Spain: A Unique History (31 page)

The first test occurred with the elections of June 28, 1931, which were swept by the new republican coalition. Monarchists and conservatives found themselves in disarray, ill-prepared to contest the elections. Even so, the new republican forces were determined to dominate, and in cities and provinces where the opposition made a serious effort, it was harassed and in some cases shut down altogether. Because of the confusion and disarray of the right, the republican coalition was bound to win these elections even under scrupulously democratic conditions, but the degree of electoral control and harassment of the opposition demonstrated that "republicanism" did not by any means indicate a clear break with the electoral practices of the monarchist regime.

The new system introduced a series of rapid changes, and in the early twentieth century change tended to fragment. The variety of new political parties and movements was extraordinary, one of the most varied and diverse to be found in any country in the world. These groups represented quite varied agendas, making it difficult to achieve unity behind a single democratic, parliamentary program, all of which has been commented on ad infinitum in the historical studies of the period.

A brief tour d'horizon of the political scene reveals this diversity and how little agreement existed in support of any specific project. The initial republican coalition was composed of three distinct elements: the Left republicans, the centrist liberal or moderate republicans, and the Socialists. Each had a different political agenda, which only with the greatest difficulty could be combined and coordinated into a common and coordinated republicanism.

The group that led the government during the first biennium, setting the tempo and much of the agenda, were the Left republicans, at first composed of several different parties, several of which eventually collapsed, until by 1934 the main Left republican force was the party of Izquierda Republicana (Republican Left), led by Manuel Azaña. The only other major and enduring Left republican group was the Esquerra Catalana (Catalan Left). Though the Left republicans frequently gestured toward democracy, they were not as interested in constitutional democracy, free elections, and the rule of law as they were in a new kind of radically reformist regime. It was this regime of radical middle-class reformism that they referred to as "la República" and "el republicanismo," compared with which procedural democracy was secondary. In their concept, republicanism stood for a vigorously anti-Catholic program, separating church and state, eliminating Catholic education, and strictly controlling Catholic interests and activities. This was to be accompanied by other major institutional reforms dealing with education, culture, Catalan autonomy, and the reorganization and subordination of the military. In 1933-34 it was broadened to include extensive intervention in the economy as well, but remained primarily a program of cultural, educational, religious, and institutional reforms oriented toward the secularized sectors of the middle classes.
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The problem was that this program was never supported by more than about 20 percent of the electorate. Even if this figure were slightly increased, it would be nowhere near a majority, so that Azaña always recognized that the Left republicans had no hope of maintaining themselves in power without the support of the Socialists.

The Socialists, however, accepted the Left republican program only as an initial minimum program, their own goal being the construction of an economically collectivist socialist regime. The Socialists were no more than "semiloyal," at best, to a democratic nonsocialist Republic, so their alliance with the Left republicans was inevitably limited and circumstantial. Whenever the development of the Republic took a path that would not lead to socialism, the Socialists would cease to support the Republic. But since the popular vote of the Socialists also never amounted to much more than 20 percent — scarcely more than the Left republicans — it was not clear how a socialist regime could be established by democratic republican politics alone.

Did Azaña's concept of an exclusively leftist, radically reformist republic therefore make any sense if it was not going to lead to a socialist regime? Azaña seems initially to have believed that full Socialist support would be needed for no more than a few years, after which a united coalition of middle-class republican parties in a radically reformed Spain might have the strength to govern. The other main republican force, the parties of the moderate liberal democratic center, soon refused to maintain the alliance with the Socialists — who did not accept the democratic regime as an ultimate goal — nor did they agree with the extent or radicalism of the reforms imposed by a government led by Left republicans and Socialists. To maintain the strictly leftist option, the Left republicans were thus dependent on the Socialists, who nonetheless refused simply to settle for the Left republican program. Though for the moment disunited, Left republicans and Socialists rejected the results of the second republican elections of 1933, which returned a majority for the moderate republicans and the Catholic Right. Left Republicans and Socialists immediately launched a series of attempts to cancel the results of the most honest and democratic elections in Spanish history. Much more than the contest of 1931, the elections of 1933 reflected the competition of a fully mobilized electorate, and would constitute the freest and fairest contest known to Spain until 1977.
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If even the Left republicans would not accept the results of democratic elections, the question of the future of a democratic republic lay in grave doubt.

The only large party to support a democratic republic tout court were the Radicals, whose share of the vote was, mutatis mutandis, no greater than that of the Left republicans. At one point the Radicals had sought to form an all-republican government (that is, a coalition of all the republican parties), but the virtual disappearance of the Left republicans in the new elections made that impossible. The Radicals were therefore willing to work with the moderate Right, in this case the new Catholic party, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas — Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rightist Groups), which had suddenly emerged as the largest party in Spain; with only about 30 percent of the vote, however, it was far from having a majority.

From June 1933 the key figure in Spanish politics was not any of the major party leaders but the president of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, who, because of the extreme political fragmentation, assumed a dominant role. The Republican constitution required that each parliamentary government face a "double responsibility" — responsible not merely to a majority of the Cortes but also to the approval of the president of the Republic, who had the power to force the resignation of any cabinet of ministers. Alcalá-Zamora used this prerogative with a vengeance, further destabilizing Republican politics.

He was a veteran of the Old Regime, a former leader of one of the more progressive wings of the old monarchist Liberal Party. A practicing Catholic, scrupulously honest in his personal affairs, Alcalá-Zamora in theory supported the Republic as a liberal democratic system. He opposed both radical anti-Catholic reformism and any form of rightist authoritarianism, believing that he had a special responsibility to "center the Republic," as he put it. To that end he constantly interfered in parliamentary affairs, making and unmaking governments according to his own will, to the extent that he himself became one of the Republic's chief political problems.

