Regional policy in Spain

0016-7185/82D20107-14SO3JCVO 0 1982 Pergamon Press Ltd.

Geoforum, Vol. 13,No. 2. pp. 107-120.1982. Rioted in Great Britain.

Regional Policy in Spain

MICHAEL

HEBBERT,*

London, U.K.

Abstract: This paper shows how regional policy in Spain has been doubly transformed in the past decade, on the one hand by the economic crisis which has affected the content of regional disparities, and on the other hand by the return to constitutional democracy which has substituted for the centralism of the Franc0 dictatorship a radical devolution of government to the regions. Many of the uncertainties which have surrounded this process derive from fears that in the Spanish context, where regionalism is strongest in the wealthier regions, devolution will increase disparities and not reduce them. The paper discusses the basis for such fears.

game played - under a referee of uncertain temperament, the Spanish State - by regions that vary greatly in their economic strength and political leverage. In this paper I shall first review the extent of inter-regional disparities; next, discuss the fundamental shifts in the political and administrative context of regional planning which have occurred since the death of Franc0 in 1975 and the restoration of democracy in 1978; and lastly, assess, under a variety of assumptions, the prospects for a reduction in the inter-regional disparities.

Introduction

In most countries, regional planning is a subject of minor political importance, the preserve of a relatively small coterie of politicians, technicians and bureaucrats. By contrast, the key feature of regional planning in Spain is its centrality in the contemporary history of the country. In analysing the regional problem we are not treating a discrete policy field with uniform objectives administered and monitored by just one or two agencies, but an issue which pervades political life and continually occupies the front pages of the national press. The explanation for this state of affairs lies in a combination of two factors. One is the economic geography of the country and the marked disparities between its dynamic core and its stagnant periphery. The other is the political history of Francoism and its aftermath, in which a system of authoritarian centralism forcibly imposed upon the ethnic and cultural variety of Spain has been replaced by a democratic constitution that guarantees among many other liberties the rights of regions to some form of autonomy, so transforming the regional planning process from a central exercise in resource allocation to a pluralist bargaining

Inter-regional

Disparities

The basic unit for my analysis of regional disparities will be the ‘autonomous communities’ or autonomias which are in the process of being created under the Constitution of 1978. Hitherto, the largest territorial units in the Spanish system of government have been the provinces (Figure l), created in 1822 on the lines of the French departments as a uniform and rational scheme for tax gathering and public order purposes. The new regions may be seen in Figure 2. So far, four are already established, with their own statutes of autonomy, governments and executives, but the majority are still in an early and uncertain stage of gestation. Certain adjustments may yet be made to their boundaries, while their powers remain not

* Department of Geography, The London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WCZA 2AE, England. 107

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Towns with population

GUADALAJARA

CIUDAD BADAJOZ

REAL

,:

Figure 1

Autonomous

cc7 b

Figure 2

SALEARES

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data remain indispensable. Nevertheless, in the paragraphs that follow I shall look at the disparities at the aggregated level of the new autonomous or soon-to-be autonomous regions of Spain. The least one can say about these regions is that, with some exceptions such as Castilla-Leon, they display a fair degree of internal homogeneity. More positively, their boundaries define a new political geography or framework for any future debate about regional inequalities.

only unresolved but also politically contentious. Nevertheless, it is not too premature to make some general observations about the map of the autonomias. It evidently originates in a political rather than a technical regionalisation. The grouping of the provinces expresses subjective identification rather than any bureaucratic considerations of comparability or homogeneity. For example, in contrast to the regionalisation of Italy under the Constitution of 1947, the Spanish Constitution places no lower size limit on the autonomias, which range from single-province regions such as Rioja, Cantabria and Asturias (otherwise the provinces of Logroiio, Santander and Oviedo) to the enormous tracts of Andalucia, which contains eight provinces, or Castilla-Leon, which contains nine. Andalucia covers 17.3% of the surface area of Spain and had 16.8% of the national population in 1978; Rioja covers 1.0% and has only 0.7% of the population. The largest region, Castilla-Leon, is nineteen times the size of the smallest, the Balearic Islands. These variations present certain problems, not least of statistical comparability. For a detailed analysis of regional disparities, the finer-grained provincial

n

Let us begin with some maps which permit an instant visual appreciation of disparities in four key variables: employment structure, average incomes, population change and unemployment rates (ALCAIDE INCHAUSTI, 1980, is my general reference for the following analysis). Figure 3 displays the range of disposable household income between regions. Taking Spain as 100, the poorest region is Extremadura with an index of 69.8, the richest, Madrid at 123.3. These disparities have been decreasing over the past two decades because of population migration, of which I say

