From partisan to pluralist ideology: the changing practices of democracy through Spain’s 20th-century constitutional moments

Abstract

This article explores the practices of democracy in Spain through the lens of its 20th-century constitutional moments, namely, those around the 1931 and the 1978 constitutions, with the aim of elucidating its changing ideological significance. Whereas in 1931, supporting democracy had a strongly partisan meaning, as every endorsement of the democratic ideal entailed a conflicting understanding of the Republic’s democratic character, in 1978 it gave rise to an integrative form of pluralism. Even if the former has left a deep imprint on Spanish politics, anticipating a kind of seemingly irreconcilable opposition between left and right, the latter has proved instrumental in the consolidation of the new democratic regime. After the institutional distortion of democracy during the four-decade dictatorship’s ‘organic democracy’, since 1977 the ideal of democracy was thoroughly recast into a pluralist ideology. Unlike views describing it as a consensual regime, the article argues that the politics of consensus tested since the 1977 constitutional debates paved the way for the accommodation of democratic pluralism; furthermore, the culture of pacts it contributed to set up has continued to inspire a new form of adversarial, parliamentary politics well beyond the transition years.

Acknowledgements

This article is part of the Civic Constellation II project (Spain’s National Research Fund, FFI2014-52703-P). The author gratefully acknowledges both the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and the editor’s thoughtful reading of the manuscript.

Notes

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2. Adolfo Suárez, ‘Apuntes sobre la transición política’, in ‘1971–1991: 1000 semanas que hacen historia’, Cambio 16, 1000, 16 January 1991, p. 17.

3. In this sense, even if Stanley Payne’s characterization of the Second Republic as ‘Spain’s first democracy’ carries a positive connotation, it is a historically inaccurate judgement. See his Spain’s First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931–1936 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

4. Diario de Sesiones de las Cortes (Proceedings of the Spanish Parliament), No. 28, 27 August 1931, p. 648.

5. Javier Fernández Sebastián, ‘Democracia’, in Javier Fernández Sebastián and Juan Francisco Fuentes (Eds) Diccionario político y social del siglo XX español (Madrid: Alianza, 2008), pp. 353–358.

6. Santos Juliá, Historias de las dos Españas (Madrid: Taurus, 2004), pp. 139–178.

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8. José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Contraseña del día: saludo a la sencillez de la República’ [1931], in Obras Completas, IV (Madrid: Taurus–Fundación Ortega, 2005), pp. 777–778.

9. Juan F. García Santos, Léxico y política de la Segunda República (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1980), pp. 641–652.

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15. Ibid., p. 69.

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25. Fuero was a medieval name for law. Characteristically fueros were the laws given by monarchs to territories. See e.g. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 511–513.

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31. See, e.g. Diego Diéguez, ‘Spain’s golden silence’, Index on Censorship, 2(1) (1973), pp. 91–100.

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38. Boletín Oficial del Estado (Spain’s Official Bulletin), No. 4, 5 January 1977, p. 170.

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41. Suárez, ‘Apuntes sobre la transición política’, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 17.

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43. Max Weber, ‘Politik als Beruf’ [1919], in Studienausgabe der Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, I/17, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Wolfgang Schluchter, and Birgitt Morgenbrod (Eds) (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1994), pp. 73–74; ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, in Weber, Political Writings, Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 352–353.

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50. Law 5/1985 of the General Electoral Regime, Boletín Oficial del Estado (Spain’s Official Bulletin), No. 147, 20 June 1985. See Ignacio Lago Peñas, ‘Cleavages and thresholds: the political consequences of electoral laws in the Spanish autonomous communities, 1980–2000’, Electoral Studies, 23(1) (2004), pp. 23–43.

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54. See, e.g. Eliseo Aja, El Estado autonómico. Federalismo y hechos diferenciales, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Alianza, 2003), pp. 312–315.

55. Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, trans. Mark Gordon Oakley (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002).

56. See also Paloma Aguilar, Políticas de la memoria y memorias de la política. El caso español en perspectiva comparada (Madrid: Alianza, 2008), pp. 233–412.

57. Boletín Oficial del Estado (Spain’s Official Bulletin), No. 310, 27 December 2007.

58. Walther L. Bernecker, ‘Spaniens Übergang von der Diktatur zur Demokratie. Deutungen, Revisionen, Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52(4) (2004), pp. 693–710.

59. See, e.g. Danielle Rozenberg, ‘Le “pacte d’oubli” de la transition démocratique en Espagne. Retours sur un choix politique controversé’, Politix, 74 (2006), pp. 173–188.

60. Omar G. Encarnación, Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), pp. 102–130.

61. Cercas, Anatomía de un instante, op. cit., Ref. 42, p. 108; Anatomy of a Moment, p. 91.

62. Ibid.

63. Azaña, ‘Discurso en el Ayuntamiento de Barcelona, 18 July 1938’, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 181.

64. Richard Gunther, ‘The Spanish Model Revisited’, in Rogelio Alonso and Diego Muro (Eds) The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition: The Spanish Model (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 23–36.

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