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Spanish Politics Today (review)

The accomplishments of Spain since the death of Franco (1975) are remarkable by anyone’s standards. The country of Lorca, Picasso, and Buñuel has experienced a veritable metamorphosis and has been the envy of many Eastern European states who have struggled, not often successfully, to achieve an acceptable balance between centralism and ethnic-driven federalism. The Spanish transition from a centralized authoritarianism to a largely federal constitutional monarchy is one of the great success stories of European politics during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Few would have predicted that the pariah nation of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which had been excluded from Marshall Plan aid and from membership in the United Nations, would twice achieve the European Community presidency (in 1989 and 1996) or that the 1992 Olympic Games would have been showcased in an ultramodern Barcelona, proud capital of a resurgent Catalonia. Nor would many have predicted in 1969, when Franco presented Juan Carlos to the Cortes as his designated successor, that the young Bourbon heir would subsequently be “often cited as a role model for other royal families who wish to balance the idea and rituals of a traditional monarchy with the needs of the modern state.” Even more unlikely was the possibility that Spain’s public prosecutor—Baltazar Garzón—already a prominent crusader against political corruption, would underscore Spain’s credentials in international law by requesting the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in London in October 1998 for crimes committed by the former Chilean dictator against humanity. John Gibbons’s Spanish Politics Today goes a long way toward explaining how these improbable occurrences came about, while examining the structure of politics in the mid to late 1990s, coinciding with post–Felipe González Spain. Gibbons focuses on the