Essays: In many ways, the Madrid bombings of March 11th, 2004, and the elections three days later, in which the socialists, to the surprise of many, won a majority of votes, constitute the pivot around which the cornucopia of essays in this volume turns, writes Ciaran Cosgrove.
Modern Spain had an abrupt birth in 1975 when General Franco (taking his cue from the protagonist of García Márquez's wonderful novella, Chronicle of an Announced Death, whose death is eternally postponed until the last two lines of the book) at last expires, after what must have been the longest death agony in history.
Historian Paul Preston has eloquently detailed the sustained attempts by surgeons, against all the laws of nature, to keep the old dictator alive. In a few short years, Spain visibly metamorphosed. Political freedoms, poetry and pornography all began to flourish in 1975.
The book under review, superbly edited by Sebastian Balfour, is a treasure trove of empirical data on everything from the monarchy to the several "nationalisms" that insist, in their different ways, on separate cultural, political and linguistic identity. The essays here are at their most vivacious and incisive when they approach the liminal areas of shocking possibility. For example, Preston's own essay on King Juan Carlos comes tantalisingly close to suggesting that Lt Col Tejero's failed coup d'état in 1981 might have had royal approval.
Succinctly written analyses of corruption, of state terror covertly practised against the terrorists in the 1980s, of Opus Dei and its machinations, and a truly brilliant analysis of conservative Spanish nationalism since the early 1990s by historian Xosé-Manoel Núñez Seixas - all that and much more besides make this book an invaluable compendium of the political contradictions, wonders and waywardness of western Europe's most variegated country.
Time has eroded somewhat the memory of the charismatic socialist leader of the 1980s and early 1990s, Felipe González. He was the embodiment of that prolonged "moment" of post-Franco Spain in which newly burgeoning democratic practice got overlaid with political malpractice, whose defining instance is the spawning of the "Anti-terrorist Liberation Groups" known as the GAL, superbly analysed here and, in his book Dirty War, Clean Hands, by Paddy Woodworth.
But the one character portrait that is delineated again and again in Balfour's book is that of the distinctly uncharismatic former Spanish Popular Party leader, José María Aznar, so rudely extirpated from the seat of power on March 14th, 2004. The seeds of Aznar's undoing were undoubtedly sown by his uncritical and opportunistic support of the pre-emptive war waged against Iraq by Bush and Blair. Choosing to ignore the will of the Spanish people on the issue, and without seeking parliamentary approval, the profoundly Manichaean Aznar committed Spain to a new crusade, the war of the western "good" against the "evil" east. Aznar could ill conceal his deep ideological conviction too that Spain needed to pursue a "re-conquest" of that pure Catholicity it was once presumed to have embodied.
As commentators such as the Irish Hispanist, Ian Gibson, the excellent Spanish columnist Eduardo Castro, and others have observed elsewhere, the official annual celebration of the "taking" of Granada by the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492 has been regularly and enthusiastically supported by Aznar and his ilk. As Núnez Seixas so acutely observes in what for me is the most penetrating and profound essay in Balfour's volume: "Aznar argues that Spain is a historical reality forged in the 15th century, and unified by the agency of the monarchy and the existence of a common project, best expressed in the 'generous' Spanish conquest of America." The peaceful co-existence of Christian, Jew and Muslim in Córdoba, for example, between the 10th and 12th centuries is a model that factions on the right of the political spectrum in Spain cannot dare to contemplate.
What the collection of essays in Balfour's book makes clear is that there is a new Spain in the making. The irredentism of the Aznar era is on the wane. A possible consequence of the March 11th bombings in Madrid might have been racial onslaught against the now substantial Moroccan population of that city. This did not occur. Once sworn in, the new socialist leader, José Luis Zapatero, announced withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. This was carried out within a short time. That has been coupled with a new rapprochement with Morocco, and with repeated and felt assertions that Spaniards must welcome ethnic diversity because that is what makes them what they are.
The success of this current collection of essays is that it takes us on an odyssey through the 30 years since the death of Franco, zigzagging its way through periods of institutional reform and political vicissitude. It gives us a picture of a dynamic "new" Spain (not "new" in Donald Rumsfeld's understanding of the term) where heterogeneity and diversity are the order of the day, and are to be embraced.
Ciaran Cosgrove is head of Spanish at Trinity College, Dublin.
The Politics of Contemporary Spain. Edited by Sebastian Balfour, Routledge, 239pp. £19.99