The Best of All Possible Islands: Seville's Universal Exposition, the New Spain, and the New Europe

PART III: Conjunctures and Conflicts: Technobureaucracy and the City

PART III 䉬 Conjunctures and Conflicts: Technobureaucracy and the City 95 9. The Two-Headed Monster To the ordinary visitor setting forth on the Route of Discoveries, the Expo presented itself as a bland consensual mélange of the past and present. For all its diversity of themes, it offered nothing that was likely to shock a nineyear -old child or give much pause to any but the most skeptical of adults. Even if, as has been suggested, much of the exposition promoted a cosmopolitan vision that undercut the authority of nationalist and other strongly held ways of viewing the world, this was done with the perpetually smiling face of liberal tolerance. As a result, the Expo’s selective version of culture and history seemed little more than an elaboration of common sense, a sweetly reasonable version of the general opinions and aspirations of humankind. Who and how many would want to deny that cultural convergence holds more promise than isolation, that solidarity is better than prejudice, or that cooperation is needed to solve problems which are increasingly global in scope? The apparently seamless and broad appeal of such messages did not encourage doubts about what was left unsaid, about contradictions in what was being said, or about who exactly was saying what. Nevertheless, virtually everything about the Expo was at least a little less bland and straightforward than it first appeared to be. And if the event as a whole finally did manage to offer some sort of coherent and consensual vision, it appears on closer examination to have been a consensus that was rather narrowly based. Consider, for example, the endlessly repeated public relations slogan that the Expo offered “something for everybody.” This slogan was ordinarily buttressed by a listing of the diverse contents of many pavilions and the even more diverse series of concerts and other performances being offered. In general, it conveyed the notion that the Expo was cosmopolitan in scope and was democratic, pluralistic, and egalitarian in spirit. However, it also served as one among many means to obscure some important facts and relationships. On the one hand, the slogan belied the fairly obvious fact that the Expo was overwhelmingly designed to appeal to the tastes of urban, well-heeled, middle-class adults and offered little to most Andalusian country folk, working-class people, or even children, much less to members of minority groups, dissenters, radicals of one stripe or another, and numerous other identifiable segments of the population . On the other hand, the slogan tended to gloss over the fact that Expo ’92, like all expositions, was created by and reflected the views and purposes of a tiny cultural, political, and economic elite—an elite whose members in this particular case were divided into antagonistic factions and were often at one another ’s throats. As discussed in Part II, the early history of the Expo’s organization was rocky. To maintain at least the appearance that the Expo was a nonpartisan project of the state rather than a partisan project of the Socialist party, Felipe González had appointed Manuel Olivencia, a non-Socialist, to be the Expo’s commissioner general. However, this decision was never fully accepted by sectors of the Socialist party apparatus and led to a crisis during Olivencia’s tenure in early 1987. To resolve this crisis, the Expo bureaucracy was reorganized . Jacinto Pellón, a fellow traveler of the Socialists, was made chief executive officer of the State Society and put in charge of its day-to-day operations, while Olivencia retained his position as overall director. This division of labor appeared to work well for only a short time. Internal disputes over prerogatives and responsibilities soon arose between the staff of the commissioner general’s office and the functionaries of the State Society, and a highly charged political environment made these conflicts difficult to resolve. Much of the problem was that Olivencia had little space for maneuver, both because he was carefully watched from Madrid and because his enemies within the Andalusian wing of the Socialist party had not been content with the gains that they had made in 1987 and continued to take every opportunity to attack his authority. Eventually, the tensions led to the metamorphosis of the Expo’s already bifurcated bureaucracy into a snarling twoheaded monster that was driven by what at times seemed to be an unbridled desire for autocannibalization. Not surprisingly, in...