PASCUAL MARAGALL
I
RUBERT de VENTOS
451
Carios, even though the Prince is not their political dream. This again is the
DemocraticJunta's biggest problem .Juan Carlos could count on this diffuse
military support to win short-term recognition by the democratic forces if he
enacts a program of change not too different from that advanced by the
Junta's Manifesto.
This is why 1975 could be the year of the hasty coronation of Juan
Carios, and then of his overthrow.
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What abour the intellectuals? Theirs is a long story. From the end of the
war through the fifties, those still alive in Spain collaborated culturally,
hoping to give some kind of formal expression to the fascist "idearium ."
Finally, the last of them defected - the Falangists to Marxism , the Catholics to
amore liberal Catholicism. And in fact, liberal Catholicism became for a while
the only way to express the longing for social and cultural change.
Since the mid-sixties the Spanish intelligentsia has been responding to
the same currents as have Western intellectuals . The new influences made
themselves felt in milder and second-hand forms perhaps , but they contrasted
more sharply with a flat and insipid past. The crisis of the myth of unlimited
growth; the collapse of welfare statism; the sense of a cultural limbo which
despite repression had come over the Pyrennees to Madrid and Barcelona
along with the Spanish economic miracle ; since 1968 , disillusion with
"revolution now" ; since 1971 , disillusion with the " cultural revolution"–
all have meant that the intellectuals' political and social concerns have turned
back to classic political and nationalist issues (whether Basque or Catalan). In
the early sixties, the Spanish intellectuals had incarcerated themselves in the
clandestine political parties . But now , their sensitivity to what they see as
imperial patronization-of the Social Democrats by the Americans ; of the
Communists by the Soviet Union; of the Christian Democrats by the
Vatican-has meant many of them have joined socialist reconstruction
platforms. It remains to be seen how they will steer their way through two clear
dangers: The Scylla of leftists' intellectualism, the creation of a party of and
for the intellectuals
a
la the P .S.U. ; and the Charybdis of pure electoralism.
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The Spanish oligarchy, it has been argued , needs America as much as
America seems to need Spain. The United States' military presence, the
argument goes, can be used as a symbol to discourage domestic upheaval.
And Franco's Spain, it's true, has been useful to the United States, as an
