Shaping, not Making, Democracy: The European Union and the Post-Authoritarian Political Transformations of Spain and Portugal

This essay argues that the forces and attitudes shaping the politics of transition in the two Iberian cases should be understood as prior to and deeper than those underpinning the ultimate form taken by the politics of European integration (although clearly EC membership had been pursued by some actors prior to democratization). The Spanish and Portuguese democracies have been shaped, but not made, by the successful effort of both countries to achieve full EC membership. The process of European integration has interacted with a wide variety of domestic political and economic factors, thus shaping the new democracies. European integration has not eliminated major differences between the cases, however, and above all it cannot explain the broader pattern of political transformation with its clearly identifiable (yet remarkably dissimilar) underpinnings in the two cases.