Adiós, amigo Willy. Nuestro homenaje será el de seguir trabajando por tus ideales europeos e internacionales; lo haremos con el mismo entusiasmo que tú nos mostraste. Pero te confieso, y quiero confesar a todos, que será difícil llenar el hueco de tu ausencia.Footnote 1 (Felipe González's speech at Willy Brandt's funeral, Berlin, 17 Oct. 1992; Felipe González Foundation Archive)
Felipe González . . . Fils spirituel de Willy Brandt, connu et apprécié en Europe et en Amérique latine, il était l'un des leaders très écoutés de l'Internationale socialiste.Footnote 2 (Pierre Mauroy, Mémoires ‘Vous mettrez du bleu au ciel’, 2003)
The ‘Willy Brandt – Politikerleben’ exhibition at the Willy Brandt Foundation's old headquarters near the Brandenburg Gate culminated in a display of the Order of Service of the West German chancellor's state funeral on 17 October 1992, a photograph of Brandt's casket and a radio broadcast of a farewell speech delivered at the memorial.Footnote 3 Only one person was present in all three exhibition memorabilia – Felipe González, the former president of Spain. The only non-German listed in the Order of Service, González was seen in the photograph standing next to Brandt's casket as he delivered his farewell speech in Spanish – the broadcast included a voice-over in German – at the first state funeral held at the Reichstag in a reunified Berlin.
Despite the public spotlight on González at Brandt's funeral and in the foundation's curatorial display, which clearly highlights their bond, there are no academic texts that explore the connection between the two politicians. Published in 2018, Willy Brandt and International Relations: Europe, the USA and Latin America is a most welcome contribution to scholarship on Brandt and the only book in English to address his politics as an elder statesman between 1974 and 1992.Footnote 4 However, with only a few passing references to González, it offers little on their relationship. Even Hélène Miard-Delacroix's recent biography (published in both French and English), Willy Brandt: Life of a Statesman, mentions González only twice: when the two men met formally for the first time in Portugal in 1974 and later when Brandt asked González to deliver his eulogy in 1992.Footnote 5 There is no discussion of what occurred between the two dates, though much must have passed between the two men to establish a relationship such that Brandt would ask González to deliver the eulogy at his state funeral. This is also the case with biographies of Brandt in German, even though Hans-Joachim Noack calls González Brandt's ‘politische[r] Ziehsohn’ – his political adopted son.Footnote 6
A review of the scholarship on political parties reveals a similar picture. Despite his lifelong interest in Spain and democratisation in the Iberian Peninsula, Brandt is mentioned only once in a recent study on Southern European socialism in the 1970s.Footnote 7 Earlier important works on the support the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung; FES) offered the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español; PSOE) during Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy also fail to explore the personal and intellectual link between González and Brandt.Footnote 8 Works on socialist transnational networks at a European level, whether of a more structured or intellectual kind, have little to say about the subject.Footnote 9
However, political advisors to both men have often remarked that Brandt and González shared an almost ‘father–son’ relationship. Indeed, in a recent interview, Luis Yáñez-Barnuevo (the PSOE's international secretary from 1974 to 1979) observed that ‘they were like father and son’.Footnote 10 Such remarks reveal that Brandt and González shared a strong emotional bond which is in itself a subject worthy of academic exploration and one that historical research has yet to catch up with. Yet were there political-intellectual underpinnings to their affective rapport as well?
In his memoir, Pierre Mauroy, the first socialist French prime minister under President François Mitterrand, described González as Brandt's ‘spiritual son’ in a political context, implying that their bond contained an important intellectual element.Footnote 11 This description is particularly revealing because Brandt served as president of the Socialist International (SI) for two decades, and Mauroy assumed the role a month before Brandt's death. Mauroy thus acknowledged that, although he was Brandt's institutional successor, the continuity of Brandt's intellectual project lay with González. Indeed, Walter Haubrich, the Frankfurter Allgemeine's Spanish correspondent from the late 1960s and for over three decades, called theirs a ‘political father–son relationship’.Footnote 12
This article unpacks the term fils spirituel used by Mauroy to refer to the bond between Brandt and González. The research is based on memoirs; interviews with senior policy makers, including González himself and former US Secretary of State George Shultz; archival material from the FES and the Willy Brandt Archive in Bonn; new or underexplored material from the Felipe González Foundation in Madrid, the Pablo Iglesias Foundation in Alcalá de Henares, the Mário Soares Foundation in Lisbon, the Bruno Kreisky Foundation in Vienna and the Swedish Labour Movement's Archive in Stockholm; and exclusive additional private papers and CIA reports.
The article first explores the biographies of Brandt and González up until 1974, when they first met in Portugal, to review their backgrounds in terms of both their generational differences and their nationalities and political experiences, as well as their commonalities. It provides an essential framework to understand what brought such a seemingly unlikely pair together. This exploration leads into the second section of the article on the three distinct yet interconnected political-intellectual pillars that sustained their relationship: (i) democracy, (ii) social democracy and (iii) internationalism. Brandt and González also shared a common purpose: to usher their vision of international social democracy into a new decade (the 1990s) and project it toward new territories on both sides of the Atlantic. The conclusion examines González's eulogy of Brandt to better understand the emotional dimension of the ‘father–son’ relationship between the two men, thus bringing the paper full circle to their initial encounter and putting flesh on the limited references in the literature. It also highlights the point that their political relationship was based on an emotional bond. In doing so, new threads on the international history of social democracy, on the transnational history of contemporary Europe in the late Cold War, on the democratisation of Spain and on transnational approaches to political mentorship are woven into the narrative.Footnote 13
A Seemingly Unlikely Pair
At first glance, Brandt and González seemed like an unlikely pair, especially when it came to their age, nationality and political experience. Soon after the PSOE's 1974 conference in Suresnes, a small town in the western suburbs of Paris, González, the new PSOE first secretary, travelled to Portugal to attend a meeting of that country's Socialist Party (Partido Socialista; PS), where he met Brandt for the first time.Footnote 14 González made an immediate impression on Brandt. From the beginning, ‘I felt a liking for the young lawyer, Felipe González, who had taken over the leadership of the PSOE’, Brandt intimated in his memoirs.Footnote 15 He continued: ‘It has been fascinating to see Spain find its way into the modern world under his prudent and courageous leadership’.Footnote 16 Brandt had found just the man to lead the socialist project in Spain. Indeed, the meeting was a turning point for both men. González was in his early thirties when he met Brandt, who was sixty-one.
Importantly, González did not think and sound like the ‘Toulouse gerontocracy’, a term used by historian Richard Gillespie to refer to the PSOE leaders who lived in exile in southern France, and with whom Brandt had dealt since the 1930s.Footnote 17 Years later, Austrian social democrat Bruno Kreisky (who served as Austria's chancellor from 1970 to 1983) recalled that at the very first, ‘we listened to Felipe with respect, but not without a certain scepticism . . . [due to his age]. But the young Felipe struck us with his objectivity and insight in an impressive analysis of the situation in Spain. We were meeting with a representative of the new Spanish youth for the first time, and we all talked about it in the corridors – admiringly and a great deal’.Footnote 18 Brandt later wrote in his memoirs that González ‘was the only Spanish leader who ever spoke to me about the future and change’.
