Introduction

Since the late 1950s, Spain has been transformed. A stagnant, inefficient economy, with a large and backward agricultural sector, has become one of the most dynamic in Western Europe, which often produces the continent's highest growth rates. This transformation brought with it tremendous changes in where Spaniards lived, in how they earned their livelihoods, and in their standard of living. It also came to mean that Spain, long sealed off from the social changes of Western Europe by a reactionary authoritarian regime, gradually opened up and, in the course of a single generation, adopted the living habits and the attitudes of its more advanced neighbors. Most striking of all were two political events. The first, the fashioning of a working democracy that most Spaniards supported, was unique in the country's history. Perhaps equally pathbreaking was the attainment of varying degrees of autonomy by the country's regions, in a radical departure from a centuries-old tradition of centralized control from Madrid.

Only since the early 1960s have the doctrines of economic liberalism been widely practiced in Spain. Traditional policy was based on high tariffs, protectionism, and a striving for economic self-sufficiency, practices which resulted in a backward Spanish economy in 1960. At that time, agriculture was still very important because slightly under half of the population earned its living working on farms. The manufacturing sector consisted mainly of small, privately owned firms, using outmoded methods of production, or of large, inefficient, state-run enterprises, specializing in heavy industry. Only the Basque Country (Spanish, Pais Vasco; Basque, Euskadi) and Catalonia (Spanish, Cataluna; Catalan, Catalunya) had experienced an industrial revolution, but both the former's heavy industry and the latter's textile production were dependent on the domestic market for sales and on protection from foreign competition. Spanish industry had profited hugely from World War I, but, once peace returned, it was unable to meet the demands of free trade. The government had resorted to traditional protectionism to keep the country's businesses running. The Civil War of 1936- 39 so devastated the economy that the living standards of the mid-1930s were not matched again until the early 1950s. The political regime established by the war's victor, Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, showed its essentially traditional character by embracing the principle of national economic self-sufficiency and by codifying it into the doctrine of autarchy. Stringent import controls and extensive state participation in the industrial sector, through large state-owned and state-operated enterprises, became characteristic features of the economy.

Protectionism preserved inefficient businesses, and state controls prevented agricultural innovation or made it pointless. Labor was rigidly controlled, but job security was provided in return.

While Western Europe's economies experienced a miraculous rebirth in the 1950s, Spain's economy remained dormant. Lack of growth eventually forced the Franco regime to countenance introduction of liberal economic policies in the late 1950s. The so-called Stabilization Plan of 1959 did away with many import restrictions; imposed temporary wage freezes; devalued the nation's currency, the peseta; tied Spain's financial and banking operations more closely to those of the rest of Europe; and encouraged foreign investment. After a painful start, the economy took off in the early 1960s, and, during the next decade, it grew at an astonishing pace. The Spanish gross national product expanded at a rate twice that of the rest of Western Europe. Production per worker doubled, while wages tripled. Exports grew by 12 percent a year, and imports increased by 17 percent annually. Between 1960 and 1975, agriculture's share of the economically active population fell by almost half, while the manufacturing and service sectors' shares each rose by nearly a third. Some of this growth was caused by tourism, which brought tens of millions of Europeans to Spain each year, and by the remittances of Spaniards working abroad. Without the liberalization of the economy, however, the overall gains would not have been possible. Liberalization forced the economy to be more market-oriented, and it exposed Spanish businesses to foreign competition.

The first and the second oil crises of the 1970s ended this extraordinary boom. An excessive dependence on foreign oil, insufficient long-term investments, structural defects, and spiraling wage costs made Spain unusually susceptible to the effects of the worldwide economic slump of the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Spain's economy languished until the second half of the 1980s, and during this time the country was afflicted by an unemployment rate that often exceeded 20 percent, higher than that of any other major West European country.

The sensational victory of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol--PSOE) in the national election of 1982 gave it an absolute majority in Spain's Parliament, the Cortes, and allowed it to introduce further liberal economic measures that previous weak governments could not consider. The Socialist government, headed by the party leader and prime minister, Felipe Gonzalez Marquez, opted for orthodox monetary and fiscal policies, for wage austerity, and for the scaling down of wasteful state enterprises. The government's policies began to bear fruit in the second half of the decade, when the economy once again had the fastest growth rates in Western Europe. Many large manufacturing companies and financial institutions had record-breaking profits, and inflation was kept under control.

One reason for the government's interest in reforming the economy was Spain's admission to the European Community (EC) in 1986. If the country were to benefit from EC membership, it would have to be able to meet unrestricted foreign competition. At the end of 1992, when a single EC market was to come into being, virtually all restrictions shielding Spain's economy against competition from other members of the organization would end. This change meant that Spanish firms had to be strong enough to thrive in a more rigorous commercial climate. In mid-1989 the peseta was believed to be sufficiently healthy for the country to join the European Monetary System (EMS), which tied the peseta to the other EC currencies. The country's financial institutions were undergoing a long strengthening process of reorganization and consolidation. Portions of the agricultural sector had also been modernized, and, given the advantage of Spain's Mediterranean climate, they were well poised to hold their own with the commercialized farming of other EC countries. In short, in thirty years Spain's economy had undergone a profound transformation and had joined the European mainstream.

The economic boom of the 1960s and the early 1970s had social effects that transformed Spain in a single generation. First, there was a great movement of population from the countryside to those urban areas that offered employment, mainly Madrid, Barcelona, and centers in the Basque Country. A rapid mechanization of agriculture (the number of tractors in Spain increased sixfold during the boom) made many agricultural workers redundant. The need for work and the desire for the better living standards offered in urban centers, spurred about five million Spaniards to leave the countryside during the 1960s and early the 1970s. More than one million went to other countries of Western Europe. The extent of migration was such that some areas in Extremadura and in the high Castilian plateau appeared nearly depopulated by the mid-1970s.

Urbanization in the 1960s and the 1970s caused cities to grow at an annual rate of 2.4 percent, and as early as 1970 migrants accounted for about 26 percent of the population of Madrid and for 23 percent of that of Barcelona. After the mid-1970s, however, this mass migration slowed down appreciably, and some of the largest urban areas even registered a slight decrease in population in the 1980s.

Another result of the economic transformation was a dramatic rise in living standards. In the 1940s and the 1950s, many Spaniards were extremely poor, so much so that, for example, cigarettes could be bought singly. By the late 1980s, the country's per capita income amounted to more than US$8,000 annually, somewhat lower than the West European average, but high enough for Spanish consumption patterns to resemble those of other EC countries. In 1960 there were 5 passenger cars per 1,000 inhabitants; in 1985, there were 240. In the same period, the number of television sets showed a similar increase, and the number of telephones per capita increased sixfold. Access to medical care was much better, and the infant mortality rate had decreased so greatly that it was lower than the EC average. In addition, many more Spaniards received higher education.

However, the economic boom was not an unmixed blessing. Housing in many urban regions was often scarce, expensive, and of poor quality. Although many new dwellings were built, the results were frequently unappealing, and there were unhealthy tracts of cramped apartment buildings with few amenities. City transportation systems never caught up with the influx of people, and the road network could not accommodate the explosion in car ownership made possible by increased incomes. An already inadequate social welfare system was also swamped by the waves of rural immigrants, often ill-prepared for life in an urban environment. Widespread unemployment among the young, usually estimated at about 40 percent in the late 1980s, caused hardship. Material need, coupled with a way of life remote from the habits and the restrictions of the rural villages from which most migrants came, often resulted in an upsurge of urban crime. The boom also had not touched all sections of the country. Some areas, for example, had twice the per capita income of others.

The material transformation of Spain was accompanied by a social transformation. The Roman Catholic Church lost, in a single generation, its role of social arbiter and monitor. Traditionally one of the most rigid and doctrinaire churches in Western Europe, the Spanish church had enjoyed a privileged role under the Franco regime. Although significant elements of the church had fought against oppressive aspects of the regime and for democracy, especially after the Second Vatican Council (1962- 65), the church as a whole had been comfortable with the regime. The church supervised the education system, supported the bans on divorce and abortion, and in general counseled submission to political authorities.

This close relationship ended after the death of Franco in 1975. The 1978 Constitution separates church and state, and it deprives Roman Catholicism of the status of official religion. Subsequent legislation brought education under secular control, liberalized press laws, permitted pornography; and, in the first half of the 1980s, both divorce and abortion became legal. More significant than these formal changes was the secularization of the Spanish people. Church attendance dropped significantly, and by the early 1980s only about 30 percent of Spaniards viewed themselves as practicing Roman Catholics, compared with 80 percent in the mid-1960s. Moreover, about 45 percent of Spaniards declared themselves indifferent, or even hostile, to religion. This attitude was reflected in the precipitous drop in the number of Spaniards choosing religious vocations, and it was evidence of the loss of religion's central place in many people's lives.

Another indication of the lessening importance of religion was the absence of any successful nationwide religious political party. Although there were impassioned debates about the legalization of divorce and about the proper role of the Roman Catholic Church in the national education system in the early 1980s, religion was no longer the highly divisive element it had so often been in Spanish politics, and the Roman Catholic Church refrained from endorsing political parties before elections. In contrast to the Second Republic (1931-36), when anticlericalism was a powerful force, many church-going members of leftist parties in the post-Franco era saw no contradiction between their political affiliations and regular church attendance.

Some secular creeds also lost the place they had once filled in public life. The anarchist movement that had been so important for most of the century up to the end of the Civil War was nearly extinct by the end of Franco's rule. Other left-wing movements that survived the years of Francoist oppression either adapted to the new economic and social circumstances or were marginalized. Old sets of political beliefs faded away in new economic and social conditions.

Social attitudes changed, too. Migration separated many people from old ways of thought. Moreover, the enormous influx of foreign tourists brought in new social and political attitudes, as did the movement of large numbers of Spanish workers back and forth between their country and the rest of Western Europe. Migration broke down the patron-client relationship that had been characteristic of Spaniards' relationships with the government. Using informal personal networks and petitioning the well-placed to obtain desired government services became, within the space of a few decades, much less common. Persistent, but not wholly effective, reforms of the civil service also aimed at increasing the impartiality of public institutions.

