The Franco Regime, 1936–1975

1. The Politics of Modern Spain

1 The Politics ofModem Spain Commentary on modern Spain has largely revolved around concepts of difference, and in fact it was the idea of difference that was eventually converted into a positive slogan by the Spanish tourist industry of the 1960s. For historians and political observers, the difference has been that the perceived prototype of western modernization and the Spanish pattern vary considerably. This has led to considerable exaggeration and distortion on the one hand and defensive ethnocentric hyperbole on the other. It is obvious enough that the formative period of Spanish and of all western history, the Middle Ages, was unique in Spain because of the Muslim conquest and intimate confrontation with Islamic civilization. Yet Spanish culture stems from the Christian north, not AI-Andalus, and reveals a fidelity to major aspects of medieval western Christian culture unequaled elsewhere. A dividing line between western and Levantine or Muslim civilization has always remained firmly set at the southern frontier of Hispanic Christendom. The only notable difference between Spain and certain of the most advanced areas of western Europe lay in a disparity ofeconomic and technical-educational development. Spain's lag was partially overcome in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the primary short-circuiting (to use Sanchez Albornoz's term) of Spanish development occurred in the seventeenth century, the period in which the advanced societies of northwestern Europe surged ahead of the rest of the continent. During the seventeenth century Spain fell into a typically southern and eastern European pattern of ruralism, archaism, and slow economic development . Even in the seventeenth century, however, Spain's institu3 4 I. Origins tional and juridical structure remained typically western and distinct from the serfsocieties east ofthe Elbe. The eighteenth century, by comparison, was a period ofrecovery, though not oftruly accelerated development. The Old Regime in Spain was a victim of Napoleonic imperialism and of the first era of colonial liberation. Early introduction of modem parliamentary and constitutional liberalism (1810) gave Spain one ofthe longest modem political histories of any country .in the world, exceeded among larger states only by Great Britain, the United States, and France. Early nineteenth century Spain was clearly not, by any normal set of criteria, properly prepared for modem liberalism, yet its precocious development seemed possible to the small minority of early Spanish liberals. One reason for this was the very long, ifuneven, history ofparliamentary institutions in Spain, for the initial late twelfth-century Cortes ofLe6n may have been the earliest ofall medieval parliaments, antedating the Magna Carta. Another was the long and deep tradition offueros (group rights and privileges ), individual law and inheritance, and recognized autonomies within the peninsula. Yet another was the strong legalist-constitutionalist tradition of Spanish scholars and intellectuals, first fully developed by the theologians and philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and further elaborated by the late eighteenth-century Catholic enlightenment in Spain. The primary limitation of tolerance and freedom among formal institutions had come from the Inquisition, whose authority was seriously undermined by the modem rationalist culture that by the early nineteenth century dominated most educated opinion in Spain. These factors help to account for the early emergence of minority, upper-class liberalism in Spain, but were far from sufficient to guarantee success for the nineteenth-century liberal polity. Popular illiteracy, extreme factional division, profound regional differences, and lagging, highly uneven economic development were only some ofthe major handicaps it faced. Thus the record ofSpanish liberalism from 1810 to 1936 was complex, halting, and to the casual student confusing in the extreme, sometimes seemingly more Latin American than European. Focusing on a myriad of discordant details can, however, easily obscure the overall pattern as well as the primary factors at work. If one looks at modem politics in broad historical perspective, Spain's experience in many respects turns out to be more typical than has often been assumed. Only a small minority of modem representative polities have undergone a long-term peaceful evolutionary development without a phase of breakdown. They are almost without exception either Englishspeaking or small states in northern Europe (including Switzerland). Most European and all non-European states have experienced convulsion and breakdown at least once, and the majority more than once. The truth is that the Spanish pattern is typical and the Anglo-American atypical. The Politics of Modem Spain 5 The great majority of modern polities with a political history of a century or...