Spain: A Unique History (17 page)

The gulf between Spain and "modern Europe" did not develop as a result of the Muslim conquest, as some essentialists would have it, and was not the inevitable cultural product of any abyss between the fatalistic, abulic "oriental" Spanish and their more enterprising northern neighbors. It was above all the result of key structural, political, and more broadly historical developments of the seventeenth century. The deep variation that developed at that time was not a mere cleavage between a backward, fanatical Spain and the Protestant world, but rather a gap that began to develop between the more dynamic and enterprising areas of northwestern Europe (mainly Protestant) and most of the rest of Europe, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Eastern Orthodox. It was not a religious divide alone, for the Catholic society of the Low Countries was just as well prepared to take advantage of new opportunities as their Protestant counterparts, and the extent to which they were not quite able to do so was due primarily to political and military developments, not directly to religion. The majority of the features that fueled new enterprise, wealth creation, and discoveries in England and Holland were also present to some extent in Spanish society, but to a distinctly lesser degree. They were also increasingly choked off by the specific policies of the Habsburg state, whose priorities were oriented toward endless dynastic wars and crushing taxes. The disastrous effects of these policies were compounded in Spain by the effects of the plague and even of climate change, as the relatively warm climate of most of the Middle Ages, which had encouraged the growth of the West, had given way to a colder natural environment. The peninsula was struck by a series of afflictions during the seventeenth centuries, with great floods, rains, and droughts, while the Ebro River is said to have frozen seven times between 1505 and 1789. What occurred in Spain was, in general, not so different, mutatis mutandis, from what happened in most of the rest of Europe, only a minor share of Western society participating fully in the precocious early modernization of the northwestern countries during that era.

There is no question that a country like England, the leader in modernization, was better positioned than Spain to develop new forms and techniques in commerce, economics, technology, and politics in the seventeenth century. It was more united in law and institutions (though not always in politics), had a more open and individualistic society, much greater entrepreneurial initiative, and more concerted state support for new enterprise.
¹⁶
In Spain — with the partial exception of Catalonia — status won out over enterprise, and the result of all the negative tendencies that came to fruition by the 1650s and 1660s was a profound decline, which affected nearly all avenues of Spanish life.

During the first part of the Franco regime historians reacted against the understanding of a "Spanish decadence" that had largely informed thinking about this phenomenon for the two preceding centuries. They advanced instead the interpretation of "exhaustion," which was certainly true enough, concluding that the grueling and continued effort to meet the titanic challenges of the seventeenth century had simply worn Spain out. This was clearly the case, but along with the prostration of the third quarter of the century there was also a general retrocession in nearly all the key features of Spanish activity — absolute and extensive demographic decline, a significant reduction in economic production, absence of new initiatives, radical decline in what only recently had been a flourishing cultural activity, and a retreat and a diminution in religious affairs as well. The Spanish had ceased to innovate in administration and in military and maritime activity, and even their religious thought was becoming primarily defensive. For six generations, since the 1480s, the Spanish had been engaged in a series of massive enterprises, and that exhaustion began to sink in increasingly following the breaking point of 1640, when the Portuguese and Catalans abandoned the project of the Spanish monarchy. If this was not decadence, it was certainly a remarkable decline.

Some distinctions should be made. Artistic and cultural creativity continued to some extent into the 1670s, and, although the Spanish crown could do little for the Spanish territories in the Americas, they were strong enough to fend largely for themselves, which speaks well for the accomplishments of the earlier era. Moreover, by the 1680s definite symptoms of reform and recovery were apparent in Spain, Catalonia at that point initiating the start of the "modern pattern" by which economic growth in that region would precede progress in the rest of Spain.

Spanish decadence was not a matter of loss of cultural and religious values, all of which remained intact, and there was no danger that the decline would produce a new culture antagonistic to its predecessor, as in some historical declines elsewhere, but there was a drastic falling away. It also occurred at a time when northwestern Europe, including much of France, was advancing more rapidly than ever before. The result was the opening of the "modernization gap," which would bedevil all subsequent Spanish development until the gap was finally closed after more than three hundred years, late in the twentieth century. From 1659 to 1985 key aspects of the history of Spain could be treated under the theme of the struggle for modernization.

