Spain

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SPAIN.

INSTABILITY AND RAPID CHANGE
DICTATORSHIP AND THE SECOND REPUBLIC
REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION
THE FRANCO REGIME
DEMOCRATIZATION IN POST-FRANCO SPAIN
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Spain entered the twentieth century as one of the two most underdeveloped countries in Western Europe, its political and military elite traumatized by defeat at the hands of the United States in 1898, a disaster that cost Spain all the remnants of its former world empire. The new slogan in Spanish affairs would be "regenerationism," an all-embracing term that could refer to political development, economic growth, educational expansion, social reform, or any possible combination of these goals.

INSTABILITY AND RAPID CHANGE

During the nineteenth century Spain had adapted with some difficulty to the institutions of modern liberalism, after introducing the first new liberal constitution of that century in 1812. Political conflict was profound both between traditionalists and liberals and among varying sectors of the liberal elite. The result was the "era of pronunciamentos, (1820–1874) in which sectors of the military provided the strength either for stability or for further change. In addition, Spain spent more time at war during that period than any other European country, engaging in three international wars, two major civil wars, numerous political insurgencies, and thirteen years of costly colonial campaigns in Cuba. The economy grew but at a comparatively modest rate, so that the gap between Spain and advanced northwestern Europe was proportionately as great in 1900 as it had been in 1800. The economy remained largely agricultural and underdeveloped, the society predominantly rural and still partially illiterate. Political stability was achieved only after the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in 1874. A two-party system of Liberals and Conservatives, led by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, ruled the country with a system of restricted suffrage. Universal male suffrage was restored in 1890 but participation was limited and elections largely controlled by established elites.

Alfonso XIII assumed the throne at the age of sixteen in 1902 and reigned until 1931, a period in which the country underwent decisive change. Although political fragmentation increased, a process of greater mobilization and incipient democratization began, challenging the entrenched elites. Spain was the largest of the European countries to remain neutral during World War I but was also strongly affected by the tidal wave of political and social change after the war ended. Labor organization became important for the first time, the chief protagonist being the anarchosyndicalist movement of the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, or National Confederation of Labor). Three prime ministers were assassinated by anarchists between 1897 and 1921, and from 1919 on labor strife intensified and turned very violent.

While all-Spanish nationalism was weak, a further challenge appeared in the form of the movements of "peripheral nationalism" that were gaining strength in Catalonia and the Basque country. Added to these domestic conflicts was the increasingly disruptive impact of a long, bloody, intractable colonial war in Morocco, where a Spanish Protectorate had been established over the northern 10 percent of the country in 1912–1913.

DICTATORSHIP AND THE SECOND REPUBLIC

By 1923 political and social relations had reached an impasse. Although the nineteenth-century elites retained control of the two-party system, challenges mounted on every side, with severe conflict over political, social, and colonial issues. In September, General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1870–1930) intervened to institute the first direct military dictatorship in Spanish history. With military assistance from France, he crushed the revolt in Morocco and also presided over a great wave of economic prosperity. Primo de Rivera was nonetheless bereft of concrete political ideas and failed to offer any long-term political alternative. The king forced him to resign in January 1930, but by that time half a century of stable parliamentary government had come to an end and could not readily be restored. Between 1910 and 1930, while experiencing political failure, Spain enjoyed the greatest economic growth in all its history to that time, and prosperity began to transform the country. During the 1920s the country had one of the highest growth rates in the world. Industrialization, urbanization, per capita income, and educational opportunities all expanded rapidly. By 1930 the agricultural share of the labor force had declined to 45.5 percent, dropping below half for the first time. Yet these dramatic improvements were not sufficient to turn Spain within one generation into a fully developed and modernized country, and their political and social effects were profoundly destabilizing. They produced the most fundamental of all revolutions—the revolution of rising expectations.

The new government appointed by the Crown in 1930 to succeed the dictatorship moved very slowly toward holding elections, having found that the old ruling class had been displaced. In the minds of many, Alfonso XIII was identified with Primo de Rivera, and a republican movement gained strength for the first time in more than half a century. The municipal elections held in April 1931 were won by an alliance of republican parties and Socialists, who demanded that the king abdicate. No longer enjoying support even from the armed forces, Alfonso XIII chose to avoid conflict and left the country. The Second Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931.

