Spain and Greece

Abstract

By the time some junior officers under the leadership of Colonel Papadopoulos staged their April 1967 coup to prevent an alleged Communist takeover in Greece, Spain had already weathered an anti-Communist crusade following the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). In fact, it was experiencing a second, more complex phase, as the Communist threat of the 1930s seemed to be safely distant and new elites played an important role in Spanish society. In structural terms, it is possible to identify a variety of common features between the two countries’ economic and social development. Both Spain and Greece consisted of a dominant peasantry, a large petty bourgeoisie, and comprador oligarchy. At the same time, they each had similar small-scale commodity-type production coupled with delayed industrialization under the aegis of foreign capital.1 Despite U.S. capital investments, the marked scarcity of employment opportunities in both Spain and Greece in the late 1950s led to sustained labor power emigration, primarily to West Germany and Belgium. Compared to other European countries, both nations experienced the effects of the postwar economic boom fairly late; consumerist trends toward such products as televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, and automobiles were unknown before the mid-1960s.2 In Greece, consumerism reached a mass level only after the Colonels’ seizure of power and was favored by a booming economy and the dictators’ inclination toward a series of populist measures including agricultural debt cancellation and various other benefits for hitherto unprivileged sectors of Greek society (primarily rural people, but also such diverse professions as farmers, building contractors, and taxi drivers).