Morning. Thanks very much for that kind introduction.
And let me first of all thank the organisers for having invited me and let me congratulations for having convened this extremely interesting seminar.
When I first received the invitation, of course, I it was something I just had to accept.
How often do you receive an invitation from an organisation whose acronym spells the word pomp?
Well, that's certainly foolish courage, I think accounts for that.
I also accepted out of nostalgia my first set foot in these grounds in March of 1981.
And of course, everything brings me back to that transition time and time again, because although I was I was an undergraduate then,
the reason for my first visit was that Philippe Gonzalez had been invited to speak here by Sir Raymond Carver.
And this was only a few weeks after that terrible episode, the failed coup, that some of you will recall on the 23rd of February 1991.
And I have never forgotten how pale and worried if anything of that is still not three weeks after the event.
I have been I've been learning a great deal in the last day and a half or rather evening until the morning.
And I am very pleased to have come because as a result of the Arab Spring,
I've been rethinking and rereading about trends, ontology and its strengths and weaknesses.
And I've been daring enough, mad enough to lecture in Tunisia and Egypt, not very successfully in Egypt, as you can see from the results,
trying to advise the governments, the successive governments there on how to deal with their transition issues.
So very quickly, I'm going to start by looking at the so-called Spanish model and I will criticise the trends of talk
to the literature about the Spanish model because I think that's something that's that needs doing.
And I will have a first look at the negotiations themselves and try to tease out
the differences in the similarities that exist with the Spanish experience.
And finally, I will look at some of the criticism that is currently levelled at the transition in Spain,
both from the from the academic world and also from the society more broadly.
As you all know, Spain is experiencing a very difficult economic crisis,
which is resulting also in serious political difficulties, having major political consequences.
And some observers would argue that, in fact, the whole transition settlement is currently in danger of unravelling altogether.
So let me start by saying that, as you all know,
the Spanish transition was one of the first in the so-called third wave of transitions, as Samuel Huntington just called them.
And this therefore, means that by 1989, it was very well known.
And polls have yet to make a mistake.
And others have specifically said that they they are on record saying that the Spanish experience influence them,
that they had visited Spain, they had talked to Spanish leaders to see how they had done it.
So I think the Spanish model can be said that the Spanish model was very much on their minds.
Now, as you know, of the Spanish transition, partly because it was one of the first only Portugal and Greece preceded,
it has become to some extent the quintessential negotiated package of transition.
Scott and Mainwaring have declared it to be the most successful transition by transaction,
and Gunther and Higley have called it the very model of the modern elite settlements.
That's quite a big thing to live up to.
And it's understandable, of course, that the Spanish experience should have attracted so much attention and interest,
both among academics and practitioners, particularly, of course, given Spain's very turbulent political history,
not only the 20th century with a civil war and 40 years of authoritarian rule under Franco and also the 19th century,
I think most Spanish prime ministers were murdered in between 1918 70,
1934, and in any other Western European country, in fact, possibly any other European country, including Central Eastern Europe.
I have never had a problem with this transition as a transaction narrative in the
sense that I think that it portrays an overly simplistic picture which is distorting,
which has distorted our understanding of the process and continues to cast a slightly ambiguous shadow today.
First of all, because of this emphasis on pacts and negotiated agreements between elites has shifted our attention away
from the very spectacular socio economic transformation of Spain experienced prior to democratisation.
In fact,
I've lectured in Central and Eastern European countries where there was kind of confusion about this and extrapolating from their own experiences.
Audiences there seem to believe that serious economic growth.
Only took place after democratisation with Spain's accession to the EEC in 1986.
In fact, the most important social and economic transformations took place under the Franco regime in the 1960s and early seventies,
and as a result of those. Spain was already a relatively prosperous, free market economy with a relatively large, stable middle class.
By the time of his death in 1975.
Secondly, this emphasis on elites and the role of parents runs the danger of leaving the social movements out of the equation.
And in fact, I think academics could explore far more than they have done the nature of the precise relationship
between those political elites that carried out those parents and expand their social base.
In other words, what I'm suggesting is that this intuition has tended to underestimate the pressure from below,
which very often led to those negotiations in the first place.
Thirdly, this emphasis,
emphasis on elite pacts also draws attention away from the highly favourable European context in which the Spanish transition took place.
