On External Transition

It is the book gathering Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo’s welcoming speech in the Spanish Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences from the session that took place on November 16, 2005.

Calvo-Sotelo makes a distinction between internal and external transition, about which he had already spoken previously in Living memory of the Spanish transition and Papers of an unemployed person, and now he focuses on the latter.

After the praise from Antonio Garrigues Díaz-Cañabate, his predecessor as chairman, Calvo-Sotelo looks into the past to put that external transition into perspective, and he makes an "anthology of neutralities" of Spain and its milestones, including the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Great War of 1914 ("we were obsessively neutral with a resigned neutrality"), and World War II.

That long history of Spanish neutrality has its turning point in 1953, due to the agreements with the United States, and it is a first step towards "anchoring Spain to the Western world".

Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo’s essay becomes more engaging when it approaches the transition "because the writer has also been an actor and a witness of the facts he recounts". Who started the transition while being in the government "were, in politics, little more than fishermen from Galilee. And the same happened with PSOE, the opposition." For that reason, "the Transition, the whole Transition, but especially the external Transition, unavoidably had a lot of improvisation." In such a way that "it was necessary to start the external Transition sailing through an unknown ocean, without any reference nautical charts and with only one clear path: integrating Spain in the international forums in which it was not admitted when these were constituted due to the non-democratic nature of the previous Regime."

"The entry in the Common Market" and "The Atlantic controversy" are the most intensely biographical chapters of this dissertation, since Calvo-Sotelo was the man to whom "corresponded the unique duty of forming the negotiating team of our membership" and Calvo-Sotelo was, as the President of the Government, who pushed for and achieved the admission of Spain into the NATO.

After remembering the long and arduous process of the negotiations, he concludes saying "that Spain was not received with generosity by its community neighbours." And he quotes two key figures from this story: Alberto Ullastres, "who had masterfully negotiated" the Preferential Agreement of 1970; and Raimundo Bassols, "true architect of our entry into the Common Market."

He also documents through his papers "the uncertain topic of the secular Spanish-French friendship."

He recounts firsthand the fact that he considers "the kernel of the External transition, the hinge on which the new Spanish external policy would turn", which would be, the entry into NATO. He analyzes the position of UCD, of Adolfo Suárez, and of Marcelino Oreja, and examines the historical evolution of PSOE’s international doctrine –from Rodolfo Llopis’ time to Felipe González’s– and the volatility of Spanish public opinion. He also speaks about the attitude of the USA ("the renewal of the Agreements of 1953 without the NATO were the short-sighted American intentions when I came to the Presidency" ) and of the USSR (Letter from Leonid Brezhnev, that he diplomatically returned to him).

The book concludes with a chapter entitled by him "The transition revisited", where he states how nowadays it is considered a problem and how unpleasant it feels to "unravel Penelope’s shroud that never got to be finished," while he is an advocate of "revisiting the Transition without destroying it".

He finishes with a few lines on the new Europe that must be illuminated, a hard duty because "France does not accept that they have to lock down with two keys De Gaulle’s tomb."

During his answering speech, Salustiano del Campo says: "The pithy speech we just heard insists on subjects Calvo-Sotelo has previously dealt with in one or several of his previous works, but he does it giving new ideas and, especially, suggesting new considerations."

Marcelino Oreja finds this essay "a masterpiece on the external transition and it displays the efforts made to put Spain in the place it belongs to."

Historians Pablo Pérez and Jorge Lafuente think about this book by Calvo-Sotelo that "he synthesized his ideas on the history of the Spanish external relationships using his usual sententious, elegant, and frequently ironic style. His central idea must be summarized by saying that Spain abdicated the performance of a role in the international panorama since the times of King Carlos III and it did not get that role back until the Transition, and especially until its entry into NATO in 1982 and into the European Community in 1986 […] Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, one of the men who used more energy on this, is a clear example of to what extent the Transition was an Enterprise that united continuity and change, and not only on the terms of the 20th Century, or of dictatorship and democracy, but in wider terms; in the terms of the strategic position of our country in the international board. The intellectual depth of Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo’s political plan, his direct knowledge on the European reality, his familiarity with our history, probably were the causes that made him have a sight covering a wider range and made him move to a higher plane of political tactics focused on taking and keeping power on a short term."

This is the last book by Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo. Nevertheless, according to his own confessions, "I have at home drawers full of unpublished pages: from the first ones written on a typewriter (a Yost tampon), from sixty years ago, until the last ones typed on the computer. My wife (who will outlive me, as is the norm) may get some money publishing, in many years, those that are more impertinent and politically incorrect and, among others, a long string of satirical sonnets, perfectly measured and more wrongly intended, which my friend (poet Muñoz Rojas) correctly calls skills."

References

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