A Surrealistic Referendum: Spain and NATO

Abstract

THE POSITIONS OF THE TWO MAIN SPANISH POLITICAL PARTIES vis-8-vis the NATO referendum held on 12 March 1986 have caused commentators to recall that Spain, although much less so of late, always was ‘different’ and ‘dramatic’; Lord Carrington, on a boost-the-Atlantic-Alliance visit to Madrid, was reported to have gone one better and said that a country in which those in favour appeared not to be going to vote at all, while those who had been totally against were now set to vote in favour, was nothing short of ‘surrealistic’, while the French magazine L'Express described the referendum itself with the colourful word ‘loufoque’. Miguel de Unamuno, that master of contradiction, and Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, the man who saw Spain as an esperpento or grotesque distortion of what a European country should be, would have smiled. And, indeed, although there are hoardings in the Peninsula proclaiming the message ‘Spain is not different - your credit-card is valid here, too’, the fact remains that it is the only country to restore monarchy in the late twentieth century and to hold a NATO referendum.