Nation and State in Twentieth-Century Spain

1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-485
Author(s):  
Mary Vincent
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
The West ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Americo Castro

Pamela Beth Radcliff, From Mobilisation to Civil War: The Politics of Polarisation in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 354 pp., £40, ISBN 0–521–56213–9.Carolyn Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History, and National Identity in Spain, 1875–1975 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 358 pp., $49.50, £35.00, ISBN 0–691–02656–4.Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire 1898–1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 269 pp., £35.00, ISBN 0–198–20507–4.Clare Mar-Molinero and Angel Smith, eds., Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula: Competing and Conflicting Identities (Oxford/Washington, DC: Berg, 1996), 281 pp., £34.95, pb £14.95, ISBN 1–859–73175–9.Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 314 pp., £40.00, $59.95, ISBN 0–521–59401–4.Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: the Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (London: John Murray, 1998), 354 pp., £25, ISBN 0–719–55556–6.During the long years of Francoism, Spanish historiography was dominated by a search for explanation. Against the regime's triumphalist account of the ‘essential’ Spain – resurgent in the form of the victorious general's authoritarian, confessional state – exiled intellectuals such as Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz and Américo Castro posed questions about the ‘problem’ of Spain, looking to the country's past to explain the political violence of the present. For those who won the Civil War of 1936–39, Spain's national destiny was to remain true to the imperial, Catholic legacy of the Habsburg monarchy. Eschewing modern ‘decadence’ and the false paths of secularism and democracy, Spain was to remain, according to Franco, the ‘spiritual reserve of the west’. Such a vision of history, in Mike Richards's words, ‘appropriated time itself in acknowledging no distinctions between past, present and future’ (Mar-Molinero and Smith, p. 152). To Francoist ideologues, both history and the nation were understood in terms of providential destiny: once understood, the national destiny would prove immutable.

Rethinking the Postwar Period in Spain: Violence and Irregular Civil War, 1939–52

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 492-513
Author(s):  
Jorge Marco
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Prison System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Franco Dictatorship ◽  
Guerrilla Movement

There is a consensus among scholars regarding the slow transformation of ‘hot-blooded terror’ into ‘cold-blooded terror’ during the Civil War and the postwar period in Spain. This article challenges this framework in two ways. First, it argues that the Spanish Civil War did not end in 1939, but lasted until 1952, divided in three stages: symmetric nonconventional warfare (July 1936 – February 1937), conventional civil war (February 1937 – April 1939), and irregular civil war (April 1939–52). Second, it argues that the narrative of ‘cold-blooded terror’ after 1939 has obscured the complexity of the political violence imposed by the Franco dictatorship. The author argues that throughout the three stages of the Civil War the Francoists implemented a process of political cleansing, but that from April 1939 two different logics of violence were deployed. These depended on the attitude of the vanquished – resignation or resistance – after the defeat of the Republican army. The logic of violence directed against the subjugated enemy was channelled through institutional instruments. In contrast, the logic of counterinsurgency directed against the guerrilla movement, alongside instruments such as military courts and the prison system, imposed a wide repertoire of brutal practices and massacres against civilians and combatants.

The Spanish Civil War: New Approaches and Historiographic Perspectives

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-267
Author(s):  
Eduardo González Calleja
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Military History ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is almost unattainable, but the matter continues to elicit such interest that it remains open to new historiographic trends. For example, the ‘classic’ military history of the conflict, cultivated prominently in recent years by Gabriel Cardona, Jorge Martínez Reverte and Anthony Beevor, does not renounce the microhistory or cultural perspective. These constitute the theoretical framework of the New Military History and its corollary the New Combat History, which combine philological, anthropological, psychological and historiographical perspectives to various degrees. In the specific field of the war experiences pioneered by George L. Mosse, the concepts of brutalisation, barbarisation and demodernisation of military operations, coined by Omer Bartov to describe the particularities of the Eastern campaign during the Second World War, are being used by Spanish historians dedicated to the study of the violence and atrocities of the civil war and post-war. Focusing on the field of political history, government management or diplomacy has been studied almost exhaustively, but this is not the case for the principal phenomenon of political violence in the 1930s in Europe, namely paramilitarisation. It is surprising that the latest studies on the issue at the European level (Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore) do not include any essays on the enormous incidence of paramilitary violence in Spain before, during and after the civil war.

From Ideological to Humanistic Interpretations

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-260
Author(s):  
Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Paradigms ◽  
The Cold War

The recent evolution of both the historiography on the Spanish Civil War, and even the general population's perception of the conflict, cannot be separated from the changes in the political and cultural paradigms in Europe since the end of the Cold War. By this I mean that Europeans, but not only them, have been evolving from a mostly ideological view of the past to an increasingly humanistic one.

Memory and Politics in Democratic Spain

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Omar G. Encarnación
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Franco Regime ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Right

This chapter explains the persistence of Spain’s ‘politics of forgetting’, a phenomenon revealed by the wilful intent to disremember the political memory of the violence of the Spanish Civil War and the human rights abuses of General Franco’s authoritarian regime. Looking beyond the traumas of the Civil War, the limits on transitional justice and truth-telling on the Franco regime imposed by a transition to democracy anchored on intra-elite pacts, and the conciliatory and forward-looking political culture that consolidated in the new democracy, this analysis emphasizes a decidedly less obvious explanation: the political uses of forgetting. Special attention is paid to how the absence of a reckoning with the past, protected politicians from both the right and the left from embarrassing and inconvenient political histories; facilitated the reinvention of the major political parties as democratic institutions; and lessened societal fears about repeating past historical mistakes. The conclusion of the chapter explains how the success of the current democratic regime, shifting public opinion about the past occasioned by greater awareness about the dark policies and legacies of the Franco regime, and generational change among Spain’s political class have in recent years diminished the political uses of forgetting. This, in turn, has allowed for a more honest treatment of the past in Spain’s public policies.

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