Spain: A Unique History (45 page)

The senior military command adjusted to this situation quite comfortably. For junior and middle-rank officers, on the other hand, pay was low and promotion very slow. Indeed, because of the excess number of officers, promotion during the 1950s and 1960s was slower than in almost any other Western army. Amid the scarcity of the 1940s, officers had access through military commissaries to goods either unavailable or very expensive on the civilian markets. As the economy improved in the 1950s, this relative advantage was lost: while officers' salaries increased little in real terms, new barracks and housing were finally being built.

The pacts signed with the United States in 1953 provided the first significant foreign military assistance since the Civil War. American arms given Spain were always older weapons that had already seen use, but they were far more advanced than anything in the Spanish arsenal. It was finally possible to begin to retire the Civil War-vintage planes (including captured Soviet aircraft) in favor of the first jet planes, even though the latter were of a design already abandoned by the American air force. More advanced facilities and military cooperation with Washington made it possible to develop a new goal, "professionalization," in place of the politicized garrison-army of the recent past. During the next two decades the most able younger sectors of the officer corps devoted themselves increasingly to this task, encouraged by the "Barroso reforms" undertaken in the army while Gen. Antonio Barroso was minister between 1957 and 1962.
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After 1943 the military never again presented the slightest political challenge to Franco. By about 1960 nearly all the top Civil War-era generals had retired, and the new commanders were even less likely than their predecessors to cause trouble. During the dramatic economic development of the 1960s, little of the new funding that became available was spent on the military, whose share of the national budget declined more and more, until it was proportionately less than in many west European democracies. By that point, for the first time in Spanish history, the state was spending more on education than on the armed forces.

The officers as a whole remained conservative, with increasing interest in professionalization, but during the last years of the regime three different sectors could be identified in politico-professional terms. On the Right were the "blue generals," ultra-rightist generals handpicked by Franco to hold most of the top commands and dedicated to maintaining the present system. On the Left was a small number of liberal or leftist officers who hoped to see the armed forces support modernization. Though not truly radical or subversive, a small group who had formed a "Unión Militar Democrática" was expelled from the officer corps in 1975 and not reincorporated for many years. In between was a group of moderates who emphasized professionalization and keeping the military out of politics, while the country's political evolution proceeded. They were represented especially by Lt. Gen. Manuel Díez-Alegría, chief of the supreme general staff, and his principal assistant, Gen. Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado.

It was in these circumstances that only a few months prior to the death of Franco, the leaders of the Spanish Communist Party and their partners in the Junta Democrática arranged a public hearing in the chambers of the U.S. Congress. Its purpose was to air publicly the need for strong American pressure on the Spanish military to discourage them from interfering in the democratization process that would be undertaken after Franco's death. On that occasion, I could express some confidence that this would not be necessary because the conditions that had elicited military intervention in the past probably would not succeed in the future. The military had not interfered with a democratic transition in 1931-32, which was supported by society and enjoyed relatively coherent leadership. There was a good likelihood that both these factors — strong social support and solid leadership — would prevail during the prospective new democratization, which would also be likely to maintain legal continuity and to uphold law and order. Military interference in the past had always responded to situations of fragmentation, paralysis, or crisis, which would less likely be repeated in the immediate future. No one could guarantee that capable leadership and stability would predominate, but it seemed a reasonably sound calculated risk to assume that they might, and so it turned out.

The military command in 1976-78 remained franquista, but Franco himself had trained his generals to keep out of politics, and they followed his final request that they transfer their loyalty to King Juan Carlos.
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Despite its legalization of the Communist party, the transition government proceeded "de la ley a la ley" (from the law to the law), maintaining legal continuity and law and order, and thus enjoyed overwhelming popular support.

There was only one point at which there was danger of military intervention, immediately following the collapse of Adolfo Suárez's government in February 1981, the only major crisis of political leadership during the transition. Even then, the goal of intervention was not to restore the Franco regime or install a Greek-style military dictatorship, but to provide a military leader for an all-party national government, one that would not technically rupture parliamentary legality but would significantly reorient national policy. This was not planned as a coup d'état, but as an updated semi or pseudo-legalitarian version of a nineteenth-century pronunciamiento. Even this, however, never happened, because of the crown's startled and resolute reaction to the crude assault on the parliamentary chamber by the Civil Guard units of Lt. Col. Antonio Tejero Molina on February 23, 1981, a poorly planned tactical maneuver that seemed out of control.
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Not only was the action completely quashed but, in the subsequent prosecution of key ringleaders, the civil government intervened with the military tribunals to exact longer terms of imprisonment.

The abortive pronunciamiento had the effect of moderating government policy during the year or two that followed, but it proved to be the swan song of the political influence of the military. The "long government" of the Socialists that followed (1982-96), enjoying an absolute majority in its first years, provided the strong and stable administration to institute a progressive change of policy, which was simply extended by the Aznar government in power from 1996 to 2004.
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The "blue generals" were soon retired, and the army was focused on professional reform, integration with NATO and, later, international peacekeeping.
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Conversion to an all-volunteer force was part of a process of relentless reduction in size that was not really compensated for by improved training and weaponry. In a stable democracy, the pretorian role of the military came to a complete end, but the Spanish army has been unable to recapture a genuine military role either, and in comparison with other countries has declined even further in strength. It is to be hoped that in the future Spain has no need to call on its army for defense from foreign foes, because even less than in the recent past has it the strength for such a mission.

