A Seemingly Unlikely Pair

At first glance, Brandt and González seemed like an unlikely pair, especially when it came to their age, nationality and political experience. Soon after the PSOE's 1974 conference in Suresnes, a small town in the western suburbs of Paris, González, the new PSOE first secretary, travelled to Portugal to attend a meeting of that country's Socialist Party (Partido Socialista; PS), where he met Brandt for the first time.Footnote ¹⁴ González made an immediate impression on Brandt. From the beginning, ‘I felt a liking for the young lawyer, Felipe González, who had taken over the leadership of the PSOE’, Brandt intimated in his memoirs.Footnote ¹⁵ He continued: ‘It has been fascinating to see Spain find its way into the modern world under his prudent and courageous leadership’.Footnote ¹⁶ Brandt had found just the man to lead the socialist project in Spain. Indeed, the meeting was a turning point for both men. González was in his early thirties when he met Brandt, who was sixty-one.

Importantly, González did not think and sound like the ‘Toulouse gerontocracy’, a term used by historian Richard Gillespie to refer to the PSOE leaders who lived in exile in southern France, and with whom Brandt had dealt since the 1930s.Footnote ¹⁷ Years later, Austrian social democrat Bruno Kreisky (who served as Austria's chancellor from 1970 to 1983) recalled that at the very first, ‘we listened to Felipe with respect, but not without a certain scepticism . . . [due to his age]. But the young Felipe struck us with his objectivity and insight in an impressive analysis of the situation in Spain. We were meeting with a representative of the new Spanish youth for the first time, and we all talked about it in the corridors – admiringly and a great deal’.Footnote ¹⁸ Brandt later wrote in his memoirs that González ‘was the only Spanish leader who ever spoke to me about the future and change’.

In her 1978 article, ‘Mentoring in Politics: The Case of Willy Brandt’, Barbara Kellerman explores the qualitative impact of Brandt's mentors, Julius Leber and Ernst Reuter. Leber had been a prominent politician in Germany's Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD) in the interwar period and the editor-in-chief of the social democratic newspaper Lübecker Volksboten, for which Brandt wrote as a student in the early 1930s. Reuter was the mayor of West Berlin between 1948 and 1953 after his return from exile in Turkey. Kellerman notes that ‘prophetically, Brandt met Reuter at the home of Leber's widow’, a further connection between Brandt and both his mentors.Footnote ¹⁹

‘From the first moment I felt that Reuter and I understood each other very well. When I was a young man I never felt that the difference of twenty years in our age alienated me from Julius Leber; that difference did not matter in my relationship with Ernst Reuter either’, wrote Brandt in his memoirs published in 1960.Footnote ²⁰ Almost thirty years later, in another book of memoirs, Brandt remembered:

Brandt's words consistently show that age did not stop him from establishing significant political relationships and that personal affection played an important role in them. While unaware of the Brandt–González relationship at the time of publication, Kellerman concluded that ‘having a mentor facilitates generative ability, the ability to become a mentor oneself. This last point can scarcely be overestimated’.Footnote ²² As the Brandt–González relationship later demonstrated, Kellerman's statement was prescient. The age gap between Brandt and González was ultimately an asset rather than a liability.

González also provided ‘new blood’ – or ‘a boost of young sap’, to use the literal translation of his statement in a 1982 interview – to the SI, an otherwise ageing organisation.Footnote ²³ Western Europe's best-known socialists, including Brandt, Kreisky, Olof Palme, Michael Foot, Pietro Nenni and François Mitterrand, flew to Madrid to show their support for the PSOE's grand public debut in Madrid after decades of proscription.Footnote ²⁴ In 1976, González was closest in age to Palme, who was nevertheless fifteen years his senior, followed by Mitterrand, Brandt, Foot and Kreisky, who were all about thirty years older than González, and finally Nenni, who was fifty years older. They all remembered the Spanish Civil War and had lived through the Second World War, whereas González was born halfway through the latter in officially neutral, yet Nazi-influenced, Francoist Spain.Footnote ²⁵ In short, though there was a clear age gap, González was a rare and welcome sight among the ageing PSOE leaders and a breath of fresh air within the SI.

Another key difference between Brandt and González was their nationality and their life abroad. Brandt ‘came from a North German Protestant background’,Footnote ²⁶ while González was born and raised in Seville, southern Spain – north vs. south, Lutheran vs. Catholic. However, both Brandt's and González's families had been involved in the trade union movement. Brandt's mother – a single mother – had worked as a salesgirl in a social-democratic co-operative store and been active in the SPD's workers’ associations; his maternal grandfather, who assumed the role of father, had been an SPD member. González's father had been a member of the General Union of Workers (Unión General de Trabajadores; UGT) before the Civil War.

Equally, both families were committed to Brandt's and González's education. Brandt's grandfather saw to it that Brandt did not attend a local primary school, which would have made it difficult for him to pursue higher education, and enrolled him in the St Lorenz Boys’ Middle School instead.Footnote ²⁷ His grandfather's ambition, wrote Brandt, ‘was to see me go further than himself and my mother Martha’.Footnote ²⁸ González's family sent him to San Antonio María Claret,Footnote ²⁹ a newly built Catholic (day and boarding) school for boys from a middle-class background and with aspirational parents like González's.

