Spain: A Unique History (30 page)

Regenerationism, in a great variety of guises, became the watchword well into the 1930s, and even after. This took three forms: political, socioeconomic, and cultural. Both cultural and socioeconomic regenerationism were quite successful. Building on some already significant achievements of the late nineteenth century, the writers and artists of what later would be known as the Silver Age raised Spanish culture to its highest comparative level since the third quarter of the seventeenth century. Economic development and social transformation continued to accelerate until 1930. Political regenerationism was the least successful.
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The process of political democratization was difficult throughout central, southern, and eastern Europe, and, for that matter, had been enormously conflictive in nineteenth-century France. There was no reason to expect that it would be anything other than difficult in Spain, as well. As in much of southern and eastern Europe, the foundation in terms of literacy and social and economic development had not been laid prior to World War I, and in Spain would only begin partially to emerge during the dramatic transformation of the 1920s. The older restrictive, elitist systems encountered increasing stress in every European country either before or immediately after the war, though in almost every case the upheaval led to the introduction of nominal universal male suffrage, except in Portugal. Yet by the 1930s, the new democratic parliamentary systems had given way to authoritarian regimes almost everywhere save Czechoslovakia. Thus it was in no way surprising that Spain and Portugal encountered severe difficulties.

World War I and the Russian revolution initiated a generation of political and social conflict absolutely without precedent in European history, what has sometimes been called the era of international civil war. The interwar generation presented Spain with a grave political dilemma analogous to that of a century earlier, yet more extreme and more complex, due to the consequences of modernization. In both cases, the old order was clearly inadequate, while sufficient conditions for a new order were not yet at hand. To cite the words of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, "The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In the interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." Spain simply had no easy or simple way out of this predicament. As it was, several other European countries did even worse.

The Restoration regime had been the most appropriate for Spain in the late nineteenth century. As David Ringrose has written, "Rather than reading the topic teleologically, as Spain's failure to be as democratic as it should have been, we should view Spain's combination of parliament, elections, and traditional patronage as a phase in the evolution of political culture that appeared all over Europe" (and, indeed, in parts of the United States, as well).
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It was based on what Carlos Dardé has fittingly called "the acceptance of the adversary," involving what the Italians called "trasformismo," with continuing reform and the co-optation and inclusion of new adversarial elites.

Reformism began to falter with the failure of the Maura and Canalejas governments between 1909 and 1912, after which the system began to fragment and enter crisis, reaching a low point in 1917 with the impact of the war and major new social and political mobilization.
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Salvador de Madariaga, the Spanish writer and diplomat, has considered the failure of the diverse reform movements of 1917 the turning point in the history of the constitutional monarchy.

The old elitist, pre-democratic political parties had outlived their usefulness, and were fragmented and ineffective, while the final effort to reunify the Liberal Party in 1923 was not very successful.
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The alternative in 1923 was to encourage greater reform and democratization or to attempt reform differently under an authoritarian government. Choice of the latter would fail to provide any lasting solution, or to achieve genuine reform, since Spanish society had long been predominantly liberal, while workers and farm laborers were becoming increasingly politically conscious and leftist.

Spain did not possess all the qualities needed for a successful civil society of democracy, yet a counterfactual case can be made that democratization might have stood a better chance after 1923 than after 1931.
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Despite the growth of the revolutionary worker movements, in 1923 Spanish civil society had been trained to live under an evolutionary, reformist constitutional monarchy and might have responded positively, not with radicalization, to democratic reforms. During the preceding generation the main republican forces had taken increasingly moderate positions, and were in considerable measure disposed to cooperate with a reformist parliamentary monarchy. As it was, the sequence of events between 1923 and 1931 was destructive in the extreme. It must always be kept in mind, however, that democracy failed everywhere in central, southern, and eastern Europe except for Switzerland and Czechoslovakia. Modernization produces fragmentation, and the fragmentation had become so extreme in Spain that the country was not likely to have become an exception to the failure of democracy.

If democratization was not possible, then continuation of a moderate authoritarian system for another fifteen years, until the end of 1945, would probably have been the second-best solution. For example, the Pilsudski regime in Poland was, compared with other dictatorships, only moderately repressive and would have lasted for some time into the future had it not been for the sudden German invasion in 1939. Catholic, internally diverse, and still in large measure agrarian, Poland was the east European country most similar to Spain. Yet a "Pilsudski solution" was not possible in Spain, for several reasons: Since nationalism was weak in Spain, it could not serve as a unifying, stabilizing force as in Poland. Second, Primo de Rivera was no Pilsudski. Both were moderate, semiliberal authoritarians, but Primo de Rivera had no real political vision and no idea how to build a viable alternative regime. Franco was more brutal, but also more astute. At the end, Primo de Rivera could think of no way to prolong his system other than to try to copy Italian Fascism more directly, something not likely to work in Spain. Finally, the liberal tradition in Spain was so strong that Spanish opinion, even within the military, was simply not willing to tolerate authoritarian government for very long, despite unprecedented prosperity, once the initial problems that elicited authoritarianism seemed to have disappeared.