Personal relations changed as well. The position of women improved as the legalization of divorce and birth control gave women more freedom than they had traditionally enjoyed. Although divorce was still not common in Spain in the 1980s, families had become smaller. The extended family continued to be more important in Spain than it was in Northern Europe, but it had lost much of its earlier significance. Legal reforms made women more equal before the law. The expanding economy of the 1960s and the late 1980s employed ever more women, although at a rate considerably below that in Northern Europe.

The social and the economic changes that occurred during the 1960s and the early 1970s convinced segments of the Franco regime that autocratic rule was no longer suitable for Spain and that a growing opposition could no longer be contained by traditional means. The death of Franco made change both imperative and possible. There was no one who could replace him. (His most likely successor had been assassinated in 1973.) Franco's absence allowed long-submerged forces to engage in open political activity. Over the course of the next three years, a new political order was put in place. A system of parliamentary democracy, rooted in a widely accepted modern constitution, was established. For the first time in Spanish history, a constitution was framed not by segments of society able to impose their will but by representatives of all significant groups, and it was approved in a referendum by the people as a whole.

Given the difficulties this process entailed, Spain was fortunate in several regards. In addition to a population ready for peaceful change, there was political leadership able to bring it about. A skilled Francoist bureaucrat, Adolfo Suarez Gonzalez, guided the governmental apparatus of the Franco regime in disassembling itself and in participating peacefully in its own extinction. Another favorable circumstance was that the king, Juan Carlos de Borbon, chosen and educated by Franco to maintain the regime, worked instead for a constitutional monarchy in a democratic state. The king's role as commander in chief of the armed forces and his good personal relations with the military served to keep the military on the sidelines during the several years of intense political debate about how Spain was to be governed. Yet another stroke of good fortune was that Spain's political leadership had learned from the terrible bloodletting of the Civil War that ideological intransigence precluded meaningful political discourse among opposing groups. The poisonous rancors of the Second Republic, Spain's last attempt at democratic government, were avoided, and the political elite that emerged during the 1970s permitted each significant sector of society a share in the final political solution. Suarez's legalization in April 1977 of the Communist Party of Spain (Partido Comunista de Espana--PCE), despite much conservative opposition, was the most striking example of this openness.

The first free elections in more than forty years took place in June 1977, and they put Suarez's party, the Union of the Democratic Center (Union de Centro Democratico--UCD) in power. The UCD also won the next elections in 1979, but it disintegrated almost completely in the elections of 1982. The UCD, a coalition of moderates of varying stripes, had never coalesced into a genuine party. It had, however, been cohesive enough to be the governing party during much of an extraordinary transition from autocratic rule to democracy, and it had withstood serious threats from a violent right and left.

The UCD's successor as a governing party was Spain's socialist party, the PSOE, under the leadership of Felipe Gonzalez Marquez, a charismatic young politician. Gonzalez had successfully wrested control of the party away from the aging leadership that had directed it from exile during the dictatorship, and he was able to modernize it, stripping away an encrustation of Marxist doctrine. Gonzalez and his followers had close ties to the West German Social Democrats and they had learned from their example how to form and to direct a dynamic and pragmatic political organization. The PSOE's victory at the polls in 1982 proved the strength of Spain's new democracy in that political power passed peacefully to a party that had been in illegal opposition during all of Franco's rule.

Once in office, Gonzalez and the PSOE surprised many by initiating an economic program that many regarded as free-market and that seemed to benefit the prosperous rather than working people. The government argued that only prosperity--not poverty-- could be shared, and it aimed at an expansion of the economy rather than at the creation of government social welfare agencies, however much they were needed. Many of the large and unprofitable state firms were scaled down. The Socialist government also reversed its stand on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership, and it successfully urged that the voters support Spain's remaining in the alliance in a referendum in early 1986. One reason the PSOE reversed its position was that it came to see that NATO membership could contribute to the democratization of Spain's armed forces. The government also worked toward this goal by modernizing the military, by reducing its size, by reforming its promotion procedures, and by retiring many of its older officers. Nevertheless, the government retained part of its early position on defense by insisting that the United States close some of its military bases in Spain and by placing some limits on Spain's participation in the alliance.

The governing PSOE was faithful to its origins, in that it somewhat reformed the education system, and it increased access to schooling for all. There were improvements in the country's backward social welfare system as well. Critics charged, however, that the Socialist government paid insufficient attention to the more immediate needs of ordinary Spaniards. In the second half of the 1980s, even the PSOE's own labor union, the General Union of Workers (Union General de Trabajadores--UGT), bitterly contested the government's economic policies. In December 1988, the UGT and the communist-controlled union, the Workers' Commissions (Comisiones Obreras--CCOO), mounted a highly successful, nationwide general strike to emphasize their common contention that the government's economic and social policies hurt wage- earners. Critics within the labor movement were also incensed at the tight control Gonzalez and his followers had over the PSOE, which effectively eliminated any chance of deposing them.

As the 1980s drew to an end, the PSOE, despite a steady erosion of electoral support in national elections, continued to be Spain's most powerful political party, by far. This continuing preeminence was confirmed by the national elections held on October 29, 1989. Gonzalez had called for the elections before their originally scheduled date of June 1990, because the party leadership believed that the belt-tightening measures needed to dampen inflation and to cool an over-heated economy could only hurt the party's election chances. They thought it opportune to hold the elections before painful policies were imposed. In addition, the PSOE was encouraged by its success in the elections for the European Parliament in June 1989. The Socialists based their campaign on the premise that Spain needed the continuity of another four years of their rule in order to meet the challenges posed by the country's projected full participation in the EC's single market at the end of 1992. In what was generally regarded as a lackluster contest, the opposition countered by pointing to the poor state of public services and to the poor living conditions of many working people; by suggesting possible reforms of the terms of service for military conscripts; and by decrying the Socialists' arrogance, abuse of power, and cronyism after seven years in office. An important bone of contention was the government's alleged manipulation of television news to benefit the PSOE's cause, a serious issue in a country where newspaper readership was low, compared with the rest of Western Europe, and where most people got their news from television.

The PSOE was expected to suffer some losses, but probably to retain its absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies (the lower-chamber of the Cortes). At first it appeared to have held its majority, but a rerun in late March 1990 in one voting district because of irregularities reduced the number of its members in the Congress of Deputies to 175, constituting exactly half that body, an appreciable drop from the 184 seats the PSOE had controlled after the 1986 national election. The most striking gains were made by the PCE-dominated coalition of leftist parties, the United Left (Izquierda Unida--IU), which, under the leadership of Julio Anguita, increased the number of its seats in the Congress of Deputies from seven to seventeen. The moderately right-wing People's Party (Partido Popular--PP), which until January 1989 bore the name Popular Alliance (Alianza Popular--AP) gained 2 seats for a total of 107--an excellent showing, considering that the group had a new leader, Jose Maria Aznar, because its long-time head, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, had stepped down just weeks before the election. One reason there was still no effective party on the right, a decade after the promulgation of the Constitution, was that Fraga had never been able to shake off his Francoist past in the eyes of many voters. A new, young, and effective leader of the PP could conceivably change this situation in the 1990s.

Another obstacle to the PP's political dominance was the existence of several moderately conservative regional parties that received support that the PP otherwise might have claimed. The largest of these parties, Convergence and Union (Convergència i Unio--CiU), was the ruling political force in Catalonia and won 18 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, a result identical to that of 1986. Second in importance was the venerable Basque Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalists Vasco--PNV), which won five seats, one less than in 1986. As of early 1990, the PP had been unable to come to an accommodation with the conservative nationalist movements these parties represented.

Suarez's new party, the Democratic and Social Center (Centro Democratico y Social--CDS), stumbled badly, losing a quarter of its seats for a total of fourteen. His party was believed to have been hurt by its collaboration with the PP in the previous June's European Parliament elections, a move seen by voters as yet another indication that Suarez still had not formed a party with a distinct program.

In addition to the establishment of a democratic system of government, the other historic achievement of post-Franco Spain was a partial devolution of political power to the regional level through the formation of seventeen autonomous communities. This development was nearly as significant as the first, for it broke with the tradition of a highly centralized government in Madrid that had been a constant in Spanish history since the late Middle Ages. Despite the weight of this tradition, centrifugal forces had persisted. Various peoples within Spain remembered their former freedoms, kept their languages and traditions alive, and maintained some historical rights that distinguished them from the Castilian central government. Most notably conscious of their separate pasts were the Basques and the Catalans, both of which groups had also been affected by nationalist movements elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe. During the Second Republic, both peoples had made some progress toward self-government, but their gains were extinguished after Franco's victory, and they were persecuted during his rule. Use of their languages in public was prohibited, leading nationalist figures were jailed or were forced into exile, and a watchful campaign to root out any signs of regional nationalism was put in place.

During the period of political transition after Franco's death, regional nationalism came into the open, most strongly in the Basque Country and in Catalonia, but also in Galicia, Navarre (Spanish, Navarra), Valencia, and other regions. Regional politicians, aware that their support was needed, were able to drive hard bargains with politicians in Madrid and realized some of their aims. The 1978 Constitution extends the right of autonomy to the regions of Spain. Within several years of its adoption, the Basques, the Catalans, the Galicians, the Andalusians, and the Navarrese had attained a degree of regional autonomy. Publications in Catalan, Galician, Basque and other languages became commonplace; these languages were taught in schools at government expense, and they were also used in radio and television broadcasts. Dozens of regional political parties of varied leanings sprang up to participate in elections for seats in the parliaments of the newly established autonomous communities. Many conservatives regarded this blossoming of regionalism as an insidious attack on the Spanish state. Portions of the military resolved to fight decentralization at all costs, using force if necessary. Elements of the Basque nationalist movement were also dissatisfied with the constitutional provisions for regional autonomy. In contrast to the ultraright, however, they regarded the provisions as too restrictive. They therefore decided to continue the armed struggle for an independent Basque state that they had begun in the last years of the Franco regime. They reasoned that a campaign of systematic attacks on the security forces would cause the military to retaliate against the new democratic order and, perhaps, to destroy it. The strategy of the Basque terrorist organization, Basque Fatherland and Freedom (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna--ETA), nearly succeeded. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, the ETA assassinated hundreds, many of whom were policemen or military men. These killings were a key factor behind a number of planned military coups, nearly all of which were aborted. A large-scale coup did occur in February 1981, during which the Cortes was briefly occupied by some military men; however, the courageous and expeditious intervention of King Juan Carlos, the commander in chief of Spain's military forces, on the side of the new democratic order, ended the dangerous incident.