I

Figure 3

Disposable household income oer capita 1977

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more below. Nevertheless, they remain exceptionally great by European standards. At the more disaggregated level of the provinces the polarisation is, of course, even more acute: in 1977, for example, per capita income in each of the five wealthiest provinces was twice or more than twice that in each of the five poorest provinces. The geographical pattern of inequality can readily be grasped from the map. Setting aside the special cases of Madrid (the capital) and the diminutive but prosperous region of the Balearic Islands, the zone of prosperity is confined to the north eastern corner of the country, where Catalonia and the Basque Country have, since the 195Os, constituted a first division in the earnings table, with income levels comparable to national averages in northern Europe. These leading regions are quite closely followed by Navarre and Rioja, where average earnings stand well above the national level. Moving southward and westward, regional income declines; Andalucia stands at 21% below the national average and Extremadura, as noted above, at the very bottom, with average disposable household incomes in real figures of 130,622 pesetas in 1977, rather under &lOOOat the exchange rate of that time. Not only is take-home pay markedly less in the poorer regions, but workers work longer hours and do more overtime (GARCIA DE BLAS and FERRER MARGALET, 1980, pp. 78-81). Inter-regional income disparities are caused by disparities in regional economic structure. With the exceptions, once again, of the capital region and the Balearics, there is a clear relationship between the level of industrialisation in a region and its level of income. The symbols superimposed on Figure 3 compare the percentages of the active labour force and mining/ in two sectors, agriculture/fishing manufacturing (i.e. the industrial sector less construction). To appreciate their significance, we should recall that Spain is a transitional economy in which as recently as 1950, half the labour force worked on the land and only a quarter in the secondary and tertiary sectors respectively. After 1960, when the economy entered a period of rapid expansion, the balance between sectors shifted radically, so that by 1975 the labour share of agriculture and fishing had fallen to less than a quarter, while its contribution to the gross national product fell to less than ten per cent. Some types of agricultural production were modernised in this period, ensuring a steady improvement in the output of the but much of Spanish agriculture is sector, traditional, small scale and impoverished. Mean-

GeoforumNolume 13 Number U1982 while, industrial production expanded rapidly, with a trebling of output over the decade 1962-1972 and a restructuring of the sector towards a greater weight of capital and intermediate goods against consumption goods. But this industrialisation displayed two weaknesses typical of other transitional economies such as Italy, which at the macroeconomic level Spain closely resembles, namely the structural problem of dualism between a very large number of small and traditional businesses at one end and the concentration of production at the other - particularly in the more dynamic sectors in the hands of oligopoly enterprises, and the corresponding problem of geographical dualism caused by the expansion of large-scale capital in the advanced regions at the expense of traditional industries on the periphery. Returning to the comparison of the regions, the distinctive employment structure of the Basque Country and Catalonia will be immediately apparent. With well below ten per cent of their labour force in the primary sector and almost half in manufacturing, these regions more resemble the advanced industrial economies of Europe than the remainder of Spain. They dominate the economy, contributing 27.5% of the GNP from just 7.7% of Spain’s geographical area. Both the Basque Country and Catalonia have had a substantial industrial sector since the late nineteenth century, and (unlike Asturias) consolidated this leading position during the years of expansion. By contrast, the regions which border them, Navarre, Rioja, Aragon and Valencia, have industrialised only in the past two decades. The relative attraction of their location on the lines of communication between Spain and the EEC has tended to increase with the bottlenecks in the Bilbao and Barcelona metropolises. Besides, the modernisation of agricultural production has progressed furthest along the Ebro valley and the Mediterranean seaboard. In consequence, a rapid run-down in the size of the rural labour force has been compensated by gains in agricultural productivity and by a growth in industrial employment. If we were dealing with provincial data it would be evident that some of the north eastern provinces of Castilla-Leon, particularly Burgos, Saragossa, Valladolid, have more in common with this intermediate zone of diffusion than with their poorer Castillian neighbours, having a third or more of their workforce in the industrial sector (compare 27% for Spain as a whole) and an average income somewhat above the national level. But if we take Castilla-Leon as a whole, it presents a