In her 1978 article, ‘Mentoring in Politics: The Case of Willy Brandt’, Barbara Kellerman explores the qualitative impact of Brandt's mentors, Julius Leber and Ernst Reuter. Leber had been a prominent politician in Germany's Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD) in the interwar period and the editor-in-chief of the social democratic newspaper Lübecker Volksboten, for which Brandt wrote as a student in the early 1930s. Reuter was the mayor of West Berlin between 1948 and 1953 after his return from exile in Turkey. Kellerman notes that ‘prophetically, Brandt met Reuter at the home of Leber's widow’, a further connection between Brandt and both his mentors.Footnote 19
‘From the first moment I felt that Reuter and I understood each other very well. When I was a young man I never felt that the difference of twenty years in our age alienated me from Julius Leber; that difference did not matter in my relationship with Ernst Reuter either’, wrote Brandt in his memoirs published in 1960.Footnote 20 Almost thirty years later, in another book of memoirs, Brandt remembered:
Politically and personally, Reuter and I were close, almost entirely of one mind. I was regarded as ‘Reuter's young man’, and I was proud of his liking for me and of being able to give him support. What drew us together? On my return from wartime exile in Scandinavia, I felt attracted by his humane and sociable manner, his warmth, his wit, his courage in standing up for his convictions, his readiness to shoulder responsibility, his optimistic nature and his assured but not arrogant way of expressing himself, even to the Allies.Footnote 21
Brandt's words consistently show that age did not stop him from establishing significant political relationships and that personal affection played an important role in them. While unaware of the Brandt–González relationship at the time of publication, Kellerman concluded that ‘having a mentor facilitates generative ability, the ability to become a mentor oneself. This last point can scarcely be overestimated’.Footnote 22 As the Brandt–González relationship later demonstrated, Kellerman's statement was prescient. The age gap between Brandt and González was ultimately an asset rather than a liability.
González also provided ‘new blood’ – or ‘a boost of young sap’, to use the literal translation of his statement in a 1982 interview – to the SI, an otherwise ageing organisation.Footnote 23 Western Europe's best-known socialists, including Brandt, Kreisky, Olof Palme, Michael Foot, Pietro Nenni and François Mitterrand, flew to Madrid to show their support for the PSOE's grand public debut in Madrid after decades of proscription.Footnote 24 In 1976, González was closest in age to Palme, who was nevertheless fifteen years his senior, followed by Mitterrand, Brandt, Foot and Kreisky, who were all about thirty years older than González, and finally Nenni, who was fifty years older. They all remembered the Spanish Civil War and had lived through the Second World War, whereas González was born halfway through the latter in officially neutral, yet Nazi-influenced, Francoist Spain.Footnote 25 In short, though there was a clear age gap, González was a rare and welcome sight among the ageing PSOE leaders and a breath of fresh air within the SI.
Another key difference between Brandt and González was their nationality and their life abroad. Brandt ‘came from a North German Protestant background’,Footnote 26 while González was born and raised in Seville, southern Spain – north vs. south, Lutheran vs. Catholic. However, both Brandt's and González's families had been involved in the trade union movement. Brandt's mother – a single mother – had worked as a salesgirl in a social-democratic co-operative store and been active in the SPD's workers’ associations; his maternal grandfather, who assumed the role of father, had been an SPD member. González's father had been a member of the General Union of Workers (Unión General de Trabajadores; UGT) before the Civil War.
Equally, both families were committed to Brandt's and González's education. Brandt's grandfather saw to it that Brandt did not attend a local primary school, which would have made it difficult for him to pursue higher education, and enrolled him in the St Lorenz Boys’ Middle School instead.Footnote 27 His grandfather's ambition, wrote Brandt, ‘was to see me go further than himself and my mother Martha’.Footnote 28 González's family sent him to San Antonio María Claret,Footnote 29 a newly built Catholic (day and boarding) school for boys from a middle-class background and with aspirational parents like González's.
Despite the difference in scale and population, Lübeck and Seville were both port cities and historic centres of international trade. Lübeck was a key Hanseatic town while Seville was the Spanish departure point for the New World – perhaps a motivation or sign of Brandt's and González's future internationalism. ‘I had realised in my Lübeck days that it was far from adequate to consider political problems from a purely national standpoint . . . and was particularly anxious to enrich this picture with personal contacts’, wrote Brandt.Footnote 30 Although he spent the first nineteen years of his life in his hometown, in April 1933 ‘the young shipbroker's apprentice pressed his possessions into a small attaché case and, with only a hundred [Reichsmarks] in his pocket, escaped Hitler's Reich as a stowaway on a fishing vessel’.Footnote 31 Like Brandt, González also spent the first twenty years of his life in his hometown and experienced his first extended stay away from home abroad.
Brandt spent approximately fifteen years in exile in Norway and later Sweden; he only moved to Berlin permanently in 1947. ‘My only choice was “external” emigration. I took that choice, and I have never regretted it, because it offered me not only the chance to learn but also to resist’, wrote Brandt.Footnote 32 González's experience abroad was also one related to learning and activism. After graduating in law from the University of Seville, González took up a Catholic trade union scholarship at the University of Louvain in Belgium, where he improved his French and studied economics during the 1965–6 academic year. There, he had to face the grim realities of Spanish migrants: ‘they are helpless, oppressed, exploited and, to top it all, hated as inferior beings, as a cursed race’, he wrote in a personal letter.Footnote 33
Brandt and González went abroad before they had even lived in the capital of their respective countries; by the time they met in 1974, both had travelled widely. According to one academic commentator, ‘Among the Federal Republic's post-war chancellors, Brandt was the one most widely travelled in his youth’.Footnote 34 Brandt later travelled extensively as foreign minister and chancellor, while González repeatedly visited France, Portugal and Belgium.Footnote 35
The only country in which both Brandt and González had lived was Spain. Brandt was emotionally attached to Spain.Footnote 36 Aged twenty-three, he travelled there to report on the Spanish Civil War as well as to improve relations between the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands; SAPD), a breakaway faction of the SPD which he had joined in 1931, and the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista; POUM), a Trotskyist group.Footnote 37
The Spanish Civil War captured the imagination of the left everywhere, from Europe to India.Footnote 38 As the prominent British historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, the Civil War ‘became and has remained something remembered by those who were young at the time like the heart-rending and indestructible memory of a first great and lost love’.Footnote 39 Brandt was no exception, and his stay in Barcelona and on the Aragon front in 1937 was ‘full of the most contradictory impressions and of important experiences which later largely determined my political actions and thinking’.Footnote 40 On his return to Oslo, he felt particular satisfaction ‘to work on the Spanish Aid programme, which provided food and medical supplies to the bitter end’.Footnote 41 Although Brandt did not officially visit the country for almost four decades, he did spend time on vacation in the Canary Islands from 1972 onwards, ‘and save for Norway and Sweden where he went into exile, Brandt felt most attached to Spain’.Footnote 42
Until 1974, Brandt and González's experience in public service had been completely different. Brandt had held municipal office as mayor of West Berlin from 1957 to 1966, and he became chairman of the SPD in 1964, a post he retained until 1987. That is to say, Brandt had been the leader of the SPD for a decade when he met González, whereas González had been the leader of the PSOE for just a few weeks. Unlike Brandt, who served as foreign minister and vice-chancellor of West Germany from 1966 to 1969 and then as chancellor from 1969 to 1974, González had no experience in either municipal or national government. Brandt's track record as a highly experienced municipal, party, national and international politician and policy maker contrasted sharply with González's lack of experience in office. Yet it was precisely the contrast between Brandt and González, along with Brandt's resignation as chancellor just a few months before their meeting in Portugal, that partly motivated Brandt to become involved in González's political development. After unexpectedly resigning the chancellorship, Brandt searched for new political projects. In other words, González presented himself at the right time.
