Castles in Spain

IT IS OFTEN SAID that the Spanish do not believe in monarchy, but have faith in King Juan Carlos. Meaning, one supposes, that in their hearts they believe in a republic, but they recognize the irreplaceable role played by their current monarch in assuring the arrival of a democratic regime in their country.

Like all clichés, this particular one is flawed. If the Spanish were mere “Juancarlistas,” how could one explain the public emotion, even concern, displayed in the country with the recent wedding of the king’s heir, Prince Felipe of Asturias, to a journalist–and a commoner? The ritual was carried out in the Cathedral of Madrid on May 22, and prices for good seats to watch the royal couple entering and leaving the church reached $75,000. Perhaps the Spanish are monarchists after all.

Nevertheless, there is something real in the Byzantine debate over monarchism versus Juancarlism in Spain. Juan Carlos I is much more than a head of state. He is a founding father of post-Franco Spain, and he earned that position by his own efforts. From the legal perspective, Juan Carlos is merely a “Euromonarch,” an ornamental figurehead. In his book Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward failed miserably to describe the Spanish king’s role when he declared that Juan Carlos I “held sway [over] the nomination of the country’s president.” The king has no more influence in choosing Spain’s political leader than Elizabeth II has in selecting Britain’s.

Writing about founding fathers is not easy, especially when they are still alive. The eminent British historian Paul Preston took up a serious challenge when he set out to write the unofficial biography of Juan Carlos I. Spanish political debate may be destructive, but since the advent of democratic rule there has been a quiet agreement in Spain to spare the head of state from having to deal with ideological bickering and media curiosity. The king has been portrayed in a positive light by the media, although this has not prevented constant gossip in the street, basically concerning his private life (he is said to be a womanizer), his role in the military coup attempt of 1981, and the fact that, after all, he was appointed by Francisco Franco, a military dictator who took power via a civil war. In Juan Carlos: Steering Spain From Dictatorship to Democracy, Preston risks falling into a combination of hagiography and scandal–bad traits in a serious historical study.

He seems to have avoided the bigger pitfalls. The book depicts the rapid evolution of post-Franco Spain from something very much like a banana republic in the death throes of fascism–with an exiled opposition fond of Stalinism–to a vibrant democracy firmly based in the West, in its values as well as its geography. Preston’s book is not only a biography; it is also a political history of Spain from 1939 to 1983.

It hardly could have been otherwise. The debate over the future of the Spanish monarchy remained at political center stage in the country for most of the twentieth century. As Preston shows, in his dynamic narrative style, the Spanish conservative elite never abandoned the idea of restoring the monarchy, deposed in 1931 after pro-Republic forces won the local elections. When, in 1936, General Franco launched his coup against the Republic and began the civil war, some of his supporters among the aristocracy and the armed forces leaders remained fervent monarchists, to the point that Juan Carlos’s father, Don Juan de Borbón, son of the same King Alfonso XIII deposed in 1931, tried to join the military insurrection.

The Francoists not only did not accept Don Juan’s offer, but they also forced him back into exile, since, among the many constituencies of Francoism, there were several antimonarchical forces. These included sympathizers of Mussolini’s fascism, which formed the core of the Movimiento, the political umbrella created by Franco to bring order to his heterogeneous enthusiasts. Franco won the Civil War in 1939 and, during four decades, Spain was formally a single-party regime, with the Movimiento furnishing a political cover to de facto one-man rule.

Franco never accepted the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Don Juan, whom he considered too liberal and friendly with Freemasonry. (Franco’s obsession with Spanish Freemasonry, which much more resembled its French, anticlerical counterpart than its British and American homologues, could fill a whole volume.) Instead, Franco allowed Don Juan’s elder son, Prince Juan Carlos, to be educated under the strict canons of the Movimiento. His aim was for Juan Carlos to establish a monarchy identified with Franco’s own political principles and thus to perpetuate his political legacy.

