Spain's Transition to Democracy

Spain's Transition to Democracy
Author: Andrea Bonime-blanc
Publisher:
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2019-10-02
Genre: Constitutional history
ISBN: 9780367288525

After the death of longtime dictator Generalissimo Franco in 1975, King Juan Carlos acted decisively to institute a dramatic change in Spanish politics. By appointing an unknown Christian democrat, Adolfo Suarez, as prime minister, the king paved the way for the transformation of Spain from an authoritarian regime to a liberal democracy. Central to this singular transition was the formulation of the new Spanish constitution, an unusual process of political give and take. Dr. Bonime-Blanc examines the evolutionary phases of the constitution-making process, describing the conflicts, maneuvers, and compromises of the principal political players involved. Analyzing the negotiations and their constitutional results, she pinpoints the factors that make a successful transition to democracy possible. In her closing chapter, the author illustrates the lessons of the Spanish case and their practical implications for future transitions to democracy.

The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition

The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition
Author: Diego Muro
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2010-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136852247

Designed to evaluate the paradigmatic view of the Spanish transition as an ideal model for political and social change, this new and innovative volume appraises Spain's movement to democracy from a variety of important perspectives.

Memory and Amnesia

Memory and Amnesia
Author: Paloma Aguilar Fernández
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781571817570

Using a rich variety of sources, this book explores how the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War influenced the transition to democracy in Spain after Franco's death in 1975.

Freedom Betrayed

Freedom Betrayed
Author: Michael Arthur Ledeen
Publisher: American Enterprise Institute
Total Pages: 208
Release: 1996
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780844739922

In Freedom Betrayed, Michael Ledeen weaves together key moments in the fall of communism with the skill of a born storyteller. His insider's knowledge of the interplay of complex personalities and Byzantine strategies makes a compelling narrative - a narrative enlivened by his wit and flair for the dramatic. He observes that just when democracy seemed everywhere triumphant - with the fall of antidemocratic regimes in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa - our leaders failed those fledgling democracies, first by misunderstanding the monumental achievement of that triumph and second by not providing the political, legal, and entrepreneurial know-how and support the new democrats so desperately needed.

Party Formation and Democratic Transition in Spain

Party Formation and Democratic Transition in Spain
Author: J. Hopkin
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 289
Release: 1999-01-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780333717097

The abrupt collapse and dissolution of the Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD), the party which governed Spain during the crucial period of the transition to democracy (1977-82), is one of the most extraordinary events in the history of European party politics. This book develops an original theoretical framework for the study of party institutionalisation, and draws on a wide range of empirical sources to offer new insights into the causes of the UCD's collapse.

Disremembering the Dictatorship

Disremembering the Dictatorship
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2021-08-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004483225

Most accounts of the Spanish transition to democracy have been celebratory exercises at the service of a stabilizing rather than a critical project of far-reaching reform. As one of the essays in this volume puts it, the “pact of oblivion,” which characterized the Spanish transition to democracy, curtailed any serious attempt to address the legacies of authoritarianism that the new democracy inherited from the Franco era. As a result, those legacies pervaded public discourse even in newly created organs of opinion. As another contributor argues, the Transition was based on the erasure of memory and the invention of a new political tradition. On the other hand, memory and its etiolation have been an object of reflection for a number of film directors and fiction writers, who have probed the return of the repressed under spectral conditions. Above all, this book strives to present memory as a performative exercise of democratic agents and an open field for encounters with different, possibly divergent, and necessarily fragmented recollections. The pact of the Transition could not entirely disguise the naturalization of a society made of winners and losers, nor could it ensure the consolidation of amnesia by political agents and by the tools that create hegemony by shaping opinion. Spanish society is haunted by the specters of a past it has tried to surmount by denying it. It seems unlikely that it can rid itself of its ghosts without in the process undermining the democracy it sought to legitimate through the erasure of memories and the drowning of witnesses' voices in the cacaphony of triumphant modernization.

Spanish Politics

Spanish Politics
Author: Omar G. Encarnación
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2008-07-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0745639925

An introductory textbook on contemporary Spanish politics, this book shows how Spain made a smooth transition from authoritarian to democratic rule, each chapter dealing with a different aspect of this process. The book goes on to analyse the consequences of the socialist administration of Zapatero.

Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain

Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain
Author: Laura Desfor Edles
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1998-04-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521628853

This is a book about the role of culture in social change and the Spanish transition to democracy after Franco. Laura Desfor Edles takes a distinctively culturalist approach to the 'strategy of consensus' deployed by the Spanish elite and uses systematic textual interpretation (with a particular focus on Spanish newspapers) to show how a new symbolic framework emerged in post-Franco Spain which enabled the resolution of specific events critical to the success of the transition. In addition to uncovering underlying processes of symbolization, she shows that politico-historical transitions can themselves be understood as ritual processes, involving as they do phases and symbols of separation, liminality and re-aggregation.

Democracy in Modern Spain

Democracy in Modern Spain
Author: Richard Gunther
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780300101522

Based on more than 500 hours of interviews with key political elites (under both the Franco regime and the current democracy), extensive analyses of public opinion and electoral behavior surveys, and other original research, the book sheds important new light on Spain's democractic regime and its key institutions."--BOOK JACKET.