This introduced a directly democratic political system to Spain for the first time, but it had to cope with the combined effects of the Great Depression, mounting political radicalization, and the more distant influence of the Soviet Union and the rise of fascist and rightist dictatorships abroad. The first Republican cabinets between 1931 and 1933 were dominated by a coalition of middle-class left Republicans and Socialists. They prepared a left Republican constitution that established the separation of church and state and also instituted a militant anticlerical policy. Religious orders were banned from teaching and a series of social, economic, and political reforms were enacted, including a highly controversial agrarian reform, laws strongly favoring organized labor that increased both wages and prices in the midst of the Depression, and extensive autonomy for Catalonia. At the same time, the new regime restricted certain civil rights more severely than the monarchy had done.

REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION

For the next elections, in November 1933, an electoral law that heavily favored coalitions allowed an alliance between the center and the Catholic Right to win control of Parliament. The displaced leftist parties, which had written the electoral law, rejected the results and insisted the election be voided. The Socialist Party, a major force for the first time, had adopted a position of social democratic reformism in 1931, but by 1934 veered toward violent revolution. The anarchosyndicalist CNT attempted three different revolutionary insurrections during 1932 and 1933, and in October 1934 the Socialists undertook a more extensive one of their own, which was suppressed.

The Republic tended increasingly toward polarization between the revolutionary Left and a counterrevolutionary Right. Since all insurrections had failed, the leftist parties formed a popular front for the elections of February 1936. They won a narrow victory but the electoral law gave them a decisive majority in parliament. The leftist Republicans of Manuel Azaña then formed a minority government in the face of the Socialists' refusal to collaborate, and the revolutionary forces reopened the revolutionary process, seizing farmland, burning churches, forcibly closing Catholic schools, initiating the largest series of strikes in Spanish history, and launching a wave of violence. By-elections in two provinces in May were marked by strong police repression and the denial of civil rights, which skewed the results.

There were also revolutionary activists among the police, and they participated in the kidnapping and murder of José Calvo Sotelo, the leader of the monarchist parliamentary opposition, on 13 July 1936. This was the Spanish equivalent of the Matteotti affair in Italy twelve years earlier. In each case the major source of political violence—the Fascists in Italy, the Socialists in Spain—was responsible for the assassination, with traumatic consequences. Five days later, part of the military revolted, beginning the civil war of 1936–1939.

The left Republican government responded by "arming the people," that is, distributing weapons to the revolutionary groups, who then seized power in most of what became known as the "Republican zone." This produced the most extensive worker revolution in modern European history, as worker groups seized control of most of the economy and the greater share of farmland, effecting a much more extensive direct worker revolution than the one that had occurred in Russia in 1917. The first months were violent in the extreme, as both sides carried out tens of thousands of political executions.

The weakness of the Spanish revolution lay, however, in its internal fragmentation and relative international isolation. The anarchists, revolutionary Socialists, and independent communists insisted on révolution à l'outrance (all-out revolution), whereas left Republicans, more moderate Socialists, and the Spanish Communist Party called for a more disciplined policy that would emphasize unity and the military strength necessary to win the civil war.

After Britain and France instituted a formal policy of nonintervention, the only state to support the Spanish revolution was the Soviet Union. It began to send large-scale military assistance in September 1936, and for the first time the Spanish Communist Party became a major force. A more effective Republican government began to be reestablished, and, together with the extensive Comintern propaganda apparatus, sought to present the image abroad of a middle-class democracy rather than a violent revolutionary regime. Internally, the Comintern policy dictated that the Spanish revolution eschew extreme collectivist policies for the duration of the war in order to win over the lower middle class and adopt an economic program equivalent to the Soviets' New Economic Policy (NEP) during the 1920s. Resistance from the anarchists was crushed in May 1937 and the new government, under the Socialist Juan Negrín, came to rely heavily on the Communists, concentrating on military resistance. The new Spanish Republican People's Army sought to emulate the Soviet Red Army of twenty years earlier but lacked its great numbers and relative strength, while international complications led Joseph Stalin to reduce assistance to the Republic.

