A Global Campus Beyond the Cold War. Peace and Disarmament Among Spanish Academics during the Debate on Joining and Remaining in NATO (1981-1986)

INTRODUCTION: PROTESTS FOR DISARMAMENT, A TRANSNATIONAL MOMENT OF CHANGE

Culturally speaking, the decade between 1979 and 1989 was intertwined in complex ways with the final stage of the Cold War arms race. Because of the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan and NATO’s decision in 1979 to install new medium-range ballistic missiles in five Western European countries in response to the Soviet SS-20s, political and intellectual elites all over the world, alongside ordinary people, witnessed a rapid transition from worsening relations between the two superpowers to the ratification of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987 (Gassert et al., 2020Gassert, P., Geiger, T. and Wentker, H., eds. (2020) The INF Treaty of 1987: A Reappraisal. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.; Colbourn 2022Colburn, S. (2022) Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.). This treaty concerning nuclear missiles on European territory in fact marked a turning point in the negotiation process over atomic arms control. For the first time, medium-range ballistic missiles were not reduced, but rather eliminated, marking an initial milestone at the end of the Cold War.

During this period, nuclear power -in both its military (missiles) and civilian (nuclear power plants, after the serious accidents at Three Miles Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986) capacities- became the tangible symbol of a future that seemed to elude the rationality and understanding of ordinary people. Nuclear power became a metaphor for a reality that contradicted postwar confidence in the steady improvement in the security of the world order (Grant and Ziemann, 2016Grant, M. and Ziemann, B., eds. (2016) Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought and Nuclear Conflict, 1945-90. Manchester: Manchester University Press.). As historian John Hogg (2016, p. 134)Hogg, J. (2016) British Nuclear Culture: Official and Unofficial Narratives in the Long 20th Century. London: Bloomsbury. has argued, it was in the 1980s that the clash between official and unofficial narratives about nuclear power became more heated everywhere. For the first time, scepticism about nuclear policies connected with the Cold War balances became visible and normalised in various sectors of society.

Moreover, as Gerd-Rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney have argued, this decade represented a “transnational moment of change” for Europe, a time when “social, political and cultural movements and even entire society, even as they are bound within a narrative of the nation-state, consciously or unconsciously embrace similar experiences or express similar aspirations across distinctly national frontiers” (Horn and Kenney, 2004, p. XHorn, G-R and Kenney, P., eds. (2004) Transnational Moments of Change: Europe, 1945, 1968, 1989. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.). Alarm over the nuclear issue was felt by vast, varied segments of public opinion. A fierce movement for peace and nuclear disarmament-capable of galvanising public opinion and attracting the attention of the mass media, the political class, and therefore governments themselves-re-emerged at the global scale (Wittner, 2003Wittner, L. S. (2003) Toward Nuclear Abolition. A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971-Present. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.; Maar III, 2022Maar III, H. R. (2021) Freeze!: The Grassroots Movement to Halt the Arms Race and End the Cold War, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.). The decade was characterised by new, creative forms of resistance to civil and military nuclear technology, alongside the spread of women’s activism in favour of atomic disarmament (Nehring and Ziemann, 2012Nehring, H. and Ziemann, B. (2012) “Do all paths lead to Moscow? The NATO dual-track decision and the peace movement – a critique.” Cold War History, 12 (1), pp. 1-24. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2011.625160). The belief that the threat of a nuclear war was the necessary price for world peace hit a crisis point.

In this period, the fear of nuclear power and of a potential Third World War was primarily conveyed, and interpreted, by the most qualified sectors of society, leading to a renewed presence of the intellectual and academic world in the public sphere, at a time traditionally seen as a moment of ideological disengagement from the intense politicisation of the previous decade (Wirsching et al., 2011, pp. 8-26Wirsching, A., Therborn, G., Eley, G., Kaelble, H. and Chassaigne, P. (2011) “The 1970s and 1980s as a Turning Point in European History?” Journal of Modern European History, 9 (1), pp. 8-26. doi: https://doi.org/10.17104/1611-8944_2011_1_8). A large number of scientists, philosophers, and sociologists spread a sense of scepticism about the effectiveness of nuclear defence, beyond their individual national borders. Together with social mobilisations, therefore, academics and educators at all levels helped fuel a popular debate on the pros and cons of nuclear weapons, the associated security policies, and the effects these weapons would have on the environment. For the first time, these issues emerged from the confines of the control rooms of government elites, and reached the attention of ordinary people.

As the sociologist Pierangelo Isernia (1996, pp. 91-92)Isernia, P. (1996) Dove gli angeli non mettono piede. Opinione pubblica e politiche di sicurezza in Italia. Milan: Franco Angeli. argues, the post-war generations in Western Europe -who grew up in an environment of relative economic prosperity and the absence of war, and who were better educated, and more accepting of change- were the most active when it came to the nuclear issue. This generation was more critical of science and technology, but also more sensitive about the use of natural resources and more attentive to quality of life and the significance of democratic values. In this context, the “experts” (scientists, intellectuals, and academics) played an active role in the final stage of the Cold War, becoming unique non-state political actors. They displayed great initiative both in encouraging a transnational dialogue on nuclear arms control and in spreading technical information about the dangers of nuclear proliferation at the local level (Clavarino, 2021Clavarino, L. (2021) “Italian Physicists and the Bomb: Edoardo Amaldi’s Network for Arms Control and Peace during the Cold War.” Journal of Contemporary History, 56 (3), pp. 665-692. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009420980520). Scientists also actively exploited their professional authority to acquire a legitimate voice in the public arena in relation to the debate on the nuclear state and global security.

Historiography has recently shown a special interest in so-called “science diplomacy” (Ruffini, 2017Ruffini, P-B. (2017) Science and Diplomacy. A New Dimension of International Relations. Cham: Springer.), and in assessing the cultural impact of the social engagement of scientists and academics during the Cold War through their advocacy of certain issues such as disarmament or human rights. This academic social activism became part of a complex “transnational civil society,” which was set to influence international relations (Evangelista, 1999Evangelista, M. (1999) Unarmed forces. The transnational movement to end the Cold War. New York: Cornell University Press.; Kraft et al., 2018Kraft, A., Nehring, H. and Sachse, C. eds. (2018) “The Pugwash Conferences and the Global Cold War. Scientists, Transnational networks, and the complexity of nuclear histories.” Journal of Cold War studies, 20 (1), pp. 4-30. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_e_00799; Ruffini, 2020Ruffini, P-B. (2020) “Conceptualizing science diplomacy in the practitioner-driven literature. A critical review.” Humanities and social sciences communications, 7 (1), pp. 1-9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00609-5; Bini and Vezzosi, 2020Bini, E. and Vezzosi, E., eds. (2020) Scienziati e Guerra Fredda. Tra collaborazione e diritti umani. Roma: Viella.; Krige, 2022Krige, J. (2022) Knowledge Flows in a Global Age. A Transnational Approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.). In light of these considerations, this article aims to delve into the specific characteristics of the “nuclear culture” of the academic world in Spain between 1981 and 1986. Drawing upon the multisemantic concept of “nuclear culture,” the article will explore “the sum of all experiences with regard to civilian and military uses of atomic energy, including such diverse layers as science and technology (both theoretical and applied), society, culture, politics, identity, gender, ethnicity and race” (Laucht, 2012, p. 5Laucht, C. (2012) Elemental Germans: Klaus Fuchs, Rudolf Peierls and the Making of British Nuclear Culture 1939-59. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.). To this end, the aim is to delve into how formal and informal “science diplomacy,” introduced by the Spanish academia during this period in close connection with global disarmament activism, influenced the changes in perceptions of the Cold War and shaped the domestic nuclear culture.

One point worth highlighting here is that Spain’s experience of the final stage of the Cold War was somewhat unusual. The resurgence of nuclear tension between the two superpowers was mediated by the domestic political transition from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy, but also by the democratisation of foreign policy (Ortiz Heras and González Madrid, 2022Ortiz Heras, M. and González Madrid, D. A., coords. (2022) La Transición Exterior. La asignatura pendiente de la democratización. Granada: Comares.). As such, the question of entry into the European Community in 1986 and the increased hostility to American military bases on Spanish territory during the Transition shaped the domestic view of the final phase of the bipolar conflict. A few years after Franco’s death, in May 1982, Spain became the sixteenth country in the world to join the Atlantic Alliance. The entry process was accelerated by the President of the centrist UCD government, Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, without any prior grassroots debate on the direction the country would take regarding security and international relations (Quaggio, 2023Quaggio, G. (2023) “En el patio de mi casa, no. Guerra Fría, neutralidad e internacionalismo en el movimiento anti-OTAN y por la paz (1979-1986).” In: F. J. Leira Castiñeira, coord., El pacifismo en España desde 1808 hasta el “No a la Guerra” de Iraq. Madrid: Akal, pp. 473-498.). During the transition to democracy, government parties and institutions deliberately set aside the most challenging foreign policy issues, for fear of jeopardising the reconciliation between reformist Francoists and anti-Francoists. Much of Spanish society and primarily a large part of its political parties wished to see the country join the European Community. On the contrary, many anti-Francoist sectors rejected NATO based on the idea that responsibility for the longevity of Franco’s military regime lay with the international legitimisation by the USA, which had entered into economic and military agreements with the dictatorship since 1953, as well as the perception that the USSR did not pose any danger to Spain (Blanco Sío-López, 2019Blanco Sío-López, C. (2020) “Transitional margins to re-join the West: Spain’s dual strategy of democratization and Europeanization.” In: L. Crump and S. Erlandsson, eds., Margins for Manoeuvre in Cold War Europe. The Influence of Smaller Powers. New York: Routledge 2020, pp. 205-223.).

The debate on Spain’s entry into NATO in 1981 and the referendum on remaining in March 1986 polarised society and changed the country’s nuclear culture. Until then, the perception of the Cold War in Spanish society had been altered by the country’s partial international isolation from Western institutions, and particularly by the substantial unawareness of civil nuclear power and the proliferation of atomic weapons promoted by Franco’s dictatorship. Moreover, between 1981 and 1986, albeit somewhat belatedly, Spain joined the global cycle of protests for peace and disarmament at the end of the Cold War. Consequently, in this article I will argue that Spanish society developed various relationships with European peace movements through the mediation of academics engaging in renewed reflections on the ethical value of disarmament. However, this reflection beyond national borders was intertwined with specific national concerns about NATO and about how to democratise the country.

