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Collection Highlights

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The People vs Democracy Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and

How to Save It Yascha Mounk

The People Vs Democracy Why Our Freedom Is In Danger And

How To Save It Yascha Mounk

From Grain to Pixel The Archival Life of Film in

Transition 3rd Edition Giovanna Fossati
Homo Religiosus Exploring the Roots of Religion and
Religious Freedom in Human Experience Timothy Samuel Shah

From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom 2nd Edition Manoj

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Freedom From Fear Freedom From Want An Introduction To

Human Security Robert J. Hanlon

Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien

Régime to the Present Day Sheri Berman

State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain

Republics of the Possible Miguel A. Centeno
ruiz carciner - xx - index - r1 27/09/2018 15:39 Page i

FROM FRANCO
TO FREEDOM
ruiz carciner - xx - index - r1 27/09/2018 15:39 Page ii

ii LEFTTT

Sussex Studies in Spanish History

General Editor: Nigel Townson, Universidad Complutense, Madrid

Consultant Editor: José Álvarez-Junco, Universidad Complutense, Madrid
Advisory Editors: Pamela Radcliff, University of California, San Diego
Tim Rees, University of Exeter

José Álvarez-Junco, The Emergence of Mass Politics in Spain: Populist

Demagoguery and Republican Culture, 1890–1910.
Avi Astor, Rebuilding Islam in Contemporary Spain: The Politics of Mosque
Establishment, 1976–2013.
Tom Buchanan, The Impact on the Spanish Civil War on Britain: War, Loss
and Memory.
Andrew Dowling, Catalonia since the Spanish Civil War: Reconstructing the
Nation.*
Ferran Gallego and Francisco Morente (eds), The Last Survivor: Cultural
and Social Projects Underlying Spanish Fascism, 1931–1975.
Hugo García, The Truth about Spain!: Mobilizing British Public Opinion,
1936–1939.
Irene González González, Spanish Education in Morocco, 1912–1956:
Cultural Interactions in a Colonial Context .
Aitana Guia, The Muslim Struggle for Civil Rights in Spain: Promoting
Democracy through Migrant Engagement, 1985–2010.
Patricia Hertel, The Crescent Remembered: Islam and Nationalism on the
Iberian Peninsula.
Silvina Schammah Gesser, Madrid’s Forgotten Avant-Garde: Between
Essentialism and Modernity.
David Messenger, L’Espagne Républicaine: French Policy and Spanish
Republicanism in Liberated France.
Javier Moreno-Luzón, Modernizing the Nation: Spain during the Reign of
Alfonso XIII, 1902–1931.
Inbal Ofer, Señoritas in Blue: The Making of a Female Political Elite in
Franco’s Spain.
Stanley G. Payne, Alcalá Zamora and the Failure of the Spanish Republic,
1931–1936.
Mario Ojeda Revah, Mexico and the Spanish Civil War: Domestic Politics
and the Republican Cause.
ruiz carciner - xx - index - r1 27/09/2018 15:39 Page iii

Raanan Rein and Joan Maria Thomàs (eds), Spain 1936: Year Zero.
Elizabeth Roberts, “Freedom, Faction, Fame and Blood”: British Soldiers of
Conscience in Greece, Spain and Finland.
Julius Ruiz, ‘Paracuellos’: The Elimination of the ‘Fifth Column’ in
Republican Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.
Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer (ed.), From Franco to Freedom: The Roots of
the Transition to Democracy in Spain, 1962–1982.
Guy Setton, Spanish–Israeli Relations, 1956–1992: Ghosts of the Past and
Contemporary Challenges in the Middle East.
Emilio Grandío Seoane, A Balancing Act: British Intelligence in Spain
during the Second World War.
Manuel Álvarez Tardío, José María Gil-Robles: Leader of the Catholic Right
during the Spanish Second Republic.
Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Fernando del Rey Reguillo (eds.), The Spanish
Second Republic Revisited.
Nigel Townson, The Crisis of Democracy in Spain: Centrist Politics under
the Second Republic, 1931–1936.
Nigel Townson (ed.), Is Spain Different?: A Comparative Look at the 19th
and 20th Centuries.
* Published in association with the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary
Spanish Studies and the Catalan Observatory, London School of Economics.
A full list of titles in the series is available on the Press website.
ruiz carciner - xx - index - r1 27/09/2018 15:39 Page iv

iv LEFTTT
ruiz carciner - xx - index - r1 27/09/2018 15:39 Page v

Rightt v

FROM FRANCO
TO FREEDOM
The Roots of the
Transition to Democracy in Spain,
1962–1982

EDITED BY
Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer
TRANSLATED BY
Nigel Townson
Introduction and organization of this volume copyright © Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer,
2019; all other chapters copyright © Sussex Academic Press, 2019.

The right of Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer to be identified as Editor of this work, and
Nigel Townson as the translator, has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published in the Sussex Academic e-Library, 2019.

SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS
PO Box 139, Eastbourne BN24 9BP, UK

Distributed worldwide by
Independent Publishers Group (IPG)
814 N. Franklin Street
Chicago, IL 60610, USA

ISBN 9781845198503 (Hardcover)

ISBN 9781782845423 (Pdf )

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of
criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This e-book text has been prepared for electronic viewing. Some features, including
tables and figures, might not display as in the print version, due to
electronic conversion limitations and/or copyright strictures.
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Rightt vii

Contents

Preface by Series Editor Nigel Townson 1

1 Introduction: From Franco to Freedom 1

Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer

2 The Sociologists and the Analysis of Social (and Political) 17

Change in Spain between 1962 and 1982
María Luz Morán Calvo-Sotelo

3 The Blue Factor: Falangist Political Culture under the Franco 41

Regime and the Transition to Democracy , 1962–1977
Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer

4 Voting under Franco: The Elections of the Family 70

Procuradores to the Cortes and the Limits to the Opening Up
of Francoism
Carlos Domper Lasús