But the dictator erred. As Preston explained in his 1996 volume, Franco: A Biography, the old general increasingly lost control of his own regime, beginning in the mid-1960s. Effective political initiative fell into the hands of the so-called “technocrats,” a group of Catholic modernizers who understood that the future of Spain lay in the direction of a liberal monarchy. It is not clear how much freedom this group was willing to allow in Spanish political life, but it is obvious that they plotted with Prince Juan Carlos for a democratic opening of the regime after Franco’s death.

THE REST IS WELL KNOWN. Once Franco died, Juan Carlos became king and commenced the titanic work of dismantling Francoism’s political structure from the inside. He alienated his followers within the Movimiento, ditched the technocrats, and established links with an opposition still heavily influenced by Marxism and nostalgia for the Republic. In fact, during approximately two and a half years at the beginning of his power, he committed a kind of political suicide, pushing the country towards a democratic monarchy in which he would have less power than the king of Sweden.

As a good professor–he teaches in the London School of Economics–Preston vividly describes the intrigues and bickering between the recusant Francoists, the elderly Don Juan, and the surviving old-fashioned monarchists. This is no little achievement, since the biggest part of Preston’s biography is the story of a dour dictatorship, isolated from the rest of the world, and an impoverished and banished royal house trying to get its throne back.

Preston’s main accomplishment, however, is not his description of this political process but of the intricacies of life in the Borbón dynasty. Don Juan, the current monarch’s father, was ready to sign a pact with anyone to become king. Preston tells how Don Juan unsuccessfully negotiated his comeback with the Nazis, the Allies, the then-extreme Marxist Socialists, the democratic liberals, the ultraconservative Traditionalists, and, of course, Franco himself. Actually, Don Juan’s conversations with Franco would be decisive for Juan Carlos: His father sent him to Spain as a student, to establish good relations with Franco, so that some day the dictator would let Don Juan, Franco’s contemporary, become king. Preston’s assessment of this is by no means benevolent: Don Juan sent Juan Carlos “as a hostage to Franco.”

This offers the reader an opportunity to look at the whole life of Juan Carlos from a fresh perspective, as someone impelled from very early to become king no matter what, and yet, at the same time, to put reasons of state well above his own interests as Juan Carlos de Borbón. That meant separation from his family and education in an alien culture; when Juan Carlos, ten years old, first arrived in Spain by his father’s agreement with Franco, he did not even speak Spanish correctly. He always contended with uncertainty in reaching the throne by the benevolence of Francisco Franco, an ailing and then senile man, increasingly obsessed with Masonic, Jewish, and Marxist conspiracies.

Clearly, Preston is a Juancarlist, showing his respect and admiration for the king and his antipathy for his enemies by a generous employment of qualifiers and other highly charged words. The ultra-right press, according to Preston, adopted “an air of scandalized horror”; Franco’s “malevolent” followers suffered “neurosis,” and terrorist attacks drove them “to apoplexy.” Alfonso de Borbón y Dampierre, a rival prince who disputed Juan Carlos’s right to the throne, suffered “incomprehensible vagueness,” and Franco himself is said to have been a master of “duplicity,” “condescending,” “cold,” “patronizing,” and characterized by a “combination of cunning and prejudice.”

Such a mountain of adjectives risks transforming a historical work into a tale of simple good and bad people. This feeling is aggravated by the fact that there is no critical analysis of the king’s actions. The reader feels compelled to ask himself if the monarch ever made any mistake, adopted any erroneous decision, or put forward any unwise judgment.

BUT PRESTON is not only a Juancarlist. He is also a leftist. It is surprising, for instance, when he suddenly refers to Felipe González, Spain’s former Socialist prime minister, by his first name, the way his followers and friends do. This obvious bias contrasts starkly with certain minor problems in this book. Paradoxically, Preston’s weaknesses appear in the middle of the book’s main strength: the depiction of the king’s intimate entourage. A case in point is the treatment of Queen Sofía, Juan Carlos’s wife and the sister of the deposed King Constantine of Greece.

Queen Sofía appears, plays a key role in consolidating Juan Carlos’s political and personal relationship with Franco, and then almost disappears. Later, Preston explains, fairly confusingly, an alleged family crisis between the Spanish royal couple in the early 1990s became a matter of speculation in Spanish media, and prompted a number of reappointments among the king’s personal servants.

