When Ideology Takes Precedence over Historical Understanding: The Role of the ‘Right' in the Spanish Interwar Crisis

In a relatively recent book on interwar fascism, Michael Mann claimed that in Republican Spain, the main conservative political party, the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (Confederación Española de las Derechas Autónomas or CEDA) had been the ‘main political destroyer of Spanish democracy’. Indeed, he went as far as to write that the CEDA’s ‘“accidentalist” trajectory’ before July 1936 was ‘far more damaging than the supposedly “revolutionary” trajectory of the anarcho-syndicalists or socialists’. ¹ The reader will observe that the professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles described the ‘revolutionary’ trajectory of the Socialist Party as ‘supposed’, while the responsibility of the CEDA for the destruction of Republican democracy was presented as irrefutable.

That Mann’s study, an otherwise interesting and valuable examination of interwar fascism, puts forward such arguments is not infrequent. Although there are numerous comparative works on interwar European politics, few analyse Spanish politics between 1931 and 1936 recognizing its extreme complexity. To a great extent, this is due to the fact that many English-language studies on the Second Republic have not effectively assimilated the work of some very good Spanish historians after the death of Franco in November 1975. But it is also the case that Mann’s arguments reflect a general narrative on the Spanish Civil War (and its origins) that has remained popular among foreign (and some Spanish) historians since the 1970s. In other words, apart from a small Republicanized element, the rest of the Spanish ‘right’, led by the CEDA, had as its principal objective the destruction of the Republic and the eventual restoration of a traditional and anti-liberal monarchy.

In this interpretation of 1930s Spanish politics, the CEDA, the largest and organizationally the most modern political party, acted as a ‘Trojan horse’ created to destroy Republican democracy from within. It depicts Spanish conservatism as a ‘rightist’ monolithic bloc with the same fundamental interests. This has served to justify the attitudes of left-wing Republican parties who refused to regard the CEDA as a legitimate political rival for power and defended the insurrection of October 1934 when that party (which then had the largest number of parliamentary deputies) entered a coalition government.

The most significant exponent of this thesis was José Ramón Montero. His 1977 monograph on the CEDA has been uncritically accepted by Hispanists such as Paul Preston who continue to insist that the ‘accidentalism’ of the CEDA was merely a political tactic to destroy reformist Republican democracy. ² Nevertheless, there have long been alternative analyses. As early as 1970, Richard Robinson placed Spanish conservatives in the wider international context and pointed out that the CEDA was at least as loyal to the Republic as the Socialist Party, which maintained a (Marxist-based) instrumental attitude towards ‘bourgeois’ democracy from April 1931. ³ Javier Tusell, one of the leading Spanish historians of the 1930s, made similar arguments in 1986. ⁴ Both also underlined the necessity of placing the ambiguous behaviour of Spanish conservatives in the context of the words and actions of their opponents; in other words, the determination of the Socialists and their left Republican coalition partners to uphold a politically exclusive vision of the Republic helps to explain the refusal of the CEDA to accept unconditionally the new regime and its 1931 Constitution.

The more recent work by José Manuel Macarro and myself on what Stanley Payne calls ‘Spain’s first democracy’ also stresses that politics in this period cannot be reduced to a narrative of supporters and opponents of ‘reformist’ Republicanism. ⁵ My work shows that Socialists and left Republicans created a new political system after 1931 to facilitate what they called the ‘republican revolution’. Put bluntly, they saw the Republic more as a revolutionary process than a conventional democracy where political power alternates between parties representing different interests and values. While it is true that Socialist-Republican coalition governments between 1931 and 1933 verbally defended democratic principles, fundamental democratic rights were in practice subordinated to the pursuit of the ‘republican revolution’. Thus those conservatives who did not accept the leftist rules of the constitutional game were not seen to have any legitimate role in Spanish politics, irrespective of their electoral strength.

Without taking into account the controversial bases of Republican democracy, one cannot examine the actions of the minority of rightists who wanted to violently overthrow the Republic or the majority who had a more ‘accommodating’ attitude in the sense that they wished to change the Constitution or laws through legal means. This does not mean, of course, that one should assume a priori that rightists were either democrats or authoritarians; republicans or monarchists; pragmatists or ideologues. Rather, one needs to recognize the diverse reaction of rightists to the challenges presented by the ‘republican revolution’ and the sudden arrival of mass democracy. Thus hostility towards the 1931 constitutional framework does not necessarily suggest an anti-democratic or authoritarian mindset. On the contrary, one should ask why and how critics reacted to socio-economic and cultural policies that seriously disadvantaged them. One should also consider, among other questions that help to explain the complex relationship between conservatives and Republican democracy, the extent to which this reaction utilised the legal channels provided by the Republic and whether a refusal to integrate fully in the Republican system (as it was passed in 1931) was ideologically based or a response to events. ⁶ In any event, it is clear that any analysis that sees the diverse forces of the Spanish right as a ‘power bloc’ representing still powerful traditional elites who refused to accept Republican ‘reforms’ is outdated.

