100 Books, Stories From 20 Countries, More Than a Dozen Scholars: Understanding National Transitions — Spain

Why We're Doing This Series

A year ago, we asked a question: “Has this society been too good to young people?”

It is worth pursuing along at least two lines. First, beyond materialism, how is the culture and the value system of the society that will belong to young people being built? If what gets handed down to young people is a chaotic society — confused values, a lack of trust and respect, rampant cynicism, violence, ignorance, no sense of gratitude — if the civilization humanity has accumulated is disregarded, then by no measure can we call that “being good to young people.”

The second line looks self-evident for now but will cause growing concern: how will the future system of justice be established, or maintained? This is really the question the American political scientist Robert Putnam raised in Our Kids: people widely believe that “political inequality is more frightening than economic inequality,” and that “inequality between generations is worse than inequality within any one generation.” It is also the question Woodrow Wilson faced a hundred years ago: in governing a society undergoing industrialization, how do you find a way that benefits everyone in that society at once?

For the world the younger generation will live in, this is bound up with the redistribution of interests in an industrializing society, and with whether a genuinely just and equal society ever actually takes shape.

That is the question we set out with.

Unavoidably, it runs into the idea of transition. What we mean by “transition” here is really a discussion of our own future — what kind of world will today's and tomorrow's young people live in?

In the Chinese context, this might be put in a different vocabulary — the road to “common prosperity,” say, or worry over the stratification and calcification of social classes and how to address it. One thing is certain: no one, including those in charge, intends to avoid this question.

QDaily invited more than a dozen scholars to write more than a dozen articles on the big topic of “transition.” We hope they give you something to think about. More important, each article is followed by a recommended reading list on national transitions. If you're interested, it should make further reading and thinking easier.

Immanuel Kant said: “The greatest problem for the human species is to achieve a civil society which can administer justice universally.” QDaily continues to believe that reporting like this helps every one of us who cares about the future think a little further. After all, the problem we face is so large that it deserves some real thought.

This is the second piece in the series, and it looks at Spain's transition.

On October 21, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced that Madrid would revoke Catalonia's regional autonomy, dissolve the Catalan regional government, and call local elections within six months.

Twenty days earlier, Catalonia had held an independence referendum. More than 2.28 million people — 43% of Catalan voters — took part, and more than 90% of them voted for independence. It was the second such referendum in Catalonia's history, and the share voting for independence was 10 percentage points higher than in the 2014 vote. Spain's Constitutional Court soon declared the result illegal.

The conflict between the two sides kept escalating, and the situation grew severe. The New York Times wrote that this was the biggest test Spanish democracy had faced since the end of Francisco Franco's dictatorship in the 1970s.

Franco's dictatorship in Spain ended on November 20, 1975. That day, the 83-year-old dictator who had ruled Spain for 36 years died. Two days later, the heir he had designated in 1969, the 37-year-old Juan Carlos I, was crowned and sworn in as king of Spain.

Starting that year, it took Spain only seven years — with the king, the prime minister, and society all pushing in the same direction — to launch and complete what King Juan Carlos called a “bloodless, non-violent process of democratization,” one of the most dazzling democratic transitions in 20th-century world political history.

The author of this piece, Xiao Han, is an associate professor at the China University of Political Science and Law; Xiao Han is a pen name, and his real name is Ye Jing. Born in 1969, he worked in his early career at the Unirule Institute of Economics and later served as legal counsel to Caijing magazine. He now works mainly on constitutional history and social theory. His books include Seventeen Strikes of the Gavel and Idle Thoughts.

This piece looks in detail at how Spain's successful democratic transition happened 40 years ago.

In his view, Franco's foresight, King Juan Carlos's firm push for change, Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez's political skill, the opposition's rationality and restraint, the stable society created by a judiciary with a measure of independence, a moderately open media, and religious organizations with a democratic spirit — none of these was dispensable. Together they assembled a well-equipped, well-running express train of Spanish democratic transition, one able to break free of the gravitational pull of dictatorship's aftereffects and pass safely through the turbulent, narrow strait of history into the open sea of democratic government, all the way to today. And today's Catalan independence referendum movement is, in a sense, the recurrence of an ailment that Spain's successful democratic transition 40 years ago seemed to have cured.

Xiao Han reviews the British historian Paul Preston's work on Spain's transition, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain. He argues that because the book gives such a detailed and comprehensive account and analysis of the causes and consequences of Spain's democratic transition, it has become the standard introduction and required reading in the field.

To Understand Today's Catalan Independence Movement, You Have to Look Back at That Democratic Transition 40 Years Ago

Right now, the independence referendum movement in the Kingdom of Spain's region of Catalonia is running hot — hot enough, in fact, to have touched off a degree of low-level violence. Needless to say, it has set off a new constitutional crisis in Spain. Anyone with some knowledge of modern Spanish history will naturally think of this as the recurrence of an ailment that seemed to have been cured 40 years ago, during that successful democratic transition.

On November 20, 1975, Franco, who had ruled Spain as dictator for 36 years, died. On November 22, the heir he had designated in 1969, the 37-year-old Juan Carlos I, was crowned and sworn in as king of Spain. Over the following seven years, Spain launched and successfully completed what King Juan Carlos called a “bloodless, non-violent process of democratization,” becoming one of the most dazzling democratic transitions in 20th-century world political history.

Even so, this process — one that overall did achieve a “bloodless, non-violent process of democratization” — was fraught with uncertainty over those seven years; one misstep and the wheels of reform could have overturned or even sunk entirely. Set aside the constant threat the Basque armed terrorist group ETA posed to the democratic transition; set aside the fact that the transition could have died on the spot had the king not personally stepped in to turn back the tide during Colonel Antonio Tejero Molina's “2.23” military coup attempt in 1981 — even persuading the Socialist Workers' Party and the Communist Party to join the current of transition, earlier on, was no easy task. As with any successful democratic transition, Spain's success was the collective achievement of countless people's courage and wisdom.

The British historian Paul Preston has studied Spanish history for more than 30 years and is especially known for his work on the Spanish Civil War. His books related to Spain's democratic transition include The Triumph of Democracy in Spain (1986), Franco: A Biography (1996), and Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy (2004). Of these, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain, published in 1986 (the Chinese edition was published by the Shanghai Academy of Sciences Press in February 2017, translated by Li Yongxue), has become the standard introduction and required reading in the field because of how thoroughly it accounts for and analyzes the causes and consequences of the transition.

The chapter titles of The Triumph of Democracy in Spain sum up, in brief, how Spain moved smoothly from the Franco era to the era of Prime Minister González, whose Socialist Workers' Party won the general election. It took six stages: the Blanco stalling phase in Franco's late years (1969–1973), the Navarro struggle phase (1974–1976), the Suárez coordination phase (1976–1977), the Suárez democratic-bonding phase (1977–1979), the phase in which Suárez exited the stage and democracy was renewed (1979–1981), and the phase in which González consolidated democracy (1981–1982). Four of these six phases took place after Franco's death.

These six phases of democratic transition were shaped by the political forces formed during the Franco era and by the ideas and actions of the leading political figures on the stage at the time — but, seen more fully, the transition process was both a product of its era and a successful unburdening of historical baggage.