Despite the difference in scale and population, Lübeck and Seville were both port cities and historic centres of international trade. Lübeck was a key Hanseatic town while Seville was the Spanish departure point for the New World – perhaps a motivation or sign of Brandt's and González's future internationalism. ‘I had realised in my Lübeck days that it was far from adequate to consider political problems from a purely national standpoint . . . and was particularly anxious to enrich this picture with personal contacts’, wrote Brandt.Footnote ³⁰ Although he spent the first nineteen years of his life in his hometown, in April 1933 ‘the young shipbroker's apprentice pressed his possessions into a small attaché case and, with only a hundred [Reichsmarks] in his pocket, escaped Hitler's Reich as a stowaway on a fishing vessel’.Footnote ³¹ Like Brandt, González also spent the first twenty years of his life in his hometown and experienced his first extended stay away from home abroad.

Brandt spent approximately fifteen years in exile in Norway and later Sweden; he only moved to Berlin permanently in 1947. ‘My only choice was “external” emigration. I took that choice, and I have never regretted it, because it offered me not only the chance to learn but also to resist’, wrote Brandt.Footnote ³² González's experience abroad was also one related to learning and activism. After graduating in law from the University of Seville, González took up a Catholic trade union scholarship at the University of Louvain in Belgium, where he improved his French and studied economics during the 1965–6 academic year. There, he had to face the grim realities of Spanish migrants: ‘they are helpless, oppressed, exploited and, to top it all, hated as inferior beings, as a cursed race’, he wrote in a personal letter.Footnote ³³

Brandt and González went abroad before they had even lived in the capital of their respective countries; by the time they met in 1974, both had travelled widely. According to one academic commentator, ‘Among the Federal Republic's post-war chancellors, Brandt was the one most widely travelled in his youth’.Footnote ³⁴ Brandt later travelled extensively as foreign minister and chancellor, while González repeatedly visited France, Portugal and Belgium.Footnote ³⁵

The only country in which both Brandt and González had lived was Spain. Brandt was emotionally attached to Spain.Footnote ³⁶ Aged twenty-three, he travelled there to report on the Spanish Civil War as well as to improve relations between the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands; SAPD), a breakaway faction of the SPD which he had joined in 1931, and the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista; POUM), a Trotskyist group.Footnote ³⁷

The Spanish Civil War captured the imagination of the left everywhere, from Europe to India.Footnote ³⁸ As the prominent British historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, the Civil War ‘became and has remained something remembered by those who were young at the time like the heart-rending and indestructible memory of a first great and lost love’.Footnote ³⁹ Brandt was no exception, and his stay in Barcelona and on the Aragon front in 1937 was ‘full of the most contradictory impressions and of important experiences which later largely determined my political actions and thinking’.Footnote ⁴⁰ On his return to Oslo, he felt particular satisfaction ‘to work on the Spanish Aid programme, which provided food and medical supplies to the bitter end’.Footnote ⁴¹ Although Brandt did not officially visit the country for almost four decades, he did spend time on vacation in the Canary Islands from 1972 onwards, ‘and save for Norway and Sweden where he went into exile, Brandt felt most attached to Spain’.Footnote ⁴²

Until 1974, Brandt and González's experience in public service had been completely different. Brandt had held municipal office as mayor of West Berlin from 1957 to 1966, and he became chairman of the SPD in 1964, a post he retained until 1987. That is to say, Brandt had been the leader of the SPD for a decade when he met González, whereas González had been the leader of the PSOE for just a few weeks. Unlike Brandt, who served as foreign minister and vice-chancellor of West Germany from 1966 to 1969 and then as chancellor from 1969 to 1974, González had no experience in either municipal or national government. Brandt's track record as a highly experienced municipal, party, national and international politician and policy maker contrasted sharply with González's lack of experience in office. Yet it was precisely the contrast between Brandt and González, along with Brandt's resignation as chancellor just a few months before their meeting in Portugal, that partly motivated Brandt to become involved in González's political development. After unexpectedly resigning the chancellorship, Brandt searched for new political projects. In other words, González presented himself at the right time.

Despite his lack of experience in office, González, like Brandt in his youth, had been active in the labour movement in his hometown and had played an important role in promoting the PSOE in Spain.Footnote ⁴³ Though not in a formal capacity, González had also built international links with several socialist comrades abroad. By the time Brandt and González met, González had established a strong connection with several prominent French socialists, including international relations secretary of the French Socialist Party, Robert Pontillon, and Gaston Defferre, who served as mayor of Marseille and went on to become French prime minister under Mitterrand.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, González was not unfamiliar with international matters and had started to develop transnational collaborations with other European socialists.

In addition, González had a great deal of underground experience in politics, which Brandt would have identified with from his youth in Nazi Germany and Scandinavia, where he had been ‘a refugee twice over’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Brandt had engaged in underground politics when he was González's age and had built an international network with other exiles in the Kleine Internationale based in Stockholm. In this ‘modest international circle’, as he called it in a letter written in 1946, ‘many things now appear considerably more complicated than they did at the time, but we should nonetheless not feel ashamed of the work we did then’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Approximately three decades later, Brandt thought that González would benefit from a Grosse Internationale of sorts – the Socialist International. Brandt took office as president of the SI in 1976,Footnote ⁴⁷ and two years later González became its vice-president.Footnote ⁴⁸ He and Brandt worked closely together until Brandt's death.

To sum up, Brandt and González had little in common at first glance: old vs. young, northern vs. southern, experienced vs. inexperienced. They belonged to different generations, hailed from different national backgrounds and had radically different levels of experience in office when they met in 1974. Rather than divide them, these differences brought them closer together, allowing them to forge a sense of continuity in their shared project of advancing democracy, social democracy and internationalism.

