Spanish Transition To Democracy Research Articles

Architecture Competitions as an Opportunity for Young Women Architects. The Case of the Competition for Rural Subsidised Housing and the Canarian Magüi González, 1981-85

The Spanish democratic transition (1975-1982) was a time when architecture competitions with open and anonymous participation gradually began to appear, a phenomenon that coincided with the progressive incorporation of women architects into the discipline. The first part of this article analyses the situation of these competitions by studying their repercussions in 16 Spanish professional architectural journals belonging to both consolidated and emerging Spanish Architects’ Associations. The participation of women architects is also analysed in order to assess whether these competitions were a source of professional opportunities for them. In the second section, the article studies the Competition for Architectural Solutions for Officially Subsidised Single-Family Housing in Rural Areas (1981-83), a nationwide call with the most significant participation of architecture professionals (more than 1.000) and with a notable number of selected proposals by women architects. This study shows that women architects working in peripheral areas of the Spanish territory had a special presence in this competition, with the Canary Islands being the most remarkable case, for both the good results of its female participants and its ultra-peripheral location. Among the participating women architects, Magüi González stands out for the quality of her proposal and for being the only female professional who eventually obtained a commission from this competition. Finally, the investigation focuses, from a compositional, constructive and design culture perspective, on González’s final built project: 30 dwellings in Juan Grande in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (1983-85), which was, indeed, her opera prima and was eventually awarded an important regional architecture prize.

Trade union renewal against a background of national conflict: the strategies of the trade unions ELA and LAB in the Basque country (1976–2008)

ABSTRACT The structural transformations of the world of work, together with certain strategic choices, have caused a crisis in unionism in Western Europe and distanced them from their social origins. As a result, the unions have needed to renew their strategies in order to revitalise their power. Using qualitative techniques of discourse analysis and in-depth interviews, we analyse the keys to the success of the Basque nationalist unions ELA and LAB and their strategic renewal stretching from the beginnings of the Spanish democratic transition until 2008, a process that occurred against a backdrop of national political conflict in the Basque Country. Firstly, we contextualise the particularity of the political, institutional and union situation in the Basque Country. Secondly, we go on to present the main keys to understanding the crisis of unionism in the West and strategies for revitalizing its power. Thirdly, we describe the methodology used for the analysis. Finally, we present the main results of the research.

Desencanto in the Spanish Transition (1977–1982)

Abstract This article analyzes how the concept of desencanto (disenchantment) was framed within the political discourse of the Spanish democratic transition as a way of delegitimizing radical political actors and normalizing the realpolitik of elite consensus. Through an analysis of the ubiquitous mainstream press usage of the term between 1977 and 1982, I argue that the combination of emotional and temporal meanings assigned to the concept worked to reinforce the moderation exhibited by government positions. Desencanto represented the disappointment or sadness felt by those hoping for a revolutionary rupture with Franco's dictatorship, which was associated to nostalgia or pathological relationships of the past. With the “revolution,” or “utopia” of the past, critics made clear that the radical Left was nostalgic or unrealistic for political projects that did not belong in a modern democracy, exclusively understood from the single and present-oriented politics of moderation and the possible.

Alejandro J. Gómez del Moral. Buying into Change: Mass Consumption, Dictatorship, and Democratization in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1982.

Buying into Change is an aptly titled book with a simple premise: that while much has been written about the liberal political culture that fueled Spain’s democratic transition, insufficient attention has been paid to the role that mass consumption played in the liberalization of Spanish society during the Franco regime. In five clearly organized chapters, Alejandro J. Gómez del Moral explains how the rise of Spanish department stores, consumer magazines, the Spanish advertising industry, and foreign-influenced supermarkets resulted in the development of a Spanish mass consumer society that helped to pave the way for Spain’s remarkably peaceful transition from Francoism to democracy. The main contribution of the book to existing scholarship on the Spanish democratic transition is its historiography of the emergence and development of Spanish department stores and self-service supermarkets. Food and clothing are fundamental cultural elements, and the author offers a compelling argument that the adoption of new foreign ways of buying and selling unwittingly became politically subversive by undermining the Francoist notion that “Spain is different” from other Western nations.

Memories of resistance. The people with physical disability movement in the late francoism and the Spanish democratic transition

This article’s objective is to analyse the birth and development of the People with Physical Disabilities Movement in late Francoist Spain and the democratic transition. To that end, this work is based on qualitative research, based on 12 in-depth interviews, carried out with people with innate or acquired physical disabilities, from different regions of Spain, and born between 1938 and 1960. The participants selected for this work have been especially involved in the People with Physical Disabilities Movement in Spain since the sixties and seventies until today, from a total of 26 informants sources. These testimonies, always used anonymously, will be completed with reference works on the issues discussed, as well as other primary sources.