The Long Transition Really Begins with Spain's Second Republic, Before Franco Came to Power

Looking back, Spain's democratic transition in the late 1970s was a great success, and to this day the country remains a stable constitutional monarchy. But it was not Spain's first democratic transition, so we need to go further back in time to see things more clearly. The Triumph of Democracy in Spain does not cover the period before 1969, but the continuity of history is self-evident.

In Spain: A History, edited by Raymond Carr, the final chapter, written by Sebastian Balfour, runs from 1931 to 2000, and its closing line is: “In the new Spain, reconciliation with the past remains unfinished business.” The history of the Second Republic, of the civil war, and of Franco's 36-year rule were all part of the burden Spain carried into the democratic transition it began in 1976. One misstep and this historical baggage could have wrecked the train of reform entirely.

After Spain's crushing defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898, its international standing collapsed; the glory of a former empire on which “the sun never set” was gone, and domestic politics fell into economic stagnation and disorder. The constitutional monarchy that had existed since 1875 fell into crisis as a result, and neither the Catholic establishment nor the military, taking turns at dictatorship, managed to clean out the rot and revive the country. In an age of widespread illiteracy, universal male suffrage — introduced as early as 1887 — not only failed to move Spain quickly toward democracy but, for lack of supporting institutions (an independent and authoritative judiciary, for one), simply gave cover to oligarchy or dictatorship, and even fed a populist split into left and right that ran through the whole society.

After 30 years of political turmoil, a radical republican movement fed by these realities became an unstoppable current. But as the British historian Martin Blinkhorn put it in Democracy and Civil War in Spain, “it was clear that, by the early 1920s, the absolutist monarchy was incapable, in its existing form, of successfully managing the difficult transition from ‘oligarchic' liberalism to genuine democracy.” In fact, it wasn't just the royal house that lacked this capacity — no social force at the time had it either. So although Spain didn't immediately see “power fall to the ground,” as the French historian Taine described France in 1789, like every place in turmoil that lacks a healthy force to steer the transition, it eventually fell under the sway of whichever extreme faction happened to gain the upper hand.

In Spain, that force was the far-left “republican” camp. In August 1930, the various republican factions signed a pact in San Sebastián aimed at overthrowing the monarchy. Two months later, the left-wing Socialist Party joined the “Revolutionary Committee.” In December, left-wing officers launched an uprising in Aragón; though it failed, it shook King Alfonso XIII badly enough that his government decided to move ahead with elections and a representative system. In the elections of April 12, 1931, the republican camp — a mix of communists, syndicalists, anarchists, and other leftist forces — won a sweeping victory. Alfonso XIII, saying he did not want to see “a single drop of Spanish blood shed” again, chose exile, and the monarchy came to an end.

On April 14, 1931, Spain's Second Republic was founded, and the Revolutionary Committee took power as a provisional government. This regime, nominally a democratic republic but in reality a far-left one, pushed through a series of radical socialist policies — nationalization, public ownership of land, fixed wage schedules, the abolition of the Catholic Church's established status — that only widened and deepened the split between the country's left and right. At the same time, since these radical policies were themselves hard to carry out, they stirred up further resentment at the bottom of society. And a republic without an authoritative judiciary had no way to rein in communists, anarchists, or right-wing populists alike. Violent clashes between left and right broke out continuously, the pendulum swinging back and forth across the political middle with wide amplitude, so that the “republic” was one in name only.

After the second general election in 1932, the first left-wing government fell and the right took power. Over its two years in office, the right made a series of tit-for-tat policy reversals — returning confiscated land, releasing right-wingers who had been jailed for armed rebellion, repealing most of the left's reform legislation from the previous two years. This enraged the left, and the fractured left factions regrouped as the Popular Front, built around the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers' Party, which won again in the 1936 election.

On February 19, 1936, after a smooth transfer of power, the far left demanded that the new left-wing president, Manuel Azaña, push through even more radical policies. When they didn't get a satisfactory answer, they simply resorted to violent looting on their own, and rioters held in prison launched riots behind bars; rather than putting these down, the new government, without even seeking parliamentary approval, went ahead and released them. Old and new offenders alike then looted the property of the rich and seized land, and the new government issued statements declaring their actions legal after the fact. Even as it encouraged and tacitly supported anarchist violence and crime, the new government kept calling on all sides to stop the violence, and the gap between its words and deeds cost it all credibility — which finally infuriated the right completely, driving them to call on the military to step in and restore order. Both left and right kept drifting toward extremes; by that point, Spain no longer allowed anyone to stay neutral — both sides pulled hard, forcing the middle to pick a camp. Right at that moment, a left-wing officer was assassinated by the right, and the left retaliated by killing the prominent right-wing legislator Calvo Sotelo. When the right held a mass protest march at his funeral, the new government's police shot and killed two people — an incident that led the right to give up entirely on the government and parliament, and directly set in motion General Mola's and General Franco's military rebellion against the government. On July 17, 1936, the two generals issued a declaration and marched their forces on Madrid, opening the curtain on the Spanish Civil War.

As the historian of Spain Burnett Bolloten shows in his sweeping three-volume study of the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution, it was the Second Republic's own far-left policies — nationalization, public ownership of land — together with the refusal of grassroots anarchist and populist forces on both sides to submit to the rule of law, that were the real culprits behind the civil war.

As events unfolded, this brutal war became one of the strangest phenomena in the history of civil wars anywhere in the world: both the far left and the far right of Europe and America became deeply entangled in it. Fascist Germany and Italy backed the Spanish far right, while the Soviet Union, the Comintern, and leftists across the globe backed the Spanish far left. Spain became an international battlefield, and the Spanish Civil War became a dress rehearsal for the Second World War.

The civil war lasted three years and cost at least 600,000 lives, to say nothing of the devastation it wrought across the economy and every other sector. And within it, the mutual slaughter inside the republican camp itself was especially chilling. George Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War himself, wrote Homage to Catalonia, which expressed his deep suspicion of the so-called progressive republican camp. The atrocities of large-scale killing among comrades that the far-left republicans committed during the war left Orwell pained and repelled — the book later became the seedbed for his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. As for the so-called Fifth Column — originally just a joke made by military men — it ended up a fabrication of the left tied to Stalin's Great Purge, used as a fig leaf to cover the republican camp's mass killing of its own comrades (including the massacre of somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 political prisoners held in jail), a fact long acknowledged by serious, impartial historians. As Orwell wrote, the so-called republicans practiced totalitarianism in substance, carrying out brutal purges of their own side. The Franco camp, by contrast, notorious as it was, engaged in no such self-cannibalization — which may be one important reason it ultimately won the civil war.

Franco: More Than Just a Dictator — What Did He Actually Do?

The German journalist Walther Haubrich, in his book Spanish Politics With and Without Franco, divided the Franco era into three periods: “the early phase of totalitarian rule by the Falange (1939–1945), the institutionalized conservative Catholic phase (1945–1960), and the phase of rule by technocrats and development planners (1960–1973)” (Franco's Legacy: Contemporary Spain, p. 20).