An analysis of the state-of-the-art on the relationship between Spanish academia and the debate on joining NATO and nuclear disarmament highlights a lack of literature. As Javier Muñoz Soro (2016a, p. 19)Muñoz Soro, J. (2016a) “El final de la utopía. Los intelectuales y el referéndum de la OTAN en 1986.” Ayer, 103, pp. 19-49. Available at: https://revistaayer.com/articulo/209 [Accessed 27 July 2023] argues, this relationship has been interpreted as “the end of the utopia of the intellectual world” and as “a definitive break with memory of anti-Franco culture” and “the primacy of political parties over civil society.” There is no doubt that assessing the impact of the NATO debate put forward by Spanish scientists and intellectuals is challenging and controversial, and I will only be able to provide some empirical data here. However, it would be reductive, to say the least, to interpret the cultural impact generated by the NATO referendum in exclusively national terms and as a mere confrontation for hegemony between political parties. Contrary to some analyses of culture in the 1980s (Echevarría, 2012Echevarría, I. (2012) “La CT: un cambio de paradigma.” In: G. Martínez, ed., CT o la Cultura de la Transición. Critica a 35 años de cultura española. Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, pp. 25-36.), I will argue that this period was also a multifaceted, innovative time for Spain. If we shift our attention to what was happening in Europe and the rest of the world, it becomes clear that Spanish academics adapted the national debate on joining NATO to the ongoing global fears in original ways. In other words, the aforementioned transnational moment of change also completely shook up Spanish culture.

To understand how this took place and with what effects, starting with an examination of the fund dedicated to Spain held in the archives of the European Nuclear Disarmament campaign at the London School of Economics and an exploration of the conceptual character of the domestic debate on NATO and nuclear disarmament, this article will focus on three case studies. Firstly, it will set out an analysis of the impact of historian E.P. Thompson’s critical thinking on the Cold War and the European Campaign for Disarmament among Spanish academics. Secondly, it will examine how certain academics and scientists, who played an active part in the debate either for or against joining and remaining in NATO, shaped the nuclear culture of the time through the daily press. Finally, it will investigate the involvement, or lack thereof, of Spain’s scientific sector in specific transnational networks for peace and disarmament and how, through civil society itself, the foundations were laid for the first centres aimed at the dissemination and study of peace and the analysis of national and international security policies.

SPREADING CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT THE COLD WAR: THE EUROPEAN NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT CAMPAIGN (END)

In the aftermath of Franco’s death -despite the fact that atomic energy, in both its civil and military dimensions, had had immediate consequences for everyday life with the Palomares accident (1966) and the dangerous leaking of radioactive waste from the Juan Vigón National Nuclear Energy Centre in Madrid (1970)- awareness of the risks of military and civil nuclear power remained quite limited. In this regard, it is useful to apply historian Olga Kuchinskaya’s line of argument concerning the social construction of “nuclear ignorance” by dictatorial regimes (2014Kuchinskaya, O. (2014) The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects After Chernobyl. Cambridge: MIT Press.). During Franco’s regime, several scientists, members of the military, and industrial and government elites encouraged a nuclear culture that rendered the risk of nuclear power invisible to ordinary people, or more generally sought to minimise it. Instead, they fostered an image of nuclear power closely linked to a positive idea of capitalist modernity and of fruitful, accelerated economic growth (Florensa, 2021, p. 321Florensa, C. (2021) “A nuclear monument the size of a football field: The diplomatic construction of soil nuclearity in the Palomares accident (Spain, 1966).” Centaurus, 63 (2), pp. 320-338. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12378). Francoist Spain, one of Western Europe’s weaker countries, was welcomed into the prestigious club of countries that entertained the civil uses of the atom under America and Europe’s tutelage, undergoing an intense process of civil and military nuclearisation (De la Torre and Rubio-Varas, 2016De la Torre, J. and Rubio-Varas, M. (2016) “Nuclear Power for a Dictatorship: State and Business involvement in the Spanish Atomic Program, 1950-85.” Journal of Contemporary History, 51 (2), pp. 385-411. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009415599). According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Spain was one of twenty-seven countries in which the United States stored around 200 atomic bombs between 1958 and 1976 (Norris et al., 1999, pp. 26-35Norris, R.S., Arkin, W. M. and Burr, W. (1999) “Where They Were.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 55 (6), pp. 26-35. doi: https://doi.org/10.2968/055006011). What is more, as Spain chose not to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) until 1987, certain military and scientific sectors of Franco’s regime even harboured a secret ambition to create their own atomic weapon modelled on France’s force de frappe (Garrido Rebolledo, 2001Garrido Rebolledo, V. (2001) El régimen de no-proliferación nuclear: participación e implicaciones para España. Madrid: UCM.).

After Franco’s death, a popular critical discourse on nuclear power took time to take hold in Spain, if we exclude the protests against the 1975 National Energy Plan, which foresaw the construction of thirty-seven nuclear power plants in the country (Román Antequera, 2023, pp. 123-124Román Antequera, A. (2023) “Medioambiente y paz: las interconexiones entre el movimiento anti-OTAN y la protesta ecologista en la década de los 1980.” In: G. Quaggio and S. Molina García, eds., Imaginando la Guerra Fría desde los márgenes. La sociedad española y la OTAN. Granada: Comares, pp. 119-136.). Albeit with a perception that was not entirely correct as peace thinking was already widespread among sections of progressive Catholics and conscientious objectors since the early 1970s (Prat Carvajal, 2007, pp. 19-61Prat Carvajal, E. (2007) Moviéndose por la paz. De Pax Christi a las movilizaciones contra la guerra. Barcelona: Hacer.; Oliver Olmo, 2021Oliver Olmo, P. (2021) “El movimiento de objeción de conciencia e insumisión en España (1971-2002).” Hispania Nova: Revista de historia contemporánea, 19, pp. 353-388. doi: https://doi.org/10.20318/hn.2021.5885; Ordás García, 2022Ordás García, C. Á. (2022) “The Antimilitarist Campaign against Compulsory Military Service in Spain during the 1970s and 1980s.” Contemporary European History, pp. 1-19. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777322000224), activists from the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) at the start of the 1980s declared that:

Due to the urgent pro-democracy focus of the clandestine anti-Francoist movement, Spanish society paid relatively less attention to the global debate on atomic weapons triggered by the mobilisations for peace and against nuclear tests in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, not even the clandestine Spanish Communist Party was immune to the controversies generated by the peace propaganda by the Soviet World Peace Council in contraposition to the propaganda about freedom in the United States (Ruiz Panadero, 2022Ruiz Panadero, D. (2022) “Los usos políticos de la paz durante la Guerra Fría. Enrique Líster, la ‘Pax Soviética’ y el Consejo Mundial de la Paz.” Brocar. Cuadernos de Investigación Histórica, 46, pp. 137-166. doi: https://doi.org/10.18172/brocar.5281). Furthermore, intense reflections on the meaning of peace were hardly lacking in Spain during the twentieth century either, whether by various pacifist and anti-militarist socialist currents, the first feminist wave, or exiled intellectuals (Aguado Hernández, 2019Aguado i Hernàndez, J. A. (2019) “El pacifismo-antimilitarismo en España desde el siglo XIX hasta la Guerra Civil: los ‘efectos desplazamiento.” Revista de Paz y Conflictos, 12 (1), pp. 85-108. doi: https://doi.org/10.30827/revpaz.v12i1.7923; Muñoz Soro, 2016bMuñoz Soro, J. (2016b) “Gli intellettuali spagnoli e la Guerra Fredda durante la dittatura di Franco.” Memoria e Ricerca, 51, pp. 25-44.; Leira Castiñeira, 2023, pp. 21-359Leira Castiñeira, F. J., coord. (2023) El pacifismo en España desde 1808 hasta el «No a la Guerra» de Iraq. Madrid: Akal.). After Franco’s anti-democratic caesura, however, the Spanish peace mobilisations took place in an environment that was strongly defined by the political cultures of the anti-Francoist left and new left. The cultural references underpinning these mobilisations were not so much ethical reflections concerning the responsibility of humankind during the so-called atomic age, but rather the the politicised idea of social peace of progressive Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council (Cueva Merino and Louzao Villar, 2023Cueva Merino, J. and Louzao Villar, J., eds. (2023) Un 68 católico. Catolicismo e izquierda en los largos años 1960. Madrid: Marcial Pons.), a refusal of the strong interference of militarism in civil life and, in particular, the anti-imperialist and Third Worldist rejection of American bases and the perception of the Atlantic Alliance as an armed wing of the USA rather than as a defensive alliance for the benefit of Western Europe (Ruiz Jiménez 2005, pp. 254-255Ruiz Jiménez, J. Á (2005) E.P. Thompson. La conciencia crítica de la Guerra Fría. Democracia, pacifismo y diplomacia ciudadana. Granada: Universidad de Granada.).

A dossier Nicholas and Loreto Perry wrote for Sanity, the CND’s periodical publication, underscored the fact that in Spain:

The document also stressed that it was “Very difficult to find a single book on nuclear weapons (still a taboo subject) in any language.”³Idem. As a solution to this information vacuum, the two British activists therefore proposed bolstering the exchange of educational materials on nuclear disarmament between the two countries: “among the things we believe are badly needed here are a series of consciousness-raising exercises backed up by a proper flow of information.”⁴Idem, p. 8. From 1982-1983 onwards, developments in the critical narratives on defence policies in Spain went hand in hand with the growing thematic complexity of the NATO debate and the broadening cultural opposition to the Atlantic Alliance, which actively included new social movements other than the Marxist and post-Marxist left, such as the feminist and environmental movements. Such developments also occurred thanks to the bridge of the European Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (END) and the influence of the alternative Cold War thinking proposed by historian Edward P. Thompson (1924-1993).

After the ideological fundamentalism phase of the 1970s, the Western peace movements of the 1980s focused on more tangible demands. Experts played a key legitimising role in building alliances with the new social movements. These considerations also apply to Spain’s intellectual output. Indeed, after an initial phase of one-dimensional anti-American criticism, the anti-NATO movements assumed a broader interpretative perspective, extending the reasons for their opposition to the Western bloc to incorporate a multifaceted critique of both Cold War blocs, of Spain’s position between Europe and the Americas, and the type of national security promoted by the logic of deterrence. In this context, the END campaign played a vital role in fostering a critical awareness of the alleged usefulness of the Cold War as well as the possibility of promoting new peace strategies, even from Spain’s seemingly “marginal” position.

