Abstract
In the context of Spain’s unabating public and scholarly debate around the country’s recent past, Julián Casanova and Carlos Gil Andrés’s Twentieth-Century Spain: A History performs a valuable public service. The book is a masterful synthesis of recent research, offering a readable and myth-busting account of Spain’s turbulent experience of Europe’s ‘dark’ century.
The first of the book’s five parts focuses on the monarchy of Alfonso XIII, a period typically described in terms of stagnation, if not decadence. But as Casanova and Gil Andrés point out, recent research shows that Spanish agriculture in this period saw modest growth and an ability to adapt to changing markets. There were also attempts at political reform, although here the traditional parties undeniably failed to make the structural changes needed to accommodate emerging social and political mass movements. The anti-democratic interventions of the King played a significant role in this failure, as did internal party crises and the deepening social conflicts following the First World War. General Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship (1923–31) sought to restore ‘order’ by halting the process of political inclusion, but ultimately and unwittingly played a decisive role in strengthening social support for a more radical democratic option, ending not only the dictatorship but also the monarchy which had endorsed it.
The Republican years (1931–9) form a particularly complex period of Spanish history, which Casanova and Gil Andrés dissect expertly. Their account of the pre-civil war years explains how conflicts over agriculture, labour reform, public order and religion deprived Republican reformers of a social mass base. The many political crises of the counter-reformist cabinets of 1933–6 are also analysed in detail, especially in relation to the general strike of October 1934. The strike marked a high-point of prewar social conflicts, yet the authors reasonably assert that it did not spell an inevitable end to peaceful co-existence in Spain. It cannot be considered the ‘opening battle’ of the civil war, as some revisionists claim, since a workers’ uprising is not comparable with a rebellion supported by sections of the armed forces of the state.
What really ended any chance of peaceful co-existence in the Spanish Republic was the military coup of July 1936. Casanova and Gil Andrés offer a balanced assessment of the terror unleashed on both sides by the coup before analysing the different political realities faced by the Republic and the military rebels, soon under the undisputed leadership of General Francisco Franco. The internal fragmentation suffered by the Republic naturally weakened its ability to wage total war, but in response to the fundamental question of why the Republic lost the war Casanova and Gil Andrés ultimately stress the unfavourable international climate. An asymmetrical Non-Intervention Treaty enforced by Britain and France allowed Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy generously to aid the rebel campaign, while the Republic’s war effort, bolstered in more modest ways by the Soviet Union, was severely hampered by international restrictions.
From an international perspective, the war was only the beginning of a longer history in which the attitudes of European governments would consistently favour the exclusionary project led by Franco. Spain’s non-belligerence during the Second World War saved the regime when the winds turned against the Axis, and Franco’s credentials as an anti-communist helped him secure economic and military aid from the US from 1953 onwards. The liberalizing economic reforms of 1959 – known as the Stabilization Plan – showed that the dictatorship could also adapt domestically, even though Franco had been deeply suspicious of the reforms, which were designed by a team of government technocrats (a fact which characteristically did not prevent Franco from taking full credit for the ensuing economic boom). Yet such examples of flexibility should not blind us to the fact that Franco’s rule fundamentally continued to rest on violence and political mass exclusion. The year when the Stabilization Plan was launched also saw the inauguration of the Valley of the Fallen, a gigantic monument dedicated to the ‘martyrs’ of Franco’s ‘crusade’, celebrated by the regime in order to maintain civil war divisions in perpetuum. Still, when the dictator drew his last breath on 20 November 1975, the social structure on which he had based his dictatorship had all but vanished. Increasingly fossilized in a fast-changing world, the regime had become a relic from a former era.
However, despite the anachronistic nature of Franco’s dictatorship in 1970s Europe, its rapid dismantling was not a foregone conclusion; the transition to democracy was the outcome of complex negotiations, foreseen and unforeseen problems tackled in a climate of economic crisis and uncertainty. From this perspective, it was a remarkable achievement. But its success must not obscure the problematic nature of some of the compromises made at the time, notably, the amnesty law of 1977 and the related ‘Pact of Forgetting’. That this pact is now being questioned is not, as Casanova and Gil Andrés stress, an indication of a desire on the behalf of the defeated in the civil war to open old wounds and sow social discord, but rather ‘evidence of the maturity of a democratic society that is deciding to confront the ghosts of its past without fear’ (p. 354). In this task, the kind of evidence-based history presented here by Casanova and Gil Andrés is an indispensable tool.