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The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote in 1921: ‘Starting with the monarchy and moving on to the Church, no national authority has thought of anything but itself. When has the heart, after all foreign, of a Spanish monarch or of the Spanish Church ever beat for ends that were deeply Spanish? As far as is known, never. They have done the exact opposite. They have ensured that their ends have been adopted as if they were in the national interest.’1 In similar vein, the poet Antonio Machado, during the Spanish Civil War, wrote to a Russian friend, the novelist, David Vigodsky: ‘The best thing in Spain is the people. That is why the selfless and heroic defence of Madrid, which has astounded the world, moves me but it does not surprise me. It has always been like that. In difficult times, the señoritos – our Boyars – invoke the fatherland and then they sell it; the people do not even mention it but they buy it back with their blood and they save it. In Spain, it is impossible to be a decent person and not love the people. For us, love of the people is a basic duty of gratitude.’2

Similar views were expressed in the nineteenth century by the English romantic travellers. The most celebrated, Richard Ford, author in 1845 of A Handbook for Travellers in Spain and one year later of Gatherings in Spain, portrayed ordinary Spaniards as generous and noble while referring constantly to bad government and misgovernment: ‘The real permanent and standing cause of Spain’s thinly peopled state, want of cultivation, and abomination of desolation, is BAD GOVERNMENT, civil and religious.’ He claimed that, at all levels of government, there were despots always open to bribes.3 Gerald Brenan agreed to a certain extent: ‘Spain has been seen as the land of paradox where a people of great independence of character allowed themselves to be governed by corrupt and arbitrary rulers.’ However, commenting on the extent to which such criticisms derived from an idealized image of Britain at the time when Ford was writing, Brenan remarked: ‘He has much to say of Spanish mismanagement and poverty, yet who would not have preferred to be a Spanish workman in those days to an English miner or mill-hand or agricultural labourer?’4

The present volume is another work written by a British historian who loves Spain and one who has spent the last fifty years studying the country’s history. As might be deduced from its title, this book echoes the spirit of Richard Ford and of many Spanish commentators such as Lucas Mallada, Ricardo Macías Picavea, Joaquín Costa, Manuel Azaña and José Ortega y Gasset. While drawing on the perceptions of Ford, it does not adopt his simplistic comparisons of a benighted Spain with an idealized Britain. Equally, while deriving great insight from the critical analysis of the regenerationists, it does not share the view of Costa that the problem called for an authoritarian solution – the ‘iron surgeon’. This book makes no attempt to suggest that Spain is unique in terms of corruption or governmental incompetence. There are other European nations for which, at various historical moments, similar interpretations might be valid. For instance, while writing the book, I have lived, on a daily basis for the last three years, under the shadow of the Brexit process in Britain. It has been a painful experience to have to witness the combination of lies, governmental ineptitude and corruption that have bitterly divided the nation and threatened to provoke the break-up of the United Kingdom.

There are many possible approaches to the rich and tragic history of Spain. This book spans the period from the restoration of the Borbón monarchy in 1874 with Alfonso XII, to the early days of the reign of his great-great-grandson Felipe VI in 2014. It aims to provide a comprehensive and reliable history of Spain with a dramatic emphasis on the way the country’s progress has been impeded by corruption and political incompetence. It demonstrates how these two features have resulted in a breakdown of social cohesion that has frequently been met with, and exacerbated by, the use of violence by the authorities. All three themes consistently emerge in the tensions between Madrid and Catalonia. Throughout the Restoration period, and most spectacularly during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, institutional corruption and startling political incompetence were the norm. Popular disgust with this opened the way to the country’s first democracy, the Second Republic.

From the inception of the Republic in 1931 until its demise in 1939, corruption was less toxic, not least because the newly installed political elite was inspired by many of the propositions of the regenerationists. That is not to say corruption did not exist. A recurring character in the book, the multi-millionaire Juan March, who was behind some of the most spectacular corruption during the Primo de Rivera period, was equally active during the Republic, as indeed he would be in the first decades of the Franco dictatorship. This was also true of Alejandro Lerroux, an important politician who was on March’s payroll. A lifetime of shameless corruption reached its peak when, as Prime Minister in 1935, Lerroux brazenly sponsored a system of fixed roulette wheels, an outrageous operation that gave rise to the word estraperlo which has become a synonym for economic malfeasance.