As Alcalá-Zamora saw it, the main problem facing the Republic was the resurgence of the Right in the form of the CEDA. José María Gil Robles and the other leaders of the CEDA did not propose monarchist restoration but affirmed drastic reform of the constitution and the establishment of a system of Catholic corporatism. As the chief representative of the Catholic middle classes, the CEDA stood for law and order, and carefully obeyed the law, but despite this "legalist" posture, Alcalá-Zamora refused to allow the largest parliamentary party to form a government. First he engineered a minority government of the Radicals, supported by CEDA votes, and — when the latter finally demanded a share of power, Cedo-Radical coalition governments, always led by the Radicals — which governed from October 1934 to September 1935. The Socialists used the entry of three CEDA ministers into the government in 1934 as an excuse to launch a revolutionary insurrection, the fourth revolutionary insurrection in less than three years (following three smaller ones by the anarchosyndicalists of the CNT-FAI). From that point the country was increasingly polarized between Left and Right, between revolution and counterrevolution.

Alcalá-Zamora seized the initiative once more in September 1935 and soon thereafter manipulated certain corruption charges to discredit the Radicals. He then dissolved parliament prematurely and unnecessarily, calling new elections for February 1936. He suffered from the illusion that his government could invent a new centrist party to replace the Radicals, but this attempt at government control and coercion failed altogether, leading to a victory of the Left in the new elections. Alcalá-Zamora had failed completely in his attempt to "center the Republic."

The only political sector that supported a liberal democratic government, with honest elections and fair rules of the game, was the republican center. The only large center party, the Radicals, had expanded rapidly and then completely lost all cohesion amid the corruption charges of 1935. Of the large parties, only the Radicals believed in "a Republic for all Spaniards," as Lerroux put it, abandoning most of their old anticlericalism and rejecting extreme changes either by the right or left. Yet this newly expanded Radical Party was a weak coalition of liberals, pragmatists, and opportunists, sound and constructive in its basic orientation but novel, rootless, and centrifugal in its membership, too weak internally to face a major challenge.
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Beyond the Radicals, the other centrist parties were small and weak, with the partial exception of the Lliga Catalana. President Alcalá-Zamora, who proposed to lead the center and a liberal democratic Republic, undermined both with his egotism and manipulations, which made genuine parliamentary government impossible.
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The two largest parties of Left and Right, the Socialists and the CEDA, in some respects mirrored each other as semiloyal parties. The Socialists supported the Republican government from 1931 to 1933, with the stipulation that it must soon move into socialism. The CEDA supported the Republican government during 1933-35, expecting that it would lead to drastic constitutional changes and eventually a corporative system. The key difference was that the CEDA rejected violence and followed a strict policy of legalism (with the possible exception of the administration of a few electoral districts in Granada province in February 1936).
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The extreme Right (monarchists, Carlists, Falangists) all firmly rejected the Republic but were too weak to have any political effect, all their conspiracies coming to naught. The same might be said of the revolutionary extreme Left. Down to 1934-35 the anarchosyndicalists of the CNT-FAI, Communists, and the independent Communist BOC/POUM all sought to overthrow the Republic by violent revolutionary means, but were too weak to achieve anything, the three anarchist insurrections failing completely.
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The key elements in republican affairs were the republican parties themselves, even though all combined they could scarcely have achieved a majority of the vote in fully competitive elections. Their mutual enmity cast doubt on the future of the regime. From 1934 on, Azaña and the Left republicans chose to ally themselves with the worker revolutionaries, abandoning any pretense of merely supporting a liberal democratic Republic of equal rights for all, in favor of a leftist exclusionary Republic. Due to the disastrous leadership of Alcalá-Zamora, the centrist liberals managed the astonishing feat of self-destruction, so that after February 1936 supporters of a liberal democratic Republic with equal rights for all had shrunk to a tiny minority in the Cortes.

Historians can agree that the Spanish Civil War began on the weekend of July 17-20, 1936, when in a variety of poorly coordinated actions various garrisons and units of the Spanish army rebelled against the Republican regime. Ever since that time, supporters of the Left have held that the cause and origin of the Civil War are perfectly clear — it was the military revolt. No military revolt, no civil war. In the most immediate sense, this is an obvious and logical argument.

Supporters of the military rebels, however, from the very beginning argued that this was a gross oversimplification. They contended — and their supporters still contend — that the civil breakdown had already taken place in the unprecedented decline of the rule of law in Spain during the spring and early summer of 1936. Some have even contended that the Civil War began initially in October 1934, with the revolutionary insurrection of the Socialists. The military revolt was held to have taken place not against the legal order, but to restore a legal order and to put an end to widespread civil conflict that long predated July 1936.

The contention is also made that the military revolt per se did not necessarily begin a civil war, since it was intended to be more like a pronunciamiento or coup d'état. According to this argument, the war began not on July 17-18 with the start of the military revolt but on July 19 , when the Left Republican government began to "arm the people," that is, to give weapons en masse to the leftist worker organizations. This sought to create a second armed force with which to combat the insurgent sector of the army, opening the way to widespread civil war. According to this interpretation, the Republican government, when faced with a massive challenge like Alfonso XIII on April 14, 1931, should also have responded like Don Alfonso — who said he wanted to avoid civil war — by handing over power. That would certainly have been a means by which the Republican government could have avoided civil war, but the weakness in this argument, at least by analogy with the collapse of the monarchy, was that in 1931 there were not two potentially large and polarized forces — Left and Right — as in 1936.