Spain and the United States - Real Instituto Elcano

CULTURAL RELATIONS, IMAGE AND ANTI-AMERICANISM 113
William Fulbright), which guaranteed Spaniards during the Franco dictatorship
(1939-75) an impartial selection process and Americans the necessary
protection to move freely through the maze of archives and libraries
throughout the country. The Commission Board in Spain, comprising
Spaniards and Americans, remains an independent policy-making body and
completely free of political interference. Most grantees from Spain in the first
decade of the programme were in the fields of the physical and social sciences.
While Spaniards who went to the United States as “Fulbrighters” found a
democratic and ethnically diverse society, the first Americans who came to
Spain, such as the distinguished historians Gabriel Jackson and Edward
Malefakis, found a very poor country with no political freedom.
As a result of the 1976 Treaty of Friendship, Defence and Cooperation
between the United States and Spain, one year after the death of General
Franco, more money was made available to Spain’s Fulbright programme, and
in the 1980s two Spanish banks began to sponsor a large number of grants
(later followed by other companies). The Socialists, who ruled Spain from
1983 to 1996, had several “Fulbrighters”, notably Javier Solana, who was three
times a minister before becoming Nato’s Secretary General (1995-99) and
since 1999 European Union Foreign Policy Chief, as did the centre-right
Popular Party (1996-2004), among them Pilar del Castillo, the education
minister. Other notable “Fulbrighters” are Pascual Maragall, the Socialist
prime minister of the region of Catalonia, José Borrell, the Socialist president
of the European Parliament, and Miguel Sebastián, the chief economic advisor
to Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. According to María Jesús
Pablos, the executive director of the Fulbright programme in Spain, “a strong
case can be made that the changes that have taken place in Spain over the last
30 years were influenced, if not shaped, by the efforts of those who studied in
the United States, the majority of whom had Fulbright grants.”
More than 7,000 grants have been awarded in 46 years, 70% of them to
Spaniards (see Exhibit 6.5). The Commission awards around 100 grants a year
to Spaniards and an average of 60 for US citizens. The main sponsor is Spain’s
Ministry of Education, followed by the US Department of State and the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Private sponsorship comprises 20% of the annual
budget, with 85% of this amount being spent directly on grants. Spain’s
programme today is the third-largest in the world after Germany and Japan in
terms of the budget allocated and the number of scholars going to the United
States every year.