The campaign took hold with the “END Appeal,” which the Bertrand Russell Foundation circulated worldwide after NATO’s decision to install Euro-missiles. As is well known, at the height of the Cold War (1955), the English philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell drafted with Albert Einstein the famous manifesto on scientists’ ethical responsibilities in the modern world. This manifesto against the application of science to war warned of the dangers of nuclear proliferation and called on world leaders to find peaceful solutions to conflicts through education (Lenz, 1996Lenz, J. R. (1996) “Pugwash and Russell’s Legacy.” The Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly, 89, pp. 18-24.). The END Appeal returned to the ethical spirit of this manifesto through an international lobby group that, despite its small size, included many highly esteemed professors, intellectuals, and scientists. Until 1992, the aim of the campaign was to promote the idea of a non-aligned Europe around the world through a dynamic information policy and the circulation of the proposal for a continent independent of the two superpowers. According to the END, European independence could be achieved through a process of progressive unilateral and multilateral military denuclearisation of the continent, from Poland to Portugal (Baehr, 2000Baehr, P. (2000) “E.P. Thompson and European Nuclear Disarmament (END): A Critical Retrospective.” Online Journal for Peace and Conflict Resolution. Available at: https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/ojpcr/ojpcr_3_1/ojpcr_3_1a.html [Accessed 27 July 2023]; Ruiz Jiménez, 2006Ruiz Jiménez, J. Á (2006) El Desarme Nuclear Europeo (END). Movimiento social y Diplomacia Civil. Granada: Universidad de Granada.; Burke, 2016Burke, P. (2016) “European Nuclear Disarmament: Transnational Peace Campaigning in the 1980s.” In: E. Conze, M. Klimke and J. Varon, eds., Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 227-250.).

The roots of this approach lay in a radical tradition of “third way” and humanist socialism characteristic of the British left. In particular, the END Appeal drew upon the ideas put forward by E.P. Thompson. In his critical analysis of the Cold War, the British Marxist historian applied his own first-hand experience in the Second World War and in Yugoslavia, “bottom-up” studies on the British working class’s agency, and, above all, the ethical reasons underpinning his decision to distance himself from the British Communist Party and the Soviet Union in 1956. To put a stop to the polarised conflict, Thompson was convinced it was necessary to make each and every citizen aware of their own capacity for action (Taylor and Fieldhouse, 2013Taylor, R. and Fieldhouse, eds. (2013) E.P. Thompson and English radicalism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.). Together with his wife Dorothy, herself a historian of the Chartist movement, he brought the internationalist, non-aligned, radical ideas of the British New Left to the very heart of the debate on the neo-liberal economic measures of the 1980s, arguing for a rapprochement with independent groups in Eastern Europe to build a third route to peace and human rights. According to Thompson and the END, the responsibility for the arms race and the Cold War lay with both blocs, which he called “two monstrous antagonistic structures” (Thompson, 1978, p. 265Thompson, E. P. (1978) The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press.).

Thompson also abhorred communist internationalism, believing, instead, in a radical humanist environmentalism as a new ideological tool for uniting the East and West in “a new form of life” and “humanist socialism” (Berger and Wicke, 2021, p. 208Berger, S. and Wicke, C. (2021) “…Dos monstruosas estructuras antagonistas: el activismo pacifista y la filosofía histórica marxista de E.P. Thompson durante la Guerra Fría.” In: S. Berger and C. Cornelissen, eds., Culturas históricas marxistas y movimientos sociales en la Guerra Fría. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, pp. 199-224.). In his view, the division in Europe was not so much between the East and West of the continent, but rather between the common people of Europe and the ruling elites, who had been maintaining a militarist division since the Second World War for their own economic and social benefit. Consequently, the END manifesto called upon ordinary people to act and demanded that people “commence to act as if a united, neutral and pacific Europe already exists.”⁵The entire manifesto can be read on the Bertrand Russell Foundation website: http://www.russfound.org/END/EuropeanNuclearDisarmament.html [accessed 30/July/2023]. The aim was to encourage ordinary people to inform themselves about the international dynamics, to trigger a process of “détente from below,” to achieve total denuclearisation and therefore an end to the apocalyptic threat of the Cold War. According to Thompson, as well as threatening the extermination of humanity, the Cold War indirectly established restrictions on civil and democratic rights not only in the East but also in the West of the continent.

Other figures who actively joined the END and whose thoughts circulated in Spain included Ken Coates, one of the founders of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, a lecturer in special education for adults at the University of Nottingham and a proponent of humanitarian internationalist socialism, as well as the professors and analysts of the British Labour Party’s Defence Study Group Dan Smith and Mary Kaldor.⁶Mary Kaldor was working on weapons technology at the University of Sussex at the time and had grown up in Cambridge where her father taught, graduating with a degree in Economics from the University of Oxford. Her mother had been an active member of the CND from the outset. In 1984, she delivered the seminar “Euromissiles and Pacifism” in Segovia. See: El País [EP] “Mary Kaldor,” 5 June 1984. https://elpais.com/diario/1984/06/05/ultima/455234405_850215.html [accessed 27/July/2023]. Ken Coates was editor of The Spokesman, the journal of the Bertrand Russell Foundation. He wrote several articles in El País on the European peace movement in the 1980s (e.g.: EP “El lenguaje del antipacifismo,” 6 November 1985. https://elpais.com/diario/1985/11/06/opinion/500079605_850215.html [accessed 27/July/2023]. The END also included other European experts, such as the German Federal Republic researcher Ulrich Albrecht (1941-2016), who specialised in the effects of armaments on people’s living conditions, and the dissident Soviet scholars Roy and Zhores Medvedev.⁷Ulrich Albrecht earned a doctorate in Stuttgart on the global arms trade. He was appointed Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Free University of Berlin, fighting for arms conversion projects. Roy Medvedev (1925), a Russian dissident Marxist historian, was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1968-1969 with his biochemist twin brother Zhorés. Roy Medvedev wrote articles in El País on the relationship between peace and Italian communism, the military transformations of the USSR, and relations with Germany. As Kaldor explained in the END Bulletin:

This approach, which is based on an interpretation of international relations beyond the realpolitik of nuclear deterrence, first attracted supporters from the Labour Party, thus liberals, along with members of the Christian churches, feminists, left-wing libertarians, antimilitarists, and new environmental activists. It was particularly successful in the world of higher education and research. As well as promoting conferences and seminars in British universities, the END also organised various “researcher meetings” to discuss the issues disturbing peace at the beginning of the decade.⁸The END Bulletin was a constant source of information about meetings between researchers, the so-called “END Research Conferences.” See, for example, the 2^nd Conference on Security in the Mediterranean which was held in Milan in December 1981. Mary Kaldor and Dan Smith provided detailed information about this in 1981 in issue 8 of the END Bulletin (p. 22). The conference was attended by researchers as well as activists and politicians, for example Fernando Morán himself, at the time PSOE spokesman for Foreign Affairs and future Minister of Foreign Affairs in the PSOE government (1982-1985). As Thompson argued: “Intellectuals and communicators are the primary messengers that must transmit their ideas across ideological boundaries. They must act on their own initiative, find their own path, and not wait for some higher order from a peace party or movement to tell them what to do” (Thompson, 1985a, p. 151Thompson, E. P. (1985a) The Heavy Dancers. London: Merlin.).

According to Enrique Gomáriz Moraga (1987, p. 556)Gomáriz Moraga, E. (1987) “El movimiento por la paz en España.” Revista internacional de Sociología, 3, pp. 549-568., a founding sociologist of the Movement for Peace, Disarmament and Liberty (MPDL), which was partially aligned with the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), contact between the END and the Spanish movements was consolidated in 1983. In reality, as the END Bulletin’s interest in the Spanish case demonstrates, this contact goes as far back as 1980, with the circulation of the END Appeal among the Euro-communist current of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), the small groups of the extra-parliamentary left and progressive Catholicism, as well as among artists, such as Joan Miró, and other figures from the worlds of culture and academia who, albeit not directly affiliated with a party, were sensitive to the theme of anti-militarism and protecting the environment.

The main tool for exchanging ideas was the END Conventions between 1982 and 1989. The Conventions were intended to build a foundation for opening up new channels of communication capable of destroying the idea of an “enemy to protect oneself from” (Ruiz Jiménez, 2006, p. 80Ruiz Jiménez, J. Á (2006) El Desarme Nuclear Europeo (END). Movimiento social y Diplomacia Civil. Granada: Universidad de Granada.). It is important to point out that the Conventions were not decision-making bodies but rather heterogeneous forums between peace activists from different currents and geographical origins. From the second END Convention in West Berlin, the presence of Spanish activists, politicians, and academics was a constant, as is demonstrated by the correspondence between the END and a number of movements that participated in the Spanish Coordination of Peace Organisation (CEOP) from 1983 onward, an innovative, varied platform that brought together almost 400 Spanish pro-peace and anti-NATO groups from that year (Prat, 2007Prat Carvajal, E. (2007) Moviéndose por la paz. De Pax Christi a las movilizaciones contra la guerra. Barcelona: Hacer.).⁹See the case of the CAO (Anti-NATO Committee) in Madrid, which had an “international commission” made up of Pablo Carbajoso, Ruth Mir, Francisco Peñas, and José Luis Pérez Herrero. This commission wrote numerous newsletters to the END, informing them of the activities of the CAO and the CEOP, e.g., LSE, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, END 20/10, Spain, f. 142, “International Newsletter n. 5,” by CAO, November 1985. Gomáriz himself informed the Spanish public of the activities of the END Conventions through several articles published in El País, one of the most widely circulated newspapers at the time.¹⁰El País [EP] “Un pacifismo no alineado,” 31 July 1984. https://elpais.com/diario/1984/07/31/internacional/460072801_850215.html [accessed 27/July/2023]. EP “¿Un pacifismo exhausto?,” 26 July 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1985/07/26/internacional/491176819_850215.html [accessed 27/July/2023]. EP “Coventry y el pacifismo perdedor,” 23 July 1987. https://elpais.com/diario/1987/07/23/internacional/553989610_850215.html [accessed 27/July/2023].

Thompson became an “ambassador” for the ethical reasons behind the need for the disarmament of both the superpowers. To this end, he travelled to Spain on two separate occasions, during which time he strengthened his solidarity with Spain’s position in the nuclear conflict. As Thompson recalled in Double Exposure, what made him feel close to the Spanish peace movement was:

The first direct contact between Thompson and Spain came about through the counter-cultural world of Barcelona and, specifically, thanks to the Anti-Nuclear Committee of Catalonia and the Campaign for Total Disarmament (Grasa, 1994, pp. 96-99Grasa, R. (1994) “Recordar para sobrevivir: memoria de E.P. Thompson como luchador por la paz, la justicia y el socialismo.” Mientras Tanto, 58, pp. 93-102.). In May 1984, Thompson travelled to Barcelona for the “Days on Nuclear Danger and the Pacifist Alternative,” when he also gave a lecture at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The days had the ambitious goal of “making sure everyone is an expert when it comes to defence.”¹¹EP “Empiezan en Barcelona las jornadas sobre el peligro de guerra nuclear,” 22 May 1984. https://elpais.com/diario/1984/05/22/sociedad/454024804_850215.html [accessed 27/July/2023].

