Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (119 page)

It was notable, indeed, that during the 1970s Switzerland overtook Sweden as the country with the highest socially balanced living standards, a result achieved by what might be termed plebiscitory conservatism. Industrialization came to Switzerland from 1800 onwards and by 1920 over 40 per cent of the employed population were in industry (plus a large service element in hotels and banks), against only 25 per cent in agriculture. Universal male suffrage was introduced as early as 1848, together with a constitutional referendum system, augmented by further referenda options in 1874 and 1891, making direct voting by the mass electorate the normal process of legislative change. This was accompanied by a device known as ‘concordance democracy’, which entails representation of all major parties on the government executive, the Federal Council, and public acknowledgement of pressure-groups.
⁹³
This system had two very important political consequences. First, referenda forced conservatives to build up mass parties, which have always been populist rather than élitist. The anti-Socialist
Bürgerblock
, of Radicals, Catholic Conservatives and peasants, which dominated Swiss politics from 1919 onwards, was a completely multi-class party, including some of the poorest elements in the nation: Italian-speaking Catholics, who felt discriminated against by progressive, French- and German-speaking Protestant liberals. Conservatism became a powerful negative force, able to block plebiscitory change.
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Secondly, by preventing the radicalization of the workers, Conservative populism drove the Socialists towards the centre. In 1935 the Swiss Social Democrat Party became the first to renounce the principle of class struggle and two years later negotiated a ‘Peace Agreement’ in the engineering industry. This opened the way for a Socialist to joint the Federal government in 1943, and in turn to the
creation of an integrated bourgeois—Social-democrat state, based on conservative negativism.

The negative approach paradoxically promoted the dynamism of the Swiss economy, especially in its biggest growth industry, banking. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was the refusal of conservative elements to accept the Social Democrat demand to ‘democratize’ and ‘open’ Swiss banking which allowed the economy to continue to grow and the banks to survive the ‘Chiasso Affair’ of 1977 (which involved a branch of Credit Suisse and Italian currency smugglers). Swiss banks were forbidden to divulge information about accounts by a law passed in 1934 to prevent the Nazi government from tracking down the savings of German Jews. Information is made available through Interpol in cases of kidnapping and robbery and (since 1980) to the US government to deal with certain cases of organized crime. But Switzerland resolutely refused to divulge financial data for political purposes, although it came under a great deal of pressure when the Shah of Iran was ejected in 1979. There are many thousands of numbered ‘political’ accounts in Switzerland, including many from behind the Iron Curtain. But they represent only a tiny fraction of the Swiss banking trade, which at the end of 1978 held foreign deposits of $115.06 billion, plus a further $123.7 billion in securities.
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By the early 1980s total Swiss bank holdings were in the trillion-dollar range and to ‘democratize’ the system would, Conservatives argued, destroy the efficiency of a system whose secrecy is linked with informality, speed and hatred of bureaucracy. Since banking was the source of Swiss industrial growth (in 1980 the three largest Swiss banks held 2,200 seats on 1,700 Swiss corporations), a flight of capital would send the entire economy into recession. To defend banking secrecy is perhaps the most unpopular cause anyone could now support in the late-twentieth century. Yet thanks to Swiss plebiscitory democracy, which has made it easy to construct negative coalitions, the line was held throughout the 1970s, the Swiss economy remained buoyant, the Swiss franc one of the world’s strongest currencies and Swiss
per capita
income pulled ahead of Scandinavian and North American levels.

The high performance and the democratic stability of the Swiss and Scandinavian countries, generally classified as ‘Protestant’, fitted in with the theories, first advanced in France in the 1830s and culminating in Max Weber’s ‘Protestant ethic’ thesis, that religious belief tended to determine economic patterns. This was demolished on a historical basis in the 1940s and 1950s, but even more interesting was its practical refutation, during the post-war period, by the development of the south European, ‘non-Protestant’ economies.
Italian Switzerland caught up with the French and German cantons. Italy had its industrial ‘miracle’ in the 1950s, France in the 1960s. Even more impressive, in view of past performance, was the political and social progress of the Iberian peninsula and Greece.

