Spain: A Unique History (43 page)

The problem in Spain was what political scientists call "pretorianism" — that is, the political predominance of the military, rather than "militarism" — the hypertrophy of the armed forces as military institutions, or their widespread employment in military activity. Militarily, the modern Spanish army has been a weak institution, and the only plan for "militarism" was the one attempted by the Franco regime in 1939-40 and then soon abandoned, above all for financial reasons. The modern Spanish army stems from the military reforms of the eighteenth-century Bourbon dynasty that organized the army on the French regimental model and also introduced the internal captaincies-general, though it never managed to restore the military potency that had been enjoyed down to the mid-seventeenth century. After the first half of the reign of Felipe V, rulers of the new dynasty were not given to military adventures, with the partial exception of Carlos III. The military were employed relatively rarely, and then, with a few exceptions, usually did not earn distinction. During the War of Independence much of the regular army disappeared, to be replaced by guerrillero bands, paradoxically not infrequently led, certainly often inspired, by priests.

The "military problem" of modern Spain then emerged at the same time as the "praetorian problem," and indeed to some extent the former preceded the latter. The army emerged from the Napoleonic wars deficient in organization and leadership, incorporating into the officer corps some of the leaders of the guerrilleros, lacking adequate financial support or logistical base. It was not given the resources to deal effectively with the independence movement in the Americas, repression of which seeming a doomed enterprise in any event, nor did many of the military have much stomach for it, though fighting went on intermittently for a decade.

The first modern pretorian act of the military was the forcible restoration of Fernando VII as absolute monarch, abrogating the Constitution of 1812.
²
After the War of Independence the country was severely divided politically, with a new liberal government, which did not entirely correspond to the culture and structure of society, making conflict inevitable and inviting military arbitration. Nonetheless, liberalism was the new direction of Spanish affairs and slowly grew stronger with each passing decade, though without the ability to establish clear dominance or to govern with stability. Therefore, despite the reactionary character of the coup of 1814, for the next seventy years, from 1815 to approximately 1885, most acts of political intervention by the military would be carried out on behalf of the more liberal or progressive forces, in an effort to give the latter the decisive strength which in fact they lacked.
³
A specifically Spanish phenomenon was the role of the "ayacuchos," officers who were veterans of the colonial campaigns in South America, the moniker taken from the site of their final climactic defeat. Anticipating the much later experience of some French and Portuguese officers, the ayacuchos were influenced by their former enemies and came to form a core of liberal activists within the military.

Military discipline was largely reestablished after the French intervention of 1823, when absolute monarchy was restored the second time, but the long-term military problem would be revealed by the First Carlist War and its aftermath. Since the new liberal regime held control of state institutions, the great majority of army officers rallied to liberalism, yet the army proved inefficient at civil war. After finally winning victory, the army was not restored to its proper dimensions, above all because of the permanent incorporation of thousands of officers commissioned during the civil war, as well as a certain number of Carlist officers, according to the generous terms that ended the First Carlist War. Sheer hypertrophy of the officer corps would remain one of the major problems for an entire century, down to the time of the Azaña reforms of 1931-32, and would partially reemerge under Franco, as well.

The Isabeline regime (1833-68) constituted the heart of the "era of pronunciamientos," though to some extent this would continue until the full stabilization of the Restoration system in the 1880s. The new liberal regime had largely eliminated nonliberal political elites through civil war, but it was weakly established socially and also internally fragmented, unable to create much of what political scientists call a "civil society." An inexperienced, inept, and fearful young queen was unable to act coherently as a moderating force, despite the power placed in her hands, and access was routinely denied to competing liberal groups. In a nonfunctional liberal system, the pronunciamiento, in its several forms, moderated access to power. Though most army officers were not strong liberals, the effect of military intervention was to move the political system in a more and more liberal direction, climaxing in the disastrous sexennium of 1868-74. This was a sobering experience and marked the end of successful pronunciamientos on behalf of greater liberalization. The two successful interventions of 1874 each moved the situation in a more conservative direction, the second restoring the Bourbons and marking the beginning of the more stable system directed by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo.
⁴

There was never any question of military dictatorship in the Latin American or twentieth-century Afro-Asian style. The political generals of the era operated within the general framework of the political system, usually as armed representatives of regular political parties or forces. When a general led the government, he did so as the nominal leader of a parliamentary group. There was no question of a complete military supersession of the regular political system. The only occasions in which a general served as quasi-head of state occurring in the regency of Espartero in 1841-43, during the minority of Isabel II, and the brief leadership of Serrano as head of the "unitary republic" in 1874. In each case a general presided over formally constitutional and parliamentary regimes.

If during the six decades between 1815 and 1874 the military had often moved politics to the Left, the following six decades (1874-1934) were not so much a time of movement toward the Right as toward greater political balance, punctuated by the temporary rightist swing of Primo de Rivera in the 1920s. Only in 1936 did the military move decisively to the Right. A case can be made that in fact their political attitudes and values never really changed that much during this entire era. Rather, the political context changed enormously, while the political stance of most of the military remained little altered. That is, army officers as a whole were never for the most part political radicals. During the early nineteenth century the politically active sector moved toward moderate liberalism. Once the country went beyond that during 1868-74, political intervention pulled back in the opposite direction. After Primo de Rivera had temporarily moved government to a moderate form of rightist authoritarianism — at that point unprecedented in contemporary Spanish history — the politically active sector of the military once more sought to move back to liberalism. The new republic was widely accepted by the military in 1931 not as any gateway to revolution, which at that point it hardly seemed to be, but as a new national community of liberal democracy, which it turned out not to be.