After the installation of the Euro-missiles in 1983, for Thompson the Spanish peace movement was the event that presented the greatest challenge, namely, the first global public meeting on whether a country should remain in NATO. In February 1986, Thompson consequently returned to Spain, this time to Madrid to personally support the anti-NATO campaign, as he had already done at the 1984 END Convention in Perugia (Italy). In his speech, during a multitudinous anti-NATO demonstration in Colón, the British academic explained the internationalist reading of the need for Spain to leave NATO:

Anti-NATO thinking quickly took on an internationalist dimension in Spain too. The idea of the need for a “positive neutrality” took hold, and the long-standing tradition of Spanish “active neutralism” was reinvigorated, according to which the Iberian country would gain in relevance in the world by remaining independent of the two blocs. Moreover, this was broadly the same kind of argument that Soviet diplomats raised to discourage Spain’s entry into NATO during the 1970s (Centenera Ulecia, 2013Centenera Ulecia, J. (2013) La transición exterior española y la larga mano de Moscú. Madrid: Quinquerreme.; Kramer et al., 2021Kramer, M., Makko, A. and Ruggenthaler, P., eds. (2021) The Soviet Union and Cold War Neutrality and Nonalignment in Europe. Lanham MD: Lexington Books.). The memory of Thompson’s trip to Spain in 1986 underscores to what extent, and through which academics, his ideas were circulated. It also helps us understand which figures from the world of Spanish academia were the most receptive of his narrative at the time. The trip was organised by the British researcher Louis Lemkov, who had completed his doctorate in Economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1981, and the academic Jane Mayes from the University of Cumbria. While it was, therefore, British mediators that first introduced Thompson to the country, there is no doubt that, as the English historian explains, it was Spanish “anti-NATO philosophers” that organised dissemination activities in situ.¹³LSE, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, END 20/10, Spain, f. 241, “Visit to Spain, Feb. 20-24,” by E.P. Thompson for CND, 1986, p. 1.

To understand the social background that contributed to certain Spanish academics approaching the END campaign, it is useful to focus on the cultural milieu of two academics, Manuel Sacristán (1925-1985), a philosopher of science, and Jesús Ibañez Alonso, a sociologist of consumer society (1928-1992). On the one hand, after distancing himself from the Catalan Communist Party in 1978, Sacristán, along with his wife Giulia Adinolfi, founded the journal Mientras Tanto, where he translated and commented on the END manifesto in issue no. 4 from 1980. This journal gave ample space to Russell’s positions on unilateral disarmament. It welcomed numerous Marxist critics who were eager to overcome the militarist communist culture in Spain, enriching Marxist thought, in innovative ways, with the values of environmentalism and feminism. This was nonetheless in a different direction from Euro-communism which, in their opinion, had shown some interest in the Atlantic Alliance. Above all else, they sought to criticise and distance themselves from orthodox or party communism (Capella, 2005, pp. 249-257Capella, J.-R. (2005) La práctica de Manuel Sacristán. Una biografía política. Madrid: Trotta.). On the other hand, Thompson recalls that the sociologist Ibañez, along with his wife, the biologist Esperanza Martínez-Conde, hosted the British historian while he was visiting Madrid to organise a conference at the Complutense University and the Autonomous University of Madrid, attended by some 200 researchers and academics.¹⁴Idem, p. 2.

The two professors had similar biographies. They were both part of a generation that had lived through the Civil War during childhood, as Thompson had lived through the tragedy of World War Two. They were both born in the 1920s. They both grew up within the institutions of Franco’s dictatorship, were briefly attracted to the Falangist Movement, and then firmly opposed Franco’s regime through the student resistance movements.¹⁵Manuel Sacristán Luzón was part of the leftist wing of the Barcelona Phalange during his academic career in Philosophy and Law in the 1940s. He also joined the Spanish University Syndicate (SEU) only to be expelled from it for having approached clandestine anarchist groups. After this event, he studied Mathematical Logic in Münster, where he came into contact with the exiles of the PCE, before distancing himself following the events of May 1968. Jesús Ibañez Alonso also joined the youth of the Phalange and studied Political Science in Madrid and became part of the SEU, sympathising with the student protests of 1956. In the late 1960s, he participated in the foundation of the Critical School of Social Sciences (CEISA). After being cut off from the regime’s university structures in the 1960s and suffering the regime’s cultural repression, they were then reintegrated-albeit with difficulty-into the Spanish academia during the transition to democracy. Both were deeply critical of the hard-won terms of Spanish democratisation. They denounced the excessive importance attached to political parties at the expense of ordinary people, as well as those same parties’ lack of interest in building a participatory democracy. They strongly believed, on the contrary, in the civic function of their academic studies. During the Transition, they were both introduced to the incipient environmental activism movement in Spain, and to the post-materialist reasons for the new social mobilisations, along with the labour movement and the class struggle. At the beginning of 1977, Sacristán joined the activities of the Anti-Nuclear Committee of Catalonia, and it was precisely by acquiring a critical awareness of civil nuclear power and the significance of the nuclear question for the notion of economic growth and late-capitalist industrialism that he became attuned to the European debate on peace. As Thompson argues, however, this generation was joined, as occurred during street protests, by a new generation of students and young researchers, who had made extensive study trips to Western Europe or the United States during the 1970s. For these young people, the anti-Francoist academics were a reference point. They were part of a process that Nicholas and Loreto Perry defined in their dossier for the CND as the “slow intellectualisation” of the Spanish academia.¹⁶LSE, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, END 20/10, Spain, f. 142, “An initial assessment of the Spanish Anti-War movement seen from Catalonia,” by Nicholas and Loreto Perry, May 1982, p. 6.

As the philosopher of law Juan-Ramón Capella, a student of Sacristán, testifies:

As Thompson outlines, it was the “anti-NATO philosophers” who “had arranged a panel discussion in the Athenaeum, a club for the liberal intelligentsia and artistic circles in Madrid.”¹⁷LSE, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, END 20/10, Spain, f. 241, “Visit to Spain, Feb. 20-24,” by E.P. Thompson for CND, 1986, p. 1. The panel consisted of the philosopher Carlos París (1925-2014), who, like Sacristán and Ibañez, had been born in the 1920s and taken part in the clandestine anti-Francoist struggle during the 1960s, until the creation of the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1968, when he founded and directed the Department of Philosophy, which was, however, closed down for a year in 1973 by the Francoist minister Julio Rodríguez-Martínez. Furthermore, like Sacristán and Ibañez, París too had abandoned the Communist Party in 1982, despite being part of the party’s leadership. Educated in Falangism, París specialised in the philosophy of science. In his view, science had to be seen as part of human beings’ social activities and, as for Sacristán, it was an ethical duty to study the relationships between society, technology, and science. Other participants included the philosopher Javier Muguerza, a disciple of professor of Ethics José Luis López Aranguren, and part of a younger generation of emerging philosophers, Antoni Domènech, who was close to Sacristán and Antonio García-Santesmases, a member of the critical, anti-Atlanticist “Socialist Left” current of the PSOE (Arellano García, 2017Arellano García, J. M. (2017) “Los intelectuales en la Transición: Antonio García Santesmases.” Investigación y Letras, 1. Available at: https://revistas.uca.es/index.php/IyL/article/view/3532 [Accessed 28 July 2023].). As well as the stimulus supplied by these international contacts, the ability to lay the foundations for a critical culture on the Cold War must therefore be interpreted in the light of the affective and identitarian link that emerged between a generation of philosophers that had fought against the closure of Franco’s scholasticism and a younger generation that, born in the 1950s, had played an active part in the process of democratisation of Spanish universities.

On 9 March 1986, when the final act of the “no” to NATO campaign took place, the web of international relations woven by the anti-NATO movement was now clear to see. Petra Kelly, a Green Party Member of the German Federal Republic Parliament, Antonio Coutinho, captain of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution, Ken Coates, president of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, the Catholic priest Bruce Kent from the CND and two former NATO generals, the German Gerd Bastian and the Italian pro-Soviet Nino Pasti, closed the campaign.¹⁸EP “Más de 100.000 personas vivieron en un clima de euforia el último gran acto en Madrid a favor del ‘no’,” 10 March 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/03/10/espana/510793204_850215.html [accessed 28/July/2023]. Together with these contacts, we should also add Thompson’s mediation to ensure the Spanish movement became part of the International Peace Communication and Coordination Centre (IPCC) and the fact that, in 1985, the meeting of the END’s Liaison Committee was held in Madrid and was also attended by the Dutchman Mient Jan Faber, secretary of the IKV movement (Inter-Church Peace Council), an important European networking hub. As Faber himself explained: “The decision to hold the meeting in Spain highlights the interest the announcement of the referendum on NATO has aroused in Europe since the possibility for citizens to have their say on matters of peace and security represents an important democratic development.”¹⁹EP “Jan Faber: ‘En Holanda, la clase media es pacifista’,” 13 February 1985. https://elpais.com/diario/1985/02/13/internacional/477097219_850215.html [accessed 28/July/2023].

According to Rafael Grasa i Hernández -then a young scientist connected to the Catalan branch of the Communist Party and subsequently to that Sacristán group, and a spokesman at the time for the CEOP- Petra Kelly and the German Green Party gained in intellectual relevance within sections of the Spanish movement since: “they refuse-like the END itself-to be loyal to either the East or the West; instead, they choose to be loyal to themselves, by opposing the blocs, including their own” (Grasa, 1984, p. 40Grasa, R. (1984) “Los movimientos pacifistas en la era nuclear. En pie de paz por la supervivencia.” Mientras Tanto, 18, pp. 21-48.). Petra Kelly had in fact become a major source of inspiration for various feminist Spanish academics who identified not only with the union between feminism, environmentalism, and pacificism, but above all with Kelly’s ideas on the need for social justice, non-violence, civil disobedience, and the aspiration for a “politics from the heart” (Kelly, 1984Kelly, P. (1984) Fighting for Hope. London: Chatto & Windus.). Kelly herself wrote a long letter in El País “from a German pacifist to Spanish citizens,” calling upon the country to leave NATO.²⁰EP “Carta de una pacifista alemana a los ciudadanos españoles 1-2,” 19-20 September 1984. https://elpais.com/diario/1984/09/19/espana/464392803_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. As Carmen Magallón Portolés, a physicist from the University of Zaragoza, recounts:

THE CLASH BETWEEN OFFICIAL AND UNOFFICIAL COLD WAR NARRATIVES IN THE MEDIA

The consolidation of democracy in Spain is often associated with a discourse that postulates crisis, silence, apathy, or even the end of the public role of academics and intellectuals in the 1980s in relation to the intense public anti-Francoist and pro-democracy compromise during the final phase of the dictatorship and the democratisation process. On the contrary, with the rapid expansion of the cultural goods market, the massification and democratisation of the university and media system, there was a rise in the number of symposia, publications, academic posts, and public offices related to science and culture (Jiménez Torres, 2023, pp. 160-161Jiménez Torres, D. (2023) La palabra ambigua: Los intelectuales en España (1889-2019). Madrid: Taurus.). As the sociologist Gisèle Sapiro (2009)Sapiro, G. (2009) “Modèles d’intervention politique des intellectuels. Le cas français.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 176-177, pp. 8-31. doi: https://doi.org/10.3917/arss.176.0008 argues, Spaniards experienced what also happened in France and the rest of Western Europe: from the 1980s, the number of episodes of collective mobilisation increased, with academics and intellectuals being active players. Between 1984 and 1986, in particular, the debate on Spain’s participation in NATO polarised the academia when it came to the meaning of the Cold War and the related question of how to define peace.

