This book closes a gap in the literature on transitions from authoritarianism by addressing the relationship between democratic instauration and foreign policy behavior. Using Spain as the case, Robin Rosenberg makes an almost psychoanalytic study of that nation’s traumatic and idiosyncratic attempts to come to terms with a changed domestic polity and a concomitant new international role. Authoritarian, autarkic, Francoist Spain’s transformation to a more democratic, Europeanized, and internationalist nation—particularly in its promotion of democracy in Central America—is the focus.
The result is a sweeping yet organized, well-documented, and lucid work with wider applications and implications in this “new world order.” Spain presents an attractive case, illustrating the paradox between real- and idealpolitik. Rosenberg cogently illustrates how Spain’s unabashed use of its own democratic transition as a metaphor to support democracy elsewhere was both an effort to maximize power internationally and a priority policy item as a normative good in itself. Comparison of Spain’s international promotion of its transition with its own still-incomplete democracy leads to the book’s primary thesis: the rhetoric and the actual behavior are incongruent. Both internal and external projects change course when realistic national interests intrude on pro forma policy declarations.
Internally, lingering authoritarian impulses (repression, praetorianism, and electoral fraud) tarnish the pretensions of Felipe González’ Socialist government to being the vanguard of Spanish democracy, and reveal the fragility of Spanish polyarchy. Externally, Spain’s forays (more ceremonial than substantive) into Central America’s various democratization processes provide the Spanish regime with a source of external validation that aids its attempts to exercise semiauthoritarianism on the domestic scene.
“That an international political metaphor can substitute for more traditional foreign policy instruments is by no means certain,” states Rosenberg (p. 199). Metaphors are notoriously inaccurate, vague, and inconsistently applied. Championing a host of platitudinous principles, widely popular at least in rhetoric, costs the Spanish government little in terms of “realistic” resources and diverts attention from unprogressive domestic policies. Systematic contradictions of this sort, however, if continued over time, will erode the credibility of Spain’s proclaimed “new” national values. For students of Iberian America in particular and international relations in general, Rosenberg’s informative and intellectually challenging book is worth buying and carefully reading.
