Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

In many ways this was the best possible outcome: Suárez’s victory reassured conservatives (most of whom had voted for him) that there would be no sharp lurch to the Left, while the absence of a clear majority obliged him to work with Left-wing deputies who thus shared responsibility for the new Constitution that the new Assembly was to draft. This Constitution (duly confirmed in a second referendum in December 1978) was in most respects quite conventional. Spain was to be a parliamentary monarchy; there was to be no official religion (though in a calculated concession to the Church, Catholicism was recognized as a ‘social fact’); the voting age was reduced to eighteen; and the death penalty was abolished. But in a major break with the recent past, the Assembly wrote into Spain’s new laws a right of autonomy for the country’s historic regions, notably Catalonia and the Basque country. Article Two of the Constitution affirmed ‘the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation, common and indivisible patria of all Spaniards’, but went on to ‘recognize and guarantee the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions that compose it and the solidarity among them all.’ The subsequent Statutes of Autonomy acknowledged the ancient fact of linguistic variety and regional sentiment within Spain’s hitherto ultra-centralized state; they also recognized the disproportionate demographic significance of Catalonia in particular, and the depth of autonomist sentiment in the Basque country a...