Professor Joao Carlos Espada, co-founder of the Institute for Political Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal, Dr. Ainhoa Campos Posada, Universidad Complutense Madrid, and Harris Mylonas, Associate Professor at George Washington University, discussed these developments in Portugal, Spain, and Greece respectively. The seminar was chaired by ESC and SEESOX Director, Dr Othon Anastasakis.
Portugal, Spain, and Greece represent the first cases of democratisation within the European space after the Second World War and before the fall of Communism, and are thus central to democratisation theory. It was precisely on this theoretical approach that Joao Carlos Espada grounded his presentation. He considered the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal as part of the third wave of democratization, as outlined by Samuel Huntington. Espada drew consistently on Huntigton’s views on the third wave of democratisation.
He argued that the military coup that heralded the establishment of democracy in Portugal was followed by a strong confrontation between two radically different conceptions of democracy: on the one hand popular democracy, which was supported by the military, inspired by Communism, and on the other, parliamentary democracy. Although the communists were electorally defeated, they attempted a coup in November 1975 that was defeated by a coalition of left and center-right parties.Espada credited the intellectual influences of Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and particularly Ralf Dahrendorf as inspirations for the intellectual dispositions that led to the transitions in Europe. He further discussed two concepts of revolution – namely, dogmatic revolution of an authoritarian kind and a critical and piecemeal revolution towards a free and pluralist competition. He finished his presentation by concluding that parliamentary democracy won in Portugal because pseudo-democracy was fought and won over.
Ainhoa Campos Posada presented the politics of transition from dictatorship in Spain and focused on the political use of the memory of the transition in contemporary Spanish politics. She examined the use of the myth of the national unity and its use in contemporary Spanish politics by focusing on a recent speech of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, in which he appealed to the collective consciousness of Spanish society by urging them to unify and repudiate a right-wing campaign accusing his wife of corruption. Sanchez had suspended his activities because of the campaign, but considered the campaign as a departure from the unity of purpose of Spanish politics.
The myth of Spanish democratic transition had been that the Spanish nation had been unified in a process that – in hindsight – looked as if it were inevitably and naturally leading towards democracy. And the general agreement had been that the transition started with the death of Franco in 1975 and ended with the elections of 1982.
Campos Posada presented a more complex picture. Despite the reforms ushering in political pluralism and the separation of church and state, political power during the transitional period was contested by the socialists, communists, and conservative forces led by Adolfo Suarez, who would become the first democratically elected prime minister. The local elections of 1979 led to transformation of local politics and politics of consensus gave way to party politics, according to Campos Posada. The party created by Suarez broke up and Suarez resigned. A military uprising was attempted but failed; the King did not support it, despite the delay in taking such a decision.
In the 1990s the myth of an inevitable transition to democracy driven by socio-economic needs was shaped and considered as a model for South America. The media, according to Campos Posada, reinforced this discourse and crystallized the transition myth in the public consciousness.
Despite the attempts of academics to debunk the transition myth, the public still believed it. The turning point, according to Campos Posada, came during the financial crisis and the popular protests in June 2011. Following the protests a new party – Podemos – was established, whilst the popularity of the King was tarnished. The public started seeing him as being appointed by Francisco Franco. Another part of the myth to be dismantled was the role of Adolfo Suarez and his reluctance to subject the monarchy to a referendum during the transition. But the protests ushered in a second myth, according to Campos Posada, namely that all the problems that Spain currently faces are due to the lie of the transition.
Harris Mylonas focused his presentation on the different interpretations of the transition in Greece and on the broader question of meaning of democracy for different Greek political factions. Mylonas argued that those who are concerned with substantive democracy and who tend to occupy the left of Greek politics do not see the transition from the military dictatorship to the governments of Kostantinos Karamanlis and Adreas Papandreou as a fundamental leap towards substantive democracy, but merely a transition towards procedural democracy. For them the transition, which is celebrated today, did not happen.
This definition of democracy, according to Mylonas, impacts whether one thinks that there is backsliding in Greece today. Even within those who maintain that the transition brought Greece greater democracy, they refer to different periods as transition markers: for some is 1974; for others is 1975 after the adoption of the new constitution; for supporters of Papandreou, who saw the Karamanlis government as the continuation of the old regime, the transition happened in 1981, when Papandreou came to power.
Mylonas, like Campos Posada, argued that the transition was not inevitable and the actors themselves did not think of it as inevitable. Andreas Papandreou, for example, was worried that there would be a coup after 1981 – perhaps in 1983 or 1984 – which does not fit with a linear understanding of democratic transition.
Similar to the Spanish case, Mylonas argued that the transition period in Greece holds an important legitimising function. According to him, for a long time the Polytechnic generation – referring to the student protests against the military regime – legitimated their position in politics through their position in relation to the dictatorship, but this generation is gradually disappearing. Since the connection of the present generation of politicians to the transition period is getting more distant, the source of legitimation in contemporary Greek politics is the stance they took in relation to the financial crisis.
The discussion that followed the three presentations focused – among others – on the connections between the three cases, the role of the church and the communist party, and the role of EU accession process as an incentive for democratization.
by Alban Dafa (ESC Research Assistant)
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