New elections gave power again, in 1979, to the party led by Adolfo Suárez, the Union of the Democratic Center. Political difficulties, however, led Suárez to resign in January 1981. On the day when the Parliament should swear in the new president of the government, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, also member of the UCD, ministers and deputies were kidnapped, in the plenary of the Cortes, by a group of civil guards. The monarch's firmly constitutional attitude made the coup d'etat fail.
In the disputed elections a year later, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) won a majority absolute, but the moderate performance of Prime Minister Felipe González disappointed his supporters most radicals. Even so, the party achieved an absolute majority in the 1986 and 1989 elections. In the 1993 elections, he won again.
Despite the continued growth of unemployment - which in the late 1980s affected more than 20 percent of the working population - the The PSOE government managed to maintain a stable situation in the following years, thanks in part to moderate but sustained growth in the economy. From 1986 onwards Spain became an effective member of the European Economic Community.
political institutions
The Spanish political system is governed by the constitution approved in the referendum of December 6, 1978, which recognized the right to autonomy of the country's nationalities and regions. The political form of the state is parliamentary monarchy, and national sovereignty resides with the people. Religious, union and political party freedoms are recognized, and the submission of citizens and public authorities to the law is affirmed. Adults are 18 years of age. The legislative power is constituted by the General Courts, composed of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate, whose members are elected by universal suffrage every four years, unless there is prior dissolution of the chambers.
The head of state is the constitutional monarch, whose successor has the title of prince of Asturias.
It is up to the king to propose a candidate for the presidency of the government, which will have to be accepted by the Chamber of Deputies. The Council of State is the highest advisory body to government. The Supreme Court is the last court of law, but the Constitutional Court has jurisdiction over cases involving constitutional rights.
Spain is a member of the United Nations and its specialized agencies, the Council of Europe, the European Economic Community and most of the continent's technical and economic cooperation organizations, as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It maintains a friendship and cooperation treaty with the United States and is closely linked to most Latin American countries and their regional organizations.
territorial organization
Territorially, the country is divided into municipalities, provinces and autonomous communities. The latter, organized according to the 1978 constitution, constitute the way in which articulate in the political system the different regions and nationalities, previously submitted to the central power. The autonomous communities have their own parliaments and governments, and in some of them the autochthonous language is co-official with Castilian. The central government reserves numerous powers, but the whole constitutes a system very close to a federal state.
The division of Spanish territory into provinces remains in force, but since the creation of the autonomous communities, this administrative structure has lost much of its content. The division into provinces, made in 1833, had taken into account the old peninsular kingdoms; for this reason, the new autonomous communities were constituted by the agglutination of provincial territories, without the need to segregate parts to recompose historical nationalities.
Society
Different socioeconomic indicators show Spain, since the mid-1980s, as a developed country. However, the late industrial expansion, even having allowed the complete overcoming of the stage of underdevelopment, left Spain at a considerable distance from the central and northern countries of Spain. Europe. The old social inequality, more visible in the Spanish regions of the south than in the north, was significantly reduced in the 1960s, when the national economy experienced strong development.
The profound differences between urban and rural areas, and between industrialized regions and more backward, lost strength as a result of economic growth that benefited all layers of the population. At the end of the 20th century, the country was socially stable, of a Western European type. Political stability seemed more threatened, by the disruptive trends that had emerged in some nationalities, particularly in the Basque Country, where a minority sought independence national.
In a context of union freedom, there were two hegemonic union centrals: the Workers' Commissions, linked to to various communist parties, and the General Workers Union, linked to the Socialist Workers Party Spanish. Compared with that of other European countries, union membership, like membership in political parties, was low.
The state health network is the most important in the country, and although it is not yet as efficient as that of the richest European countries, it is relatively complex and developed. The country also has numerous hospitals and charitable and free medical institutes, belonging to the Catholic Church, the Red Cross and other private institutions.
With regard to elementary education, practically the entire child population is assisted, but at the high school and university levels there is still a repressed demand. The country also has universities and private colleges.
