The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [116]
The nations of western Europe had learned the same lesson as the Spanish politicians. They had almost seen their neighbor return yet again to the 1930s. In the future Spain would be encouraged and not criticized. There would no longer be discussion of its human rights record. Spain would be welcomed into the ranks of Europe. A great effort would be made to move forward its request for membership in the European Economic Community. The West would also persuade Spain to join NATO, thereby integrating its troublesome troops into the Western alliance.
Even ETA was changed by the coup. The Spanish government’s frustrating two year negotiation with ETA’s politico-militar wing suddenly bore fruit. The members of politico-militar saw that they would be defenseless if the military overthrew the democracy, and concluded that continuing to attack the current Spanish state would be too dangerous for the Basque people. In exchange for an amnesty and release from prison of its members, ETA politico-militar dissolved. But that did not end the violence because other branches of ETA were still active. There is always a splinter group. In time the Spanish government has come to feel that no matter what it negotiates with ETA, a dissident group refusing the accord will always emerge.
IN THE HISTORY of the Spanish “transition,” there is no more dramatic change than the metamorphosis of Felipe González between the 1981 coup d’état and his election as prime minister the following year. After the coup attempt, the coming-to power of the man all of Spain simply called Felipe was seen as inevitable. The youthful Socialist lawyer-turned-underground-labor-organizer was to be a political leader. The man who used to leap onto the back of trucks, dressed in corduroys and leather jacket, and talk to the workers had somehow vanished. The new man in the dark suits was still youthful and charming, but gone was the lawyer who defended civil rights. He became a firm advocate of repressive antiterrorist laws, arguing that other democracies, faced with terrorism, had done the same and therefore it was a democratic thing to do.
Felipe had been an active member of the Socialist International, a protégé of Germany’s Willy Brandt, and a young friend of France’s avuncular François Mitterrand, who was also about to come to power. Felipe had headed the Socialist’s committee on Nicaragua that had taken a critical stance in favor of the Sandinista rebels and against U.S. policy. Asked, in a 1981 interview, in what sense of the word was he a Socialist, he replied, “In all senses of the word—except in the Communist sense.” One political maneuver, in preparation for power, was to resign from the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and refuse to come back until it struck the word Marxist from its party charter.
Asked if he was concerned that power might have a corrupting effect, he insisted that there would be no temptation for him to abuse power because the constitution provided a system of checks and balances that would prevent it.
The Socialist Party slogan for the 1982 election was Por Cambio, For Change, and although little change was being offered, the Spanish, even many Basques, could not help but feel excited about the prospect of someone taking over the government who had not been a part of, who had in fact opposed, the thirty-six-year dictatorship. After so many years of morose stagnation, nothing more than forward motion was a thrilling prospect. Begoña Aretxaga, later a Harvard anthropologist, was in her native San Sebastián at the time. “I was excited in spite of myself, even without believing,” she recalls of the 1982 election. “The legitimacy of the government depends on the continuous exercise of an act of forgetting.”
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14: Checks and Balances
In people’s lives and in social history there is always a first mistake, a little mistake, which happens almost imperceptibly, a momentary slip-up, but this