Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: personal networks, political strategies and the making of democracy
- PART I PERSONAL NETWORKS, POLITICAL TRADITIONS AND STATE POLICIES
- PART II SYNDICAL PRACTICES, SOCIAL STRUGGLES AND POLITICAL PROTESTS
- PART III POLITICAL PRACTICES, REPRESSION AND STRATEGIC RESPONSES
- PART IV POLITICAL STRATEGIES AND THE DEMOCRATIC PROJECT
- 13 Democratic transformation and the transition to democracy: the political project of the labour movement, 1955–1985
- 14 Corporatist strategies and the transition to democracy: the institutional terrain of the struggle
- 15 Personal networks and political strategies: Spanish civil society in the struggle for democracy
- Bibliography
- Index
15 - Personal networks and political strategies: Spanish civil society in the struggle for democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: personal networks, political strategies and the making of democracy
- PART I PERSONAL NETWORKS, POLITICAL TRADITIONS AND STATE POLICIES
- PART II SYNDICAL PRACTICES, SOCIAL STRUGGLES AND POLITICAL PROTESTS
- PART III POLITICAL PRACTICES, REPRESSION AND STRATEGIC RESPONSES
- PART IV POLITICAL STRATEGIES AND THE DEMOCRATIC PROJECT
- 13 Democratic transformation and the transition to democracy: the political project of the labour movement, 1955–1985
- 14 Corporatist strategies and the transition to democracy: the institutional terrain of the struggle
- 15 Personal networks and political strategies: Spanish civil society in the struggle for democracy
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and PunishThis is the story of ordinary people who worked to make democracy possible. They came together in personal networks to seek support for their immediate demands, and so discovered the piecemeal political strategies which came to create political spaces for the exercise of citizenship. It is therefore a story about political actors at the grass roots of civil society, and their commitment to making democracy, and in this connection it makes no sense to refer to Spain's transition to democracy without taking into account the long years of democratic transformation which preceded it (see Chapter 13). In other words, a guiding assumption of the story is that the achievement and consolidation of democratic arrangements at governmental level are rooted in the democratic maturation of actors within civil society; and democracy is thus to be defined as the practice of citizenship, or the achievement of an increasingly autonomous control of the political conditions of social life.
Hence, in contrast to many recent and current theories of democratic transition in southern Europe and Latin America, which concentrate on the State and on political engineering at the level of the State, this story thinks of democracy in terms of civil society first and the State second.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Making Democracy in SpainGrass-Roots Struggle in the South, 1955–1975, pp. 247 - 262Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989