Spain’s First “Re-Branding Effort” in the Postwar Franco Era

Abstract

Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy in the mid-to late 1970s was a momentous event—for Spain, for Europe, and indeed even on a global scale, as it offered a dramatic demonstration that an authoritarian regime could relinquish the reins of power relatively peacefully with little subsequent polítical upheaval and violence. To many scholars and practitioners of “nation branding,” post-Franco era democratization has meant something more: the fundamental “rebranding” of Spain, the construction of an entirely new set of externally directed positive images and associations with concomitant salutary effects on Spain’s soft power, the success of which offers a role model for other states seeking to rebrand themselves. As the communications scholar Melissa Aronczyk has put it in her recent book Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity, “Spain is considered the original success story of nation branding, and until recently, most countries contemplating the process looked to Spain as proof that it works.” Citing the justly lauded “Sol” tourism logo illustration devised in 1983 by Joan Miró, one of Spain’s greatest twentieth-century artists, at the request of the recently installed Socialist government, Aronczyk states,

The logo and the impact it came to have on the international imagination are widely considered to have been instrumental in the ‘repositioning’ of [Spain]. Once an impoverished and isolated nation emerging from dictatorship, the country now put forward an image of an effective democracy and a cultural and cosmopolitan destination. Indeed, the logo was seen to symbolize Spain’s entry into modernity.¹

This chapter is adapted from Neal M. Rosendorf, Franco Sells Spain to America: Hollywood, Tourism and Public Relations as Postwar Spanish Soft Power, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2014.

New Mexico State University.