Many observers contend, however, that the February 1981 coup did cause a slowing of the movement toward regional autonomy. In the next two years, the remainder of Spain's regions became autonomous communities, but with a less extensive degree of independence than that argued for by many regional politicians during constitutional negotiations. The Organic Law on the Harmonization of the Autonomy Process (Ley Organica de Armonizacion del Proceso Autonomico--LOAPA), passed in the summer of 1981, brought the process of devolution under tighter control. In subsequent years, there were gains in political power at the regional level, but the goals of self-government set in the late 1970s were only slowly being realized. Separatist terrorism was still a problem in Spain at the end of the 1980s, but it was no longer the potentially lethal issue for Spanish democracy that it had been in the late 1970s. The ETA continued to kill, but at a greatly reduced rate. Increased Basque political independence and the establishment of an indigenous police force in the Basque Country undercut much of the popular support the ETA had enjoyed in the last years of the Franco era and in the first years of the democratic transition. Occasional terrorist outrages that claimed the lives of ordinary citizens also eroded local support. Moreover, police successes in capturing or killing many ETA leaders took their toll on the organization, as did belated international support in fighting terrorism, particularly that provided by French authorities. A policy of granting pardons to members of the ETA not linked to acts of violence was also effective.

Violence from the right also declined. Ultrarightist elements in the armed forces were dismissed, or they retired, and the military as a whole had come to accept the new democracy. The Spanish people's overwhelming support for democracy and for the election successes of the PSOE also undercut any tendency of the military to stage a coup. Military interventions in politics had traditionally been based on the notion that the armed forces were acting on the behalf of, or at the behest of, the Spanish people, and that the military were therefore realizing the true will of Spain. The legitimacy conferred on the new political system by nearly all segments of society made such reasoning impossible.

However reduced violence had become, it was still troubling. In November 1989, two Basques elected to the Chamber of Deputies were shot in a restaurant in Madrid. One of the deputies died; the other was seriously wounded. Police believed that ultrarightist killers had attacked the two men, both of whom had ties to the ETA. The action provoked extensive public demonstrations and some street violence.

Whether or not this dark side of regional politics would continue to be significant through the 1990s was uncertain. It appeared likely, however, that regionalism would play an even greater role in the 1990s than it had since the transition to democracy. Much political energy would be needed to arrange a mutually satisfactory relationship between the Spanish state and its constituent nationalities. The degree to which the autonomous communities should gain full autonomy, or even independence, was likely to be much debated; however, the wrangling, fruitful or futile, could be done peacefully, within the context of Spain's new democracy.

Historical Setting

THE NATIONAL HISTORY of Spain dates back to the fifth century A.D., when the Visigoths established a Germanic successor state in the former Roman diocese of Hispania. Despite a period of internal political disunity during the Middle Ages, Spain nevertheless is one of the oldest nation-states in Europe. In the late fifteenth century, Spain acquired its current borders and was united under a personal union of crowns by Ferdinand of Aragon (Spanish, Aragon) and Isabella of Castile (Spanish, Castilla). For a period in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, Portugal was part of that Iberian federation.

In the sixteenth century, Spain was the foremost European power, and it was deeply involved in European affairs from that period to the eighteenth century. Spain's kings ruled provinces scattered across Europe. The Spanish Empire was global, and the influence of Spanish culture was so pervasive, especially in the Americas, that Spanish is still the native tongue of more than 200 million people outside Spain.

Recurrent political instability, military intervention in politics, frequent breakdowns of civil order, and periods of repressive government have characterized modern Spanish history. In the nineteenth century, Spain had a constitutional framework for parliamentary government, not unlike those of Britain and France, but it was unable to develop institutions capable of surviving the social, economic, and ideological stresses of Spanish society.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39), which claimed more than 500,000 lives, recapitulated on a larger scale and more brutally conflicts that had erupted periodically for generations. These conflicts, which centered around social and political roles of the Roman Catholic Church, class differences, and struggles for regional autonomy on the part of Basque and Catalan nationalists, were repressed but were not eliminated under the authoritarian rule of Nationalist leader Generalissimo Francisco Franco y Bahamonde (in power, 1939-75). In the closing years of the Franco regime, these conflicts flared, however, as militant demands for reform increased and mounting terrorist violence threatened the country's stability.

When Prince Juan Carlos de Borbon became king of Spain following Franco's death in November 1975, there was little indication that he would be the instrument for the democratization of Spain. Nevertheless, within three years he and his prime minister, Aldolfo Suarez Gonzalez (in office 1976-81), had accomplished the historically unprecedented feat of transforming a dictatorial regime into a pluralistic, parliamentary democracy through nonviolent means. This accomplishment made it possible to begin the process of healing Spain's historical schisms.

The success of this peaceful transition to democracy can be attributed to the young king's commitment to democratic institutions and to his prime minister's ability to maneuver within the existing political establishment in order to bring about the necessary reforms. The failure of a coup attempt in February 1981 and the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another in October 1982 revealed the extent to which democratic principles had taken root in Spanish society.

West European governments refused to cooperate with an authoritarian regime in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and, in effect, they ostracized the country from the region's political, economic, and defense organizations. With the onset of the Cold War, however, Spain's strategic importance for the defense of Western Europe outweighed other political considerations, and isolation of the Franco regime came to an end. Bilateral agreements, first negotiated in 1953, permitted the United States to maintain a chain of air and naval bases in Spain in support of the overall defense of Western Europe. Spain became a member of the United Nations in 1955 and joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1982.

Iberia

The people who were later named Iberians (or dwellers along the Rio Ebro) by the Greeks, migrated to Spain in the third millennium B.C. The origin of the Iberians is not certain, but archaeological evidence of their metallurgical and agricultural skills supports a theory that they came from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The Iberians lived in small, tightly knit, sedentary tribal groups that were geographically isolated from one another. Each group developed distinct regional and political identities, and intertribal warfare was endemic. Other peoples of Mediterranean origin also settled in the peninsula during the same period and, together with the Iberians, mixed with the diverse inhabitants.

Celts crossed the Pyrenees into Spain in two major migrations in the ninth and the seventh centuries B.C. The Celts settled for the most part north of the Rio Duero and the Rio Ebro, where they mixed with the Iberians to form groups called Celtiberians. The Celtiberians were farmers and herders who also excelled in metalworking crafts, which the Celts had brought from their Danubian homeland by way of Italy and southern France. Celtic influence dominated Celtiberian culture. The Celtiberians appear to have had no social or political organization larger than their matriarchal, collective, and independent clans.

Another distinct ethnic group in the western Pyrenees, the Basques, predate the arrival of the Iberians. Their pre-Indo- European language has no links with any other language, and attempts to identify it with pre-Latin Iberian have not been convincing. The Romans called them Vascones, from which Basque is derived.

The Iberians shared in the Bronze Age revival (1900 to 1600 B.C.) common throughout the Mediterranean basin. In the east and the south of the Iberian Peninsula, a system of city-states was established, possibly through the amalgamation of tribal units into urban settlements. Their governments followed the older tribal pattern, and they were despotically governed by warrior and priestly castes. A sophisticated urban society emerged with an economy based on gold and silver exports and on trade in tin and copper (which were plentiful in Spain) for bronze.

Phoenicians, Greeks, and Carthaginians competed with the Iberians for control of Spain's coastline and the resources of the interior. Merchants from Tyre may have established an outpost at Cadiz, "the walled enclosure," as early as 1100 B.C. as the westernmost link in what became a chain of settlements lining the peninsula's southern coast. If the accepted date of its founding is accurate, Cadiz is the oldest city in Western Europe, and it is even older than Carthage in North Africa. It was the most significant of the Phoenician colonies. From Cadiz, Phoenician seamen explored the west coast of Africa as far as Senegal, and they reputedly ventured far out on the Atlantic. Greek pioneers from the island of Rhodes landed in Spain in the eighth century B.C. The Greek colony at Massilia (later Marseilles) maintained commercial ties with the Celtiberians in what is now Catalonia (Spanish, Cataluna; Catalan, Catalunya). In the sixth century B.C., Massilians founded a polis at Ampurias, the first of several established on the Mediterranean coast of the peninsula.

Al Andalus

Early in the eighth century, armies from North Africa began probing the Visigothic defenses of Spain and ultimately they initiated the Moorish epoch that would last for centuries. The people who became known to West Europeans as Moors were the Arabs, who had swept across North Africa from their Middle Eastern homeland, and the Berbers, inhabitants of Morocco who had been conquered by the Arabs and converted to Islam.

In 711 Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Berber governor of Tangier, crossed into Spain with an army of 12,000 (landing at a promontory that was later named, in his honor, Jabal Tariq, or Mount Tariq, from which the name, Gibraltar, is derived). They came at the invitation of a Visigothic clan to assist it in rising against King Roderic. Roderic died in battle, and Spain was left without a leader. Tariq returned to Morocco, but the next year (712) Musa ibn Nusair, the Muslim governor in North Africa, led the best of his Arab troops to Spain with the intention of staying. In three years he had subdued all but the mountainous region in the extreme north and had initiated forays into France, which were stemmed at Poitiers in 732.

Al Andalus, as Islamic Spain was called, was organized under the civil and religious leadership of the caliph of Damascus. Governors in Spain were generally Syrians, whose political frame of reference was deeply influenced by Byzantine practices. Nevertheless, the largest contingent of Moors in Spain consisted of the North African Berbers, recent converts to Islam, who were hostile to the sophisticated Arab governors and bureaucrats and were given to a religious enthusiasm and fundamentalism that were to set the standard for the Islamic community in Spain. Berber settlers fanned out through the country and made up as much as 20 percent of the population of the occupied territory. The Arabs constituted an aristocracy in the revived cities and on the latifundios that they had inherited from the Romans and the Visigoths.
Most members of the Visigothic nobility converted to Islam, and they retained their privileged position in the new society. The countryside, only nominally Christian, was also successfully Islamized. Nevertheless, an Hispano-Roman Christian community survived in the cities. Moreover, Jews, who constituted more than 5 percent of the population, continued to play an important role in commerce, scholarship, and the professions.