5 Public Opinion and Political Culture in a Post-Fascist 101

Dictatorship (1957–77)
Javier Muñoz Soro

6 Marcelismo (and Late Francoism): Unsuccessful 137

Authoritarian Modernisations
Manuel Loff

7 Paving the Way for the Transition? The Administrative 175

Reform of the late 1950s
Nicolás Sesma Landrin

8 The Dismantling of Spanish ‘Fascism’: Socio-Political 208

Attitudes during the Late Franco Dictatorship (1962–76)
Claudio Hernández Burgos

The Editor and Contributors & Index 231–251

ruiz carciner - xx - index - r1 27/09/2018 15:39 Page viii

Series Editor’s Preface

Research into the Franco dictatorship has tended to focus until quite
recently on the 1940s. This is partly due to the inherent fascination of
these years, as they include the regime’s struggle for survival during the
Second World War, the post-war period, and the early part of the Cold
War. It is also because the 1940s can be seen as a continuation of the Civil
War of 1936–39, the central trauma of twentieth-century Spain, as
illustrated by the dictatorship’s determination to keep alive the memory
of the conflict, by its deliberate division of society into the victorious and
the vanquished, by the continuing repression of the republicans, and not
least by its alignment with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the
Second World War. Support for the Axis was shown by Franco’s Spain
joining the Anti-Comintern Pact, by its abandonment of the League of
Nations, and by its material and logistical help during the war, including
sending the Blue Division to the Eastern Front. The extreme isolation of
the Franco regime at the end of the Second World War – when its very
future seemed to hang in the balance – reflected the extent to which it
had identified itself with the fascist cause.
Over the last decade or so more and more attention has been paid to
the last twenty-five years of the dictatorship, especially the 1960s and
1970s, when Spain underwent sweeping economic, social and cultural
change. The overarching objective of From Franco to Freedom is to offer
new perspectives on the period by focusing not so much on the struggle
against the dictatorship as on the myriad conflicts that were unfolding
within it, such as those that were unleashed within the Movement (or
single party), the state-controlled media, the bureaucracy, the Cortes, the
university, and the Catholic Church. The conclusion is that change was
pursued from within the dictatorship not as a means of undertaking a
post-Francoist transition to democracy, but of perpetuating the regime,
albeit in an altered form, after the death of its supreme leader, Francisco
Franco. Highly relevant here is the comparison drawn with the attempt
of Marcello Caetano to guarantee the continuity of the dictatorial regime
in Portugal following the death of António de Oliveira Salazar.
Scrutiny of the anti-democratic aspirations of even those Francoists
who regarded themselves as reformists leads naturally to a reevaluation
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Series Editor’s Preface

Rightt ix
ix

of the debate over the very nature of the Franco regime. During its first
twenty years the dictatorship was generally characterised as ‘fascist’, such
as by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1946. A credible
alternative interpretation did not emerge until the 1960s, when the
US-based Spanish sociologist Juan Linz elaborated the concept of the
‘authoritarian’ regime. While many historians, political scientists, and
sociologists have embraced this definition, others have disputed it on the
grounds that it was a product of the Cold War which implicitly strove to
differentiate between the ‘good’, Western-leaning dictatorships and the
‘bad’ Communist-inspired ones. Linz was effectively accused of legit-
imising the integration of Franco’s Spain into the orbit of the West. Many
of the authors in From Franco to Freedom take the Linz thesis to task by
highlighting the ways in which, and the extent to which, the regime
remained wedded to fascist ideas, practices and aims.
The final goal of From Franco to Freedom is to explore the linkages
between dictatorship and democracy by analysing the impact of initia-
tives taken from within the regime – whether intended or not – on the
Transition, such as the partial opening up of the media, the creation of
neighbourhood and other associations, the adjustment of the Catholic
Church to the imperatives of the Second Vatican Council, or the post-
1975 adaptation of the Movement’s networks to the demands of party
politics. Much of this reflected the often muddled response of the regime
to the economic, social and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s in a
vain attempt to ensure the continuity of the regime.
From Franco to Freedom therefore furnishes fresh perspectives on the
Franco regime through its focus on the institutions, mentalities and
reforms of the dictatorship itself, through its far-ranging and inter-
disciplinary research, and through its willingness to challenge established
ideas regarding a watershed period in modern Spanish history.
NIGEL TOWNSON
Complutense University
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1
Introduction:
From Franco to Freedom
MIGUEL ÁNGEL RUIZ CARNICER

For the majority of scholars or informed readers interested in the history

of Europe during the 20th century, the story of General Franco’s regime
in Spain during the middle decades of the century is that of an anomaly,
a mixture of fascist imitation and the persistence of traditional and
conservative features embodied in the person of the colonial soldier and
plotter General Franco.1 Study of the regime acquired an intellectual
solidity with the seminal work of Juan Linz – a Spanish political scientist
based at Yale and a reference point in the analysis of democracies in crisis
during the 20th century – who characterised the Franco regime as author-
itarian.2 Except for the work of Stanley Payne and Paul Preston, little new
has made an impact on the international academic community, except
for those researchers specialising in the period. Many scholars in Spain
turned against the Linz definition, insisting on the fascist character of
Francoism (and therefore its perverse character, identifying it with some-
thing as evil as the fascist powers who had been defeated in 1945),
something which appeared to be contradicted by the relative smoothness
with which the transition from the dictatorship to democracy took place
in the late 1970s.3
Later debate on the nature of the regime has emphasised its nascent
fascist character, which was maintained in part throughout its subse-
quent evolution, especially in relation to certain aspects, such as the
power concentrated in the hands of Franco, the mechanisms of repres-
sion and institutional control, and the imposition of certain cultural and
religious values on the population as a whole.4 The fascist political
culture that took shape under Francoism was the result of the conver-
gence of different elements from the radical and fascist-influenced right,
as well as from Catholicism, which permeated all these currents.5 This
ruiz carciner - xx - index - r1 27/09/2018 15:39 Page 2

