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Highlights
Assessment of the significance of major occurrences nearly always requires not just detailed knowledge but the passage of time in which to digest it
Whatever the cynical propaganda about building a society infinitely superior to that of imperialist Western capitalism, the Soviet Union and its satellites had turned into merely conservative authoritarian states whose actual aims soared no higher than maintaining the system but were devoid of revolutionary dynamism or utopian ambitions. Beyond the apparatchiks who profited from the system and, doubtless, a leaven of enthusiasts and true believers, most ordinary people got on with their lives, indifferent or simply resigned to seemingly unalterable political conditions
The generation born towards the end of the war, or in the post-war ‘baby boom’, was truly fortunate. Although at first growing up during the years of post-war austerity, amid the physical as well as psychological scars of the Second World War, they had experienced neither the misery of the Great Depression nor the horrors of the war itself. And they went on to enjoy material conditions in a peaceful Europe that their parents and grandparents could scarcely have imagined: the security blanket of the welfare state; improved housing; stable jobs amid full employment; better opportunities to benefit from education; and, gradually, money to spend on consumer luxuries, not just necessities, as well as increasing opportunities to travel to other countries. They could look to the future with optimism. They were living in good times.
Spain and Portugal only in the 1960s, as both countries belatedly took steps to liberalize their economies and Spain started to profit from international tourism. (The number of tourists visiting Spain rose eightfold between 1959 and 1973, while the money they spent rose twentyfold
One was Le Corbusier’s strikingly modernist pilgrimage chapel, Notre Dame du Haut, at Ronchamp in eastern France, built for the Catholic Church between 1953 and 1955, described by Nikolaus Pevsner as a ‘monument of a new irrationalism
One fashion oddity was the disappearance of men’s hats, even long after the war still worn by most adult males. Perhaps the greater attention that young men in the 1950s started to pay to their elaborate hairstyles, quiffed back and greased in the style of Elvis Presley, is part of the answer to this minor sartorial mystery.
Rural Spain, the
regime’s backbone, started to empty as labour drained to the cities or to the rapidly growing tourist resorts
Meanwhile, the beaches of the Costa Brava guaranteed sunshine, and cheap package holidays had already by the 1960s started to attract millions of tourists each year. They exposed Spaniards to external cultural influences that inevitably clashed with the traditional values of Catholic Spain. These values were in any case being eroded in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. In fact, even the Catholic Church, since the civil war the ideological bulwark of Francoism, was turning away from the regime. By 1970 far more priests sympathized with socialism than with the state’s official falangist ideology, while the Church hierarchy defended human rights and spoke out in favour of political neutrality
All had been partially transformed by the industrialization that had gathered pace in the two decades or so before their collapse – Spain by mass tourism as well. This had greatly reduced the size of the rural population and served to undermine traditional structures of the family and Church. The countryside had earlier provided much of the base of support for authoritarianism. The modernizing changes in the economy greatly weakened this support, while strengthening the industrial working classes, with their predominant ideological base in
The term that seemed to capture the spirit of the age was ‘postmodernism’. What it precisely meant no one could define. It was generally taken to imply a transition from a society dominated by industry to a computerized world shaped by information technology, and from ‘high’ Westernized culture to global mass culture. It also signified divergence, dissonance, a pluralism of interpretations, the absence of any claim to an authoritative voice, to cultural superiority or predominance.
The rejection of any ‘objective reality’ favoured a splintering of cultural interpretation into a myriad of individualist, subjective approaches or ‘discourses’, none of which could claim superiority over others.
And an uncomfortable truth had to be faced: in a free and open society it was impossible to provide total security from acts of terrorism. For the foreseeable future, in globalized societies terrorism would be part of the price of freedom
The use of referenda to determine policy is itself a reflection of a trend away from representative towards plebiscitary democracy. The scope for manipulation, for appeals to emotion over rationality, is thereby greatly enhanced
For the most part, even so, identity politics are the preserve of the right. The reservoirs of extremist nationalist support remain large. The rising incidence of crime sparked by racial hatred and the detestable xenophobic content that pours out daily on the internet are testimony to the prevalence of mentalities which, if those of a minority of the population, nevertheless pose a threat to the liberal values on which modern democracy has in recent decades come to rest.