Spain: The Politics

SPAIN is a deep country, and no superficial explanation will ever fit her history. The hour she is living now — as grave an hour she has had but twice before (in the period that preceded the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel, and again during the Napoleonic invasion) — cannot be interpreted as a mere fight between Stalinites and Hitlerites on her soil. Spain’s ordeal, though by no means unconnected with the duel between the two rival dictatorships, is primarily Spanish. Nothing can be usefully said as to its world import until it has been adequately estimated as a crisis in Spanish history.

The political structure of the country when the monarchy collapsed in 1931, as a result of a mere municipal election, can be objectively estimated by an analysis of the votes cast at the two parliamentary elections of 1933 and 1936. ‘Votes cast,’ and not‘members elected,’ because the electoral law is so ingenious that in 1933 it produced a parliamentary majority of the Right with a statistical majority of votes cast in favor of the Left, while in 1936 it produced a parliamentary majority of the Left with a statistical majority of votes cast for the Right.

If the real votes are analyzed, it is found that — in so far as votes affect actual opinion — the country from 1931 to 1936 seems to have been divided into three opinions of nearly equal strength: Left, Right, and Centre. None of these three groups could be said to be simple and homogeneous. The Left contained three varieties of Socialists, led respectively by Senor Largo Caballero (the present Prime Minister), Senor Indalecio Prieto (the present Minister of Navy and Air), and Senor Besteiro, a professor of the University of Madrid, now elbowed out of affairs. In point of doctrine, these three groups, though fairly united at the beginning, evolved in different directions. While Senor Largo Caballero, after two years of office as Minister of Labor, rapidly shifted to the Left and, by his advocacy of immediate revolution, earned the nickname of ‘Spanish Lenin,’ Serior Besteiro remained faithful to a reformist policy and Don Indalecio Prieto endeavored to bridge over the difference and to save the unity of the party.

But the Socialist Party was by no means the only constituent of the Left. There was a Communist Party, though small, also divided into an orthodox group, faithful to Stalin, and a dissident faction which followed the leadership of Trotzky; and there was anarcho-syndicalism. This group, possibly the majority in the Spanish labor movement, is an offshoot of anarchism. The anarcho-syndicalists profess that the State is unnecessary, hold hierarchy and discipline in contempt as mere bourgeois prejudices, and consider Lenin and Stalin as no better than the old Tsars.

The Right was no less complex. Drawing together when hard-pressed, quarreling when victorious, the Right comprised the monarchists, led by Senor Goicoechea and by Senor Calvo Sotelo; the Fascists or Falange Espanola, led by Senor Primo de Rivera (a son of the dictator); the Agrarian Republicans, a party of landowners, who thought it better to turn republican; and the Popular Agrarians of Senor Gil Robles, a ramshackle party which reproduced within its ranks the picturesque complexity of the whole Right, having perhaps as its only distinctive feature a clerical tendency common to all its components.

As for the Centre, it comprised the old guard of Radicalism — that is, the republicans of monarchical days — and all the progressive and democratic middle class which had not been converted to Socialism. Senor Lerroux, an old politician, with all the advantages and disadvantages of a long and battered political career, incarnated the first; and Senor Azaha, an intellectual new to active politics, personified the second.

Nor is this all. For, along with the national parties, Spanish politics had to take into account the local parties of at least two regions having nationalistic aspirations of their own — Catalonia, fairly evenly divided into a somewhat enlightened Right (whose leader is Senor Cambo) and a turbulent and somewhat mixed Left led by Senor Companys; and the Basque Regions, where clericalism is strongly ‘nationalistic’ (that is, in favor of Home Rule for the ‘Basque nation’) and where the industrial centres such as Bilbao and Eibar are less interested in nationalism than in Socialism.

None of these groups has actual political cohesion. They are here described according to the affinities of opinion which, in a country endowed with more political sense, would have sufficed to determine a permanent coalition, possibly even a definite party, among the components of each of them. In Spain, however, natural affinity was not sufficient to crystallize the numerous tendencies of public opinion into the three natural groups. The situation remained fluid, despite the fact that the three political zones described above could be clearly and not inaccurately defined as Red, Black, and Neitherred-nor-black.

The government which took office in 1931 was composed of the Centre and the Left, including the Catalan Left. It was obvious that such a government was bound to lead to the strengthening of the Right, particularly as, newborn and full of the zeal of the neophytes, the revolutionary government proceeded to implant drastic reforms in the economic and religious life of the country, without sufficient regard for the strength of the Black and Neitherred-nor-black sectors. A country thus divided into three zones of opinion can only be governed from the Centre. This was realized at the outset by Senor Lerroux, who, as early as December 1931, advised the newly elected President, Senor Alcala Zamora and his Prime Minister designate, Senor Azana, to reduce the number and importance of the portfolios held by the Socialists. This advice was not taken, and he thereupon decided to pass into the opposition with his party, then the second in numbers in the Republic. That day were sown the seeds of the present civil war.