2 MIGUEL ÁNGEL RUIZ CARNICER

does not prevent a significant part of the international scholarly

community from continuing to affirm that the Francoist regime was
merely ‘authoritarian’.
Historical revision of the harsh period following the Civil War
(1936–39) advanced by means of two central questions: the repression
and the establishment of the political structures during the early years of
the regime, with the diverse political ‘families’ as the protagonists in the
struggle to control the regime. The studies on the repression were the
logical, moral need of several anti-Francoist generations – indepen-
dently of the side on which their families had fought – to settle accounts
with the regime before coming to terms with a democratic Spain. It was
also the expression of an urgent need to reconstruct the initial steps of
the dictatorship, giving rise to the completion of the first theses in a
context of democratic liberty and reasonable access to the archives. In
addition to these initial investigations there were studies of the cultural
evolution of the regime in all its complexity and of domestic politics,6
including the controversies over the virtually silent liberalism that was
hidden away within a repressed society, but which would flourish in the
1960s, giving rise to elements of change.7 At the end of the 1990s,
however, the second half of the Franco regime remained neglected, but
this has received more and more attention, raising new questions in
relation to the period that begins with the university revolt of 1956 and
the Plan of Stabilisation of 1959.8 For the contributors to this book,
these two events represent turning points – the first being political and
social in nature and the second economic and judicial (the necessity of
a reliable and stable judicial framework) – as they condition any overall
vision of the regime. Francoism has been analysed in its entirety for a
number of years, while aspects such as mentalities, society, politics and
culture in the 1960s and early 1970s have been reconstructed from many
different perspectives.
The research group that presents its results in this volume has endeav-
oured from the beginning to scrutinise those elements of social and
political change which were most closely related to the Transition and the
consolidation of democracy in Spain in the second half of the 1970s and
the early 1980s.9 The aim has been to study in depth those factors that
made it possible to supersede a regime inspired by the fascism of the
interwar period and whose survival of the Second World War made it a
residue of European fascism. The idea has been to identify those aspects
that help provide nuanced explanations that go far beyond the status quo,
above all in terms of the international political sciences, which still frame
the Franco regime in terms of Linz’s paradigm and which, in a few para-
graphs, banish the Spanish experience to the margins of the academic
ruiz carciner - xx - index - r1 27/09/2018 15:39 Page 3

Introduction 3

debate. We believe that the analysis of the Spanish case is important not
only in order to reconstruct the trajectory of Spaniards in the 20th
century, but also to understand the reality of European fascism more
clearly, and even the strengths and weaknesses of Europe today.
The ease of the rupture with the Franco regime and that of the corre-
sponding transition to democracy continues to cause admiration (if there
is anything to admire about Spain in these uncertain times). How was it
possible, with the social and personal resources available at the end of the
Civil War, the brutality of the post-War period, the reactionary nature of
the development policies of the 1960s, and the antipathy to all cultural
concerns, to produce new generations that sought reconciliation, that
were able to supersede the worst legacy of the Civil War, and that were
capable of taking on board democratic practices in a difficult economic
context (the oil crisis of 1973 and its delayed but terrible impact on Spain)
and a difficult civil one (the terrorism of ETA and of the extreme right)?
The story of the Transition is one of success – despite the many short-
comings and limitations that can be appreciated in our democracy – and
that is how it was lived by contemporary Spaniards.10 Still, for a number
of years a more critical vision of the Transition and its legacy, which
includes the academic world, has gained ground. This has been a result
of the economic crisis of 2008 and an awareness of the deep-set problems
of Spanish democracy, such as the widespread corruption, territorial
disputes, the limited internal democracy of the parties and so on, above
and beyond the public debates in which history is exploited for current
political gain.11
Many scholars have studied the roots of Spanish democracy in-depth
following the book of 1979 of Raymond Carr and Juan Pablo Fusi, Spain:
Dictatorship to Democracy.12 Some of the most recent and suggestive
works explore the development of democratic practices under the
dictatorship as an explanation for the success of the new regime.13 From
the perspective of the political sciences, the political change in Spain has
been important in terms of the ‘Third Wave’ of democratisation, which
included the rest of Southern Europe and, later, Eastern Europe following
the end of Communism in the 1990s.14 In this sense, the great economic,
and therefore social, transformations have been considered an essential
element of the later political change by sociologists, historians and polit-
ical scientists alike in Spain.15 However, the importance of the governing
elites, their divisions and transactions in the transition to democracy was
soon highlighted. In standard works, such as those of Richard Gunther,
Spain is presented as a model case of the political elites in the context of
Southern Europe and Latin America.16 This vision of the importance of
those that controlled the levers of power has been confirmed by recent
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4 MIGUEL ÁNGEL RUIZ CARNICER

studies, such as those by Omar Encarnación and others,17 in which the

role of personal strategies and of the established power structures is
underlined at a time of transition to democracy.18 We do not believe that
social mobilisation can be ignored in relation to socio-political change,
but this must be compatible with an analysis and understanding of the
origin and performance of the political elites, as well as of the institutional
mechanisms of the regime from which the transition begins, in order to
comprehend the process of political change.19
In nearly all cases, economic development and the maturing of
society, especially of the urban sectors and of the medium and highly
educated social strata, is crucial in order to understand the change in
mentality and the adoption of democratic values, as shown by the
legendary sociological works of the FOESSA Foundation, together with
those of the companies that carried out pioneering demoscopic and
‘cultural listening’ studies, as María Luz Morán shows in her chapter. The
objective which we set ourselves was to understand the mechanisms that
explain and make intelligible this process of transformation, which took
place within the regime, and to identify the key elements of that process,
but without wishing to attribute to the regime the slightest intention of
promoting democratic participation. On the contrary. If anything is
made evident in the chapters that follow it is that the Francoist regime as
a whole never possessed the vision, generosity or moral fibre to undertake
actions or platforms rooted in reconciliation or with a view to super-
seding the Civil War and the values of the 18th of July 1936, which were
increasingly qualified by the new economic and social context, the
different international framework, and generational change. This was the
reason for the growing separation of the regime from a society that was
capable of establishing mechanisms by which to supersede the Civil War,
of opening up to new realities beyond Spain, and of using extant ideo-
logical and cultural materials as a way of connecting with a changing
world that presented new realities.20 The requisite generosity was shown
by the sons and daughters of the victors in the Civil War,21 but above all
by the offspring of the defeated who were active in the opposition parties,
especially those that operated in a clandestine fashion.22 They ensured
that the anti-Francoist forces embraced reconciliation as one of their
principal strategies, thereby preempting the reformist sectors of the
regime which came to accept dialogue and negotiation at its very end.
Without this generosity, which the regime as a whole never had, except
for a number of personal exceptions – which existed, as shown in this
book – it would not have been possible to supersede the profound wound
of the Civil War and move towards the goal of peacefully recovering
democratic liberties and practices.
ruiz carciner - xx - index - r1 27/09/2018 15:39 Page 5

