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Is Spain Different?

In the Series:
Studies in Spanish History

Edited by Nigel Townson
Nigel Townson is the author of The Crisis of Democracy in Spain: Centrist Politics under the Second Republic, 1931–1936 (SAP, 2000); editor of a general history of Spanish republicanism; and author of a three-volume work of the Spanish exiled writer Arturo Barea, a counterfactual history of modern Spain; and, most recently, Spain Transformed: The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959–1975 (Palgrave, 2007). He is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Thought and Social and Political Movements at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Contributors to this volume include: José Álvarez Junco (Universidad Complutense, Madrid); María Cruz Romeo (University of Valencia); Edward Malefakis (Columbia University, New York); and Pamela Radcliff (University of California, San Diego)

The slogan that launched the tourist industry in the 1960s, Spain is different, has come to haunt historians. Much effort and energy have been expended ever since in endeavouring to show that Spain has not been different, but normal. Still, many of the defining features of the country's past – the civil wars, the weak liberalism, the Franco dictatorship – are taken as evidence of its distinctiveness. A related problem is that few historians have actually placed Spain's trajectory over the last two centuries within a truly comparative context. This book does so by tackling a number of key themes in modern Spanish history: liberalism, nationalism, anticlericalism, the Second Republic, the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy. Is Spain Different? thereby offers a fresh and stimulating perspective on Spain's recent past that is not only of interest to students of Spanish and European history alike, but also sheds new light on the current political debates regarding Spain’s place in the world.

List of Contents to follow
“Analytically the most intelligent book to come out of Spain in recent years.” Stanley Payne, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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