Spain: A Unique History (24 page)

The Portuguese revolution remained faithful to Portuguese history in that the overthrow of a restrictive regime once more failed to introduce genuine democracy, just as in 1910. The revolutionary regime introduced a new kind of left-wing pretorianism, in which the military held the deciding voice. It also represented a new kind of political reaction, which some might call "postmodern," as rebellious military for the first time fully identified psychologically with leftist aggressors and antagonists. This resulted in another peculiar kind of Portuguese "first": the first time that the victors in a European military coup attempted to establish a leftist-collectivist regime, a form of Portuguese "socialism," as enshrined in a new constitution. This outcome seemed much more like the politics of a Latin American or Afro-Asian country than a European one.

Yet Portuguese society was indeed European, not Latin American or African, and the military regime itself was even less representative than the Estado Novo had been. Though much of society in poor and agrarian southern Portugal rallied to a Portuguese Communist Party (miraculously resurrected by the military and handed a significant share of power), lower-middle class and Catholic northern Portugal manifested complete opposition. The military were in fact divided, some of them supportive of more genuine democracy, so that elections were finally permitted after a year, and that outcome clearly did not favor the extreme Left. Moderate elements in the military came to the fore, and during 1975-76 the new regime moved toward democracy. It remained semi-pretorian, however, and the last vestiges of special state and political power for the military were not removed for a decade. The transition to democracy was thus entirely different in Spain and in Portugal, initially less democratic and much more conflictive in the case of the latter. This was the only instance in all contemporary history in which political affairs were more conflictive in Portugal than in Spain. And even then, there was less violence in Portugal, because of the virtual absence of terrorism.

Conversely, the political party system normalized more rapidly during the 1980s in Portugal, where the absence of a heritage of civil war or a harshly repressive dictatorship was a factor in making possible the early emergence of a new center-right party, which moved to a position of leadership in a more moderate Portugal more than a decade before its counterpart would do so in Spain. Democratic Portugal has experienced nothing remotely comparable to the political tensions or the center-periphery conflict of democratic Spain, and in a referendum of 1998 even rejected proposals for federalization, the government then opting simply for some degree of decentralization within a unified structure. Thus Portugal has as usual remained less conflictive than Spain, though also less dynamic economically.

Spain is the only western European country for whom "decline" became an obsessive theme, first for foreign writers and then for Spanish historians and commentators. It is sometimes observed that the seventeenth century was a time of crisis and decline for the greater part of Europe-most of the south and east, and also much of the center. This is true enough, but the case of Spain has seemed more extensive and spectacular than those elsewhere, even though internal decline and destruction was probably in proportionate terms equally severe in the case of Germany, due to the Thirty Years' War. To take a different example, the tsardom of Muscovy suffered a profound political and military crisis early in the century, but after some years recovered to become stronger than ever.

More recently, Henry Kamen has challenged the idea that Spain declined, maintaining that Spain itself (as distinct from the Habsburg empire) had never risen very far in the first place. It is certainly correct that the literature on the "rise of Spain" is smaller than that treating the "decline of Spain." Thus before considering decline, it seems legitimate first to ask the question — to what extent was there a "rise of Spain"? Skeptics point out that creation of what foreigners called the "Spanish Habsburg empire" was simply a product of contingency, a marriage alliance that yielded extensive dynastic crownlands.

This was obviously the case, yet a closer reading indicates that there was indeed a "rise" of peninsular Spain itself (see chap. 5). From the fifteenth to the late sixteenth century, population increased to about 8.5 million and the economy expanded. This made possible increased military and overseas activity, the taxes of Castile providing for much of the cost of an enormous military program, as a tiny proportion of that kingdom's population conquered the largest empire in world history. This was accompanied by the most extensive cultural flowering in any European country of that era. Thus there is no question that a major "rise of Spain" indeed took place, and the issue of decline is a fully relevant one, just as most historians have contended.

Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who became one of the first modern historical specialists on the seventeenth century, at first concluded that the decline constituted a genuine decadence, though with further research, he retreated from that position. Later nationalist writers and historians insisted that it merely constituted a case of natural exhaustion following a protracted titanic enterprise. The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Virtually all historians agree that the principal sources of decline were the enormous strains of the endless dynastic wars, after 1640 further extended by the two major rebellions in the peninsula, whose great tax burden exhausted an already deteriorating economy, especially in Castile. The Spanish case was simply the most dramatic and extensive of what would later be called examples of "imperial over-reach" in European history.

Many societies have been ground down by long and costly wars, but by the middle of the seventeenth century Spain seemed to reveal a deeper malaise than temporary fatigue. While it is true that the country would have had to have run faster than it had in the sixteenth century merely in order not to lose ground during the seventeenth century — a period of greater competition and development among the "modernizing" northwest European countries — it was unable to maintain even the pace of 1600. By the second half of the century the society and culture, not just the economy or the military, showed signs of decadence in the stricter sense of the term. The society of 1670-80 was weaker in every respect than that of a century earlier.

Population loss was not relative but, for Castile, absolute, dropping by approximately a million people before beginning to recover in the last part of the seventeenth century. This was the worst period of epidemic disease in the country's history, except for the Black Death of the fourteenth century, to which were added the effects of war, heavy taxation, economic decline, and extensive malnutrition. The accompanying economic decline began in a few regions as early as the 1580s, but had become generalized by the mid-seventeenth century. Reduction in the Atlantic trade was equally steep, and the shipment of silver bullion diminished in much the same proportion. Similarly troublesome was the sharp rise in foreign competition, with which an enfeebled Spanish economy could not compete either at home or in America. Fundamental throughout was the weakness of state policy, unable to cut its losses in foreign wars and unable to protect or stimulate domestic production, its program being extractive and inflationary, which only made things worse. The government (and the aristocracy) soaked up available capital, which was not spent on new investment but almost exclusively on consumption, often for goods produced abroad. Moreover, the climate also deteriorated, with prolonged colder weather and greater, often destructive, precipitation.

