Spain: A Unique History (28 page)

Even after Carlism weakened, it could still be resuscitated by radical new challenges, when combined with the weakening of the political system. Such a situation developed immediately under the First Republic, and later under the Second Republic. Had Spain been able to sustain an orderly parliamentary evolution, the last two Carlist uprisings (1873, 1936) would presumably not have occurred, dependent as they were not upon opposition to liberalism itself (though that opposition always remained) but upon the breakdown of liberalism.

The First Carlist War was an exhausting and debilitating struggle, which further retarded Spain's development, but the liberals won a complete victory, even though they continued to recognize Basque fueros and Navarrese rights, as well. The international and domestic politics of violence in Spain between 1808 and 1840 had produced a more decisive and liberal outcome than would have existed had the country continued the peaceful evolution of the eighteenth century. The result was a political and social rupture that produced a series of weak liberal governments. The liberals had won both politically and militarily, but lacked the strength to govern with consensus and to sustain a rapid pace of development, even though they forced decisive legal, institutional, social, and economic changes. Though leftist critics later charged that the liberals had compromised excessively with the aristocracy and the Church, the liberals dominated so thoroughly in political terms that the main challenges were social, economic, and cultural.
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Under a more traditional monarchy willing to confront practical issues, government would have been less liberal but stronger and more unified, and the pace of modernization possibly somewhat more rapid, but that is a counterfactual speculation.

The only kind of liberalism that nineteenth-century Spain could sustain was a highly elitist and restrictive liberalism, which precluded democratization, but this was typical of most parliamentary systems of the mid-nineteenth century. Historical and political commentary in the twentieth century often held that this was because of the tyrannical and oppressive character of the "bourgeoisie," or whatever the ruling elites were to be called. Only recently have some historians come to realize that the real obstacle was more nearly the nature of society and culture, which could not generate a broader civil society until well into the twentieth century. Moreover, in recent years historians have concluded that Spanish liberalism was more genuinely middle class, and less allied to the traditional aristocracy (which survived as a social and sometimes economic group rather than as a political force) than was in fact the case in most European countries. Bereft of most of the traditional elites as well as of the ordinary population, Spanish liberalism was politically dominant but socially restricted, a fact that for some time weakened its stability.

The effects of the great disamortization of Church and common lands that took place in the middle decades of the century received much criticism for the country's limited development. The disamortization, however, did not so much introduce new evils as to ratify the new scheme of things that was already emerging. Given the economic weakness of small landowners and sharecroppers, the political and economic conditions of that age scarcely permitted any other outcome, and agricultural development would not have accelerated had the disamortization never taken place. To conceive of a utopian land reform by censitary or restrictive liberalism is an idle enterprise. One major effect, however, was to consolidate the new liberal elite politically and economically, guaranteeing the collaboration of the landowners with the liberal system.

As it was, the censitary form of Moderado liberalism governed the country for most of the eight decades after 1843, first under the convulsive reign of Isabel II, and then in a more enlightened, tolerant, and comprehensive form under the evolutionary and reformist Restoration system initiated in 1875 by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, arguably Spain's leading modern parliamentary statesman. Cánovas's reputation has fluctuated a good deal, like that of nineteenth-century liberalism in general, but in recent years more historians have come to recognize his system as the civic achievement that it was — one that provided a generally tolerant framework for reformism and improvement, overcoming the failures of its predecessors and providing a means of moving more confidently into the twentieth century.
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The successful compromises of the Restoration were possible in considerable measure due to the disillusionment with earlier failures and the multiple disasters of the democratic sexennium of 1868-74. Practical experience is often of great benefit in public affairs, and a mood chastened by experience was something that the Restoration had in common with the democratization of the country, which began almost exactly a century later.

The concept of the Spanish nation was clearly affirmed for the first time by the Cortes de Cádiz. Nationalism declares the sovereignty of the citizenry, as affirmed in the Constitution of 1812. It also declares the formation of a national community of equal rights, with all citizens equal before the law. A basic difference between modern nationalism and traditional patriotism is that the latter is largely defensive, while nationalism is proactive, future-oriented, and tends to take the form of a project, or a series of new claims.

Nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism assumed the project of affirming and developing the modern Spanish nation. This involved constructing a new liberal interpretation of Spanish history based on the medieval liberties of parliaments, rights, and fueros, with a special place for the failed rebellion of the Castilian Comunidades in 1520-21. It reached its highest expression in the massive multivolume
Historia de España
of Modesto Lafuente, which would continue to be reprinted well into the twentieth century. This presented a classic "liberal interpretation" of Spanish history, focused on the historical process of the development of the Spanish nation.
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Such a discourse would subsequently be modified in a more conservative direction, on the one hand, while radical liberals, on the other hand, would later change it in a more radical direction.

The doctrine of the nation was nevertheless not as fully and firmly developed and accepted in Spain as in France or even in Italy, though during the nineteenth century it seemed to make impressive progress, as revealed in the Moroccan war of 1859 and even to some extent in the final Cuban conflict of 1895-98. Nonetheless, the twentieth century would demonstrate the fragility of the nineteenth-century unified nation.

