Spain: A Unique History

Chapter 15: In the Shadow of the Military

15 In the Shadow of the Military 229 In the twenty-first century the Spanish army weakens steadily both as a national institution and also as a combat force, to the extent that one wonders if any longer it can be considered as either of these. From this vantage point it is instructive to survey the role played by the military during the era of modernization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Spanish army probably passed more years engaged in some form of combat during the nineteenth century than did any other European army of that period; most of this activity was dedicated to civil war or colonial campaigns, with major international conflict only at the beginning and end of the century. What seemed most prominent was not its military but its political role, to the extent that the army appeared to be one of the major problems in Spain. Before turning to the army as a military institution, it is important to consider the reason for its political prominence, greater than in Portugal or Greece, much greater than in Italy, comparable in the nineteenth century only to Latin American countries. Was this a “thesis” or an “antithesis”? That is, was the political initiative of the military due to a primary desire by the military itself for political domination, or was it an antithetical response to the weakness of political institutions , a response to the failure of the politicians? Any careful examination of the history of the military in modern Spain is likely to conclude that the political hypertrophy of the military stemmed from the weakness of political institutions, rather than from the dreams of the military to dominate the country, though sometimes the former did indeed lead to the latter.1 The problem in Spain was what political scientists call “pretorianism”—that is, the political predominance of the military, rather than “militarism”—the hypertrophy of the armed forces as military institutions, or their widespread employment in military activity. Militarily, the modern Spanish army has been a weak institution , and the only plan for “militarism” was the one attempted by the Franco regime in 1939–40 and then soon abandoned, above all for financial reasons. The modern Spanish army stems from the military reforms of the eighteenth-century Bourbon dynasty that organized the army on the French regimental model and also introduced the internal captaincies-general, though it never managed to restore the military potency that had been enjoyed down to the mid-seventeenth century. After the first half of the reign of Felipe V, rulers of the new dynasty were not given to military adventures, with the partial exception of Carlos III. The military were employed relatively rarely, and then, with a few exceptions, usually did not earn distinction. During the War of Independence much of the regular army disappeared, to be replaced by guerrillero bands, paradoxically not infrequently led, certainly often inspired, by priests. The “military problem” of modern Spain then emerged at the same time as the “praetorian problem,” and indeed to some extent the former preceded the latter. The army emerged from the Napoleonic wars deficient in organization and leadership , incorporating into the officer corps some of the leaders of the guerrilleros, lacking adequate financial support or logistical base. It was not given the resources to deal effectively with the independence movement in the Americas, repression of which seeming a doomed enterprise in any event, nor did many of the military have much stomach for it, though fighting went on intermittently for a decade. The first modern pretorian act of the military was the forcible restoration of Fernando VII as absolute monarch, abrogating the Constitution of 1812.2 After the War of Independence the country was severely divided politically, with a new liberal government, which did not entirely correspond to the culture and structure of society, making conflict inevitable and inviting military arbitration. Nonetheless, liberalism was the new direction of Spanish affairs and slowly grew stronger with each passing decade, though without the ability to establish clear dominance or to govern with stability. Therefore, despite the reactionary character of the coup of 1814, for the next seventy years, from 1815 to approximately 1885, most acts of political intervention by the military would be carried out on behalf of the more In the Shadow of the Military 230 liberal or progressive forces, in an effort to give the latter the...