Introduction 5

From sectors linked to the regime, there began to appear during and
after the Transition a series of memoirs by ministers and other authorities
from different periods of the regime that sought to justify their partici-
pation in the dictatorship on the grounds that they were fighting for a
democratic monarchy.23 These self-justificatory memoirs and treatises
have been published throughout the years of democracy, especially with
the rise to power of those conservative sectors linked to Manuel Fraga,
the erstwhile minister of the dictatorship, leader of the opposition to the
socialist governments of Felipe González (1982–96), and, finally, presi-
dent of the autonomous government of Galicia. This meant that many
men from the dictatorship eventually felt comfortable within a democ-
racy which until then had been mainly identified with the values of the
socialists in power and criticism of the dictatorship. The new conserva-
tive wave was spearheaded during the final years of the socialists by a
prominent group of propagandists and journalists who were highly crit-
ical of the Francoist aftermath.24
This vision of the Francoist regime as a modernising force was also
defended, especially from the second half of the 1990s, by some of the
revisionist scholars, who viewed the dictatorship as the creator of the
economic, social, and even political conditions necessary for democ-
racy.25 They ended up by portraying Franco as the ancient patriach of a
country with a tragic history whose goal was the peaceful recovery of
democracy and whose stature as a statesman rivalled that of the architect
of the Restoration system of 1875–1923, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo.26
Central to this thesis was the argument that Spain first had to undertake
an economic modernisation that produced a substantial middle class.
Even though the emergence of this middle class was real enough and the
effects of development were positive insofar as they eliminated economic
and social misery, thereby objectively improving the conditions which
made democracy possible after the death of the dictator, this thesis
ignores the fact that General Franco led the uprising of 18 July 1936
against the Second Republic, the goal of which was not just the overthrow
of a left-wing government and the repression of a revolutionary
movement, but the destruction of democracy in Spain. The uprising also
prevented any attempt at reform or social transformation, rejected the
cultural and social modernisation of the society of masses that had
merged during the first third of the 20th century, and, finally, implanted
a regime inspired by, and aligned with, the European fascist wave,
represented at the time by Rome and Berlin.
What made Spain peculiar in comparison with the Italian and German
cases, but also in relation to the Vichy experiment in France and the
fascist satellites of Eastern Europe, is that the regime did not fall in 1945.
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6 MIGUEL ÁNGEL RUIZ CARNICER

Neither was there an internal war and an occupation by Allied forces, as

in other cases. Hence Spain represented a peculiar case within the context
of post-War Europe: the survival of a fascist-inspired regime, born of an
extremely cruel civil war, under a very different Western European
democratic context. By this time, not only had the fascist wave, despite
its enormous popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, receded, but also the
fascist regimes had been overthrown after carrying out brutal policies of
extermination and annexation before and during the Second World War.
Fascism and its memory were criminalised and anyone who supported it
was branded a delinquent and a social menace. As a result, Francoism
renounced its roots and drew on other elements of the counterrevolution
of 18 July 1936: a traditional militarism influenced by the African colonial
tradition, a militant and pre-Second Vatican Council Catholicism, and a
conservative authoritarianism based on a long reactionary tradition of
the 19th and first third of the 20th century in Spain, of which Carlist
legitimism was a leading representative. Falangism was reduced to a
residual political structure during the latter half of the 1940s – a latent
force that maintained a presence on the streets and in the institutions –
until its recovery in the 1950s. In any case, it would not have found a place
in the post-War world if it were not for the Cold War.
The replacement of the confrontation that had defined the Second
World War (democracy and Communism versus fascism) with that
between Communism and anti-Communism, and the emergence of a
world divided into two military blocks, explains the survival of the
regime and its incorporation, incomplete and on a minor scale, into the
Western world. The necessity of including itself within the Western
defence system led the regime to set aside its old affinity for the defeated
in the World War and to align itself with the West, while criticising the
latter’s liberalism and its other values. The Francoist regime, which for
many scholars was no longer fascist because the era of fascism had
ended, still based its structure on the führerprinzip (the ‘theory of lead-
ership’), and formally recognised only the single party until 1977 (the
Falange Española y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista or
Traditionalist Spanish Falange and the Juntas of the National Sindicalist
Offensive), always known as the Falange), which possessed an enor-
mous structure at the national and provincial levels (known always as
the ‘Movement’ from the end of the 1950s on). It also kept up its affil-
iative bodies, with a corporative and typically fascist trade-union
structure, and a police network of asfixiating political and social
control. Institutionally, the regime denied the public liberties that
formed part of the 19th century liberal tradition, while reaffirming the
outcome of the Civil War (the triumph of the victors over the
ruiz carciner - xx - index - r1 27/09/2018 15:39 Page 7

Introduction 7

vanquished), and consecrating the 18th of July 1936 as a set of values

defined as a ‘crusade’ in terms reminiscent of the Middle Ages.
By contrast, Spanish society was becoming increasingly permeable to
democratic values as a result of the associational experience, participa-
tion in elections (however limited), and the transmission of values and
information by an increasingly diverse media. The latter led to the
emergence of an influential, if minority, sector of public opinion, which
identifed itself neither with the dictatorship nor the discourse of the Civil
War, and whose values were increasingly in consonance with those of
democratic Western Europe despite the civil backwardness which the
regime had engendered. The growing use of the term ‘democracy’ in
public discourse reflects this change.
We believe that the Francoist regime was a gigantic laboratory of
contradictions that had its epicentre in the Falangist doctrine – Spanish
fascism – which, with its highly charged revolutionary discourse, its
appeal to the masses, its defence of social justice, and its political moder-
nity represented a source of tension with the increasingly conservative
political approach of the regime, which sought above all else its own
preservation, not its radicalisation. Moreover, the complexity of the
elements that made up the regime meant that the Catholic sectors had a
growing presence in governmental circles. They were also the ones which
promoted administrative renewal, economic reform and technocratic
political practice, which led to political fights with the Falangists, who
had their own modernising project. Both currents tried to give a direction
to the regime that would ensure their own dominance, above all once the
old age of the dictator converted the regime’s continuity into a major
issue.
By the mid 1960s, and even clearly with the state of exception in 1969,
Francoism was in total crisis, not only because of the advanced age of the
person who embodied the regime, but also because of the absence of any
future project. This had been the case since around 1956, but economic
development, the desire for power of the Falangist leader José Solís Ruiz,
and the project of political technocratic development of the Catholics
linked to the religious group Opus Dei, with the support of Admiral Luis
Carrero Blanco, tried to create a future for the regime, even beyond
Franco. But these hopes were increasingly sidelined in the early 1970s, as
the divorce of the regime became evident at all levels from an increasingly
complex civil society, which aspired to democracy, Europeanisation and
the reconciliation of Spaniards in order to supersede the wounds of the
Civil War. All of this made patent the unreformable nature of the regime.
Political change after the death of the dictator, which formed part of this
socio-political transformation of Spanish society, cannot be understood
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8 MIGUEL ÁNGEL RUIZ CARNICER