Despite his lack of experience in office, González, like Brandt in his youth, had been active in the labour movement in his hometown and had played an important role in promoting the PSOE in Spain.Footnote 43 Though not in a formal capacity, González had also built international links with several socialist comrades abroad. By the time Brandt and González met, González had established a strong connection with several prominent French socialists, including international relations secretary of the French Socialist Party, Robert Pontillon, and Gaston Defferre, who served as mayor of Marseille and went on to become French prime minister under Mitterrand.Footnote 44 Thus, González was not unfamiliar with international matters and had started to develop transnational collaborations with other European socialists.
In addition, González had a great deal of underground experience in politics, which Brandt would have identified with from his youth in Nazi Germany and Scandinavia, where he had been ‘a refugee twice over’.Footnote 45 Brandt had engaged in underground politics when he was González's age and had built an international network with other exiles in the Kleine Internationale based in Stockholm. In this ‘modest international circle’, as he called it in a letter written in 1946, ‘many things now appear considerably more complicated than they did at the time, but we should nonetheless not feel ashamed of the work we did then’.Footnote 46 Approximately three decades later, Brandt thought that González would benefit from a Grosse Internationale of sorts – the Socialist International. Brandt took office as president of the SI in 1976,Footnote 47 and two years later González became its vice-president.Footnote 48 He and Brandt worked closely together until Brandt's death.
To sum up, Brandt and González had little in common at first glance: old vs. young, northern vs. southern, experienced vs. inexperienced. They belonged to different generations, hailed from different national backgrounds and had radically different levels of experience in office when they met in 1974. Rather than divide them, these differences brought them closer together, allowing them to forge a sense of continuity in their shared project of advancing democracy, social democracy and internationalism.
Brandt and González had more in common than one might think at first glance, however. They shared an emotional attachment to Spain and experience in underground politics, and they had moved straight from the local to the international. They came from families linked to the labour movement that had invested in their education, they originated from countries that had experienced civil violence and authoritarianism and they had built an informal international network of their own. Their commonalities proved essential to building an emotional bond that sustained and nurtured their shared political beliefs.
Democracy
‘To have helped in causing the German name to be linked with the concept of peace and the prospect of European freedom is the true satisfaction of my life’, reads Brandt's last sentence of My Life in Politics, Brandt's final book of memoirs published in 1992.Footnote 49 He expanded on this point a few paragraphs earlier in the chapter: ‘In my old age, I am glad of the measurable gain for human rights and civil liberties. First in the centre of Europe. Then in the South, written off by the faint-hearted only a decade and a half ago’.Footnote 50 In contrast to the faint-hearted Brandt mentioned, González thought that Brandt ‘was exceptionally attentive and exceptionally committed to democratic development in the Iberian Peninsula’.Footnote 51 Indeed, in a lengthy 1978 report entitled Portuguese Socialism and Willy Brandt, Mário Soares, secretary-general of the Portuguese PS and earlier prime minister, wrote that ‘Brandt had the courage and the clearness to trust the PS’ in the verão caiente (hot summer) of 1975 when ‘few people in Europe . . . would have then bet on the victory of the PS in that unequal fight [against the Communist Party]’.Footnote 52
Brandt's experiences in the Spanish Civil War, where he learnt to distrust the communists, as well as under the Nazi regime and in exile, made him particularly sensitive to later developments in Spain.Footnote 53 As noted in a 2014 lecture delivered by historian Bernd Rother, Brandt dedicated forty pages of his 1982 autobiography to Spain. Rother also comments that Brandt drew two major lessons for his future life in politics from his time in Spain: first, the value of freedom and that its enemies came both from the right and the left; second, the need to confront sectarianism.Footnote 54 After his defection to the SAPD and return from Spain, Brandt ‘shed all [his] inclinations towards party intrigue and factionalism’.Footnote 55 Spain was a point of inflexion in his life. In addition, supporting Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy provided some atonement for Germany's past sins, which included Nazi Germany's involvement in the Spanish Civil War.Footnote 56 To be sure, the image of Brandt dropping to his knees at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw in a gesture of humility for the crimes of the Nazis is the most poignant visual reminder of his attempts to shoulder Germany's burden. Therefore, the memory of both wars probably influenced Brandt's active interest in Spain's transition to democracy.Footnote 57
In an introduction to the English edition of his memoirs of exile published in 1971, Brandt wrote,
For me the Spain of today has not become an idée fixe. I know that there too things have progressed, and I can but hope with all my heart that the forces of freedom and a European vision will come out on top. The Spanish people certainly do not want another civil war. Democracy which is still being suppressed in Spain can only gradually emerge victorious. It needs European solidarity.Footnote 58
Brandt used his vast prestige as the German and European left's moral leader to promote democracy all over the world, especially in Southern Europe and Latin America.Footnote 59 It is therefore not surprising that González and Brandt first met in Portugal, months after the Carnation Revolution, which had led to the fall of the oldest dictatorship in Western Europe.Footnote 60
Partly as a consequence of US policy towards Portugal, explored by historian Mario Del Pero in several articles and more recently by Daniela MeloFootnote 61 – according to Soares, Henry Kissinger foretold that, in the best case, ‘I would end up my days as another Karensky [sic] in exile teaching in some American University’Footnote 62 – West Germany began its own Südpolitik, or southern policy, toward Portugal and then Spain.Footnote 63 In December 1976, at the PSOE's first conference in Spain since the Civil War, a large banner reading Socialismo es libertad (‘Socialism is freedom’) covered the main hall at the Hotel Meliá Castilla in Madrid.Footnote 64 González proclaimed that the PSOE was ‘willing to negotiate how to get from dictatorship to democracy, but not the objective of democracy itself’ and that ‘[the situation] requires us to come to terms with the past, so we can overcome it, not cling onto it. [It] requires us to look to the future . . . in search of justice, not revenge’.Footnote 65 It was then Brandt's turn to speak: ‘Compañeros, my fellow socialists, you can count on our unbroken solidarity in this difficult path to democracy and freedom’.Footnote 66 Brandt was the keynote speaker at the conference. He gave his speech entirely in Spanish, as did Palme.Footnote 67 Brandt had learnt some Spanish in school. Uwe-Karsten Heye, his speechwriter between 1973 and 1979, recalled that Brandt had delivered a speech in Spanish to thousands of people in Mexico City a year earlier.Footnote 68 At the time, Brandt, Palme, Mitterrand and González all featured on the cover of a special edition of El Socialista, the PSOE's party newspaper, to demonstrate their support for democracy in Spain.Footnote 69
In a booklet entitled ¿Qué es el socialismo? (What is socialism?) published in 1976 – part of an outreach series on political ideas launched soon after Franco's death – González cautioned that ‘the temptation, after a dictatorial regime as long-lasting as the Spanish one, to offer as an alternative a new dictatorship of the opposite sign is frequent and explicable in our society’.Footnote 70 However, he thought that ‘the individual's right to think and express one's ideas freely, the collective right to join or create associations that defend one's interests in a trade union, social or political level, or to decide who will govern one's destiny . . . are closely and indissolubly linked, and only a socialist alternative, that is to say, a democratic alternative in all these directions, can achieve complete emancipation’.Footnote 71
In an interview given to YA newspaper in June 1977, González declared that ‘this dilemma [between reform and revolution] is absolutely out of date, that it is necessary to create reforms that are irreversible, that become radical transformations of society’.Footnote 72 On 6 December 1978, the day of the referendum on the new Spanish constitution, González responded to the Brazilian weekly magazine Veja, which had asked him whether change would be made possible by the socialist alternative, as follows: ‘I never said that the PSOE is a revolutionary alternative. It offers no revolutionary expectations’.Footnote 73 He added: ‘I think that democracy – non-adjectivized democracy – is the only way to socialism. And that is because I see democracy as the socialisation of the State's wealth. Socialism is a deeper representation of the notion of democracy, not an alternative to it’. For González, therefore, democracy was not only the basic condition for socialism, but also a synonym for socialism.