The Arab-dominated Umayyad dynasty at Damascus was overthrown in 756 by the Abbasids, who moved the caliphate to Baghdad. One Umayyad prince fled to Spain and, under the name of Abd al Rahman (r. 756-88), founded a politically independent amirate (the Caliphate of Cordoba), which was then the farthest extremity of the Islamic world. His dynasty flourished for 250 years. Nothing in Europe compared with the wealth, the power, and the sheer brilliance of Al Andalus during this period.

In 929 Abd al Rahman III (r. 912-61), who was half European-- as were many of the ruling caste, elevated the amirate to the status of a caliphate. This action cut Spain's last ties with Baghdad and established that thereafter Al Andalus's rulers would enjoy complete religious and political sovereignty.

When Hisham II, grandson of Abd al Rahman, inherited the throne in 976 at age twelve, the royal vizier, Ibn Abi Amir (known as Al Mansur), became regent (981-1002) and established himself as virtual dictator. For the next twenty-six years, the caliph was no more than a figurehead, and Al Mansur was the actual ruler. Al Mansur wanted the caliphate to symbolize the ideal of religious and political unity as insurance against any renewal of civil strife. Notwithstanding his employment of Christian mercenaries, Al Mansur preached jihad, or holy war, against the Christian states on the frontier, undertaking annual summer campaigns against them, which served not only to unite Spanish Muslims in a common cause but also to extend temporary Muslim control in the north.

The caliphate of Cordoba did not long survive Al Mansur's dictatorship. Rival claimants to the throne, local aristocrats, and army commanders who staked out taifas (sing., taifa), or independent regional city-states, tore the caliphate apart. Some taifas, such as Seville (Spanish, Sevilla), Granada, Valencia, and Zaragoza, became strong amirates, but all faced frequent political upheavals, war among themselves, and long-term accommodations to emerging Christian states.

Peaceful relations among Arabs, Berbers, and Spanish converts to Islam were not easily maintained. To hold together such a heterogeneous population, Spanish Islam stressed ethics and legalism. Pressure from the puritanical Berbers also led to crackdowns on Mozarabs (name for Christians in Al Andalus: literally, Arab-like) and Jews.

Mozarabs were considered a separate caste even though there were no real differences between them and the converts to Islam except for religion and liability to taxation, which fell heavily on the Christian community. They were essentially urban merchants and artisans. Their church was permitted to exist with few restrictions, but it was prohibited from flourishing. The episcopal and monastic structure remained intact, but teaching was curbed and intellectual initiative was lost.
In the ninth century, Mozarabs in Cordoba, led by their bishop, invited martyrdom by publicly denouncing the Prophet Muhammad in public. Nevertheless, violence against the Mozarabs was rare until the eleventh century, when the Christian states became a serious threat to the security of Al Andalus. Many Mozarabs fled to the Christian north.

Ferdinand and Isabella

The marriage in 1469 of royal cousins, Ferdinand of Aragon (1452-1516) and Isabella of Castile (1451-1504), eventually brought stability to both kingdoms. Isabella's niece, Juana, had bloodily disputed her succession to the throne in a conflict in which the rival claimants were given assistance by outside powers--Isabella by Aragon and Juana by her suitor, the king of Portugal. The Treaty of Alcaçovas ended the war in September 1479, and as Ferdinand had succeeded his father in Aragon earlier in the same year, it was possible to link Castile with Aragon. Both Isabella and Ferdinand understood the importance of unity; together they effected institutional reform in Castile and left Spain one of the best administered countries in Europe.

Even with the personal union of the Castilian and the Aragonese crowns, Castile, Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia remained constitutionally distinct political entities, and they retained separate councils of state and parliaments. Ferdinand, who had received his political education in federalist Aragon, brought a new emphasis on constitutionalism and a respect for local fueros to Castile, where he was king consort (1479- 1504) and continued as regent after Isabella's death in 1504. Greatly admired by Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), Ferdinand was one of the most skillful diplomats in an age of great diplomats, and he assigned to Castile its predominant role in the dual monarchy.

Ferdinand and Isabella resumed the Reconquest, dormant for more than 200 years, and in 1492 they captured Granada, earning for themselves the title of Catholic Kings. Once Islamic Spain had ceased to exist, attention turned to the internal threat posed by hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in the recently incorporated Granada. "Spanish society drove itself," historian J.H. Elliot writes, "on a ruthless, ultimately self-defeating quest for an unattainable purity."

Everywhere in sixteenth-century Europe, it was assumed that religious unity was necessary for political unity, but only in Spain was there such a sense of urgency in enforcing religious conformity. Spain's population was more heterogeneous than that of any other European nation, and it contained significant nonChristian communities. Several of these communities, including in particular some in Granada, harbored a significant element of doubtful loyalty. Moriscos (Granadan Muslims) were given the choice of voluntary exile or conversion to Christianity. Many Jews converted to Christianity, and some of these Conversos filled important government and ecclesiastical posts in Castile and in Aragon for more than 100 years. Many married or purchased their way into the nobility. Muslims in reconquered territory, called Mudejars, also lived quietly for generations as peasant farmers and skilled craftsmen.

After 1525 all residents of Spain were officially Christian, but forced conversion and nominal orthodoxy were not sufficient for complete integration into Spanish society. Purity of blood (pureza de sangre) regulations were imposed on candidates for positions in the government and the church, to prevent Moriscos from becoming a force again in Spain and to eliminate participation by Conversos whose families might have been Christian for generations. Many of Spain's oldest and finest families scrambled to reconstruct family trees. The Inquisition, a state-controlled Castilian tribunal, authorized by papal bull in 1478, that soon extended throughout Spain, had the task of enforcing uniformity of religious practice. It was originally intended to investigate the sincerity of Conversos, especially those in the clergy, who had been accused of being crypto-Jews. Tomas de Torquemada, a descendant of Conversos, was the most effective and notorious of the Inquisition's prosecutors.

For years religious laws were laxly enforced, particularly in Aragon, and converted Jews and Moriscos continued to observe their previous religions in private. In 1568, however, a serious rebellion broke out among the Moriscos of Andalusia, who sealed their fate by appealing to the Ottoman Empire for aid. The incident led to mass expulsions throughout Spain and to the eventual exodus of hundreds of thousands of Conversos and Moriscos, even those who had apparently become devout Christians.
In the exploration and exploitation of the New World, Spain found an outlet for the crusading energies that the war against the Muslims had stimulated. In the fifteenth century, Portuguese mariners were opening a route around Africa to the East. At the same time as the Castilians, they had planted colonies in the Azores and in the Canary Islands (also Canaries; Spanish, Canarias), the latter of which had been assigned to Spain by papal decree. The conquest of Granada allowed the Catholic Kings to divert their attention to exploration, although Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1492 was financed by foreign bankers. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, a Catalan) formally approved the division of the unexplored world between Spain and Portugal. The Treaty of Tordesillas, which Spain and Portugal signed one year later, moved the line of division westward and allowed Portugal to claim Brazil.

New discoveries and conquests came in quick succession. Vasco Nunez de Balboa reached the Pacific in 1513, and the survivors of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition completed the circumnavigation of the globe in 1522. In 1519 the conquistador Hernando Cortes subdued the Aztecs in Mexico with a handful of followers, and between 1531 and 1533 Francisco Pizzaro overthrew the empire of the Incas and established Spanish dominion over Peru.

In 1493, when Columbus brought 1,500 colonists with him on his second voyage, a royal administrator had already been appointed for the Indies. The Council of the Indies (Consejo de Indias), established in 1524 acted as an advisory board to the crown on colonial affairs, and the House of Trade (Casa de Contratacion) regulated trade with the colonies. The newly established colonies were not Spanish but Castilian. They were administered as appendages of Castile, and the Aragonese were prohibited from trading or settling there.

Charles V and Philip II

Ferdinand and Isabella were the last of the Trastamaras, and a native dynasty would never again rule Spain. When their sole male heir, John, who was to have inherited all his parent's crowns, died in 1497, the succession to the throne passed to Juana, John's sister. But Juana had become the wife of Philip the Handsome, heir through his father, Emperor Maximilian I, to the Hapsburg patrimony. On Ferdinand's death in 1516, Charles of Ghent, the son of Juana and Philip, inherited Spain (which he ruled as Charles I, r. 1516-56), its colonies, and Naples. (Juana, called Juana Loca or Joanna the Mad, lived until 1555 but was judged incompetent to rule.) When Maximilian I died in 1519, Charles also inherited the Hapsburg domains in Germany. Shortly afterward he was selected Holy Roman emperor, a title that he had held as Charles V (r. 1519-56), to succeed his grandfather. Charles, in only a few years, was able to bring together the world's most diverse empire since Rome Charles's closest attachment was to his birthplace, Flanders; he surrounded himself with Flemish advisers who were not appreciated in Spain. His duties as both Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain, moreover, never allowed him to tarry in one place. As the years of his long reign passed, however, Charles moved closer to Spain and called upon its manpower and colonial wealth to maintain the Hapsburg empire.

When he abdicated in 1556 to retire to a Spanish monastery, Charles divided his empire. His son, Philip II (r. 1556-98), inherited Spain, the Italian possessions, and the Netherlands (the industrial heartland of Europe in the mid-sixteenth century). For a brief period (1554-58), Philip was also king of England as the husband of Mary Tudor (Mary I). In 1580 Philip inherited the throne of Portugal through his mother, and the Iberian Peninsula had a single monarch for the next sixty years

Philip II was a Castilian by education and temperament. He was seldom out of Spain, and he spoke only Spanish. He governed his scattered dominions through a system of councils, such as the Council of the Indies, which were staffed by professional civil servants whose activities were coordinated by the Council of State, which was responsible to Philip. The Council of State's function was only advisory. Every decision was Philip's; every question required his answer; every document needed his signature. His father had been a peripatetic emperor, but Philip, a royal bureaucrat, administered every detail of his empire from El Escorial, the forbidding palace-monastery-mausoleum on the barren plain outside Madrid.

By marrying Ferdinand, Isabella had united Spain; however, she had also inevitably involved Castile in Aragon's wars in Italy against France, which had formerly been Castile's ally. The motivation in each of their children's marriages had been to circle France with Spanish allies--Habsburg, Burgundian, and English. The succession to the Spanish crown of the Habsburg dynasty, which had broader continental interests and commitments, drew Spain onto the center stage of European dynastic wars for 200 years.

