Spain during the Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-374
Author(s):  
SUSANA SUEIRO SEOANE

Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia. The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2002), 330 pp., $27.95 (pb), ISBN 1-571-814965.Pilar Ortuño Anaya, European Socialists and Spain: The Transition to Democracy (London: Palgrave, 2002), 273pp., $69.95 (hb), ISBN 0-333-94927-7.Julio Crespo MacLennan, Spain and the Process of European Integration, 1957–85. Political Change and Europeanism (London: Palgrave, 2000), 240 pp., £52.50 (hb), ISBN 0-333-928865.S. P. Mangen, Spanish Society after Franco: Regime Transition and the Welfare State (London: Palgrave, 2001), 254 pp., $65.00 (hb), ISBN 0-333-65462-5.Luis Moreno, The Federalization of Spain (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 192 pp., £17.50 (hb), ISBN 0-714-681644.

Author(s):  
S. M. Khenkin

In the 1970s, the Spanish monarchy, represented by King Juan Carlos I, appeared in an unexpected role of the initiator of radical social change. Juan Carlos, the grandson of King Alfonso XIII, deposed in 1931, was brought up by Franco. After the death of Caudillo in November 1975, he assumed the post of head of state. Initially, the king, who shared liberal views, was in a very difficult situation. He was considered as a heir of Franco, he was deprived of democratic and dynastic legitimacy. Juan Carlos managed to appoint his trustees – T. Fernandez-Miranda and A. Souares to key government posts. They had carried out a number of reforms and as a result dismantled the authoritarian Franco regime and led the country to democracy. The king himself, remaining behind the scenes, acted as an arbiter, a “motor” and patron of the process of changes. In Spanish society, the indifference and even the negative attitude towards the monarchy was replaced by confidence in the necessity and usefulness of this institution. Unfortunately, in the last years of the reign of Juan Carlos, his popularity fell sharply due to corruption scandals in the royal family. However, giving an overall assessment of the role of Juan Carlos in Spanish history, the first place should be given to his services, not mistakes. The Spaniards at one time adopted a monarchy, because they were subdued by the king, and not by the monarchy as an institution. 


Author(s):  
Luise Li Langergaard

The article explores the central role of the entrepreneur in neoliberalism. It demonstrates how a displacement and a broadening of the concept of the entrepreneur occur in the neoliberal interpretation of the entrepreneur compared to Schumpeter’s economic innovation theory. From being a specific economic figure with a particular delimited function the entrepreneur is reinterpreted as, on the one hand, a particular type of subject, the entrepreneur of the self, and on the other, an ism, entrepreneurialism, which permeates individuals, society, and institutions. Entrepreneurialism is discussed as a movement of the economic into previously non-economic domains, such as the welfare state and society. Social entrepreneurship is an example of this in relation to solutions to social welfare problems. This can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of the neoliberal understanding of the entrepreneur, but it also, in certain interpretations, resists the neoliberal understanding of economy and society.


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