SOME OF THE KING’S more controversial friends–one of them was sentenced to jail on April 26 of this year for a $10 million fraud–are dealt with briefly, as reflecting no more than the monarch’s “enthusiasm for beautiful women.” Preston attains the heights of Juancarlism–and, bizarrely, loyalty to socialism–when he explains that these attitudes were understandable, since “with Felipe González’s Socialist government presiding over a period of stability and prosperity, it was not surprising that [the king] began to relax somewhat and give over more time to his pleasures.”

The most serious failing of Preston’s Juan Carlos is the lack of in-depth analysis of the political process it describes. The main question is unanswered: Why did the king betray his political mentor, Franco, and implement a democratic regime? Preston explains that he must have reached that decision in the late 1960s, but does not address the reasons why. In a book with the degree of information exhibited, this is an unforgivable gap.

Equally important is the absence of a more profound analysis of the role of the Spanish monarchy now. The reader of the book comes to the conclusion–hinted at by Preston himself–that Juan Carlos I earned the respect of the Spanish public first because he was an architect of democratic change and then because he served as a fireman during successive attempts at military coups in the early 1980s. But now, with Spanish democracy firmly established, the monarchy risks losing at least part of the legitimacy it so painstakingly earned.

The most surprising aspect of Juan Carlos resides in the visible differences between the American and Spanish editions of the book–something that forces the reader to question Preston’s intellectual honesty. On page 103 of the American edition, he writes: “Doña María de las Mercedes [Juan Carlos’s mother], who fell into a big depression, began to drink.” The reference to alcohol is omitted in the Spanish edition, published a little more than a year ago. On page 411 of the Spanish version, Preston narrates a dinner attended by, among others, the king, the queen, and “the chief of cabinet of [Adolfo] Suárez [then Spain’s prime minister], Carmen Diez de Rivera, an elegant blonde aristocrat.” The same description appears on page 371 of the U.S. edition, but with extra spice: mentioning Diez de Rivera, Preston continues, “to whom the king was greatly attracted.”

The Spanish and the American editions also vary when Preston writes about newspaper reporting of the king’s personal life. In the Spanish edition he describes “the media, with [the Madrid daily] El Mundo leading the pack.” In the American version, the sentence features: “The media, with the sensationalist daily ‘El Mundo’ leading the pack.” (In the interest of full disclosure, I will note that I am the Washington correspondent of El Mundo; but Preston is also among its contributors, having published, in March 2003, a two-page article in El Mundo about this book.)

Preston could have written all three of these things in the Spanish edition. Nothing would have happened, except, perhaps, some minor controversy and more critical reviews of the book. Preston seems to have tried to avoid that by resorting to self-censorship. These issues partly spoil a work that has value not only from the historical perspective, but politically as well. Juan Carlos is an extensive and well-written analysis of a regime change. A man educated from childhood to reign over a military dictatorship, Juan Carlos I “committed political hara-kiri”–as it is sometimes said in Spain–and handed power to the civilians to create a democracy.

SPAIN IS NOT IRAQ. Franco was far more intelligent and far-sighted than Saddam Hussein. When the Spanish generalíssimo died, he left a vibrant middle class, a financially slender military, and a strong economy. Juan Carlos, in his struggle to bring democratic change to Spain, successfully confronted terrorism, violent ethnic separatism, military intervention, and pressure from remnants of the old regime. He was almost unknown to his subjects and dismissed by the Francoists and most of the opposition as a stupid and out-of-touch child.

He overcame all those hurdles in part with subtle foreign support (Preston explains that American intervention was decisive in helping to stabilize Spain) but mostly because of his own political instincts. He built a new regime, and a new Spain. In the epoch when new political systems are to be constructed in the Middle East, the example of Juan Carlos is more relevant than ever. Undoubtedly, the world would be a better place if there were several imitators of Juan Carlos I to be found around the Persian Gulf.

Pablo Pardo is the Washington correspondent for El Mundo.