Modernizing a Friendly Tyrant: US Public Diplomacy and Sociopolitical Change in Francoist Spain
The United States’ attitude toward the Franco regime gradually shifted, from rejection and impelling of the international condemnation of the Spanish dictatorship during the immediate post-World War II period, to a rather wary acceptance. As the United States’ differences from the Soviet Union began being accentuated, some American policymakers—especially in the Pentagon—began to appreciate the value of the strategic enclave in the Iberian Peninsula and the dictatorship’s anticommunism. Thus, the gradual advance toward the Cold War facilitated the creation of closer ties—which only months before would have seemed totally contra natura—between the democratic regime in Washington and the Franco dictatorship. The bilateral accords signed in 1953 allowed the implantation of U.S military bases in Spain in exchange for economic aid, military hardware and technical assistance.1 The goal was to bring Spain in to the security system constructed in Europe to serve as a bulwark against any possible communist offensive. The Spanish authorities agreed to this foreign presence in exchange for international legitimization and financing for their crippled economy. They even went so far as to fantasize that the American aid would be the equivalent of what the Marshall Plan was for other European countries. However, neither the timing nor the objectives were equivalent: in the American power’s initial calculations, the aim was neither the modernization of the Iberian country nor a hypothetical democratizing process.
A complicated mission: The United States and Spanish students during the Johnson administration
This paper examines how the Johnson administration implemented new public diplomacy programmes aimed at projecting a positive image of the USA among Spanish university students as part of the cultural Cold War. In other words, the following pages are an analysis of the exchange diplomacy and the ideological action which the superpower deployed in Spain in order to gain influence over young people. However, the American ideal spread by these programmes did not manage to improve the image of US policies which students considered illegitimate and lacking in moral authority since the country was seen to be a ‘mainstay of the Franco regime’. Between 1963 and 1969, the art of public diplomacy did not succeed in counteracting the damage done to American credibility caused by collaborating with an ally which was too politically compromising. This deligitimisation was an example of the gradual weakening of bipolar restraint strategies as a guarantee of stability faced with the future succession of Franco.
Capturing Crime in the Antipodes: Colonist Cultural Representation of Indigeneity
This chapter adopts a Southern criminological lens, which allows the authors to explore how colonialism has been constructed and depicted in museums within both regional and urban Australia. By studying spatial and historical silences in Australian museums, this chapter offers a consistent frame to chronologically chart Anglo-Australian depictions of Indigeneity, imperialism and violence wielded by the state. As this chapter will argue, museums can often reflect Westernized (white) conceptualizations about Indigeneity and the state violence involved in colonization, which actively re-enforces popular views and influences sociopolitical visions of identity, the state and justice.