It was precisely the complexity of the Spanish Civil War that shaped Franco, who launched that war and won it: throughout the three phases of his usurped rule, he pursued a strict, unyielding anti-communist policy until his death. What Franco valued most was order. The chaotic democratic politics of the Second Republic era had not led Spain toward democracy but instead plunged it into an abyss of slaughter. Whether for the sake of consolidating his own power or for the sake of national peace and stability, this history left Franco contemptuous of, and deeply wary toward, democratic politics; at the very least, he believed that as long as he lived, democratic politics was simply out of the question. Any dictator, however enlightened, would come to think this way. And yet Franco was not naive: he understood that the cracks running through a society that had just been through a civil war would not disappear under high pressure — they would only lie dormant, waiting for their moment. While Franco was alive, his military government used its iron grip to suppress and outlaw organized resistance, forcibly papering over those barely visible cracks. Once he died, those cracks could be torn wide open and bloody, and the wounds of both history and the present could well burst open together.

Beyond this, the Second Republic era had left behind two especially thorny old problems: regional autonomy for Catalonia and for the Basque Country. The false unity brought about by Franco's high-pressure policies was stripped away the moment he died, becoming the thorniest issue in the democratic transition that followed — nearly all the violence, assassinations, and other terrorist activity of that period were tied to it, and at any moment it threatened to bring the transition to an end.

While Franco was alive, he used his own considerable political skill to keep Spain out of the Second World War, so that during his 36 years in power Spain remained relatively at peace — even during the decade of isolation from the end of World War II to 1959, Spain was at least stable. After joining the European Economic Community, Spain's economy began to modernize; between 1963 and 1973, Spain developed into a mid-tier developed economy, and its GDP at one point ranked eleventh in the world. Economic liberalization inevitably pushes political liberalization along with it. The far-right group led by Franco, the “National Movement,” was in truth a loose patchwork with a weak ideology; the Falange, which Franco had reorganized into the sole legal party, was, compared with the communist parties of the Soviet bloc, likewise a populist patchwork lacking a strong ideology or organizational capacity, and it was easily split apart as the economy developed.

By the later years of the Franco era, political liberalization was already stirring beneath the surface, and Franco's own camp was splitting as a result — it included a strong military faction and technocrats stubbornly loyal to Francoism, like Blanco, but also politicians like Suárez who believed liberalizing and democratizing reform should go ahead, along with plenty of opportunists ready to switch sides at any moment.

The Blanco cabinet of 1969–1973, made up mainly of Falangists, “was a team specifically designed to strangle reform and crush the opposition” (The Triumph of Democracy in Spain, p. 72; all further page citations without other attribution are to this book), and Blanco was assassinated in a bombing by ETA as a result. Under the cabinet that followed, with that lesson before them, the far right realized it might be “the last stop for pure Francoism” (p. 82). The Arias Navarro cabinet even put forward a plan with liberal leanings on February 12, 1974, including “an opening-up of political ideology” and elections for mayors and local officials. But because the Navarro cabinet itself was hesitant and wavering, and because of ETA's increasingly rampant terrorist violence in the Basque Country at the time, the situation slid back several times into repressive, high-pressure conditions, and reform proved hard to push forward. As Haubrich summed it up, “the last two years of the Franco regime under Prime Minister Arias were marked by the failure of cautious attempts at liberalization, a sudden halt to economic growth, and a renewed intensification of police repression” (Franco's Legacy: Contemporary Spain, p. 20). Though Preston's assessment below smacks of exaggeration, it does point to something that situation prepared the ground for: “Arias's clumsy reforms, together with the heavy-handed repression that accompanied them, also pushed the left toward unity. That unity, and the popular fighting spirit that sustained it, was key to the process of democratization” (p. 133).

And so, a few months later — a little more than six months after Franco died — the real reform began.

Juan Carlos: Why Did a Dictator Spend More Than 20 Years Training a Monarch Fit to Lead a Democracy?

Only once we understand this modern Spanish history can we perhaps see clearly the crossroads Spain faced after Franco's death in 1975. As Preston put it, at the very least, “few politicians of either the right or the left could have predicted with any accuracy the political developments of the following decade” (p. 1). Spain's successful democratic transition was the product of many factors combined — the result of human effort and of no small amount of luck. The social foundation always matters, and the unity of the left, which Preston overstresses, was a key factor in this transition. But as at many other historical turning points, the ideas, thinking, and actions of the elite and its representative figures mattered just as much — especially at the very moment the transition took its turn, when how the elite handled the wheel could decide success or failure.

Spain's democratic transition demonstrates this point in every sense.

On July 3, 1976, under the deft arrangement of Torcuato Fernández-Miranda — president of the Council of the Realm, a constitutional scholar and lawyer, and the king's own tutor — King Juan Carlos chose Suárez to be his prime minister. Suárez was young but politically skilled, though he wasn't especially prominent at the time.

This choice, to a great extent, determined the moderate course of Spain's democratic transition, and the statesmanship the king showed in making it can largely be credited to a plan Franco set in motion during his own rule. Paul Preston's account of the facts of Spain's democratic transition is not in dispute — they are all a matter of public record. But the history he tells of the period before the transition is incomplete, and some of his views may be biased. In Franco: A Biography, for instance, he treats Franco's grooming of Juan Carlos merely as an attempt “to tame the threat of a democratic monarchy.” Yet this reading cannot explain why Franco spent more than 20 years continuously training Prince Carlos to be a professional monarch.

As early as 1946, Franco began arranging Juan Carlos's future, when Carlos was only eight years old. After negotiations with Don Juan — Carlos's father, the fourth son of Alfonso XIII, who had a claim to the throne — Carlos returned to Spain in December 1948 and began an education designed according to Franco's plan for a future king. In 1947 Franco had declared Spain a kingdom rather than a republic, but he neither crowned himself nor intended for his own descendants to become king. Judging by his attitude toward Juan Carlos over the following two decades, the passages on Juan Carlos's upbringing in My Private Conversations with Franco, by Franco's cousin Francisco Franco Salgado-Araujo, are highly credible. The book records, for example, that Franco was explicit that Prince Carlos would have to become king through a rigorous modern education carried out in Spain, not abroad (to ensure he never lost touch with the people) — mathematics, military training, service in all three branches of the armed forces, university study, contact with prominent figures across Spanish society, involvement in politics, and other specialized training befitting a king.

Franco said: “If Juan is not prepared to have his son receive this education, or if his son himself is unwilling to accept it, then the prince need not return to Spain — that would mean he is willing to give up his right to succeed to the throne, and I will owe him nothing… If you think I am trying to turn the prince into a member of the Falange, I don't mind that view either” (record of December 20, 1954). A week later, Araujo recorded that his cousin had written complaining that, given the education Franco had arranged, he himself hardly felt fit to be a father. Franco responded: “A father educating his son is one thing; training a prince to govern a country is another. If he doesn't want to send his son here, a prince perfectly suited to the monarchy will have been wasted for nothing” (record of December 28, 1954).

Under Franco's arrangement, once he came of age, Prince Carlos, as heir apparent, traveled widely — beyond “showing his face” all over the country, he circled the globe twice, meeting many foreign dignitaries along the way. On July 22, 1969, Franco formally announced Juan Carlos as his successor after his own death and as Spain's future king. During Franco's serious illness in 1974, Prince Carlos acted as head of state for 45 days, handling routine affairs. Earlier, when Prince Carlos first got involved in political affairs, Franco deliberately kept him from learning too many of the details, so as to prevent him from picking up the administrative bad habits of the dictatorship era.