without taking into account the people, ideas, media and traditions that
helped supersede the legacy of the Civil War and looked to the reconcil-
iation of the Spanish people. If the regime as a whole could not do this,
change could not come about except through the maturing of ideas and
people, taking as its starting point the contradictions unleashed by the
system itself, much to the latter’s regret. This was complemented by the
activities of the external opposition, the historical memory of the
defeated from the Civil War, including the exiles, and the appeal of an
open, democratic and prosperous European society, all of which explains
the manifest consolidation of democracy in Spain. During the last years
of the dictatorship, the importance of the internal and external opposi-
tion grew.27 Without the pressure of a militant minority that struggled
against Francoism the establishment of a democratic regime would not
have been possible. The opening up of the regime by a sector of the
Francoist leadership made its reform possible and therefore its adapta-
tion to an era that was very different to that at its outset. We cannot
understand the process without taking into account the impact of the
contradictions that unfolded within the system and the criticisms that
were made of it, both of which contributed to its delegitimation.
This agitation within the regime’s political class in the 1960s, together
with the effects of economic development – positive in macroeconomic
terms given the growth and urbanisation, but negative insofar as the
major sacrifice was made by the working and popular classes, regional
inequalities grew, and a high price was paid in terms of internal and
external emigration – and the cultural elements generated by the most
dynamic sectors of the Falangist university world, produced a growing
disaffection.28 The original political and cultural reference points of
Francoism were replaced by new ones related to the Marxism of the
university elites, an interest in the non-aligned regimes of the Third
World, and a more open press following the Press Law of 1966, which
abolished prior censorship. Equally, the non-competitive elections which
Francoism staged, such as the municipal elections for the one-third of
councillors who represented the families, the trade union elections and
above all the elections for the procuradores or national deputies for the
‘family third’ in 1967 and 1971, signaled an element of participation,
which, like the referendums of 1947 and 1966, were designed to consol-
idate the dictatorship and show the world the support enjoyed by the
regime. Still, the critical sectors of the regime also took advantage of these
loopholes to advance their cause. The university lecturers and intellec-
tuals within the structures of the regime were conscious of the changes
and challenges of the future, which they tried to express by renovating
the political discourse. All of this, from above and from below, came up
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Introduction 9

against the immobilism of Franco himself and the inertia of a regime with
a DNA that was fundamentally incompatible with democracy. We found
ourselves here in a grey area, once that merits an in-depth anlysis and the
effort to explain individual and collective behaviour. This is because
democracy is built upon the available elements, which in many cases are
related to a process of socialisation regarding the values of the victors in
the Civil War, to their own evolution, and to internal and external factors
which modify behaviour and explain processes of maturing, as well as
social and political change.
The importance of these changes in Spanish society were undeniable
during the 1960s. Also significant was the appearance of a late Francoist
reformism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is not identifiable in
terms of a particular group or sector, but involved disparate and disperse
initiatives which emerged from within Francoism and ended up in a
regime of a different nature, but which failed time after time until the Law
of Political Reform of 1976. As in the case of Marcelism in Portugal, the
boundary between this reformism and the efforts at re-legitimising the
dictatorship were very nebulous, as shown by the hackneyed case of
‘political development’. This revealed the contradictory character of
transformations which did not defend anything approaching a demo-
cratic reform, but which nonetheless helped to create the conditions for
change.
In this book we endeavour to offer new elements in order to compre-
hend the end of the Franco regime and the transition to democracy. This
has been done via the study of elements which were central to the society
of the dictatorship. In addition, we trace their influence on the transition
to democracy and the way in which they conditioned the quality of the
democracy that emerged. This has been achieved by exploring society
‘from above’ and ‘from below’ in the search for the elements that would
allow us to understand more about the processes of social change in
Spain, about the political culture of the late Franco regime, and about the
interactions between the latter and the new democracy. This is not, as a
result, a ‘twilight’ narrative that regards the late Franco regime as the end
of a cycle or a scene of decline. What we seek in the behaviour of a section
of the elites, in their attempts at re-legitimation, in sociological analyses,
in the media and in the socialisation of the masses are the elements that
help us interpret the nature of the change, its roots and its consequences.
When we drew up the research project that led to this book we wanted
to answer these questions and to understand aspects of this society better.
In the first place, the changes in public opinion: the first steps taken in its
evaluation and how was it shaped by the interaction between the youthful
sociologists and a regime increasingly concerned with ‘social listening’?
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10 MIGUEL ÁNGEL RUIZ CARNICER

The regime found it difficult to analyse the social situation because of the
inheritance of the Civil War and because its self-perception as the origin
of an indisputable revival of the nation prevented it from questioning its
policies, even though these were repeatedly revealed to be impervious to
any proposal of real change. This is the subject tackled in the chapter by
the sociologist María Luz Morán. The impetus for change could not be
ignored by the regime, which set in motion electoral processes of a corpo-
rative nature, starting with the municipal elections of 1948, in which
some of the councillors were voted into power. Elections were also held
within the official trade union in an effort to make both participation and
the ‘contrast of opinions’ (of which the regime spoke constantly)
realities. Nonetheless, both these and other elections, such as those of
1967 and 1971, failed to forge a path that was at once peculiar but which
could be presented as comparable in representational terms to the
Western political model. The same thing happened with the later initia-
tives to create associations and open up the regime. The use of electoral
mechanisms, analysed in the chapter by Carlos Domper, reveals the
capacity for manipulation of the regime, as well as providing an assess-
ment of the influence of the elections in relation to social mobilisation.
Another essential feature of this process of change was the media. The
press played a fundamental role, thanks in part to the pseudo-space and
contrived debate created amongst the newspapers aligned with the
regime by the Press Law of 1966, but above all due to the appearance of
new media outlets, especially magazines, which provided a systematic
critique of the regime and possessed a new legitimacy. Television was one
of the principal weapons of the regime. This launched propaganda
campaigns, but always within a programming context dominated by
consumerism and depoliticisation. It also promoted the figure of prince
Juan Carlos, chosen as succesor to Franco in 1969, under the directorship
of Adolfo Suárez. A foremost feature of the dictatorship’s last decade, as
studied in the chapter of the leading specialist Javier Muñoz Soro, was
the role played by the regime’s intellectuals, including propagandists,
journalists or writers, especially those that reinvented the slogans of
Francoism in an attempt to ensure its survival in the face of a growing
disaffection amongst the new generations of Spaniards.
The final moments of the Francoist regime coincided with the crisis
of the Estado Novo in Portugal in the midst of a process of full-blown
modernisation under the post-Salazar leadership of Marcelo Caetano.
This attempt at political adaptation is compared in the book to the expe-
rience of the late Franco regime by one of the foremost Portuguese
experts, Manuel Loff. We believe this comparative approach is funda-
mental as a result of the way in which the two processes of the mid 1970s,
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Introduction 11