Brandt and González had more in common than one might think at first glance, however. They shared an emotional attachment to Spain and experience in underground politics, and they had moved straight from the local to the international. They came from families linked to the labour movement that had invested in their education, they originated from countries that had experienced civil violence and authoritarianism and they had built an informal international network of their own. Their commonalities proved essential to building an emotional bond that sustained and nurtured their shared political beliefs.

Democracy

‘To have helped in causing the German name to be linked with the concept of peace and the prospect of European freedom is the true satisfaction of my life’, reads Brandt's last sentence of My Life in Politics, Brandt's final book of memoirs published in 1992.Footnote ⁴⁹ He expanded on this point a few paragraphs earlier in the chapter: ‘In my old age, I am glad of the measurable gain for human rights and civil liberties. First in the centre of Europe. Then in the South, written off by the faint-hearted only a decade and a half ago’.Footnote ⁵⁰ In contrast to the faint-hearted Brandt mentioned, González thought that Brandt ‘was exceptionally attentive and exceptionally committed to democratic development in the Iberian Peninsula’.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, in a lengthy 1978 report entitled Portuguese Socialism and Willy Brandt, Mário Soares, secretary-general of the Portuguese PS and earlier prime minister, wrote that ‘Brandt had the courage and the clearness to trust the PS’ in the verão caiente (hot summer) of 1975 when ‘few people in Europe . . . would have then bet on the victory of the PS in that unequal fight [against the Communist Party]’.Footnote ⁵²

Brandt's experiences in the Spanish Civil War, where he learnt to distrust the communists, as well as under the Nazi regime and in exile, made him particularly sensitive to later developments in Spain.Footnote ⁵³ As noted in a 2014 lecture delivered by historian Bernd Rother, Brandt dedicated forty pages of his 1982 autobiography to Spain. Rother also comments that Brandt drew two major lessons for his future life in politics from his time in Spain: first, the value of freedom and that its enemies came both from the right and the left; second, the need to confront sectarianism.Footnote ⁵⁴ After his defection to the SAPD and return from Spain, Brandt ‘shed all [his] inclinations towards party intrigue and factionalism’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Spain was a point of inflexion in his life. In addition, supporting Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy provided some atonement for Germany's past sins, which included Nazi Germany's involvement in the Spanish Civil War.Footnote ⁵⁶ To be sure, the image of Brandt dropping to his knees at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw in a gesture of humility for the crimes of the Nazis is the most poignant visual reminder of his attempts to shoulder Germany's burden. Therefore, the memory of both wars probably influenced Brandt's active interest in Spain's transition to democracy.Footnote ⁵⁷

In an introduction to the English edition of his memoirs of exile published in 1971, Brandt wrote,

Brandt used his vast prestige as the German and European left's moral leader to promote democracy all over the world, especially in Southern Europe and Latin America.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is therefore not surprising that González and Brandt first met in Portugal, months after the Carnation Revolution, which had led to the fall of the oldest dictatorship in Western Europe.Footnote ⁶⁰

Partly as a consequence of US policy towards Portugal, explored by historian Mario Del Pero in several articles and more recently by Daniela MeloFootnote ⁶¹ – according to Soares, Henry Kissinger foretold that, in the best case, ‘I would end up my days as another Karensky [sic] in exile teaching in some American University’Footnote ⁶² – West Germany began its own Südpolitik, or southern policy, toward Portugal and then Spain.Footnote ⁶³ In December 1976, at the PSOE's first conference in Spain since the Civil War, a large banner reading Socialismo es libertad (‘Socialism is freedom’) covered the main hall at the Hotel Meliá Castilla in Madrid.Footnote ⁶⁴ González proclaimed that the PSOE was ‘willing to negotiate how to get from dictatorship to democracy, but not the objective of democracy itself’ and that ‘[the situation] requires us to come to terms with the past, so we can overcome it, not cling onto it. [It] requires us to look to the future . . . in search of justice, not revenge’.Footnote ⁶⁵ It was then Brandt's turn to speak: ‘Compañeros, my fellow socialists, you can count on our unbroken solidarity in this difficult path to democracy and freedom’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Brandt was the keynote speaker at the conference. He gave his speech entirely in Spanish, as did Palme.Footnote ⁶⁷ Brandt had learnt some Spanish in school. Uwe-Karsten Heye, his speechwriter between 1973 and 1979, recalled that Brandt had delivered a speech in Spanish to thousands of people in Mexico City a year earlier.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the time, Brandt, Palme, Mitterrand and González all featured on the cover of a special edition of El Socialista, the PSOE's party newspaper, to demonstrate their support for democracy in Spain.Footnote ⁶⁹

In a booklet entitled ¿Qué es el socialismo? (What is socialism?) published in 1976 – part of an outreach series on political ideas launched soon after Franco's death – González cautioned that ‘the temptation, after a dictatorial regime as long-lasting as the Spanish one, to offer as an alternative a new dictatorship of the opposite sign is frequent and explicable in our society’.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, he thought that ‘the individual's right to think and express one's ideas freely, the collective right to join or create associations that defend one's interests in a trade union, social or political level, or to decide who will govern one's destiny . . . are closely and indissolubly linked, and only a socialist alternative, that is to say, a democratic alternative in all these directions, can achieve complete emancipation’.Footnote ⁷¹

In an interview given to YA newspaper in June 1977, González declared that ‘this dilemma [between reform and revolution] is absolutely out of date, that it is necessary to create reforms that are irreversible, that become radical transformations of society’.Footnote ⁷² On 6 December 1978, the day of the referendum on the new Spanish constitution, González responded to the Brazilian weekly magazine Veja, which had asked him whether change would be made possible by the socialist alternative, as follows: ‘I never said that the PSOE is a revolutionary alternative. It offers no revolutionary expectations’.Footnote ⁷³ He added: ‘I think that democracy – non-adjectivized democracy – is the only way to socialism. And that is because I see democracy as the socialisation of the State's wealth. Socialism is a deeper representation of the notion of democracy, not an alternative to it’. For González, therefore, democracy was not only the basic condition for socialism, but also a synonym for socialism.