As we have seen, this debate was both influenced by the international communications by Spanish academics and scientists and the grassroots dissemination of information among neighborhood associations. At the same time, however, the global debate on the Cold War was repurposed from a domestic perspective. While Spanish academics claimed to be preoccupied with the future of humanity, their way of thinking continued to be strongly immersed in the political system and the ongoing transformation of the cultural traditions of the socialist and communist left in the aftermath of an entangled Transition process that had dismissed any vague hopes of a revolutionary break with the previous regime (Andrade Blanco, 2015Andrade Blanco, J. (2012) El PCE y el PSOE en (la) Transición. La evolución ideológica de la izquierda durante el proceso de cambio político. México: Siglo XXI.). Pro- and anti-NATO academics therefore both adopted a narrative in which the concern about the Spanish nation remained central, even if they did relate their domestic concerns to international issues (Nehring, 2005, p. 560Nehring, H. (2005) “National Internationalists: British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, the Politics of Transnational Communications and the Social History of the Cold War, 1957-1964.” Contemporary European History, 14 (4), pp. 559-582. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777305002766). Furthermore, similarly to other Western countries, the debate on NATO and the link with the two superpowers took place at a time of transition for academics and intellectuals, from the traditional system in which journals served as a platform for their ideas, to the daily press and democratic mass media as the preferred tool for public involvement (Picó and Pecourt, 2013, pp. 299-306Picó, J. and Pecourt, J. (2013) Los intelectuales nunca mueren. Una aproximación sociohistórica (1900-2000). Barcelona: RBA.).

As the sociologist Consuelo del Val Cid (1996, pp. 152-153)Del Val Cid, C. (1996) Opinión pública y opinión publicada: los españoles y el referéndum de la OTAN. Madrid: CIS. explains, the social-democratic newspaper El País, which had become the main representative of the democratisation of the Spanish press in the 1980s, was one of the few newspapers to consider “peripheral actors” when it came to the question of the Cold War. As the sociologist argues, moreover, after the PSOE came to government in 1982 with an absolute majority and the party elites’ now certain position in favour of the Atlantic Alliance (Kennedy 2013, pp. 89-142Kennedy, P. (2013) The Spanish Socialist Party and the modernization of Spain. Manchester: Manchester University Press.), the communication process became more complex, intertwining different visions of the role of domestic politics in the consolidation of democracy with the reflection on the meaning of Spain’s foreign policy projection (Del Val Cid 2023, pp. 556-557Del Val Cid, C. (2023) “Del ‘OTAN no’ al ‘No a la guerra’ de Iraq. Las mil aristas de la opinión pública.” In: F. J. Leira Castiñeira, coord., El pacifismo en España desde 1808 hasta el “No a la Guerra” de Iraq. Madrid: Akal, pp. 553-576.). This debate can be summed through three main narrative areas: a pro-NATO discourse based on a Europeanist perspective; a variegated and radical anti-NATO discourse that echoed the European discourse opposing the Cold War espoused by part of the END, but also, ambiguously, by the pro-Soviet groups of the World Peace Council²¹There have not yet been complete studies on the relationship between Spain and groups linked to the pro-Soviet World Peace Council. It is also difficult to disambiguate to what extent the USSR supported the anti-NATO groups, which in any case mostly declared themselves to be independent of both blocs. There are some possible avenues of research in the Spanish section of the Mitrokhin Archive of the KGB in Western Europe (Andrew and Mitrokhin, 1999) and the U.S. National Archive (NARA), particularly in the records of the CIA on peace movements. It is also interesting to consider Operation MARS which by 1986 involved collaboration between the Bulgarian State Security, the Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi regarding Spain’s NATO membership (Selvage, 2021).; and an anti-government, anti-NATO discourse connected with the traditionalist and anti-communist right, as well as to the extreme right and nationalists.

In particular, in relation to the first two types of discourse, the number of manifestos by academics increased. They were published in El País itself, merging domestic politics, social activism, and scientific reflections. In the wake of the Krefeld Appeal (November 1980), which was drafted by several German intellectuals and politicians opposed to the decision by Helmut Schmidt’s Social Democrat government to support the deployment of Euro-missiles in Europe and West Germany, numerous appeals against the Atlantic Alliance were made by Spain’s cultural sphere too. In many cases these were also in favour of the military blockade, however. While much of the Spanish democratic academics, in anticipation of the general elections in 1982, had unitedly supported the progressive proposal of Felipe González’s PSOE in the manifesto Por el cambio (For Change) (Quaggio, 2014, pp. 272-273Quaggio, G. (2014) La cultura en Transición. Reconciliación y política cultural en España, 1976-1986, Madrid: Alianza.), a few months later this reformist intellectual unity had already broken down. This gave rise to antagonistic alliances in relation to the reform of Spain’s international position, the attitude to bipolar conflict, and the meaning of mobilisation for peace within the country’s neoliberal and democratic economic transformations.

The following table displays the profile of only some of the Spanish academics who participated in the debate for or against NATO, adding their signatures to the manifestos alongside numerous writers, singers, and artists:²²The list is not exhaustive and has been taken from the manifestos published in El País: against joining NATO on 15 February 1981; on 19 February 1991 and 3 March 1986 (in Catalonia); and in favour of joining on 18 February 1986. A list of individuals from Spain’s cultural sphere (also artists and professionals of various kinds) who took part in the debate can be found in: Aguirre and Carbajosa, 1993, pp. 102-103; Muñoz Soro, 2016a.

It is nonetheless important to underscore that some signatures were contested by certain academics, who, for example the writer Julio Caro Baroja (in the “yes” camp) or the film director Luis García Berlanga (in the “no” camp), were displeased to see their names included in the various manifestos without their consent. The anti-NATO narrative brought together a large group of academics who had had similar experiences of Franco’s cultural repression in their various disciplines (in particular sociology, philosophy, and anti-fascist psychiatry). It also included, however, a number of young researchers in their thirties in direct contact with the European debate on the détente. At the local level, most of these academics had established more or less contentious links with the communist, Catholic, or post-Marxist left, the new social movements that emerged in Spain in the 1970s, or more generally served as spokespersons for the values underpinning a participatory idea of democracy that extended beyond political parties.

Spanish academics associated the desire to leave NATO with four key themes: the relationship between ethics and the Cold War; the interpretation of democracy in Spain and the memory of the Civil War and the dictatorship; the reflection on militarisation/violence and social injustices; and, lastly, an alternative interpretation of the concepts of “modernity” and “progress.” In fact, in 1981 one of the first manifestos by anti-NATO intellectuals highlighted the supposed contradiction “of celebrating the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in our country, the main objectives of which are détente and disarmament, and the theme of the incorporation of Spain into the Atlantic military bloc.”²³EP “Políticos e intelectuales piden un referéndum sobre la integración en la OTAN,” 15 February 1981. https://elpais.com/diario/1981/02/15/espana/351039613_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. For much of the world of culture, that opposed membership of the Atlantic Alliance, leaving NATO represented a moral opportunity for Spain to take a first step towards the end of the bipolar conflict, which Grasa defined as a system that “leaves very narrow margins for member countries’ peoples to choose their own forms of life and government, distorting or hindering the true exercise of democracy”²⁴EP “El referéndum, el Gobierno, la derecha y tú,” 14 January 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/01/14/espana/506041206_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023].. What is important to consider is that much of the anti-NATO discourse in El País compared the two blocs in terms of their restriction of freedom and also tended to place a greater emphasis on the democratic limits of the Western bloc.

The philosopher Savater, although highly critical of pro-Soviet groups, explained that, in his search for an ethics of desire as opposed to an ethics of duty: “NATO responds to a schema of the world and of U.S. hegemony that are no longer acceptable; it belongs to a polarised, belligerent conception of European security that is now [...] assuming a suicidal profile [...] rejecting NATO is not an end in itself, but rather the beginning of the search [...] for a new anti-war diplomacy.”²⁵EP “La cuestión de la OTAN,” 28 June 1984. https://elpais.com/diario/1984/06/28/opinion/457221610_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. He also believed that Spain’s exit from the Western bloc would indirectly favour an easing of tensions in the Eastern bloc. Savater added that: “precisely because of the current political weight of militarism in the Soviet regime, sheer armed pressure and the paranoid incitement of war tensions can only serve to aggravate the evil they purport to combat.”²⁶Idem.

For Manuel Ballestero, a communist professor of philosophy based in Paris, remaining in NATO meant “accepting the colonisation of Europe,” and, above all, “defending Europe against a part of itself, preventing an unarmed, peaceful, cooperative union of its differences in every way possible [...] prevents the reconstruction of a multiple Europe.”²⁷EP “Sencillamente, OTAN, no,” 8 February 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/02/06/espana/508028419_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023].