much like a ‘game of mirrors’, influenced one another, even though they
took place in contexts, and followed paths, that were very different.
This analysis would be incomplete without shedding some light on the
associative processes within the Movement, especially the neighbour-
hood associations and the family ones. These strove to maintain the
purity of the ideals of the founder of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de
Rivera, but they did so outside the official channels and in contact with
sectors that would be involved in the political forces of the Transition.
Analysis of this network, little studied until now (with the exception of
the work by Pamela Radcliff), is not only undertaken both ‘from above’
and ‘from below’, but also rejects all preconceived notions of the regime
and the opposition. The chapter written by Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer
endeavours to trace the complex landscape of the political associations,
the activities of the so-called ‘Blue [ie Falangist] reformism’, and the
Falangist publications which offered a different message to that of the
regime. These nonconformist publications expressed an interest in an
approach to international relations that was critical of the West and in
the ideological renovation of the Falange that was distinct from the neo-
fascism to be found in Italy.
Nicolás Sesma, a prominent specialist in the intellectual world of the
Francoist elite, scrutinises the rise in the late 1950s of a process of admin-
istrative and legal reform which set the men linked to the Technocrats off
against the Falangists of the Institute of Political Studies, which still
operated as a Francoist think tank. This analysis is linked to the contro-
versial subject of the creation of the rule of law (defended by the regime
itself, but contradicted by the political and judicial arbitrariness) and the
increasing complexity of a public administration that provided legal
security for a more developed society in economic and social terms, later
to be reflected in political terms. This allows us to appreciate the type of
legal and political debates that interested some of the key behind-the-
scenes figures of post-Francoist politics.
Claudio Hernández Burgos has worked in recent years on the expres-
sions ‘from below’ of a society that had to live through the long night of
Francoism. His chapter focuses on the grey zones of society, seeking to
capture the process of political maturing during the final years of the
dictatorship in the neighbourhoods, the neighbourhood associations,
and other initiatives from below. The delegitimation of the regime took
place from below, but it was taken advantage of from above for other
ends.
The Francoist regime cannot be seen as a phenomenon isolated from
the rest of Europe. Its birth is a product of interwar Europe, its survival
and consolidation was due to the anti-Communism of the Western
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12 MIGUEL ÁNGEL RUIZ CARNICER

powers during the Cold War, and its evolution and crisis must be under-
stood in terms of the changing international context of the 1960s and
’70s. During these years the Spanish people were subject to influences and
processes that cannot be disconnected from the West. A close, if sectorial,
look at the last fifteen or twenty years of the Franco regime, as we have
done in this book, offers a different and more complex perspective on
Francoism, its evolution, its contradictions, and, above all, provides clues
that allow us to understand more fully the rebirth of democracy in Spain
in the mid 1970s and the consolidation of a model integrated into the
Europe of its day.

Notes
1 A detailed account of the changing nature of the regime and its ideological
elements in Miguel Ángel Giménez Martínez, El estado franquista.
Fundamentos ideológicos, bases legales y sistema institucional (Madrid:
Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2014), p. 29 and ff. An
extensive reflection on the origin and political nature of the Franco regime
in Ferrán Gallego, El evangelio fascista. La formación de la cultura política del
franquismo (1930–1950), (Barcelona: Crítica, 2014). A summary of the
initial debates in Manuel Pérez Ledesma, ‘Una Dictadura “por La Gracia de
Dios”’, Historia Social, 20 (1994), pp. 173–93. See also Ismael Saz, “Algunas
consideraciones a propósito del debate sobre la naturaleza del franquismo
y el lugar histórico de la dictadura”, in Ismael Saz, Fascismo y Franquismo
(Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2004), pp. 245–64. An up-to-date
contextualisation of the debates over the conceptualisation of fascism in
Joan Anton Mellón (ed.), El fascismo clásico (1919–1945) y sus epígonos
(Madrid: Tecnos, 2012).
2 Juan José Linz, ‘An Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Spain’, in Erick
Allardt and Yrjö Littunen (eds.), Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems:
Contributions to Comparative Political Sociology (Helsinki: The Academic
Bookstore, 1964). See also the complete works of Linz, edited by José Ramón
Montero and Thomas Jeffrey Miley, Juan José Linz: Obras escogidas, 7 vols.
(Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2008–2013), as
well as the chapter in the present volume by María Luz Morán.
3 Although it became customary to speak of the ‘exemplary’ and ‘peaceful’
transition to democracy in Spain after the death of General Franco, the
period was characterised by a great deal of tension and much violence, as
reflected in works such as those of Mariano Sánchez Soler, La transición
sangrienta. Una historia violenta del proceso democrático en España (1975–
1983) (Barcelona: Península, 2010) and Xavier Casals, La transición
española. El voto ignorado de las armas (Barcelona: Pasado & Presente, 2016).
4 This is the line taken by Ángel Viñas in La otra cara del Caudillo. Mitos y
realidades en la biografía de Franco (Barcelona: Crítica, 2015).
5 Ismael Saz created the term ‘fascistised regime’ as a means of acknowledging
ruiz carciner - xx - index - r1 27/09/2018 15:39 Page 13