González shared a special relationship, ‘una sensibilidad próxima’, with leaders in Latin American countries, with whom he spoke in Spanish.Footnote ⁷⁴ In an interview with the author, he stated that he ‘was closest to them’, engaging in discussions of new and innovative ideas.Footnote ⁷⁵ For instance, President Ricardo Lagos of Chile revealed the impact of González's conversations with him on how to get a country to shift from dictatorship to democracy. Lagos even used Spain-inspired analogies to explain the situation in Chile to his Christian Democrat opponent: ‘If you form a small coalition, you will be Adolfo Suárez and I will be Felipe González’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Rother writes that in 1976, ‘Veronika Isenberg, who worked for the SPD's International Secretariat, related that Felipe González's trips to Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and Chile had been a triumphal procession’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Indeed, according to Eusebio Mujal-León, González travelled to Latin America twelve times between 1975 and 1982,Footnote ⁷⁸ averaging almost two trips per year. González served as the SI's informal delegate to Latin America, and at Brandt's urging he was appointed president of the SI's International Committee for the Defence of the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1980.

Two years earlier, in his opening remarks at a conference on ‘Democratization Processes in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America’, held in Estoril in September 1978, Brandt insisted there were ‘already useful experiences in Latin Europe which will hopefully give grounds for hope for Latin America’.Footnote ⁷⁹ González shared Brandt's idea. In his first meeting, as president of Spain, with US Secretary of State George Shultz, González explained that his concern for Central America was ‘not only political, it is fraternal’ and admitted to worrying about the grave risk to peace faced by the region. ‘That is why I wish to contribute to a project for peace, progress, freedom and pluralism in the region as a whole’.Footnote ⁸⁰ A democratic Spain, González added, could be of great symbolic value to Latin America's peaceful democratisation. Years later, Shultz remembered that González had ‘surprised [him] by his candour and the position he took’.Footnote ⁸¹

In a letter dated June 1981, Brandt told González that ‘I believe that our friends in Nicaragua are taking advantage of the SI for their own purposes and I believe that, for its part, the International cannot unconditionally endorse everything they do’. He added that ‘surely, you are the only one who can objectively assess developments in Nicaragua’.Footnote ⁸² The president of the SI, a former West German chancellor and Nobel Peace Laureate, asked for advice from the young Spanish socialist with no government experience but enough political acumen and trustworthy judgement. A former director of the Institute for European-Latin American Relations writes that González's ‘personal role in supporting the democratization process in some Latin American countries can hardly be overestimated’.Footnote ⁸³ Some years later, when González was already in government, the Nicaraguan vice-president, Sergio Ramírez, declared that González ‘has demonstrated that he has the ability and decision to play an important role in the future of Central America’ and underlined his ‘prestige and moral authority’ in the region.Footnote ⁸⁴

‘We will always remember you standing up against totalitarianism and oppressors, kneeling before the victims you never provoked’, said González in his eulogy of Brandt at the Reichstag.Footnote ⁸⁵ ‘And I have seen tears of emotion on your face when a dictatorship has been defeated, in Portugal or Spain, in Chile or Argentina; in any corner of the world’. In parallel to Spain's transition to democracy and after it had been completed, Brandt and González were keen to promote democracy in Latin America. From Germany in Central Europe to Spain and Portugal in Western Europe and over to the other side of the Atlantic, Brandt and González supported local attempts to democratise and end totalitarianism and authoritarianism. They worked together to achieve their shared goal.

Social Democracy

‘Willy Brandt, our comrade and president, has asked me to welcome you at the opening of the congress of the Socialist International, since he was unable to be here himself’, González announced at the start of the conference held at the Reichstag in Berlin on 15–17 September 1992, just three weeks before Brandt's death and less than three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.Footnote ⁸⁶ The subject of the conference was ‘Social Democracy in a Changing World’. As González explained, the newly reunified Berlin symbolised the extent of these changes. He also realised ‘the significance Berlin had had in the political career of Willy Brandt and what international social democracy owes to the work of our president’.Footnote ⁸⁷ In his written message to the Berlin conference, Brandt acknowledged, ‘I was very moved when Felipe González suggested Berlin’ and asked González to open it in his name – a powerful gesture of continuity after Brandt had stepped down as SI president.Footnote ⁸⁸

In the second half of the 1970s, González, like Brandt, wanted to see the PSOE move to a more moderate form of socialism.Footnote ⁸⁹ The term ‘Marxism’ had not appeared in the PSOE party statutes for almost a century until the first conference held in Madrid after Franco's death included the term in the party's self-definition. In a meeting in October 1977 with King Juan Carlos, Queen Sofía and President Adolfo Suárez, Brandt noted that González was inclined to the moderate left, whereas large sections of his party supported ‘radical Marxist’ postulates.Footnote ⁹⁰ In May 1978, González announced at the Barcelona Press Association that he would propose the removal of the term ‘Marxism’ from the party's manifesto at the PSOE conference to be held in 1979. Its inclusion, in his view, ‘was a mistake’. He added that ‘I do not mind recognising that I am a social democrat’.Footnote ⁹¹

