Consolidating democracy

In May 1982 the influential Catalan businessman and liberal politician José María Figueras summarised both the inherent progress and the dangers of the political situation as he viewed it: ‘there is a great difference between the Spain of today and that of yesterday: Spain today is moderate’. Figueras, a child of the war, born in 1928, who had founded the Centro de Estudios de Historia Contemporánea in Barcelona in the 1960s to encourage study of the civil war, supported a broad movement to disseminate information about the difficult past and its relationship to the present. The Centro, possessing a library which included many works donated by Republican exiles, was opened to the public only in 1976 and, in the same year, a pocket book entitled What Is Capitalism? had been published by him in the series Biblioteca de Divulgación Política. The country's ‘moderation’ at the start of the 1980s was ‘as novel a phenomenon as it is fundamental’, according to Figueras, and originated in both ‘the great lesson of the civil war’ and the economic development of the 1960s: ‘certainly a materialist phenomenon, but also a pacifying one’. Spain, he went on, was enjoying a ‘consensus within the body social and amongst its political parties’. Like others, he was also conscious of a continued threat, however: ‘we cannot yet be sure that this [democracy] is firmly consolidated; traditions, mental habits, genuine political forces, are lacking and there is economic crisis and will be again’.