Nearly all societies, of course, undergo longer or shorter periods of economic decline; what was remarkable about the Spanish economic decline was that it continued, with intermittent breaks, for decades, and was accompanied by social and cultural changes, which only accentuated it. Most notable here was the increasing withdrawal from new activity and creative enterprise, and the fixation on social status as an alternative to work and having to pay taxes. Under Felipe IV there was a considerable increase in the number of new aristocratic titles, and then a much greater expansion under Carlos II, during whose reign nearly three hundred new titles of nobility were created. Even worse was the fact that the mania for "endonamiento," or being made an aristocrat, consumed much of the middle classes. This was a Europewide phenomenon during the seventeenth century, but its effects were more extensive and destructive than elsewhere, a manifestation of the Spanish tendency in modern times to carry things to an extreme.

A counterpart was the declining interest in work or achievement. In an interesting study of the number of "achievement images" per thousand words of representative Spanish literature over a five-hundred-year period, Juan B. Cortés, S.J., found that in samples from the years 1200-1492 the mean was 10.74, declining for the years 1492-1610 to 6.07, and for 1610-1730 to only 2.67. It was not atypical that Felipe III would give his personal tailor two different patents of hidalguía (aristocratic status) but fail to pay him for four years of extended service. This eventually had deleterious effects on what had historically been perhaps the most important of Spanish professions — the military — as the elite increasingly shunned military service, while naval crewmen were even more looked down upon.
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Not merely did urban production decline, but the basis of the economy, agriculture, shrank both in terms of overall output and perhaps for a time in terms of per capita production as well, a result not merely of external pressures but also of internal structural changes, which handicapped and discouraged peasant production. After about 1580 there would be no real growth in agricultural production until the second quarter of the eighteenth century.
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The problem was not that the Spanish had never had any drive for achievement or completely lacked entrepreneurial skills. All these had existed to some extent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but such talents declined significantly. There developed a perverse situation in which the price of urban labor was high, due to inflation and taxation, yet there was also considerable unemployment. Even a seeming positive, such as the strong Spanish emphasis on charity, may have had the effect of discouraging work. Foreign merchants, artisans, and entrepreneurs had played a role in Spanish society since the eleventh century, if not before, but their presence was much greater by the second half of the seventeenth century, when they partly compensated for the atrophy of Spanish enterprise, the total number of foreigners reaching perhaps 150,000, some of them in middle-class roles, amounting to more than 2 percent of the entire population.

What José Antonio Maravall and others call "baroque society" was a society turning in on itself. Through the reign of Felipe IV surprising amounts of money were spent on ostentation and conspicuous consumption, but from the 1660s even esthetic culture began to atrophy. By that point secular and religious culture had become largely defensive, and had lost nearly all its creativity. The case of higher education was symptomatic. In 1590 there were some twenty-seven thousand students in Spanish universities and other institutes of higher education, for a brief time proportionately the largest student body in advanced studies in Europe. However, the dynamics of higher education belied the notion that this was a precondition for societal progress, since the Spanish system was increasingly oriented toward the attainment and maintenance of status in the bureaucracy and clergy. Then, with accelerating economic decline, the number of students in higher education also dropped greatly, while curricula stagnated.

Militant Tridentine Catholicism — in which to a considerable extent Spain had shown the way — was fully dominant, but religion also had lost much of its creative spark by the second half of the seventeenth century. The ranks of the clergy swelled, less due to spiritual zeal than to a kind of clerical bureaucratization. Older estimates that the clergy amounted to 3-4 percent of the total population were nonetheless exaggerated; the increase may have been more like a growth from 1.3 to 2.5 percent of the total society, but the most significant factor was that the expansion of the clergy accompanied a certain decline in spiritual creativity. Though the Church in Spain had helped to lead the way in the new reforms of the sixteenth century, by the seventeenth century travelers wrote that they found Spanish Catholicism "different" and in some ways more archaic. What they particularly noted was the apparent power of the monastic orders, a perceived tendency to mix the profane and the religious, as well as the emphasis on a kind of religious theatricality and a stress on the extremes.

The cultural accomplishment of the Siglo de Oro from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century was indeed monumental, concentrated in literature, painting, and religious thought. Of science there was much less, though some new activity was carried on in science and even in mathematics. The flowering of the arts was due above all to the patronage of the Church and of a wealthy aristocracy. This became a kind of transition culture, opening new dimensions for tradition, but without being able to achieve a total breakthrough into more modern forms. On one level
Don Quijote
can be read as an elegy to an age that was passing much more than as a window to a new era. Spanish baroque culture raised the culture of traditional European civilization to the highest level that that culture had ever experienced, but for the most part it was not part of the new, more modern culture that began to develop in seventeenth-century Europe, and by the 1670s its creative spark had largely expired.

The distinction can perhaps be seen most clearly in the difference between the dramatic literature of the Spanish theater and that of Elizabethan-Jacobean England. For several generations Spanish drama, headed by Lope de Vega and Calderón, was the most diverse and creative in continental Europe, yet it lacked the full range and depth of its English counterparts.
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Elizabethan theater was much more daring and innovative in treating morality, personality, and the range of human behavior, and a more direct precursor of modernity, with all its virtues and vices.