In other words, the promise of European Community membership and more generally a favourable
international dimension have played a role which which this narrative often,
often misses or underplays very significantly.
And finally, this kind of narrative can also lead us to underestimate some of the dangers and the pitfalls that existed on the road to democracy.
For example, the Spanish transition is almost invariably described as peaceful.
You will always see this adjective in standard accounts of the process.
But in fact, about 360 people were killed in acts of political violence between 1975 and 1980.
And I'm not just talking about terrorist acts. I'm actually talking about clashes with police demonstrations, strikes, marches and so on.
So, in fact, the Spanish transition was actually probably more violent than the Polish one and many others, in fact.
And this is important because it was partly the fear of social confrontation, which actually explains why those negotiations took place.
If the Spanish transition had a slogan, it was probably never again, never again.
A civil war, never again, a French recital, a struggle among Spaniards.
So if we take the violence out of the equation again, again, it's it doesn't really help us to understand how the process took place.
Let me say a little more before I move on to the negotiations themselves about
things that I think are important to keep in mind when we look at this process.
First of all, regarding the nature of the Franco regime, regarding regime society relations,
regarding the role of the state and regarding the role of the armed forces.
All of these issues have been raised in the course of the sessions yesterday and today.
But I would like to mention a few specific aspects. First of all, someone mentioned yesterday Juan Vince's famous definition of authority and regime.
Let me pay tribute, by the way, to the final is a great, great friend and colleague of mine who died on the 3rd of October last year.
As you probably know, Juan described the Franco regime as the quintessential authoritarian regime.
And this has important consequences for the way in which these negotiations took place.
First of all, the Franco is famous to some extent what Richard Johnson has described as a no party state.
The single party existed and was influential in the thirties and forties, but was an empty shell by the time of Franco's death in 1975.
This therefore meant that the party wasn't represented in these negotiations.
It didn't need to be because it wasn't a significant pact. Secondly, once this idea of limited pluralism,
there had been a lively debate within the Franco regime raging for at least a decade concerning what needed to be
done after Franco's death and how Franco recipients needed to prepare for the consequences of Franco's death.
Thirdly, authoritarian regimes very often develop what Lince and others have described as as institutional facades.
In other words, in order to legitimise themselves, they create laws, procedures,
sometimes even parliaments, which are there basically as self legitimising instruments.
And these are generations of is often very curiously legalistic.
And as a result of all of that, ample use was made of these legal procedures, laws and institutions in dismantling that same of our generation.
A very important fact often missed in comparative studies is that by 75, the final regime was a civilian led for a generation.
It was not a military dictatorship. Me too.
Popular perception sometimes.
And this explains why the army paid played no role whatsoever in the negotiations themselves for an effective in the transition process overall.
Ironically, one could argue, in fact,
that the Polish armed forces were a much more significant actor in the Polish transition than their Spanish counterparts.
Of course, one would have to factor in a key point Carter's role as commander in chief of the Armed Forces.
I wrote a biography of the King a few days ago, so I don't want to underestimate his role.
But having said that, it's interesting how the Army was really almost entirely excluded from the process.
Another important point often overlooked is that people forage in regimes which is
empirically and conceptually impossible to distinguish between state and regime.
And the point I want to stress here is that by the time of his death in 1975, the Spanish state had largely drifted apart from the regime.
It was manned by a marriage of principally recruited civil servants who were either apolitical or even in fact,
anti Franco, as probably many of them in their political leanings.
So this became a force for stability and continuity, finally, as a result of the peculiar nature of this authoritarian regime.
And this is true of Poland as well, and of Hungary as well, and of South Africa.
In fact, as we've heard earlier, political science society had re-emerged by the time effective stuff in 1975.
In other words, although political parties were still legal or illegal, as lenses also call them.
They were largely tolerated. Citizens well read citizens or well-informed citizens knew who the party leaders were.
They more or less knew what their political programs stood for, etc.
In other words, these interlocutors were already in place by the time of his death.
I would say much more about the opposition, other than the fact that it was a combination of new of the new and the old.
Thus the Socialist Party slogan captured that rather well.
We have a party or an old and new party that was over 100 years old.
But the leader was 32. Gonzalez and he'd only joined in the late sixties himself.
Let me now turn turn to the negotiations themselves.
And again, I'll try to tease out these some similarities and differences.
