A Military History of Modern Spain: From the Napoleonic Era to the International War on Terror (review)

Collections of essays are always likely to be something of a mixed bag, but there are some bags, alas, which are more mixed than others. Such is unfortunately very much the case with this self-proclaimed military history of modern Spain. A book of this sort is not unwelcome – it is, after all, over forty years since Stanley Payne wrote the only comparable work on the subject – but a number of problems succeed in leaving the efforts of Bowen and Alvarez – for want of a more military metaphor – holed below the waterline. This is not to say that there is nothing of interest between its covers. On the contrary, the last three chapters – on decolonization, institutional evolution and reform in the period from 1945 to the present, and the war against terror – contain much that is of great interest and probably not available elsewhere in the English language (though the coverage of the various coup plots of the period 1979–82 seemed rather weak: there is strong anecdotal evidence that the so-called tejerada was a far closer run thing than is suggested here).

Moving further back a little, meanwhile, the three chapters on the Civil War and World War II are a reasonably useful if unexciting primer, even if Wayne Bowen ought to have been rather less uncritical in respect of the origins of the Blue Division, large numbers of whose members were either erstwhile leftists frantic to escape the consequences of being on the losing side in 1939, or young men who saw enlistment as a good way of supporting their families in the bleak años del hambre.

Thus far, thus good, but moving back still further one runs into issues that left this reader little better than astonished. Such was the involvement of the army in the political problems of the period 1923–1936, not to mention the massive amount of material available, that it is all but incredible that there was no chapter specifically dedicated to it (or still better two). And what is one to say to the almost complete failure to discuss the juntas de defensa of 1917 or the rather cursory treatment that is accorded to the Moroccan War or the Tragic Week or the Cu-Cut incident? As for the first chapter, in which the unfortunate Geoffrey Jensen is handed the impossible brief of looking at the whole of the period 1808–1898 in a mere twenty-one pages, the best one can say is that its hapless author has evidently done the best he could.

At stake seems to be a failure to think through what was really needed: a history of Spain’s wars; a history of Spain’s military institutions; or a history of Spain’s relations with her military. These goals, of course, are not mutually exclusive, but to satisfy them all would have required a much bigger book. Presuming, as one does, that the editors’ hands were tied in this respect, they would have done better to try to do one thing well rather than three things badly. To write so is saddening, but, taking the work as a whole, it really is impossible to be more positive, while doing so might at least goad Bowen or Alvarez into writing the very good monograph that is waiting to be written here in place of Payne’s old standard.

Mention of Payne, however, brings to mind a point that cannot in current circumstances be elided. In his foreword it is stated that for the first time since the eighth century Spain looks unlikely to be able to defend her southern frontier. Perhaps. But perhaps Payne might have cared to be more specific. What is the threat at which he hints? A Russian assault seeming unlikely, let alone one from...