The victory of General Franco saw the establishment of a regime of terror and pillage which allowed him and his elite supporters to plunder with impunity, enriching themselves while giving free rein to the political ineptitude that prolonged Spain’s economic backwardness well into the 1950s. Ironically, throughout his life, Franco would express a fierce contempt for the political class that he held responsible for the loss of empire in 1898. In 1941, on the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war, he declared in a speech to the top brass of the Falange: ‘when we started out in life … we saw our childhood dominated by the contemptible incompetence of those men who abandoned half of the fatherland’s territory to foreigners’.5 In fact, some of his own fatuous errors would far outdo those of the predecessors he mocked. That he would not scruple to put his determination to stay in power above national interests can be seen in his relationships with the Third Reich and later with the United States. His scatterbrained get-rich-quick schemes, ranging from alchemy and synthetic water-based gasoline to the disaster of his autarkic policies, contributed to Spain’s backwardness until he was persuaded in 1959 to let others supervise the economy.

In denouncing politicians in 1941, Franco was far from alone. With brief intervals when optimism flowered, between 1931 and 1936 and the first decade of the rule of King Juan Carlos, the attitude of Spaniards towards their country’s political class has often been one of disdain bordering on despair. Belief in the incompetence and venality of politicians has been an underlying constant of Spanish life since the Napoleonic invasion if not before. Franco used rhetoric about corrupt politicians to justify a dictatorship under which corruption flourished unchecked and was indeed exploited ruthlessly by the Caudillo himself, both for his own enrichment and to manipulate his followers.

The humiliation of 1898 was just the final confirmation of a truth that had been coming for nearly a century. Spain’s internal economic problems could no longer be alleviated by imperial plunder. A backward agrarian economy, an uneven and feeble industrial sector, the heavy hand of the Catholic Church, parasitical armed forces and growing regional divisions were endemic burdens. They were perpetuated, as was perceived by the far-sighted polymath Joaquín Costa, by a corrupt and incompetent political system which blocked social and economic progress and kept the Spanish people in the servitude, ignorance and misery which lay behind the contemporary slur that ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’. However, the solution proposed by Costa, the iron surgeon, showed little confidence in the people and in democracy.

Other equally damaging, and inextricably linked, features of Spanish politics and society have endured since the late nineteenth century. The unspoken assumption that political and social problems could more naturally be solved by violence than by debate was firmly entrenched in a country in which for hundreds of years civil strife was no rarity. In modern times, certain forms of social violence have been a consequence of corruption and government incompetence. Electoral corruption excluded the masses from organized politics and challenged them with a choice between apathetic acceptance and violent revolution. The war of 1936–9 was the fourth such conflict since the 1830s.

Between 1814 and 1981, Spain witnessed more than twenty-five pronunciamientos, or military coups.6 That crude statistic provides a graphic indication of the divorce between soldiers and civilians. In the first third of the nineteenth century, those pronunciamientos were liberal in their political intent, but thereafter a tradition of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust between the army and civil society developed to a point at which soldiers considered themselves more Spanish than civilians. Accordingly, a factor generating hatred within Spanish society was the repression by the army of deep-rooted social conflicts that had arisen in the wake of imperial decline and military defeat. Military resentment of politicians in general and of the left and the labour movement in particular was the other side of the same coin.

The role of violence in Spain was consolidated by the way in which the armed forces dealt with post-imperial trauma. A resentful officer corps, which blamed the humiliation of 1898 on the politicians who had provided inadequate support, came to consider itself the ultimate arbiter in politics. Determined to lose no more battles, it became obsessed not with the defence of Spain from external enemies but with the defence of national unity and the existing social order against the internal enemies of the regions and of the left. At one level, this was not surprising. After the Cuban disaster, the army was inefficient, overburdened by bureaucracy and ill equipped. An absurdly high proportion of the total military budget was absorbed by salaries, administration and running costs which left very little for training or equipment.

Spain’s rulers had tried to shake off the immediate post-war shame with a disastrous new imperial endeavour in Morocco. Woefully unprepared, this African adventure stimulated massive popular opposition to conscription, thereby intensifying the mutual hatred of the military and the left. While working-class conscripts became militant pacifists in response to the appalling conditions in North Africa, there emerged within the military an elite corps of tough professional officers, the Africanistas, of whom Franco became the iconic example. They came to believe that they were a beleaguered band of heroic warriors alone concerned with the fate of the patria. This inevitably exacerbated their sense of apartness from a society which they felt had betrayed them. The Africanistas came to dominate the officer corps, particularly in the late 1920s when Franco was Director of the Military Academy. They would be at the heart of the coup of 1936 and then used against Spanish civilians the same terror tactics that they had perfected in Morocco.