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rather different picture, for the primary sector outnumbers the secondary sector in terms of its workforce, and the same is true of La Mancha, Galicia, Asturias, Extremadura and Andalucia. In all these regions, the agricultural workforce fell very sharply after 1960, but this profound change was not compensated, as in north eastern Spain, by any appreciable increase in the industrial sector. In Andalucia, for example, the proportion of the workforce in the primary sector fell from 52 to 25% between 1960 and 1979, but industrial employment shifted only imperceptibly from 16.2 to 16.9%. The same pattern can be seen in a still more accentuated form in Extremadura; with 37% of the working population on the land and only 11% in manufacturing, it is Spain’s clearest example of tercermundiulismo, i.e. underdevelopment. The case of Galicia calls for explanation. Its exceptional employment structure, with 45.3% of the economically active population in agriculture and fishing, is due to a uniquely fragmented pattern of landholding, the system of minifundias. Whereas in the south of Spain, especially Andalucia and Extremadura, up to a third of more of farming land is covered by enormous units of more than 500 hectares, the whole of the north suffers in greater or lesser degree from the opposite problem of exces-

sive subdivision into unproductive Galicia is the extreme case.

units, of which

Turning now to the demographic map (Figure 4), we can see how the population has responded to the varying opportunities presented by regional growth and stagnation between 1955 and 1975. Given the distributions of employment and income shown in the previous map, it was inevitable that the sectoral shift of labour from agriculture to manufacturing, construction and services would take geographical shape in a massive inter-regional migration. No less than four million moved, or about one in eight of the 1965 population, the majority of them channelled into the four metropolises of Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia (BARBANCHO, 1975). Madrid increased its population by 45.5% 1,200,OOOpersons - in the decade of the sixties. Its average annual rate of cumulative growth between 1955 and 1978 was no less than 3.2%, the Basque country and Catalonia following close behind with rates of 2.6 and 2.3% respectively, which is to say that their population was growing at rather more than twice the speed of Spain as a whole. Unlike the countries of northern Europe, which fuelled the labour markets of their expanding industrial areas with foreign immigrants, Spain was herself a net

Annual rate of growth of population (cumulative) 1955-1978

of growth/decline

Figure 4

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exporter of labour until 1973. The immigrants who ran the services in Madrid and worked the factories in Bilbao came not from North Africa but from the depressed rural provinces of central and southern Spain which have sustained, as the map indicates, a quarter of a century of continuous population loss, absolute population decline in the case of Extremadura and the two Castilles, and increases well below the national growth rate in the case of the nine other regions. Of course, the real impact of outmigration on the rural periphery is even more serious than these figures indicate, because as a comparison of age pyramids shows clearly, it is the young and fertile who have tended to leave (TAMAMES, 1980, p. 47). One further point should be noted about population movement. Though the population trends displayed in Figure 4 are based upon a comparison between 1955 and 1978, it is clear that 1973 will prove to have been in this as in other respects a crucial turning point. Since the outset of the economic crisis in that year, demand for labour in the teading regions has fallen steeply. The Basque Country, Catalonia and Madrid are still expanding above the national rate, but estimates from the National Institute of Statistics indicate a sharp fall from the growth

experienced before 1973. Conversely, the rate of decline in at least some of the depopulating regions has been checked. These shifts in the rate before and after 1973 are indicated on the map by positive and negative symbols. A similar change has occurred at the international level. Whereas in the sixties there was a large emigration to Northern Europe and Latin America and the net annual export of population averaged 65,000 persons, since 1973 and the slump in job opportunities in the industrialised countries, return migrants have outnumbered emigrants by between 40,000 and 50,000 each year. During the boom years, remittances from workers were (with tourism) the major source of foreign earnings for the Spanish economy as a whole, and for the poorer regions in particular, they helped to sustain the level of disposable household income. Now, return migration amplifies unemployment. We can see in Figure 5, which shows the 1979 pattern of unemployment in Spain, how the depression has settled over the economic core and the periphery alike. The severest levels, at more than 16%, are found in Andalucia and Extremadura. Andalucia has always been an area of low activity rates and high unemployment: its rate was 3.7%

Unemployment rates

Figure 5

GeoforumNolume 13 Number 2/1982 back in 1960, when Extremadura stood at 1.2% and most other regions at one per cent or less. The catastrophic deterioration in the job situation of these southern regions, due in equal measure to their lack of industrial employment, to the dominance of the agricultural sector by lufifundiu.s and to the closing off of emigration prospects in northern Spain and the rest of Europe, is at any rate consistent with their long-term record of decline in all economic sectors since 1960. A new and unexpected phenomenon of the past few years has been the appearance of large-scale urban unemployment in the prosperous areas of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Valencia, where it was hitherto unknown. In the Basque Country, for example, the rate rose from 1% in 1973 to more than 11% in 1979. Regions where, in the two years between 1977 and 1979, the rate more than doubled are marked with a symbol on the map, and it will be clear at a glance that the more industrialised areas, together with Madrid, have been the heaviest hit. This pattern of unemployment has very important implications for regional politics, and I shall return to it below. Before leaving the unemployment question we should note some of the regions at the other end of the scale. Rioja, Cantabria and Aragon show up once again as relatively strong regions with a diversified economic structure which has kept unemployment well below the national average. The lowest rate is found in Galicia (4.4% in 1979), the region which also possesses the highest activity rate in Spain (42% as against a national rate of 36%); even though minifundias are an uneconomic type of farming, the multiplication of very small labourintensive plots does ensure a certain resilience in times of depression, as thousands of Galicians return to work on the family farm or in the family fishing boat.

