Finale

The Nine failed to establish an industrial free-trade area with Spain and thus to gain access to the Spanish market, the largest west European industrial market outside their direct influence. The decision of the Council of Ministers of the European Communities, in October 1975, to suspend FTA negotiations with Spain, without denouncing the 1970 Agreement, meant the ultimate success of the Spanish government’s politico-economic strategy, the last episode of the European rescue of the Franco regime. The EC Council decision might have been inevitable in terms of public opinion and democratic morality, but it meant to permit Madrid to retain full control over the country’s import policy while fully exploiting the export prospects offered by the 1970 Agreement. In the end, the decision was detrimental for the overall interests of all the parties involved, whether the Spanish population or Western Europe. The final section of this book invites economic historians to estimate the costs of the Spanish EEC policy concerning the inefficient allocation of resources, weak technological transfer, lesser accompanying investment, and limitations to total-factor-productivity increases. Political historians, in turn, should explore what specific interests explain, in each case, why, if official Spanish trade practices in export promotion and import restriction gave the Six every incentive to denounce the 1970 Agreement, apart from obvious political reasons, they did not do so. Finally, scholars dealing with Spanish EEC-membership negotiations should determine the extent at which the Community experience over the 1970 Agreement explains Community attitudes towards some Spanish demands after 1979.

“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness

In volume 1 ofDemocracy in America, Tocqueville argues that the energy unleashed by democracy is one of democracy's greatest benefits. In volume 2, his portrait of democracy turns darker, and he recasts the dynamism of American society as an expression of an underlying restlessness. In this paper, I argue that restlessness (inquiétude) is a key element of Tocqueville's mature view of democratic man. Whereas previous scholarship on Tocqueville's view of restlessness either treats the theme instrumentally, by subordinating it to other themes, or seeks to illuminate Tocqueville's debt to other thinkers, this paper examines Tocqueville's treatment of restlessness as an important theme in its own right. Treating this theme in full requires examining his discussions of materialism, envy, democratic morality, and democratic peoples’ experiences of literature and art. Through this examination we see how, in Tocqueville's view, democracy, for all its merits, obstructs the path to human happiness.

Legislative Representation and Governability in Brazil

Democracy is, ideally, an equality fostering tool in face of different demands present in any given society and that currently is put in practice by a representative democratic model. Nevertheless, several modern thinkers are pointing to an unmeasured scale of interests within the representation spheres, in which the most powerful society’s sectors overcome the less influential social and economical groups, turning democratic representation into an uneven scheme. By having this in mind, this reflection is aimed to make an analysis of the Brazilian democratic representation model, specifically in relation to its majoritarian government composition, that, in this country, is part of a unique legislative model named as “Coalition Presidentialism”. At the composition idealized by the Brazilian National Constitution, the federal parliamentary ministers have the responsibility for the formulation of laws as well as monitoring the executive power in consonance with the will of the society’s sectors that has got them elected by the voting system. The conflict is established though, when the actual governmental practices leave aside the constitutional principle of a plural representation in consequence of economic and power interests that act independently from the diverse interests and needs of other groups belonging to the Brazilian society. It can be argued that the establishment of governmental practices better aligned to the concept of global justice, in the Brazilian case, can be achieved by a better quality democracy, through adequate governance mechanisms and plural representation practices that are capable of attending the distinct demands of diverse society layers. Thus, this article is aimed to present how the Brazilian democratic representation works, exploring its conflicts and deployments and mainly its divergences in relation to the democratic morality that presupposes the existence of gradated ways to the reaching of higher social and political equality levels, closer to the general global justice ideas.