THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

Montserrat Miller

The Iberian Peninsula is a landmass situated at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea in southwestern Europe. Its southern tip represents Europe's nearest approximation to Africa and borders on the only western entrance into the sea, known in Roman times as the mare nostrum. Constituting roughly 230,000 square miles of territory, the Iberian peninsula is marked by important regional differences in culture, history, and socioeconomic structure. The area is characterized as well by a significant degree of linguistic variety. Currently comprised of the nation-states of Portugal and Spain, the Peninsula also includes the Basque Country and Catalonia as subject nationalities with autonomous statutes that offer a modicum of home rule within Spain.

The Iberian Peninsula has generated considerable social history scholarship. Even though in Spain through the 1960s and 1970s open discussion of the legitimacy of Francisco Franco's (1892–1975) regime was not permitted, studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish economic and social patterns, and of regional processes, especially those pertaining to Catalonia, contributed to a corpus of social history work before the dictator's death in 1975. Since the transition to democracy and increased exposure to historiographical developments outside Spain, the social history work on Spain has expanded its chronological and thematic foci and grown in methodological complexity.

Portugal, too, spent much of the twentieth century under an authoritarian dictatorship that limited full and open inquiry of its social and political past. Since the 1974 revolution that ended the Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970) regime, however, social history work on Portugal has flourished. As in the case of Spain, much of this work is explicitly comparative in its orientation.

The Iberian Peninsula has long been treated by historians as exceptional within a larger European framework; much of the recent scholarship, however, stresses the degree to which the region adheres at least in broad outline to the social, cultural, economic, and political patterns found north of the Pyrenees Mountains. Attention to deeply rooted ideological and social conflict and regional agricultural problems notwithstanding, the newest interpretations argue that Spain's economy from 1700 on was characterized by a long-term vitality which, though interrupted at various points, has born fruit in the second half of the twentieth century's industrial growth and democratization.

MEDIEVAL STATE-BUILDING AND CONSOLIDATION OF TERRITORIES

When the Carolingians began their push southward across the Pyrenees into Islamic territory in the 770s, the Iberian Peninsula had already experienced more than a millennium of invasion and settlement by outside peoples. Phoenicians, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, and Muslims had all contributed to shaping the culture and economy of the peninsula. No group was more influential than the Romans. Having colonized Iberia for more than six hundred years, they left a firm linguistic imprint. Of the numerous languages spoken on the Peninsula before Roman conquest, only Basque survived. Elsewhere dialects of latin vulgar remained deeply entrenched, and even the Muslim invasion of 711 did not permanently eradicate the linguistic and religious patterns established under Roman rule. Over the course of the Middle Ages, three distinct languages developed on the Peninsula: Castilian, Portuguese, and Catalan.

Frankish overlordship in northeastern Spain during the early middle ages led to the establishment of three historic kingdoms: Navarre, Aragon, and Catalonia. Navarre, located on the western half of the Pyrenees and eastern Cantabrian Mountains, included Basque territories and remained deeply entrenched in French power struggles until the early sixteenth century. Aragon and Catalonia were joined in the late twelfth century by a dynastic union that permitted a considerable degree of autonomy for both. The Catalan-Aragonese kingdom grew quickly into a regional powerhouse. By the thirteenth century, Catalan-Aragonese society featured an emerging commercial stratum of colonizers and merchants who enjoyed broad privileges set forth in a series of charters.

In the northwestern region of the Peninsula, a second state-building process had gotten underway in the ninth century. Largely free of Frankish influence and shaped by Visigothic ideals, Christian kingdoms emerged in Asturias and León, which further dashed Muslim aspirations to control the Peninsula. The Kingdom of Asturias-León scored a series of military victories over the forces of Al-Andalus and then repopulated the Duero River tableland with Christian peasant farmers in the tenth century. Still, Asturias-León was not fully capable of carrying out the Reconquista on its own. It was rather the emerging Kingdom of Castile that seized the initiative and spread its control over the interior meseta. Then in the first half of the thirteenth century both León and Asturias were definitively joined to Castile under the rule of Ferdinand III (c. 1201–1252), and with the aid of the Crown of Aragon succeeded in driving the recently established Almohad authorities out of Andalusia and eliminating Muslim rule from all of the Peninsula save Granada.

Also taking shape on the Iberian Peninsula during the medieval period was the Kingdom of Portugal. Rebelling against the feudal overlordship of León and Castile in the twelfth century, Portugal achieved independence in 1140. Initially consisting of the northern half of the contemporary state of Portugal, the kingdom extended its boundaries to the south by driving out Muslim forces in 1297. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Iberian Peninsula consisted of three powerful kingdoms: Castile-León, Aragon-Catalonia, and Portugal.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENTS IN MEDIEVAL IBERIA

In the wake of the victories against Islamic forces, Castile extended administrative control over Andalusia in a manner that would have profound social and economic consequences for Spain's historical development into the twentieth century. The Castilian crown distributed large tracts of land to the aristocracy and thus left intact the latifundia system that had developed under Islamic rule. Out of this landholding system arose a social system comprising a minority of large landowners and a majority of landless laborers, or braceros, which survived well into the twentieth century and which contrasted with the small peasant holdings of northern Spain. The emerging bourgeoisie of Castile, concentrated in the northern cities of the kingdom, was unable to exert a counterbalancing role. With a reliance on livestock rather than commerce or productive agriculture, and without access to merchant fleets that linked the region to the markets of Europe, the economy of Andalusia collapsed under Castilian rule.

