6. Conclusion.
At present, it is difficult to foresee the coalescence of an emerging corpus of a new
'welfare statism' so that the perceived stagnation of the social-democratic programme in
Europe could be overcome. A few attempts have been aimed at re-addressing
Crossman's formula of "securing economic growth as the basis for a subsequent social
distribution". In its most updated version this vague recipe says little about the
distribution criteria linked to economic growth. Furthermore, it advocates a general
programme of action that is also assumed by some European Liberals and Christian
Democrats. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that the nature of those economic
policies implemented by the Socialists in power in France and Spain (33) are analogous
to a considerable extent to those developed, for instance, by the Kohl Governments in
Germany (34).
As stated in the introductory section of this Working Paper, the case of welfare
development in Spain has attracted little attention of academics perhaps because the
country was under the authoritarian rule of Franco for nearly 40 years. This
circumstance has conditioned and neglected to some extent the analysis of the
previous period of early development of the Spanish welfare system from 1900 to 1939.
In the first third of the 20th century the main features of the process of welfare
development in Spain were very different from those of the Anglo-Saxon and
Scandinavian models. Spanish middle classes lacked the social cohesion to mobilise as
a compound unit. Likewise, working-class organisations were deeply divided among
themselves. Further, the confrontations between Catholics and anti-clericals, on the one
hand, and the deepening of the centre/periphery cleavage, on the other, made the
political coalition of urban middle classes, industrial workers, and peasants very fragile.
Eventually this coalition was behind the electoral success of the Frente Popular in 1936,
just a few months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
In any case, the impossibility for both the progressive coalition and the traditional
privileged classes to achieve social hegemony on their own set the pace for the latter to
promote a military uprising in a somewhat favourable international context. After a civil
war (1936-1939), the triumphant dictatorship saw the collapse of an early governmental
attempt to promote autarchy and over-regulation (1939-1958). In general terms, welfare
development during Francoism was greatly influenced by an authoritarian ideology of a