The first obvious point to make, which I think hasn't perhaps been stressed sufficiently so far,
is that negotiations only happen when there is a stalemate or perhaps cognitive mechanism.
But this is a very important, obvious but very important point to make.
The balance of power between the negotiators is can shift over time in the course of negotiations.
But this is a fundamental starting point. Of course, the dynamic in Spain was peculiar for several reasons.
First of all, the opposition was largely excluded from the early stages of the transition.
It was the king and his chosen Prime Minister, Adolfo Persuaded,
who basically initiated the transition by succeeding in getting the Francoist Assembly,
the Franco as Parliament or courts to effectively vote itself out of class of existence and pave the way for democratic elections.
Very importantly, Suarez puts this decision to a referendum which he won handsomely.
And so this may not have been a may not be the greatest factor,
but he was a wonderful tactician and therefore he didn't actually start negotiations with the opposition until after the referendum,
because of course this meant that he was the only person who had any kind of popular mandate, which the opposition didn't have.
So this, I think, is very peculiar and specific to the Spanish context.
Why did they negotiate?
In a nutshell I think the king and and so I congratulated because they needed free elections and a democratic constitution to legitimise the monarchy.
That is that was the essential reason. In addition to that, of course, they had to diffuse social tension.
There was very significant intensive and extensive a popular mobilisation in the early seventies and throughout the transitional period until 79,
80, basically. And we also had the economic fact true of South Africa, Poland and Hungary, as we've heard.
In this case, it was a different economic crisis. In the Spanish case, it was still the impact of the 1974 oil crisis,
which Spain was really only beginning to suffer in 1970 677, in the wake of Franco's death.
Finally, the European dimension, again, absolutely crucial of the kingdom's fight,
as needed to convince the European Community and its major European partners, but also of Germany, Britain and France.
What is wrote in this case that they were genuinely preparing Spain for U.S. membership.
So those were the good old days with democratic conditionality still work in Europe.
One thing that I find very striking is given the reputation, if you like,
of the fame that the Spanish model has achieved is that there was no roundtable moment.
Spaniards do not commemorate any particular negotiating episode,
and that's basically because of the sequence with which in which this process took place.
Very, very briefly, I tend to bore you with the domestic details.
The negotiations took place in three separate stages, which I have called pre-election stage, pre constituent stage and constituent stage proper.
So basically what happened was that in the pre-election stage, there were formal talks between Prime Minister Suarez and the Democratic opposition.
A nine member opposition committee was created for this purpose and this nine member committee represented the entire Democratic spectrum liberals,
Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Socialists, Communists, and this being Spain, Basques, Catalans and Ulysses.
Okay, so the territorial plus the ideological cleavage was represented.
Interestingly, the trade unions were invited to join this committee, and they declined.
And the reason why they explained was,
I think because they felt sufficiently well represented by the socialist and the communist parties in particular.
So this very close relationship between those two parties and their sister unions is a very important aspect of this process.
What did they negotiate?
Basically, the conditions that the government had to meet in order for the opposition to take part in the first democratic elections.
So again, the dynamic is slightly different to the first case.
The demand was the Spanish government, which was trying to encourage the opposition to take part,
and it was the opposition that was playing hard to get. And basically those conditions included the legalisation of all parties and unions.
The crux here, of course, was the legalisation of the Spanish Communist Party, which the Spanish right,
the armed forces and others weren't particularly looking forward to respect for freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, etc.
The negotiation of an electoral law. This is a very important part of the that the process, of course, the rules of the electoral game and by the way,
the 77 electoral law is basically the one that still exists today.
And finally and this is really the only aspect that wasn't met, the recognition of Spain's territorial pluralism in Spain,
it's very cleverly argued that he hadn't been democratically elected,
nor had the opposition representatives,
and therefore it would be presumptuous of them to prejudge the outcome of the subsequent constituent process in such a crucial structural matter,
such as the territorial issue. These talks, therefore, which took place between approximately January and April 77,
resulted in an informal agreement which translated into specific acts of legislation
as a result of which the first elections were held on the 15th of June 1977.
Again, the difference with the Polish case is clear these were totally free elections to a democratically elected parliament without any constraints.
Unlike those that existed in the 1890 elections in Poland, second stage took place in the summer and early autumn of 1977.
The nature of the negotiation process changed because elections have taken place.
So basically this was a multi-party negotiation.
No longer just the government and the democratic opposition, but a negotiation.
