Political Economy, Legitimation and the State in Southern Europe

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. SUMMARYThis essay attempts to produce a historical and comparative analysis of the evolution of the political economy and the predominant power structures in the three southern European peninsulas. It covers Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece since the inception of the industrial revolution. It lends special attention to events c. 1880 to 1980and tries to explain the transitions to parliamentary democracy as a consequence of certain key periods of reactionary despotic rule, and not despite them. Although the main perspective adopted is based on class and class conflict analysis and on the study of the relationship of social inequality to the economy and the state, certain cultural phenomena-the legitimation of the political order -are also taken into account. Despite obvious differences and discontinuities between regions, countries and states, a number of important cross-national regularities and common sequences emerge which warrant certain cautious generalizations about patterns of capitalist expansion, industrialization and the role of the state and its forms of political domination in the area. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 6 Feb 2015 06:07:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Political economy, legitimation and the State in S. Europe 173and 'western' outlook who did not, in any correct sense of the word, 'import' capitalism nor the industrial mode of production. They are societies which have always been European in many a substantial sense, save to the unperceptive minds of certain travellers in search of exoticism. In fact two of them became metropolises of vast and longlasting European empires, thus actively participating in the consolidation of what was to become the modern system of international economic interdependence. (By contrast, another one, Greece, has not only never been an impenal power in modern times but was herself a part, until 1821, of a non-European one.) These societies have been subject to the ambiguities, strains and endemic polarizations generated by the simultaneous presence on their soil of a number of contradictory trends, uneven stages of economic development and, in some cases, highly heterogeneous ethnic, class and cultural components. The most diverse and apparently irreconcilable trends vigorously asserted themselves in them: cultural universalism and local kinship bonds of patronage; religious legitimation of public institutions and militant secularism; classless and doctrinaire political commitments and uncompromisingly class-bound ideologies; dependent industrialization through foreign capitalist investment and a very substantial degree of national capitalism, later followed by state capitalist intervent...

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