Abstract
Of the 38 years gone by between the first democratic elections held in 1977 and 2015, when the most recent general elections took place, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE)) has been in office for 21 years. During those years, the PSOE held office under two different prime ministers, Felipe González, for 14 years (1982–1996), and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, for 7 years (2004–2011). Since the start of the current democratic period, the PSOE has been either in office – some terms enjoying a parliamentary overall majority – or the main opposition party to conservative governments (of the Union of Democratic Centre, Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD) in 1977–1982, or of the Popular Party, Partido Popular (PP) in 1996–2004 and 2011–2015). If we take into account that the PSOE also played key roles in the previous democratic period (1931–1936) and during the civil war provoked by a coup against the democratic Second Republic (1936–1939), the relevance of this party in the recent history of Spain becomes evident. The main argument of Paul Kennedy’s book is precisely that the PSOE has been the key actor fostering Spanish modernization – meaning by that the ‘process which served to distance Spain from its historical backwardness socially, politically and economically whilst adapting the country to secure and maintain a place amongst the EU’s leading group of countries’ (p. 154) – and that, in fact, this modernization project can synthesize the PSOE’s programme.
The publication of this book is particularly timely because just now, under the brutal effects of a deep and prolonged economic crisis that started in 2008, Spanish society is experiencing the cruel effects of an economic downturn that is erasing past advancements, is wiping out some of the results of the modernization described by Kennedy and will have long-lasting consequences. Yet, what makes this publication more timely is perhaps that the PSOE itself is also suffering one of its more difficult times since the re-establishment of democracy in the 1970s. The significant role it has usually played in Spanish politics, and that Kennedy emphasizes throughout the chapters of his book, is now facing multiple challenges. What Kennedy’s The Spanish Socialist Party and the Modernisation of Spain does is to review the policies of the PSOE’s González and Zapatero governments right up until the moment when the party was ousted from office, under the effects of the economic crisis, in the 2011 general elections.
Kennedy describes González’s and Zapatero’s policies mainly in five areas: González’s EU policy (Chapter 3); González’s and Zapatero’s economic (Chapters 4 and 10), foreign and security (Chapters 5 and 9) and devolution (Chapters 6 and 8) policies; and Zapatero’s civic rights policies (Chapter 8). The author has rightly chosen some of the most relevant policy areas and most contentious policies in the Spanish context (such as the ones on regional devolution and civic rights) to delineate the main features of the PSOE’s governments’ actions.
Behind these descriptions some core arguments arise. Kennedy appropriately portrays the PSOE as a predominantly very moderate Social Democratic Party throughout its history, perhaps toning down too much the radical excesses of the party’s left during the 1930s that effectively contributed to endanger the democratic Spanish Second Republic. The party’s usual ideological moderation and pragmatic approach made easier not only its tranquil adaptation to the reign of neoliberal principles during the 1980s – when the PSOE held office for the first time in the current democratic period – but also its mostly undivided adoption of centrist economic policies. In this sense, as is the case with many social democratic parties, the PSOE is portrayed as living at ease with neo-liberal and pro-market policies in a context in which the PSOE’s own officials repeatedly argued that ‘there is no alternative’ to such policies.
There is a paradox in Kennedy’s argument – and, in fact, in the PSOE’s own discourse. Whilst the author suggests the PSOE is an example of a party exerting a major influence on the country’s economy (p. 10), he very often stresses another one of the book’s core arguments: the unavoidable constraints that both the globalization and European integration processes impose on policy forced the PSOE to embrace the neo-liberal and pro-market consensus without a plausible alternative route. But if these were the only policies possible, why was the PSOE so critical in modernizing the Spanish economy? Thus, Kennedy’s case study appears as one illustrating the limits (and, eventually, the problematic fate) experienced by social democrats across Europe. The fact that, for Kennedy, the economic policies under González’s leadership should be described as pro-market and that continuity (relative to the policies implemented by the conservative PP) had been the defining feature of economic policies under Zapatero, exemplify well the inability of European Social Democrats to design distinct economic policies.
These constraints manifested themselves once again when confronted with the shortcomings of neo-liberal practices after the 2008 crisis. The social democrats, and particularly the ones in government such as the PSOE, were unable to propose a viable economic policy alternative. At ease with the dominant liberal economic principles, the PSOE prolonged its modernization programme into the civic rights area – what journalistically is sometimes called Zapaterismo, and not Zapatismo as written in the text – signalling the only path (besides the extension of some key welfare rights) to follow in defining a distinct social democrat programme.
In sum, Kennedy has written an interesting volume on the PSOE’s government policies that illustrates the constraints faced by social democrats within a context defined by the globalization process and the European Union. Two main aspects are not addressed in this work, though. First, a more theoretically ambitious approach that would take advantage of the knowledge of the Spanish case to test some theoretically relevant hypotheses; and, second, a more critical view that could have explicitly confronted some of Kennedy’s interpretations with other studies that have analysed the González and, above all, the more recent Zapatero years.