Spain: A Unique History (37 page)

If, conversely, the European war had proceeded as it did, would a victorious Hitler and Mussolini in 1940 then have felt the need to invade a Republican Spain? This might have been Mussolini's preference, but two alternative scenarios have to be considered. Hitler might have preferred to avoid further entanglement, leaving Italy to neutralize Spain, trying to force a leftist Republic to subordinate its policy to that of the Axis.

Or Hitler might have judged an independent leftist Spain as something intolerable, proceeding to its destruction before turning on the Soviet Union. Yet the latter alternative would have involved Hitler in the "Southern Strategy" urged by his naval commanders in the autumn of 1940, a fuller commitment to developing Germany's strategic position in the Mediterranean. This would have violated Hitler's own priorities, delaying any attack on the Soviet Union, but, if pressed to its ultimate potential, with a German conquest of North Africa and the Middle East, this might have built for Germany a very powerful strategic base, with incalculable consequences for the future.

Yet another hypothetical scenario might be constructed in which a Republican Spain might have survived the European war as a neutral, though with a foreign policy quite different from that of the Franco regime, even if potentially adopting a "Swedish" policy of accommodating a dominant Germany, just as the Social Democratic government did in Stockholm. This would have made reasonable geopolitical sense in the short term, since it is difficult to define any scenario in which it would have been practical for Spain to intervene in the broader war unless directly invaded.

Spain would always have functioned as part of a peripheral rather than a core strategy by any of the great powers, potentially important only to the extent that its own engagement, or engagement with it by others, would contribute to much broader designs, and to the extent that its geographical location held the key to a larger strategic breakthrough. Its logical position in both world wars was neutrality, whatever importance it had being broadly strategic much more than narrowly economic or military. Stalin was temporarily interested in Spain as part of a complex, multidimensioned grand strategy, which turned out to be too complex and contradictory to carry out.

Hitler's interest in Spain was also strategic, but equally secondary, until the problem of exerting greater strategic pressure against Great Britain acquired significance in the summer of 1940. Even then, it never became such a prime objective that he was ever willing to meet Franco's price. After that, Hitler grew increasingly disgusted with Franco, whom he came to view as a cynical and unprincipled opportunist, calling him a "Latin charlatan" who was shockingly ungrateful for Germany's military assistance and hopelessly shortsighted in thinking that his regime could possibly survive a German defeat. He later opined that "during the civil war, the idealism was not on Franco's side; it was to be found among the Reds." Like many other observers, he thought Franco politically incompetent. Hitler believed that Franco's "reactionary" government would inevitably fail, leading to another civil war, and when that came, the Führer said, the next time he would support the Spanish "Reds."

During 1943 both sides asked the same thing of the Spanish government: that it stay out of the war and not favor the other side.
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By 1944, when the Allies had gained the upper hand, Washington began to pressure the Spanish regime more than Berlin ever had. Franco reluctantly made most of the concessions required, but he never went farther than he was forced to. By the time the war ended, he had formulated a new political strategy that would enable his regime to survive, and for some time to prosper, in a postfascist world.

In 1997, when I published a new history of the fascist movement in Spain, I added to the Spanish edition the subtitle "The Strange Case of Spanish Fascism." At the presentation of the book, one journalist asked, "Why strange?" — a perfectly reasonable question. In history, of course, every case is in some sense unique. Moreover, fascist movements were more "national" and idiosyncratic in almost every instance than were the different national Communist parties. There was no fascist international equivalent to the Comintern, no single international center and orthodoxy such as that provided by the Soviet Union, no single bible of fascism equivalent to the writings of Marx and Lenin. The writings of Mussolini and Hitler were less systematic and did not serve the same function.

