Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0334/03347.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 19KB | 331 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03347}
$Pretitle{379}
$Title{Spain
The Loss of the Remaining Colonies and the National Crisis of 1898}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Embassy of Spain, Washington DC}
$Affiliation{Embassy of Spain, Washington DC}
$Subject{war
political
spanish
spain
regime
military
authoritarian
de
economic
civil}
$Date{1989}
$Log{The Maine*0334701.scf
Workers Poster*0334703.scf
}
Country:     Spain
Book:        Spain 1989
Author:      Embassy of Spain, Washington DC
Affiliation: Embassy of Spain, Washington DC
Date:        1989

The Loss of the Remaining Colonies and the National Crisis of 1898

     The efficiency of the system broke down when a sufficient number of
citizens realized that they were left out of the political decision-making
scheme.

     On 18 August 1898 the Spanish flag was lowered without ceremony in Morro
de la Habana in Cuba. After 400 years, Spain repatriated Columbus' coffin
wrapped in the national flag. In December of that same year, the Spanish
Government signed, in Paris, the treaty for the independence of Cuba and the
cession of Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States. It had lost
420,000 square kilometres of land, thousands of men, two squadrons and 1,5
billion pesetas in a one-sided war with the United States. The same newspapers
that months before had been demanding a virile response to colonial problems
now blamed the government for having involved the nation in an irresponsible
venture founded on false patriotism.

     In 1898, a generation of morally committed intellectuals came to the
fore. They were active and intelligent and determined to Europeanize Spain,
which in their opinion had been "Africanized" by the old system. This
movement, which became known as regeneracionismo gave birth to an excellent
literary group obsessed by the singularity of Spanish backwardness.

     Towards the 1920s, a great number of Spaniards outgrew the narrowness of
the Restoration and felt that a drastic change was needed. In the meantime,
the dissolution of the Moroccan state resulted in an unpopular war that became
endemic and which restored to the military the prominent national role which
they had been losing over the course of a half century of increasing
alienation from politics. This factor, together with the factionalization of
the political parties and national and social tensions, were responsible for
the military intervention of General Primo de Rivera who seized power without
having to fire a shot.

[See The Maine: Spain's Defeat in Cuba generated a crisis of national
conscience, which gave way to regenerationism. The Maine.]

The Collapse of the Monarchy and the Brief Republican Experience

     Primo de Rivera decided to "play doctor", and eliminate some of the
ills of the political system, but in the process, he also eliminated the
patient; he put an end to the old-style politics, but dragged along in his
wake the Monarchy and the Spanish liberal right of the previous century.
Although the dictatorship coincided with other authoritarian European regimes
and imitated some of their characteristics, such as corporativism, its
Catholic and monarchic philosophy was more reminiscent of Petain than
Mussolini.

     The constitutional rupture provoked by Primo de Rivera and sanctioned by
Alfonso XIII gave the republicans the chance they were waiting for. They
unleashed a highly effective campaign to which the socialist and nationalist
parties adhered and which were victorious in the municipal elections of 1931
in the cities, thereby precipitating the exile of the Monarchy and heralding
the coming of the Republic.

     The Second Spanish Republic was the most serious pre-war attempt to
smooth a transition toward a pluralist democracy. Its main leaders belonged to
a generation of intellectuals convinced of the necessities of a regenerative
change of moral and even personal dimensions; however, they discovered that
the Spanish citizens would demand much more of the Republic than a political
regime could easily give them. There was more freedom and justice than in any
other preceeding period and the right to vote could be exercised without
restriction.

     However, the Spanish Republic was born in a rather untimely context,
shadowed by the world Depression and the recent rise to power of Hitler. Its
failure cannot be explained without bearing in mind this intellectual,
international and economic climate of general deterioration and violence.
But these were not the only problems which the democratic experience had to
face. Many were legacies of the past, such as poverty and crippling social
injustices.

     The Republic's equilibrium was upset by an authoritarian right, heir of
Primo de Rivera, and was influenced by fascism and particularly by the
political ideas of the Frenchman, Charles Maurras. This imbalance was
accentuated by the radicalization forced on a part of the left subjected to
the constant pressure of anarchism.

     The progressive rupture of the country into rival factions began to
crystallize from 1934 onward, the year in which a significant part of the
left-wing parties reacted, by supporting the uprising in Asturias, against
the electoral victory of the right-wing coalition, which was interpreted as a
repetition of the victories of Dolfuss in Austria in 1932 and of National
Socialism in Germany in 1933. The Minister of War at the insistence of General
Franco, employed african troops to put down the revolt militarily, followed by
a harsh repression which led to the arrest of thousands of alleged
revolutionaries over several months.

     It was very difficult for a democratic regime to resist such tensions and
the call for amnesty galvanized the entire left, which united for electoral
purposes. Thus was born the Popular Front, in 1936, which took its name from a
strategy popularized in other European countries. The right reacted by forming
their own National Front and, after the elections of 1936, which the left won
by a narrow margin, the country was split into two hostile camps.

The Military Uprising and the Outbreak of the Civil War

     Tensions continued to increase and the new Republican Left Government
showed itself to be incapable of dealing with the situation. While public
order rapidly disintegrated, the occupation of land by the peasants wreaked
havoc on agrarian reform initiatives made by the government and the land
owners responded with gunfire. In the cities, the confrontations between armed
gunmen occurred daily. In July, gunmen from the Falange (a active group of
fascist cast which had not obtained a single seat in the February elections)
assassinated Lieutenant Castillo, a very popular policeman with leftist ties.
Some of the victim's friends, police officers as well, avenged his death by
murdering Jose Calvo Sotelo, one of the rightist leaders of the parliamentary
opposition. Three days later, Army troops revolted in the Canaries and in
north Africa, giving the initiative to a military coup which had been
simmering for months.

     Attempts to put a stop to the war by the new head of the Republican
government, Diego Martinez Barrio, were in vain, as they were ignored by
General Mola, one of the leaders of the revolt, who was in charge of the
military in Navarra. The Civil War was, above all, the consequence of a
military coup aborted by internal divisions within the Armed Forces and by
the massive response in the streets.

     The soldiers of 1936 belonged to a generation very different from that
which participated in the pronunciamientos and bloodless coups of the previous
century. They had been born and raised with the humiliation of 1898 and had
been trained during the debacle of the Moroccan war. They distrusted
politicians, and Primo de Rivera's dictatorship had convinced them that
political problems deserved forceful treatment and had a simple solution. They
were also influenced by the violent and authoritarian political literature of
the 1920s and 1930s. These men had come to believe that the Patria was
threatened by