Well into the seventeenth century, music, art, literature, theater, dress, and manners from Spain's Golden Age were admired and imitated; they set a standard by which the rest of Europe measured its culture. Spain was also Europe's preeminent military power, with occasion to exercise its strength on many fronts--on land in Italy, Germany, North Africa, and the Netherlands, and at sea against the Dutch, French, Turks, and English. Spain was the military and diplomatic standard-bearer of the CounterReformation . Spanish fleets defeated the Turks at Malta (1565) and at Lepanto (1572)--events celebrated even in hostile England. These victories prevented the Mediterranean from becoming an Ottoman lake. The defeat of the Grand Armada in 1588 averted the planned invasion of England but was not a permanent setback for the Spanish fleet, which recovered and continued to be an effective naval force in European waters.

Sixteenth-century Spain was ultimately the victim of its own wealth. Military expenditure did not stimulate domestic production. Bullion from American mines passed through Spain like water through a sieve to pay for troops in the Netherlands and Italy, to maintain the emperor's forces in Germany and ships at sea, and to satisfy conspicuous consumption at home. The glut of precious metal brought from America and spent on Spain's military establishment quickened inflation throughout Europe, left Spaniards without sufficient specie to pay debts, and caused Spanish goods to become too overpriced to compete in international markets.

American bullion alone could not satisfy the demands of military expenditure. Domestic production was heavily taxed, driving up prices for Spanish-made goods. The sale of titles to entrepreneurs who bought their way up the social ladder, removing themselves from the productive sector of the economy and padding an increasingly parasitic aristocracy, provided additional funds. Potential profit from the sale of property served as an incentive for further confiscations from Conversos and Moriscos.
Spain's apparent prosperity in the sixteenth century was not based on actual economic growth. As its bullion supply decreased in the seventeenth century, Spain was neither able to meet the cost of its military commitments nor to pay for imports of manufactured goods that could not be produced efficiently at home. The overall effect of plague and emigration reduced Spain's population from 8 million in the early sixteenth century to 7 million by the mid-seventeenth century. Land was taken out of production for lack of labor and the incentive to develop it, and Spain, although predominantly agrarian, depended on imports of foodstuffs.

Spain in Decline

The seventeenth century was a period of unremitting political, military, economic, and social decline. Neither Philip III (r. 1598-1621) nor Philip IV (r. 1621-65) was competent to give the kind of clear direction that Philip II had provided. Responsibility passed to aristocratic advisers. Gaspar de Guzman, count-duke of Olivares, attempted and failed to establish the centralized administration that his famous contemporary, Cardinal Richelieu, had introduced in France. In reaction to Guzman's bureaucratic absolutism, Catalonia revolted and was virtually annexed by France. Portugal, with English aid, reasserted its independence in 1640, and an attempt was made to separate Andalusia from Spain. In 1648, at the Peace of Westphalia, Spain assented to the emperor's accommodation with the German Protestants, and in 1654 it recognized the independence of the northern Netherlands.

During the long regency for Charles II (1665-1700), the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, validos milked Spain's treasury, and Spain's government operated principally as a dispenser of patronage. Plague, famine, floods, drought, and renewed war with France wasted the country. The Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) ended fifty years of warfare with France, whose king, Louis XIV, found the temptation to exploit weakened Spain too great. As part of the peace settlement, the Spanish infanta Maria Teresa, had become the wife of Louis XIV. Using Spain's failure to pay her dowry as a pretext, Louis instigated the War of Devolution (1667- 68) to acquire the Spanish Netherlands in lieu of the dowery. Most of the European powers were ultimately involved in the wars that Louis fought in the Netherlands.

Bourbon Spain

Charles II, the product of generations of inbreeding, was unable to rule and remained childless. The line of Spanish Habsburgs came to an end at his death. Habsburg partisans argued for allocating succession to the Austrian branch of the Habsburg dynasty, but Charles II, in one of his last official acts, left Spain to his nephew, Philip of Anjou, a Bourbon and the grandson of Louis XIV. This solution appealed to Castilian legitimists because it complied with the principle of succession to the next in the bloodline. Spanish officials had been concerned with providing for the succession in such a way as to guarantee an integral, independent Spanish state that, along with its possessions in the Netherlands and in Italy, would not become part of either a pan-Bourbon or a pan-Habsburg empire. "The Pyrenees are no more," Louis XIV rejoiced at his grandson's accession as Philip V (r. 1700-24; 1725-46). The prospect of the Spanish Netherlands falling into French hands, however, alarmed the British and the Dutch.

War of the Spanish Succession

The acceptance of the Spanish crown by Philip V in the face of counterclaims by Archduke Charles of Austria, who was supported by England and the Netherlands, was the proximate cause of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-14), the first "world war" fought by European powers. In 1705 an Anglo-Austrian force landed in Spain. A Franco-Castilian army halted its advance on Madrid, but the invaders occupied Catalonia. Castile enthusiastically received the Bourbon dynasty, but the Catalans opposed it, not so much out of loyalty to the Habsburgs as in defense of their fueros against the feared imposition of French-style centralization by a Castilian regime.

The War of the Spanish Succession was also a Spanish civil war. Britain agreed to a separate peace with France, and the allies withdrew from Catalonia, but the Catalans continued their resistance under the banner "Privilegis o Mort" (Liberty or Death). Catalonia was devastated, and Barcelona fell to Philip V after a prolonged siege (1713-14). The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) brought the war to a close and recognized the Bourbon succession in Spain on the condition that Spain and France would never be united under the same crown. The Spanish Netherlands (which become known as the Austrian Netherlands and later as Belgium) and Spain's Italian possessions, however, reverted to the Austrian Habsburgs. Britain retained Gibraltar and Minorca, seized during the war, and received trade concessions in Spanish America. Spain emerged from the war with its internal unity and colonial empire intact, but with its political position in Europe weakened.

Philip V undertook to modernize Spanish government through his French and Italian advisers. Centralized government was institutionalized, local fueros were abrogated, regional parliaments were abolished, and the aristocracy's independent influence on the councils of state was destroyed.

The Enlightenment

Charles III (r. 1759-88), Spain's enlightened despot par excellence, served his royal apprenticeship as king of Naples. He was one of Europe's most active patrons of the Enlightenment, a period during which attempts were made to reform society through the application of reason to political, social, and economic problems. Despite Charles's attempt to reform the economy, the impact of the Enlightenment was essentially negative. Anticlericalism was an integral part of Enlightenment ideology, but it was carried to greater lengths in Spain than elsewhere in Europe because of government sponsorship. Public charities financed by the church were considered antisocial because they were thought to discourage initiative, and they were therefore abolished. The state suppressed monasteries and confiscated their property. The Jesuits, outspoken opponents of regalism, were expelled. Their expulsion virtually crippled higher education in Spain. The state also banned the teachings of medieval philosophers and of the sixteenth-century Jesuit political theorists who had argued for the "divine right of the people" over their kings. The government employed the Inquisition to discipline antiregalist clerics.

Economic recovery was noticeable, and government efficiency was greatly improved at the higher levels during Charles III's reign. The Bourbon reforms, however, resulted in no basic changes in the pattern of property holding. Neither land reform nor increased land use occurred. The rudimentary nature of bourgeois class consciousness in Spain hindered the creation of a middleclass movement. Despite the development of a national bureaucracy in Madrid, government programs foundered because of the lethargy of administrators at lower levels and because of a background rural population. The reform movement could not be sustained without the patronage of Charles III, and it did not survive him.

The Napoleonic Era

Charles IV (r. 1788-1807) retained the trappings of his father's enlightened despotism, but he was dominated by his wife's favorite, a guards officer, Manuel de Godoy, who at the age of twenty-five was chief minister and virtual dictator of Spain. When the French National Assembly declared war in 1793, Godoy rode the popular wave of reaction building in Spain against the French Revolution and joined the coalition against France. Spanish arms suffered repeated setbacks, and in 1796 Godoy shifted allies and joined the French against Britain. Godoy, having been promised half of Portugal as his personal reward, became Napoleon Bonaparte's willing puppet. Louisiana, Spanish since 1763, was restored to France. A regular subsidy was paid to France from the Spanish treasury, and 15,000 Spanish troops were assigned to garrisons in northern Europe. Military reverses and economic misery caused a popular uprising in March 1808 that forced the desmissal of Godoy and the abdiction of Charles IV. The king was succeeded by his son, Ferdinand VII (r. 1808; 1814-33). The French forced Ferdinand to abdicate almost immediately, however, and Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, was named king of Spain. A large French army was moved in to support the new government and to invade Britain's ally, Portugal, from Spanish soil. The afrancesados, a small but influential group of Spaniards who favored reconstructing their country on the French model, welcomed the Bonapartist regime.

To ingratiate himself with the afrancesados, Joseph Bonaparte proclaimed the dissolution of religious houses. The defense of the Roman Catholic Church, which had long been attacked by successive Spanish governments, now became the test of Spanish patriotism and the cause around which resistance to the French rallied. The citizens of Zaragoza held out against superior French forces for more than a year. In Asturias, local forces took back control of their province, and an army of Valencians temporarily forced the French out of Madrid. The War of Independence (1808-14), as the Iberian phase of the Napoleonic wars is known in Spanish historiography, attained the status of a popular crusade that united all classes, parties, and regions in a common struggle. It was a war fought without rules or regular battlelines. The Spanish painter, Goya, depicted the brutality practiced on both sides.

The British dispatched an expeditionary force, originally intended to occupy part of Spanish America, to the Iberian Peninsula in 1808. In the next year, a larger contingent under Arthur Wellesley, later duke of Wellington, followed. Elements of the Spanish army held Cadiz, the only major city not taken by the French, but the countryside belonged to the guerrillas, who held down 250,000 of Napoleon's best troops under Marshal Nicholas Soult, while Wellington waited to launch the offensive that was to cause the defeat of the French at Vitoria (1813).