González shared a special relationship, ‘una sensibilidad próxima’, with leaders in Latin American countries, with whom he spoke in Spanish.Footnote 74 In an interview with the author, he stated that he ‘was closest to them’, engaging in discussions of new and innovative ideas.Footnote 75 For instance, President Ricardo Lagos of Chile revealed the impact of González's conversations with him on how to get a country to shift from dictatorship to democracy. Lagos even used Spain-inspired analogies to explain the situation in Chile to his Christian Democrat opponent: ‘If you form a small coalition, you will be Adolfo Suárez and I will be Felipe González’.Footnote 76 Rother writes that in 1976, ‘Veronika Isenberg, who worked for the SPD's International Secretariat, related that Felipe González's trips to Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and Chile had been a triumphal procession’.Footnote 77 Indeed, according to Eusebio Mujal-León, González travelled to Latin America twelve times between 1975 and 1982,Footnote 78 averaging almost two trips per year. González served as the SI's informal delegate to Latin America, and at Brandt's urging he was appointed president of the SI's International Committee for the Defence of the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1980.
Two years earlier, in his opening remarks at a conference on ‘Democratization Processes in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America’, held in Estoril in September 1978, Brandt insisted there were ‘already useful experiences in Latin Europe which will hopefully give grounds for hope for Latin America’.Footnote 79 González shared Brandt's idea. In his first meeting, as president of Spain, with US Secretary of State George Shultz, González explained that his concern for Central America was ‘not only political, it is fraternal’ and admitted to worrying about the grave risk to peace faced by the region. ‘That is why I wish to contribute to a project for peace, progress, freedom and pluralism in the region as a whole’.Footnote 80 A democratic Spain, González added, could be of great symbolic value to Latin America's peaceful democratisation. Years later, Shultz remembered that González had ‘surprised [him] by his candour and the position he took’.Footnote 81
In a letter dated June 1981, Brandt told González that ‘I believe that our friends in Nicaragua are taking advantage of the SI for their own purposes and I believe that, for its part, the International cannot unconditionally endorse everything they do’. He added that ‘surely, you are the only one who can objectively assess developments in Nicaragua’.Footnote 82 The president of the SI, a former West German chancellor and Nobel Peace Laureate, asked for advice from the young Spanish socialist with no government experience but enough political acumen and trustworthy judgement. A former director of the Institute for European-Latin American Relations writes that González's ‘personal role in supporting the democratization process in some Latin American countries can hardly be overestimated’.Footnote 83 Some years later, when González was already in government, the Nicaraguan vice-president, Sergio Ramírez, declared that González ‘has demonstrated that he has the ability and decision to play an important role in the future of Central America’ and underlined his ‘prestige and moral authority’ in the region.Footnote 84
‘We will always remember you standing up against totalitarianism and oppressors, kneeling before the victims you never provoked’, said González in his eulogy of Brandt at the Reichstag.Footnote 85 ‘And I have seen tears of emotion on your face when a dictatorship has been defeated, in Portugal or Spain, in Chile or Argentina; in any corner of the world’. In parallel to Spain's transition to democracy and after it had been completed, Brandt and González were keen to promote democracy in Latin America. From Germany in Central Europe to Spain and Portugal in Western Europe and over to the other side of the Atlantic, Brandt and González supported local attempts to democratise and end totalitarianism and authoritarianism. They worked together to achieve their shared goal.
Social Democracy
‘Willy Brandt, our comrade and president, has asked me to welcome you at the opening of the congress of the Socialist International, since he was unable to be here himself’, González announced at the start of the conference held at the Reichstag in Berlin on 15–17 September 1992, just three weeks before Brandt's death and less than three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.Footnote 86 The subject of the conference was ‘Social Democracy in a Changing World’. As González explained, the newly reunified Berlin symbolised the extent of these changes. He also realised ‘the significance Berlin had had in the political career of Willy Brandt and what international social democracy owes to the work of our president’.Footnote 87 In his written message to the Berlin conference, Brandt acknowledged, ‘I was very moved when Felipe González suggested Berlin’ and asked González to open it in his name – a powerful gesture of continuity after Brandt had stepped down as SI president.Footnote 88
In the second half of the 1970s, González, like Brandt, wanted to see the PSOE move to a more moderate form of socialism.Footnote 89 The term ‘Marxism’ had not appeared in the PSOE party statutes for almost a century until the first conference held in Madrid after Franco's death included the term in the party's self-definition. In a meeting in October 1977 with King Juan Carlos, Queen Sofía and President Adolfo Suárez, Brandt noted that González was inclined to the moderate left, whereas large sections of his party supported ‘radical Marxist’ postulates.Footnote 90 In May 1978, González announced at the Barcelona Press Association that he would propose the removal of the term ‘Marxism’ from the party's manifesto at the PSOE conference to be held in 1979. Its inclusion, in his view, ‘was a mistake’. He added that ‘I do not mind recognising that I am a social democrat’.Footnote 91
González modelled his proposal on the SPD's November 1959 Godesberg programme,Footnote 92 which marked a radical shift away from revolutionary socialism. As proven by his handwritten preparatory notes and the recording of his speech at the 1959 convention, Brandt supported the Godesberg programme. It offered an up-to-date party statement, represented a combative democratic freedom movement, clarified party positions ‘on the state and in the state’, and made it harder for the SPD's opponents to distort its message.Footnote 93 The SPD transitioned from a workers’ party to a people's party, dropped the Marxist doctrine, committed itself to a social market economy ‘and adopted a policy of integration with the West and its institutions, such as NATO’.Footnote 94
Twenty years later, the PSOE still quarrelled over Marxism. The motion to drop the term was rejected by 65 per cent of the PSOE delegates.Footnote 95 In vain, González exhorted his PSOE colleagues to follow the example of other European socialist parties (many of which had already abandoned Marxist dogmatism) rather than cling self-righteously to an outdated ideology:
We Spanish socialists must be humble. We have very little to teach our socialist colleagues, particularly our European ones. If anything, what we can teach them is a century-long history where freedom is the exception and dictatorships the rule. Let us be humble when we come to debate what socialism is and where it is headed.Footnote 96
As González later put it, the party's rejection derived from ‘the ideological build-up that comes from living under a dictatorship and [carrying out] clandestine activities’ against the Franco regime.Footnote 97 In his interview with the Brazilian weekly magazine Veja in December 1978, González explained:
