Juan Cumia
April 2006
ABSTRACT
The cruel and violent conflict that split Spain in the catastrophic years between 1936 and 1939 has left an immense political scar between the two main rival camps left and right, capitalism versus communism, which still poisons the political debate today. After Franco’s death in 1975 and with the establishment of the much craved democracy, Spain seemed ready to forge a new future on which the atrocities from the dark old days should have been forgiven by all belligerent sides. However this has not been the case, the democratic left has done as much to keep the memories of the civil war alive as Franco did during his forty years reign. The Marxist’s constant attack on Franco’s retrograde regime whilst they portray themselves as the epitome of democracy and progress, sometimes reaches comical proportion. This study, away from any ideological determinism and with the hindsight of time on our side, attempts to determine if the outcome of the Spanish Civil war was the best for the future of the country. The author believes that a study of this kind is necessary in order to reconcile the antagonistic enemies and to make it possible at last for Spain to look back on her own past without anger. Spain does not need to feel ashamed for Franco’s years as the left would have us believe. It is time to assimilate the past to conclude that all the martyrs on both sides of the trenches were eventually fighting for the same aim; to take Spain forward towards modernisation in pursuit of closing the gap with her more technologically advanced Northern European neighbours albeit however from rival positions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Firstly, I would like to thank Sam Davies, my supervisor for guiding me through the completion of this dissertation.
I would also like to thank my family without whose tireless support and encouragement, this dissertation would not have been completed, especially my wife Donna for her patience and inestimable support.
LIST OF ABREVIATIONS
POUM Partido Obrero Unificado Marxista
UGT Union General de Trabajadores
PCE Partido Comunista de España
PSOE Partido Socialista Obrero Español
CNT Confederacion Nacional del Trabajador
PNV Partido Nacionalista Vasco
PSUC Partido Socialista Unificado Catalan
CEDA Confederacion Española de Derechas Autonomas
UN United Nations
INI Instituto Nacional de Industria
RENFE Red Nacional de los Ferrocarriles Españoles
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
CONTENTS
Page
Chapter One
Spain from Super Power to the Iberian Cockpit; Long term Causes of the Civil War
1
1.1
The Discovery of America and the Empire
1
1.2
Black Legend and the Decadence
3
1.3
The Napoleonic Wars Sink Spain
4
1.4
The ‘Pronunciamientos
5
1.5
The ‘Restauracion’
6
Chapter Two
The Second Republic; Short Term Causes of the War 1931 – 1936
9
2.1
Great expectations
9
2.2
The Republic’s First hurdles from Consensus to Confrontation
10
2.3
The System Under Fire; Sanjurjada - Asturias
13
2.4
The Republic’s Ineffective Political Reforms
14
2.5
Political Factionalism, the Last Mortal Blow to the System
17
Chapter Three
The Civil War
20
3.1
July 1936, Lawless Republic
20
3.2
Masters of the City, Revolution and Collectivisation
21
3.3
Russian Aid Towards ‘Stalinist’ Communist Hegemony
24
3.4
The May Day Events, Barcelona, 1937
26
Chapter Four
Franc’s Regime Against Communist Spain
29
4.1
The ‘Alzamiento’
29
4.2
The 1939 to 1942 German Initiative
30
4.3
The Allies Counter Attack
32
4.4
Counter Factual Communist Spain
33
4.5
Franco’s Statemanship
34
4.6
The Hunger Years
36
4.7
America Befriends Franco
37
4.8
1960s, Spain Takes Off
38
CONTENTS
Page
Chapter Five
Conclusion
40
References
44
Bibliography
47
Appendices
The Most Characteristic Articles of a Collective Commune in Spain 1937
48
Example of Questionnaire
49
INTRODUCTION
In the last 65 years much has been written all over the developed world about the evils of Franco’s dictatorship, such as the brutal repression after the war, the censorship, the centralised and over managed political / economic system, the catholic / fascism yoke which exposed and even glorified Spain’s backwardness etc. Although much of it was based on facts, many of these facts have been distorted by the preponderant Marxist views of the last century. This way very little has been said - except from his partisan circle - about the economic success of Franco’s regime in extreme and difficult circumstances. Franco for the international scholar community was nothing more than an old fashioned fascist, entrusted to power by the force of the canon which had survived the outcome of the Second World War by hiding behind a dubious curtain of neutrality. After the cease fire in Europe, many Spanish republicans inside and outside Spain were hoping for the allies to liberate them from Franco’s yoke, however this never happened. Much ink has been spent in search of the answer to why this aberrant regime (Fascist Spain) which came out from the more obscure passages of European history was allowed to survive the new order that shaped the world after World War II. Why was Spain never liberated from fascism? Marxist historians have never truly answered this question
It has been the intention of the author to analyse and examine the impact of the Spanish Civil War on the country both socially and economically, classifying the strengths on which Franco’s regime founded the creation and sustainability of the Spanish middle classes, hitherto unseen around the Iberian costs and to identify the long and short term causes of the war.
In order to achieve the above aims, the following plan of work has been carried out:
Undertake a review of the events leading up to the 1936 Spanish Civil War.
Quantify data from the period to verify social and economic pattern changes.
Carry out a study of Spain’s rapid industrialisation during the period 1955-70.