Part of the academic world in Spain thus saw the exit from NATO as a way of forming a different idea of Europe and of Europeanism. On the one hand, for these intellectuals there was no need to superimpose entry into the EEC with joining NATO. On the other hand, being part of a united Europe did not carry with it an obligation to be part of NATO too. While Europe’s peaceful nature had been one of the key points of the European integration project in the aftermath of the devastation wreaked by the Second World War, anti-NATO academics, on the contrary, aimed to negotiate a different idea of Europe based on a union of peoples and which should also include the East of the continent (Nehring and Pharo, 2008Nehring, H. and Pharo, H. (2008) “Introduction: A Peaceful Europe? Negotiating Peace in the Twentieth Century.” Contemporary European History, 17 (3), pp. 277-299. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777308004499). For the philosopher and París’ pupil Javier Sábada, for example: “This current is convinced that a way of being European-not that of NATO-is at stake here, and believes it is a disgrace to opt for a bad idea of Europe.”²⁸EP “La OTAN y el pacifismo,” 10 February 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/02/10/opinion/508374006_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. Moreover, for many academics, as Grasa argued, “The hope for peace lies in people’s ability to choose”²⁹²⁹EP “El referéndum, el Gobierno, la derecha y tú,” 14 January 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/01/14/espana/506041206_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]., and for the historian Antonio Elorza, expelled from the Communist Party of the Basque Country in 1981, entry into NATO would have turned Spain “into yet one more pawn in the confrontation between the blocs,” resulting in a loss of sovereignty and independence in the context of the Cold War dynamics.³⁰EP “OTAN ‘no’, ¿voto de castigo?,” 22 February 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/02/22/espana/509410810_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. Entry into and remaining in NATO were interpreted in terms of a “major moral blackmail” and the direct result of the fact that “military tension closes minds.”³¹EP “Sencillamente, OTAN, no,” 8 February 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/02/06/espana/508028419_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. For the intellectuals opposed to the Atlantic Alliance, leaving NATO would, on the contrary, have resulted in “the primacy of ethics,” positioning Spain as the model of a new concept of diplomacy and international relations.

Under the pretext of the NATO referendum, Spanish intellectuals were beginning to define a different idea of “civilization,” one no longer based on personal security and material well-being but rather on a state of general social and psychic harmony beyond the failure of revolutionary socialism and neoliberal capitalism. For certain academics, joining NATO therefore did not represent “modernity” but rather “a downgrade in the PSOE’s foreign policy.”³²Idem. Sábada questioned: “Does NATO not perhaps diminish any plan for progress?.”³³EP “La OTAN y el pacifismo,” 10 February 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/02/10/opinion/508374006_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. Joining NATO was therefore associated with the fierce criticism of militarism by some of Spanish society and with the memory of the trauma of the Civil War and the violence of Franco’s dictatorship. As the anti-Francoist and Andalucist psychiatrist José Aumente explained: “In view of the experiences of Portugal, Greece, and Turkey, with dictatorial regimes and no moral scruples on NATO’s part, the latter does not guarantee us political democracy per se.”³⁴EP “¿Qué se decide en el referéndum?,” 3 February 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/02/03/espana/507769211_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. During this period, numerous articles by researchers and specialists, drawing upon empirical data, also stressed the rapid growth of the war industry in democratic Spain. For instance, Vicenç Fisas, who holds a PhD in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford, dedicated numerous articles in El País to the scientific examination of the significant growth of the Spanish defence budget, the nuclearisation of European territory, and the irrationality of the nuclear argument. He went so far as to state that: “If we do not accept the possibility of a nuclear war, we cannot support the nuclear strategy from either an intellectual or a political perspective. Ultimately, we need to advocate for more imaginative defence formulas.”³⁵EP “¿Quién teme al pacifismo?,” 1 July 1983. https://elpais.com/diario/1983/07/01/opinion/425858412_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023].

In short, for many Spanish intellectuals, not remaining in NATO was not so much an opportunity to avoid a third nuclear war as a chance to forge an alternative model of society and defence. This aspiration highlighted the complex transition underway in the Spanish left from Marxist and revolutionary anti-Franco ideals to new transformation projects beyond social classes and socialist collectivism. According to Aumente: “Faced with the Atlanticist global alternative, we must offer a global alternative, active neutralism, creative autonomy, which is a project for an economic and social alternative. It is a question of choosing a different path out of the crisis, and opting for a different model of development”.³⁶EP “Del ‘atlantismo-OTAN’ a un ‘neutralismo activo’,” 5 August 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1985/08/05/espana/492040811_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. Consequently, rather than interpreting the debate on NATO as the “end of utopia” or “the primacy of political parties,” it would be more correct to situate the anti-NATO academic debate within this global process involving the intellectual transformation of the interests of the once revolutionary and anti-Francoist left, which was at the time developing a “new utopia” of post-materialist and post-modern social change (Tompkins 2021Tompkins, A. S. (2021) “Generating post-modernity: nuclear energy opponents and the future in the 1970s.” European Review of History, 28 (4), pp. 507-530. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2021.1881047). Within this alternative model of development, the rejection of NATO also included assessing the position of women in the public space in line with the contemporary European debate on the close relationship between antinuclearism and feminist mobilisation (Branciforte, 2022Branciforte, L. (2022) “The women’s peace camp at Comiso, 1983: transnational feminism and the anti-nuclear movement.” Women’s History Review, 31 (2), pp. 316-343. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2021.1984026). For instance, in a letter to El País from several female professors and intellectuals on whether or not it was in women’s interests to remain in NATO, Spain’s continued membership of the Atlantic Alliance was interpreted thus: “It means consolidating a policy of social militarisation in our country, and consequently reaffirming military values such as hierarchisation, obedience, and conformism, which are, objectively, contrary to the struggle for women’s emancipation.”³⁷EP “Mujeres y OTAN,” 6 February 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/02/06/opinion/508028404_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. EP “Las mujeres y la OTAN,” 10 March 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/03/10/espana/510793219_850215.html [accessed 23/October/2023]. Despite being the gender issue at the very heart of the position against the bloc policy, fewer female than male intellectuals signed manifestos against NATO on the pages of El País, among them the anti-Francoist feminist Lidia Falcón or the writer and journalist Rosa Montero against the Socialist Director of the Spanish Women’s Institute Carlota Bustelo in favour of NATO’s membership.

Not only were Spanish anti-NATO intellectuals part of an international debate but, in a mirror image, academics in favour of remaining in NATO also re-worked the contemporary debate on the persistence of the Soviet threat from a domestic perspective. If we analyse the pro-NATO discourse, we can see that it reiterated many aspects of thought of the Hungarian philosophers Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér (1982)Heller, A. and Fehér, F. (1982) “The Antinomies of Peace.” Telos, 21, pp. 5-16., the reflections by the French sociologist Edgar Morin (1983)Morin, E. (1983) “El pacifismo europeo: una toma de conciencia inconsciente.” Vardar, 18, noviembre. on the supposed unconsciousness of the European peace movement, and Octavio Paz’s reflections on Soviet totalitarianism.³⁸EP “Pacifismo y nihilism,” 11 August 1983. https://elpais.com/diario/1983/08/11/opinion/429400809_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. Above all, it adapted the reflections of the French intellectual André Glucksmann on the polemical comparison between Nazism and communism and his fierce critique of Marxist thought. For pro-NATO Spanish intellectuals, the peace movement and the reflection on conflict reduction was a phenomenon worthy of respect. At the same time, however, it raised several dilemmas. Notably, Ludolfo Paramio, then a young professor of sociology at the Autonomous University of Madrid, a pupil of Muguerza, and Fernando Claudín, a former leader of the PCE expelled from the party in 1965, both supporters of the PSOE’s pro-Atlanticist turn, stated that: “As a starting point, it is important to recall that the Soviet threat is not simply an invention of the Pentagon or the CIA, or still less so of President Reagan [...]. The only military interventions in Europe since the Second World War have involved the Soviet Union, more or less directly.”³⁹EP “OTAN: Razones para no salir/1,” 16 June 1984. https://elpais.com/diario/1984/06/16/espana/456184807_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023].

The argument that most differentiated the two discourses was the evaluation of Soviet power within the Cold War dynamics of the 1980s. While, for supporters of the peace movements, the USSR represented a declining regime in defence against the US, evaluating Gorbachev’s disarmament policies in positive terms,⁴⁰The researcher Francisco Peñas opened a debate on these issues in the anti-NATO Committee in Madrid. See: Communist Movement Archive Madrid, “Panfleto. Sobre prosovietismo, antisovietismo, y unidad en la lucha contra la guerra,” undated, not catalogued. for others, the keyword was still “liberty,” as it had been during the previous stages of the Cold War. For them, peace implied not so much the construction of a new social order as the defence of human rights and freedoms threatened in the Soviet bloc. They not only criticised the arms race, but also unconditional unilateral disarmament. Paramio and Claudín therefore took certain Soviet dissidents’ criticism of the idea of peace in the West and debates within the END literally. For instance, for Heller and Fehér, Western peace movements-which in their opinion were over-ideologised and unscientific-failed to understand the insurmountable problems of repression and censorship experienced by independent Eastern pacificism.⁴¹EP “La ‘ciencia de la paz’ y su lenguaje,” 30 October 1985. https://elpais.com/diario/1985/10/30/opinion/499474809_850215.html [accessed 29/July/2023]. Thompson’s position had in fact already been extensively debated by the Czechoslovak Charter 77 group during the 1984 END Convention in Perugia regarding the inconsistency of accepting the presence of groups from the Soviet World Peace Council at international END meetings, since independent peace groups were severely repressed in the Soviet bloc countries (Gordeeva, 2021Goordeva, I. (2021) “Solidarity in Search of Human Agency: ‘Détente from Below’ and Independent Peace Activists in the Soviet Union.” Labour History Review, 86 (3), pp. 339-368. doi: https://doi.org/10.3828/lhr.2021.15).⁴²A detailed description of the controversies opened up during the END Convention in Perugia in Tiempo de Paz n. 3 (Gomáriz 1987, pp. 101-102). In general, the END favoured the participation of both official and independent Eastern groups in its meetings.

The criticism of pro-NATO Spanish intellectuals appropriated the international debate opposing the END. Notably, Paramio and Claudín adapted the thinking of Lawrence Freedman (1980)Freedman, L. (1980) “A criticism of the European nuclear disarmament movement.” Armament and Disarmament Information Unit Report, 2 (4), pp. 1-4. and David Owen (1980)Owen, D. (1980) Negotiate and Survive. London: Campaign for Labour Victory.. For them, criticism of the END derived from the idea that the bloc system had brought peace and stability to Europe, and that the elimination of the blocs, on the contrary, would lead to an escalation of hostilities and greater disequilibrium. It was, therefore, necessary to work towards change and peace within the bloc system itself: “Our reasoning is that if one opts for voluntarism and the cause of peace, remaining in NATO presents prospects we cannot turn our noses up at.”⁴³EP “OTAN: Razones para no salir/1,” 16 June 1984. https://elpais.com/diario/1984/06/16/espana/456184807_850215.html [accessed 30/July/2023]. And, they added, “gambling on the progressive character of our external policy [...] may well also mean gambling on the kind of policy we wish to put into practice either within or outside of NATO.”⁴⁴EP “OTAN: Razones para permanecer/y 2,” 18 June 1984. https://elpais.com/diario/1984/06/18/espana/456357602_850215.html [accessed 30/July/2023]. Other pro-NATO Spanish intellectuals reiterated the ideas of Czechoslovakian dissident Václav Racek in an open letter to Thompson (Thompson and Coates, 1981, pp. 3-8Thompson, E. P. and Coates, K., eds. (1981) Human Rights and Disarmament. An Exchange of Letters between E.P. Thompson and Václav Racek. Nottingham: Spokesman.). For Racek, the vision of a denuclearised Europe was naive, while NATO’s nuclear weapons guaranteed freedom to the countries that joined the alliance. In his view, comparing the two blocs was grotesque. Unilateral Western disarmament, as Claudín also maintained, would inevitably feed into the imperialist desires of the Soviet bloc.⁴⁵EP “La cuestión soviética,” 12 February 1984. https://elpais.com/diario/1984/02/12/opinion/445388419_850215.html [accessed 30/July/2023].