They would be a favoured element of Franco’s kleptocratic elite. The survival of their ‘values’ through and beyond the dictatorship would guarantee the determination of sectors of the armed forces to derail the new democracy established in the late 1970s. Fortunately, popular distrust of the armed forces came to an end with the democratization of the army after the military reforms carried out during the first Socialist government. Generational change within the officer corps and the entry of Spain into NATO have seen a dramatic reversal of popular perception of the armed forces and the Civil Guard, which are now among the most highly rated institutions in Spain. Popular perception of Spain’s problems puts the political class second only behind unemployment.7

Equally damaging to Spain’s attempts to attain modernity was the dead hand of the Catholic Church. In the civil wars of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Catholic Church took sides against the threat of liberalism and modernization. Besieged by violent popular anti-clericalism and impoverished by the disentailment of its lands in the 1830s and 1850s, the Church allied itself with the powerful. Already by the 1880s the Church, in its educational provision for the middle and upper classes, had become the legitimizing agent of the socio-economic and political system. The history of the Catholic Church in Spain in the twentieth century parallels that of the country itself. Almost every major political upheaval of a turbulent period – with the possible exception of the revolutionary crisis of 1917–23 – had its religious backcloth and a crucial, and often reactionary, role for the Church hierarchy.

What follows interleaves these themes of military and ecclesiastical influence, popular contempt for the political class, bitter social conflict, economic backwardness and conflict between centralist nationalism and regional independence movements. It also places these processes in an international context. The breakdown of the Second Republic and the coming of the civil war are incomprehensible without consideration of the influence of international developments, particularly fascism and communism, on domestic developments. The course of the Spanish Civil War will be analysed with particular attention to the interplay between domestic and international factors in determining its outcome. In many respects, the Spanish conflict can be seen as either a rehearsal for the Second World War or as the location of its first battles. Spanish neutrality in the Second World War played a key role in the outcome of the conflict in Europe. The process whereby the Franco dictatorship shook off international ostracism to become the valued ally of the Western powers will be fully considered.

The book shows how Spain went from utter despair in 1898 on a roller coaster that culminated in the present state of almost comparable pessimism. The civil war was the most dramatic of a series of uneven struggles between the forces of reform and reaction which had punctuated Spanish history from 1808 to the present day. There is a curious pattern in Spain’s modern and contemporary history, arising from a frequent desfase, or lack of synchronization, between the social reality and the political power structure ruling over it. Lengthy periods during which reactionary elements have used political and military power to hold back social progress were followed by outbursts of revolutionary fervour. In the 1850s, in the 1870s, between 1910 and 1912, between 1917 and 1923 and above all during the Second Republic, efforts were made to bring Spanish politics into line with the country’s social reality. This inevitably involved attempts to redistribute wealth, especially on the land, which in turn provoked reactionary efforts to stop the clock and reimpose the traditional order of social and economic power. Thus were progressive movements crushed by General O’Donnell in 1856, by General Pavia in 1874, by General Primo de Rivera in 1923 and by General Franco between 1936 and 1939. It took the horrors of the civil war and the nearly four decades of dictatorship that followed to break the pattern. The moderation shared by the progressive right and a chastened left underlay a bloodless transition to democracy.

The pattern of conflict between the political establishment and sociological development – progressive forces pushing for change until driven back by violence and the imposition of dictatorship – changed in 1977. Nevertheless, the new democratic establishment was tainted by the old ways. As asserted by Baltasar Garzón, one of the judges who has worked to eliminate corruption: ‘In Spain, no one has ever been afraid to be corrupt. Given that its existence was taken for granted, corruption is not something that has bothered the average citizen. This indifference has ensured that its roots have grown deep and solid and sustain a structure of interests that is very difficult to bring down.’ In the view of Garzón, the justice system has contributed to this situation: ‘Judgments that are laid down after long years of delay, laughable sentences, incomprehensible dismissals or shelving of cases, unacceptable collusions and connivance …’8

Throughout the entire period covered by this book, corruption and political incompetence have had a corrosive effect on political coexistence and social cohesion. Spain’s transition to democracy has been widely admired. Nevertheless, the scale of uninterrupted corruption and periodic ineptitude demonstrated by the political class at various levels of society since 1982 has been remarkable. Politicians of both right and left have been unable or unwilling to deal with corruption and the pernicious clash between Spanish centralist nationalism and regional desires for independence. Only during brief periods in the early 1930s and in the first years of the transition to democracy was there a degree of public respect for politicians. However, widespread contempt and resentment have intensified anew during the economic crisis of recent years. The boom of the 1990s fostered corruption and witnessed political incompetence on an unprecedented scale. From the late 1980s to the present day, endemic corruption and renewed nationalist ferment has brought disillusionment with the political class almost full circle. While not at the unrepeatable low point of 1898, politicians are nevertheless rated by the Spanish population far lower than could have been imagined when the transition to democracy was being hailed as a model for other countries.