Spain

A MAJOR IMPERIAL power from the 16th century to the Napoleonic era, Spain in the last 150 years has been riven by significant divisions in ideology, class, and ethnicity. The 19th century was a period of loss, in which the Spanish were driven out of their Latin American possessions, a process that largely ended in 1898, with the loss of Cuba and the Philippines. The first eight decades of the 20th century were a period of internal division and struggle, with the political left having its greatest influence during the Second Republic (1931–36), and in the 1980s, after the restoration of democracy provided for by the death of fascist Francisco Franco in 1975. Under the leadership of Felipe Gonzalez in the 1980s, Spain moved a great distance toward the European mainstream. The Socialists returned to power in 2004, resulting largely from the fallout of public opposition to Spanish participation in the invasion of Iraq, and the preelection Madrid bombing.

The first major period of the left influence in Spain was in the 1930s, with the founding of the Second Republic in 1931. There was a high level of conflict in this period, and a sizable portion of the population supported conservatism and other right-wing ideologies. This conflict boiled over in 1936, when General Franco led the military in an attack on the civil authority, based on his fear that the Republic was going to turn Spain into a Marxist or Soviet state. The Republicans were constituted by a broad coalition of liberals, social democrats, socialists, communists, and anarchists, each of which organized their own militias in opposition to Franco's military and fascist Falange movement. The Republic also had strong, nonstate international support, [Page 423]in the form of international volunteer brigades from the other Western countries. Many of those who fought in the war on the Republican side, like George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, would write about those tragic events. After early successes by the Republic, the tables were turned because of the intervention of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in support of Franco, while the Western liberal democracies maintained neutrality, or in the case of the Soviet Union, provided little or no help to the Republic.

Franco won that battle and would go on to rule from 1939 to 1975, the year of his death. By that time, Spain was well behind the rest of Europe. In something of a minor miracle, instead of falling back into authoritarianism, Spaniards wrote and ratified a democratic constitution in 1978, which walked a very fine line, by providing for a strong prime minister in a strong central government in a unitary state (a right-wing demand), while establishing “autonomous communities” which were de facto subcentral governments, on the other hand (a left-wing demand). During the 11-year rule of the Socialists under Felipe Gonzalez, which began in 1982, the military was modernized by reducing its role in domestic life and by professionalizing it. The Roman Catholic Church's position as the established church was altered, and censorship of the media was lifted. Spain joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU), which helped to rule out any return to fascism.

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