Collapse of the monarchy in 1931 was a grave blow. This was not because of anything magical about parliamentary monarchy, for most democracies do well enough without it. Rather, it was because Spain had experienced grave problems of stability in the preceding century and by 1930 was living amid a European political culture that was fragmenting and entering crisis conditions, which would inevitably have grave repercussions in Spain. For half a century the monarchy had been able to serve as a reasonably successful moderating power, both a symbol and a force for unity and continuity, qualities whose absence in Spain would soon lead to disaster.

It is a commonplace that Alfonso XIII was discredited by having consented to the dictatorship. Of this there is no question, and here the principal counterfactual issue would be whether an immediate return to general elections within six months of the downfall of the dictator might have permitted the return to a functional, reformist, and democratizing parliamentary monarchy. There is no guarantee that this would have been the case. The old monarchist parties had virtually disappeared, and their leaders were terrified of a new leap in the dark. But that leap eventually took place in April 1931, with a disastrous long-term outcome. In retrospect, new parliamentary elections in April or May 1930 would have been preferable. Even had this initiative failed, it is hard to see how the eventual outcome would have been worse.

Finally, what should be history's verdict on the political role of Alfonso XIII?
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Under the constitution of 1876, the king's role in the political system had been reduced, but he remained the crucial arbiter of access and the rotation between the two established parties. He was accused of interference and arbitrariness, and there were occasional instances of such action, but in general he strove to recognize and cooperate with the political forces generated by the system. To think that the king was personally responsible for the division, factionalism, blockage of reform, and growing pressure on the system is preposterous. Nor did he conspire with the dictator in 1923 but accepted the results of a pronunciamiento that no political or military force seemed willing to contest.
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Eventually, after it became more than clear that the dictator had lost support, the king asked for his resignation. This is not to say that the king's actions between September 1923 and December 1929 were wise or judicious. At various times he should doubtless have acted differently, but it should be recognized that he was called upon to deal with an increasingly complex and difficult situation, and that whatever happened was not primarily the result of any unique initiative taken or not taken by the king himself. At the end, he chose to vacate his throne rather than to encourage civil conflict. It was a tragedy that his successors on both the Left and the Right did not follow his example five years later.

Provincial divisions of modern Spain

Had anyone reading this book been in Madrid or Barcelona on the evening of April 14, 1931, or the day following, the scenes of jubilation, accompanied by the general absence of violence, would have convinced him that the new Republic was welcomed by the vast majority of Spanish society. A logical corollary might be that the latter possessed the civic maturity and responsibility to enable a twentieth-century democracy to function successfully. But, as everyone knows, this did not prove to be the case.

There remain certain standard explanations for the failure of the Republic. For the Left, this stemmed from the unremitting hostility of the Right, which refused to accept "reforms." For the Right, it resulted from the violence and extremism of the Left, aided and abetted by Moscow, which never intended to practice democracy. For more than a few professional scholars, it stemmed from the civic immaturity and polarization of Spanish society, influenced by the European conjuncture. In fact, these various explanations should not be seen as mutually exclusive, for there are elements of truth in all of them. The factors involved will be taken up in the succeeding chapters, but any reexamination of the problems of the Republic must begin with the republicans themselves.

There is no doubt that by 1931 a large part, probably the majority, of Spanish political opinion wished to see the inauguration of political democracy, even though such an interest was not shared by at least a large minority of political opinion. This was partly the result of the six and a half years of direct dictatorship — something never seen before in Spanish affairs — which "inoculated" a sizable part of political opinion against authoritarian solutions. Another fundamental factor was the revolution of rising expectations wrought by the transformation of Spanish society in the 1920s. During those years the rhythm of economic growth, social and cultural transformation, and expansion of education was the most rapid in all of Spanish history to that time. This resulted in greatly heightened expectations of change and improvement, both among the lower classes and among much of the middle classes as well. The experience of the Republic cannot be understood without keeping in mind this background of rapid and sweeping transformation. The standard image of "backward Spain" is not incorrect, for the country remained underdeveloped in comparison with northwestern Europe, but it altogether fails to capture the pace of change and the sociocultural dynamism at work from the late 1920s on. The most important conditioning factor was not the influence of "underdevelopment" but rather the profound psychological effects of rapid change and the ways in which the country was ceasing to be merely underdeveloped. All this led to greatly increased expectations, not merely in the political realm but also in social and economic affairs.

A basic problem was that political society had not naturally evolved through reformism into democratic practice, but had lost contact with its own parliamentary traditions — thanks to the hiatus of the dictatorship. A new democratic republic was being attempted ab ovo with new leaders and mostly new political organizations, all something of a leap in the dark.

With the exception of the Radical Republican Party of Alejandro Lerroux, the republican parties of 1931 were of comparatively recent creation, as indeed some of the leaders themselves were recent converts to republicanism. Several of the key moderate figures, such as Niceto Alcalá-Zamora and Miguel Maura, became republicans only in 1930, and most of the other republican parties had been formed only in recent years. Moreover, most of the new leaders had little political experience, so the depth of their commitment to democracy could only be demonstrated under the new regime.