The Spanish case was "strange" first because it was one of the latest and weakest of all the national fascist movements, for five years even weaker than fascist movements in north European democracies. It was also peculiar in that it achieved power of a very limited sort as the state party in 1937. This was unusual, because fascist movements overwhelmingly failed; the only other fascist movements to reach power were those of Italy, Germany, and Romania (the latter briefly in a kind of diarchy with the military dictator Antonescu in 1940-41).
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Moreover, in a purely formal sense it retained its limited share of state power long after the end of the fascist era, until the death of Franco. This was totally without precedent, even though the survival of the Falangist movement was predicated on a long, slow process of defascistization — another paradox. It was also the only fascist movement to undergo ideological defascistization, the original "official" Twenty-Six Points being replaced by the defascistized Principles of the Movement (1958), another change without precedent or parallel.

Prior to 1936 Spain was an unlikely candidate for fascism, as was recognized by, for example, the country's two leading revolutionary Marxist intellectuals, Luis Araquistain of the Socialists and Joaquín Maurín of the POUM, in publications of 1934 and 1935, respectively. Since they represented two of the most paranoid sectors of Spanish politics, on the one hand, but were perfectively objective and lucid in their analysis of the prospects for fascism, on the other, their examination bears some weight, and in fact was perfectly accurate.

It is also important to examine the situation in terms of a retrodictive theory of fascism.
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Without repeating all the details of the retrodictive theory, suffice it to say that such factors were comparatively weak in Spain. The cultural crisis of the fin de siècle, despite all the discussion of "the disaster" of 1898, had less impact than in many other parts of Europe. A strong preexisting nationalism, one of the key variables, was simply not present in Spain. As Araquistain and Maurín pointed out, the Great War had impacted Spain less than it had other countries — there was only a limited sense of frustrated nationalism, no mass of returning war veterans, and even at the height of the depression crisis proportionately fewer unemployed — a noteworthy feature of the normally much-maligned Spanish economy.
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Even the more "fascistogenic" factors that were present had little effect in Spain. There was an unconsolidated new democratic system — a prime type of breeding ground for fascism — but nonetheless the political system was already fully mobilized, most political space firmly occupied by established forces of the Left and Right, leaving little room for a new radicalism. The country experienced the twentieth-century crisis of European culture, as well as the challenge of secularization, but in Spain the responses to this crisis polarized between the traditional Left and Right. A major challenge from the Left encouraged fascism in other countries but had no such effect in Spain, where the response was more moderate and to a large extent defined by religion, until the spring of 1936. Successful fascist movements required flexible and effective, preferably charismatic, leadership, as well as allies at crucial moments, but these factors were lacking prior to the Civil War. The Left was not monolithic, but it was fully mobilized, permitting no "national socialist" defections, and there was no sense of a failed revolution, as in Germany and Italy, since the revolutionary Left became stronger and stronger. The middle classes were not as secularized or as nationalist as in central Europe and did not seek alternative radical political representation. Each sector of the middle classes — Left-liberal, centrist liberal, and rightist — held relatively firmly to their positions, and there were no major defections, as in central Europe. There was no noteworthy Jewish minority, and no international pressures or humiliations that might have elicited a broader patriotic reaction. Though economic problems were severe, they were correctly not perceived as somehow imposed from abroad. Paradoxically, fascist movements developed primarily in European countries with parliamentary systems and, as mass political movements, required freedom to mobilize and develop. From approximately March 1936 the political and legal systems of Spain became progressively less free, leaving a radical opposition movement with no political prospects whatsoever. Finally, successful fascist movements required a sufficiently developed or stabilized political system that would neutralize the military as rival, but the Spanish system became so skewed and disorderly that the military suddenly became major actors. The extreme weakness of nationalist sentiment was perhaps the greatest limitation of all.