António Salazar in Portugal and Franco in Spain proved not only the most durable but by far the most successful of the pre-war dictators, and history is likely to take a far more favourable view of both than was fashionable even in the early 1980s. Salazar took over finance in 1928, the prime ministership in 1932 and survived until 1970, the only tyrant ever to be overthrown by that dangerous instrument, a collapsing deckchair. He was also the only one to run a dictatorship of intellectuals (though Lenin came near to it). Between 1932 and 1961, university professors never made up less than 21 per cent of Salazar’s cabinet. They held half the cabinet posts 1936–44; about one in four of the dictator’s colleagues came from a single department, the law faculty at Coimbra University. This
catedratiocracia
, or rule by dons, was highly successful in promoting slow but steady economic growth, maintaining a strong currency, holding back inflation and, above all, in giving Portugal what it had never possessed in modern times: political stability. The last was achieved partly by a small but highly efficient secret police force, the
PIDE
(International Police for the Defence of the State), which dated from 1926. Salazar defended the interests of the possessing classes but often went against their wishes, especially in hanging on, at great expense, to Portugal’s African possessions, long after business wanted to compromise. He saw the head of the
PIDE
every day and supervised its smallest movement. He gaoled his enemies for long periods: in the mid-1970s, the twenty-two members of the Communist Central Committee claimed they had served a total of 308 years in prison, an average of fourteen.
⁹⁶
But he would not impose the death penalty, even though he allowed the
PIDE
an occasional unofficial murder, such as the killing of General Delgado, the leader of the opposition, in February 1965.
⁹⁷
Because the
PIDE
was discreet in its brutality it was remarkably hard to expose and even enjoyed some esteem. Its commander, Agostinho Lourenco, was head of Interpol in Paris in the late 1940s, and when Pope Paul vi visited Fatima in 1967 he decorated several senior
PIDE
officers.

When Salazar, as a result of his deckchair mishap, lost his senses in 1969, the professors were sent back to their universities and the
PIDE
‘abolished’ or rather renamed. Like most bureaucratic reforms, this produced a big increase in numbers and a catastrophic reduction in efficiency (though not in cruelty and lawlessness). The secret police were taken by surprise by the uprising which overthrew the regime on 25 April 1974.
⁹⁸
Portugal was democratized, the empire vanished, the economy stumbled, inflation increased. But after three years of
confusion Portugal retreated from the headlines and reverted to basic Salazarian economic patterns. The astonishing and encouraging aspect was that Portugal was able to make the transition from a durable police state to a working democracy not only without a bloodbath but while conserving most of the achievements of the old regime.

Spain underwent a similar, and in the circumstances still more remarkable, experience in the 1970s. When Franco handed over his authority in summer 1974 to Juan Carlos (crowned King in November 1975 immediately after Franco’s death), he had held effective power for thirty-eight years, an achievement even Philip II might have respected. He was probably right in thinking that a Republican victory would have produced another civil war and that his regime was the one ‘which divides us least’, for there were two bitterly divided monarchical factions, a fascist and a traditional conservative faction as well as the mortal enmity between the
CP
and other Republicans. In October 1944, after the liberation of France, 2,000 republicans ‘invaded’ across the Pyranees, expecting a general insurrection: nothing happened. A Republican government was formed 26 August 1945: a non-event. The Allies would not act against Franco because they did not want civil war in Spain. To please them he gave up the fascist salute (which he had never liked) but would not ban the Falange, much as he deplored its posturings, because it was a safety-valve for the extremist Right, and controllable.