My Private Conversations with Franco records a conversation from December 5, 1966, that best captures Franco's firm determination to build a modern monarchy:

“Spain cannot have a republican system, because that system has twice produced anarchy for us, and it could well happen again — we should not forget that. That is why parliament has just passed the Organic Law, which will be put to a referendum within a few days, ruling out a republican system as our form of government. The trouble with the monarchist camp is that it has always splintered into many factions, each represented by a different prince. These are small cliques, each putting forward its own political figures, but this kind of clique politics is out of date — it is a product of the 19th century. All monarchists should unite on the basis of the goals of the National Movement, so as to form a strong party as the pillar of a new and modern monarchy. And no one has the legitimate standing and the proper qualities to lead the monarchist camp the way Prince Juan Carlos does. Division within the monarchist camp only benefits the enemies of the current regime, and that would be most harmful to Spain.”

Franco deeply feared a repeat of the brutal episodes of Spain's modern history, and this is why he ruled out a republic and firmly opposed anarchism and communism — this was not, or not merely, an excuse for his own hold on power. His choice of a constitutional monarchy as Spain's future form of government, and his more than two decades of careful grooming of Prince Carlos, were the product of deep deliberation, not an expedient fig leaf for dictatorship. That deliberation, and the foresight it reflected, meant that in the brief instability after his death Spain had a highly unifying national leader — the king — and so avoided repeating the split and warfare of 40 years before.

It was precisely because of Franco's more than two decades of careful cultivation that Spain had, upon his death, a king who immediately pushed the democratic transition forward, with a firmness of will that admitted no hesitation, and whose political training gave him a sharp eye for talent. Without King Carlos, there would have been no Prime Minister Suárez. Franco's dying words to Prince Carlos are said to have been “keep Spain united,” and Carlos understood their deep meaning; Franco's death was what gave the transition its opening. Whenever a genuinely hard problem arose during the transition, King Carlos stepped in to lend it weight — on the stability of the military, on Catalan autonomy, on the legalization of the Communist Party, the king's role each time was absolutely critical, especially during Tejero's military coup attempt on February 23, 1981, when King Carlos set his own safety aside and got Spain through a moment that could have aborted the democratic transition entirely.

Suárez: How Did a Reformer Emerge from Within the Old Regime?

Preston writes: “For the king, Suárez meant this: a man who was a loyal soldier of the ‘Movement,' but who would use the Movement's own machinery against the Movement itself — this would be the start of driving reform forward” (p. 137). The 43-year-old Adolfo Suárez had served as head of Spain's state television station and of its state radio station, and as deputy secretary-general of Franco's “National Movement.” His political résumé, stamped with Francoism, delighted conservatives, who saw him as one of their own. In hindsight, this mattered a great deal — it went a long way toward disarming the conservatives' guard. Because Suárez was young and had thin political credentials, forming a cabinet proved difficult, but once he had one, he threw himself straight into the great project of democratic transition. He told his new cabinet that reform would move at speed, and in a televised address to the nation he promised a referendum on political reform and a general election by June 30, 1977.

Time was extremely tight. The Suárez government had less than a year to carry out what may have been the single most consequential political act in a century of Spanish history. Suárez had two exceptional talents, both indispensable to transition politics. First, having come up through media management, he was a gifted television speaker, which let him win over public opinion through televised addresses and turn the silent majority into his political base. Second, he was superb at negotiation and communication, able to reach cooperative outcomes with people even in extremely complex and difficult circumstances — apart from the untamable Basque region, this ability let him bring almost every opposition force on board with reform. The whole course of the democratic transition bears out how valuable those two talents were.

Even with the king's backing, Suárez faced obstacles to reform on every front. He had to contend with old Falangists and other diehard loyalists of Francoism, the “bunker” faction; with a conservative military; with the Socialist Workers' Party, the Communist Party, and anarchist forces that had lain dormant for years among the public but were now surging; and with the autonomy movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country, of which ETA, which kept carrying out terrorist attacks, was the biggest headache of all.

Throughout August 1976, the Suárez government held talks with opposition leaders, including González, the head of the Socialist Workers' Party, and Suárez built cordial personal relationships with them. The Socialist Workers' Party ultimately set aside its earlier ambition of a total popular overthrow of the Franco system and came out in favor of constitutional reform. Through indirect channels, Suárez also began contact with Communist Party leader Carrillo, and they eventually reached a consensus on reform: the Communist Party would be legalized, on condition that it revise its own charter to become more peaceable. This outcome enraged the “bunker” faction and the military for a time, but it secured Suárez's plan for peaceful reform.

As a politically skilled statesman, Suárez did not rely only on soft diplomacy. When the military strongly resisted reform, Suárez acted decisively, forcing Defense Minister General De Santiago to resign and replacing him with General Gutiérrez Mellado, who supported reform. This move was an open break with the “bunker” faction and enraged the military — a high-risk step. But the Suárez government had no time to spare, and driving this military reform through so cleanly meant that, once it succeeded, the military itself could become one of the most important escorts of reform. The chain of events that followed proved the move both risky and correct.

None of the obstacles to reform were easy to handle, but Suárez's team overcame essentially all of them. Suárez's personal charisma, political affability, and low profile — and above all his gift for private negotiation, including a fair amount of realpolitik dealmaking that didn't look pretty from the outside — all proved highly effective. Suárez reached a reform consensus with González, leader of the largest left-wing civilian force, the Socialist Workers' Party; his talks with Carrillo led the Communist Party to remake itself, embrace constitutional monarchy, and join the current of reform, though this issue wasn't resolved until 1977; and he cleared the obstacles posed by the right and the military. But even with Suárez's remarkable and ultimately successful negotiating and cooperative skill, he never fully solved the Basque problem, which Preston regards as the “biggest blemish” of Suárez's transitional government (p. 173). That judgment may not be fair, though: given the conditions at the time, virtually none of the elements of timing, place, and human harmony needed to resolve the Basque question existed, and the Suárez government had neither the time nor the other prerequisites it would have needed.

On November 18, 1976, the Spanish parliament passed the reform law by an overwhelming margin of 425 in favor, 15 against, and 13 abstaining. On December 15, the reform law was put to a national referendum; 78% of eligible voters took part, and it passed again by an overwhelming 94.2%.

From Suárez's appointment as prime minister on July 3 to December 15 — in barely five and a half months — the Suárez government secured basic unity among every force except the Basque region and the Communist Party. That has to be called remarkable speed for a transition. Cooperation from the conservatives and from opposition forces mattered enormously, of course, but without Suárez's personal role and his cabinet, this achievement would have been impossible.

The Opposition: How Did Rationality and Restraint Become a Shared Value in a Turbulent Country?

Preston writes: “And yet in the summer of 1976, a bloody confrontation still seemed entirely possible. That it did not happen should be credited to the political skill of Adolfo Suárez and his advisers and to the courage and resolve of King Juan Carlos — and, above all, to the rationality and restraint of Felipe González, Santiago Carrillo, and other opposition leaders” (p. 177). Just as Preston gave scant credit to Franco for grooming King Carlos, perhaps out of the same ideological bias, he also overstates the role the opposition played in Spain's transition. This was, after all, the product of interaction between the ruling side and the opposition, not a political virtue displayed by the opposition alone.

