On the first day of 1959, La Vanguardia published a series of assessments of the year that had ended. These are texts on national politics, theater or literature, or on Spain's economic situation, in which technocrats—like Ullastres and Navarro Rubio—were already beginning to intervene with a programmatic will to clean up public finances to prevent the collapse of the Franco dictatorship. After those initial pages, there was an article looking forward, signed with the initials S.N. To Santiago Nadal—the main person responsible for the newspaper's international section—director Luis de Galinsoga did not allow him to sign columns with his name. But almost everyone knew it was him. Today, however, the assessment of his journalistic corpus is forgotten or captive to prejudice. The tradition of post-war democratic liberalism has not yet been assumed.
That article was an example of it. In "The year we entered," the monarchist Nadal, evolved from reactionism to conservative liberalism, spoke of the crisis being experienced in the city of Berlin. In the capital of the Cold War, the entrenchment of the blockade could transform into an explosive short circuit. It was the main threat to the great continental project that in 1959 was truly beginning to get underway: the European Economic Community. The creation of the EEC had occurred by virtue of the signing of the Treaty of Rome in March 1957. The leaders of the countries that had signed it—Federal Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—agreed on a series of economic measures to "consolidate, through the constitution of a series of resources, the defense of peace and freedom," as the preamble to the treaty states. On January 1, 1959, Nadal recounted, the first of the treaty's decisions would begin to be applied: member countries would reduce customs tariffs among themselves by 10%, a measure that had to be expanded over time until the total abolition of customs. Towards the Union, then, through the economy.
To the extent that customs lost their function, the European project, it finally seemed, would mature. Its strengthening was necessary above all for geopolitical reasons. Santiago Nadal said: "The progressive integration of Europe is a necessity born of insurmountable realities.
Above all of them, this: the existence of two colossal non-European blocs, whose mere existence, even disregarding their rivalry, would force, almost by a physical law, the comparatively tiny European States to tend to constitute, in a certain way, a unit." Let's call it a common market, let's call it a European economic community. Its creation, based on a specific reformist ideology and materialized from a series of economic agreements, cannot be understood outside of that critical context. On the one hand, the hecatombic end of the European civil war. If after the Great War a mistake had been made in the construction of a new order, after 1945 the consolidation of a lasting peace demanded a thorough rethinking of the idea of Europe. On the other, the Cold War. The new idea of Europe had to be formalized in an unprecedented global situation: the latent and threatening tension between the United States and the Soviet bloc. What would eventually become the European Union matured in that international context. But when those critical circumstances disappeared, the European project would have to adapt to new coordinates. And the coordinates, fortunately, changed. Nothing visualized it as iconically as the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It was in that "Ciceronian moment," fully aware of living a planetary-scale transformation, when in the summer of '89 Francis Fukuyama published the article "The End of History" in The National Interest, the international affairs magazine that had among its founders Irving Kristol —one of the gray eminences of American neoconservatism— and Henry Kissinger among its references. The proposal, with a describable impact on the Spanish debate —with an atonic right and a rusting left—, was the restructuring of the world after the disappearance of the Soviet dictatorship. In the midst of the implosion of the communist bloc, the sense of victory that emerges from Fukuyama's article, even through the drops of sarcasm he uses, is absolute. "The State that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects, through a system of laws, the universal right of man to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed." The embodiment of that State, said the political scientist, were the states of Western Europe that had created the common market.
What remains of that legacy elaborated during the zenith of intellectual re-legitimization of conservatism? Like a steamroller, the financial crisis has shattered that moment of thought: world coordinates, once again, changed. Perhaps it was still too early to elaborate a realistic formula for the challenge of globalization. In any case, the adaptation of the European project to the new coordinates created by globalization has not occurred in a convincing way. History has returned and it seems as if Europe, often, still conceived itself as living in the world of yesterday.