A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ them were minimal. They were both monarchist and were divided not on social issues but over free trade and, to a much lesser extent, over religion. The northern industrial bourgeoisie was barely represented within the system but was, for the moment, content to devote its activities to economic expansion in an atmosphere of stability. Until, in the twentieth century, they would organize their own parties, the Catalan textile manufacturers were inclined to support the Liberals because of their shared interest in restrictive tariffs, while the Basques, exporters of iron ore, tended to support the Conservative free traders.

      It was virtually impossible for any political aspirations to find legal expression outside the two great oligarchical parties. Liberal and Conservative governments followed one another with soporific regularity. When results were not faked in the Ministry of the Interior, they were fixed at the local level. The system of electoral falsification rested on the social power of local town bosses or caciques (a South American Indian word meaning ‘chief’). In the northern small-holding areas, the cacique was usually a money lender, one of the bigger landlords, a lawyer or even a priest, who held mortgages on the small farms. In the areas of the great latifundio estates, New Castile, Extremadura or Andalusia, the cacique was the landowner or his agent, the man who decided who worked and therefore who did not starve. Caciquismo ensured that the narrow interests represented by the system were never seriously threatened.

      On occasion, over-zealous local officials would produce majorities by more than 100 per cent of the electorate. It was not unkown for results to be published before the elections took place. As the century wore on, casual falsification became somewhat more difficult and, if the requisite number of peasant votes could not be mustered, the caciques were said sometimes to register as voters the dead in the local cemetery. In consequence, politics became an exclusive minuet danced out by a small privileged minority. The nature of politics in the period of caciquismo is illustrated by the celebrated story of the cacique of Motril in the province of Granada. When the coach with the election results arrived from the provincial capital, they were brought to him in the local Casino (club). Leafing through them, he pronounced to the expectant hangers-on the following words: ‘We the Liberals were convinced that we would win these elections. However, the will of God has decreed otherwise.’ A lengthy pause. ‘It appears that we the Conservatives have won the elections’. Excluded from organized politics, the hungry masses could choose only between apathy and violence. The inevitable outbreaks of protest by the unrepresented majority were dealt with by the forces of order, the Civil Guard and, at moments of greater tension, the army.

      Challenges to the system did arise, however, and they were linked to the painfully slow but inexorable progress of industrialisation and to the brutal social injustices intrinsic to the latifundio economy. The 1890s were a period of economic depression which exacerbated the grievances of the lower classes, especially in the countryside. Land hunger was creating an increasingly desperate desire for change, the more so as the southern labourers came under the influence of anarchism. The arrival of anarchism in the 1860s had given a sense of hope and purpose to hitherto sporadic rural uprisings. Its message of justice and equality found eager converts among the starving day labourers or braceros. They took part in outbreaks of sporadic violence, crop-burnings and strikes. In January 1892, an army of braceros, armed only with scythes and sticks but driven by hunger, seized the town of Jerez. Anarchism also took root in the small workshops of the highly fragmented Catalan textile industry.

      The system was rocked in 1898 by defeat at the hands of the USA and the loss of the remnants of empire including Cuba. This was to have a catastrophic effect on the Spanish economy especially in Catalonia for whose products Cuba had been a protected market. Barcelona was the scene of sporadic strikes and acts of terrorism by both anarchists and government agents provocateurs. Moreover, by the turn of the century, the growth of coal, steel and textile industries in the north saw the emergence of a militant industrial proletariat. In the two decades before the First World War, the working class aristocracy of printers and craftsmen from the building and metal trades in Madrid, the steel and shipyard workers in Bilbao, and the coal-miners of Asturias began to swell the ranks of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), the Socialist Party founded in 1879, and its trade union organization, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). Surprisingly, however, when the inevitable explosion came, it was precipitated not by the rural anarchists or the urban working class but by the industrial bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, once the crisis started, proletarian ambitions came into play in such a way as to ensure that the basic polarisation of Spanish political life became starker than ever.

      The geometric symmetry of the Restoration system, with political power concentrated in the hands of those who also enjoyed the monopoly of economic power, was shattered by the coming of the First World War. Not only were political passions aroused by a bitter debate about whether Spain should intervene and on which side, accentuating growing divisions within the Liberal and Conservative parties, but massive social upheaval came in the wake of the war. The fact that Spain was a non-belligerent put her in the economically privileged position of being able to supply both the Entente and the Central Powers with agricultural and industrial products. Coalmine-owners from Asturias, Basque steel barons and shipbuilders, Catalan textile magnates all experienced a wild boom which constituted the first dramatic take-off for Spanish industry. The balance of power within the economic elite shifted somewhat. Agrarian interests remained pre-eminent but industrialists were no longer prepared to tolerate their subordinate political position. Their dissatisfaction came to a head in June 1916 when the Liberal Minister of Finance, Santiago Alba, attempted to impose a tax on the notorious war profits of northern industry without a corresponding measure to deal with those made by the agrarians. Although the move was blocked, it so underlined the arrogance of the landed elite that it precipitated a bid by the industrial bourgeoisie to carry through political modernisation.

      The discontent of the Basque and Catalan industrialists had already seen them mount challenges to the Spanish establishment by sponsoring regionalist movements – the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) and the Lliga Regionalista. Now the reforming zeal of industrialists enriched by the war coincided with a desperate need for change from a proletariat impoverished by it. Boom industries had attracted rural labour to towns where the worst conditions of early capitalism prevailed. This was especially true of Asturias and the Basque Country. At the same time, massive exports created shortages, rocketing inflation and plummeting living standards. The Socialist UGT and the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) were drawn together in the hope that a joint general strike might bring about free elections and then reform. While industrialists and workers pushed for change, middle-rank army officers were protesting at low wages, antiquated promotion structures and political corruption. A bizarre and short-lived alliance was forged in part because of a misunderstanding about the political stance of the Army.

      Military complaints were couched in the language of reform which had become fashionable after Spain’s loss of empire in 1898. Known as ‘Regenerationism’, it associated the defeat of 1898 with political corruption. Ultimately, ‘Regenerationism’ was open to exploitation by either the right or the left since among its advocates there were those who sought to sweep away the degenerate caciquista system by democratic reform and those who planned simply to crush it by the authoritarian solution of ‘an iron surgeon’. However, in 1917 the officers who mouthed empty ‘Regenerationist’ clichés were acclaimed as the figureheads of a great national reform movement. For a brief moment, workers, capitalists and the military were united in the name of cleansing Spanish politics of the corruption of caciquismo. Had the movement been successful in establishing a political system capable of permitting social adjustment, the civil war would not have been necessary. As things turned out, the great crisis of 1917 merely consolidated the power of the entrenched landed oligarchy.

      Despite a rhetorical coincidence of their calls for reform, the ultimate interests of workers, industrialists and officers were contradictory and the system survived by skilfully exploiting these differences. The Prime Minister, the Conservative Eduardo Dato, conceded the officers’ economic demands. He then provoked a strike of Socialist railway workers, forcing the UGT to СКАЧАТЬ