Spain: A Unique History by Stanley G. Payne Read Free Book Online Page A

this brief book in Spain, encouraged by the reforms of Pío Cabanillas as minister of culture, with Ricardo de la Cierva as Director General de Cultura Popular. I mailed a copy of the manuscript to La Cierva in the winter of 1974, and on the eve of an international conference convened in March of that year by the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, I received a telegram from La Cierva telling me that he considered it "important" to publish the book in Spain. A few days later I carried a copy of the manuscript with me to Madrid and quickly reached a deal with Sebastian Auger to bring it out in Barcelona with the latter's ambitious new publishing firm Editorial Dopesa. 19 It published a Spanish edition within six months, in August, which was crucially important, for Cabanillas was dismissed by Franco little more than a month later, bringing in turn the resignation of La Cierva. 20 Had this taken place only a month earlier, publication of the book would have been prohibited. As it was, a special book fair in Bilbao, in which the book would have been one of those featured, was canceled. Dopesa provided a good advance for the book but submitted statements the next two years indicating that few copies were sold, which seems quite doubtful, according to all reports. Because of the dearth of material on Basque nationalism at that time, this gained for me altogether exaggerated credentials as a Basque specialist, which I really was not. I did no further research in the area after 1972-73, while only a few years later, after the death of Franco, work in that field would expand exponentially.
    The 1960s and 1970s were the only decades in which contemporary Spanish history attracted attention abroad, due to the Civil War legacy and the reputation of Spain as an "exceptional country" under the Franco regime. With modernization and the success of the democratization after Franco, this status disappeared. On the international level, interest in contemporary Spanish history dwindled altogether during the 1980s.
    Conversely, for the first and only time since the Civil War, interest in current Spanish politics grew rapidly during the 1970s, peaking with the years of the democratization but also continuing to some extent into the 1980s, before dropping away with the apparently complete stabilization of the new system. During those years I played an active role in advice and commentary on Spanish politics both on the government and academic levels, for in political science there were very few scholars with any expertise on the country, so that a historian like myself was called on to do double duty as political analyst.
    Interest in and speculation about the country's political future began to build slowly after the official recognition of the succession of Juan Carlos in 1969. The two questions that loomed on the horizon concerned (1) how far the next chief of state would go to encourage the introduction of democracy, and (2) whether Spanish society had been transformed to the extent that such a process could successfully be completed. The experience of the Civil War and the official doctrines of the dictatorship had developed a certain discourse about the country's "familiar demons," according to which Spaniards were culturally and psychologically unsuited for democracy. Certainly all earlier parliamentary systems had failed sooner or later, and in all but one case (the Restoration regime) sooner rather than later. Nonetheless, when I completed my treatment of broader peninsular history for the two-volume work in 1970, I pointed out the achievements of parliamentary governments in Spain's past, which seemed to suggest that a more developed society might be able to cope with democracy and also concluded that something so anachronistic as the dictatorship, even if extensively reformed, might not be able to survive very much longer. The problem was not so much that parliamentary government could not function in Spain but that the chief political