Throughout this period, however, most army officers were not involved in politics. Had that been the case, the army would have ceased to exist as a military institution. The lead was normally taken by individual senior commanders, maintaining a certain hierarchical function. Sometimes the initiative was seized by more junior officers: in one case in 1866 by sergeants in the Madrid garrison. These more "subversive" junior revolts, reversing the military hierarchy, almost always failed.

Naval commanders rarely participated. The naval officer corps remained more aristocratic than its largely mesocratic counterpart in the army, and usually kept aloof from politics, a partial exception taking place in 1868. Later, the newly formed Spanish air force of the early twentieth century was too small to play a political role, and when several air force officers sought to play a major role in the Republican revolt of December 1930, they failed completely.
⁵

Throughout these decades the military were steadily involved in civil wars and colonial wars, though after 1814 they were spared major international conflict except for a few months in 1898. Generally, the military record of the Spanish army in these conflicts was not distinguished. Semicontinuous combat experience did not serve to forge a more efficient fighting machine, the practical effect being virtually the opposite. The army was proportionately always underfunded, underequipped, inadequately prepared and commanded, but overofficered. For more than a century a disproportionate amount of the military budget simply went to pay officers' salaries, although those salaries were low. This stemmed above all from poor leadership; the fact that the army administration enjoyed considerable autonomy was no guarantee of concentration on professional excellence, but just the contrary. Routine bureaucratization accompanied frequent conflict — the Spanish army had, therefore, the worst of both worlds. By 1895 the army command feared to assign officers routinely to combat in Cuba and asked for volunteers. Comparatively few presented themselves, so that many of the junior combat officers in the final Caribbean conflict consisted of sergeants from peninsular garrisons who had been promoted to officer rank after volunteering for service in Cuba.

The military were imbued with a strong sense of patriotism, which during the second half of the nineteenth century, in keeping with general European trends, turned increasingly into a more militant and aggressive nationalism. It is probably no exaggeration to say that in the 1890s the nearest thing to a coherent group of Spanish nationalists would be found in the military, or at least sectors of the military, yet, in a manner once more typical of their Spanish contemporaries, the military were themselves not at all united. A large part of the officer corps consisted of routine bureaucratic careerists, but a defensive and nationalist reaction was fueled by the general feeling after 1898 that the army and navy were unfairly singled out as bearing sole responsibility for "the disaster."
⁶

There was an element of paradox in this, insofar as the army itself had not served as a force for national education and integration to the same extent that military institutions in France and Germany had achieved such goals during the preceding century. In Spain, the dominance of pretorianism over not merely militarism but simply any efficient attention to the development of military institutions had meant a feebly developed army that was unable to effect the universal military service introduced in certain other countries. The practice of what was called "redención a metálico," as well as other measures, exempted most of the middle and upper classes, producing what was generally a class-based army that could not serve as an inclusive school for patriotism and national pride. Added to a grossly deficient system of primary education, it was a further limitation on the development of a more self-conscious civil or national society.

During the early twentieth century the military, partially removed from politics by the stability of the Restoration system, began to resume a political role through the Law of Military Jurisdictions (1906) and the movement of the Juntas Militares, which commenced in 1916. The Juntas Militares represented first the bureaucratization and second the indiscipline of the military, aiming at a kind of political syndicalization of officers, partly in opposition to the new combat elite of "africanistas," like Franco, who fought in the Moroccan campaigns. They marked a return to politicization, if not full-scale pretorianism, as the country's political life expanded and became more conflictive.
⁷

On the other hand, the militarism of the World War I era largely passed Spain by, as most of the fighting in the Protectorate was shelved for the duration of the European conflict. No significant expansion or improvement of the Spanish military took place, leaving it proportionately even more backward and antiquated than before. Renewal of the effort to pacify the Spanish zone in Morocco led to a humiliating defeat in 1921, which placed in jeopardy the future of the Protectorate and also helped to destabilize the political system. The initiative of Primo de Rivera in 1923 could have been the last of the great nineteenth-century liberal pronunciamientos, had the dictator remained faithful to his initial declaration. As it was, he reflected hesitantly and uncertainly some of the new authoritarian alternatives of the era, governing at first through the Directorio Militar of 1923-25. Beyond that, he could not resolve the issue of reform, failing ultimately to transcend liberalism, and failing also to carry most of the military with him in his confused, abortive search for a long-term authoritarian alternative.
⁸

The whole experience was chastening for the military. For the time being it cured them of political ambitions, predisposing them to accept the inauguration of the democratic republic. The new regime faced many problems, but until the final crisis the military was not one of them. The Azaña reforms of 1931-33 tried to reorder military institutions, but their major achievement was at great cost to reduce the size of the officer corps by about forty percent. The army was in general neither transformed nor significantly improved. No more than a tiny handful of officers supported the attempted revolt against the Republican government by Gen. José Sanjurjo, the weakest of all the six armed rebellions of 1930-34, the other five all being carried out by the Left. When a small group of conspirators tried to rally support for a coup at the time of the Popular Front elections in February 1936, they quickly had to give up, for lack of support.
⁹

Most army officers were opposed to the Left, but few wanted to be involved in armed revolt. There was a very small leftist minority and a larger rightist minority, but the bulk sought to avoid having to play a political role; hence the difficulty of organizing the rebellion of July 18, 1936. Subsequently, the Azaña-Casares Quiroga administration would be almost universally criticized for its failure to repress and purge the military, but in fact the government's calculation would probably have been proven justified had it not been for the kidnapping and murder of Calvo Sotelo, followed by the almost incredible inadequacy of the government's own response.