The formation of Ezker Sindikalaren Konbergentzia: radical unitary unionism in the Basque Country and Navarre

ABSTRACT The origin of the union ESK (Ezker Sindikalaren Konbergentzia) took place in the context of the Spanish Democratic Transition in the Basque Country and Navarre, when many radical unions and political parties emerged and disappeared. Its survival may help us trace better the effectiveness of union renewal strategies. Characterized by high conflict and mobilization rates at the company level, ESK militants sought to promote direct action and horizontal organizational structures standing at the opposite end of the model promoted by the new brand CCOO (Comisiones Obreras). The origin and development of ESK cannot be understood without the parallel analysis of the communist political party EMK (Euskadiko Mugimendu Komunista). ESK turned out to be the most effective and long-lasting materialization of EMK’s strategy of mass politics, and of what we conceive as a form of ‘integral militancy’ that is reflected in the immersion of union activists in ecologist, feminist, internationalist and anti-NATO struggles among others. EMK had a significant role in the promotion of unitary candidacies during the late 1970s and early 1980s, becoming the consolidation of a non-independentist non-centralized radical union model that continues to be referential among Basque struggles today.

The communes as the counter-cultural alternative to the family within the Spanish democratic transition (1968-1986): an ontological approach

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the creation of communes within the last years of Franco’s dictatorship and Spain’s transition to democracy (1968–1986). Specifically, it analyses why some self-considered counter-cultural and young people conceived the communes as an alternative to the family in a general debate about social organization. Responding to an ontological turn in history, the article shows that communes were expected to carry out a personal revolution and open a way to realise a harmonious social relationship by the practical implementation of a set of assumptions about both the world and human nature.

Espacios de discapacidad durante la España del tardofranquismo y la transición democrática. La invención del “sujeto discapacitado"

La constitución de los seres humanos en sujetos ético-políticos viene precedida por nuestra inclusión en una comunidad política, por la aprehensión de ciertas formas de entendernos a nosotros mismos, a los demás y al mundo, así como por efecto de relaciones de poder y de saber en los distintos espacios sociales. Bajo esta perspectiva, este artículo busca analizar la conformación de una particular forma de subjetividad en el contexto de la España del tardofranquismo y la transición democrática: el sujeto discapacitado. Para ello, se abordarán varias estrategias de gobierno de la discapacidad en tres espacios de análisis: la familia, la escuela y el hospital. En cada uno de ellos, y desde una aproximación que combina principalmente las perspectivas teóricas de Bourdieu, Foucault y los miembros de la Segunda Escuela de Chicago, se analizará el material recabado en 17 entrevistas en profundidad realizadas a personas con discapacidad física, congénita o adquirida, nacidas entre 1938 y 1962 en distintos lugares de España. Este análisis permite comprender la emergencia de una nueva subjetividad entre las personas con discapacidad física en el periodo y el contexto estudiados, así como presentar algunas resistencias en sus procesos de constitución como sujetos.

Microblogging electoral: los usos de Twitter de Podemos y Ciudadanos y sus líderes Pablo Iglesias y Albert Rivera en las elecciones generales españolas de 2016

Las elecciones generales de 2016 fueron atípicas porque supusieron la primera repetición electoral de nuestra democracia como consecuencia de la incapacidad para formar gobierno tras los comicios de diciembre de 2015. En este contexto, se estudia el uso de Twitter por parte de los actores políticos emergentes que impidieron la formación de gobierno al acabar con el sistema bipartidista que dominaba el sistema político desde la transición. Los objetivos de investigación son: analizar los contenidos difundidos durante la campaña electoral por los actores analizados. Investigar las similitudes y diferencias entre los mensajes difundidos por los partidos y, por los líderes, observando que actores lograron viralizar más sus contenidos. Para el desarrollo de la investigación se utiliza una metodología mixta. Los resultados revelan que las funciones principales por las cuales los partidos y los líderes políticos utilizan Twitter en la campaña electoral son: la contra campaña y la auto promoción.