González modelled his proposal on the SPD's November 1959 Godesberg programme,Footnote ⁹² which marked a radical shift away from revolutionary socialism. As proven by his handwritten preparatory notes and the recording of his speech at the 1959 convention, Brandt supported the Godesberg programme. It offered an up-to-date party statement, represented a combative democratic freedom movement, clarified party positions ‘on the state and in the state’, and made it harder for the SPD's opponents to distort its message.Footnote ⁹³ The SPD transitioned from a workers’ party to a people's party, dropped the Marxist doctrine, committed itself to a social market economy ‘and adopted a policy of integration with the West and its institutions, such as NATO’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Twenty years later, the PSOE still quarrelled over Marxism. The motion to drop the term was rejected by 65 per cent of the PSOE delegates.Footnote ⁹⁵ In vain, González exhorted his PSOE colleagues to follow the example of other European socialist parties (many of which had already abandoned Marxist dogmatism) rather than cling self-righteously to an outdated ideology:

As González later put it, the party's rejection derived from ‘the ideological build-up that comes from living under a dictatorship and [carrying out] clandestine activities’ against the Franco regime.Footnote ⁹⁷ In his interview with the Brazilian weekly magazine Veja in December 1978, González explained:

In August 1976, González already referred to Marxism as ‘neither a dogma nor a religion’ but as a critical method of analysis.Footnote ⁹⁹ Two years earlier, and six months after the Carnation Revolution, in a press conference with Soares upon Brandt's arrival at the Lisbon airport, Brandt explained that there was no Marxist dogma in the SPD and that it used Marxist critical analysis of the economy (not Marxist philosophy, as his translator had first declared, only to be corrected immediately by Brandt, much to the interpreter's embarrassment).Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Among those who organised the rejection of the party's move towards social democracy was Enrique Tierno Galván, a law professor whose party, the People's Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Popular; PSP), had joined the PSOE the previous year after its poor results in the 1977 election. González's decision to step down as leader enabled Tierno to test the waters. Tierno approached Dieter Koniecki, the Ebert Foundation delegate to Spain, and asked him whether he would support Tierno's plans to be the party's new leader and stick with Marxism. Koniecki warned Tierno that the SPD would not endorse his nomination.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In June 1979, a month after the PSOE conference, Tierno declared that ‘at the moment, Felipe González appears as an irreplaceable man’, which he blamed on the party's unwillingness to foster other political figures. He declared himself a Marxist, affirmed that ‘socialism is indeed Marxism’ and observed that all ‘the European socialist parties’ had made severe mistakes because they aimed to be alternative governments rather than an alternative to the system.Footnote ¹⁰² González had the full support of the Ebert Foundation, the SPD and Brandt (the Ebert Foundation even prepared several dossiers with newspaper clippings around the debate on Marxism within the PSOE).Footnote ¹⁰³

González told PSOE members at the conference that he would refuse to stay on as leader if the party did not give up Marxism: ‘Though there are political reasons for me to stay on as general secretary, my ideas and my ethics do not allow me to do so.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He did not run for re-election, but four months later, in September, PSOE members voted González back in at the party's first extraordinary conference.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Possibly to support González in his struggle, Chancellor Kreisky made a statement from his summer home in Mallorca in July that ‘Marxism is no longer useful’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ González convinced the PSOE to drop the term Marxism from the party programme in a second attempt in 1979. ‘That was the move to social democracy. That was our Bad Godesberg’, he said to the author.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In Spain, González had instigated and led the PSOE's embrace of social democracy at great personal and political risk.

Social democracy was a key aspect of the special bond between Brandt and González. It was not only a question of what social democracy stood for that shaped their friendship, but also what social democracy was not. Brandt did not buy into the narrative of communism, and neither did González. Unlike Mitterrand, who struck a deal with the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français; PCF) in 1972, and Tierno, who joined the communist-led Democratic Junta (Junta Democrática) in 1974, González wanted to keep the PSOE independent from the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España; PCE).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In contrast, Tierno's decision to join the Junta did not go down well with Brandt's SPD. In a telegram to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the West German ambassador to Spain called Tierno the PCE's ‘Trojan horse’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

A year later, in July 1975, the PSOE, along with a few regional parties and some left-wing Christian Democrats, agreed to set up a separate coalition, the Democratic Convergence Platform (Plataforma de Convergencia Democrática). González wanted nothing to do with the PCE.Footnote ¹¹⁰ His decision not to join the PCE's Democratic Junta made him all the more agreeable to Brandt and the SPD.Footnote ¹¹¹ As Michele Di Donato has pointed out recently, ‘from its frontline position, the SPD made clear its outlook: détente did not change at all the ideological controversy between the two movements, and reaching agreements with Eastern European governments did not mean softening the approach to communism’.Footnote ¹¹² Brandt and González saw communism as a political adversary and thought social democracy should steer clear of it.