The Evolution of Policy: from Functional to Political Regionalism

Having described the extent of inter-regional disparities, little more needs to be said about their causes. Spain’s experience is not so very different from that of other countries around the Mediterranean basin in which rapid economic expansion in the postwar period was accompanied by polarisation between prosperous core regions and a depressed and depopulating periphery. In any transitional economy with a large traditional sector, as Spain had in 1960, a strategy of maximising national growth in order to catch up with the advanced

113 industrial countries will concentrate productive resources in already developed regions where skilled labour and unused infrastructure exist and where overhead costs are lower. When big businessoriented technocrats took over Spanish economic policy in 1957 and initiated a period of planned expansion, the implications were perfectly clear: resources would be channelled into regions and sectors which already possessed the potential for take-off. A strategy of unbalanced growth was recommended by a World Bank Report in 1962 and was vigorously justified at the time by the leading protagonist of economic planning, Lopez Rodb, against criticism from (among others) the Ministry of Housing, which had a statutory responsibility for national planning of the settlement system and favoured an ‘organic’ approach to urban growth more in keeping with the traditional ideology of the Francoist movement, i.e. more static and protective of established local interests. (CARR and FUSI, 1979, p. 60; TERAN, 1978). The Ministry of Housing’s protests were ineffectual and its work on a National Urban Plan was terminated by Franc0 in 1962. The labour syndicates in depressed regions did, however, succeed in getting certain modifications made to the first Plan for Economic and Social Development (1964-1967), namely the insertion of seven peripheral growth poles in the interests of spatial balance. So began the story of regional planning in Spain. Over the following decade there followed two further economic development plans which, like the first, combined a set of indicative targets for private investment in various sectors with a set of (supposedly) binding programmes for public sector investment and for the development of state-owned enterprises. Work on a fourth plan commenced in 1974, but was abandoned in the uncertainties of the economic crisis and the death of France, and the planning team disbanded. How regional policies evolved within this brief national planning experiment, and how they were implemented, has been well written-up by BUTTLER (1975) MEDHURST (1973) and RICHARDSON (1975). As I do not wish to cover the same ground I shall summarise it in three points. First, all three development plans were principally directed at expanding the national economy, and regional objectives were subsidiary to this. In practice, the economy did expand, although not quite at the rate intended by the plans, with all the consequences for regional disequilibria which we have already seen.

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By the late sixties the problems of bottlenecks in the labour and property markets of the boom areas, as well as the inflationary and resource-diversion effects of property speculation, were causing concern to the economic planners. Consequently and this is the second general observation to be made about regional planning - increasing emphasis was put on the spatial element in successive plans.

The second strengthened growth poles, and the third broadened them beyond recognition so that incentives became available on a regional basis throughout certain g~~~~es areas de e~pa~ion industrial. It also reinstated the concept of a national settlement strategy based upon the containment of Madrid and the promotion, on French lines, of a system of ‘equilibrium metropolises’. The abortive fourth plan was to have gone even further and introduced a set of regional as well as sectoral targets, and provision was made for the creation of fourteen regional-level Territorial Planning Commissions to coordinate their implementation. Thus, as the negative externalities and long-run costs of the uneven development strategy became more apparent, central planners became increasingly preoccupied by the question of space, which had been omitted deliberately in their earlier work. But - point number three - their regionalism was an essentially technocratic exercise, derived from ~~nc~ionu~considerations of national resource allocation. There was no local democracy under the Franc0 dictatorship, and no form of government agency above the level of the provinces was permitted (except for military purposes) for fear it might rekindle in the Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia and possibly in other regions the poLific~~regionalism which had supposedly been extinguished by the in the civil war. Both Nationalist victory MEDHURST (1973) and RICHARDSON (1975) attribute the limited success of the growth pole and grandes areas policies to the centralist manner in which they were conceived and administered. For as HIRSCHMAN (1958) observed long ago, a nation which tries to develop its backward regions must furnish them with certain equivalents of sovereignty, something incompatible with Francoism.

Though relics of these policies still survive, their incentives operating at low levels over the very extensive areas, they have got bypassed by events (see SAENZ de BURUAGA, 1981, pp. 767-799).