Miguel Julve, creative chemist and scholar, a personal account

In the frame of this special issue on the occasion of his 65th birthday, the present article is a personal account on the life and scientific contributions of Miguel Julve by a long-term coworker and friend. Miguel Julve is professor of Chemistry in the University of Valencia. I describe briefly his career, from the first training steps to the leadership of the coordination chemistry group in Valencia and to the blossoming of creative abounding works. I stress the importance of his scientific contribution to molecular magnetism, of his teaching and his careful training of young students and researchers coming from many places in Europe or South-America. I put such personal and collective adventure in the context of the Spanish democratic transition and of the best of European cooperation. I try to describe with a few anecdotes, the personal qualities of the man, who allowed him to create and to keep smoothly, during more than 40 years, with his accomplices J. Faus and F. Lloret, a friendly and studious climate in the laboratory, accompanied by a remarkable scientific production.

Aldo Rossi and the architecture of Spanish democratic transition in Seville

In the second half of the 1970s, during the Spanish transition to democracy, a new generation of young architects in Seville reassessed the city in relation to Italian debates and their strong political drive. Concerned about the destruction of Seville’s historical centre by the Franco regime’s urban planning, these architects found in Aldo Rossi not only their main figure of reference, but also a powerful object of fascination. Moreover, Rossi’s presence in Seville between 1975 and 1978 had a fundamental influence on the early work of young Sevillian architects and the subsequent planning of the city under the first democratic administrations. However, a particular analysis of Rossi’s ideas in comparison to the works of that time in Seville showed how these young local architects did not always fully bring on board Rossi’s political position through their architectural projects. Rather, these architects’ reading of Rossi favoured figure over structure, visual aspects over relational ones, and ultimately had an important impact in the way the city’s historical centre developed in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Changing Political Cleavage and Conflict Structure in Spanish Democratic Transition

The Changing Political Cleavage and Conflict Structure in Spanish Democratic Transition

The Media Protest of Neighbouring Associations, Promoter of Citizen Democratic Culture during Transition in Southern Spain

In the current context of placing value on the neighbouring movement within the Spanish democratic Transition, we set out to confirm that the press actively participates in the growing conjunction of neighbouring issues with political content and contributes to the idea that this movement becomes a parameter of the democratic culture for the citizen during Transition. Since the conflict is newsworthy, we conduct a micro-social study of the neighbouring protest in the newspaper <em>El Correo de Andalucía</em>, published in the southern Spanish city of Seville. Through analysis of content, we study the informative flow and the repertoire of protest following a typology that distinguishes four formats (demonstrations, strikes, speeches and associations) divided into two levels of conflict. The analysis sample consists of 33 texts published between November 1975 (Franco’s death and the accession to the throne of Juan Carlos I) and June 1977 (the first democratic general elections). The main conclusion reveals that the newspaper becomes a platform that gives visibility to the neighbouring movement, normalising behaviours and procedure rules through the protest.

Postepena transformacija španskog ustavnog prava - povodom 40. godišnjice španskog ustava iz 1978. godine

After a century and a half full of swings and hesitations, in which as a consequence of the limited rooting of the constitutional feeling and the lack of normative value of the constitutions, the study of constitutionalism suffered in Spain of lack of object and of method, turning itself into an encyclopedic discipline of magmatic consistency and imprecise limits, the adoption in 1978 of the current Spanish Constitution and the separation between Political Science and Constitutional Law imposed from 1981 onwards made it possible for the latter to have its object and its method precisely outlined, advancing by leaps and bounds to occupy the place it merits in a social and democratic rule of Law state - and above all, the place that such systems demand from it- and giving rise to a scientific community which in such period of time has grown, has renovated, and has buried many old cliches in the process. After carrying out a hasty characterization of the evolution of Spanish constitutional law since the times of the Cadiz Constitution and some more precise reflections on its state at the time of the beginning of the Spanish democratic transition, the present study will analyze the main dogmatic concerns and lines of research of Spanish Constitutional Law in the last forty years, differentiating those of the times of the implementation of the new constitutional system from those arising in the wake of its current crisis.

Uso de conceptos políticos en el diario ABC durante la Transición democrática (1977-1978)

El presente artículo aborda el uso de conceptos políticos en el diario ABC durante la transición democrática española en los años 1977 y 1978. Se analiza la evolución de los significados a través de los editoriales del periódico de los siguientes términos: Monarquía, nación, reconciliación, amnistía, reforma y ruptura. La evolución de los significados en estos conceptos propició la configuración de nuevas culturas políticas en la transición española. La prensa funcionó como intermediario entre los grupos políticos y la ciudadanía para difundir la lucha por definir el contenido semántico que se quería trasladar a esos términos. El ABC no fue ajeno a esta tendencia. El consenso constitucional puede analizarse desde esta perspectiva, interrelacionando los conceptos políticos con su uso por parte de los medios de comunicación. El resultado es una evolución de los significados para iniciar el proceso democrático tras la Dictadura.