Involving all parties that have been elected to the new parliament.
And these talks produced two very important pieces of legislation.
The most famous are the so-called Montreal Pacts, which I'm sure many of you have heard about.
And they involved basically two things. First of all, very important structural economic reforms and the introduction of direct taxation.
So I regard this basically as the birth of the modern Spanish welfare state.
And additionally, a whole battery of legal modifications, legal measures,
which basically aimed to bridge the existing legislation with that that would be approved once the Constitution was in place.
The other item, much more controversial item, was the amnesty law, also passed in October 1977.
And here what we have basically is amnesty in return for impunity.
In other words, to all those who were in prison at the time for having opposed the French regime, including through the use of force.
So this benefited terrorists such as members of the Basque terrorist organisation ETA were freed and in return for that,
civil servants or people in the service of the Franco regime who might have committed acts of might,
had committed crimes against humanity and so on, were retroactively amnesty as well.
In other words, as a result of this, there were no trials,
no truth and reconciliation commissions, no formal attributions of blame, no apologies and so on.
Let me stress that it was the left that advocated this amnesty law most strongly.
This is an important point to keep in mind. It was not the right that was seeking this concession.
It was the left that insisted on this legislation.
And secondly, I would also argue that there was no popular appetite for anything more ambitious, at least not at the time.
Two key differences come to mind. All three key differences when comparing the Spanish in the first case.
First of all, the pacts greatly strengthen political parties.
The protagonists of these pacts of all political parties, there's no Nelson Mandela.
There's no violence against the Filipinos.
And this was involved. But he didn't play a particularly important role.
So it's basically the parties that are the protagonists of this process.
Secondly, surprising in a Catholic country, the church was totally absent, probably because of its own internal divisions.
The church was so divided internally that if it had taken part by supporting the process actively,
it would have undermined its internal cohesion even further.
Thirdly, if there was no intelligence about the role played by the intelligentsia in Parliament was missing.
But interestingly, the media played a crucial role. And in fact, one particular outlet, the newspaper El Pais, which was born in 1976,
which its first editor convinced Obiang, called some pompously the collective intellectual.
But it played a very important role. It was really this was really the newspaper that explained the peace processes to public opinion.
Let me turn now to the. The criticism of his negotiated peace negotiations and of negotiated transitions generally.
As in the case of Spain, Spain's elite settlement has come under very heavy fire, some of it contemporary, some of it more recent.
And as was discussed yesterday, I think there's been more political revision and revisionism than historiographical.
And of course, it's fuelled by the current political and economic crisis.
Part of this crisis criticism, I think, falls under the heading of what Sir Timothy described as the price of velvet yesterday.
In other words, the idea that Spanish democracy was contaminated at best by its excessive continuity with the past.
The head of state today is the same head of state as existed in the months after his death.
Much of the political elite, which governed between 1977 and 1982 and held important political jobs of the Franco regime and so on.
Poles are very familiar with this kind of discourse, as in Poland.
People, particularly on the left, some people on the left have criticised the Opposition for being too accommodating.
They've argued that the regime was much weaker than it seemed at the time and that opposition leaders, communists and socialists effectively sold out.
So the idea of a betrayal is also present, not the idea of conspiracy, but certainly the idea of a betrayal.
And this has led to a rather sterile academic and political debate as to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the regime and the opposition.
And here, this idea of illusions, of retrospective determinism, I think is particularly relevant from a more slightly more sophisticated perspective.
Some have argued that negotiations necessarily required demobilisation.
And the criticism here is that political parties intentionally demobilised social
movements in such a way that was weakened civil society in Spain permanently.
I have always found this rather difficult to swallow, not least because surely civil society, because there isn't an original sin here.
Civil society should have been able to recover from that if that would be the case.
And secondly, I don't like the idea of political elites turning civil society on and off as if it were a switch.
I think it's a little bit more complex than that.
It's true that Spanish civil society is weak and has been weak throughout the last 40 years since Franco died.
But I think the causes for that are much more complex than causes that we can relate directly to the nature of the transition.
The most sophisticated academic critique of these kinds of transitions has been
put forward by a number of Latin American transit geologists who have argued,
to put it very succinctly, that picture transitions or negotiated transitions result in frozen democracies.
The phrase for this is Spanish rhymes. So I will tend to, which is transition back to the democracy.
Okay. That's rather neat before the equation.