Thus it is clear that the work of the aforementioned Spanish historians as well as Moreno Fernández, Valls, González Cuevas, Grandío, Sanz Hoya, Comes, Rodríguez Lago, Báez Pérez de Tudela and Del Rey ⁷ has provided a more nuanced and detailed knowledge of the attitudes and actions of Spanish conservatives between 1931 and 1936. While some historians still argue that the CEDA played a nefarious role in the destruction of Spanish democracy, it is now difficult to deny the existence of a modern conservative party and its complex attitude towards the new republican Constitution.

Moreover, some of the most recent publications on the CEDA are still resistant to the idea that the old orthodoxies require revision and a more detailed research, without implicit prejudices. This is the case, for example, with Sid Lowe’s 2010 study of the JAP (Juventud de Acción Popular), the youth wing of the CEDA, in which the British historian insists that the acceptance of democracy by conservatives was always a question of tactics rather than principle. ⁸ Similarly, Eduardo González Calleja’s 2011 analysis revives the ‘Trojan Horse’ theory of the CEDA, in which the party’s final objective was nothing less than total power to undertake ‘a process that would transform the Republic into an authoritarian, antiparliamentary and corporative regime’ with always ‘the decisive support of the Armed Forces’. This strategy, according to González Calleja, was inspired by the Nazi seizure of power from January 1933. ⁹ The weakness of these emotive ‘antifascist’ comparisons can clearly be seen if one recalls that Gil Robles, the party leader, never became prime minister; indeed, the CEDA only ever managed to occupy three ministerial posts. While it is true that Gil Robles became War Minister for a few months in 1935, it is clearly absurd to compare his actions to that of the Nazis, if only because the CEDA leader always defended his actions in parliament (where his party did not have an absolute majority) and not violently in the streets. More importantly, after the Socialist-led insurrection of October 1934 (seen by its organizers as defending democracy), Gil Robles repeatedly refused, despite the demands of the authoritarian monarchist right, to use the failed violent attempt to overthrow a legally constituted government as a pretext to launch a wave of terror similar to that witnessed in Nazi Germany after January 1933. ¹⁰

So it is evident that some historians are still resistant to recent scholarship showing that the CEDA was not a time-bomb waiting to detonate and destroy Republican democracy. The degree of resistance is related to the progress made in recent years by other historians in revealing the plurality and complexity of Spanish conservatism during the interwar period. This is because recent research does not simply demonstrate the increasing influence of corporative ideas among rightists but also the partisan and exclusive vision of Republican democracy propounded by their left-wing opponents. The need to portray politics in terms of ‘action/reaction’ is therefore a mechanism to understand the complexity of such political competition in which most left-wing parties barely accepted electoral defeat and did not expressly renounce violence.

In sum, the recent historiography on Spanish conservatism in the 1930s is characterized by the coexistence of profitable research with a worrying trend that refuses to engage with this research, defending obsolete views on the role of conservatives in the breakdown of democracy. As Chris Ealham’s recent review in this journal of The Second Spanish Republic Revisited (2012) illustrates, historians who critique simplistic and one-sided interpretations of the political development of the Second Republic are confronted by those determined to protect antifascist ‘truths’ of the 1930s. It is no wonder that The Second Spanish Republic Revisited, which exposed many of the myths still surrounding the CEDA, while showing the party’s internal contradictions and complexities, provoked such an extreme reaction. For writers still wedded to the myth of the ‘fascist’ CEDA, a book that shows both the pragmatism of the largest party on the Spanish right and its refusal to engage in violence (even in so difficult a context such as that of the end of 1935 and the beginning of 1936) cannot be considered with equanimity.

There is no doubt that the ‘possibilist’ right (CEDA) failed. It is very significant that in the last months of peace in 1936 (before the 18 July coup d’etat), both extreme monarchist authoritarians and most of the left turned their anger towards Gil Robles’s party. For the former, the CEDA was blamed for failing to crush the revolution before the electoral defeat of February 1936; the latter considered their fallen opponents as mere ‘clerico-fascists’ exploiting democratic freedoms to destroy the Republic. But the CEDA did not ultimately collapse because its strategies were doomed to failure or because it was always primarily interested in a violent overthrow of the Republic. The reasons are more complex than this. The first is that the ‘possibilist’ right was always considered by those supporting the 1931 Constitution as a dangerous adversary that had to be nullified. With the important exception of the Republican Radical Party, those to the left of the CEDA were not prepared to recognize that many Spaniards did not support their vision of the Republic. This can be seen by the visceral reaction to the CEDA’s success in the 1933 general election. Second, the integration of Catholics within the Republican system was stymied by President Alcalá-Zamora’s obstinate refusal to permit any constitutional reform or appoint Gil Robles (the leader of the largest parliamentary party between 1933 and 1935) as prime minister. Thus in December 1935, the President (a former monarchist) handed the keys of power to Manuel Portela Valladares (another ex-monarchist) in order to ‘make’ a new centrist Republican party via the time-honoured process of electoral manipulation. Finally, the CEDA was a heterogeneous organization always prone to schism if Gil Robles’s strategy of ideological pragmatism failed to produce any tangible short-term results.

But I suppose that such arguments hold little interest for writers such as Ealham who prefer to denounce illusionary ‘revisionist’ conspiracies than debate the issues. Fortunately, such abuse does not intimidate those interested in providing an objective and multifaceted analysis of the role of Spanish conservatism in the 1930s.