Spain: A Unique History (42 page)

No other government not in the war engaged in such extensive collaboration with the Axis, even though much of this collaboration was entirely or partially covert. This did not mean, however, that Madrid followed an absolutely clear-cut policy. It was also necessary at least temporarily to play a double game and to placate Britain and the United States, whose fleets controlled the Atlantic and on whom the survival of the Spanish economy depended, producing the element of ambiguity that always characterized Madrid's official policy. Then, as the war became more complicated, what at one time was conceived as a short-term necessity became a long-term policy. Franco generally agreed with Hitler and the German diplomats when they told him that his regime could never survive a military defeat of Germany. He sought to avoid any such outcome to the war, and in 1943 attempted to arrange a compromise peace, an effort that failed completely and did not gain the slightest cooperation from Hitler. As late as the beginning of 1944, Franco and some of his chief associates could not imagine that the Third Reich would be totally defeated. Rather, they hoped that it would still survive the war as a power, while they demonstrated to Hitler that Spain was Germany's last major friend, and so would be positioned to enjoy German support once the war ended. Only in the summer of 1944 did Franco accept the fact that Germany would be totally defeated, and by that time he simply had to hope that the pledges from Britain and the United States not to intervene militarily in Spain were valid. Indeed they were, though both London and Washington hoped that Franco would soon disappear or be overthrown.

In 1945 Franco was almost universally denounced as "the last surviving fascist dictator," and would never entirely escape "the Axis stigma."
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Nonetheless, most scholars conclude that the Spanish regime was not intrinsically fascist, though it included aspects of fascism.

One of Franco's fundamental goals was not to repeat "el error Primo de Rivera" of leading a "hollow" or Latin American-style dictatorship without serious political content. Hence the partial adoption of the Italian model in 1937, though Franco made it clear that this was not an attempt merely to imitate Mussolini or anyone else but to create a new kind of Spanish system. He left it open-ended so long as the Civil War lasted, and the uncertainties of World War II then further extended the interregnum process. The events of 1941 nonetheless demonstrated that he intended to keep the Falange firmly under control and not permit the development of a true party-regime. Movement toward establishment of a corporative Cortes during 1942-43 was not much of a change in one direction or another, however, and to some extent was consistent with an Italian model.

More significant was the beginning of defascistization that began in August 1943, one month after the fall of Mussolini. By then it was becoming clear that whether or not Germany would be totally defeated, the war would not be followed by the political triumph of fascism as such, and the Spanish regime began to trim its sails. Along with this the goals of major militarization, so strong in 1939-41, had been abandoned and also those of imperial expansion. Even so, Franco generally moved slowly, so that the metamorphosis of the regime — into a corporative and ultra-Catholic system that by 1947 would be nominally converted to monarchy — was not in place until the middle of 1945, very nearly but not quite too late.

The regime survived, for several reasons. One was the political metamorphosis that Franco carried out, and another the implacable determination of the Caudillo himself, impassive amid the international ostracism of 1945-48. At the end of the greatest war in history, the only major power willing to promote some sort of direct intervention in Spain was the Soviet Union, but fortunately for Franco, Moscow was too far away. The opposition remained divided and did not present a convincing alternative in 1945, seeming to many to offer only the revival of the Civil War. The polarization of the 1930s paralyzed the possibility of the development of democracy in Spain for an entire generation, and even a leftist critic of Franco such as Gerald Brenan concluded that the country would have to remain under authoritarian rule for some time, until it had outgrown the conflicts of the past.

The second phase of franquismo, from 1945 to 1959, was unique in contemporary politico-cultural history not in downplaying fascism, which was inevitable, but in striving to complete the counterrevolution begun in 1936 and to sustain the only national neotraditionalist religious revival seen on such a scale in the Western world in the twentieth century — the only national Christian equivalent, however temporary, to the revival of Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim world. Despite the triumph of the counterrevolution, Spain nonetheless remained essentially a modern Western — that is, secularizing — country — and the forces of secularization quickly began to win out again after 1960.

In its final fifteen years the Spain of Franco ended with the most sustained burst of economic development and social prosperity in the country's history. To Franco's many critics, his only relationship to this was "dumb luck" — he happened to remain as dictator during a great phase of European prosperity to which his ministers managed to connect the Spanish economy. It is certainly true that Franco did not understand modern development economics, but not so true that his leadership had nothing to do with rapid growth. From the beginning, he had made it clear that he intended to endow Spain with modern industry and technology, and thus achieve prosperity, but he believed that this could best be accomplished through a statist, autarchist program of "military economics." That model proved disastrous in the early 1940s, although it functioned to a certain extent during the 1950s, by the end of which it was totally exhausted. Franco was sufficiently realistic, unlike many Communist and other dictators, to accept the alternatives prescribed by his ministers. He did not understand these alternatives and was in fact skeptical of them, but to his credit and to the well-being of Spain, he did not reject them.

It has been observed that the changes and achievements in Spain under Franco can be divided into three categories: (1) those that Franco deliberately set out to bring about; (2) those that resulted from his policies as unintended effects; and (3) those that he opposed but could not prevent, though it may be artificial to try to separate unintended consequences between categories 2 and 3. The long duration of the dictatorship and the depoliticization of Spanish society were fundamental goals and achievements, which also made it possible to transcend the era of civil war. Economic modernization and prosperity were also fundamental goals, though Franco's own economic ideas would have been totally inadequate for the process.

