Neal M. Rosendorf,Franco Sells Spain to America: Hollywood,Tourism and Public Relations as Postwar Spanish Soft Power

The producers of the Mad Men series have missed a wonderful opportunity to make a feature film before disbanding the atrezzo from the 1960s. Halfway through that decade, the then authoritarian government of Spain used the New York exhibition celebrating the Tercentenary of the city’s founding to land an astoundingly modern pavilion furnished daily with fresh Spanish fish and showcasing Goya’s nude and clothed Majas under the careful guardianship of an iconic three-cornered hatted Guardia Civil. The Spanish Pavilion could have been the title of that film, which would have documented the curious relationship between a foreign government and a local public relations agency. This little-known exercise in international public relations by the Franco government is one of the three ‘public diplomacy’ strategies (along with tourism and film production) analysed by Neil Rosendorf in this illuminating and highly entertaining book. Franco sells Spain to America shows that the now trendy ‘public diplomacy’ is a practice that predates the age of Internet or satellite television, and that can be wisely exercised by authoritarian, and not just democratic, regimes.

As Rosendof argues, Franco used Spain’s strategic position as a bastion against communism to overcome the years of autarchy and isolation that followed the end of the Spanish Civil War. By becoming a reliable ally of the USA in the Cold War, Franco hoped to gain international recognition, or at least acquiescence from the neighbouring European countries. The friendship with America was key in Franco’s survival, and this relationship was cemented with what now could be defined as ‘soft power’ measures. To wit: in 1952, Franco waived the visa requirements for American tourists, seven years before doing the same for other European countries. A Spanish Tourism Office had been opened in New York as early as 1948. A key tenet for modern public diplomacy specialists, the importance of horizontal informal relationships between citizens of different countries to generate mutual sympathies, seems to have inspired Franco international public relations policy in the 1950s. The Ministry of Information and Tourism was established in 1951, and two years later a National Plan for Tourism was approved, coinciding with the opening of Hilton’s first hotel outside the USA in Madrid.

Just as China is now financing Hollywood films and trying to encourage film production on Chinese soil, the Franco regime came up with a ‘Hollywood in Madrid’ strategy. Rosendorf skips the anecdotes related to the American stars that dropped by the overly-musealized Chicote bar in Spain’s capital (no mentions to Ava Gardner’s liking of local bullfighters either) and sticks to explaining the legacy of American film producer Samuel Bronston. The presence of Hollywood stars like Charlton Heston interpreting a national icon such as El Cid (1961) was no minor legitimation of the Franco regime: an authoritarian government barely acted as an impediment in attracting foreign film stars and presented Spain as a country open for business. Besides producing films like King of Kings (1961), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), and 55 days in Peking (1963), Bronston aided the regime’s propaganda machine with indulging documentaries. But the most curious film examined by Rosendorf is The Pleasure Seekers (1964), a sort of Sex in the City with young American women making the most of 1960s’ Madrid and surroundings.

What transcends from Rosendorf’s book is that Franco managed to combine hard and soft diplomacy, offering the US military bases strategically placed in the Iberian peninsula, while at the same time using the American recognition to picture the country as a tourist haven. As Rosendorf eloquently argues, this was an exercise of ju-jitsu on the part of Franco: he used the strength of his rival to defeat him, or at least to reach a friendly entente. Rather than colonizing Spanish culture (a recurrent worry among the French), US film-making and tourism legitimized the Franco regime as an odd-but-amicable government, filling Spanish coffers with much needed foreign hard currency. To be fair, Spain was also transformed in the process. Although the dictator died in his bed, the European-level middle-class that greased the Transición of the 1970s emerged during what historians like Nigel Townson have labelled as the ‘late Franco’ period (1959–75), marked by fast economic development and secularization. ¹ One of the key compromises that Franco had to abide with in order to keep his friendship with America was over religion. In a dedicated chapter, Rosendof explains how US-based pressure groups, helped by the liberalizing Second Vatican Council, managed to end the discrimination against Protestant and Jewish minorities in Spain with the enactment of the Law of Religious Freedom in 1967.

As the author laments at the end of his book, public diplomacy is a field marred by ahistorical approaches. Rosendorf’s work is a vindication of the role of history in the study of Spain’s rebranding as a modern country. The 1982 World Football Cup or the 1992 Barcelona Olympics could be seen as the democratic culmination of a strategy crafted in non-democratic times. To understand Spain’s miraculous repositioning from a backward to a vanguard country one must go beyond the 1970s and look at the wake of the Second World War, when Franco cannily used the USA’s anti-Communist stance to uphold his regime as a necessary exception. And the means by which this was achieved was through international public relations, well before the term ‘public diplomacy’ was coined by US diplomat Edmond Gullion in 1965. On this point, the liberalizing and far-sighted impetus of ministers Fernando Castiella and Manuel Fraga is rightly acknowledged. Some of Spain’s contemporary tourist magnets like the revitalization of the Camino de Santiago (Road of Saint James) were envisaged by Fraga during his term as a Franco minister, well before he reinvented himself as a regionalist champion in his native Galicia.

Rosendorf’s book is a masterful piece of scholarship that puts history at the centre of the study of public diplomacy. It deserves wide readership among scholars and public relations practitioners, and not least among Spanish government officials, who have created public diplomacy and nation branding secretariats in the past few years, but seem oblivious to history. A very telling example is the seventh edition of the International Congress on the Spanish Language, held in Puerto Rico in March 2016, which backfired as a public diplomacy event. The Kings of Spain voiced their happiness for being ‘in the United States’ and the director of the Cervantes Institute, Víctor García de la Concha, stated that this was the first congress held ‘out of Latin America’. An uproar of anti-colonial overtones ensued.