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The medium-term macro-economic planning of which they formed part was already weakening by 1970 for want of effective fiscal inst~ments, and the OPEC price rises of 1973 were the coup de grace. (The Ministry of Development Planning was finally wound up in January 1976.) Since then there have been periods when the economy has drifted with the winds and periods of monetary control and other short-term management measures. There has, however, been no planning as such to provide a context for territorial planning.

But more importantly, the type of policy practiced in the sixties has become anachronistic because of the profound change in the political environment which accompanied the death of Franc0 and the return to democracy (ALONSO and HEBBERT, 1982). Perhaps the most important task of the 1978 Constitution, which was negotiated consensually by all political parties, was to satisfy the pent-up demands of political regionalism. The desire for regional autonomy was not limited to the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia - areas with a distinct linguistic and cultural identity and with historic precedents of self-government under the Republic in the thirties. One of the most significant developments after France’s death was the upsurge in regionalist sentiment throughout Spain, including areas where territorial identification had never before found political expression. In Andalucia this went as far as the creation of a ‘nationalist’ Andalucian Socialist Party (PSA) seeking autonomy comparable to that which Catalonia and the Basque Country expected to obtain. Regionalism here, as CARR (1980, p. 178) observes, had no historical or cultural base, but derived from the claims of an undeveloped region neglected by the central government, a phenomenon with affinities to Third World nationalisms. The parties of the left were willing to support the principle of a generalised devolution of regional autonomy in the interests of deepening democratic consciousness at all levels and of providing a counte~eight to the traditional local power-centres of the provinces. It also obtained support from the political right, though with the different and negative motive of diluting the Basque and Catalan problem. As a result, the Constitution of I978 provides for a substantial devolution of sovereignty to newly-created regional governments throughout Spain subject to two overriding principles, national unity and interregional solidarity. The emerging system is not a federal model, indeed, it does not fit neatly into any

Geoforurn/Volume 13 Number 211982 constitutional category, though there are some parallels with the provisions for regional government in the Italian Constitution of 1947. Given the unevenness of regional consciousness in Spain and the contentious boundary issues between certain regions - particularly Navarre, which is half Basque, half Castillian - the Constitution did not attempt to specify a map of the autonomias. Instead, it set up a number of formal procedures by which provinces could jointly or singly move towards obtaining a statute of autonomy. The resulting regionalisation is, as noted already, curiously uneven, one of the more ticklish questions now facing the Spanish Government being whether to enforce a merger on the one-province regions in the interests of the consistency of the whole. Nor did the Constitution specify a standard set of powers and functions of regional governments. Instead, this was left to the statute of autonomy for each region, within constitutional ground rules certain concerning matters over which the autonomias can assume powers and matters over which the state reserves exclusive competence. What was written in 1978 was essentially ‘a constitution of constitutions’ whose implementation is deliberately open-ended and will take many years of political negotiation to complete. The Spanish Government is attempting belatedly to standardise the package of powers and the timetable for devolution. But the Basque and Catalan statutes of autonomy, obtained in 1979 and 1980, have already provided the benchmark against which subsequent developments will be measured. Both regions have their own legislative assembly, a council of government with an elected president, and a court of justice. Their governments have exclusive competence over strategic and local planning, housing, public works serving the region and within its territory, road and rail transport within the territory, education, tourism, agriculture, forestry and water resources, fresh water and inshore fishing and craft industry. The Basque Statute pushes to the very limit the autonomic provisions of the 1978 Constitution, particularly in the powers which it gives over savings banks and other financial institutions within the region. To this must be added the considerable fiscal autonomy obtained by the Basques through the historically unique system of ‘economic agreements’, or conciertos economicos, whereby their government itself assesses and collects all taxes and negotiates a lump sum contribution to the Spanish State. (In Catalonia and elsewhere, the autonomias merely act as tax collectors on behalf of the State, which returns to them