Restoration of the monarchy was also Franco's plan, though the political decisions subsequently made by Juan Carlos fall into category 2 of unintended consequences. Similarly a certain institutionalization and depoliticization of the military was a goal, though Franco would probably not have expected this to go so far as acquiescence of the military in the dismantling of his regime. Equally, Franco intended to create an institutionalized system, which to some extent was achieved, yet he would never have intended that its institutions be used as legal mechanism to carry out a new model of transition and democratization, which is what happened. The "Spanish model" then to some extent became the standard for peaceful transition and democratization in Latin America, eastern Europe, and elsewhere. The regime eventually made a major effort to expand Spanish education on every level, and in the long run accomplished much more than any of its predecessors. The unintended consequence, however, was a better informed and more critical-minded society that preferred to embrace political change. What the regime indirectly accomplished was to prepare Spanish society to make good use of the opportunity for democracy, though that was never its intention.

What Franco never wanted at all were the profound cultural and religious changes that accompanied economic modernization and social transformation. He seems to have had the idea that economic development could be combined with traditionalist culture, but that was impossible. Franco desired a certain social transformation to create larger middle-class sectors in Spanish society, but he was appalled at the social, cultural, and religious consequences. To him, the most incomprehensible change was the secularization of culture and society in the 1960s and 1970s, which seemed to deny everything that the regime stood for.

The question is sometimes raised of Franco's place among the major dictators of the twentieth century. He did not wield either the power or the radical program of a Hitler or a Stalin, nor did he follow the intrinsically fascist priorities of a Mussolini. Similarly, he cannot be compared in equivalent terms with his longtime peninsular neighbor, Dr. António de Oliveira Salazar. Salazar was a university professor, an intellectual, and a fine literary stylist. More conservative than Franco, he also directed a more moderate regime, which he firmly and clearly endowed with a corporative constitution in 1933, remaining faithful to that model, even though it involved a partial compromise with limited residues of liberalism. Salazar never enjoyed undisputed domination of the Portuguese military, which frequently conspired against him, but his genuine wartime neutrality and rejection of the fascist model made his regime much more internationally acceptable, at least until the final African wars.

Javier Tusell has suggested that in some ways Franco can be usefully compared with the Yugoslav dictator Tito. At first glance it would seem counterintuitive to compare Franco with a Communist, yet there are notable similarities and contrasts. Like Franco, Tito led a one-party state that won power in a bloody civil war, one that Tito concluded with a massive repression which, in proportion to the population, may have claimed three times as many victims as that of Franco. Spain was not a new invention like Yugoslavia: both countries faced severe problems of internal unity. Both dictators also imposed political metamorphoses a few years apart, though of differing types. While Franco had to move beyond a semifascist model, Tito had eventually to abandon Leninist orthodoxy and try to develop a more liberal and reformist mode of Communism. Both found new sources of support during the Cold War, though Tito officially followed a neutralist policy. Both dictators were harshly condemned by the Soviet Union, which encouraged the overthrow of Franco and made a number of attempts to assassinate Tito. Both dictators enjoyed a kind of international rehabilitation, though as a rightist dictator Franco never enjoyed the adulation that the Western political leadership and intelligentsia tended to lavish on Tito, primarily for ideological reasons. Both dictators ruled for very long periods, and both presided over a long period of economic development and modernization, though in this regard Franco more fully abandoned his initial ideological rigidity and enjoyed greater success. Franco left Spain at a higher level of development in every respect. Both political systems imploded after the death of the dictator, but Spain underwent a peaceful transition to democracy, and Yugoslavia once more collapsed into civil war.

Near the final phase of his regime, Franco declared publicly that he was leaving everything "tied and well-tied." Did he really relieve that? There is every indication that he was shrewd enough to appreciate that some things would have to change after his death, yet he apparently believed that the fundamental essence of the regime could survive him. According to the testimony of Adolfo Suárez, shortly before his death Franco inquired whether the Movimiento Nacional could in some form endure. Suárez replied that it could not, responding affirmatively when the aged Caudillo asked if Spain then had "an inevitably democratic future." At the very end of his life, Franco may have intuited fairly clearly what Juan Carlos was likely to do, but by that point he was far too weak and exhausted, near death's door, to contemplate any further alternative.

Franco's death marked the end of a very long historical epoch, the era of the "Spanish ideology" of the unity, continuity, Catholic identity, and mission of a traditional culture and set of institutions whose roots lay in the eighth century or earlier. This long epoch of one-and-a-quarter millennia had perhaps the broadest chronological span of any national-ideological complex in Europe, even though it underwent innumerable variations and metamorphoses during those centuries. With Franco it was laid to rest, presumably forever. He was the last great historical figure of Spanish traditionalism, who sought unsuccessfully to combine modernization and tradition. After his death, Spain entered another historical era and, with more than a little anguish, sought a new identity.

In the twenty-first century the Spanish army weakens steadily both as a national institution and also as a combat force, to the extent that one wonders if any longer it can be considered as either of these. From this vantage point it is instructive to survey the role played by the military during the era of modernization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Spanish army probably passed more years engaged in some form of combat during the nineteenth century than did any other European army of that period; most of this activity was dedicated to civil war or colonial campaigns, with major international conflict only at the beginning and end of the century. What seemed most prominent was not its military but its political role, to the extent that the army appeared to be one of the major problems in Spain.

Before turning to the army as a military institution, it is important to consider the reason for its political prominence, greater than in Portugal or Greece, much greater than in Italy, comparable in the nineteenth century only to Latin American countries. Was this a "thesis" or an "antithesis"? That is, was the political initiative of the military due to a primary desire by the military itself for political domination, or was it an antithetical response to the weakness of political institutions, a response to the failure of the politicians? Any careful examination of the history of the military in modern Spain is likely to conclude that the political hypertrophy of the military stemmed from the weakness of political institutions, rather than from the dreams of the military to dominate the country, though sometimes the former did indeed lead to the latter.
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