Postwar

By the mid-Eighties official unemployment data suggest that more than one in five of the working-age population was out of work. The real figure was probably closer to one in four. In a country still lacking a fully functioning social safety net and where few people had private savings, these figures indicate widespread hardship.

237

In 1982, the PSOE campaigned on the slogan ‘OTAN, de entrada no!’ Four years later, their posters read ‘OTAN, de entrada si!’

238

The traditional Socialist platform of nationalization hardly applied in Spain, where the authoritarian state already owned much of the official economy.

239

Spain’s new constitution of 1978, whose design was aimed above all at reconciling the antagonistic poles of Spanish history—Left/Right; Church/anti-clericals; center/periphery—was conspicuously silent about the regime it replaced.

240

His films—most recently La Mala educacion (Bad Education, 2004)—were also quite pointedly anti-clerical; perhaps the one respect in which Almodovar remains consistently faithful to an older tradition of Spanish cultural dissidence.

241

Victor Perez-Diaz, Spain at the Crossroads. Civil Society, Politics and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 65.

242

On both occasions the capital, Oslo, voted heavily in favor. But the decision was carried by an anti-European coalition of radicals, environmentalists, ‘linguistic nationalists’ and farmers from the country’s coastal and northern provinces, along with fishermen vehemently opposed to the EEC’s restriction of the exclusive coastal fishing zone to just twelve miles. Denmark’s entry also brought in Greenland, at the time still governed from Copenhagen. But after Greenland achieved self-rule in 1979, a referendum was called in which the country voted to leave the EEC, the only member-state ever to do so.

243

This was offset, however, by new investment opportunities for the private sector: the proportion of foreign-owned shares in Spanish companies rose 374 percent in the years 1983-1992.

244

More than one influential voice was raised in Brussels entreating the European Commission to call his bluff…

245

Of course the Common Agricultural Policy, the other major charge on the EU budget, had long had the effect of exacerbating the very regional distortions that the Cohesion Funds and others were now supposed to help eliminate…

246

Richer countries were typically less beholden to Brussels and maintained closer control of their affairs. In France, despite the ‘decentralization’ enshrined in laws passed during the 1980s, the reins of budgetary power stayed firmly in Parisian hands. As a result, prosperous regions of France followed the international trend and benefited from their EU links, but poor districts remained dependent on state aid above all.

247

The ‘Schengen zone’ has since been expanded to encompass other EU member states, but the UK has remained outside and France, among other participants, has reserved the right to re-impose border controls on security grounds.

248

Were it not for the distinctly upward curve of the birth rate in immigrant communities from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, the figures would have been even lower.