dictatorship would guarantee the determination of sectors of the armed forces to derail the new democracy established in the late 1970s. Fortunately, popular distrust of the armed forces came to an end with the democratization of the army after the military reforms carried out during the first Socialist government. Generational change within the officer corps and the entry of Spain into NATO have seen a dramatic reversal of popular perception of the armed forces and the Civil Guard, which are now among the most highly rated institutions in Spain. Popular perception of Spain’s problems puts the political class second only behind unemployment.7
Equally damaging to Spain’s attempts to attain modernity was the dead hand of the Catholic Church. In the civil wars of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Catholic Church took sides against the threat of liberalism and modernization. Besieged by violent popular anti-clericalism and impoverished by the disentailment of its lands in the 1830s and 1850s, the Church allied itself with the powerful. Already by the 1880s the Church, in its educational provision for the middle and upper classes, had become the legitimizing agent of the socio-economic and political system. The history of the Catholic Church in Spain in the twentieth century parallels that of the country itself. Almost every major political upheaval of a turbulent period – with the possible exception of the revolutionary crisis of 1917–23 – had its religious backcloth and a crucial, and often reactionary, role for the Church hierarchy.
What follows interleaves these themes of military and ecclesiastical influence, popular contempt for the political class, bitter social conflict, economic backwardness and conflict between centralist nationalism and regional independence movements. It also places these processes in an international context. The breakdown of the Second Republic and the coming of the civil war are incomprehensible without consideration of the influence of international developments, particularly fascism and communism, on domestic developments. The course of the Spanish Civil War will be analysed with particular attention to the interplay between domestic and international factors in determining its outcome. In many respects, the Spanish conflict can be seen as either a rehearsal for the Second World War or as the location of its first battles. Spanish neutrality in the Second World War played a key role in the outcome of the conflict in Europe. The process whereby the Franco dictatorship shook off international ostracism to become the valued ally of the Western powers will be fully considered.
The book shows how Spain went from utter despair in 1898 on a roller coaster that culminated in the present state of almost comparable pessimism. The civil war was the most dramatic of a series of uneven struggles between the forces of reform and reaction which had punctuated Spanish history from 1808 to the present day. There is a curious pattern in Spain’s modern and contemporary history, arising from a frequent desfase, or lack of synchronization, between the social reality and the political power structure ruling over it. Lengthy periods during which reactionary elements have used political and military power to hold back social progress were followed by outbursts of revolutionary fervour. In the 1850s, in the 1870s, between 1910 and 1912, between 1917 and 1923 and above all during the Second Republic, efforts were made to bring Spanish politics into line with the country’s social reality. This inevitably involved attempts to redistribute wealth, especially on the land, which in turn provoked reactionary efforts to stop the clock and reimpose the traditional order of social and economic power. Thus were progressive movements crushed by General O’Donnell in 1856, by General Pavia in 1874, by General Primo de Rivera in 1923 and by General Franco between 1936 and 1939. It took the horrors of the civil war and the nearly four decades of dictatorship that followed to break the pattern. The moderation shared by the progressive right and a chastened left underlay a bloodless transition to democracy.
The pattern of conflict between the political establishment and sociological development – progressive forces pushing for change until driven back by violence and the imposition of dictatorship – changed in 1977. Nevertheless, the new democratic establishment was tainted by the old ways. As asserted by Baltasar Garzón, one of the judges who has worked to eliminate corruption: ‘In Spain, no one has ever been afraid to be corrupt. Given that its existence was taken for granted, corruption is not something that has bothered the average citizen. This indifference has ensured that its roots have grown deep and solid and sustain a structure of interests that is very difficult to bring down.’ In the view of Garzón, the justice system has contributed to this situation: ‘Judgments that are laid down after long years of delay, laughable sentences, incomprehensible dismissals or shelving of cases, unacceptable collusions and connivance …’8
Throughout the entire period covered by this book, corruption and political incompetence have had a corrosive effect on political coexistence and social cohesion. Spain’s transition to democracy has been widely admired. Nevertheless, the scale of uninterrupted corruption and periodic ineptitude demonstrated by the political class at various levels of society since 1982 has been remarkable. Politicians of both right and left have been unable or unwilling to deal with corruption and the pernicious clash between Spanish centralist nationalism and regional desires for independence. Only during brief periods in the early 1930s and in the first years of the transition to democracy was there a degree of public respect for politicians. However, widespread contempt and resentment have intensified anew during the economic crisis of recent years. The boom of the 1990s fostered corruption and witnessed political incompetence on an unprecedented scale. From the late 1980s to the present day, endemic corruption and renewed nationalist ferment has brought disillusionment with the political class almost full circle. While not at the unrepeatable low point of 1898, politicians are nevertheless rated by the Spanish population far lower than could have been imagined when the transition to democracy was being hailed as a model for other countries.
A satirical cartoon published in the magazine La Araña in August 1885. ‘Poor Spain. How beautiful she is. The more they strip her, the more beautiful she is.’ Among the watching European leaders are Otto von Bismarck and King Umberto of Italy. Among those ripping the flag from her body are the architects of electoral corruption, Francisco Romero Robledo, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and Práxedes Mateo Sagasta.
1
Spanish Stereotypes? Passion, Violence and Corruption
Spain has often been seen through the myths of national character. One of the most persistent has been that of corruption and dishonesty, which owed much to the numerous translations into other European languages of the first and hugely popular picaresque novels, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Francisco de Quevedo’s El buscón (o Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado don Pablos; ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños) (written 1604, published 1626). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spain was a frequent, and conveniently exotic, setting for operas by foreigners. Among the most extreme examples of operas based on myths of national character, especially Spanish, are almost certainly Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Verdi’s Il trovatore and La forza del destino and Bizet’s Carmen. Artists wishing to portray violent passions drew upon a view of Spain, its history and its people as the embodiment of fanaticism, cruelty and uncontrolled emotion. This image went back to the Reformation, when a series of religiously inspired pamphlets had denounced the activities of the Spanish Inquisition, the Tribunal of the Holy Office and the terrors of the auto-da-fé. Religious hatreds aside, the European perception of Spain was confirmed by the experience of an empire in the Americas, Italy and Flanders built on greed and maintained by blood. The Peninsular Wars, or the wars of national independence, and the subsequent nineteenth-century series of civil wars did nothing to undermine stereotypes which survived into the twentieth century in the literature spawned by the Spanish Civil War.
Collectively, this view of Spain constituted what the Spaniards themselves came to call ‘the black legend’, the most extreme examples of which were collected in the celebrated work by the historian Julián Juderías, La leyenda negra. Combating the notion of universal laziness and violence, Juderías railed against ‘the legend of the inquisitorial, ignorant, fanatical Spain,