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resources proportional to their responsibilities.) All this adds up to a substantial shift in the territorial division of power. If the process is pursued to its logical conclusion over the next few years, Spain will have moved from being one of the most centralised to one of the most decentralised governments in the western world. What is its logical conclusion? The ambiguous character of the Constitution, and its much-discussed uniqueness in comparative law, allow for a variety of mutually incompatible interpretations and much potential for conflict. The centre-right party which has governed Spain since the return of democracy has maintained a formal commitment to regional autonomy while in practice applying the brakes since January 1980 both to the obtaining of statutes of autonomy and to the subsequent complex process of negotiation by which executive powers are transferred from centre to region. Besides, the hostility of a traditionally centralised civil service to devolution has found expression in a subtle variety of blocking tactics. For example, the Basque and Spanish Governments were deadlocked for almost a year over the rather minor issue of the right to open tourist offices. The government protests that it can move no faster on a highly complicated process of administrative reconstruction. The regions, and especially the ethno-linguistic regions which have already obtained their statutes of autonomy, suspect the national political parties of reneguing on the Constitution’s recognition of their historic liberties and substituting a milder form of homogenised devolution based upon the lowest common denominator of the weakest region. These disputes lie at the heart of contemporary Spanish politics and their issue remains uncertain. Some needed clarification in an excessively deadlocked and complex situation was given, however, by two expert commissions on the administration and financing of the autonomies which met under the chairmanship of Professor Garcia de Enterria in the aftermath of the attempted right-wing coup of February 1981, and recommended that the devolution process should be speeded up and systematised and should be clearly seen to involve a reform of the central apparatus of the Spanish State. Legislation to this effect is being enacted during 1981-1982 according to a set of formal agreements between the two main political parties. Its prospects are considered below. But first let us return to the central theme of this paper, the inequalities existing between advanced and backward regions within the Spanish economy.

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A major impetus behind the establishment of the autonomias has been the hope that decentralisation will help to reduce this gap and create within the more. backward regions the conditions for selfsustained growth, a hope based upon the acknowledged fact that Francoist regional policy failed in part because it was centralist and lacked any roots in local knowledge or aspirations. At a time when decentralised planning theories are attracting general interest (FRIEDMANN and WEAVER, 1979; HEBBERT, 1982, STOHR and TAYLOR, 1981), Spanish commentators are perfectly aware of the significant distinction between earlier topdownwards approaches and the bottom-up system implicit in the 1978 Constitution (see, for example, JAVALOYS, 1978, chapters 1 and 2; QUINT& SEOANE, 1981, pp. 122-128). There could hardly be a greater contrast between the functional regionalism of France’s macro-economic planners and the political regionalism which provides the driving force today. In the euphoria of the return to democracy after the long period of political repression under France, very high expectations were held of the potential of autonomous regional government to tackle, by policies of selective spatial closure, the deep problems created by the expansion of the sixties, whether as in the south these are problems of underdevelopment and rural decay or, as in the north, overdevelopment, pollution and urban congestion. No doubt expectations of local control were pitched too high with all the risks that this entails, in a political system as fragile as Spain’s, of disenchantment arising from false perceptions of what democracy is about and what it can achieve as a problem-solving system, ~‘particularly evident in the hopes, which cannot be fulfilled, that grants of regional self-government will ‘solve’ deep structural problems: the poverty of Galicia, the pool of unemployment in Andalucia” (CARR, 1980, p. 179). Two factors have helped to modify initial notions which, one might add, were evident equally in the speeches of politicians and in the writings of academic commentators - of autonomy as a cureall. Firstly, the depth and intensity of the economic crisis constrains the prospects for a bottom-upw~ds reconstruction of regional economies. indeed, the term ‘regional economies’ begs the question, for in a country so integrated as Spain none have existed, except as an ideological construct, since the late nineteenth century. The Constitution rules, though in the view of many commentators less clearly than it should do, that devolution to autonomias in mat-

Geoforum/Volume 13 Number 211982 ters economic is subordinate to the state’s global responsibility for customs and external trade, the monetary system, general taxation, the national debt and macro-economic planning. (As it happens, there has been no such planning since 1974, but demand is building up for it again.) The Spanish economy’s need for macro-level policy has never been more apparent. In 1980 its growth fell to zero for the first time since 1959, the balance of payments deficit reached almost $5000 million and unemployment rose to 12.6%. These circumstances clearly constrain the degree of economic freedom which a national government, whatever its political complexion, can allow the autonomias in applying, as the ‘bottom-up’ approach presupposes, localist criteria to public investment decisions and to the regulation of business activity. A grey area of potential conflict thus exists between the global responsibilities of the state and the legitimate ambitions of regional governments to plan and promote activity within their boundaries (see ACOSTA, 1980; CIRCULO DE EMPRESARIOS, 1979; TORRES BERNIER, 1980, for the business lobby’s perspective on this). Secondly, attitudes have been shaped by the fact that two of the most prosperous regions of Spain enjoy the earliest and fullest autonomy. The question is now being raised, as it was not in the more rose-tinted beginnings of the autonomic process, whether the principle beneficiaries might not be the regions already most advantaged. The answer depends largely, though not entirely, upon the extent to which the devolution of sovereignty to regional governments is accompanied by mechanisms for the redistribution of resources between rich and poor regions. The articles of the Constitution which establish the principle of regional autonomy also guarantee ~~~~~u~~~ between regions, “safeguarding the establishment of a just and adequate economic balance between the different areas of Spanish Territory”. Solidarity implies in fiscal terms a positive redist~bution from rich to poor areas over and above the allocation which central government will include in its general grant to the regions to guarantee a minimum level of basic public services throughout Spain. As specified in the Constitution, an Inter-regional Compensation Fund (FCI) has been set up under parliamentary control to implement this redistributive principle. Like earlier regional policies, its objective is to correct inter-territorial economic imbalances, but unlike them it may involve very large sums of money indeed, since by law it must incorporate no

