Making Democratic Citizens in Spain: Civil Society and the Popular Origins of the Transition. By Pamela Beth Radcliff (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xvii plus 414 pp.)

Abstract

In her impressive new study Pamela Beth Radcliff argues that two types of civic associations in Spain played a crucial role in laying the foundations for the democratic society that emerged after the death of Franco. Eschewing monocausal explanations, Radcliff offers a detailed and nuanced account of the agency of ordinary men and women in the fascist Movimiento party's family associations and in the more loosely-constructed grassroots neighborhood associations. She contends that these associations, emerging across Spain in the last fifteen years of the regime, constituted the core of a nascent civil society flourishing within the constructs of authoritarianism. Inasmuch as these associations proved to be all but dead on arrival once the transition to democracy actually took place, her narrative emphasizes a lost opportunity to construct a democratic system involving real citizen engagement. Radcliff's argument is important on several levels. She offers a new periodization for the transition that de-emphasizes political developments taking place between 1975 and 1978, treating them instead as the culmination of earlier processes. Her focus on the Movimeinto's creation and management of the family associations provides a clearer picture of how Spanish fascist social thinking evolved in response to decreasing influence within the regime. And she recovers the activities of women in both family and neighborhood associations, who moved toward redefining gender roles and fomented habits of democratic participation.