So the idea is that the pacts necessarily lead to low quality democracies, basically due to the undemocratic nature of those pacts themselves.
In other words, the idea that these transitions brought in democracy for the people but without the people.
Personally, I really don't see any evidence of this in the Spanish case, given the enormous transformations that are taking place in Spain,
including not least, the most radical process of political decentralisation witnessed anywhere in Europe since World War two.
I would go slightly further than that, though,
and argue that it's probably unhelpful to divide transitions into protected versus unprotected or negotiated versus non negotiated.
I think this dichotomy is too simplistic, not least by the way, because there is always an element of fact,
even in those transitions where the policy of regime comes to an end more abruptly.
And I'm thinking of Greece and Portugal, for example.
But my main objection is that the long term characteristics of new democratic regimes will depend on a very broad array of factors,
very few of which can be related back to the nature of the transition process itself.
I think that this idea that the way in which the transition took place permanently determines the nature of a democracy is again, not very convincing.
More specifically in the Spanish case,
what happened is that a democracy which was established by consensual means has not resulted in a consensual democracy, which is a majority policy.
Okay. So Spain's pact in transition, ironically, has actually resulted in one of the most majoritarian democracies in Europe.
Spain has never had a coalition government.
All of Spain's governments since 77 have been single party governments.
Spain has one of the most impressive records of Cabinet Cabinet stability in the world,
and it has a very low effective number of parliamentary parties.
2.8. All of these are things that you would that you associate with majoritarian democracies, not with consensual or associational ones.
The one area where I perhaps would accept this this frozen democracy thesis is with regard to the handling of the past, the historical memory issue.
And this, as you probably know, is one of the most hotly contested aspects and criticise aspects of the transition settlement.
Spain had no transitional justice, as I explained, as a result of the 1977 amnesty law.
And there is now a very lively debate within Spanish academia and within Spanish
society as a whole as to whether Spain will have a post transitional justice.
By the way, I'd like to strongly recommend a book by a young American academic called Burma International called Democracies Without Justice.
The Politics of Forgetting in Spain. And interestingly, he actually defends the Spanish model, the forgetting model.
As you may know, in fact, last week I saw Pablo de Graaf, who is the UN rapporteur for the Human Rights Committee,
and he has publicly advocated that Spain should repeal the 1977 amnesty law,
which is not going to happen quite simply because there is no social consensus in Spain concerning these matters for several reasons.
First of all, I think there are a lot of difficulties concerning this whole debate and spent the first,
of course, is that most of the repression that we're talking about took place in the 1930s and the 1940s.
And secondly, there is no social consensus in Spain regarding the rights and wrongs of the Second Republic,
the Civil War, and being Franco coup of 1936.
This doesn't mean that significant sectors of Spanish society near Franco is on the contrary.
I think only four or 5% of the population would describe themselves in this way.
But many Spaniards do believe that given the direction the republic was taking, the coup was inevitable or to some extent justifiable.
And finally, of course, this whole issue has been compounded by the impact of ETA terrorism.
The 800 people ETA has assassinated since 1960 until the year 2011,
because many of the policemen involved in the worst atrocities were, in fact, involved in anti-terrorist activity.
My personal view is that there will never be a Truth and Reconciliation Committee commission.
I don't think it would help at this stage. I don't accept the claim that it has been impossible to do research in Spain into the past,
and I think that's an insult to the Spanish historical academic community.
I think there is there is very considerable knowledge of the nature and the magnitude of
the repression that took place both during the Civil War and during the post-war period.
But I think a great deal can be done and should be done with regards to reparation of victims.
According to some estimates, there are about 100,000 unmarked graves in Spain.
So the exhumation of these victims should be a top priority.
In 2006, the Zapatero government passed a historical memory law without the support of the conservative opposition,
as it then was, and sadly, as a result of the lack of a fundamental consensus, this law has not been fully implemented.
But just to end on an optimistic note, last week the Spanish government decided to award Spanish nationality to Sephardic Jews,
people of Sephardic Jewish origin who simply need to demonstrate that they have some association with Spain going back five, four years.
If you are able to do this, which is actually quite easy, you are automatically awarded Spanish nationality.
According to some estimates, as many as 300,000 Israelis are planning to do this.
So my take is the Spanish society can do this.
Surely it can develop some kind of reparations policy. Thanks very much.