THE FRANCO REGIME

The military rebels soon chose General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) as commander-in-chief. He assumed dictatorial powers in the "Nationalist zone" on 1 October 1936 and received extensive military assistance from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Franco proved an effective leader, slowly building a preponderance of military strength based on a more effective army and foreign assistance. He won complete victory in the civil war and total control of Spain by 1 April 1939.

Franco organized a semipluralist rightist dictatorship that was concerned to avoid the limitations of the Primo de Rivera regime by codifying an ideology and building a new institutional structure. In April 1937 he took control of Spain's native fascist party, Falange Española (Spanish phalanx), merging it with a sector of the extreme Right to create a new state political organization. The other main pole of support came from conservative Catholicism, which built a broad base for the regime but also generated a certain internal contradiction and tension.

Although Spanish legend enshrined the myth of un millón de muertos (a million dead), the civil war in fact produced approximately 300,000 violent deaths, of which about 100,000 were political executions by both sides. Militarily, it had been a relatively low-intensity conflict punctuated by a number of high-intensity battles. It borrowed a strange combination of tactics and weapons from both World War I and World War II, the principal innovation being the effective employment of air-to-ground support. The Germans accurately gauged the military lessons of the civil war, but it was the Soviet Red Army that studied it most intensively, sometimes drawing the wrong conclusions.

Franco's Nationalist regime pursued an effective economic policy, avoiding inflation and maintaining full production, the opposite of the situation in the Republican zone. In general, however, economic deprivation became more severe in Spain during the years of World War II, when vital imports were in short supply, international markets were either badly skewed or disrupted, and a rigidly statist policy by the new regime had the effect of discouraging production.

Franco's foreign policy was oriented toward the fascist powers that had helped him achieve victory, but, as ruler of a gravely weakened country, he at first declared neutrality in the European war that began in September 1939. After the fall of France nine months later, Franco became convinced that Germany would win the war and changed his government's policy to official "nonbelligerence," with a tilt toward the Axis. Spain later sent a division of volunteers, the "Blue Division," to fight alongside the Germans on the eastern front, but never entered the war. Franco demanded that Germany provide massive economic and military assistance and also hand over much of French northwest Africa to Spain. This was a price that Hitler refused to pay.

In August 1943, one month after the fall of Benito Mussolini in Italy, the Franco regime began a tenuous process of "defascistization," downgrading the Falange. In postwar Europe the regime was diplomatically ostracized as a residue of the fascist era, but it tried to recast its structure and alter its image through a "cosmetic constitutionalism." A referendum in 1947 ratified Spain's future form of government as that of a monarchy, with Franco a sort of regent for life, holding all power to choose the king who would succeed him.

The regime also wrapped itself in the banner of Catholic corporatism, stressing its identity as the most Catholic regime in the world. The onset of the Cold War ended the ostracism, and Franco was partially rehabilitated in 1953 when he signed a pact to establish American military bases in Spain and also finally managed to negotiate an official concordat with the Vatican. A unique feature of Spanish society during the 1940s and 1950s was the temporary revival of neotraditionalist Catholicism, a revival unprecedented in twentieth-century Western countries, paralleled only by the later growth of Islamist neotraditionalism in certain Muslim societies.

After midcentury the dictatorship increasingly abandoned its initial economic nationalism, stressing rapid growth, foreign investment, mass tourism, and an increasing openness to the international market. This policy worked, and by the 1960s Spain had regained its ranking of the 1920s, possessing one of the highest economic growth rates in the world. This new "economic miracle" started at a higher level than the previous one, converting Spain into a developed, educated, and urbanized country, with a middle-class society that was increasingly independent and secularized. Thus Franco achieved the secular Spanish dream of "regeneration," but at the cost of eroding the conservative Catholic society and culture on which he had based his regime. Even before Franco's death in November 1975, Spanish society had developed characteristics and aspirations similar to those of social democratic Western Europe.

Although the fundamentally authoritarian character of the Franco regime was never altered, its policies and procedures grew steadily more moderate. The goal of an empire in Africa had to be abandoned altogether. The Moroccan Protectorate was relinquished in 1956, Equatorial Guinea was granted independence in 1968, and the Spanish Sahara was handed over to Morocco in 1975–1976. The aftermath of these last two transfers was grim, resulting in dictatorship and genocide in Guinea and bloody repression by the Moroccan government in the Sahara.