One cannot say that Marxism defines socialism. Marx was the revolution's man. Nobody questions this. He made, in this sense, an invaluable contribution. However, between Marx and socialism there is the same relation as between Freud and analysis. Not every analyst is Freudian . . . There are points in which Marx has become obsolete . . . He knew nothing about theory of the state . . . I do not accept the ecclesiastic notion which views Marxism as an untouchable subject . . . More than anything else, I think, it is necessary to use the critical approach – that is the Marxist approach – on Marxism . . . I do not accept any dogma.Footnote 98
In August 1976, González already referred to Marxism as ‘neither a dogma nor a religion’ but as a critical method of analysis.Footnote 99 Two years earlier, and six months after the Carnation Revolution, in a press conference with Soares upon Brandt's arrival at the Lisbon airport, Brandt explained that there was no Marxist dogma in the SPD and that it used Marxist critical analysis of the economy (not Marxist philosophy, as his translator had first declared, only to be corrected immediately by Brandt, much to the interpreter's embarrassment).Footnote 100
Among those who organised the rejection of the party's move towards social democracy was Enrique Tierno Galván, a law professor whose party, the People's Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Popular; PSP), had joined the PSOE the previous year after its poor results in the 1977 election. González's decision to step down as leader enabled Tierno to test the waters. Tierno approached Dieter Koniecki, the Ebert Foundation delegate to Spain, and asked him whether he would support Tierno's plans to be the party's new leader and stick with Marxism. Koniecki warned Tierno that the SPD would not endorse his nomination.Footnote 101 In June 1979, a month after the PSOE conference, Tierno declared that ‘at the moment, Felipe González appears as an irreplaceable man’, which he blamed on the party's unwillingness to foster other political figures. He declared himself a Marxist, affirmed that ‘socialism is indeed Marxism’ and observed that all ‘the European socialist parties’ had made severe mistakes because they aimed to be alternative governments rather than an alternative to the system.Footnote 102 González had the full support of the Ebert Foundation, the SPD and Brandt (the Ebert Foundation even prepared several dossiers with newspaper clippings around the debate on Marxism within the PSOE).Footnote 103
González told PSOE members at the conference that he would refuse to stay on as leader if the party did not give up Marxism: ‘Though there are political reasons for me to stay on as general secretary, my ideas and my ethics do not allow me to do so.’Footnote 104 He did not run for re-election, but four months later, in September, PSOE members voted González back in at the party's first extraordinary conference.Footnote 105 Possibly to support González in his struggle, Chancellor Kreisky made a statement from his summer home in Mallorca in July that ‘Marxism is no longer useful’.Footnote 106 González convinced the PSOE to drop the term Marxism from the party programme in a second attempt in 1979. ‘That was the move to social democracy. That was our Bad Godesberg’, he said to the author.Footnote 107 In Spain, González had instigated and led the PSOE's embrace of social democracy at great personal and political risk.
Social democracy was a key aspect of the special bond between Brandt and González. It was not only a question of what social democracy stood for that shaped their friendship, but also what social democracy was not. Brandt did not buy into the narrative of communism, and neither did González. Unlike Mitterrand, who struck a deal with the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français; PCF) in 1972, and Tierno, who joined the communist-led Democratic Junta (Junta Democrática) in 1974, González wanted to keep the PSOE independent from the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España; PCE).Footnote 108 In contrast, Tierno's decision to join the Junta did not go down well with Brandt's SPD. In a telegram to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the West German ambassador to Spain called Tierno the PCE's ‘Trojan horse’.Footnote 109
A year later, in July 1975, the PSOE, along with a few regional parties and some left-wing Christian Democrats, agreed to set up a separate coalition, the Democratic Convergence Platform (Plataforma de Convergencia Democrática). González wanted nothing to do with the PCE.Footnote 110 His decision not to join the PCE's Democratic Junta made him all the more agreeable to Brandt and the SPD.Footnote 111 As Michele Di Donato has pointed out recently, ‘from its frontline position, the SPD made clear its outlook: détente did not change at all the ideological controversy between the two movements, and reaching agreements with Eastern European governments did not mean softening the approach to communism’.Footnote 112 Brandt and González saw communism as a political adversary and thought social democracy should steer clear of it.
Brandt took a stand on Eurocommunism in his inaugural speech as president of the SI, delivered in Geneva in 1976. He stated that in addition to its previous opponents – Moscow, Beijing or even national communism – social democracy now must also keep a watchful eye on Eurocommunism.Footnote 113 Earlier that year, in an interview with the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Brandt, when asked whether the SPD could ignore the communists, admitted that although the fundamental assessment remained unchanged, ‘there are interesting developments in the communist world. We don't walk around the world with blinders and say there is nothing. There are really very interesting things’.Footnote 114 On the subject of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano; PCI), Rother contends that Brandt cautiously but insistently promoted ‘like no other would have done’ the rapprochement of the PCI to the SI, greatly facilitating the dissolution in 1991 of what was once the largest communist party in the West and its relaunch as the Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra; PDS), which joined the SI and the Party of European Socialists.Footnote 115 As Brandt had commented fifteen years earlier, ‘it would be wrong if our behaviour contributed to the fact that the developments that loosened up the former monolithic bloc of communism came to a standstill again’.Footnote 116
The historian Alan Granadino rightly points out that, after the refounding of the French PS at the Épinay conference in 1969, the Iberian Peninsula became a target of political influence for the PS and its line of democratic socialism, which Granadino defines mainly as self-management (autogestion) and unity of the left.Footnote 117 As Christian Salm writes, ‘the French PS worked for a left-wing union in Portugal in order not to hamper the French leftist unity with the PCF . . . Also in Spain, the French PS worked for a socialist–communist union in the form of a merger of the PCE and the PSOE’.Footnote 118 Their research highlights that the French PS managed to influence the PSOE, at the expense of the social democracy espoused by the British Labour Party and the German SPD, especially in the first half of the 1970s.Footnote 119
However, Mathieu Fulla's work shows the usefulness of unpacking the French PS into different, sometimes contradictory, actors: Mauroy, Mitterrand and the Centre d’études, de recherches et d’éducation socialiste (CERES), for instance, had different views and degrees of appreciation for self-management, ranging from scepticism in Mauroy's case to advocacy of its Marxist variety by CERES.Footnote 120 The current article uses a similar approach of not treating the PSOE as a monolithic entity or an umbrella term, but rather zooming in on its leader. Indeed, Tierno, after he joined the PSOE, and Pablo Castellanos, before he left the PSOE to establish Izquierda Unida, disagreed with González on important issues. Abdón Mateos, doyen of the history of the PSOE in the twentieth century, points out that in 1976 González showed less enthusiasm for the concept of self-management than many other senior PSOE members,Footnote 121 and ‘always rejected the possibility of a common programme of the [Spanish] Left’.Footnote 122