Brandt took a stand on Eurocommunism in his inaugural speech as president of the SI, delivered in Geneva in 1976. He stated that in addition to its previous opponents – Moscow, Beijing or even national communism – social democracy now must also keep a watchful eye on Eurocommunism.Footnote ¹¹³ Earlier that year, in an interview with the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Brandt, when asked whether the SPD could ignore the communists, admitted that although the fundamental assessment remained unchanged, ‘there are interesting developments in the communist world. We don't walk around the world with blinders and say there is nothing. There are really very interesting things’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ On the subject of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano; PCI), Rother contends that Brandt cautiously but insistently promoted ‘like no other would have done’ the rapprochement of the PCI to the SI, greatly facilitating the dissolution in 1991 of what was once the largest communist party in the West and its relaunch as the Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra; PDS), which joined the SI and the Party of European Socialists.Footnote ¹¹⁵ As Brandt had commented fifteen years earlier, ‘it would be wrong if our behaviour contributed to the fact that the developments that loosened up the former monolithic bloc of communism came to a standstill again’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The historian Alan Granadino rightly points out that, after the refounding of the French PS at the Épinay conference in 1969, the Iberian Peninsula became a target of political influence for the PS and its line of democratic socialism, which Granadino defines mainly as self-management (autogestion) and unity of the left.Footnote ¹¹⁷ As Christian Salm writes, ‘the French PS worked for a left-wing union in Portugal in order not to hamper the French leftist unity with the PCF . . . Also in Spain, the French PS worked for a socialist–communist union in the form of a merger of the PCE and the PSOE’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Their research highlights that the French PS managed to influence the PSOE, at the expense of the social democracy espoused by the British Labour Party and the German SPD, especially in the first half of the 1970s.Footnote ¹¹⁹

However, Mathieu Fulla's work shows the usefulness of unpacking the French PS into different, sometimes contradictory, actors: Mauroy, Mitterrand and the Centre d’études, de recherches et d’éducation socialiste (CERES), for instance, had different views and degrees of appreciation for self-management, ranging from scepticism in Mauroy's case to advocacy of its Marxist variety by CERES.Footnote ¹²⁰ The current article uses a similar approach of not treating the PSOE as a monolithic entity or an umbrella term, but rather zooming in on its leader. Indeed, Tierno, after he joined the PSOE, and Pablo Castellanos, before he left the PSOE to establish Izquierda Unida, disagreed with González on important issues. Abdón Mateos, doyen of the history of the PSOE in the twentieth century, points out that in 1976 González showed less enthusiasm for the concept of self-management than many other senior PSOE members,Footnote ¹²¹ and ‘always rejected the possibility of a common programme of the [Spanish] Left’.Footnote ¹²²

In a 1977 interview with Zona Abierta, a radical left-wing theoretical magazine, González was asked, ‘How would you define the difference between social democracy and democratic socialism?’, to which he replied, ‘I would say that, above all, this difference is being abused . . . In the course of the conference of socialist parties of southern Europe I have insisted many times that if there is a political project, it is that of a united Europe . . . To draw a north-south dividing line, a supposed total division between social democracy and socialism, would be to strengthen a conservative alternative in the construction of Europe’.Footnote ¹²³ Indeed, González had insisted on both these points in his speech at the inaugural session of the conference of Southern European socialist parties held in Paris in January 1976, just two months after Franco's death.Footnote ¹²⁴

Brandt and González believed that communism should be opposed, but they continually engaged with communist countries in order to nudge them towards social democracy and collaborate towards a safer world. In his first visit to Spain, González bluntly told Shultz that he was not a friend of the communist system. He said that the PSOE's victory in the 1982 election had reduced the PCE to a mere shell of its former power – ‘a mere symbolic role’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Yet in his first meeting with President Ronald Reagan at the White House in 1983, González skilfully defended his engagement with Fidel Castro of Cuba, eliciting a chuckle from Reagan.Footnote ¹²⁶ González also enjoyed the trust of Mikhail Gorbachev, who acknowledged that before the fall of the Berlin Wall he had been able to exchange opinions confidentially ‘only with you, Mr Gonzalez – then, you already understood a lot, with several details of the West as well’.Footnote ¹²⁷

‘The complaint that has sometimes been raised that parties and institutions of the Federal Republic gave only moderated assistance to related groups on the Iberian Peninsula – that criticism has always annoyed me’, wrote Brandt. In particular, Antonio Muñoz Sánchez's research on the Ebert Stiftung and the PSOE demonstrates that the criticism was unfounded. The FES provided the PSOE with major ‘financial, logistical and training support’.Footnote ¹²⁸ The FES also helped the PSOE organise several workshops for party and union officials, including the PSOE's first summer school in El Escorial, which had a profound effect on public opinion in Spain, as it was the first time that González appeared on TV.Footnote ¹²⁹ According to one FES report, from 1976 to 1981 the FES helped organise over 2,000 seminars.Footnote ¹³⁰ This was an expensive enterprise. Mujal-León estimates that between 1975 and 1980, the FES spent over 1,600 million pesetas in Spain, which is approximately €9.5 million (£8 million) in today's currency.Footnote ¹³¹

The FES trained PSOE officials and supported campaigns, helping the party to expand across Spain and gain ground on the PCE. In 1975, the PSOE and the UGT had only one full-time employee each, while the PCE had seventy full-time staff in Madrid alone.Footnote ¹³² By the time democratic elections were held in June 1977, the SPD and the FES's support had helped the PSOE become the largest opposition party in parliament, and González become the left's undisputed leader. ‘I am still proud to think that under my leadership, the SPD sent more than fine words to help Spanish democracy to its feet’, wrote Brandt towards the end of his life.Footnote ¹³³