Given the weakness of the liberal center in Spain, the challenge to the Left came not from fascism but, in normal political terms, from the Catholic Right, or, in a time of crisis, from the military. When the hour arrived, these would propose to establish their own alternative systems that would be more authoritarian, but this would not be fascism. The Popular Front generated massive propaganda about "fascism," but by that term the Left simply meant their political enemies on the Right, a standard trope in Spanish leftist discourse that has continued into the twenty-first century, long after the total demise of fascism. In 1935 a revolutionary Marxist analyst like Maurín admitted that the key rightist leader Gil Robles, for example, was no fascist, but in fact "feared fascism."

The Spain of the Second Republic was not a mature north European democracy, but neither was it subject to the strong nationalist pressures generated in Germany and Italy. In some respects it was politically more similar to Austria and to certain east-central European countries. In the former the Catholic Right imposed a relatively moderate anti-Nazi authoritarian system, and in the latter the military or moderate rightist authoritarian forces predominated. Wherever the latter were in control they simply excluded fascists by force, as the Left did in Spain in March 1936. The only exception was the diarchy established in Romania in September 1940, but that lasted only a few months.

The Romanian case was the only one even remotely similar to Spain, the difference being that under the diarchy the Legion of the Archangel Michael held more power than did the Falange Española Tradicionalista (FET) under Franco. That situation tempted the legionnaires to bid for absolute power, prompting a three-day civil war in January 1941 that ended in their defeat and total suppression. In Spain Falangists occasionally talked of something similar but wisely chose not to follow the Romanian example.

Given the weakness of the movement in Spain, combined with the incipient breakdown of Republican democracy, there was not the slightest chance of achieving power. Communists sometimes attempted to seize power through insurrection and civil war; fascists very rarely did. Reduced to the Communist modus operandi, the Falangists had little hope of success. In Spain, as emphasized in chapter 11, it was the Communists who, thanks to the Popular Front, reversed their course, and formed a very effective alliance that, for the first time in western Europe, associated them with a government in power.

The extensive historical commentary on the insignificant early history of Falangism is focused to a large degree on its leader and key founder, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. I once wrote that José Antonio was "everybody's favorite fascist," even on the part of antifascists. There is almost universal testimony that on the personal level he was courteous, charming, intelligent, and entirely engaging. In the tumultuous Republican parliament of 1933-36, he may have won the popularity contest. No other deputy was so well liked even by his opponents, and this in the case of one ideologically dedicated to antiparliamentary politics. Prior to the advent of Felipe González, he was the first political leader known to friend and foe primarily by his first name. With the possible exception of the continuing Mussolini cult in Italy, in no other case can such continuing fervor be found on behalf of a national fascist leader in the twenty-first century.
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His admirers generally claim that he was not a genuine fascist at all but the architect of an attempted political "third force" cut short by his early death.
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There is almost universal testimony that José Antonio did not have the personal style, manner, or temperament of a typical fascist leader. He stepped into politics, at first only temporarily, after the collapse of his father's dictatorship in 1930. His primary concern at first was to defend and by some means continue the work of his father, which, as the eldest son, he felt was his particular responsibility, though initial efforts were completely unsuccessful.

Political ambition began to crystallize at the time of the initial crisis of the Republic in 1933. As his thinking evolved, he concluded that only a new kind of movement, with a modern social program, was required to achieve such national goals. José Antonio's thinking to a large extent anticipated the later calculations of Franco during 1936-37.

The year 1933 marked the "second wave" in the expansion of fascism's influence in Europe, with Hitler's triumph in Germany. Hitler, however, was only in the first stages of building his National Social regime, while Benito Mussolini enjoyed great prestige as the senior fascist dictator, given credit for already having transformed and modernized Italy and, in the eyes of some, at least, of having made it into a great power. At that moment he stood as the supremely successful "regenerator" of a major underdeveloped south European country. José Antonio was strongly and naively attracted to Mussolini and the Italian Fascist example, which seemed to provide ideology, program, and system to triumph where his father had failed. Within two more years he would begin to grasp both the dangers of imitation and the limitations of Italian Fascism, and to strive, without very much success, to differentiate his Falangist movement.