Perform a counter-factual exercise to contrast the outcome of communist Spain against Franco’s regime
Research for this study has been carried out using primary sources of information such as questionnaires to members of the Spanish public and selected lecturers from Liverpool John Moores University.
Secondary sources of information include published articles by authors relating to the area of study, interviews, speeches, memoirs and books edited by main protagonists of the events, journals of an academic nature, relevant published legal documents from the collectivisations and the World Wide Web
This dissertation is structured as follows:
Analysis of the short and long term causes of the Spanish Civil War
An overview of the Civil War
A review of Franco’s Regime
A comparative Counter Factual study of Communist Spain
The author has chosen to carry out an exercise of counter-factual history in order to prove whether the out come of the Civil War was indeed the best. The dissertation includes a small but fact based comparison between Franco’s Spain and communist Spain. To reach its conclusion the study closely revises the political intrigues which occurred between late 1936 to May 1937 (events of Barcelona) on the Republican side and how a supposedly victorious Republican Government could have looked.
In order to make viable this counter-factual history exercise the study assumes that Spain’s Communist Republic was after the Second World War kept as a satellite regime of Russia in the west. No other considerations in the political international arena are to be taken into account, despite that obviously the triumph of the communists in Spain in 1939 would undoubtedly have altered the events and the outcome of the Second World War, in ways that have not been explored yet.
Being a general survey of the period undoubtedly means that the work, due to the time and length of the project, is not as deep as the author would have wanted. However from this study the author expects to open enough new leads from were to follow further studies on the subject.
LITERATURE REVIEW:
The Spanish civil war is a fascinating theme that has produced countless works both academic and non-academic. In the Spanish language alone, more than 900 novels related to the war have been published. The prolific academic production of writings which started during the conflict, was for many years mutilated of valuable Spanish works. Authors from the Republican side who were submitted to the hardship from exile and without access to resources became bitter and entangled in personal arguments which did little to aid the Republican views. The victorious Nationalist side of Francisco Franco has for nearly forty years kept alive the memory of the war, presenting their particular and biased visions of the conflict on which the victors were impossibly good and virtuous whilst the defeated were the sum of all sins, vice and perversion of society. In Franco’s Spain, the Nationalists saved the country from the Masonic and communist plot which was trying to destroy her. Thus the first attempts at an overall and as far as possible impartial view on the civil war fell on foreign scholars. The British Gerald Brenan in his background work on the civil war “The Spanish Labyrinth” and George Orwell with his acclaimed “Homage to Catalonia” are two examples of earlier works. Although both are substantiated by the authors own experiences on the conflict, Brenan’s scholar work became a classic reference for future studies whilst Orwell’s moving and personal account turned out to be the more widely read. Later scholars such as Preston, Shubert, Fraser and the Spaniard Tuñón, drawn by Brenan’s works, tried to widen the scope of the theme. However their impenitent Marxist economic determinism restrained them from going further than the knowingly failed agrarian reform, the world economic crisis and similar themes. They portrayed Franco as a mass murderer oppressor of the working class, forever in the hands of Hitler whose decisive help decided the war in the dictator’s favour. They never adventured further although none-Marxist works from Payne, Bowen and Stradling, without widening the scope on the causes and consequences of the war, try to give a more dimensional view of the dictator and his regime. Thus in order to assert Franco’s independency, Straddling in his journal article ‘The Spanish Civil War’ argues the fact that Franco ultimately spared Spain from Hitler’s claws. Payne in his history of the ‘Falange’ exposed the intrigues and manipulation which took place at the heart of this miniscule political party during and after the war. Ultimately this was to prove only how they were cleverly manipulated by Serrano Suñer, brother in law of the dictator and the ideological leader of a political movement without ideology and in desperate need of one. Ronald Radosh in his work ‘Spain Betrayed’ presented the Stalinist Soviet Union aid to the republican side as duplicitous and self-serving, aimed not only at swindling the Spanish Republic out of millions of dollars through arms deals but also to take over and run the Spanish economy, government, and armed forces in order to make Spain a Soviet possession. More radical and controversial Spanish authors such as Ricardo de la Cierva or Pio Moa have centred their thesis not so much on the economic determinism but rather on how this influenced the decisions and actions of the protagonist. Moa maintained that it was on the politicians’ shoulders where the responsibility of the Civil War must rest. Moreover Moa in his “Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil” pointed out that the 1934 Asturias uprising was a violent coup d’etat from the left, designed to overthrow the democratic system after the landslide victory of the right coalition CEDA in the 1934 elections. For these authors, the intransigence of the left during the Second Republic years was the main cause for the outbreak of the war. The works of Raymond Carr ‘Spain 1808-1939’ and ‘The Spanish tragedy; The Civil War in Perspective’, together with the engaging deep narrative of Hugh Thomas ‘The Spanish Civil War’ demonstrate a more levelled opinion.
For Franco’s regime period, works such as Preston’s ‘Franco; a Biography’ is nothing more than a biased Marxist view on the ‘Generalisimo’ whilst Ricardo de la Cierva’s ‘Franco:La Historia’ is too candid an account of the ‘Caudillo’ years. In between the two antagonistic sides, Payne’s ‘Franco’s Spain’ gives a more levelled overview of the dictator’s regime less founded on ideological prejudice than the two mentioned above - grounds which the author would tend to agree with and explores further throughout this dissertation.
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