A nation transformed in two generations

When in November 1975 Franco died, he still possessed the powers granted him by his fellow generals after the outbreak of the Civil War. Such powers, a French general observed, had been enjoyed by no leader since Napoleon. For 36 years, ‘all important decisions’, in John Hooper’s words, ‘were taken by one man’. In the last instance he decided who should govern Spain under his guidance. With the constitution of 1978 Spain became a democratic constitutional monarchy. Governments are the creation of free elctions based on universal suffrage. Elections are a contest betweeen two modern mass parties: the progressive centre left Socialists and the conservative right-of-centre Partido Popular.

Hooper describes with characteristic clarity how this political sea change came about. What concerns him is how political liberty was seen as demanding liberty in all spheres of life. He chronicles the social, economic, moral and cultural transformations in everyday life that created the ‘New Spaniards’ of his title.

He starts with the ‘years of development’ in the 1960s. In the 1950s, Spain was still classed by UNO as an under- developed economy. Its GDP was substantially below that of Britain; nearly half the population won their living on the land, whereas in Britain only 2 per cent did. Faced with bankruptcy, in 1959 Franco’s ministers abandoned the vain enterprise of creating an autarchic economy closed to Europe. The result was that the economy in the 1960s grew at the rate of 7 per cent a year, well above European levels, exceeded in the developed world only by Japan. The trickle of workers to the industrial towns became a flood: first to the shanty towns and finally to bleak tenements. Substantial villages in Upper Aragon were left without a single inhabitant, the telephone lines dangling in the deserted streets. By the 1970s what had been largely a traditional agrarian society was well on the way to becoming an urbanised, technologically advanced consumer society of