William Chislett - Spain: What Everyone Needs to KnowRG

SPAIN

WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW

WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW

WILLIAM CHISLETT

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chislett, William, 1951

Spain : what everyone needs to know / William Chislett.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780199936465 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN 9780199936441

(hardback : alk. paper) 1. SpainHistory20th century.

2. SpainHistory21st century. 3. SpainPolitics and government

20th century. 4. SpainPolitics and government21st century.

5. SpainEconomic conditions20th century. 6. SpainEconomic

conditions

21st century. I. Title.

DP272.C47 2013

946.08dc23

2012051579

1 3 5 7 9 5 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

For Sonia, Toms, and Benjamin, without whom the opportunity
to write this book would never have arisen.

Spain is not so different, so special as it is manipulatively said to be. We must stamp out once and for all the idea that Spain is an anomalous country a case apart, an exception that justifies any action.

Julin Maras, philosopher
and sociologist (19142005)

Spain is different.

Tourism slogan in the 1960s during
the Franco dictatorship

I thank Angela Chnapko, my editor at Oxford University Press, for encouraging me to write this work, and Katherine Ulrich for her meticulous copyediting. I am also grateful to the following people who over the years, and in different ways, have enhanced my understanding of Spain: Tom Burns, Salustiano del Campo, John Carlin, Guillermo de la Dehesa, Michael Eaude, Fernando Fernndez, Soledad Fox, Ian Gibson, Ferdi Grafe, Mauro Guilln, Jorge Hay, Jos Antonio Herce, Gabriel Jackson, Michael Jacobs, Emilio Lamo de Espinosa, Elvira Lindo, Javier Maras, Mariano Morcate, Marcelino Oreja, Vctor Prez-Daz, Philip Petit, Paul Preston, Michael Reid, Gabriel Tortella, Giles Tremlett, Nigel Townson, and Jos Varela Ortega. Given the compressed nature of the series What Everyone Needs to Know, with much to be covered in a short space and the temptation to oversimplify a very complex country such as Spain, it was very important for me to have the manuscript read by a series of experts in different fields. I was very fortunate to persuade the following friends to read all or part of the manuscript, and I much appreciate the comments they made. The manuscript was read by: the historians Santos Juli and Charles Powell, the novelist Antonio Muoz Molina, the economist Valeriano Muoz, the political scientist Diego Muro, the Oxford University academic Eric Southworth, and the author Jeremy Treglown. Finally, Juan Manuel Cendoya, executive vice president, communications, corporate marketing and research, of Banco Santander, the euro zones largest bank by market capitalization, and Alejandra Kindelan, global head of research and public policy of Banco Santander, arranged generous funding for some of my research, and with no strings attached. I thank them for their enlightened approach.

Alliance USA

Oxford University Press -Chislett/Spain

Map 1 - Spain

02/26/13 - Third Proof

SPAIN

WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW

I came to Spain as a young journalist in 1974, the year before General Franco, the countrys dictator since winning the 193639 civil war, died. I had intended, after a short spell teaching English in Madrid, to return to journalism in Britain, but, instead, was swayed into staying by my then girlfriend (now wife) and Spanish friends. They were convinced the ailing ruler would not live much longer and post-Franco Spain would be a much more exciting place for a budding journalist than my home country.

According to a long-running joke at the time, thousands of Spaniards had short index fingers because every year they had tapped surfaces with it while saying that this really was the year when Franco would die. When he died in 1975 at the age of 82, Spain, a backwater known for little else apart from its mass tourism (today, Spain receives more than 57 million tourists a year, one of the largest numbers in the world), bullfighting, flamenco, siestas, and Europes longest-serving dictator, became overnight a major international story amid fears, played up not only by the more sensationalist international media, that the country would be plunged into another civil war.

I returned to journalism after Harry Debelius, the longtime Madrid correspondent of The Times of London, hired me to work with him. It was an intense three years during which I interviewed many of the key protagonists of the transition to democracy, including King Juan Carlos, Francos successor as head of state. The king, nicknamed Juan Carlos the Brief by Communists when he assumed the throne, as they predicted he would be swept away along with other remnants of the Franco regime, appreciated a joke against himself when we met. Why was I crowned in a submarine? Because deep down I am not so stupid. Nothing could be truer, given the remarkably smooth transition to democracy (the first successful effort in Spains turbulent history), which became something of a model for Latin American and former Communist countries. At the other end of the spectrum, I interviewed (in the sanctuary of the Biarritz golf club in southwestern France) Jos Miguel Bearan Ordeana (nom de guerre, Argala), a member of the violent Basque separatist ETA commando that detonated a bomb in December 1973 under the car of the 70-year-old Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the prime minister and Francos political heir. The bomb hurtled Carrero Blancos car into the air and over the roof of the San Francisco de Borja Church, where he had just been attending mass. Argala was later murdered in Anglet, France, near the border with Spain, by extreme-right-wing activists in similar circumstances.