Even so, throughout Spain's democratic transition, the leaders and members of the various opposition factions did, on the whole, show real rationality and restraint. Strikes, student movements, even bombings, assassinations, and other terrorist activity kept flaring up one after another, and the government's own response to these problems was often clumsy — the brutality of the old regime kept resurfacing — yet the opposition still exercised considerable restraint.

González and his Socialist Workers' Party were the first opposition force to see clearly which way the wind was blowing and to throw themselves actively into the process of peaceful democratic transition; once they committed to cooperation, the party began remaking and rebuilding itself. As the referendum on the reform law approached on December 15, since the Communist Party had not yet been legalized and so had no ticket to participate in reform, whether the Socialist Workers' Party should stand or fall together with the Communist Party — which had originally split off from the Socialists — became a delicate question. Given the balance of forces at the time, the referendum was clearly going to pass whether or not the Socialist Workers' Party took part; boycotting it would have put the party outside the camp of reformers, marginalized, and even risked having its traditional base taken over by some other party, such as the People's Socialist Party. So in the end, the Socialist Workers' Party kept quiet and chose to cooperate with the government.

Suárez had once declared that, under the Communist Party's charter as it then stood, legalizing it was out of the question. This was his promise to the military — and it clearly left an opening: if the Communist Party changed its charter, it could be legalized. So when Suárez kept his word and allowed the Communist Party to be legalized on condition of a charter revision, the “bunker” faction and the military exploded in fury (Admiral Pita da Veiga resigned in protest as a result), calling Suárez a liar — a charge Suárez never accepted for the rest of his life. Preston calls this sophistry on Suárez's part (p. 170), which is unfair: revising the charter to renounce the violent overthrow of the government amounted to a real transformation of the Communist Party's nature, turning it from a party of violent revolution into a peaceful, democratic socialist party — and legalizing it on that basis was plainly a democratic act. The Communist Party's restraint and rationality weren't limited to this either. As the referendum drew near amid mutual violence between left and right (extremists within the Communist Party first kidnapped two government officials, and the far right retaliated by killing five people, four of them Communist Party lawyers), Carrillo and his Communist Party broke from their old tradition of tit-for-tat retaliation and called on everyone to stay calm and level-headed. The Communist Party organized a large-scale mourning gathering at the victims' funerals — a wise move that showed both the party's organizational discipline and its considerable political maturity, easing public anxiety at just the right moment and clearing the last obstacle to the party's legalization.

In resolving the Catalan question, Suárez initially made a misstep born of insufficient forethought. The 77-year-old president of the government-in-exile and spiritual leader of Catalonia, Tarradellas, was willing to negotiate with the Suárez government, but he also insisted that if he returned to Barcelona, the welcome ceremony would include a review of the Catalan armed guard. Suárez refused, apparently because he failed to grasp the political significance of the request (p. 196), and this cost him valuable time. Even so, when Tarradellas came to Madrid to negotiate with Suárez in July 1977, Suárez readily promised that Catalonia would regain the autonomous status it had held in 1932, while Tarradellas in turn promised that Catalonia would remain loyal to the Kingdom of Spain, recognize national unity, and respect the Spanish military.

Right up to the end, the one problem that remained unsolved was the Basque Country. Unlike Catalonia's independence movement, which had a relatively unified organization, the Basque independence movement was scattered and internally divided — it included relatively rational organizations like the Basque Nationalist Party, as well as the radical ETA, which itself split into two: the more moderate ETA Politico-Military and ETA Military, the latter the globally notorious terrorist organization. Rational negotiation with the government not only failed to win the backing of other forces in the region but also drew violent interference, which is why the Basque autonomy question could not be resolved as smoothly as Catalonia's. ETA Military's terrorist violence remained a hard knot obstructing reform; it did not renounce violence until October 1998, and 14 months later ETA went right back to carrying out attacks, killing government officials in Madrid and representatives of the Basque Socialist Party along with their bodyguards. From that point on, ETA Military steadily lost public support, becoming an organization universally condemned and opposed as a pure terrorist group.

Looking at these negotiations and this cooperation over the course of the transition, it is clear that after a civil war followed by 36 years of the Franco era, Spain's political factions, in government and out, had by the late 1970s grown steadily more rational and mature. A small number of political extremists on either side still resorted to bloody violence from time to time, but overall, people had become more cautious and restrained about violence, valuing negotiation, principled mutual compromise, and cooperation — means that could produce win-win outcomes — and behind all these political tools lay the political virtue of rationality and restraint.

It was precisely because there was a king, Juan Carlos, who supported democracy; a head of government, Suárez, who was skilled at political operation while committed to the direction of democracy; and an opposition capable of rationality and restraint, that Spain's democratic transition achieved what it did. The late, eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, in The Third Wave, gave a concise, comprehensive account of exactly how Spain's democratic transition succeeded:

“The government led by Juan Carlos and Suárez controlled the process of transition, but the government and the opposition also engaged in a ‘politics of compromise' to reach agreement in the constituent assembly, covering both the constitutional framework of the new democratic system and the agreement reached in the Moncloa Pacts signed in November 1977. In this agreement, all the relevant parties, including the Socialists and Communists, agreed to a comprehensive economic program that included wage restraint, currency devaluation, monetary policy, increased public investment, restrictions on social security, tax reform, union activity, management of state enterprises, and other matters.”

What Did the Government, the Judiciary, the Military, Religion, and the Media All Do to Make Spain's Transition Succeed?

In institutional history, the historical inertia the economist Douglass North called “path dependence” is often the main cause of accidents at the moment a country turns from dictatorship toward democracy. From the French Revolution of the 18th century right up to the present, in country after country making the move from dictatorship to democracy, the old system's entanglements and troubles have run deep. Spain's democratic transition of the 1930s was calamitous — its far-left policies led to civil war, and civil war led to nearly 40 years of high-pressure far-right dictatorship under Franco. But the democratic transition begun in 1975 ultimately broke free of the gravitational pull of dictatorship and moved toward a consolidated democratic politics.

Because of the brilliance of its political achievement, Spain's transition has drawn wide praise and deep study around the world. Preston's The Triumph of Democracy in Spain describes the process of Spain's democratic transition in detail, and the sweeping historical panorama it paints gives later readers a fairly clear lens onto that era, but it does not extract the key elements of the transition itself for any theoretically deep discussion. As mentioned earlier, Preston does not give due weight to the far-reaching political significance of Franco's grooming of King Juan Carlos, dwelling only on its value for stabilizing Franco's own power. Beyond that, aside from analyzing the role of the various political forces during the transition, Preston also fails to look within the existing institutional structure of the Franco regime for elements of greater stabilizing value — the role of judicial power during the transition, for instance.

The move from a dictatorial to a democratic system requires certain intellectual and economic conditions — the middle-class rise driven by economic development that Huntington stresses heavily in The Third Wave — but it also requires the political and technical operating capacity to match those intellectual conditions. The French Revolution did not quickly bring France into a stable republic; instead it brought disorder, a constantly changing form of government, and even international war. In the 80 years after the revolution, France produced 14 constitutions, with extreme political instability and frequent social disorder. The root cause, and the lesson, is always the same: the train of transition took the historical curve too fast and too hard, and so derailed.

