7 - Democratic reaggregation and the 1978 Constitution

Summary

In the previous chapter we saw that there was a critical symbolic dimension to the drafting of the Moncloa Pacts. The Moncloa pacting reaffirmed a (sacred) “new beginning” of “convivencia”/“national reconciliation,” and “democracy” in symbolic opposition to (profane) “Civil War” (see Figure 6.1); and it ritualized the communal state of liminality in the process of transition (see Table 4.1). We also saw that the drafting of the Moncloa Pacts engendered a specific strategy of elite negotiation, called the “politics of consensus.” This strategy was evoked again in the drafting of the Spanish Constitution. In both cases, party leaders confronted and worked through potentially explosive issues by wittingly and unwittingly calling up the core transitional symbols of “a new beginning” of “democracy” and “national reconciliation.” The drafting of the 1978 Constitution was a far more lengthy, complicated and consequential process than the drafting of the Moncloa Pacts, however.

Constitutionalism and symbolization

In the industrialized nations of the West, constitutionalism represents the claim that the people possess the authority to regulate the relations among all members of the political community, including those who govern. While in the older states, the constitution typically was drafted by a group of revolutionaries united in their opposition to political autocracy, in the new nations of the twentieth century the constitution is not so much a revolutionary document of liberation as an effort by the ruling elite to integrate a diverse, already mobilized, national population.