During the first half of the nineteenth century Catholicism was an obstacle to this process. Religion had provided one of the most important sources of Spanish identity throughout history but inevitably possessed a more universal and trans-Hispanic dimension, whereas to Catholic leaders nationalism seemed a radical and secular doctrine stemming from the French Revolution, which to a considerable extent it was. It has often been observed that the clergy were the most active and effective elite in fomenting armed resistance against the French; their appeal was religious, universalist, and also patriotic, but not truly nationalist. Carlists, for example, resisted the project of a modern Spanish nationalism, which they associated with liberalism and revolution, in favor of maintaining tradition. Only in the 1850s, with the nation seemingly firmly established, did Catholic writers and ideologues begin to develop their own interpretation of the historically Catholic nation, defining a kind of right-wing Catholic nationalism, more in line with the reading of nationalism by many Catholics in Poland.
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The traditional "Spanish ideology" was thus updated to embrace a form of modern nationalism, its leading avatar being Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and its vision of Spain expressed in a variety of textbooks.
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Moreover, by the end of the century, with liberalism more firmly established than ever, Carlism developed its own project of building a traditionalist Catholic nationalism.
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The nineteenth-century project of the Spanish nation was never effectively completed. Slow development of the national economy and of a national education system were two factors that impeded fuller integration and the formation of a national consciousness. The absence of universal military service may have been another. Moreover, the tenacious resistance to national uniformity by traditionalists and regionalists, particularly in the Basque Country and Navarre, proved intimidating to a weak liberal nationalism, which won on the battlefield but continued to respect special fiscal privileges that would never be overcome. Related to this and perhaps more important was the sense of national failure by the end of the century, combined with the absence of any foreign threat or major new national project, which might have served as motivating and unifying influences. The consequence was the growth of Catalan, then Basque, nationalism, as well as other regional movements, so that both in the early and later parts of the twentieth century the term "nationalism" more often than not would refer to the micronational and peripheral movements, not to Spanish nationalism, which, despite its victory in the Civil War of 1936-39, had faded by the last years of the Franco regime, along with all the major western nationalisms, and would subsequently seem almost nonexistent.

Even though Spain faced no challenges from other European countries after the defeat of Napoleonic France, the liberal state was involved in military operations on many occasions during the nineteenth century. The Spanish army became notorious for its political pretorianism (see chapter 15), but in fact was never truly militaristic, despite the fact that it was involved in significant military campaigns for more years than any other European army during the nineteenth century.

Rather than facing international conflicts, under liberalism Spain became the classic land of civil war, beginning with the limited struggle of 1822-23, followed by the insurrection of the Catalan peasantry in 1827 (Guerra dels agraviats), the First Carlist War (1833-40), a minor Carlist revolt in Catalonia between 1846 and 1849 (Guerra dels mariners), and the Second Carlist War (1873-76), to which must be added the republican cantonalist rebellion of 1873-74 and many civil and military "pronunciamientos" (attempted coups d'état) of shorter duration, some of which involved serious armed confrontation. The First Carlist War lasted seven years, during which nearly 150,000 men died, a very high figure for the population of those years. In addition, there were large-scale campaigns to suppress Hispano-American independence movements (which might also be considered civil wars), first during the decade 1815-25 and later during the Ten Years' War in Cuba (1868-78), followed by the brief "Guerra Chiquita" or Little War (1879-80) and the disastrous final Cuban war of 1895-98, climaxed by the conflict with the United States.

Spain was the only country for whom the nineteenth century began and ended with major international conflicts, with France and United States, respectively. During the intervening years occurred a war with Morocco (1859-60), a naval conflict off the western coast of South America, and a lesser military conflict with Morocco in 1894. The two main Cuban campaigns cost the army more than 100,000 deaths, and altogether, the Spanish colonial conflicts of the nineteenth century were by far the most costly in human and economic terms of those waged by any European state — at least in comparative terms — ending in absolute failure. The only country that might even begin to equal Spain in terms of the number of civil conflicts through the early twentieth century was Colombia.

The economic cost of all this was very great. Not merely did it retard development and modernization, but required that most of the state budget be devoted to the military, which remained backward and completely second rate. This also helped to guarantee miserably inadequate funding for education, arguably the greatest of the failures of nineteenth-century liberalism.

For much of the nineteenth century Spanish nationalism was relatively optimistic. It affirmed Spain's grand national past and looked to modern development to lift the country to an important place in the future. Pessimism first began to set in during and after the sexennium of 1868-74, when the nation seemed almost to dissolve amid major colonial war, civil conflict, and cantonalist insurrection. When all this was combined with lagging social, cultural, and economic development, the present and future looked dark. As early as 1876 the novelist Juan Valera expressed gratitude for the existence of Turkey, whose abysmal circumstances guaranteed that Spain would not quite be at the lowest rank of European and Mediterranean countries.

The Restoration provided stability and restored some degree of competence, but by the 1880s a persistent sense of failure could be perceived in some quarters, for it was obvious that liberalism, modernization, and success had obviously not followed together. The "regenerationist" societies did not begin after 1898, but were foreshadowed by a number of new groups formed in Castile during the 1880s, seeking to regenerate the Castilian economy and strengthen the nation.
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A more adequate perspective on the "failure debate," replete with empirical data and rigorous analysis, would be provided by the flowering of Spanish historiography one hundred years later. Considerable expansion of economic history took place during the last part of the twentieth century, and one of the main questions addressed by the new scholars in this field was that of
El fracaso de la revolución industrial en España
(The Failure of the Industrial Revolution in Spain), as the title of a well-known earlier book by Jordi Nadal put it.
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The futility of direct comparison between Spain and England began to be appreciated. Comparative study of Italy, for example, was more fruitful, but this also revealed shortcomings in Spanish performance, at least by the end of the nineteenth century.
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The historians tended to single out state protectionism as the most deleterious government policy, even though that was not always entirely convincing.