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of nations which have carried out much more modest regional reforms - Italy springs readily to mind - suggests that it would be premature to judge the performance of a new subnational level of government until at least a decade has elapsed. To conclude, then, I shall speculate about the range of possible answers which might be given to the question of how the inter-regional disparities described in the first section of this paper may be affected by the transition from ~n~nal to political regionalism described in the second.

less than 30% of total state investment in any given year. Also, unlike earlier forms of regional policy its allocation is a major issue of political contention. The regions of the south anticipate substantial benefits from the Fund and see it as the key to the re~nst~~on of their economies. The industrialised regions fear that they will be milked dry and argue that their own infrastructure deficits - inherited from the boom years - and needs for industrial restarting in the face of international competition give them claim to equal consideration. Whatever the future course of these controversies, and I offer some speculations below, the metaphor is now firmly established that solidarity is the other side of the autonomy coin and that the successful implementation of the decentralist Constitution of I978 depends as much on the management of economic conflict between regions as

experience

between region and state.

is economic and measures the degree of interregional disparity of income and productivity; at one extreme would be an equilibrium in which all regions were in balance in their trading relations and at the other would be a polarised system of core dominance and peripheral dependence. The question is, how might these political and economic variables let us call them ‘autonomy’ and ‘solidarity’ - relate to each other in the Spanish case? Four distinct scenarios present themselves for ~nsideration:

Some Alternative Futures

The reconstruction of Spain into a state of autonomous regions is a complex and contentious process whose eventual outcome permits a wide variety of interpretations (see the various contributions to BANCO DE BILBAO, 1981). Moreover, the

There are, to simplify, two basic dimensions to regional policy. One is political and administrative, and on it we can measure the degree of concentration of power, ranging from the extreme centralism of the Franc0 dictatorship to, say, Yugoslavia at the other end. The second dimension

Autonomy

Ill

IV

Solidarity

I

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(i) First is a scenario of limited autonomy with strong inter-regional equalisation. This corresponds broadly with the perspective of the centre-right in Spanish politics which sees little benefit in devolution for the poorer Castilian regions which are the heartland of conservatism, provincialism and Hispanic nationalism. There are a number of ways in which the Spanish Government could limit the degree of regional autonomy in the supposed interest of solidarity. Perhaps the least likely is a direct challenge to the Basque and Catalan Governments and a re-negotiation of their statutes of autonomy: the political costs of any such move would be very great. But it is quite possible to envisage a process of attrition based upon three elements. First, the Constitutional Tribunal, i.e. the court of last appeal in central-regional conflicts, is likely in Spain, as in all truly federal states, to rule in defence of the unity of the national market and strike down attempts by subnational governments to intervene seriously on the production side, which the autonomias undoubtedly aspire to do at present (see in general GARCIA DE ENTERRIA, 1980). Second, autonomy may tend as in Italy to be limited, in practice if not in principle, by bureaucratic inertia and an expensive duplication rather than devolution of central government functions which eventually frustrates and discredits the regional level (FREDDI, 1980). Third and most importantly, the state may devalue the autonomias by maintaining the existing role of the provinces which, as much because of their electoral composition as because of their administrative continuity with the era of the dictatorship, tend to be conservative and clientelistic, in contrast with the more responsive political style of the regional governments, and are certainly more amenable to central control. By these means the state might well drain away much of the substantive content of autonomy without incurring the political costs of a direct challenge to its formal institutions. Maintaining the formal system of the autonomias is in any case vital to the scenario, for it provides the fiscal channel, in the form of the InterRegional Compensation Fund, through which public investments flow to the backward areas. It should be noted that the distribution of the Fund lies in the lap of the newly formed Council for Fiscal and Financial Policy on which the poorer regions enjoy, in conjunction with central government, a decisive majority. But the word ‘solidarity’ could only be used ironically of inter-regional transfers levied from the leading regions in these circumstances.