THE LIBERAL ASCENDANCY

The Cadiz Cortes

From the first days of the War of Independence, juntas, established by army commanders, guerrilla leaders, or local civilian groups, appeared in areas outside French control. They also existed underground as alternatives to the French-imposed government. Unity extended only to fighting the French, however. Coups were frequent, and there was sometimes bloody competition among military, partisan, and civilian groups for control of the juntas. A central junta sat in Cadiz. It had little authority, except as surrogate for the absent royal government. It succeeded, however, in calling together representatives from local juntas in 1810, with the vague notion of creating the Cortes of All the Spains, so called because it would be the single legislative body for the empire and its colonies. Many of the overseas provinces had by that time already declared their independence. Some saw the Cortes at Cadiz as an interim government until the Desired One, as Ferdinand VII was called by his supporters, could return to the throne. Many regalists could not admit that a parliamentary body could legislate in the absence of a king.

The delegates at the Cortes at Cadiz formed into two main currents, liberal and conservative. The liberals carried on the reformist philisophy of Charles III and added to it many of the new ideals of the French Revolution. They wanted equality before the law, a centralized government, an efficient modern civil service, a reform of the tax system, the replacement of feudal privileges by freedom of contract, and the recognition of the property owner's right to use his property as he saw fit. As the liberals were the majority, they were able to transform the assembly from interim government to constitutional convention. The product of the Cortes' deliberations reflected the liberals dominance for the constitution of 1812 came to be the "sacred codex" of liberalism, and during the nineteenth century it served as a model for liberal constitutions of Latin nations.

As the principal aim of the new constitution was the prevention of arbitrary and corrupt royal rule, it provided for a limited monarchy which governed through ministers subject to parliamentary control. Suffrage, determined by property qualifications, favored the position of the commercial class in the new parliament, in which there was no special provision for the Church or the nobility. The constitution set up a rational and efficient centralized administrative system based on newly formed provinces and municipalties rather than on the historic provinces. Repeal of traditional property restrictions gave the liberals the freer economy they wanted.

The 1812 Constitution marked the initiation of the Spanish tradition of liberalism; by the country's standards, however, it was a revolutionary document, and when Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne in 1814 he refused to recognize it. He dismissed the Cadiz Cortes and was determined to rule as an absolute monarch.

Spain's American colonies took advantage of the postwar chaos to proclaim their independence, and most established republican governments. By 1825 only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under the Spanish flag in the New World. When Ferdinand was restored to the throne in Madrid, he expended wealth and manpower in a vain effort to reassert control over the colonies. The move was unpopular among liberal officers assigned to the American wars.

Rule by Pronunciamiento

In 1820 Major Rafael de Riego led a revolt among troops quartered in Cadiz while awaiting embarkation to America. Garrison mutinies were not unusual, but Riego issued a pronunciamiento or declaration of principles, to the troops, which was directed against the government and which called for the army to support adoption of the 1812 constitution. Support for Riego spread from garrison to garrison, toppling the regalist government and forcing Ferdinand to accept the liberal constitution. The pronunciamiento, distributed by barracks politicians among underpaid members of an overstaffed officer corps, became a regular feature of Spanish politics. An officer or group of officers would seek a consensus among fellow officers in opposing or supporting a particular policy or in calling for a change in government. If any government were to survive, it needed the support of the army. If a pronunciamiento received sufficient backing, the government was well advised to defer to it. This "referendum in blood" was considered within the army to be the purest form of election because the soldiers supporting a pronunciamiento--at least in theory--were expressing their willingness to shed blood to make their point. A pronunciamiento was judged to have succeeded only if the government gave in to it without a fight. If it did not represent a consensus within the army and there was resistance to it, the pronunciamiento was considered a failure, and the officers who had proposed it dutifully went into exile.

French intervention, ordered by Louis XVIII on an appeal from Ferdinand and with the assent of his conservative officers, brought the three years of liberal government under the 1812 constitution--called the Constitutional Triennium (1820-23)--to an abrupt close. The arrival of the French was welcomed in many sectors. Ferdinand, restored as absolute monarch, chose his ministers from the ranks of the old afrancesados.

Ferdinand VII, a widower, was childless, and Don Carlos, his popular, traditionalist brother, was heir presumptive. In 1829, however, Ferdinand married his Neapolitan cousin, Maria Cristina, who gave birth to a daughter, an event followed closely by the revocation of provisions prohibiting female succession. Ferdinand died in 1833, leaving Maria Cristina as regent for their daughter, Isabella II (1833-68).

Don Carlos contested his niece's succession, and he won the fanatical support of the traditionalists of Aragon and of Basque Navarre (Spanish, Navarra). The Carlists (supporters of Don Carlos) held that legitimate succession was possible only through the male line. Comprised of agrarians, regionalists, and Catholics, the Carlists also opposed the middle-class-- centralist, anticlerical Liberals who flocked to support the regency. The Carlists fielded an army that held off government attempts to suppress them for six years (1833-39), during which time Maria Cristina received British aid in arms and volunteers. A Carlist offensive against Madrid in 1837 failed, but in the mountains, the Basques continued to resist until a compromise peace in 1839 recognized their ancient fueros. Sentiment for Don Carlos and for his successor, remained strong in Navarre, and the Carlists continued as a serious political force. Carlist uprisings occurred in 1847 and again from 1872 to 1876.

Liberal Rule

The regency had come to depend on liberal support within the army during the first Carlist war, but after the end of the war against the traditionalists, both the Liberals and the army tired of Maria Cristina. They forced her to resign in 1840, and a liberal government assumed responsibility for the regency.

The Liberals were a narrowly based elite. Their abstract idealism and concern for individual liberties contrasted sharply with the paternalistic attitudes of Spain's rural society. There was no monolithic liberal movement in Spain, but anticlericalism, the touchstone of liberalism, unified the factions. They theorized that the state was the sum of the individuals living within it and that it could recognize and protect only the rights of individuals, not the rights of corporate institutions, such as the church or universities, or the rights of the regions as separate entities with distinct customs and interests. Because only individuals were subject to the law, only individuals could hold title to land. As nothing should impede the development of the individual, so nothing should impede the state in guaranteeing the rights of the individual.

Liberals also agreed on the necessity of a written constitution, a parliamentary government, and a centralized administration, as well as the need for laissez-faire economics. All factions found a voice in the army and drew leadership from its ranks. All had confidence that progress would follow naturally from the application of liberal principles. They differed, however, on the methods to be used in applying these principles.

The Moderates saw economic development within a free market as the cure for political revolution. They argued for a strong constitution that would spell out guaranteed liberties. The Progressives, like the Moderates, were members of the upper and the middle classes, but they drew support from the urban masses and favored creation of a more broadly based electorate. They argued that greater participation in the political process would ensure economic development and an equitable distribution of its fruits. Both factions favored constitutional monarchy. The more radical Democrats, however, believed that political freedom and economic liberalism could only be achieved in a republic.
The army backed the Moderates, who dominated the new regency in coalition with supporters of Isabella's succession. Local political leaders, called caciques, regularly delivered the vote for government candidates in return for patronage and assured the Moderates of parliamentary majorities. The Progressives courted the Democrats enough to be certain of regular inclusion in the government. State relations with the church continued to be the most sensitive issue confronting the government and the most divisive issue throughout the country. Despite their anticlericalism, the Moderates concluded a rapprochement with the church, which agreed to surrender its claim to confiscated property in return for official recognition by the state and a role in education. Reconciliation with the church did not, however, win the Moderates conservative rural support.

Modest economic gains were made during the administration of General Leopoldo O'Donnell, an advocate of laissez-faire policies, who came to power in 1856 through a pronunciamiento. O'Donnell had encouraged foreign investors to provide Spain with a railroad system, and he had also sponsored Spain's overseas expansion, particularly in Africa. Little economic growth was stimulated, however, except in Catalonia and the Basque region, both of which had already possessed an industrial base. Promises for land reform were broken.

O'Donnell was one of a number of political and military figures around whom personalist political parties formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of these parties failed to survive their leaders' active political careers. O'Donnell, for example, formed the Liberal Union as a fusion party broad enough to hold most liberals and to counter the drift of left-wing Progressives to the Democrats. After several years of cooperating with the one-party parliamentary regime, the Progressives withdrew their support, and in 1866 a military coup toppled O'Donnell.
In 1868 an army revolt, led by exiled officers determined to force Isabella from the throne, brought General Juan Prim, an army hero and popular Progressive leader, to power. Isabella's abdication inaugurated a period of experimentation with a liberal monarchy, a federal republic, and finally a military dictatorship.

As prime minister, Prim canvased Europe for a ruler to replace Isabella. A tentative offer made to a Hohenzollern prince was sufficient spark to set off the Franco-Prussian War (1870- 71). Prim found a likely royal candidate in Amadeo of Savoy, son of the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel II. Shortly after Amadeo's arrival in Spain, Prim was assassinated, leaving the new king, without a mentor, at the mercy of hostile politicians. The constitution bequeathed to the new monarchy did not leave Amadeo sufficient power to supervise the formation of a stable government. Mistrustful of Prim's foreign prince, factional leaders refused to cooperate with, or to advise, Amadeo. Deserted finally by the army, Amadeo abdicated, leaving a rump parliament to proclaim Spain a federal republic.

The constitution of the First Republic (1873-74) provided for internally self-governing provinces that were bound to the federal government by voluntary agreement. Jurisdiction over foreign and colonial affairs and defense was reserved for Madrid. In its eight-month life, the federal republic had four presidents, none of whom could find a prime minister to form a stable cabinet. The government could not decentralize quickly enough to satisfy local radicals. Cities and provinces made unilateral declarations of autonomy. Madrid lost control of the country, and once again the army stepped in to rescue the "national honor." A national government in the form of a unitary republic served briefly as the transparent disguise for an interim military dictatorship.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY

A brigadier's pronunciamiento that called Isabella's son, the able British-educated Alfonso XII (r. 1875-85), to the throne was sufficient to restore the Bourbon monarchy. Alfonso identified himself as "Spaniard, Catholic, and Liberal," and his succession was greeted with a degree of relief, even by supporters of the republic. He cultivated good relations with the army (Alfonso was a cadet at Sandhurst, the British military academy, when summoned to Spain), which had removed itself from politics because it was content with the stable, popular civilian government. Alfonso insisted that the official status of the church be confirmed constitutionally, thus assuring the restored monarchy of conservative support.