There were, no doubt, obstacles to the political consolidation of a Centre Party containing elements as different as the old radicals of Senor Lerroux and the new intellectuals of Sexior Azana. But it cannot be doubted that, if such a consolidation had taken place, the civil war would have been averted; the country would have been governed by a progressive, though not revolutionary, government which would have ensured the Left against reaction and the Right against revolution. As the prospective Centre split, its own Left (Senor Azaha’s group) became an ally — that is, a servant — of the Socialists; while its own Right (Senor Lerroux’s group) became an ally — that is, a servant — of the clericals. The country was left with nothing but revolution or reaction. Civil war became inevitable.

The more so as civil war, for temperamental reasons, is always latent in Spain. In August 1932, General Sanjurjo revolted against the government presided over by Senor Azana. There was not a shadow of a justification for such a revolt. The government was perfectly legal, and, though its policy and legislation were not — how could they be ? — to the taste of the Right, nothing but political passion could consider it as an oppressive government. In October 1934, the Socialists and the Catalans revolted against the government of Senor Lerroux. Nothing, again, could justify such a revolt. The Lerroux government was perfectly constitutional, and, though its policy was not to the taste of the Left, it could no more be described as oppressive than the Azana government two years previously.

These two examples — one from each side — show that civil war had been latent in the country since, at any rate, the beginning of 1932. The strictly Spanish origin of this situation has just been established. There were, however, on either side, foreign influences to be considered. I do not refer to political ‘meddling,’ Russian on the Left, Italo-German on the Right. When things can be explained without melodrama, why drag it in? The influence of the two schools of dictatorship has, no doubt, made itself felt in the form of intellectual infiltration, propaganda, and gradual conversion of individual Spaniards who came to admire either the Russian or the ItaloGerman way of cutting the Gordian knots of democracy. But, though such influences prepared the environment for the civil war, they did not determine it. What hardened people’s hearts and obsessed people’s minds till the civil war became inevitable was, on the Right, the feeling that Senor Largo Caballero was preparing his extreme Left Socialists for a revolution ‘a la Lenin’; and, on the Left, the haunting memories of the way in which the Austrian and the German dictatorships had ruthlessly suppressed Socialism. Thus, the Spanish tendency toward civil war found a favorable environment in a world in which since Lenin, the first and the most responsible of political housebreakers, public life has ceased to be civilized.

Both Right and Left have been preparing for civil war, and no one in Spain doubted that whichever of the two lost the February election would revolt against the State rather than deliver it into the hands of its adversary. Yet civil war was entirely unnecessary in Spain. A pure matter of politics, a struggle for power’s sake, a symptom of impatience and intransigeance, it was not an inherent necessity in the evolution of contemporary Spain. Though much remained to be done, particularly in the field of agrarian reform, Spain was by no means a backward country, and, in actual forms of living, it was far ahead of many European nations. A moderate Left government, such as Senor Azana might have constituted with the exclusion of the extreme Socialists, would have ensured the necessary changes without provoking an excessive amount of reaction. But the impatience of the Largo Caballero group gave the reactionary Right its opportunity, rallying to it a mass of moderate opinion which, while ready to evolve, was not ready to submit to the dictatorship of the proletariat which Senor Largo Caballero advocated.

The Left, from 1931 to 1933, exasperated the country by the excessive and unnecessarily vexatious manner in which they rushed reforms, good in themselves, while at the same time they failed to make them efficient. And so they brought in the Right. From 1933 to 1936, the Right, with an all but criminal shortsightedness, returned to their policy of greed and low salaries for agricultural laborers. And so they brought in the Left. But this time (February 1936) the political temperature of the nation was too high. The Left, elated by their success, began to take high-handed measures with no respect for the Constitution, nor for property, nor even for life, while the government stood by powerless. The Fascist movement, till then a relatively unimportant feature in the situation, was powerfully stimulated and driven to violence by official outlawry. And when, after a period of growing unrest and insecurity, the monarchist leader Senor Calvo Sotelo was murdered by a police squad, the military brotherhood struck. Half the nation followed.

The loss of life, treasury, creative work, and artistic monuments is appalling. The gash in the national soul is more appalling still. Those of us who remain convinced that war is no more adequate to solve home conflicts than it is to solve international ones can do nothing but wait and watch. Both parties claim to represent Spain. The claim does not hold good. If by Spain is meant the majority of Spaniards, we have shown that, normally, the Left is about one third and the Right about another third of public opinion, so that in point of numbers, assuming the middle zone of opinion to have gone equally to both sides, or — what is more likely — to neither side, the duel is a ‘fiftyfifty’ affair. If, as we prefer to think, Spain is a higher value than mere numbers, a historical and spiritual form of mankind ‘up to which’ her sons must live, Spain is looking sadly on both.