The decline also meant the abandonment of the special Spanish project that had begun to form in the late Middle Ages on the basis of a sort of "Spanish ideology" (see chap. 3). The Spanish project intended to expand the frontiers of Christendom while leading Europe in the struggle to maintain creative tradition and religious orthodoxy. By the end of the seventeenth century both aspects of this project had largely been abandoned. The goals of Spanish institutions, rather than projecting outward into Europe and into unknown territory, had become primarily defensive. Spanish affairs would become increasingly divided between the defensive traditionalists and the reformers who sought not only to introduce productive changes in economics and institutions but also to encourage the country to adopt some of the new doctrines and practices present in northwestern Europe.

This meant that from the end of the seventeenth century the country was becoming more peripheral to the core of the modern West than had been the case earlier, but it did not mean that culturally it was in the process of becoming an "orientalized" North African land not part of Europe or the West. That said, the Spanish drama was played out in most other European countries, in quite different ways, for example, in Germany and Ireland, and even more in Italy, Austria, and Poland. The struggle to achieve a new modern framework would nonetheless be especially difficult and bitter in Spain, more than in any of the other larger countries issuing from Latin Christendom. Spain had momentarily risen to the height of European and world power under the traditionalist Old Regime, with the result that traditionalism had become more firmly entrenched in some respects than in almost any other part of Western Europe, while the reformist and innovative tendencies were proportionately weaker.

In this struggle, Spanish government applied nearly all the standard policies of European enlightened despotism and of European liberalism, the latter at a precocious phase of historical development. Some of these policies were successful, but many failed in whole or in part. Reform and innovation would follow each new phase of Western modernization, and, in fact, Spanish political innovation by the nineteenth century preceded that of most European countries, even those that surpassed it in economic and social modernization. Between 1833 and 1923 Spain lived for more years under parliamentary government than did one of the great "modernizing mentors," France. In 1812, 1820, and even during the 1830s, Spanish liberalism (however premature and sometimes even destructive) served as an inspiration to many other countries in Europe and in Latin America. This was in itself an extraordinary record. No other country more thoroughly experienced the entire gamut of European political and social practices during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All the modern European trends were present in Spain, sometimes in exaggerated or extreme form, often locked in mortal conflict.

The crisis of identity that overtook the Western world in the late twentieth century had a particularly severe impact on Spain. The long dictatorship of Franco had stressed unity, centralism, and Spanish nationalism, but its consequence was to discredit the very idea of Spanish nationalism, and to some extent even of the Spanish nation, in the succeeding generation of democracy, individualism, and hedonism. During the final decades of the century the country was filled with more claims for new kinds of "fractional" nationalism — which may variously be termed micro, peripheral, or deconstructive than in any other Western land, the great contrast being that there were few spokesmen for a Spanish nationalism.

Many commentators then opined that a single or united "Spain" had been little more than a figment of the imagination, that the country had never been more than a loose community of regions governed normally by a monarchy, and later on occasion by artificial despots in Madrid. This was an extraordinary climate of opinion that could not be equaled in any other European country, with the alarming exception of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As deconstructive discourse mounted, it provoked a reaction in a series of works that affirmed a common historical identity of the diverse regions of Spain, even prior to the united monarchy, and insisted that from the sixteenth century on the country had constituted an increasingly united nation.
¹
The internationally famous
Historikerstreit
— the controversy among the historians — in Germany was in some ways surpassed by the broad controversies about Spanish history, both with regard to earlier eras and also to the twentieth century.

It seems clear that despite the political fragmentation of the peninsula under the impact of the Islamic conquest and the following long struggle, a common cultural, religious, and juridical heritage from the Visigothic era remained. There was some sense of common identity at least among the elites of the medieval Spanish principalities, but the question is the extent to which this went beyond the religious and the geographical. The problem was first extensively examined in José Antonio Maravall's
El concepto de España en la Edad Media
(1950), though some historians conclude that he exaggerated the conscious sense of common identity, particularly with regard to political issues.

