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Nabarralde | About Nabarra
Post-Francoism:
Controlled Democracy and Low Regional Autonomy
After
the death of Spain's General Francisco Franco in November 1975, Juan
Carlos de Borbon suceeded the dictator and Monarchy was re-established.
A pact between the Left and the Right allowed Franco's army, his security
forces and most of his judiciary to remain intact. The type of government
had changed but Franco's forces now had new
names.
This decision made by the ailing dictator and executed by political
parties are in line with the concept of controlled democracy. "They
have all been top-down, run mainly by the parties and large institutions
who push out to the sidelines the popular forces that are the real motor
of change." In Spain, writes Jose Vidal-Beneyto, "the political transition
[1975-1982] that followed the death of the dictator Franco was a matter
of changing the political regime while confirming the social system.
Amnesia about the autocratic past, and the patronage of the Western
powers as guarantors of the result, complete the picture."
Vidal-Beneyto, director of the Paris-based College des Hautes Etudes
Europeennes Miguel Servat, states that the Spanish politicians "blanked
out political memory" during the Spanish transition period and "succeeded
in making dictatorship seem ordinary" to a point that today Franco's
authoritarian regime (1936-1975) is justified as a need "to put an end
to the chaos of the Republic (1931-1939) and to save the Spanish people
from communism, bring them into Europe and give them a democratic king."
A total break with the Franco's regime did not happen in Spain by "those
who alone could have made it, the Spanish left." The political parties
of the left have claimed all along that "calling for the break would
have provoked a head-on clash with the armed forces, and ended in a
return to dictatorship in its harshest form."
A look at official U.S. documents now available may be useful. They
make it impossible to sustain the assumption of a military intervention,
according to Vidal-Beneyto. The contacts that CIA Vernon Walters and
Richard Nixon's special envoy, "kept up with Franco and his generals
were designed to keep Spain in the Wetern camp once Franco was gone"
When Franco, talking about his death and after said "Everything's tied
up, and the knots are tight," he undoubtedly had Washington's assurance
in mind.
Indeed, it was not for fear of the army that the idea of a break with
the dictatorship was abandoned, and a reform based on a pact between
the left and the right put in its place. This pact made possible for
the transition "to become a mask behind which the Franco regime could
transform itself" and the president of of his government and the entire
power structure of the dictatorship, including the political police
"to acquire a new legitimacy, allowing them a share in fathering the
new democracy, an instrument of legitimation and control."
It is in this context that the Basque national liberation struggle continues.
The effects of the conquest of Nabarra and the following long ensuing
periods of humiliation left the national identity the Nabarrase had
achieved in fragments. Yet this pulverized identity persists.
In 1842, a year after Spain established military service in Nabarra,
the first insurrection against the Spanish military erupted. Many others
would follow. In 1993 Nabarra had the highest percentage of conscientious
objectors in the Spanish state and in the European Community. Yet many
young Nabarrase have joined ETA, an outlawed military organization.
Nabarra remains an open wound of Spain's and France's imperial system:
a still audible "J'accuse."
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