour Party returned to office in 1974 and called a referendum on UK membership of the Community, the country approved by 17,300,000 to 8,400,000. But even Heath could not make the British—the English especially—‘feel’ European, and a significant share of voters on Right and Left alike continued to doubt the benefits of being ‘in Europe’. The Norwegians, meanwhile, were quite distinctly of the view that they were better off outside: in a referendum in September 1972, 54 percent of the country rejected EC membership and opted instead for a limited free-trade agreement with the Community, a decision reconfirmed in an almost identical vote twenty two years later.
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British membership of the Community would prove controversial in later years, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opposed the emerging projects for ever-closer union and demanded that Britain be refunded her ‘overpayments’ to the common budget. But in the Seventies London had problems of its own and, despite the price-inflationary impact of membership, was relieved to be part of a trading area that now supplied one third of Britain’s inward investment. The first direct elections to a new European Parliament were held in 1979—until then, members of the European Assembly sitting in Strasbourg had been selected by the respective national legislatures—but aroused little popular interest. In the UK the turnout was predictably low, just 31.6 percent; but then it was not especially high elsewhere—in France only three out of five electors bothered to vote, in the Netherlands even fewer.

The adhesion of three ‘northern tier’ countries to the EC was relatively unproblematic for newcomers and old members alike. Ireland was poor but tiny, while Denmark and the UK were wealthy and thus net contributors to the common budget. Like the next round of prosperous additions, in 1995, when Austria, Sweden and Finland joined what was by then the European Union, the new participants added to the coffers and clout of the expanding community without significantly increasing its costs, or competing in sensitive areas with existing members. The newcomers from the South were a different matter.

Greece, like Ireland, was small and poor and its agriculture posed no threat to French farmers. Thus despite certain institutional impediments—the Orthodox Church had official and influential standing and civil marriage, to take one example, was not permitted until 1992—there were no powerful arguments against its admission, which was championed by French President Giscard d’Estaing among others. But when it came to Portugal and (above all) Spain, the French put up strong opposition. Wine, olive oil, fruit and other farm products cost far less to grow and market south of the Pyrenees; were Spain and Portugal to be admitted to the common European market on equal terms, the Iberian farmers would offer French producers stiff competition.

Thus it took nine years for Portugal and Spain to gain entry to the EC (whereas Greece’s application went through in less than six), during which time the public image of France, traditionally positive in the Iberian peninsula, fell steeply: by 1983, two-thirds of the way through an acrimonious series of negotiations, only 39 percent of Spaniards had a ‘favorable’ view of France—an inauspicious beginning to their common future. Part of the problem was that the arrival of the Mediterranean nations entailed more than simply compensating Paris with a further increase in the Community’s support payments to French farmers; between them Spain, Portugal and Greece brought an additional 58 million people into the Community, most of them poor and thus eligible for a variety of Brussels-funded programs and subsidies.
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