The conditions for a republic are in fact quite demanding. It requires a self-aware sense of freedom among the people and a sense of free association, and this kind of loose union puts a special strain on the political virtue of its leaders. Among republics, the one that has run best in every respect to this day remains the United States, but as Walter Bagehot explained in The English Constitution, that is because Americans “love the law dearly” — a solid foundation of rule of law laid down back in the colonial era. In countries burdened with the aftereffects of dictatorship, however, the collapse of the dictatorial system cannot instantly bring about the free association of free people that a republican democracy requires. Political actors generally lack the good public habits of freedom, equality, peaceful compromise, and cooperation, and instead retain plenty of the bad habits cultivated in the dictatorial era — autocracy, hierarchy, the winner-takes-all mentality, cruelty and bloodlust, an unwillingness to compromise, an inability to cooperate. Once the traditional monarch is deposed, the result is political — even military — turmoil as various political forces vie and fight brutally over dictatorial power. Not only does this fail to build a republic, it can produce an even worse new dictatorship. Tocqueville predicted exactly this kind of outcome long ago, precisely because — as noted above — both the dictatorial era and the transition period lack a sound rule-of-law environment, and cannot cultivate the political soil that quasi-democracy needs to take root. This was true of France, and true of Spain, and many countries have been through such grave political accidents.

Moving from monarchical dictatorship to republican democracy is rarely achieved in one leap; a stable democratic system also depends on many factors of time and place and on political, economic, and cultural conditions — republican transitions, even the relatively successful ones, usually come with a long period of transitional pain. Franco's preference for constitutional monarchy was itself a decision drawn fully from Spain's own bitter lessons, by no means a sign of stubborn complacency. Franco's regime may have been detestable, but his foresight in establishing a constitutional monarchy reflected real political wisdom and prudence. In a constitutional monarchy, the monarch can serve as a critically important political stabilizer: relying on royal tradition rooted in a specific bloodline, the monarch can prevent any ordinary political strongman from usurping the throne, thereby eliminating a source of conflict, while also being relatively safe precisely because he holds no real government power in day-to-day politics — and he can stabilize the situation and defend the constitution should a constitutional crisis arise, serving as a reserve of authority. And if the monarch himself keeps his own conduct clean, he can even become a moral icon for society and a symbol of national and ethnic unity, reinforcing national cohesion. At least in countries with a monarchical tradition, this is easier to achieve than under a republican system of government.

Franco was well aware of the transitional nature of his own regime, and this far-sighted preparation for transition meant that, after his death, Spain avoided, as much as possible, a repeat of the false-republic tragedy of 1931–1939. Beyond grooming a future king, Franco's regime showed foresight in one other important respect: its quiet cultivation of an independent judiciary — the essential axis of the rule-of-law environment the coming transition would need. The prominent Spanish legal scholar and sociologist J.J. Toharia published a paper in 1975 titled “Judicial Independence in an Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Contemporary Spain,” concluding that “on the whole, the judiciary is independent of government control… Spain's judges are independent, but they are powerless.” Toharia also acknowledged that while the judiciary was nearly fully independent in matters of personnel, it remained politically subject to the authoritarian government. But this subjection was mostly confined to the political sphere, just as the judiciary's independence was mostly confined to private law and to criminal matters with no political dimension. (Toharia's paper shows that among the 189 judges he surveyed, every single one opposed harsh punishment; the vast majority of Spanish judges at the time opposed the death penalty, and over the decade from 1964 to 1974, only six people were sentenced to death by military tribunals, while ordinary courts handed down not a single death sentence.) Even a judicial independence this limited and narrow in scope still carried no small value.

This shows that even a judiciary confined to the private-law sphere can play a huge role in social stability, and can give peaceful anti-tyrannical forces a measure of just protection. All the more so in the purely criminal justice that has no political dimension, where a relatively independent judiciary could do its best to remain fair. A judiciary like this couldn't fully perform its judicial function or play the role it should in the political sphere, but staying insulated from politics was itself a kind of protection for the judiciary — keeping it from being torn apart in future by vicious political struggle. This branch of power, which Hamilton described as having neither the sword nor the purse, draws its sole authority from being seen as fair, and fairness in turn comes from independence. When every political force in a society is caught up in one struggle or another, a quiet, relatively independent judiciary — as a passive form of power — can at least, within the limits of its reach, protect private property, protect personal liberty and safety fairly effectively, prevent society from sliding into total disorder, and cool down social movements that have grown too heated, becoming an important stabilizing force during the transition.

In grooming Juan Carlos, Franco placed particular emphasis on his service in the armed forces, so that through Carlos's service across all three branches, the king would build the personal standing within the military that he would need — and should the military ever get involved in a domestic power struggle or attempt a coup, the king might be able to stop it effectively. Preston describes in detail the crucial role Juan Carlos played in crushing Tejero's “2.23” military coup attempt in 1981. This was exactly the payoff of Franco's foresight. A king building standing within the military was never meant for using the military, but for controlling it stably, keeping it insulated from domestic politics. This too is a form of authority and reserve of power a country needs to meet sudden emergencies.

Beyond this, the traditional religious power of Catholicism in Spain also played a major role in the democratic transition through the media; whether other secular media played a good or bad role was likewise a fairly critical factor. As the American scholar Richard Maxwell, who specializes in the political economy of media, shows in his 1994 book The Spectacle of Democracy: Spanish Television, Nationalism, and Political Transition, media played an enormously important role in Spain's democratic transition, acting as both a propeller and a stabilizing valve during this period of social change. The Spanish historian Javier Tusell, in his 2007 book Spain: From Dictatorship to Democracy, 1939 to the Present, also stressed repeatedly that Catholic groups, through the public media, spread the principles and spirit of democracy, playing a very good role in the peaceful transition; he also argued that political and economic change was closely tied to the role the media played.

Franco's foresight, King Juan Carlos's firm push for change, Prime Minister Suárez's political skill, the opposition's rationality and restraint, the stable society created by a judiciary with a measure of independence, a moderately open media, and religious organizations with a democratic spirit — none of these was dispensable. Together they assembled a well-equipped, well-running express train of Spanish democratic transition, one able to break free of the gravitational pull of dictatorship's aftereffects and pass safely through the turbulent, narrow strait of history into the open sea of democratic government, all the way to today.

What Lessons Can Spain's Successful Transition 40 Years Ago Offer Those Who Come After?

Since the 18th century, waves of democratization in the West have followed one after another, sending huge political ripples across the globe. Because national conditions differ, the paths countries take toward democratization differ too. Since the end of World War II, democratic politics has increasingly become a kind of universal political ideal for the world — a phenomenon that has produced good effects wherever it was pursued in earnest, but that has also, undeniably, brought a degree of political overreach in some places.

Quite a few countries and regions, while celebrating democratic politics, have failed — in government and out — to study seriously the cultural foundations of democratic politics, its political and economic thinking, the practical political techniques involved, the forms a political system can take, or the steps and methods of transition itself. Their political action has instead been rash and careless, producing all kinds of uncontrollable situations, so that a democratic system either could not be established at all, or collapsed shortly after being established, sliding back into a new round of dictatorship. In short: haste makes waste.

