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

PART II: Origins and Structures: The State, the Party, and the Expo

PART II 䉬 Origins and Structures: The State, the Party, and the Expo 37 5. Royal Patronage of a Noble Tradition: Madrid, Santo Domingo, Washington, and Paris, 1976–1982 According to the Expo ’92 Official Guide, “On 31 May 1976, H. M. King Juan Carlos I of Spain announced that a Universal Exposition was to be held to celebrate the Fifth Centenary of the Discovery of America” (see SEEUS 1992b:21). The statement, strictly speaking, is not correct. It serves as a sort of myth of origin, conveying the impression that the Expo sprang fully conceived from the royal mind, like wisdom from the ear of Zeus. The myth serves a number of useful purposes—such as enhancing the king’s prestige and defining the Expo as a straightforward project of the state—but it also distorts what may now seem to many Spaniards to be ancient history, something best left pleasantly blurred in the mists of time. In 1976, Juan Carlos did not literally “announce a Universal Exposition.” What he publicly envisioned was, for good reasons, put in slightly vaguer, more conditional, and less confining terms. To overlook this, as published versions of the origins of the Expo have tended to do since the early 1980s, creates an aura of manifest destiny about the celebration by obscuring the cultural politics that made it a risky venture from its very beginnings. But at almost any point along the long road from 1976 to 1992, events could have swung in a quite different direction. Indeed, when the king made his proposal in May 1976, virtually nothing was certain in Spanish affairs, least of all the future of the monarchy. It was only a few months before, in November 1975, that Francisco Franco Bahamonde , Spain’s dictator for nearly forty years, had died in Madrid. In accordance with the Caudillo’s plans, Juan Carlos de Borbón had recently been “installed” on a throne that had been vacant since the exile of Juan Carlos’s grandfather (Alfonso XIII) and the foundation of the second Spanish republic in 1931. As Franco lay dying, Juan Carlos had become the new head of state and, as such, he was formally pledged to defending the fundamental laws of the authoritarian regime that had been born in 1936 amidst the blood, ashes, and embittered passions of the Spanish Civil War. Franco’s demise quickly raised pressures for democratization to the boiling point. While the king recognized the need for liberalization, Carlos Arias Navarro, Spain’s prime minister, vacillated about implementing a law of reform that would make political parties legal. Arias Navarro dallied and finally failed to implement the law, in part because he feared the reaction of the army and Francoist stalwarts. In the view of the king and many other moderates, the failures of the prime minister seemed to be leading toward a complete disaster . Arias Navarro clearly had to go, but to dismiss him precipitously might well lead to a situation that threatened the monarchy itself. The army or the Francoist stalwarts might be provoked into attempting some sort of direct takeover, or the democratic opposition might irrevocably commit itself to a republic . In either case, a prophecy made by Santiago Carillo, the head of the Communist party in Spain, would be fulfilled: the king’s reign would go down in history as the reign of “Juan the Brief.”1 To forestall the end of his reign and to achieve what came to be called a ruptura pactada (a negotiated break) with the Francoist regime, the king not only had to distance himself politically from his own government but also had to strengthen his ability to act autonomously. But how could he do this? After consultations with his circle of advisers, Juan Carlos decided that he would be the first Spanish monarch in half a millennium to make a state visit to the Americas. The visit would have to be short, because being too far removed from the scene in Spain was as dangerous for the king as being on the scene but appearing incapable of acting. Therefore, he planned only two main stops, the first one in Santo Domingo, the capital city founded by Columbus in Spain’s first American colony, the present Dominican Republic, and the second one in Washington, D.C., the capital city of the “Free World.” The key theme running through Juan Carlos’s speeches and remarks in...