For the anti-Francoist historian of socialist thought Santos Juliá, ethics not only arose in relation to the choice of neutrality or nuclear disarmament. Rather, the concept of ethics was itself a flexible idea. In this respect, he gave the example of the advance of Nazism in Europe, which was referenced heavily by various pro-NATO intellectuals at the time: “Neutrality is also a political option [...]. For the Belgians, neutrality was worth as much as pacifism was for the French: a lustre of Nazi domination, which would have been eternalised if an Atlantic power had not broken with its tradition of neutrality for the second time and gone to war against Germany.”⁴⁶EP “Ética y neutralidad,” 12 March 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/03/12/opinion/510966012_850215.html [accessed 30/July/2023]. Consequently, for Claudín and Paramio it was necessary for Spain “to assume that integration into Europe also means signing the treaty, and leaving behind the old progressive culture that identified Coca-Cola, NATO, John Ford films, and the Vietnam genocide.”⁴⁷EP “OTAN: Razones para permanecer/y 2,” 18 June 1984. https://elpais.com/diario/1984/06/18/espana/456357602_850215.html [accessed 30/July/2023]. As the Christian Democrat historian Javier Tusell explained: “Peace is not possible without détente. Deterrence hinges on the goodness of one’s own political organisation, within an enormous range of disparities from the left to the right. NATO is deterrence in freedom; as such, it is in itself an indispensable element of peace.”⁴⁸EP “España y la OTAN: bienvenido Fernando,” 5 July 1984. https://elpais.com/diario/1984/07/05/espana/457826415_850215.html [accessed 30/July/2023]. According to the Spanish exile Juan Marichal, a professor at Harvard, the NATO referendum placed the spirit of reconciliation of the Transition under severe strain. As such, citizens needed to show themselves to be responsible and politically mature, so as not to upset the equilibrium of what, on the contrary, was interpreted as a successful democratisation process: “[...] Spain’s position as part of the Atlantic Alliance is the logical extension of the principles of political rationality that guided the restoration of democratic institutions.”⁴⁹EP “Apelación a la concordia de España,” 3 March 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/03/03/espana/510188419_850215.html [accessed 30/July/2023].

Mirroring anti-NATO academics, who associated leaving NATO with the possibility of a different model of democratisation, another exiled intellectual, Francisco Ayala, instead noted that the NATO debate represented that much hoped-for “confrontation of Spaniards with reality, setting aside their desire to walk on clouds.” For Ayala, Spain’s exit from NATO would not have changed a thing about its national sovereignty, a concept that, in his view, “had moved, since the Second World War, into the category of mere superstition.”⁵⁰EP “Un cuarto a espadas,” 29 January 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/01/29/opinion/507337212_850215.html [accessed 30/July/2023]. In short, for pro-NATO academics, as a manifesto in favour of the Atlantic Alliance recalled: “leaving would imply very serious consequences for Spain’s freedom and security, as well as for the freedom and security of democratic Europe, of which we are part.”⁵¹EP “Medio centenar de intelectuales y artistas pide en un manifiesto el ‘sí’ a la Alianza,” 18 February 1986. https://elpais.com/diario/1986/02/18/espana/509065219_850215.html [accessed 30/July/2023]. According to this perspective, being part of Western Europe implied “freedom,” but also a “responsibility” to be part of NATO, given that Europe did not have its own defence system. For pro-NATO intellectuals, the categories of peace, freedom, and democracy therefore overlapped with and reflected Spain’s “moral obligation” to contribute to the defence of Western Europe to become “modern” and “mature” and leave behind the fratricidal past and the ideological overload of anti-Francoism.

SCIENTIFIC DIPLOMACY AND RESEARCH ON PEACE

The new social movements, such as pacificism, environmentalism, and feminism, which began to spread at the global level following the protests during the second half of the 1960s helped draw attention to the critique of the scientific discipline. As such, they also facilitated to popularise the condemnation of the negative applications of science in the arms race and of technologies resulting in increased environmental pollution, as well as spreading the idea that science was not as neutral and independent as was perhaps believed, but rather closely linked to the values of the society in which it was developed and to power dynamics (Debailly, 2015Debailly, R. (2015) La critique de la science depuis 1968. Paris: Hermann.). Some of the academics opposed to Spain remaining in NATO developed their critical thinking about the Cold War in this context, which involved a global reconsideration of the relationship between science, power, society, and economic growth, and a renewed consideration of its social applications.

In Spain, Francoism did not renounce science as an instrument of economic growth. However, criticisms of its wartime applications by scientific leaders and the intellectual world were reduced or generalised. For example, José María Albareda-a scientist, Opus Dei priest, and secretary general of the Superior Council of Scientific Research (CSIC)-stated in 1951 that: “The world sees that grain underpinning personal sustenance is lacking and that instead, the terrible energy of disintegrated atoms abounds” (1951 cited in Díaz-Fierros Viqueira, 2019, p. 5Díaz-Fierros Viqueira, F. (2019) “La crítica de la ciencia en España después del 68.” Arbor, 195 (794), a531. doi: https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2019.794n4005). Proposals that were critical of the relationship between science and the military and civil uses of the atom only spread in Spain after the Palomares nuclear accident, in particular through the anti-Francoist journal Triunfo, which featured several appeals about the responsibility of scientists (Díaz-Fierros Viqueira, 2019, pp. 5-6Díaz-Fierros Viqueira, F. (2019) “La crítica de la ciencia en España después del 68.” Arbor, 195 (794), a531. doi: https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2019.794n4005) as well as through magazines that were emblematic of the late-Francoist opposition, such as Cuadernos para el Diálogo, which often used the symbolic language of foreign policy to discuss the country’s internal problems, or counter-cultural magazines such as El Viejo Topo during the Transition. Even Unesco circles, which emerged in Spain in the 1960s, began to channel critical initiatives on the applications of science. It was only from the second half of the 1970s that a real change of mindset began to take hold, albeit at a minority level, or at least a greater interest in the ambiguous relationship between science and society. For example, in 1973 the mathematician Ernesto García Camarero wrote a long article on the social responsibility of scientists in the journal Triunfo, citing Einstein, Born, and Pauling and their positions against the war applications of the atom (García Camarero, 1973, pp. 10-11García Camarero, E. (1973) “La responsabilidad social del científico.” Triunfo, 566, pp. 10-11.).

Nevertheless, it was the debate on joining NATO that internationalised and complicated this criticism. In fact, in October 1981 and November 1982, just as the parliamentary debate on joining the Atlantic Alliance was about to open and Spain’s entry into NATO thus made official, two meetings of the World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW) were held in Madrid. The WFSW was an international non-governmental organisation set up in the aftermath of the Second World War by the anti-fascist and communist nuclear physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie. The WFSW strove to ensure that broad international forums of scientists with different political positions could take place, despite evidence of some affinity with communist peace rhetoric. The theoretical goal of such meetings was to create a scientific bridge to overcome Cold War divisions, since they were attended by both Soviet and Western scientists (Roberts, 2020Roberts, G. (2020) “Science, Peace and Internationalism: Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the World Federation of Scientific Workers and the Origins of the Pugwash Movement.” In: A. Kraft and C. Sachse, eds., Science, (Anti-)Communism and Diplomacy. Leiden: Brill, pp. 43-79.). For Joliot-Curie, the WFSW’s main objective was to promote science as a means of fostering peace and, above all, the international exchange of scientific knowledge.

The communist trade union Worker’s Commission of the CSIC (CC. OO.) came to represent the spirit of the WFSW in Spain.⁵²EP “Los trabajadores científicos por la paz y el desarme,” 22 October 1981. https://elpais.com/diario/1981/10/21/sociedad/372466802_850215.html and EP “Primera reunión en España de la Federación Mundial de Trabajadores Científicos,” 4 December 1982. https://elpais.com/diario/1982/12/04/sociedad/407804407_850215.html [accessed 30/July/2023]. The meeting was attended by several academics from the CSIC, such as José Manuel Orza, a pioneer of molecular spectroscopy in Spain, Ángel Pestaña, director of the CSIC’s Institute of Biomedical Research, the philologist Pedro Bádenas de la Peña, Mariano García Emilio Criado, an expert in materials science, as well as academics from UNED, such as German-trained philosopher Emilio Lledó and several researchers from the Nuclear Energy Board and the Autonomous University of Madrid, for instance the literary critic Francisco Ynduráin. During the first meeting, the Spanish academics drafted an appeal that was very similar to the manifestos by scientists that were being produced in other western countries, highlighting the “immensely important role that public awareness can play if it is scientifically informed about the effects of a nuclear war.”⁵³Archivo de la Transición, Spanish section of the WFSW, “Appeal,” 3 November 1981. However, the difference-compared to the position of many of the scientists of other Western European countries-was the appeal made to the Spanish rulers to “weigh up the opinion of scientists and consult the Spanish people directly before making a hasty decision on Spain’s entry into NATO, the effects of which could be irreversible in the current situation.”⁵⁴Idem. Unlike other Western communities, in fact, the Spanish scientists advocating for disarmament associated themselves with communist and socialist trade union associations, mostly supported the radical proposal of unilateral disarmament of their country from Atlantic defence, and connected the issue of disarmament with the economic criticality of Spain’s university system.

This is, in all likelihood, one of the possible explanations for why Spanish scientists did not actively participate in the Pugwash Meetings until the 1990s, another “transnational advocacy network” that since 1957 had been combining scientific exchanges with the promotion of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament and which over time became a “forum for second-track nuclear diplomacy” (Kraft et al., 2018, p. 4Kraft, A., Nehring, H. and Sachse, C. eds. (2018) “The Pugwash Conferences and the Global Cold War. Scientists, Transnational networks, and the complexity of nuclear histories.” Journal of Cold War studies, 20 (1), pp. 4-30. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_e_00799). Compared to the WFSW, the Pugwash Conferences presented themselves as politically neutral and independent, careful not to be associated with left-wing organisations or communist fellow-travellers, yet at the same time connected with high governmental and domestic defence institutions. According to the Pugwash documents, the Spanish participants during this period were sporadic, such as quantum mechanics professor Antonio Fernández Rañada. Notably, Rañada had completed his doctorate in Paris, collaborated with the Spanish Nuclear Energy Board (JEN) and, above all, had close international ties with the European CERN laboratory.⁵⁵A list of all the participants in the Pugwash Conferences from 1957 to 2007 can be found at: https://pugwashconferences.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/participants-and-meetings-1957-2007.pdf. In theory, in 1969 the economist José Luis Leal Maldonado, who worked for a time at the OCDE and was the UCD Minister for the Economy between 1979 and 1980, also participated in the conferences. However, there is no trace of him in the Pugwash record.

