The New Resilience of Pacted Transition in Spain

A most over-used buzzword of the new century is resilience: understood as our bouncing back from turbulence, vulnerability, disaster. Somehow the concept of solidarity has been eclipsed, defined minimally as a synonym for the downward flowing social protection of the State. Social solidarity can better be understood as a resilience bubbling up from below in a new form of social pact-ing of homo reciprocans rather than homo oeconimicus. A form of social pact-ing neither opaque nor exclusive. One not imbricated within a cartelized or corporatist membrane reminiscent of Franco's Vertical Syndicate; and not sustained in what Juan Linz refers to as the Post-Franco minimalist Transition toward democratization. This has been a pact-ing by a political class (La Casta) of established bipartisan political parties (PP, PSOE). The minimalist Transition -- obsessed with consensus and forgetting the trauma of The Civil War -- has been only a surface dismantling of the Vertical Syndicate, making use of direct government grants to coopt the trade union movement.  The paper studies an emerging new phenomena of bonding connexion. The New Transition recalls Spanish traditions of municipal mutual aid initiatives (1840s-1936): within a  Confluence stategy of municipalist, inter-urban and inter-regional pacts among the Popular Unity platforms and "tides" (mareas) associated with the evolving 15-M Indignados movement. The paper makes a start at identifying a promising new form of social pact-ing -- among what Elinor Ostrom categorizes as  reciprocators -- so as to prepare for interviews with actors involved in the negotiations and the pact-ing.