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A Surrealistic Referendum: Spain and NATO

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Anthony Gooch
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Extract

THE POSITIONS OF THE TWO MAIN SPANISH POLITICAL PARTIES vis-8-vis the NATO referendum held on 12 March 1986 have caused commentators to recall that Spain, although much less so of late, always was ‘different’ and ‘dramatic’; Lord Carrington, on a boost-the-Atlantic-Alliance visit to Madrid, was reported to have gone one better and said that a country in which those in favour appeared not to be going to vote at all, while those who had been totally against were now set to vote in favour, was nothing short of ‘surrealistic’, while the French magazine L'Express described the referendum itself with the colourful word ‘loufoque’. Miguel de Unamuno, that master of contradiction, and Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, the man who saw Spain as an esperpento or grotesque distortion of what a European country should be, would have smiled. And, indeed, although there are hoardings in the Peninsula proclaiming the message ‘Spain is not different - your credit-card is valid here, too’, the fact remains that it is the only country to restore monarchy in the late twentieth century and to hold a NATO referendum.

Type
Research Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1986 , pp. 300 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1986

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References

1 See Cebrián, Juan Luis, Una cuestián polítics , El País, 26 01 1986 .Google Scholar

2 Carnbio 16, 10 March 1986, p. 20.

3 Le Monde, 12 March 1986.

4 The Daily Telegraph, 14 March 1986.

5 Expressions used by The Times in connection with the 1977 elections.

6 i.e. ‘alone in the face of danger’—the title given in Spanish to the film High Noon.

7 The Spanish original is ‘baraca’, a word of Arabic origin.

8 See Cambio 16, 17 March 1986 and 31 March 1986.

9 El País, 9 March 1986

10 Cambio 16, 17 March 1986

11 Cambio 16, 24 February 1986

12 Ibid, 10 March 1986

13 Ibid.

14 Cambio 16, 24 March 1986.

15 Ibid.

16 See Jover, José María, ‘La percepción espanˉola de los conflictos europeos’, Revista de Occidente , 02. 1986.Google Scholar ‘War of Independence’—Peninsular War.

17 Ibid, p. 30.

18 Cambio 16, 24 March 1986

19 See Marquina, Antonio, ‘España y Estados Unidos’, Revista de Occidente , 02 1986, p. 134.Google Scholar

20 In its edition of 28 April 1986, Cambio 16 reported that President Reagan’s special envoy Vernon Walters raised with Felipe González the question of the possible use not only of Spanish airspace but also of the bases leased by Spain to the United States. According to the report, the Prime Minister’s reply was categorical: ‘The Spanish bases that have American forces stationed on them will be used by those forces for the defence of the West, but never in any bilateral conflict between the United States and another country’.