Over a Young Dead Body: The Spanish Transition as Bildungsroman

On November 26, 1984, Jürgen Habermas, by then one of the most influential living philosophers, gave a lecture in front of the Spanish Parliament. Just two years before, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE)¹ had won an absolute majority in the General Elections closing, for some, the “Spanish Transition” to democracy.² The text was entitled “La pérdida de confianza en sí misma de la cultura occidental.” A few days later, a shorter version was published for a much wider audience by El País, the most important Spanish newspaper, under a new title: “El fin de una utopía.”³ In his address, Habermas implicitly confronted the new Spanish government with a huge task and responsibility. The welfare state model was not only in crisis but also in immediate danger of collapse due to recent victories by Reagan and Thatcher. The young Spanish democracy, exempt from the disappointments experienced by the old Western parliamentary regimes and by the slow decadence of the welfare state model, was in a privileged position to place itself at the avant-garde of the social-democratic ideal implied in Habermas’ theories. Indeed, the so called “consensus” that had been privileged in the writing of the new constitution, the social pacts of the Moncloa and other essential moments of the transition, could be seen, at least superficially, as a staging of Habermas’ ideas around an “emancipa-tory communicative act” described in his “Theory of Communicative Action” (Medina 60–1). Supposedly, the new democracy had been the result of a non-violent, non-exclusionary dialogical process in which everybody had given priority to rationality over ideology. In the future, the role of Spain as a possible emblematic script for the renovation of a Welfare State in crisis required the self-confidence and responsibility of an “adult” nation. If the youth of Spanish democracy was an advantage that could provide the illusion and strength long lost by more experienced democracies, on the other hand, the dangers associated with the potential irresponsibility of that same youth had to be quickly left aside. Spain had to act as an adult and responsible democracy. First of all, it should recognize that there was no alternative to the welfare state (Habermas, “The New Obscurity” 10). Then, it should distance itself not only from the “old” neo-conservatives (“legitimists” in Habermas’ words [13]), whose goal was limited to the mere stabilization of the system, but also from the so-called “anti-productivist alliance,”⁴ integrated by radical dissidents of the industrial society. The Spanish transition was implicitly framed as the fastest “coming-of-age” story. Less than ten years after the death of the father, the child was supposed to behave not only as an adult but also as an exemplary one. It should be able to take advantage of its youth but also, at the same time, be ready to take his adult responsibilities very seriously.

Another model of exemplarity for the new democracy was outlined a few years later from a very different, indeed antagonistic, theoretical position. Gianni Vattimo, the most influential representative of “post-modernism” in Southern Europe gave Spain, again, a privileged position and responsibility in the “Foreword” to the Spanish Edition of his Transparent Society (1990). For Vattimo, the youth of Spanish democracy made it a perfect stage for a new model of “postmodern emancipation” (La sociedad transparente 67). The transition years had made Vattimo fantasize about the possibility of following Benjamin’s steps by authoring a volume entitled Madrid Capital of the XXth Century: “España, mucho más que París o Londres, y hasta puede que Nueva York incluso, ha sido efectivamente el lugar ideal donde se han dado cita todas las aventuras intelectuales de occidente” (La sociedad transparente 67). What made Spain so exemplary were not only its political youth, but also its hedonistic Latin drive. Vattimo ended his foreword with a challenge, an invitation but also a call for responsibility:

¿Es posible actuar una emancipación que libre la existencia a sus aspectos de gozo inmediato, es decir, que nos aproxime a...