Franco was intent on creating a new system, not just a temporary dictatorship, that would survive his death, but the profound changes that took place in Spanish society and culture under his rule made this unlikely. Spain had become increasingly integrated into the economy and culture of Western Europe.

DEMOCRATIZATION IN POST-FRANCO SPAIN

Franco's successor as chief of state, King Juan Carlos, the grandson of Alfonso XIII, therefore had no illusion that the system of personal dictatorship could continue. He instituted a process of democratization in 1976 under the leadership of Adolfo Suárez, whose Unión de Centro Democrático presided over democratic elections in the following year and the writing of a new constitution that established a democratic parliamentary monarchy. In the process, there emerged a new "Spanish model" of democratization that eschewed overt rupture and violence but achieved peaceful reform from the inside out, using the legal mechanisms of the old authoritarian system to achieve democracy without major strife. Aspects of the Spanish model would be adopted a few years later by newly democratizing systems in Latin America, South Africa, and Eastern Europe. The new system also provided for extensive regional autonomy, and by the 1980s a de facto federalism had developed, known to the Spanish as "the state of the autonomies."

A charismatic new Socialist leader, Felipe González, changed his party from an ideologically Marxist-collectivist organization into a Western European–style social democratic party, and on that basis won an absolute majority in the elections of 1982. González enjoyed the longest tenure of any premier under the system, heading the government for nearly fourteen years, until the spring of 1996. Under the Socialists economic growth resumed and further social and cultural transformation took place, facilitated by entry into the European Union at the beginning of 1986. Spain had joined NATO five years earlier (a privilege always denied to the Franco regime) and benefited considerably from the transfer payments of the European Union. Yet the Socialist government was never able to overcome the highest rate of unemployment in Western Europe and struggled with recession in the early 1990s. Moreover, during their long tenure in power, González's Socialists succumbed to the temptations of office and became highly corrupt. A long series of scandals played a major role in the electoral loss that drove González from power in 1996.

After the death of Franco, a new generation of Spaniards made a major effort to put the civil war behind them without further recrimination, and largely succeeded. A culture of secularization and radical individualism expanded rapidly, with the result that Spain changed more during the second half of the twentieth century than any other Western European country save Ireland. Its birth rate became one of the lowest in the world.

The new Spanish democracy rested on a broad consensus that faced only one major political problem, the continuing demands of the more extreme "peripheral nationalisms," especially that of the Basques, who demanded outright independence. Whereas Catalan nationalists were generally more cooperative, the most radical Basque organization, ETA (for "Basqueland and Liberty"), adopted a policy of violence and terrorism, causing nearly a thousand deaths during the first twenty-five years of democracy. Painful though this was, it was a much lower rate of violence than during the Second Republic in 1931–1936; under the democratic monarchy, all the major Spanish parties remained united in a consensus to reject violence and uphold the democratic constitution.

A progressive and democratic form of Spanish conservatism came to power in 1996, when José María Aznar's People's Party formed its first government, going on to win an absolute majority in the elections of 2000. The greatest success of the Aznar government was its growth-oriented economic policy, which by the beginning of the twenty-first century had achieved the highest growth rate of any large country in Western Europe. Spain's per capita income was more than 80 percent of the average in Western Europe overall. The public debt, the budget deficit, and tax rates were reduced, and the country's social security and pension accounts became more solidly grounded. Unemployment declined considerably for the first time in years. Terrorism was reduced and new reforms in education were introduced.

Aznar proved a strong leader, supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite massive domestic opposition on this issue. The People's Party nonetheless seemed to retain predominant support, based on its impressive performance in most aspects of domestic affairs. Aznar became the first prime minister in more than a century to retire voluntarily from political life at the height of his success, even though he was only fifty-two. Conversely, the massive attacks on two Madrid commuter trains by Moroccan Islamists in March 2004, three days before general elections, had a major impact on public opinion, returning the Socialists to power.

Unsolved problems during the early twenty-first century included the continuing tension with Basques and Catalans, a new concern about Spain's southern flank—given the influx of Muslim immigrants and the instability in the Islamic world—and the common European dilemma of a rapidly aging population that had failed to reproduce itself.