Introduction 13

the fascist foundations of the dictatorship, while recognising its conservative

elements and the strength of the Catholic sectors throughout. See Saz,
Fascismo y franquismo, and Ismael Saz, Las caras del franquismo (Granada:
Comares, 2013). The complexity of the Francoist political cultures is dealt
with in Manuel Pérez Ledesma and Ismael Saz (eds.), Del franquismo a la
democracia 1936–2013 (Madrid/Zaragoza: Marcial Pons Historia /Prensas
de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2015).
6 A recent historiographical analysis of Francoism by Glicerio Sánchez Recio,
“Dictadura franquista e historiografía del franquismo”, in José Luis de la
Granja (ed.), La España del siglo XX a debate. Homenaje a Manuel Tuñón de
Lara (Madrid: Tecnos, 2017), p. 189 and ff. There are many thematic or
sectorial accounts of the period, but there is not sufficient space here to offer
an overview of all the research. One of the best sources is the excellent
synthesis of Borja de Riquer, La dictadura de Franco, vol. 9 of Josep Fontana
y Ramón Villares (dirs.), Historia de España (Barcelona: Crítica/Marcial
Pons, 2010).
7 Important here are the works of Santos Juliá, such as Historia de las dos
Españas (Madrid: Taurus, 2004), and the books of Jordi Gracia, such as
Estado y Cultura. El despertar de una conciencia crítica bajo el franquismo,
1940–1962 (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006) and La resistencia silenciosa,
Fascismo y cultura en España (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004). An up-to-date
vision of the Falange throughout the regime can be found is Miguel Ángel
Ruiz Carnicer (ed.), Falange. Las culturas políticas del fascismo en la España
de Franco (1936–1975) (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2013).
8 An outstanding volume on the subject is Nigel Townson (ed.), Spain
Transformed: The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959–75 (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010). See also Glicerio Sánchez Recio (ed.), Eppure si muove.
La percepción de los cambios en España (1959–1975) (Madrid: Biblioteca
Nueva, 2008). Arguably one of the best books on the later Franco regime is
Carme Molinero and Pere Ysàs, La anatomía del franquismo. De la supervi-
vencia a la agonía, 1945–1977 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2008). See also Ismael Saz
(ed.), Crisis y descomposición del franquismo, Ayer, nº 68, 2007 (4).
9 This project, HAR-2012-36528, has been financed by the Spanish Ministry
of the Economy and Competition.
10 Spaniards regarded the Transition as a sucess from the moment that a
pluralistic parliament was elected in the general election of June 1977. This
perception was reaffirmed over the following years, when the Spanish model
became an international reference point. See Josep. M. Colomer, La transi-
ción a la democracia: el modelo español (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1998), p. 9
and ff. In December 1995, twenty years after the death of Franco, a survey
of the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (Centre for Sociological
Research), which polled the public on the most varied subjects, revealed that
78.9% of Spaniards regarded the Transition as ‘a source of pride’. Estudio
2201 downloaded from www.cis.es on 13 November 2017.
11 An example of this vision is Emmanuel Rodríguez López, Por qué fracasó la
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14 MIGUEL ÁNGEL RUIZ CARNICER

democracia en España. La transición y el régimen del 78 (Madrid: Traficantes

de sueños, 2015).
12 Raymond Carr and Juan Pablo Fusi, Spain: Dictatorship to Democracy
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979) are the precursors, but the following
list is very long. The following books are worth citing for their academic
impact: Robert P. Clark and Michael H. Hatzel (eds.), Spain in the 1980s:
The Democratic Transition and a New International Role (Cambridge:
Ballinger, 1987); Ramón Cotarelo, Transición democrática y consolidación
democrática: España, 1975–1986 (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones
Sociológicas, 1992); Paul Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain 1969–
1982 (London: Routledge, 1987); José María Maravall, La política de la
transición 1975–1980 (Madrid, Taurus, 1981); and Javier Tusell and Álvaro
Soto (eds.), Historia de la transición 1975–1986 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial,
1996). For a more recent and critical perspective, see Ferrán Gallego, El mito
de la transición. La crisis del franquismo y los orígenes de la democracia (1973–
1977) (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003) and Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, Atado y mal
atado: el suicidio institucional del franquismo y el surgimiento de la democracia
(Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2014). A recent bibliographical revision of the
subject can be found in Xosé M. Núñez Seixas (ed.), Lina Gálvez Muñoz and
Javier Muñoz Soro, España en democracia, 1975–2011, volume 10 of the
Historia de España (Barcelona: Crítica/Marcial Pons, 2017), directed by
Josep Fontana and Ramón Villares, p. 587 and ff.
13 This is the case of associationism, as shown in the book by Pamela Radcliff,
Making Democratic Citizens in Spain: Civil Society and the Popular Origins of
the Transition, 1960–78 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The
neighbourhood movement is also tackled in Carme Molinero and Pere Ysàs
(eds.), Construint la ciutat democratica: El moviment veïnal durante el tard-
ofranquisme i la transició (Barcelona: Icaria/UAB, 2010). The socialisation
of the young in Falangist values and their later evolution towards anti-
Francoist positions can be found in Alfonso Lazo, Historias falangistas del
sur de España. Una teoría sobre vasos comunicantes, (Sevilla: Ediciones
Espuela de Plata, 2015). A recent approach to the global construction of citi-
zenship in relation to the early social movements in Spain, which
undermined the legitimacy of the Franco regime, in Tamar Groves, Nigel
Townson, Inbal Ofer, and Antonio Herrera, Social Movements and the
Spanish Transition. Building Citizenship in Parishes, Neighbourhoods, Schools
and the Countryside (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
14 Samuel F. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late
Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklhoma Press, 1991) and
Guillermo O Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead
(eds.), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Southern Europe (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1986.).
15 Víctor Pérez Díaz, The Return of Civil Society: The Emergence of Democratic
Spain (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998).
16 Richard Gunther, “Spain: the Very Model of the Modern Elite Settlement”,
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Introduction 15