In a 1977 interview with Zona Abierta, a radical left-wing theoretical magazine, González was asked, ‘How would you define the difference between social democracy and democratic socialism?’, to which he replied, ‘I would say that, above all, this difference is being abused . . . In the course of the conference of socialist parties of southern Europe I have insisted many times that if there is a political project, it is that of a united Europe . . . To draw a north-south dividing line, a supposed total division between social democracy and socialism, would be to strengthen a conservative alternative in the construction of Europe’.Footnote 123 Indeed, González had insisted on both these points in his speech at the inaugural session of the conference of Southern European socialist parties held in Paris in January 1976, just two months after Franco's death.Footnote 124
Brandt and González believed that communism should be opposed, but they continually engaged with communist countries in order to nudge them towards social democracy and collaborate towards a safer world. In his first visit to Spain, González bluntly told Shultz that he was not a friend of the communist system. He said that the PSOE's victory in the 1982 election had reduced the PCE to a mere shell of its former power – ‘a mere symbolic role’.Footnote 125 Yet in his first meeting with President Ronald Reagan at the White House in 1983, González skilfully defended his engagement with Fidel Castro of Cuba, eliciting a chuckle from Reagan.Footnote 126 González also enjoyed the trust of Mikhail Gorbachev, who acknowledged that before the fall of the Berlin Wall he had been able to exchange opinions confidentially ‘only with you, Mr Gonzalez – then, you already understood a lot, with several details of the West as well’.Footnote 127
‘The complaint that has sometimes been raised that parties and institutions of the Federal Republic gave only moderated assistance to related groups on the Iberian Peninsula – that criticism has always annoyed me’, wrote Brandt. In particular, Antonio Muñoz Sánchez's research on the Ebert Stiftung and the PSOE demonstrates that the criticism was unfounded. The FES provided the PSOE with major ‘financial, logistical and training support’.Footnote 128 The FES also helped the PSOE organise several workshops for party and union officials, including the PSOE's first summer school in El Escorial, which had a profound effect on public opinion in Spain, as it was the first time that González appeared on TV.Footnote 129 According to one FES report, from 1976 to 1981 the FES helped organise over 2,000 seminars.Footnote 130 This was an expensive enterprise. Mujal-León estimates that between 1975 and 1980, the FES spent over 1,600 million pesetas in Spain, which is approximately €9.5 million (£8 million) in today's currency.Footnote 131
The FES trained PSOE officials and supported campaigns, helping the party to expand across Spain and gain ground on the PCE. In 1975, the PSOE and the UGT had only one full-time employee each, while the PCE had seventy full-time staff in Madrid alone.Footnote 132 By the time democratic elections were held in June 1977, the SPD and the FES's support had helped the PSOE become the largest opposition party in parliament, and González become the left's undisputed leader. ‘I am still proud to think that under my leadership, the SPD sent more than fine words to help Spanish democracy to its feet’, wrote Brandt towards the end of his life.Footnote 133
In preparation for the November 1978 Socialist International conference in Vancouver, Brandt sent the draft of his presidential speech to González. ‘I would be very grateful if you could look at it and let me know if you have any comments or remarks’, he wrote.Footnote 134 At its executive bureau meeting held in Hamburg in February of that year, the SI had decided to start drafting a New Declaration of Principles to replace the one adopted at the Frankfurt congress in 1951. Brandt entrusted González with the critical task of chairing the New Declaration of Principles Working Group for the SI. The bureau accepted the PSOE's offer to set up a technical secretariat for the working group at PSOE headquarters and that the Spaniard Francisco López Real, an old supporter of González's with significant experience in Brussels, should be responsible for the technical coordination of the work.Footnote 135
González chaired the group for a decade, and a new SI Declaration of Principles, which is still in place, was adopted at the Stockholm conference in 1989. The end of the preamble, entitled ‘Global Change and Future Prospects’, read: ‘Today the Socialist International combines its traditional struggle for freedom, justice and solidarity with a deep commitment to peace, the protection of the environment and the development of the South. All these issues require common answers. To this end, the Socialist International seeks the support of all those who share its values and commitment’.Footnote 136 The partnership reflected Brandt and González's commitment to promoting social democracy at the start of a new decade; it also showcased how González had brought new energy to the global social democratic project.
In January 1992, ten months before his death, Brandt wrote to González and offered him the presidency of the SI. ‘I want you to know’, he wrote, ‘that if you want to do this job then you can be sure that you can count on great approval’.Footnote 137 González, who was still in office, turned down the offer. He similarly declined Chancellor Helmut Kohl's later nomination to replace Jacques Delors as European Commission president.Footnote 138 Though Kohl and several other EU leaders continued to insist throughout Jacques Santer's term, González rejected their second nomination.Footnote 139 His refusal was neither personalFootnote 140 nor due to a lack of commitment to international socialism and a unified Europe; González wished to avoid further institutional responsibilities, yet ‘without abandoning political tasks – quite the opposite’.Footnote 141
In his public farewell to Brandt, González shared his own private farewell with Brandt:
A month ago, after the end of the congress of the Socialist International, which you were unable to chair, I called on you in Bonn. You asked me about various points to do with the congress and after I'd told you three times that everything had gone off well you said to me with a little laugh, ‘it seems that everything goes on better without me’. From that moment, and in the knowledge that we would not meet again, you began to take your leave, and spoke of the many difficulties facing Europe and my country. You wished me the best of luck for the next few years and encouraged me to continue to work towards the ideals which we have shared.Footnote 142
This was a powerful reminder that their shared understanding of social democracy envisioned an expanding, evolving social democracy that would expand globally.
Internationalism
Brandt and González's international experience and global vocation also drew them together. Writing about his early youth, Brandt said that his ‘journey of discovery of the world – intellectually and geographically – was too exciting . . .’Footnote 143 and that he ‘was lucky enough to discover Europe’ in his twenties.Footnote 144 He spent a decade and a half surrounded by other European socialist exiles in Scandinavia, which helped foster his ‘growing interest in international affairs’.Footnote 145 Indeed, their regular discussions ‘promoted a sense of fellowship among them and understanding of each other's views’, notes B. Vivekanandan.Footnote 146 Brandt's later decision to return to Allied-occupied Berlin and a life in city politics committed him to involvement with international actors and events, such as the nearly year-long Soviet blockade of West Berlin, Soviet demands for the withdrawal of Western troops and the building of the Berlin Wall. Brandt's internationalism, therefore, was awakened, nourished and practised well before he became foreign minister and later chancellor of West Germany.
