The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870–1945

3. Traditionalist Fascism: Spain,1876–1945

Why did Spanish liberalism succumb to fascism, as opposed to developing as a mass democracy, and why did fascism in Spain assume a traditionalist form? The collapse of Spain’s democracy in the thirties derived from causes analogous to those in Italy: namely, the failure to develop a hegemonic politics in the face of an associational boom. As in Italy weak intraclass hegemony among the dominant classes produced a weak interclass hegemony and finally a failure of counterhegemony . In the early thirties this generated a political crisis out of which a fascist response emerged, but the specific historical path that Spain followed to this similar outcome differed from Italy’s. Although the early twentieth century was a period of rapid associational development in Spain, these associations remained under the control of landlords and capitalists. This gave Spanish social elites an organizational basis for maintaining mass support, despite the collapse of their explicitly political organizations in the early thirties. The fascist project in Spain thus relied on these organizations, not a newly minted mass party, as in Italy. As in the Italian narrative, the analysis here traces the development of Spanish fascism through five stages. It begins by investigating intraclass hegemony in the period of the Restoration monarchy. Spanish liberal institutions consolidated Traditionalist Fascism Spain, 1876–1945 3 Traditionalist Fascism 73 during this regime, which arose in the aftermath of the radical First Republic. During the Restoration, narrow suffrage combined with regional differences to produce a dominant class split into local patron-client networks, as in Italy. This did not, however, undermine the development of civil society. Especially after 1885, the Spanish political order was open enough to allow for the development of associationism, particularly in the countryside. Yet this phenomenon remained under the control of social elites through the twin organizations of regional nationalism and Catholicism. Despite remaining under the control of the social elite, the development of civil society had important political consequences. It undermined the clientalistic politics of the Restoration and led to the search for interclass hegemony. The most consistent attempt to extend hegemony to nonelites took place during the Primo de Rivera regime. This military dictatorship only further weakened the Spanish social elite and laid the political foundations for the rise of Franco. Intraclass Hegemony in Liberal Spain The Spanish liberal regime emerged in 1876 out of the destruction of the revolutionary thrust of 1868. Its liberal institutions formed on the basis of restricted suffrage and rampant electoral corruption, while the clientalism of the Spanish political system fragmented the social elite, undermining intraclass hegemony. This would become a fateful weakness during the first decades of the twentieth century. The two basic political groups or parties (the moderates and the progressives) that would contend for power throughout the nineteenth century emerged during the Carlist Wars. These groups represented “the two principle sections of the landed oligarchy, the wine and olive growers of the south and the wheat growers of the center” (Heywood 1990: 5).1 Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (1828–1897), the conservative architect of the Restoration monarchy (1876–1923), stabilized the political system by establishing a mechanism through which the dynastic parties (the conservatives and the liberals, heirs of the progressives and the moderates) would regularly alternate in power without the intervention of the army, and also with limited input from the population. What historians have subsequently termed the Canovite system had two principle features: caciquismo, which might loosely be described as clientalism, and el turno pacifico, a system of party alternation . The parties operated as political machines, distributing benefits to caciques (local bigwigs),2 who could then deliver votes. They alternated in power by 74 The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe striking bargains in Madrid, not through winning elections. Voting was managed by state employees and generally so corrupt that it played little role in determining who governed (Boyd 1979: 4; Carr 1982: 356–357; Gómez-Navarro 1991: 60; Lyttelton 1973: 98; Payne 1967: 44–45; 1973: 495; Tusell 1976a: 14; 1976b: 510; 1990: 32). During the late nineteenth century this system extended out from its original southern and agrarian basis in Andalusia to the smallholding areas of the north and the Basque Country.3 Until the turn of the century the Liberal and Conservative parties formed relatively coherent blocks; and because of this the Canovite system worked.4 Three factors undermined its coherence during the twentieth century: the emergence...