Conclusion

Any book on Spain is tempted to challenge or concur with the famous defensive quip ‘¡Spain is different!’ made by a Francoist Minister during the dictatorship as he vainly struggled to justify the country’s lag with respect to accepted European norms of good governance. Subsequent writers played with the idea that Spaniards thankfully no longer had to be so defensive, Spain could now boast of having a ‘democracy without adjectives’ (to qualify or excuse it). The historian Juan Pablo Fusi suggested Spaniards could enjoy living in a merely normal country.