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Catholicism is a vast majority among the population, as a result of the historic links between church and state and the persecution of other faiths. Although Spanish society has gone through an intense process of secularization in the second half of the 20th century, the Catholic Church continues to exercise a remarkable role. influence on public opinion and to receive special treatment by the state, without prejudice to religious freedom, guaranteed by the constitution of 1978. Minority groups profess Islam, various Protestant creeds and Judaism.
Culture
Spain was, for centuries, the meeting point of two civilizations, the Arab and the European. This fact determined numerous peculiarities of Spanish culture, which, without ceasing to be Western, is marked by centuries of coexistence with the Muslim world.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the intense secularization process that affected the northern countries of the continent did not occur in Spain. change in the path followed by Spanish culture, lacking, among others, the bourgeois components that characterized the rest of the Europe. However, at the time of the Habsburg dynasty, and more specifically in the 16th century and in the first half from the 17th century, the country went through a brilliant artistic and literary period, the so-called Century of Gold.
Great artists have placed Spanish culture at the forefront of the Western world: writers and playwrights like Miguel de Cervantes, Mateo Alemán, Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo, Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barge; architects such as Juan de Herrera and José de Churriguerra; and painters such as El Greco, Zurbarán, Velásquez and Murillo. In the scientific aspect, however, the country remained at the rear of the modern world. The innovative impulses of the 18th and 19th centuries were not enough to "Europeanize" Spain. Among northern Europeans a romantic movement occurred in the 19th century which tended to see in the south of the Pyrenees only the exotic, not the reality of a fundamentally European culture, though delayed.
After the flowering of the generations of 98 and 27 and the cultural decadence of the post-war period, at the end of the 20th century Spain opened up fully to European and world intellectual currents, without this implying a renunciation of the peculiar Hispanic forms of understand life.
A notable Spanish characteristic is the great diversity of contents of its popular culture, which vary according to region or nationality.
Thus, entire regions do not know about bullfights, while flamenco music - considered outside the country as the quintessential Spanish art - is only cultivated in a few. On the other hand, the flourishing literary production in Catalan, Galician and the Basque language is very little known abroad.
20th century. From the last years of the 19th century on, there was an extraordinary awakening of Spanish creativity in the literary, artistic, scientific and philosophical fields. Among the great figures of Spanish culture at the beginning of the 20th century are the writers Pérez Galdós, Leopoldo Alas (Clarín), Blasco Ibáñez, Miguel de Unamuno, Antonio Machado, Pío Baroja and Ramón del Valle Inclan; the playwright Jacinto Benavente; the scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal; historian Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo; the philosopher Romón Menéndez Pidal; the architect Antonio Gaudí; the painters Isidro Nonell, Santiago Rusiñol, Darío de Regoyos, Ignacio Zuloaga and Joaquín Sorolla; and musicians Manuel de Falla, Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados.
The so-called 1910 Generation was characterized by a strong connection with European cultural currents. Among many others, noteworthy are the essayists Eugenio d'Ors, Gregorio Marañón and José Ortega y Gasset; historians Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz; writers Gabriel Miró and Ramón Gómez de la Serna; and the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. The 1927 Generation took Spanish lyric music to its fullest, with Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre and Dámaso Alonso, among others.
In architecture, Spain experienced a brilliant creative period in the years before the civil war. Engineer Eduardo Torroja was a forerunner in the creation of large structures in reinforced concrete, and the architects José Luis Sert and Secundino Zuazo incorporated the rationalist conceptions into their achievements.
In turn, the history of universal painting in the 20th century was deeply marked by the Spaniards Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies and Salvador Dali.
The civil war brought about a sharp cut in intellectual production. Some of the great creators, like García Lorca, died during its course, and a great number of others had to go into exile in the end. Literature like Ramón J. Sender, Max Aub, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Jorge Guillén and Fernando Arrabal worked in exile. In the internal cultural panorama, Camilo José Cela and Carmen Laforet emerged.
In the 1980s, Spanish culture normalized and diversified. The cinema, despite the reduced industrial support, presented works of great value, thanks to directors such as Luis Buñuel, Luis García Berlanga, Juan Antonio Bardem, Carlos Saura or Manuel Gutierrez Aragon. Literary creation, heavily influenced by Hispanic-Americanism, in an already very unified cultural universe, acquired an intense dynamism, similar to that of the publishing industry.