Propuesta de un Centro de Archivo del Feminismo tras el análisis de los fondos documentales del Movimiento Feminista

Primary sources are essential for scientific research. This study reviews the documentary sources and analyses the state of the flow of documents generated from the struggle of the women's movement since the Spanish Democratic Transition. It reveals the vulnerability and the lack of archives on feminism and women, as they are outside the scope of protection afforded by archival systems. There is a risk that many of these papers could disappear because of the ephemeral nature of the groups studied. The analysis leads to a proposal for the establishment of a Feminism Archive Centre, to safeguard and protect documents that represent bibliographic heritage as well as the memory of the feminist movement and women's history.

Transformación social y creación de sentido en los testimonios de maestros y alumnos de la segunda etapa del movimiento Freinet en España

This paper begins with a brief overview of who was Celestin Freinet and how their pedagogy was spread throughout the thirties at the Republican Spain and then focuses on how their ideas were used again at schools during the Spanish democratic transition through three testimonies. The reflections of two teacher members of Movimiento Cooperativo de Escuela Popular (MCEP) and one student of the Valencian school that achieved to meet the more Freinet's teachers following this perspective in their classrooms, will be the leitmotif of some key issues of Freinet's pedagogy and will lead us to detect renovating questions that Freinet formulated and which remain in force today. Some of them are not fulfilled while others are part of the teacher's imaginary, such as inserting the assembly with students, connecting the school with the environment by going out for environmental research or having a library in the class.

La construcción de la imagen de la mujer en el humor gráfico del semanario Hermano Lobo (1972 - 1976)

La finalidad de esta investigación es analizar la construcción de la imagen de la mujer en el semanario de humor, Hermano Lobo. Con este objetivo, se analizan las viñetas publicadas en la revista desde mayo de 1972, momento en que aparece la publicación, hasta junio de 1976, fecha en que desaparece. A través de la visión del humor gráfico de Hermano Lobo, encontramos una figura de la mujer desplazada con escasa representación y relevancia. La mujer ejerce de figurante silenciado como acompañante y fiel apoyo del hombre como consecuencia de una sociedad de tradición androcéntrica. Esta investigación forma parte de la tesis doctoral El humor en los últimos años del franquismo e inicios de la transición democrático española: el caso de Hermano Lobo (1972-1976).

El País de los hombres perdidos. Personajes masculinos en el abismo en el cine español de la transición

The study on male characters in the Spanish cinema remains low. In these times when much of the research focuses on the investigation of characters and television stories looking for a new audiovisual masculinity, it is appropriate to look back and press the moment the breakdown of patriarchal conventions occurs in buil­ding male characters. This article comes to the stage of the Spanish democratic Transition, when the female character is released and begins a transformation, as many studies have already shown, in a visible manner. However, male characters in the Spanish cinema of the twentieth century 70-80 emerge with a change of skin, showing the contradictions and fears, and especially the need of a metamorphosis, parallel to the social and political evolution that the country was suffering. Men also in some Spanish films of the moment denote a comprehensive crisis in a turning point between the breakdown of the old regime, the patriarchy, and look to the future of the “new man” who must take and implement, not with little effort and disorientation, new freedoms, new women and new democracy.

Who negotiates for a nation? Catalan mobilization and nationhood before the Spanish democratic transition, 1970–1975

Much of the literature on democratic transitions and ethnic conflict focuses on the role of elites, whether as constructive contributors to ethnic harmony and pacted transitions, or as fomenters of disharmony. What these accounts often fail to take into account is the extent to which the existence of political elites is a variable in itself, particularly when their power bases are not organizations like an army but rather nations or classes. The article develops an analysis of how competition for scarce militants and the demands of organizing them shapes the power and importance of elites. It does this through a case study of Catalonia in the years preceding the Spanish transition. During those years Catalonia, both a stateless nation and a potentially divided society, was the site of organizing from the left and right that nearly monopolized militants and channelled their activity into autonomist, inclusive forms of nationalist mobilization that stifled attempts at internal polarization while creating elites who could negotiate on Catalonia's behalf in the transition. In other words, the ability of moderate Catalan nationalists to organize before the transition explains their ability to represent Catalonia and control its fissures later, and contributes to explaining the success of Catalonia as a case of peaceful multinational coexistence.