British practices served as the model for the new constitution's political provisions. The new government used electoral manipulation to construct and to maintain a two-party system in parliament, but the result was more a parody than an imitation. Conservatives and Liberals, who differed in very little except name, exchanged control of the government at regular intervals after general elections. Once again, caciques delivered the vote to one party or the other as directed--in return for the assurance of patronage from whichever was scheduled to win, thus controlling the elections at the constituency level. The tendency toward party fracturing and personalism remained a threat to the system, but the restoration monarchy's artificial two-party system gave Spain a generation of relative quiet.

Alfonso XIII (r. 1886-1931) was the posthumous son of Alfonso XII. The mother of Alfonso XIII, another Maria Cristina, acted as regent until her son came of age officially in 1902. Alfonso XIII abdicated in 1931.

The Cuban Disaster and the "Generation of 1898"

Emigration to Cuba from Spain was heavy in the nineteenth century, and the Cuban middle class, which had close ties to the mother country, favored keeping Cuba Spanish. Cuba had experienced periodic uprisings by independence movements since 1868. Successive governments in Madrid were committed to maintaining whatever armed forces were necessary to combat insurgency. Hostilities broke out again in 1895. The United States clandestinely supported these hostilities, which required Spain to send substantial reinforcements under General Valerio Weyler. Reports of Weyler's suppression of the independence movement, and the mysterious explosion of the battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor, stirred public opinion in the United States and led to a declaration of war by the United States in April 1898. The United States destroyed antiquated Spanish naval units at Santiago de Cuba and in Manila Bay. Despite a pledge by Madrid to defend Cuba "to the last peseta," the Spanish army surrendered after a few weeks of hostilities against an American expeditionary force. In Paris that September, Spain gave up Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

The suddenness and the totality of Spain's defeat as well as the country's realization of its lack of European support during the war with the United States (only Germany had offered diplomatic backing) threw Spain into despair. The disaster called forth an intellectual reevaluation of Spain's position in the world by the so-called "Generation of 1898," who confronted Spaniards with the propositions that Spain had long since ceased to be a country of consequence, that its society was archaic, and that its institutions were outworn and incapable of moving into the twentieth century. These words were painful for the proud nation.

The traumatic events of 1898 and the inability of the government to deal with them prompted political reevaluation. A plethora of new, often short-lived, personalist parties and regional groups on both the left and the right (that broke the hegemony of the two-party system and ultimately left the parliamentary structure in disarray) sought solutions to the country's problems. By 1915 it was virtually impossible to form a coalition government that could command the support of a parliamentary majority.

Some politicians on the right, like the conservative, Antonio Maura, argued for a return to traditional authoritarianism, and they blamed the parliamentary regimes (kept in power by caciques) for corrupting the country. Maura failed in his attempt to form a national Catholic party, but he inspired a number of right-wing groups with his political philosophy.

Regionalist movements were organized to free progressive Catalonia, the Basque areas, and Galicia from the "Castilian corpse." Whether on the left or on the right, residents of these regions stressed their distinct character and history. An electoral coalition of Catalan parties regularly sent strong parliamentary contingents to Madrid to barter their votes for concessions to Catalonian regionalism.
Alejandro Lerroux was an effective, but demagogical, political organizer who took his Liberal splinter group into the antimonarchist camp. He formed the Radical Republicans on a national, middle-class base that frequently allied itself with the Catalans.

The democratic, Marxist-oriented Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol--PSOE), founded in 1879, grew rapidly in the north, especially in Asturias, where a trade union, the General Union of Workers (Union General de Trabajadores--UGT), had most effectively organized the working class.

The Federation of Iberian Anarchists (Federacion Anarquista Iberica) was well organized in Catalonia and Andalusia and had many members, but in keeping with anarchist philosophy, they remained aloof from participation in the electoral process. Their abstention, however, had a telling effect. They practiced terrorism, and the anarchist trade union, the National Confederation of Labor (Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo--CNT), was able on several occasions to shut down Barcelona. The aim of the anarchists was not to take control of the government, but to make government impossible.

The African War and the Authoritarian Regime of Miguel Primo de Rivera

Spain was neutral in World War I, but the Spanish army was constantly engaged from 1909 to 1926 against Abd al Krim's Riff Berbers in Morocco, where Spain had joined France in proclaiming a protectorate. Successive civilian governments in Spain allowed the war to continue, but they refused to supply the army with the means to win it. Spanish losses were heavy to their fierce and skillful enemy, who was equipped with superior weapons. Riots against conscription for the African war spread disorder throughout the country, and opposition to the war was often expressed in church burnings. Officers, who often had served in Morocco, formed juntas to register complaints that were just short of pronunciamientos against wartime inflation, low fixed salaries for the military, alleged civilian corruption, and inadequate and scarce equipment.

Conditions in Morocco, increased anarchist and communist terrorism, industrial unrest, and the effects of the postwar economic slump prompted the pronunciamiento that brought a general officer, Miguel Primo de Rivera (in power, 1923-30), into office. His authoritarian regime originally enjoyed wide support in much of the country and had the confidence of the king and the loyalty of the army. The government lacked an ideological foundation, however; its mandate was based on general disillusionment with both the parliamentary government and the extreme partisan politics of the previous period.

Once in power, Primo de Rivera dissolved parliament and ruled through directorates and the aid of the military until 1930. His regime sponsored public works to curb unemployment. Protectionism and state control of the economy led to a temporary economic recovery. A better led and better supplied army brought the African war to a successful conclusion in 1926.

The precipitous economic decline in 1930 undercut support for the government from special-interest groups. For seven years, Primo de Rivera remained a man on horseback. He established no new system to replace parliamentary government. Criticism from academics mounted. Bankers expressed disappointment at the state loans that his government had tried to float. An attempt to reform the promotion system cost him the support of the army. This loss of army support caused him to lose the support of the king. Primo de Rivera resigned and died shortly afterward in exile.

REPUBLICAN SPAIN

Antimonarchist parties won a substantial vote in the 1931 municipal elections. Alfonso XIII interpreted the outcome of the elections and the riots that followed as an indication of imminent civil war. He left the country with his family and appealed to the army for support in upholding the monarchy. When General Jose Sanjurjo, army chief of staff, replied that the armed forces would not support the king against the will of the people, Alfonso abdicated.

A multiparty coalition in which regional parties held the balance met at a constitutional convention at San Sebastian, the summer capital, to proclaim the Second Republic. The goals of the new republic, set forth at the convention, included reform of the army, the granting of regional autonomy, social reform and economic redistribution, the separation of church and state, and depriving the church of a role in education. Niceto Alcala Zamora, a nonparty conservative, became president and called elections for June.

The first general election of the Second Republic gave a majority to a coalition of the Republican Left (Izquierda Republicana--IR)--a middle-class radical party led by Manuel Azana, who became prime minister--and labor leader Francisco Largo Caballero's PSOE, backed by the UGT. Azana pledged that his government would gradually introduce socialism through the democratic process. His gradualism alienated the political left; his socialism, the right

Azana's republicanism, like nineteenth-century liberalism and Bourbon regalism before it, was inevitably associated with anticlericalism. His government proposed to carry out the constitutional convention's recommendations for complete state control of education.

In 1932 the Catalan Generalitat gained recognition as the autonomous regional government for Catalonia. The region remained part of the Spanish republic and was tied more closely to it because of Madrid's grant of autonomy. Representatives from Catalonia to the Madrid parliament played an active role in national affairs. Efforts to reform the army and to eliminate its political power provoked a pronunciamiento against the government by Sanjurjo. The pronunciamiento, though unsuccessful, forced Azana to back down from dealing with the military establishment for the time being.
Azana's greatest difficulties derived from doctrinal differences within the government between his non-Marxist, bourgeois IR and the PSOE, who, after an initial period of cooperation, obstructed Azana at every step. Opposition from the UGT blocked attempts at labor legislation. The PSOE complained that Azana's reforms were inadequate to produce meaningful social change, though there was no parliamentary majority that would have approved Largo Caballero's far-reaching proposals to improve conditions for working people. Azana's legislative program may not have satisfied his ally, but it did rally moderate and conservative opinion against the coalition on the eve of the second general election in November 1932.

Azana's principal parliamentary opposition came from the two largest parties that could claim a national constituency, Lerroux's moderate, middle-class Radical Republicans and a rightwing Catholic organization, the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (Confederacion Espanola de Derechas Autonomas-- CEDA). Lerroux, who had grown more conservative and tolerant since his days as an antimonarchist firebrand, capitalized on the left's failures to reach a compromise with the church and to deal with industrial unrest and with the extragovernmental power of the UGT and the CNT. He appealed for conservative support by showing that Azana was at the mercy of the unions--as he was when in coalition with Largo Caballero.

CEDA was a coalition of groups under the leadership of Jose Maria Gil Robles, a law professor from Salamanca who had headed Popular Action (Accion Popular), an influential Catholic political youth movement. As a broadly based fusion party, CEDA could not afford a doctrinaire political stance, and its flexibility was part of its strength. Some elements in the party, however, favored a Christian social democracy, and they took the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII as their guide. CEDA never succeeded in establishing a working-class base. Its electoral strength lay in the Catholic middle class and in the rural population. Gil Robles was primarily interested in 1932 in working for a settlement favorable to the church within the constitutional structure of the republic.

In the November election, the IR and the PSOE ran separately rather than placing candidates on a common slate. Combined electoral lists, permitted under the constitution, encouraged coalitions; they were intended to prevent parliamentary fragmentation in the multiparty system.
The government parties lost seats, and CEDA emerged as the largest single party in parliament. CEDA's showing at the polls was taken as a sign of conservative Spain's disenchantment with the Republic and its anticlericalism. But there was no question that the Catholic right was being called on to form a government. President Zamora was hostile to CEDA, and he urged Lerroux to head a minority government. Lerroux agreed, but he entered into a parliamentary alliance with CEDA a little more than a year later. Lerroux did not welcome the center-right coalition; however, he knew the coalition presented the only means by which a parliamentary majority that included his party could be obtained. Gil Robles was appointed minister for war, with a role in maintaining public order, in the new government.