in John Higley and Richard Gunther (eds.), Elites and Democratic

Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 38–80.
17 Omar G. Encarnación, The Myth of Civil Society: Social Capital and
Democratic Consolidation in Spain and Brazil (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003).
18 Sergio Bitar and Abraham F. Lowenthal (eds.), Democratic Transitions:
Conversations with World Leaders (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 2015).
19 As shown in the volume edited by Manuel Pérez Ledesma and Ismael Saz,
Del franquismo a la democracia, 1936–2013. Historia de las culturas políticas
en España y América Latina, vol. IV (Madrid/Zaragoza: Marcial Pons
Historia/Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2015).
20 “We, the sons and daughters of the victors and the vanquishes”, it says in
the ‘Appeal of 1st April’, in Santos Juliá, Nosotros, los abajo firmantes. Una
historia de España a través de manifiestos y protestas (1896–2013), (Barcelona:
Galaxia Gutemberg, 2014), p. 380.
21 Santos Juliá, Camarada Javier Pradera (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutemberg,
2012).
22 Felipe Nieto, La aventura comunista de Jorge Semprún. Exilio, clandestinidad
y ruptura (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2014). A recent recapitulation of the efforts
made during the Civil War itself to supersede the war and avoid a dictator-
ship by means of pacts and agreements that would lead to a transition to
democracy can be found in Santos Juliá, Transición. Historia de una política
española (1937–2017), (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutemberg, 2017).
23 There are many examples, but one of the first and best are the memoirs of
Laureano López Rodó, a close collaborator of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco
and the embodiment of the developmental sectors linked to Opus Dei. See
Laureano López Rodó, La larga marcha hacia la monarquía (Barcelona:
Noguer, 1977).
24 Federico Jiménez Losantos, La dictadura silenciosa: mecanismos totalitarios
en nuestra democracia (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1993). This was a bestseller.
It contended that the socialism of Felipe González was destroying Spain and
its unity as a result of the agreements with the Basque and Catalan nation-
alists, as well as establishing mechanisms of social control that were
undermining democracy in Spain.
25 In his prologue written for the book edited by Juan C. García, La Falange
imposible. La palabra de la generación perdida (1950–1975), (Barcelona:
Ediciones Nueva República, 2007), José María Adán argues that it was the
Falangists who brought democracy to Spain and that this has been under-
mined because it has distanced itself from its initial values. From this
perspective, the Falangist reformists, together with the king, were respon-
sible for the triumph of democracy. For an academic perspective, see the
recent book by Álvaro de Diego, La transición sin secretos. Los franquistas
trajeron la democracia (Madrid: Actas, 2017), the subtitle of which explains
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16 MIGUEL ÁNGEL RUIZ CARNICER

the book’s thesis. A very small and contradictory part of the regime’s
political class – the Falangist reformists of the late Franco period – is equated
with the Francoists as a whole, despite the fact that they always opposed the
establishment of a Western-style liberal democracy in Spain.
26 This is the case of the leading revisionist of Francoism, Pio Moa, especially
in his books for the general public, such as Franco, Un balance histórico
(Barcelona: Planeta, 2005). The comparison with primie minister Antonio
Cánovas del Castillo is on page 190.
27 One of the most revealing accounts of this subject is that of Nicolás Sartorius
and Alberto Sabio Alcutén, El final de la dictadura. La conquista de la demo-
cracia en España, 1975–1977 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2008).
28 See, amongst others accounts, those of Elena Hernández Sandoica, Miguel
Ángel Ruiz Carnicer and Marc Baldó Lacomba, Estudiantes contra Franco
(1939–1975). Oposición política y movilización juvenil (Madrid: La Esfera de
los Libros, 2007), Javier Muñoz Soro, “La disidencia universitaria e intelec-
tual”, in Abdón Mateos (ed.), La España de los años cincuenta, (Madrid:
Eneida, 2008), p. 201 and ff., and Antonio López Pina (ed.), La generación
del 56 (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2010).
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2
The Sociologists and the Analysis
of Social (and Political) Change in
Spain between 1962 and 1982
MARIA LUZ MORÁN CALVO-SOTELO

The goal of this chapter is to evaluate the way in which the social sciences
in Spain, especially socio-political analysis, tried to make sense of the
social changes that took place in the period under study, 1962 to 1982. I
will focus on a number of interpretations regarding the nature of Spanish
society, its evolution and its principal problems. The visibility that the
work of the social scientists gradually acquired explains, in my view, the
importance of a clearly defined set of diagnoses that supported the idea
of a society – at the beginning of the period in question – in the throes of
modernisation, which, by the end of the period, was fully modernised
and comparable to its European neighbours. This interpretation even-
tually became hegemonic. Despite certain pecularities of Spain’s
modernisation being acknowledged and distinct visions of this process
being deployed, it was concluded that political change – what became
known as the ‘Spanish political transition’ – was not only desirable but
also practically inevitable.
The twenty years between 1962 and 1982 constitute an exceptional
period. In contrast to the extreme marginality of the social sciences in
Spain from the moment of their introduction, and in comparision with
the predominance of a strictly economic conception of society and
politics from the mid 1990s, socio-political analysis gained in academic
weight, as well as acquiring a notable visibility in the discourse of
politics and the media.1 As a result, during the last years of the Franco
regime, but above all during the Transition and the consolidation of
democracy – the end of which is normally taken as 1982 with the forma-
tion of the first Socialist government – a well-worked narrative emerged
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18 MARIA LUZ MORÁN CALVO-SOTELO

on the nature and development of Spanish society. In my opinion, this

played an important role in certain decisions, shifts and strategies of the
political parties, especially the Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD)
(Union of the Democratic Centre) and the Partido Socialista Obrero
Español (PSOE) (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), and eventually
became a core part of the new democratic political culture. Even at the
risk of exaggerating, I would go so far as to state that this narrative
became something very similar to what Margaret Somers defines as an
“ideational regime”.2
In the last stage of this ‘Golden Age’, the experts and researchers in
political sociology became so involved in the main media outlets that
there was talk of a ‘mediatic sociology’.3 Some occupied important
positions in the political parties4 and in government.5 The presence of
the sociologists, all of them professors at public universities, was an
unprecedented development given their scarce presence within the
Francoist political elite. My goal is not to carry out an historical analysis
of sociology during these years in the strict sense, although I will
inevitably have to refer to its origins as well as to certain events that
shaped its development.6 Rather, I will try to introduce the principal
figures behind the dominant interpretation of Spanish modernisation
and political development. I will first focus on the institutions (university
faculties, schools, research centres, and so on) in which debates were
generated regarding the role of the social sciences in society. This
concerned a highly significant epistemological question that translated
into a tension between a pragmatic conception of sociology as a ‘tech-
nical’ discipline, which could be applied to the most pressing social
problems, as against the approaches that emphasised its ‘theoretical’
capacity to transform social reality. I shall also refer to a number of figures
who developed the work that resulted in these interpretations. In addi-
tion, I shall consider the reception of certain currents of thought, above
all structural functionalism, that provided the theoretical frameworks for
the characterisation of Spain as a modern country that marched
inevitably towards democratisation, as well as the channels by which
these debates, analyses and investigations became known. The last part
of the chapter will be dedicated to the essential features of the interpre-
tation of the Transition that has been hegemonic until the early 21st
century. Incidentally, I wish to acknowledge an important limitation to
my work. I have focused on one of the possible stories, that of the domi-
nant narrative on socio-political change in Spain, and I will try to show
the way in which this was constructed and how it shaped public opinion
and certain political actors. But there is also another story, not considered
here, which is arguably as interesting and relevant as the one which I am
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