Spain Chapter 5.5 Questions, January 6, 2011

1. Successes Spain experienced in international relations in the 1950s included the $62 million dollar loan from the US as part of the European Co-Operation Adminstration, the 1952 decision to allow Spain membership of UNESCO, and in 1955 full membership of the United Nations.

2. Economic troubles Spain faced included the per capita meat consumption that was in 1950 only half of what it was in 1926, bread consumption being only half of what it was in 1936, and shortages and corruption that forced people to buy goods at black market prices double those in the shops.

3. A technocrat is a technical expert put in a position of power or control. Opus Dei was an organization within the Catholic Church that believed that economic development lead to the spread of liberal ideas and therefore, anti-Catholic thought.

4. Desarrollo means Spanish Miracle. The Stabilization Plan of 1957 was made up of cutting public spending, wages were frozen, credit restricted, and the peseta (the Spanish currency) was devalued. The goal of this was to tackle inflation and the balance of payments deficit and in the longer term to break with the Falangist policy of autarky, which had restricted the possibility of economic growth.

5. The Spanish economy was boosted in the 1960s because foreign investment was attracted by the low cost of labour and the lack of civil rights the authoritarian regime guaranteed, and Northern Europe's expanding middle class started to take holidays on the rapidly developing Spanish costas. Spanish people working in the service sector abroad sent home one third of their earnings to family left behind, and by 1973 there were 750,000 Spanish working in Germany and France.

6. Three examples of the economic improvement experienced by the Spaniards during the 1960s include the fact that they ceased to be on the list of UN-designated "Developing Nations", and when the Desarrollo ended with the world oil crisis of 1973, Spain was the world's ninth biggest industrial power. Additionally, average incomes nearly tripled during the 1960s.

7. Types of media that came to dominate Spanish culture during the 1960s were television, and Television Espanola (TVE) was established as a state monopoly in 1956. By 1970, 90% of the Spanish owned a television. Also, the cinema was another media, as it had more seats per capita than in any other European country. Football also offered a similar means of escape and was fully exploited by the nation.

8. Three ways that economic growth in Spain undermined the social structure that helped create Franco's regime were the fact that Falangists had glorified the peasant farmer and traditional class structure of southern Spain, but the urbanization of the Desarrollo did much to destroy this. Also Falangist propaganda denigrated the moral turpitude of the liberal democracies but Spain's economic revival depended on the remittances of Spaniards living in these democracies. Also, the Spanish brought home with them liberal ideas when they returned.

9. The "anti-democratic" legacy of the Franco regime is the fact that the state and laws were fundamentally unchanged from the system established at the end of the civil war, and in 1975 when Franco died, Spain stood alone in Western Europe as the only remaining authoritarian regime that owed its origins to pre-war fascism. Also, Spain was still overwhelmingly focused on the Cortes representing not political parties but interest groups drawn from the monarchists, army, church, and Falange.

10. The "institutionalized discrimination against married women" in Spain in the 1970s because women were in Franco's Spain considered second class citizens, the basis of the relationship between men and women was the idea of permiso marital (permission of marriage), where without the husband's permission, a wife could not take job, open a bank account or even travel any significant distance. Married women didn't have rights to property and had to pass everything to their husbands, and although adultery was a crime punishable 6 years in prison, it was only a crime for men if the affair became public knowledge, and there was no divorce and contraception was illegal. Basically, women had no choices.

11. Nationalist minority groups in Spain during the 1960s and 1970s such as the Catalans and Basques protested the suppression of regionalism. In Catalonia the protests were expressed peacefully through cultural means but in the Basque country, the protest became associated with the terrorist group ETA which became caught up in a spiral of retaliatory violence which continues today.