Political scientists around the world have long studied cases of democratic collapse in newly democratized countries, but as Tolstoy famously opened Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The success or failure of democratic transitions across countries is much the same. One notable pattern among these cases is that a transition from monarchy to constitutional monarchy tends to have a higher success rate, with fewer setbacks along the way, than a transition from monarchy straight to a republic. Looking at the history of transitions around the world, once a country sets off down the road from monarchical dictatorship to democratic republic, it is often accompanied by extreme social turmoil, and it is hardly surprising when it sinks back into the mire of dictatorship — or even ends up in the worst kind of totalitarian state, as happened in both Russia and Germany.

Some countries, having found that the move from monarchical dictatorship to a republic wasn't going well, tried to change course back to constitutional monarchy, but this is usually difficult, and often unnecessary too (France, for instance, went through a century of turmoil as a result, and Bulgaria at one point tried to restore constitutional monarchy but failed, ending up a democratic republic instead). At present, Spain appears to be the most successful case of this kind — but that outcome depended on many conditions, and not every country can pull it off.

Spain moved from monarchical dictatorship to a republic, failed and fell back into authoritarian rule, and finally turned back to constitutional monarchy — a winding road, but one with an extraordinarily successful outcome. This winding path of transition is not, in itself, something worth emulating, and its ultimate success doesn't mean constitutional monarchy is the only option — for Spain, it was simply the option with the highest odds of success among several possibilities, and it did in fact succeed. In this success story, as far as Spain itself is concerned, the choice of constitutional monarchy as a form of state and government certainly mattered, but as a matter of experience, what mattered more was the specific path of transition — reading the moment correctly, the precisely judged design of its steps, and the concrete political techniques employed.

Whether it was King Juan Carlos, of whom Preston writes, “he was a democratic king, one who set aside his own safety to defend the constitution” (p. 333), or Adolfo Suárez, who “took on an almost impossible task — overseeing and completing the transition from the ‘legitimacy' of Francoism to democracy” (p. 333), or other forces, of whom Preston writes, “all the democratic parties worked together to build the constitutional framework and the structure of regional autonomy” (p. 333) — it was only by overcoming “the conservatism of the military and the bloody plots of extreme-nationalist youth, the two great enemies of democratic government, [which] presented formidable obstacles” (p. 333) that Spain arrived at the moment when, “in the election of October 28, 1982, public opinion delivered an overwhelming victory. The transition was over. Real change was about to begin” (p. 333).

In a word, Franco's dying words to King Carlos — “keep Spain united” — were not some throwaway slogan sprayed out in passing, but a hard-won result that could only come from combining far-sighted political vision, painstaking political preparation, and the most careful, cautious political execution.

Spain's case of democratic transition is a vast trove of experience in beneficial institutional and social change — one can only hope that Spain today can find, once again, a way in it to solve the Catalan question.

(Note: all section headings were added by the editors; the original title of this piece was “Spain's Democratic Transition: A Successful Case of Overcoming the Gravitational Pull of Dictatorship — With a Review of The Triumph of Democracy in Spain.”)

Recommended Reading

1. The Triumph of Democracy in Spain

This book tells the winding story of Spain's move from dictatorship to democracy. It begins with the collapse of the Franco regime, moves through the appearances of Carrero Blanco and Arias Navarro, then through the era of Suárez and Calvo Sotelo, and closes with three major historical events: the legalization of the Communist Party, the coup attempt of February 1981, and the 1982 election victory of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. The author, Sir Paul Preston, offers a lens for understanding Spain's social transformation. In his view, the key to Spain's democratic triumph lay both in a newly emerging democratic political class willing to reach compromise and in the crucial role King Juan Carlos played during the coup attempt of February 1981.

Paul Preston holds the chair in Spanish studies at the London School of Economics (LSE). He has studied Spanish history for more than 30 years and has written extensively, including The Spanish Holocaust, The Spanish Civil War, Franco: A Biography, and Juan Carlos: A People's King.

“Looking back, the fragile new democracy faced its twin mortal enemies almost daily: military coup-mongering (golpismo) and terrorism. This made me start to wonder just how well I actually understood the process. Like many commentators, I once believed that a transition built on consensus between progressive forces within the old regime and the traditional democratic opposition could be roughly as stable as one might reasonably hope. That Spanish democracy survived the bloodshed ETA produced daily and the frequent coup attempts is, in a sense, proof of that belief,” he writes in the book.

2. My Private Conversations with Franco

This book records the private conversations the author, Francisco Franco Salgado-Araujo, had with Franco between 1954 and 1971. It reflects Franco's thinking and records many major events in modern Spanish history.

Francisco Franco Salgado-Araujo was Franco's cousin, two years his senior. He served as his cousin's aide-de-camp and as head of the head-of-state secretariat and of the military attaché's office. After 1956, he mainly ran Franco's military office. Salgado-Araujo died in Madrid in 1975 at the age of 85.

“He [Franco] answered me: ‘Once it serves the interests of the fatherland, Juan will give up his claim to the throne. His eldest son, Prince Juan Carlos, will prepare to enter the general military academy; although he won't sit the entrance exam, he will still be required to have a grounding in mathematics before continuing his studies at the academy,'” he writes.

3. The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution

The author, Burnett Bolloten (1909–1987), spent more than 50 years writing this book. Across three volumes, he presents a full picture of the republican camp during the Spanish Civil War, overturning conventional understandings of the war.

Specifically, drawing on primary sources gathered over many years, Bolloten develops two major themes. First, he describes in deep and thorough detail the mass revolution triggered by the military uprising of July 1936, showing how it dramatically reshaped the political structure of republican-controlled territory — even as some factions within the republican camp went to great lengths to downplay its significance — with revolutionary committees springing up in countless towns and villages, forming a new economic structure and political power controlled largely by workers' organizations.

Second, he shows that the fierce struggle for political control of the left camp caused the Spanish Communist Party's power and influence to grow steadily; he documents precisely how the communists set about eliminating or absorbing their rivals on the left, including anarcho-syndicalists, dissident Marxists, socialists, and liberal republicans; backed by Soviet prestige and material aid, the communists came to hold decisive control over nearly every sphere of public life. The author also gives a detailed analysis of the international diplomacy of the period, and from that angle explains the reasons for the Communist Party's rise.

Bolloten is a well-known scholar of the Spanish Civil War. Born in Britain, he traveled the Mediterranean in his youth rather than take up his father's trade; when he reached Barcelona, he witnessed the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and reported the truth of it as a special correspondent for United Press. After the war ended, he spent several years reporting from Mexico, and settled in the United States in 1949, where he spent decades gathering material on the civil war, eventually completing three works: The Grand Camouflage, The Spanish Revolution, and The Spanish Civil War.

“In fact, none of the measures taken by the government of prime minister Manuel Azaña, a leader of the liberal left republicans then in a difficult position, to calm the situation achieved its aim; as a result, the state of alert declared after the general election — a form of security measure less severe than martial law but one that still infringed on civil liberties — was extended month after month. Day after day, week after week, scenes of violence and unrest kept recurring one after another: mass rallies and demonstrations; arson and destruction, including the burning of churches and church schools; the seizure of party and union headquarters; the confiscation, or attempted confiscation, of property; mob unrest and bloody clashes with police; assassinations and counter-assassinations,” Bolloten writes.