González also enjoyed intense international engagement prior to his first election victory in 1982.Footnote 147 He made numerous trips across Western Europe and to America, both North and South, many of which were staunchly supported by Brandt. In 1980 González, Kreisky and Palme, the latter two close friends of Brandt's from his Stockholm years, embarked on a three-member mission to Teheran to seek a solution to the Iran hostage crisis. Mitterrand wrote to Brandt to express his ‘serious concerns’ that the PS had been left out of the trip,Footnote 148 to which Brandt replied that the Iranian authorities had invited only González, Kreisky and Palme.Footnote 149 Kreisky had confided in a friend that González's performance in the difficult negotiations with the leader of Iran had been ‘brilliant’; he foresaw a very bright future for González in the SI.Footnote 150 That same year, González met with Castro in Cuba on a stopover to Panama, where he also met President Omar Torrijos, ‘who saw me like a son’,Footnote 151 and discussed Reagan's recent election victory, the 1980 Uruguayan constitutional referendum and the Iran–Iraq war with them.Footnote 152 As González reflected later, ‘I had accumulated international experience . . . I learnt very quickly. I lived in the world. I had travelled a lot, had lots of contacts and had a very close relationship with lots of leaders from Latin America and Europe. Lots of them’.Footnote 153
Once in office in 1982, González quickly set up a strong international affairs team that worked directly out of his presidential residence, the Moncloa Palace, to lay down the general outlines of Spain's foreign policy and to assume a highly visible role in its conduct. Manuel Marín, then secretary of state for European affairs at the foreign ministry, notes that ‘foreign policy was Felipe González's personal commitment, an absolutely earnest endeavour’, because he liked international affairs.Footnote 154 The CIA described the International Department at the President's Office as akin to the National Safety Council of the White House.Footnote 155 Yet, in reality, González's organisational arrangements were modelled along the lines of Brandt's major reform of the chancellor's office a decade or so earlier,Footnote 156 which reflected his great interest in pursuing a self-assured and active role in the international affairs of West Germany.Footnote 157 Similarly, the CIA expected González to ‘assume a highly visible role’ in the conduct of Spain's diplomacy, which turned out to be an accurate speculation.Footnote 158
The CIA's January 1983 report added, ‘we expect Prime Minister Gonzalez to keep Spain in harness with the US and Western Europe. The harness, however, will sometimes be looser than Spain's allies would like’. New York Times correspondent David Binder reported that Brandt had stated a similar position immediately after he took office in October 1969: ‘We will be a loyal ally but not a comfortable government. I will not be the Chancellor of a conquered Germany, but of a liberated Germany’.Footnote 159 Spain had an uneasy ‘bases-for-cash’ arrangement with the United States dating back to 1953, hosting four US bases on its national territory, one of them just twenty kilometres from Madrid.Footnote 160 Both González and Brandt took steps to reclaim Spanish and German sovereignty, respectively, and to effect change without calling into question the structural basis of the system, the kind of action that British political scientist Archie Brown calls ‘redefining leadership’.Footnote 161
Despite intense pressure against it from the NATO allies,Footnote 162 González delivered the 1982 PSOE manifesto promise to hold a referendum on Spain's continued NATO membership.Footnote 163 Once Spain had been taken into NATO by a Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD) government, González believed it was in Spain's best interest not to leave it, and therefore campaigned in favour of continued membership. To convey to the electorate that NATO was not an American organisation, but a European one and even a socialist one, there is evidence that González's team asked Brandt to make a statement in favour of Spain remaining in NATO.Footnote 164 Indeed, Italian socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, Soares (newly appointed president of Portugal) and Brandt all spoke in favour of González's proposal to keep Spain in NATO.Footnote 165 In addition, as Marina Pérez de Arcos maintains, the referendum per se and the result gave the Spanish government leverage when it renegotiated the US–Spain bilateral treaty and rebalanced its relations with the United States, thus regaining Spanish sovereignty, as was also Brandt's aim for Germany.Footnote 166
Indeed, Pérez de Arcos has shown that, contrary to the long-established narrative,Footnote 167 Spain's continued NATO membership was not a precondition for Spain's accession to the European Economic Community (EEC).Footnote 168 Furthermore, although González was not in favour of the UCD government's decision to join NATO in 1981–2, he was also not anti-NATO before he came into office in December 1982 and therefore did not perform the alleged U-turn from anti-NATO to pro-NATO once he was in government, as is widely held in the literature. For instance, preparatory notes for González's meeting with US President Jimmy Carter in June 1980 reveal that he planned to clarify his position to Carter: ‘PSOE action in foreign policy pursues autonomy for Spain, in line with our Western, democratic and pluralistic character. Being against Spain's entry into NATO is neither anti-NATO nor anti-US’.Footnote 169 González also maintained his position in public, as captured in an article in El País newspaper just days after meeting Carter in MadridFootnote 170 and again the following year in the official debate on accession to NATO held in the Spanish parliament.Footnote 171
As mentioned earlier, Brandt recognised that the true satisfaction of his life was to have contributed to the association of Germany with peace and European freedom, a sort of readjustment of German identity and a reconciliation with Germany's recent past. González made a similar acknowledgement in his most recent book: ‘When I meditate on those years . . . I realize that, of all things, the most satisfying thing for me is that, at the end of the eighties, we Spaniards could finally feel reasonably well in our own skin’.Footnote 172 He notes that a Spanish miner who had emigrated to Belgium – the type of person he met as a student in Belgium during the 1960s – said that ‘“at long last we could move around our continent with a kind of citizenship right that is comparable to any other”. We were once again proud to be Spanish’.Footnote 173 Both Brandt and González shared a deep commitment to helping their respective countries overcome their international pariah status and foster a renewed national and European identity.
‘German citizen to the core, European citizen by conviction and world citizen by vocation’ is how González described Brandt at his state funeral. Brandt proved himself a dedicated Europeanist committed to further enlargement and integration. According to historian Daniel Möckli, the rélance européene of the late 1960s, which was initiated at the Hague summit, included Brandt's active support for the establishment of European Political Cooperation (EPC), European Monetary Unity (EMU), the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and Britain's accession to the EEC after two French vetoes.Footnote 174 Brandt later became a Member of the European Parliament at the first direct European parliamentary elections held in 1979. In turn, González played a key role in Spain's difficult EEC accession negotiations by setting up a bilateral strategy that mainly targeted Paris and Bonn to overcome years of virtual standstill.Footnote 175 Once in the EEC, González introduced the concept of European Union (EU) citizenship and the notion of social and economic cohesion in the Maastricht Treaty – signed just months before Brandt's death – which paved the way for the creation of a single European currency, the euro. Ten years after he left office, González presided over a committee of EU ‘wise men’ to examine the EU's role until 2030.Footnote 176
As president of the SI for sixteen years, Brandt's leadership and his personal and political connections proved to be ‘a key asset in allowing the European social democracy movement to create an extensive network of political leaders and organizations that spread around the world, particularly to Latin America’.Footnote 177 The SI stopped its eurocentrism under Brandt.Footnote 178 Furthermore, ‘in more than one country we [the SI] were able to contribute to the replacement of military dictatorships by democratically legitimated governments . . . where dictatorships prevailed, however, we could at least offer help and protection to persecuted democrats’.Footnote 179 González's international solidarity similarly extended beyond Europe. In 2014, president of Colombia and later Nobel Peace Laureate Juan Manuel Santos described González, on his conferral of Colombian citizenship, ‘as a “key figure” because there is no president in the last decades who can say that in moments of anguish or doubt he did not have him “to give his advice, to help, to contribute in an effective, selfless way, with love for Colombia”’.Footnote 180
For his part, Brandt chaired the World Bank's Independent Commission on International Development Issues that made recommendations to help improve North–South relations. ‘It was well worth the trouble, and not just because meeting people from other parts of the world and learning about their ways of thinking and reacting was a great gain. The experience helped me to understand the great social question of the late twentieth century [global inequality]’.Footnote 181 As González observed in his eulogy of Brandt, ‘he continuously demonstrated what has always been a mark of democratic socialism: internationalism [and] international solidarity’, which may be said of González as well.Footnote 182
Conclusions
The many drafts of his eulogy of Brandt show that González considered quoting an elegy by the Spanish poet Miguel Hernández and dedicated to his mentor, knowing that Hernández ‘was not unfamiliar’ to Brandt. Thus, González's original choice of eulogy material harks back to Kellerman's work on Brandt's own mentors. González quoted the first line of the poem, ‘In Orihuela, his town and mine, death has taken from me as if struck by lightning Ramon Sijé, with whom I shared so much love’. The poem ends with ‘we've so many things to speak of, friend, friend of my soul’.Footnote 183 In the end, González decided to quote instead from a different Spanish poet, possibly his favourite, Antonio Machado, and described Brandt's traits rather than the friendship the two shared: ‘and in the good sense of the word, he was good’.Footnote 184 In any case, González referred to Brandt six times as ‘friend’ and finished the speech with ‘Adiós, amigo Willy’.
