Thinking Europe, Thinking Democracy: The Struggle for European Democracy in Spain, 1949-1986 Restricted; Files Only
López Fuentes, Julia (Summer 2020)
Published
Abstract
This dissertation examines the role of a small but highly active group of Spaniards who mobilized around the processes of European integration, formed an international network of opposition to Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975), and helped shape Spain’s political evolution over the second half of the twentieth century. Scholars of contemporary Spain have widely credited the European Communities (EC) and other postwar European institutions’ democratic values with guiding Spain’s relatively smooth democratization in the late 1970s. Indeed, when Franco died in 1975, Spanish society associated European integration with political normalization and democratization. Through analysis of the Europeanist opposition network that emerged in Spain and its diaspora in the late 1940s and endured into the 1970s, this dissertation interrogates the evolution of the relationship between European integration and democratization in Spain. “Thinking Europe, Thinking Democracy” argues that Spanish Europeanists consciously crafted and popularized a concept of European democracy in order to combat the regime and pursue their own political objectives. In so doing, they significantly influenced Spain’s relationship with the European Communities and path towards democracy. On the European stage, they led a campaign to define democracy as a central tenet of European integration so as to weaken the Franco regime’s attempts to join the EC and legitimize itself internationally. Within Spain, they cast European integration—defined by democratization—as a prerequisite for Spain’s modernization, contributing to the formation of a so-called Europeanist consensus throughout Spanish society. Upon the dictator’s demise, their politics of Europeanism became a key part of Spain’s contemporary democratic politics. Along the way, this Europeanist opposition network developed a political culture of Europeanism, still central to Spanish politics today, by which Spaniards use references to and connections with European institutions as proxies for domestic political struggles. “Thinking Europe, Thinking Democracy” thus pushes back against narratives of Spanish society passively imbibing a democratic Europeanism presented to them by the European Communities or other external forces. Instead, it reveals how Spaniards, despite their limited political means and exclusion from European institutions, actively created a democratic Europeanist politics that shaped both Spain and the European institutions into the present day.
Table of Contents
A Note on Names and Translations i
Introduction 1
The European Beehive
Chapter One 34
“The True Spanish Europeanists”: The Origins of the Europeanist Opposition Network
Chapter Two 78
Performing European Democracy: The Europeanist Opposition Network on the International Stage
Chapter Three 121
The Myth of Munich: The Europeanist Opposition Network in Crisis
Chapter Four 163
Europeanists Everywhere: The Political Culture of Europeanism in the Transition to Democracy
Epilogue 200
¿Ya estamos en Europa?
Bibliography 208
About this Dissertation
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