4. The Spanish Civil War

This book describes the tangled origins of the Spanish Civil War, the collapse of the Spanish Republic, and the course of the only workers' revolution in Western European history. The author, Stanley G. Payne, not only explains the character of the Spanish revolution and the interlocking policies of the republican camp, but also examines the formation of Franco's counterrevolutionary dictatorship and the meaning and impact of the civil war. Beyond that, he analyzes the war itself from a military-history perspective and its place in the history of military development, explains the non-intervention policies of the democratic countries as well as the roles played by German, Italian, and Soviet intervention, sums up the war's impact on European affairs, and situates it, from a comparative perspective, within the broader picture of 20th-century revolutionary civil wars.

Like Bolloten, Stanley G. Payne is also a leading authority on modern Spanish history. He has taught at Columbia University, UCLA, and the University of Wisconsin, among other institutions. His books include The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933–1936: Origins of the Civil War, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II, Spain: A Unique History, and Civil War in Europe, 1905–1949.

“The Spanish Civil War was the most important political and military struggle in Europe in the decade before the Second World War; it did not just divide Spain, it sent strong shockwaves through the rest of Europe and the United States as well. The war has been given all kinds of labels. Leftists and many liberals described it as ‘fascism versus democracy,' ‘the people versus the oligarchs' (or ‘the people versus the army'), ‘revolution versus counterrevolution,' even ‘the future versus the past.' Right-wingers and conservatives of various periods, meanwhile, called it a struggle of ‘Christians versus atheists,' ‘Western civilization versus communism,' ‘Spain versus anti-Spain,' ‘law and order versus subversion.' These labels flatly contradict one another, yet they are not always mutually exclusive. The Spanish Civil War was extremely complex and full of contradictions, so while none of these labels is entirely accurate, each captures a piece of the truth,” he writes.

5. Spanish Travel Notes

This is a travelogue about Spain by the well-known writer Lin Da. Facing Spain's exotic and dazzlingly rich history, art, figures, palaces, churches, castles, and other cultural treasures, Lin Da not only describes their incomparable humanistic and artistic value but weaves more than a thousand years of stories from this land into the journey itself, running kings and generals, the fires of war, mountains and rivers — and above all Spain's path toward becoming a modern nation — through the whole book. It lets readers take in Spain's captivating landscape while also going deep into its history, gaining insight into its profound and instructive process of social evolution.

“Since 1898, the Spanish have doggedly sought a road to national strength and prosperity, and traveled a rocky path over a hundred years. They deposed their king, only to get national chaos in exchange. They imported every kind of thinking from Europe, only to see the public split apart. They wanted to take the road to a strong nation, but instead swung between left and right extremes; they wanted to replicate an October Revolution, but instead replicated the disaster of a civil war, getting in exchange retreat, a fresh start, and 36 years of dictatorship under Franco. Finally, after Franco's death, in the space of just a few years, they successfully completed the reform and transition of their political system,” Lin Da writes in the book.

6. Franco: A Personal and Political Biography

This is another work by Stanley G. Payne, the author of The Spanish Civil War mentioned above. It is a biography of Franco, covering his whole life and addressing important questions such as why Franco became a dictator, and how he managed to lead the civil war to victory and consolidate his rule.

7. Juan Carlos of Spain: Self-Made Monarch

There's no doubt that King Juan Carlos was one of the most pivotal figures in Spain's democratic transition. This biography tells the detailed story of his early life, his rise as heir, his role in pushing forward democratization, and the eventual establishment of the constitutional monarchy.

The author, Charles Powell, is a historian born in 1960, a graduate of Oxford University who specializes in Spain's transition. After graduating, he first taught at Oxford; in 1997 he moved to Spain to live and work. His most recent book is El amigo americano. España y Estados Unidos: de la dictadura a la democracia (2011), which tells the story of how relations between the United States and Spain changed between 1969 and 1989 — a change for which Spain's successful democratic transition was a major factor.

8. Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy

This, too, is another work by Paul Preston, author of The Triumph of Democracy in Spain mentioned above.

Like Juan Carlos of Spain: Self-Made Monarch, it is a biography of King Juan Carlos, and the two can be read side by side.

9. Spain: From Dictatorship to Democracy

Compared with The Triumph of Democracy in Spain, published in 1987, this is a more recent monograph on Spain's transition, published in 2011, covering more recent major events such as the 2004 Madrid bombings.

The author, Javier Tusell, was not only a historian but also a public intellectual who had served in government, including as a member of parliament. Worth noting: it was through the negotiating efforts of Javier Tusell and others that Picasso's masterpiece Guernica returned to Spain from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

10. From Dictatorship to Democracy: Spanish Reportage

This is a chronologically organized collection of reportage on Spain before and after the transition. The author, Anatoly Krasikov, is Russian, born in 1931, and was formerly a correspondent for the Russian news agency TASS.

11. Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain: The Transition to Democracy after Franco

This book examines what role culture played in social change in the post-Franco era. Specifically, how did symbol and ritual shape people's sense of identity with Spain as a new democratic nation?

The author, Laura Desfor Edles, is a professor of sociology at California State University, Northridge, and the author of Cultural Sociology in Practice, among other works.

12. Making Democratic Citizens in Spain: Civil Society and the Popular Origins of the Transition, 1960–78

Whether it's Xiao Han's article or the books above, most of them place heavy emphasis on the important role the political elite played in the country's transition. Making Democratic Citizens in Spain, along with Making Democracy in Spain below, instead examine how Spain's transition happened primarily from the perspective of civil society.

Pamela Beth Radcliff argues that between 1960 and 1978, Spanish civil society put pressure on the authoritarian regime that helped push it toward collapse and transition, while also laying the groundwork for the later consolidation of democratic society.

Pamela Beth Radcliff is an associate professor in the history department at the University of California, and has previously published several works on Spain, including From Mobilization to Civil War: The Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900–1937 and Contesting Spanish Womanhood, a collection of scholarly essays co-edited with Victoria Enders.

13. Making Democracy in Spain: Grass-Roots Struggle in the South, 1955–1975

This book looks, from the angle of social movements, at how the struggle of civil society over the 20 years from 1955 to 1975 contributed to Spanish democracy's ultimate triumph — what personal networks and political strategies did ordinary citizens use to take part in that struggle, given the social and economic demands of the time, and so on.

The author, Joe Foweraker, is a professor at Oxford University; much of his earlier work concerned civil rights and social mobilization in Latin America, and he now works mainly on comparative studies of democratization. His books include Popular Mobilization in Mexico: The Teachers' Movement 1977–87, The Struggle for Land: A Political Economy of the Pioneer Frontier in Brazil from 1930 to the Present Day, Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical Analysis, and Theorizing Social Movements.

14. The Spectacle of Democracy: Spanish Television, Nationalism, and Political Transition

The last book here has a narrower focus, examining what role media played in Spain's transition. The author, Richard Maxwell, argues that media exerted a major influence in shaping nationalism and identity. He is now an associate professor of radio, television, and film studies at Northwestern University.

(Note: the introduction to each book was added by the editors and does not represent the views of this article's author.)

This is the second piece in the national-transitions series. Click here to read the first: “100 Books, Stories From 20 Countries, More Than a Dozen Scholars: Understanding National Transitions — Eastern Europe.”

Cover image from: Wikipedia