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(ii)

The second scenario, which I find more plausible, follows directly from the above. In it, the state minimises the level of regional autonomy and purportedly does so in the interests of solidarity. But in practice, the poor regions decline under centralism exactly as they did in the 1960s and for the same reasons. In a highly competitive international climate, both market forces and public expenditure priorities will continue in the absence of countervailing political power to channel resources to areas of highest return and away from the periphery, though in the eighties it may become the provinces of the Ebro Valley which constitute, with Madrid, the main poles of attraction. Under this scenario the poorer regions will have no political mechanism through which they can prevent themselves from being backwashed. Besides, if the regional governments of Andalucia, Murcia, Extremadura and Castilla-la Mancha are reduced to mere ciphers and political power remains consolidated within the conservative provincial assemblies, then the opportunity will have been lost to create what they seem most to have needed in the past two decades, i.e. a capacity for positive planning which has the participation of local interests and can break across the chronic departmentalism of the Spanish public sector to achieve an integrated development strategy for backward areas. (iii) In the third scenario, the devolution of power to regional governments continues according to schedule, so that by 1985 each of the regions in Figure 2 has its own statute of autonomy and a range of devolved powers, executive and judicial, similar though not equal to those enjoyed by the Basques and Catalans. (Possibly the map might by this time have been modified by the merging of the uniprovincial autonomias into their larger neighbours to produce a more consistent regionalisation in terms of scale and resources.) We are assuming, in other words, a political transition to the decentralised system envisaged in the Constitution of 1978 with, as a corollary, an actual reduction in the central bureaucracy in proportion with the shedding of state functions. But what devolution means in this scenario is a widening of the gap between rich and poor regions. The Constitutional safeguard of the solidarity fund fails for two reasons. One is the inherent limitations to this type of supposedly propulsive public expenditure within the peripheral zones of a market economy (what we could call ‘the Mezzagiorno syndrome’). The other is that the Basque country and Catalonia maintain their current

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privileged status as regions with a right to bilateral negotiations with central government, so precluding the emergence of the Council for Fiscal and Financial Policy as an effective quasi-federal agency able to operate the Fund to their potential disadvantage. In other words, the stronger regions prove the better players in the new central-regional bargaining games opened up by devolution. With their traditions of militant nationalism and a highly organised urban working class, regional political parties and fiscal resources, the industrialised regions successfully use their head start in autonomy as a stepping stone for economic recovery, including the allocation of resources to shore up obsolete and uncompetitive industry which from the point of view of the Spanish economy as a whole might better have been invested elsewhere. High urban unemployment rates ensure that their governments are under the most intense political pressure to retain locally generated tax revenues for local benefit. So in this scenario, as foretold by Castillian conservatives, autonomy deteriorates into an unstable situation of privilege and exploitation.

(iv) The final scenario, by contrast, is the ideal of the 1978 Constitution: autonomy with solidarity. This paper has given many reasons why the ideal is a difficult and ambitious one, but under what circumstances will it be viable? The first precondition is that the state should use its constitutional powers for economic planning. Though the centre-right government has left them idle, the socialist party has made it clear that in the event of a general election victory, which is quite feasible, they would re-establish macro-economic planning and so provide the global framework which, from a political as well as a methodological point of view, is the necessary counterpart of a ‘bottom-up’ approach. In the 1980s Spain will experience a sharp conflict between the claims of equity, which now have a political voice, and the dictates of efficiency. The harsher the international economic climate the more difficult it will be to maintain the reduction in territorial disparities as a priority over the promotion of global growth, and the greater the need for a planning context within which the tradeoff can be made explicitly. A second consideration, which correctly received emphasis in the Garcia de Enterria reports and the subsequent legislation, was that the devolution should be as comprehensive and as uniform as possible, given the unevenness of regional history and identification in the peninsula. The more lopsided the regionalisation, the more

likely it is to aggravate inherent inequalities between core and periphery regions. Another consideration which has yet to be established on the political agenda is the creation of quasi-federal mechanisms through which the autonomous govemments can participate collectively in public expenditure decisions. Mention has already been made of the first such mechanism, the advisory Council of Fiscal and Financial Policy on which three ministers of state will sit with equal voting rights with representatives of the autonomias. In form and purpose this is comparable to the Plunningsausschuss of the German Federal Republic. What Spain lacks, however, under the Constitution of 1978 is an upper house of the autonomias to match the Bundesrat, which directly represents the governments of the eleven Lander and is the key-stone to the success of decentralised government in that country (JOHNSON, 1979). Instead, the membership of the Spanish house of territorial representation, the Senate, is dominated by the provinces. A ‘senate of the autonomias’ would confirm the status of regional governments within Spanish democracy while also safeguarding the redistributive capacity of the state on behalf of the numerical majority of regions which are poor. In 1978, Spain was not ready to take such a drastic step from a unitary to a federal system. But it is perhaps doubtful whether the ideal of solidarity with autonomy can be achieved without it.

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