In preparation for the November 1978 Socialist International conference in Vancouver, Brandt sent the draft of his presidential speech to González. ‘I would be very grateful if you could look at it and let me know if you have any comments or remarks’, he wrote.Footnote ¹³⁴ At its executive bureau meeting held in Hamburg in February of that year, the SI had decided to start drafting a New Declaration of Principles to replace the one adopted at the Frankfurt congress in 1951. Brandt entrusted González with the critical task of chairing the New Declaration of Principles Working Group for the SI. The bureau accepted the PSOE's offer to set up a technical secretariat for the working group at PSOE headquarters and that the Spaniard Francisco López Real, an old supporter of González's with significant experience in Brussels, should be responsible for the technical coordination of the work.Footnote ¹³⁵

González chaired the group for a decade, and a new SI Declaration of Principles, which is still in place, was adopted at the Stockholm conference in 1989. The end of the preamble, entitled ‘Global Change and Future Prospects’, read: ‘Today the Socialist International combines its traditional struggle for freedom, justice and solidarity with a deep commitment to peace, the protection of the environment and the development of the South. All these issues require common answers. To this end, the Socialist International seeks the support of all those who share its values and commitment’.Footnote ¹³⁶ The partnership reflected Brandt and González's commitment to promoting social democracy at the start of a new decade; it also showcased how González had brought new energy to the global social democratic project.

In January 1992, ten months before his death, Brandt wrote to González and offered him the presidency of the SI. ‘I want you to know’, he wrote, ‘that if you want to do this job then you can be sure that you can count on great approval’.Footnote ¹³⁷ González, who was still in office, turned down the offer. He similarly declined Chancellor Helmut Kohl's later nomination to replace Jacques Delors as European Commission president.Footnote ¹³⁸ Though Kohl and several other EU leaders continued to insist throughout Jacques Santer's term, González rejected their second nomination.Footnote ¹³⁹ His refusal was neither personalFootnote ¹⁴⁰ nor due to a lack of commitment to international socialism and a unified Europe; González wished to avoid further institutional responsibilities, yet ‘without abandoning political tasks – quite the opposite’.Footnote ¹⁴¹

In his public farewell to Brandt, González shared his own private farewell with Brandt:

This was a powerful reminder that their shared understanding of social democracy envisioned an expanding, evolving social democracy that would expand globally.

Internationalism

Brandt and González's international experience and global vocation also drew them together. Writing about his early youth, Brandt said that his ‘journey of discovery of the world – intellectually and geographically – was too exciting . . .’Footnote ¹⁴³ and that he ‘was lucky enough to discover Europe’ in his twenties.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ He spent a decade and a half surrounded by other European socialist exiles in Scandinavia, which helped foster his ‘growing interest in international affairs’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Indeed, their regular discussions ‘promoted a sense of fellowship among them and understanding of each other's views’, notes B. Vivekanandan.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Brandt's later decision to return to Allied-occupied Berlin and a life in city politics committed him to involvement with international actors and events, such as the nearly year-long Soviet blockade of West Berlin, Soviet demands for the withdrawal of Western troops and the building of the Berlin Wall. Brandt's internationalism, therefore, was awakened, nourished and practised well before he became foreign minister and later chancellor of West Germany.

González also enjoyed intense international engagement prior to his first election victory in 1982.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ He made numerous trips across Western Europe and to America, both North and South, many of which were staunchly supported by Brandt. In 1980 González, Kreisky and Palme, the latter two close friends of Brandt's from his Stockholm years, embarked on a three-member mission to Teheran to seek a solution to the Iran hostage crisis. Mitterrand wrote to Brandt to express his ‘serious concerns’ that the PS had been left out of the trip,Footnote ¹⁴⁸ to which Brandt replied that the Iranian authorities had invited only González, Kreisky and Palme.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Kreisky had confided in a friend that González's performance in the difficult negotiations with the leader of Iran had been ‘brilliant’; he foresaw a very bright future for González in the SI.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ That same year, González met with Castro in Cuba on a stopover to Panama, where he also met President Omar Torrijos, ‘who saw me like a son’,Footnote ¹⁵¹ and discussed Reagan's recent election victory, the 1980 Uruguayan constitutional referendum and the Iran–Iraq war with them.Footnote ¹⁵² As González reflected later, ‘I had accumulated international experience . . . I learnt very quickly. I lived in the world. I had travelled a lot, had lots of contacts and had a very close relationship with lots of leaders from Latin America and Europe. Lots of them’.Footnote ¹⁵³

Once in office in 1982, González quickly set up a strong international affairs team that worked directly out of his presidential residence, the Moncloa Palace, to lay down the general outlines of Spain's foreign policy and to assume a highly visible role in its conduct. Manuel Marín, then secretary of state for European affairs at the foreign ministry, notes that ‘foreign policy was Felipe González's personal commitment, an absolutely earnest endeavour’, because he liked international affairs.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The CIA described the International Department at the President's Office as akin to the National Safety Council of the White House.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Yet, in reality, González's organisational arrangements were modelled along the lines of Brandt's major reform of the chancellor's office a decade or so earlier,Footnote ¹⁵⁶ which reflected his great interest in pursuing a self-assured and active role in the international affairs of West Germany.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Similarly, the CIA expected González to ‘assume a highly visible role’ in the conduct of Spain's diplomacy, which turned out to be an accurate speculation.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