Brandt's third wife, Brigitte, and Lars Brandt, the second of his children from his second wife, both thanked and commended González for his speech, which they recognised as ‘based on warmth and knowledge’.Footnote 185 Brigitte remembered ‘Willy smiling in [her] mind’ and saying about González, ‘Now you all understand what I found again and again in him’. She wrote that Brandt had spoken often about González during his last, difficult months, reminiscing about 1975 and some later encounters, and that he had been ‘incredibly moved’ by these recollections.Footnote 186 Interestingly, Harold Mock notes that Brandt's ‘failure to cultivate a natural successor among the party's moderate base left him no natural heir’.Footnote 187 Perhaps as a result of Brandt's international experience and internationalist vocation, as well as his aim to expand the chronology and geography of his social-democratic project, Brandt did not find his spiritual heir within Germany's borders, but outside them.
Brandt's funeral was the first state funeral of a former chancellor to take place in Berlin since 1929, and the first time since then that the Reichstag – until recently located in the eastern part of a divided Berlin – was used for a state memorial service. González was the only non-German to give a speech at the event, and he was also the only speaker to do so in a language other than German – a poignant symbol of how Brandt's life had touched many beyond Germany's borders. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Brandt's death in 2017, González was again asked to deliver a speech, this time at the SPD headquarters (named after Brandt) in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Once more, he was the only non-German to speak at the commemoration. ‘We still need Willy's ideas today’, said González. ‘Europe is suffering again from a “virus of destruction” – nationalism’.Footnote 188
By focusing on the Brandt–González bond, this article extends Kellerman's 1978 study on Brandt's relationship with his own mentors and fills some of the gaps in the many published biographies of Brandt.Footnote 189 It has sought to shed light on what occurred between their first meaningful meeting in 1974 and Brandt's death in 1992. It also contributes to recent studies on the reception of the Bad Godesberg programme by other European socialist parties, such as Karim Fertikh's work on the French PS.Footnote 190 The paper also provides much-needed content to explain the oft-quoted catchphrase that Brandt and González shared a ‘father-and-son’ relationship.
In addition, it provides new biographical and political information about Brandt and González, which can be valuable for studies on political mentorship, particularly transnational mentorship, international leadership and transnational networks, as well as for the broader study of Spanish–German relations, democratisation, the European left and the Socialist International in the late and early post-Cold War period. Indeed, the article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how personal guidance, assistance and exchange, linked with institutional support, contributed to the expansion of democracy and social democracy in Spain, and to these projects beyond the Iberian Peninsula, offering new insights into the international affiliations and global outlook of the president of Spain.
The need for this research is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that not even a recently published multinational history of German reunification includes a discussion of why González was the only both EEC and NATO leader to support German reunification at the Strasbourg European Council meeting held on 8 December 1989, less than a month after the Berlin Wall had come down.Footnote 191 Moreover, Kohl admits that González was the only European leader to stand firmly on ‘our side’ from the very outset of the reunification process,Footnote 192 and that he was immensely grateful for González's support,Footnote 193 as was Brandt.Footnote 194 Just hours after the opening of the Berlin Wall, González wrote to Brandt telling him that ‘we are very happy and excited’ and that they ‘can count on us to shape a European opinion’ and ‘to search for consensuses in the EEC and the Atlantic Alliance’. The newly unveiled dispatch and archival proof of early Spanish support concluded that ‘this is, broadly speaking, the message he conveyed to Kohl’.Footnote 195 González's own friendship with Kohl (which is only now starting to garner academic attention),Footnote 196 national interests and European integration may also explain Spain's support. González's bond with Brandt, who was Berlin's mayor at the time of the building of the Wall, however, is also deeply significant here. González's poignant understanding of divided Germany's plight would not have been as profound if not for his formative, intense relationship with Brandt.
A scholarly biography of González is yet to be written. Some recent multinational, archival research has been done to offer a basis for González to be written into the histories of German reunification or European integration. As a case in point, Gorbachev expert Brown and several of Gorbachev's closest aides have insisted that González was Gorbachev's ‘favourite foreign leader’.Footnote 197 In fact, Brown's most recent book notes that ‘Gorbachev's preference was for like-minded leaders who would move towards a social democratic variant of socialism. His problem was that they were more readily identifiable in Western than in Eastern Europe – in the persons, most notably, of former German Chancellor Willy Brandt and Spanish Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González, with both of whom Gorbachev had established a real friendship’.Footnote 198 Just as we have explored the ‘father-and-son’ relationship between Brandt and González, we still need to know more about the special bond between Gorbachev and González and the political implications of that connection. Also in this vein, an archival study focused on the relationship between the two Iberian socialist leaders, Soares and González, especially in the lead-up to the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution and Franco's death, is still needed to complement the important party-focused and comparative works on Southern European political transitions to democracy published to date.Footnote 199
The three political-intellectual pillars that sustained Brandt and González's relationship – democracy, social democracy and internationalism – were interconnected. Indeed, to a great extent, the stages of political development followed in both post-war Germany and post-Franco Spain were similar. These pillars were also evolving constantly, for Brandt and González shared a common purpose: to project their political-intellectual ideas through time and space, into the future and towards new horizons. This was complemented and sustained by their affective rapport. To quote González, ‘I shared more than a political relationship with Willy Brandt, I shared with him more than ideas and projects. I shared friendship, I would even say I shared with him a similar perception of the world and the reality around us’.Footnote 200 In this light, Mauroy's description of González as Brandt's fils spirituel gains even greater significance. González's prominence at Brandt's state funeral and the Brandt Foundation's permanent exhibition on his life thus simply reflected their profound political friendship and strong ‘father–son’ bond.
Acknowledgements
The completion of the article and final archival research trips were facilitated by the Federal German Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation's 2021 Research Award. My warm thanks to the Ruhenstroth-Bauer family (Max, Peter and Cornelia) for their kind hospitality in Bonn, and Dietmar Post and Lucía Palacios for their generosity in Berlin. My thanks also to Professor Birgit Aschmann and Dr Anna Catharina Hofmann at the Department of History at Humboldt Universität, where I enjoyed a research fellowship over a summer. I am grateful to Professors Paul Betts and Nick Stargardt for their stimulating questions at the Oxford Modern History Seminar, Magdalen College, Oxford, and Peter Barnes and Professors Anne Deighton and Barbara Kellerman for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of the article. I also thank Professor Piers Ludlow for his support of the project and the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. The article is dedicated to the memory of Hans Steinböck (1927–2021).
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