PUTTING THE PEOPLE BACK IN DEMOCRACY

This is a story of the making of democracy in Spain. Its main aim is to explain how this came about. Its main preoccupation is with the people who brought it about. So I will tell you of the countless unsung heroes who fought for more than twenty years for their measure of human dignity and personal freedom. In doing so I will search out the beginnings of the struggle at the grass roots of civil society, before pursuing the political and strategic initiatives which shaped the forms of struggle in the years to come. Simple as this may sound, it is an ambitious task. I wish to return this piece of democratic history to the people who made it and to return the study of democracy in general to a Rousseauian concern with its roots in civil society. It is my belief that the ways in which the Spanish people struggled to assert more control over the political conditions of their own social lives were the ways they came to achieve their own citizenship; and that this achievement prepared the political ground for the formal achievement of democracy itself.

In this perspective, the democratic struggle in Spain arose spontaneously from the needs and aspirations of civil society and was an organic expression of that society.