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But the very emphasis
that Communist leaders had placed upon ‘Helsinki’ as the source of their regimes’ international legitimacy would now come to haunt them: by invoking Moscow’s own recent commitments, critics (at home and abroad) could now bring public pressure to bear on the Soviet regimes. Against this sort of opposition, violent repression was not just ineffective but, to the extent that it was public knowledge, self-defeating. Hoist by the petard of their own cynicism, Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues had inadvertently opened a breach in their own defenses. Against all expectation, it was to prove mortal.
the Communist KKE terrorized villages under its control, leaving a legacy of fear and associating the radical Left in many Greek memories with repression and atrocity. After the Communists abandoned the struggle, in October 1949, it was the Left’s turn to suffer sustained repression.
Instead it undercut for a generation the domestic credibility of Greek Communism, by suggesting that a Communist victory would result in autonomy for the Macedonian north, with its Slav and Albanian minorities, and thence to the break up of the Greek state. If this mattered so much, it was because Greek nationalism was peculiarly insecure, even by regional standards. Permanently on the qui vive for conflict with their former imperial masters in Turkey, in a state of war with Albania since 1940 (a circumstance left un-remedied until 1985), and unwilling to concede even the fact of a large Slav
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or post-war reconciliation. Conflating old Greek concerns with new international divisions the Greek king, his army and his ministers presented themselves to the West as the most reliable allies in an unstable region.
Indeed—and much like the traditional Spanish officer corps in this respect—Greek officers saw themselves, rather than the ephemeral constitutional documents they were sworn to defend, as the guardians of the nation and its integrity.
Proferring just this excuse—the ‘Communist threat’ insistently invoked in Greece since 1949—and pointing to the undoubted inadequacies of Greece’s democratic institutions and the incompetence of its political class, a group of officers working inside the army’s long-established right-wing networks seized power on April 21st.
But the autarkic instincts of the colonels favored a return to old-established national habits of import-substitution—inefficient local manufacturers producing low-quality products and protected against foreign competition. This was bound eventually to bring the military regime into conflict with the country’s urban middle class, whose interests as consumers and producers alike would within a few years triumph over their relief at the dismissal of the
bickering politicians. And the colonels, mediocre even by the undemanding standards of their kind, had nothing to offer for the future: no project for Greek integration into the emerging and expanding European Community, no strategy for a return to civilian rule.5
More brazenly than most, the colonels’ regime rested on force alone. It was thus altogether appropriate that the dictatorship should fall in the course of an incompetent attempt to apply force beyond its frontiers, to resolve the long-running problem of Cyprus.
Thus in 1973, when students in Athens (first at the Law School, later at the Polytechnic) embarrassed the colonels by publicly opposing their rule for the first time,
the military’s response was to divert attention and seek to shore up public support by re-asserting the Greek claim to Cyprus. General Ioannides, a ‘hard-liner’ who displaced Papadopoulos as junta leader following the Polytechnic demonstrations, plotted with George Grivas and other Greek-Cypriot nationalists to overthrow Makarios and ‘re-unite’ the island with Greece.
Unable either to prevent or respond to this move by vastly superior Turkish forces, the junta appeared helpless: ordering full mobilization one day, canceling it the next. Faced with widespread public anger at this national humiliation, the Greek dictators themselves turned to the ageing Karamanlis and invited him to return home from his exile in Paris. By July 24th the former Prime Minister was back in Athens and had initiated the country’s return to civilian rule.
The smoothness of Greece’s return to democracy was due in part to Karamanlis’s skill in breaking with his own past, while at the same time conveying an image of seasoned competence and continuity.
Meanwhile Greek politicians were thereby relieved of responsibility for the island’s affairs (though they remained constrained by domestic politics to express a continued interest in its fate) and could turn to more promising horizons.
Salazar, an economist who had for some years lectured at the University of Coimbra, was not only unperturbed at Portugal’s backwardness, but saw it instead as the key to stability—upon
With no local capital available to finance domestic industry and foreign investors distinctly unwelcome, Portugal was largely dependent upon the export or re-export of primary commodities, including its own people.
material inequality and exploitation for profit were more marked in Portugal than anywhere else in Europe, while the authoritarian state in Lisbon smothered all independent opinion and initiative.
Reform-minded junior officers in the army or navy might chafe at the stagnation around them, but they lacked allies or any popular base. All that changed in 1961, when Delhi forcibly annexed Portugal’s mainland Indian territory of Goa and armed revolt broke out in the African colony of Angola. The loss of Goa was a national humiliation, but rebellion in Africa was more serious still.