In Spain, the debate on NATO triggered a desire to update research on peace and conflict resolution, which had begun to establish in Western Europe, the United States and Japan since the end of the Second World War (Drago, 2012Drago, A. (2012) “Peace Studies and the Peace Movement.” Peace Research, 44-45 (2), pp. 163-191.). Indeed, until that point there had never been an effective public debate -as there had in other Western academic contexts- on the multidisciplinary meaning of peace, and its connection with the study of international relations. Nor had any reflections taken place on the scientific nature of this field of research or on the extent to which it was the result of moral concerns or ideologised by social activism and political militancy. As explained by Mariano Aguirre Ernst, who fled to Europe from the violent Argentinean dictatorship in 1974 and was coordinator of the Peace Research Centre in Madrid, and Pablo Carbajosa, a philosopher at the CSIC and former member of the anti-NATO Committee in Madrid, during the Euromissile crisis: “The low incidence of Spanish authors was notable and, at the same time, the search for connections with foreign experts was very determined” (Aguirre and Carbajosa, 1993, p. 103Aguirre, M. and Carbajosa, P. (1993) “Construyendo un espacio teórico: una aproximación bibliográfica a la investigación para la paz en España.” Revista Internacional de Filosofía Política, 2, pp. 99-122.). For Aguirre and Carbajosa, as well as for Thompson and Kaldor, Spanish attitudes to peace and disarmament centred on numerous foreign reference points. For example, the Norwegian sociologist and mathematician John Galtung, one of the founding fathers of academic research on peace, frequently visited Spain and introduced the idea of “positive” peace, that is, the idea of peace as something more than the mere absence of conflict. It was at this time that the studies by the Stockholm International Institute of Peace Research (SIPRI), a governmental body founded in Sweden in 1966 to analyse arms control, began to be translated. The significance of foreign intellectual influences can thus be seen in the basic bibliography on peace published in Spain in 1987 by the researcher Vicenç Fisas, which included no fewer than sixty-five foreign authors against just twenty-two Spanish ones (Aguirre and Carbajosa, 1993, p. 103Aguirre, M. and Carbajosa, P. (1993) “Construyendo un espacio teórico: una aproximación bibliográfica a la investigación para la paz en España.” Revista Internacional de Filosofía Política, 2, pp. 99-122.).

The anti-NATO movement lost the 1986 referendum. Nevertheless, thanks to the open debate and given the lack of studies on defence and security at the time and above all of any alternative thinking on these topics, journals were set up, such as Papeles para la Paz in 1985, which followed the model of English pamphlets, the MPDL’s Tiempos de Paz and the eco-feminist En Pie de Paz. Moreover, translations were produced not only of Thompson’s books on the Cold War, but also of Noam Chomsky, John Paul Lederach, and Dorothy Thompson (Gomáriz, 1987, pp. 138-140Gomáriz Moraga, E. (1987) “El movimiento por la paz en España.” Revista internacional de Sociología, 3, pp. 549-568.). The foundations were therefore laid for academic research on peace and disarmament in Spain too. For example, the International Centre for Documentation in Barcelona (CIDOB), founded in 1973 on a Catholic initiative and to cooperate with Third World countries, encouraging the democratisation of international relations, created a specific section on peace and conflict. In 1985, the Fundación Hogar del Empleado, of Catholic origins, set up the Peace Research Centre in Madrid (CIP). And a group of professors at the University of Granada, including María Luisa Espada, pushed for a permanent seminar on peace and, subsequently, a doctoral school.⁵⁶Other Spanish peace research centres that emerged at this stage: the Unesco Centre in Catalonia; the Association for Human Rights of Spain, the first association for the promotion of human rights in Spanish memory founded in 1976; the Basque Institute Gernica Gogoratuz (1987); Greenpeace Spain (1982); and the Foundation for Peace (1983). Through these centres, actors who had previously been unconnected -such as state administration, peace activism, and the Spanish military itself- began to discuss issues such as the limitation of the arms trade, the structure of the defence system, the potential conversion of the military industry into a civil industry, and the Mediterranean as an area of peace. New and unexpected spaces of democratic coexistence were therefore created.

A good example is the peace research seminar linked to the Zaragoza Pignatelli Centre (SIP). As Magallón Portolés (2009)Magallón Portolés, C. (2009) “El movimiento por la paz en Aragón en los años 80. Un contexto para el nacimiento del SIP.” In: Fundación SIP, ed., 1984-2009. Veinticinco años de trabajo por la paz. Zaragoza: SIP, pp. 17-41. explains, the peace movement in Aragona arose in response to the United Nations Assembly’s Resolution A/36/458 on the need to organise activities for détente and against the arms race. In Zaragoza, in November 1982 more than seventy Catholic, environmentalist, neighbourhood, professional and left-wing political associations organised the “Peace and Disarmament Week,” which became the basis for the birth of the Collective for Peace and Disarmament of Aragon. It is interesting to note that one of the objectives of the Collective was to introduce the issue of peace into schools. Consequently, the Collective developed a teaching unit called “Lesson for Peace” which was distributed to all local school centres, with a view to including the issue of world disarmament in educational programmes. In addition, the Collective supported the establishment of a peace documentation centre, given “the need for an up-to-date review of all the issues threatening peace, and the obligation [...] to inform public opinion: with a democratic, decidedly educational outlook” (Magallón Portolés, 2009, p. 37Magallón Portolés, C. (2009) “El movimiento por la paz en Aragón en los años 80. Un contexto para el nacimiento del SIP.” In: Fundación SIP, ed., 1984-2009. Veinticinco años de trabajo por la paz. Zaragoza: SIP, pp. 17-41.). In 1984, the Documentation Centre therefore began its journey with the support of the University of Zaragoza, professional associations, and even military academies. Following in the footsteps of the Zaragoza centre, there are now three university institutions dedicated to Peace Studies in Spain (Barcelona, Granada and Castellón).

CONCLUDING REMARKS

For Spain, in the first half of the 1980s, the social debate on joining and remaining in NATO was the tip of the iceberg of a “transnational moment of cultural change,” in which the experts played an important public role in disseminating new “nuclear cultures” across national borders and among ordinary people. The Cold War began to no longer be interpreted in rigidly dichotomous terms, as it had in the past. In other words, the intellectual justifications for favouring an exit from NATO were not connected exclusively with Marxist anti-Americanism and the anti-imperialism of the anti-Francoist opposition, nor were the reasons for remaining in NATO connected exclusively with Francoist anti-communism and, later, with the strategic pro-Atlanticism of the ruling PSOE. In both cases, the narratives became complex and multidisciplinary, and derived their raison d’être from the profound transformations underway concerning the idea of Europe, the interpretation of Europeanist values, and how people from the East were included in this idea.

This debate also gained in importance by progressively breaking down the “public ignorance” that the Francoist regime had generated, for economic and propaganda purposes, on the proliferation of weapons and militarism in the Cold War and, as such, by consolidating democracy and bringing the discussion on the Transition of foreign policy out of the control rooms of the government elites, for the very first time. If we shift our attention to the international cultural links/exchanges that inspired pro- and anti-NATO reflections, this article has shown that an association can be drawn between the debates by intellectuals that the newspaper El País made visible to a mass audience and similar official/alternative debates that were taking place in the rest of the world regarding issues such as the relationship between the Cold War and the transformations brought about by the neo-liberal economy, the idea of modernity, the role of military alliances in future societies, or the definition of human rights and contact with Soviet dissidents. In other words, Spanish academics tuned into a “global campus” that, albeit from different perspectives and with different strategic motivations, sought to overcome the bipolarism of the Cold War. This desire to move forward, which was aimed both at disengaging and at giving intellectual substance to the proposals of the political parties of the Spanish left, is the key to understanding the numerous informal contacts and “civil diplomacy” that some Spanish academics established with the END campaign and peace research in the rest of Europe.

In their defence of the Atlantic bloc, pro-NATO intellectuals also tuned into the changes underway, adapting national concerns to the reflection on European defence, the changes to Euro-Atlantic relations, and above all the polemical question of the cultural comparison between communist and Nazi totalitarianism. However, both pro- and anti-NATO academics adapted these international exchanges to the political cultures of the local left, the different evaluations of a transition process to democracy based on the pact between Francoists and anti-Francoists at a time when, more than “the end of anti-Francoist memory,” a profound transformation of this culture was underway thanks to the arrival of new generations with different concerns on the public scene.

An examination of these international connections highlights the need for future research on the cultures surrounding the consolidation of democracy in Spain. As the Spanish debate on the Atlantic Alliance reveals, the anti-NATO intellectual activism of the 1980s can no longer be interpreted simply as the end or the defeat of the participatory and counter-cultural utopias of the Transition years and of the anti-Francoist struggle for democracy, or, as has been noted, of the definitive primacy of the political parties over Spanish civil society. In my opinion, the time has come to interpret this desire for political participation (both anti- and pro-NATO) and, more generally, the mobilisations of the 1980s not as a linear transition to the end of the Cold War or the tail-end of a civil demobilisation strategically imposed from above, but rather, in the case of Spain, as the effects of a tangled, rapid domestic adaptation to the global socio-cultural order that anticipated the end of the Cold War and the reflections on the meaning and implications of this adaptation to western modernity. This adaptation merits further study on the basis of greater empirical evidence and oral history data.

Finally, the period of the debate on peace and nuclear disarmament had a lasting effect on Spain. The impact of transnational academic networks can in fact be gauged by considering not only the direct influence such communities had on states’ policies but, above all, their ability to influence the climate of opinion in which such policies were shaped (Voorhees, 2002, p. 25Voorhees, J. (2002) Dialogue Sustained: The Multilevel Peace Process and the Dartmouth Conference. Washington DC: US Institute of Peace Press.). In Spain, as a result of the diplomacy of science connected to the disarmament debate, the analysis of security and defence issues was ultimately conducted from a cosmopolitan perspective. It also allowed for the addition of Spain’s case in international scientific forums on nuclear proliferation, led to the introduction of university courses on peace and, more generally, contributed to the study of international relations beyond the rigid realist approach adopted in the past, with the inclusion of new actors, including women and ordinary citizens.