A common complaint about contemporary Western society is that it suffers from amnesia and has little knowledge of, or interest in, history. Growing addiction to the Internet atomizes reading, so that information is obtained in snippets or packets without sustained study or broader understanding, and without criteria concerning accuracy or reliability. This results in vast amounts of information, much more so than in any preceding era, yet without many standards, organization, or sustained comprehension. Thus the young spend untold hours seated before computer screens, but do not read books. It is alleged that they learn less than preceding generations, compared with their level of formal education. They do not study but merely "retrieve" bits and pieces of information.
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Is such criticism accurate? To some degree this would seem to be the case, and as far as history is concerned, it is absolutely clear that the great expansion of formal education has not been accompanied by an equivalent expansion of the knowledge of history. A culture informed by the most intense narcissism and materialism in human history is oriented toward instant gratification and thus loses touch with its own cultural tradition.

There is another side to the story, insofar as there has never been so much scholarly research on history as at the present time, and never have so many books of history been written, purchased, and, presumably, read. This is due, however, in large part to the growth in population and in the economy, and the expansion of the university systems, which creates a larger base for specialized activities. In addition, it is sometimes argued that historical thinking or historical consciousness has become more common, at least among much of the intellectually informed minority of the population, than ever before.
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Moreover, in the United States and several other countries, there are many skilled scholars and writers of history who are not university professors. They concentrate on the kind of big topics and themes of broader interest that academic historians usually spurn, and as a result often sell large numbers of books. Military history, especially, seems to flourish in all countries, even though political prejudice largely bans it from the universities.

All these signs of interest in history exist but do so amid increasing intellectual and cultural fragmentation, and are characteristic simply of certain minorities, with little or no effect on the population at large. This produces a seeming paradox: on the one hand, a minority studies and reads history more than ever before, while the great majority — despite universal literacy and basic education — has little or no awareness of history, which recedes more and more in the educational curriculum.

Moreover, among historians the study of history has been greatly broadened on the one hand, while on the other it has been weakened by politicization, contemporary cultural trends, and trivialization. Dominant among the latter are the ideology of political correctness, totally hegemonic by the 1990s, and the consequences of postmodernist theory, two different but mutually reinforcing trends. The effect is drastic deconstruction of previously dominant paradigms, replaced by a contradictory combination of new political dogmas that coexist with radical subjectivism. In the universities, this has almost completely eliminated certain fields, such as military history, and resulted in a major de-emphasis on political history, though this is somewhat less notable in Spain. Major themes are replaced by comparatively minor considerations, which emphasize small groups, deviants, and cultural oddities. Most studies are required to fit somewhere within the new sacred trinity of race, class, and gender — the new "cultural Marxism." Research that does not conform to these criteria is increasingly eliminated from the universities, where hiring practices in the humanities and social sciences have become blatantly discriminatory.

New cultural and political trends often take a little longer to arrive in Spain, but by the twenty-first century they have become increasingly characteristic of new historical work in Spain, as well. The great expansion of the university system has indeed resulted in much more research and writing than ever before, producing historical knowledge and significant publications in almost every field, but as stated earlier, the study of history in Spain is constrained by the provincialization and trivialization of history on the one hand, and the weaknesses of the university system on the other.

Production of significant historical work in the past generation has been limited by a massive emphasis on local and regional history. This field can be as significant a field as most others, but in Spain matters have been carried to the point of political and cultural hysteria, producing a massive disproportion of attention, stimulated by the quasi-federalization of the country and the increasingly large amounts of money spent by local and regional governments on cultural affairs. Young scholars know that if they concentrate on such themes, publication is virtually guaranteed, irrespective of how petty or trivial the work may be.

Spanish universities for the most part follow these trends, because of the localist and endogamic character of most of the new universities themselves. What might be called a "national market" in research and hiring is comparatively weak. Most of the universities play to local audiences and are heavily nepotistic in their personnel practices. The failure to recruit professors on a broader basis is a major limitation, as is the lack of emphasis on achievement in their professional evaluation. These same tendencies, together with a decided politicization of the universities, currently exist in almost every country, though provincialization and endogamy are especially pronounced in Spain.

What is most notable about the treatment of history in Spain in the twenty-first century is not the almost inevitable presence of certain common contemporary trends, but the degree of controversy that exists in two key areas. The first is the effort to deconstruct a common national history of Spain, replacing it with a new focus on the regions, which in turn has produced a reaction that stresses a common national history and identity.
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The second focuses on the Civil War and the Franco regime, particularly those issues associated with the repression carried out by the latter, and has been especially promoted in terms of what is called "la memoria histórica." Since the first problematic has already been treated to some extent in several of the early chapters of this book, I shall not go back over that ground but devote the remainder of this concluding chapter to the controversy, more political than historiographical, associated with "memoria histórica."

Spain is far from unique in having suffered a severe trauma in its history during the twentieth century. The same thing may be said of most — though not quite all — the countries of Europe, and of a good many others in other continents. In such circumstances it becomes all the more difficult to achieve the kind of detachment and objectivity that is the goal of the professional scholar.