The CIA's January 1983 report added, ‘we expect Prime Minister Gonzalez to keep Spain in harness with the US and Western Europe. The harness, however, will sometimes be looser than Spain's allies would like’. New York Times correspondent David Binder reported that Brandt had stated a similar position immediately after he took office in October 1969: ‘We will be a loyal ally but not a comfortable government. I will not be the Chancellor of a conquered Germany, but of a liberated Germany’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Spain had an uneasy ‘bases-for-cash’ arrangement with the United States dating back to 1953, hosting four US bases on its national territory, one of them just twenty kilometres from Madrid.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Both González and Brandt took steps to reclaim Spanish and German sovereignty, respectively, and to effect change without calling into question the structural basis of the system, the kind of action that British political scientist Archie Brown calls ‘redefining leadership’.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Despite intense pressure against it from the NATO allies,Footnote ¹⁶² González delivered the 1982 PSOE manifesto promise to hold a referendum on Spain's continued NATO membership.Footnote ¹⁶³ Once Spain had been taken into NATO by a Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD) government, González believed it was in Spain's best interest not to leave it, and therefore campaigned in favour of continued membership. To convey to the electorate that NATO was not an American organisation, but a European one and even a socialist one, there is evidence that González's team asked Brandt to make a statement in favour of Spain remaining in NATO.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Indeed, Italian socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, Soares (newly appointed president of Portugal) and Brandt all spoke in favour of González's proposal to keep Spain in NATO.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ In addition, as Marina Pérez de Arcos maintains, the referendum per se and the result gave the Spanish government leverage when it renegotiated the US–Spain bilateral treaty and rebalanced its relations with the United States, thus regaining Spanish sovereignty, as was also Brandt's aim for Germany.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Indeed, Pérez de Arcos has shown that, contrary to the long-established narrative,Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Spain's continued NATO membership was not a precondition for Spain's accession to the European Economic Community (EEC).Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Furthermore, although González was not in favour of the UCD government's decision to join NATO in 1981–2, he was also not anti-NATO before he came into office in December 1982 and therefore did not perform the alleged U-turn from anti-NATO to pro-NATO once he was in government, as is widely held in the literature. For instance, preparatory notes for González's meeting with US President Jimmy Carter in June 1980 reveal that he planned to clarify his position to Carter: ‘PSOE action in foreign policy pursues autonomy for Spain, in line with our Western, democratic and pluralistic character. Being against Spain's entry into NATO is neither anti-NATO nor anti-US’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ González also maintained his position in public, as captured in an article in El País newspaper just days after meeting Carter in MadridFootnote ¹⁷⁰ and again the following year in the official debate on accession to NATO held in the Spanish parliament.Footnote ¹⁷¹

As mentioned earlier, Brandt recognised that the true satisfaction of his life was to have contributed to the association of Germany with peace and European freedom, a sort of readjustment of German identity and a reconciliation with Germany's recent past. González made a similar acknowledgement in his most recent book: ‘When I meditate on those years . . . I realize that, of all things, the most satisfying thing for me is that, at the end of the eighties, we Spaniards could finally feel reasonably well in our own skin’.Footnote ¹⁷² He notes that a Spanish miner who had emigrated to Belgium – the type of person he met as a student in Belgium during the 1960s – said that ‘“at long last we could move around our continent with a kind of citizenship right that is comparable to any other”. We were once again proud to be Spanish’.Footnote ¹⁷³ Both Brandt and González shared a deep commitment to helping their respective countries overcome their international pariah status and foster a renewed national and European identity.

‘German citizen to the core, European citizen by conviction and world citizen by vocation’ is how González described Brandt at his state funeral. Brandt proved himself a dedicated Europeanist committed to further enlargement and integration. According to historian Daniel Möckli, the rélance européene of the late 1960s, which was initiated at the Hague summit, included Brandt's active support for the establishment of European Political Cooperation (EPC), European Monetary Unity (EMU), the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and Britain's accession to the EEC after two French vetoes.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Brandt later became a Member of the European Parliament at the first direct European parliamentary elections held in 1979. In turn, González played a key role in Spain's difficult EEC accession negotiations by setting up a bilateral strategy that mainly targeted Paris and Bonn to overcome years of virtual standstill.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Once in the EEC, González introduced the concept of European Union (EU) citizenship and the notion of social and economic cohesion in the Maastricht Treaty – signed just months before Brandt's death – which paved the way for the creation of a single European currency, the euro. Ten years after he left office, González presided over a committee of EU ‘wise men’ to examine the EU's role until 2030.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

As president of the SI for sixteen years, Brandt's leadership and his personal and political connections proved to be ‘a key asset in allowing the European social democracy movement to create an extensive network of political leaders and organizations that spread around the world, particularly to Latin America’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The SI stopped its eurocentrism under Brandt.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Furthermore, ‘in more than one country we [the SI] were able to contribute to the replacement of military dictatorships by democratically legitimated governments . . . where dictatorships prevailed, however, we could at least offer help and protection to persecuted democrats’.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ González's international solidarity similarly extended beyond Europe. In 2014, president of Colombia and later Nobel Peace Laureate Juan Manuel Santos described González, on his conferral of Colombian citizenship, ‘as a “key figure” because there is no president in the last decades who can say that in moments of anguish or doubt he did not have him “to give his advice, to help, to contribute in an effective, selfless way, with love for Colombia”’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

For his part, Brandt chaired the World Bank's Independent Commission on International Development Issues that made recommendations to help improve North–South relations. ‘It was well worth the trouble, and not just because meeting people from other parts of the world and learning about their ways of thinking and reacting was a great gain. The experience helped me to understand the great social question of the late twentieth century [global inequality]’.Footnote ¹⁸¹ As González observed in his eulogy of Brandt, ‘he continuously demonstrated what has always been a mark of democratic socialism: internationalism [and] international solidarity’, which may be said of González as well.Footnote ¹⁸²