Unions used strikes as political weapons, much as the army had used the pronunciamiento. Industrial disorder climaxed in a miners' strike in Asturias, which Azana openly and actively supported. The police and the army commanded by Franco crushed the miners. The strike confirmed to the right that the left could not be trusted to abide by constitutional processes, and the suppression of the strike proved to the left that the right was "fascist." Azana accused Gil Robles of using republican institutions to destroy the republic.

The Lerroux-Gil Robles government had as its first priority the restoration of order, although the government's existence was the chief cause of the disorder. Action on labor's legitimate grievances was postponed until order was restored. The most controversial of Gil Robles's programs, however, was finding the means to effect a reconciliation with the church. In the context of the coalition with Lerroux, he also attempted to expand his political base by courting the support of antirepublican elements. The government resigned in November 1935 over a minor issue. Zamora refused to sanction the formation of a new government by CEDA, without the cooperation of which no moderate government could be put together. On the advice of the left, Zamora called a new general election for February 1936.

The Asturian miners' strike had polarized public opinion and had led to the consolidation of parties on the left from Azana's IR to the Communist Party of Spain (Partido Comunista de Espana-- PCE). The PSOE had been increasingly "bolshevized," and it was difficult for a social democrat, such as Largo Caballero, to control his party, which drifted leftward. In 1935 Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had sanctioned communist participation in popular front governments with bourgeois and democratic socialist parties. The Left Republicans, the PSOE, the Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya), the communists, a number of smaller regional and left-wing parties, and the anarchists, who had boycotted previous elections as a matter of principle, joined to present a single leftist slate to the electorate.

The Spanish Popular Front was to be only an electoral coalition. Its goal was not to form a government but to defeat the right. Largo Caballero made it clear that the Socialists would not cooperate in any government that did not adopt their program for nationalization, a policy as much guaranteed to break Spain in two and to provoke a civil war as the appointment of the CEDA-dominated government that Zamora had worked to prevent.

The general election produced a number of irregularities that led the left, the right, and the center to claim massive voting fraud. Two subsequent runoff votes, recounts, and an electoral commission controlled by the left provided the Popular Front with an impressive number of parliamentary seats. Azana formed his minority government, but the front's victory was taken as the signal for the start of the left's long-awaited revolution, already anticipated by street riots, church burnings, and strikes. Workers' councils, which undertook to circumvent the slow-grinding wheels of the constitutional process, set up governments parallel to the traditional bodies. Zamora was removed from office on the grounds that he had gone beyond his constitutional authority in calling the general election. Azana was named to replace him, depriving the IR of his strong leadership.

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

Gil Robles's influence, as a spokesman for the right in the new parliament, waned. The National Block, a smaller coalition of monarchists and fascists led by Jose Calvo Sotelo, who had sought the army's cooperation in restoring Alfonso XIII, assumed CEDA's role. Calvo Sotelo was murdered in July 1936, supposedly in retaliation for the killing of a police officer by fascists. Calvo Sotelo's death was a signal to the army to act on the pretext that the civilian government had allowed the country to fall into disorder. The army issued a pronunciamiento. A coup was expected, however, and the urban police and the workers' militia loyal to the government put down revolts by army garrisons in Madrid and Barcelona. Navy crews spontaneously purged their ships of officers. The army and the left rejected the eleventh-hour efforts of Indalecio Prieto (who had succeeded Azana as prime minister) to arrive at a compromise.

The army was most successful in the north, where General Emilio Mola had established his headquarters at Burgos. North-central Spain and the Carlist strongholds in Navarre and Aragon rallied to the army. In Morocco, elite units seized control under Franco, Spain's youngest general and hero. Transport supplied by Germany and Italy ferried Franco's African army, including Moorish auxiliaries, to Andalusia. Franco occupied the major cities in the south before turning toward Madrid to link up with Mola, who was advancing from Burgos. The relief of the army garrison besieged at Toledo, however, delayed the attack on Madrid and allowed time for preparation of the capital's defense. Army units penetrated the city limits, but they were driven back, and the Nationalists were able to retain the city.

A junta of generals, including Franco, formed a government at Burgos, which Germany and Italy immediately recognized. Sanjurjo, who had been expected to lead the army movement, was killed in a plane crash during the first days of the uprising. In October 1936, Franco was named head of state, with the rank of generalissimo and the title el caudillo (the leader).

When he assumed leadership of the Nationalist forces, Franco had a reputation as a highly professional, career-oriented, combat soldier, who had developed into a first-rate officer. Commissioned in the army at the age of eighteen, he had volunteered for service in Morocco, where he had distinguished himself as a courageous leader. Serious, studious, humorless, withdrawn, and abstemious, he had won the respect and the confidence of his subordinates more readily than he had won the comradeship of his brother officers. At the age of thirty-three, he had become the youngest general in Europe since Napoleon Bonaparte.

Franco opposed Sanjurjo in 1932; still, Azana considered Franco unreliable and made him captain general of the Canaries, a virtual exile for an ambitious officer. Though by nature a conservative, Franco did not wed himself to any particular political creed. On taking power, he set about to reconcile all right-wing, antirepublican groups in one Nationalist organization. The Falange, a fascist party founded by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera (the dictator's son), provided the catalyst. The Carlists, revived after 1931, merged with the Falange in 1937, but the association was never harmonious. Jose Antonio's execution by the Republicans provided the Falange with a martyr. The more radical of the early Falange programs were pushed aside by more moderate elements, and the Nationalists' trade unionism was only a shadow of what Jose Antonio had intended. The Nationalist organization did keep its fascist facade, but Franco's strength lay in the army.

Nationalist strategy called for separating Madrid from Catalonia (which was firmly Republican), Valencia, and Murcia (which the republic also controlled). The Republicans stabilized the front around Madrid, defending it against the Nationalists for three years. Isolated Asturias and Vizcaya, where the newly organized Basque Republic fought to defend its autonomy without assistance from Madrid, fell to Franco in October 1937. Otherwise the battlelines were static until July 1938, when Nationalist forces broke through to the Mediterranean Sea south of Barcelona. Throughout the Civil War, the industrial areas--except Asturias and the Basque provinces--remained in Republican hands, while the chief food-producing areas were under Nationalist control.

The republic lacked a regular trained army, though a number of armed forces cadres had remained loyal, especially in the air force and the navy. Many of the loyal officers were either purged or were not trusted to hold command positions. The workers' militia and independently organized armed political units like those of the Trotskyite Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista--POUM) bore the brunt of the fighting in the early months of the Civil War. For example, the anarchist UGT militia and the Assault Guards (the urban police corps established by the Republic to counterbalance the Civil Guard--Guardia Civil--the paramilitary rural police who were generally considered reactionary) crushed the army garrison in Barcelona. Moscow provided advisers, logistics experts, and some field-grade officers. Foreign volunteers, including more than 2,000 from the United States, formed the International Brigade. The communists pressed for, and won, approval for the creation of a national, conscript Republican army.

The Soviet Union supplied arms and munitions to the republic from the opening days of the Civil War. France provided some aircraft and artillery. The republic's only other conduit for arms supply was through Mexico. The so-called spontaneous revolutions that plagued the industrial centers hampered arms production within Spain.

Nationalist strength was based on the regular army, which included large contingents of Moroccan troops and battalions of the Foreign Legion, which Franco had commanded in Africa. The Carlists, who had always maintained a clandestine militia (requetes), were among Franco's most effective troops, and they were employed, together with the Moroccans, as a shock corps. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (Fascist premier, 1922- 45) dispatched more than 50,000 Italian "volunteers" (most of them army conscripts) to Spain, along with air and naval units. The German Condor Legion, made infamous by the bombing of Guernica, provided air support for the Nationalists and tested the tactics and the equipment used a few years later by the Luftwaffe (German air force). Germany and Italy also supplied large quantities of artillery and armor, as well as the personnel to use this weaponry. A nonintervention commission, including representatives from France, Britain, Germany, and Italy, was established at the Lyon Conference in 1936 to stem the flow of supplies to both sides. France and Britain were concerned that escalating foreign intervention could turn Spain's Civil War into a European war. The commission and coastal patrols supplied by the signatory powers were to enforce an embargo. The net effect of the nonintervention agreement was to cut off French and British aid to the republic. Germany and Italy did not observe the agreement. The Soviet Union was not a signatory. By 1938, however, Stalin had lost interest in Spain.

While the Republicans resisted the Nationalists by all available means, another struggle was going on within their own ranks. A majority fought essentially to protect republican institutions. Others, including the communists, were committed to finishing the Civil War before beginning their anticipated revolution. They were, however, resisted by comrades-in-arms--the Trotskyites and anarchists--who were intent on completing the social and political revolution while waging war against the Nationalists.

Largo Caballero, who became prime minister in September 1936, had the support of the Socialists and of the communists, who were becoming the most important political factor in the republican government. The communists, after successfully arguing for a national conscript army that could be directed by the government, pressed for elimination of the militia units. They also argued for postponing the revolution until the fascists had been defeated and encouraged greater participation by the bourgeois parties in the Popular Front. The UGT, increasingly under communist influence, entered into the government, and the more militant elements within it were purged. POUM, which had resisted disbanding its independent military units and merging with the communist-controlled national army, was ruthlessly suppressed as the communists undertook to eliminate competing leftist organizations. Anarchists were dealt with in similar fashion, and in Catalonia a civil war raged within a civil war.
Fearing the growth of Soviet influence in Spain, Largo Caballero attempted to negotiate a compromise that would end the Civil War. He was removed from office and replaced by Juan Negrin, a procommunist socialist with little previous political experience.

The Republican army, its attention diverted by internal political battles, was never able to mount a sustained counteroffensive or to exploit a breakthrough such as that on the Rio Ebro in 1938. Negrin realized that Spaniards in Spain could not win the war, but he hoped to prolong the fighting until the outbreak of a European war, which he thought was imminent. Barcelona fell to the Nationalists in January 1939, and Valencia, the temporary capital, fell in March. When factional fighting broke out in Madrid among the city's defenders, the Republican army commander seized control of what remained of the government and surrendered to the Nationalists on the last day of March, thus ending the Civil War.

There is as much controversy over the number of casualties of the Spanish Civil War as there is about the results of the 1936 election, but even conservative estimates are high. The most consistent estimate is 600,000 dead from all causes, including combat, bombing, and executions. In the Republican sector, tens of thousands died of starvation, and several hundred thousand more fled from Spain.