To secure his own power and distract attention from the country’s overseas woes, Marcello Caetano—Salazar’s anointed successor—had eased credit restrictions, borrowed heavily from abroad and encouraged the flow of imports. In the years 1970–73, further fuelled by remittances from Portuguese working abroad, the country underwent a brief consumer boom. But it was followed in short order by spiraling inflation brought on by the oil crisis. Wages in the public sector began to fall far behind prices. For the first time in many years Portugal was hit by strikes. The residents of the shanty towns
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In essence, the Portuguese revolutionaries of 1974 were repeating the mistake of the agrarian radicals of the Spanish republic in the Thirties: in seeking to impose a collectivist land reform based on southern social conditions upon the privately-owned and more efficient smallholders of the north, they turned the latter against them.
off. As some of the MFA leaders were later to acknowledge, the outcome of the April 1975 elections had discredited in advance the goals of the revolutionary officers: the Left could have parliamentary democracy or a revolutionary ‘transition’, but not both.
In 1977 the Parliament passed an Agrarian Reform Law that confirmed the land collectivization of the immediate past but confined it to the South, with restrictions on the amount of land that could be expropriated from existing owners. This move ended the risk of rural conflict and a conservative backlash,
But they offered no objection when parliament revised the constitution in the course of the next two years, reducing the power of the executive (abolishing the Council of the Revolution itself in 1982), and quietly removing the anti-capitalist emphasis in the original document.
But against all expectations Portugal had avoided both a ‘White Terror’ and a ‘Red Terror’. The Communists, while still popular in the rural south and the industrial suburbs of Lisbon, remained unrepentantly hard-line under the ageing Cunhal, who stayed in charge until 1992. But their influence was permanently diminished. The repatriated colonials never succeeded in forming a far-right party of embittered nationalists.
On closer inspection, however, Spain—or at least northern Spain and the cities—was changing quite rapidly. Franco was a rigid and truly reactionary dictator, but unlike his neighbor Salazar he was also an economic realist.
Franco’s ‘economic miracle’ should not be overstated. Spain was not burdened by the residue of empire and thus faced none of the economic or social costs of decolonization. Most of the foreign cash flowing into the country in the Sixties came not from the export of Spanish-produced goods, but rather from overseas remittances by emigrant Spanish workers or else holiday-makers from northern Europe: in short, Spain’s economic modernization was largely a by-product of other nations’ prosperity.
In a time before television Spain may have been largely shielded from the cultural impact of the Sixties elsewhere, but the economic disparities and disruption engendered by the Stabilization Plan produced widespread labour discontent.
But all active expressions of sympathy or collaboration across sectors—with striking miners, for example—were strictly off limits.
The army, largely confined to a ceremonial role, had become risk averse; its traditional conservatism was expressed increasingly in enthusiasm for the return of the monarchy, an identification that was to prove ironically beneficial in the nation’s transition to democracy.
But because formal political opposition was banned, it was from inside these same ruling circles—rather than amongst an intelligentsia whose leading lights remained in exile—that reforming ideas and pressure for change would come, prompted by frustration at local inefficiency, foreign criticism or the example of Vatican II.
The transition to democracy was thus managed from within the ranks of Franco’s own ministers
and appointees, which helps account for its speed and success. In the initial stages of Spain’s exit from Francoism the traditional forces of democratic change in Spain—liberals, Socialists, Communists, trade unions—played a subordinate role.
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.
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.
But what was granted some Spaniards could hardly be withheld from others. Within four years Spain was to be divided into seventeen self-administering regions, each with its own flag and capital city. Not just Catalans and Basques, but Galicians, Andalusians, Canaries, Valencians, Navarrese and many others were to be recognized as distinct and separate.
What determined the outcome, and the shape of subsequent Spanish history, were King Juan Carlos I’s outright rejection of the conspirators’ demands and his televised
speech uncompromisingly defending the Constitution and unambiguously identifying himself and the monarchy with the country’s emerging democratic majority.
But the UDC majority was increasingly caught between a clericalist and nationalist Right that was unhappy at the speed of change, disturbed by regional autonomy and offended by the relaxed public morals of the new Spain, and a newly assertive Socialist Left, open to compromise on constitutional affairs but presenting a radical face to the country’s fractious labor movement and the growing number of unemployed.
As in the short-lived Republic of the 1930s, Spain was building a democracy in the teeth of an economic recession, and there was much talk of the country going the way of Argentina, with indexed wages and government-subsidized prices degenerating into hyper-inflation. If this was averted, much of the credit must go to the signatories of the so-called Moncloa Pacts of October 1977, the first in a series of negotiated settlements in which politicians, labour leaders and employers agreed to embark upon a broad range of reforms: devaluation of the currency, an incomes policy, controls on
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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 Popular Alliance (renamed the People’s Party in 1989) which won a surprising 26.5 percent of the vote.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
Geography, it appeared, had triumphed over history.
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
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:
It was in these years, then, that the European Community acquired its unflattering image as a sort of institutionalized cattle market, in which countries trade political alliances for material reward.
