'Transitional Margins to Re-Join the West: Spain's Dual Strategy of Democratisation and Europeanisation'

This contribution addresses the hopeful and contentious parallel processes of transition to democracy and European Community (EC) accession in the case of Spain within the Cold War context. More particularly, it studies the margins of maneuver of a Cold War small power like Spain in retracing a way back to democracy and mainstream foreign relations as part of a paradigmatically convergent post-Francoist Europeanism. In this respect, it focuses on the entangled constraints and opportunities of Spain’s catch-up convergence and ‘Return to Europe’, which would have a later mirror in the case of the EU’s Eastward enlargement process. In short, this piece navigates the challenges to the consolidation of a post-transitional democracy in Cold War Spain while nuancing the weight of exogenous and endogenous factors in correlation with the European integration process