The philosopher Gustavo Bueno argues that the elites of the Hispano-Christian states thought of themselves as forming something analogous to a separate peninsular political community or "empire," as something absolutely independent from trans-Pyrenean rulers.
²
This was certainly the case among some of the elites in certain periods, but probably posits more of an "ideal type" than an empirical historical description.

There is no question that medieval elites often referred to their principalities as forming part of "España," the term that in its several spellings and versions (Espanha, Espanya, etc.) developed with the rise of the new vernaculars. On various occasions the medieval chronicles referred to the Spanish rulers collectively as
reges Hispaniae
, but this can be read as a merely geographical reference. Medieval writings also refer to Spain as a collective entity in other ways, using expressions such as "toda España," which may be found with some frequency in Latin, Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese texts. The new word for its inhabitants — "español" and "españoles" — developed during the twelfth century, expanding from Pyrenean Aragon, though the conclusion of some that it was originally a Provençal word from beyond the Pyrenees has not been substantiated.
³
From that time the term was recorded as the family name of a certain number of individuals, as well. Medieval writing also frequently referred to "las Españas" in the plural, something that would continue to be found until the eighteenth century; in the Middle Ages, though, it was common to refer in the plural to any number of European countries, which in modern times would be known only in the singular.

The sense of community or special relationship that existed among some of the elites of the Spanish Christian kingdoms was also reflected in the ambition of the rulers of Asturias-León-Castile to claim or establish a broader hegemony over them all.
⁴
The extent of these claims varied, sometimes being merely rhetorical, at other times referring only to the present kingdom itself, at still other times more vaguely to the entire peninsula. Alfonso II, with the expansion of Asturias, was the first to call himself
Imperator
. Alfonso III later used the title of
Rex Magnus
as ruler of the only true Hispano-Christian kingdom and as claimant to the entire inheritance of the Visigoths. After defeating the Muslims at the battle of Simancas in 939, Ramiro II termed himself
Imperator
and
Rex Magnus
. The next step was taken by Sancho el Mayor, who created the concept (though not the full reality) of the
regnum Hispaniae
, as he termed himself
Rex Dei gratia Hispaniarum
and
Princeps diversarum gentium
.
⁵
A kingdom, or regnum in medieval parlance, was just a distinct principality and not necessarily even a fully sovereign state. Sancho's usage affirmed a completely independent entity, what in traditional parlance was termed an empire, though he made no specific claim to empire itself. Even before, Alfonso II had introduced the title of emperor as a means of defining the total independence of Asturias among Christian kingdoms, not beholden to the more genuine empire of Charlemagne, a usage briefly revived by Ramiro II more than a century later.

Alfonso VI used the titles of both king and emperor —
Princeps diversarum gentium
and
Imperator super omnes Hispaniae nationes
. These formulae implied recognition of the plurality and diversity of Hispanic states but did not define it. The title of emperor was used most extensively of all by his grandson Alfonso VII, ruler of the self-styled
regnum-imperium
of León and "emperor of Spain," whereas earlier, during the reigns of Alfonso II and III, the title of emperor was used in official documents primarily to refer to the kingdom of León itself, and not primarily to its claims over other territories. Invocation of empire by Alfonso VII was not merely a matter of grandiosity, since his primacy was to some degree accepted by other rulers who were temporarily subinfeudated to him.
⁶
In the traditional usage only an empire could be considered totally independent and totally sovereign, and the claim of imperial status for the Hispanic states was an affirmation of their uniqueness, referring to their independence and full sovereignty, as an entity or entities not inferior to the claims of the French crown or the Holy Roman Empire in Germany-Italy. Hispanic empire, however, was never fully established juridically, depending for whatever effectiveness it might have on the temporary power of individual rulers, and hence the tendency to be used more frequently by chroniclers and by descendants of the kings of León than by these rulers themselves.
⁷
Alfonso VII ended by dividing his kingdom among his sons.