In essence Franco was a non-political figure, who ruled through men acceptable to the Church, the landed classes and business. That was what the army wanted and the army had a veto on policy which long antedated Franco. Franco, like the army, was a negative force. He kept the state immobile and unadventurous; he prevented professional politicians from doing things. He described himself dourly to senior army officers as ‘the sentry who is never relieved, the man who receives the unwelcome telegrams and dictates the answers, the man who watches while others sleep.’
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If he had been a younger man he might have devised a plebiscitory framework. As it was, on 6 July 1947 he submitted a ‘Law of Succession’, embodying the monarchical principle, to a vote. Out of an electorate of nearly 17,200,000,15,200,000 cast their votes and 14,145,163 voted ‘Yes’, under conditions which observers testified to be fair.
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With that out of the way Franco educated and coached Juan Carlos as his successor. In the meantime, within the framework of negative government, not unlike Salazar’s or, for that matter, the Swiss Confederation’s, the economy modernized itself with the help of market forces. In the twenty years 1950–70, Spain was transformed. Those living in towns over 20,000 rose from 30 per cent to
nearly 50 per cent of the population. Illiteracy dropped from 19 to 9 per cent in thirty years, and in a mere fifteen years the student population doubled. Spain was in some ways more successful in modernizing its backward south than Italy. Physically and visually the landscape of Andalucia was transformed in the quarter-century 1950–75, and the rapidly falling rural population probably benefited more, in terms of real wages, than the industrial workers of the swelling towns. But the important change was in expectation: surveys showed that workers could expect much better jobs, in pay and prestige, than their fathers; that a man had higher expectations at forty than at twenty. The old hopelessness of Spain, the source of its sullen misery and occasionally of its frantic violence, had gone.
¹⁰¹
During the 1950s and 1960s, in effect, Spain became part of the general modern European economy, sharing its successes and failures and its overall prosperity: the Pyrenees ceased to be a cultural-economic wall.

The relative prosperity made possible by Franconian stability and political negativism helps to explain the success of the transition. It was characteristic of Franco’s attitude that his last Prime Minister, and King Juan Carlos’s first, Carlos Arias, was not a politician or a technocrat or a member of the Falange, but a protégé of an important army general.
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It was equally characteristic of Spain’s grudging acknowledgement of Franco’s virtues that the first true Prime Minister of the democratic regime, Adolfo Suarez, though born only in 1932, had created his Right-Centre party, the Union of the Spanish People
(UDPE
), on the principle of
continuismo.
Suarez was assisted by the experience of Gaullism: both by its intrinsic success and by its ability to survive the death of its creator. He got his political reform through Franco’s last Cortes without having to dissolve it, had it approved by a 94.2 per cent ‘Yes’ vote (15 December 1976), and in the eleven months before the elections he abolished Franco’s monopoly party structure, introduced a multi-party system (including the
CP
), legalized trade unions, restored freedom of speech and the press, besides setting up the poll itself, the first free voting since February 1936. The system was biased in favour of rural areas: the fifteen smallest provinces, with 3.4 million population, had fifty-three seats in the Cortes, while Barcelona, with 4.5 million, had only thirty-three. But this allowed the emergence in the June 1977 vote of a quadripartite structure (as in France), with Suarez’s re-named Union of the Democratic Centre as the strongest, with 34 per cent, followed by the Socialists (29 per cent), and Communists and Conservatives equal on the wings.
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The concentration of power in the centre was important, for the new Cortes had authority to write the constitution. The document which was eventually produced and approved by referendum in December 1978 defined Spain as a ‘social and democratic state ruled by law’,
whose form of government was ‘parliamentary monarchy’; but it also guaranteed the ‘nationalities’ autonomy, a major departure from the centralism not merely of Franco but of Spain itself ever since it accepted Castilian dominance in the late fifteenth century. The King was made head of the armed forces as well as the state, a point which was to prove vital during the attempted
putsch
of 1981: Spain remains a country where the army is accorded a special role, though it is not, curiously enough, a large force (220,000, plus 46,600 in the navy and 35,700 in the air force). The constitution abolished the death penalty, gave recognition, though not official status, to the Catholic Church, opened the way to divorce, and gave legal status to unions and parties. It raised a host of problems by laying down very complicated procedures for regional devolution, the issue likely to dominate Spanish politics in the 1980s. Indeed, being a parliamentary text and not a
diktat
, it was long (169 articles), as well as complex, absurdly detailed and gruesomely ill-written. Its great merit, however, was that it represented a consensus: Spain’s first constitution which did not express a single ideology or a party monopoly of power.
¹⁰⁴
By the early 1980s, the new Spanish establishment, led by a cool and cunning monarch (who showed his self-confidence by making Suarez a duke in 1981, Europe’s first new non-royal one since the war), isolated both radical terrorism on the one hand, and army conspiracy on the other, and successfully pushed both out of the public mainstream, so that in 1982 the first Socialist government since 1936 was able to take office peacefully. Hence in a political sense, too, Spain now joined the European culture.