This stood in sharp contrast to the Catalan-Aragonese administration of the newly conquered region of Valencia. There, nobles were given only mountainous land near Aragon and the rest was distributed among Catalan knights and farmers who adopted the productive Muslim agricultural techniques and enjoyed broad freedoms through royal charters and semi-autonomous governance. Valencia flourished economically under Christian rule, and it developed as Spain's most prosperous commercial agricultural region into the modern period. These distinctive patterns of administration thus contributed to a growing economic and social differentiation between the periphery and hinterland of the Peninsula.

Castilian society was transformed by the efforts to repopulate Andalusia. The lack of manufacturing coupled with high levels of demand for luxury goods on the part of an aristocracy led the Castilians toward a dependence on the sale of wool. The mesta emerged as a powerful influence within the Castilian state. The mesta was an association of sheep and cattle owners whose council taxed the whole wool industry on behalf of the crown and whose political influence grew as the economy stagnated. With a population that was stretched thin, the northern part of Castile lost much of its earlier character of social egalitarianism, and in the fourteenth century town councils came under the influence of knights. Rounds of inflation and debasement of the coinage contributed to the weakness of the Castilian economy as it extended over the new territories of the peninsula. This socioeconomic stagnation contrasted sharply with well-known periods of cultural brilliance during which the intellectual fruits of the "School of Translators" in Toledo disseminated the classics of antiquity and of Islamic science to the rest of Europe.

Still, the contrast between the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of Aragon in the High Middle Ages was a sharp one that was reflected in the nature and extent of each realm's relationship to larger European trade networks. The Crown of Aragon, with its dynamic Catalan economic base that rested on the production of woolen textiles, cast iron, and leather for export, experienced the consolidation of an urban patriciate whose membership was open to successful manufacturers, merchants, and bankers of humble birth. But the strain resulting from the effort to repopulate new areas also contributed to social tensions within Aragon. In the oldest part of Catalonia, the peasantry, which had historically held land under limited seigniorial obligations, increasingly suffered legal servitude by the thirteenth century under what came to be known as the remança system. Uprisings began in the countryside in 1388 and laid the groundwork for rupture.

Aragonese social and economic development followed the general western European pattern much more closely than did Castile. Whereas Castile was industrially stagnant, aristocratic, and pastoralist, Aragon-Catalan society featured an urban middle class that dominated the politics of privileged towns and an expanding trade network in the Mediterranean. Portugal lay somewhere between the two. The Portuguese solution to the economic challenge of absorbing new Muslim territories had been to turn toward the sea. Lisbon emerged as an important port and fueling station for maritime traffic between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and Portugal developed early commercial links to west Africa. Still, there was less manufacturing there than in Aragon and southern areas of Portugal remained largely unproductive.

In the fifteenth century the Iberian Peninsula experienced a crisis similar to that which took place in other areas of Europe. Many of the problems were the direct result of the Black Death, which depleted the labor force. In Castille, the aristocracy used the economic contraction to secure greater privileges from the crown. In Catalonia, the remança peasants rose up against landlords; artisans came into direct conflict with the urban patriciate; and the patriciate itself rebelled against the authority of the crown. Particularly noteworthy is the outcome of the peasant uprisings and war that extended from 1388 to 1486. Nowhere else in Europe did peasants so successfully achieve relief from seignorial obligations through royal intervention on behalf of their cause (Freedman).

Popular unrest in the fifteenth century also manifested itself in the first intense wave of pogroms against the Jews. Beginning in the south, they spread to the north and led to the looting of Jewish neighborhoods in major cities. Fueled by clerics and the Castilian aristocracy, this wave of violence set the stage for the more concerted effort to impose religious orthodoxy that began under Isabella I (1474–1504).

EMPIRE BUILDING IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY: CASTILE'S PATH TO POLITICAL HEGEMONY

These were the circumstances under which the dynastic union of the crowns of Aragon and Castile was forged in the late fifteenth century. Economic and social dislocation coupled with conflicts over succession in Castile and revolution in Catalonia served as a backdrop for the emergence of a new Spanish polity under the rule of Ferdinand of Aragon (1452–1516) and Isabella of Castile. From 1479 to 1504 these monarchs pursued a coordinated policy of foreign and domestic affairs. Though the historic charters of the Crown of Aragon were held as inviolable in this union, the administration of the conjoined kingdoms was increasingly carried out from, and in the broad interests of, Castile. The larger territory and population of Castile, along with the limited constitutional restrictions on monarchical rule there, contributed to this shift in the epicenter of political power away from the periphery of the peninsula.

At the close of the fifteenth century, the Iberian Peninsula's role in European and global politics and economics expanded dramatically. The newly broadened powers of the Catholic monarchs led to a series of important military victories and effective diplomatic strategies vastly increasing the territories under their domain. In 1492 Spanish forces conquered Granada. Not long afterward, Ferdinand was able to annex Navarre and thus curtail French power in the Pyrenees altogether, though the historic charters or fueros were, as in the Crown of Aragon, held as legal limitations on expanding royal power. In Italy, the Spanish were able to retake Naples and then use it as a strategic military and political outpost. By negotiating crucial marriage alliances, the Catholic kings produced a grandson, Charles (1500–1558), who was heir to these territories and to the Hapsburg royal line as well.

By 1550, the new Spanish state's holdings in Europe were enormous and included the Low Countries, Austria, Hungary, and most of Italy. In 1580 Philip II (1527–1598) seized Portugal, and Hapsburg control of the Peninsula was completed. Added to all these holdings were new territories in the Americas and the impressive riches and prestige derived from colonial domination and being the first colonial power. Indeed, with the rise of the Hapsburg monarchy, the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula entered into a new period marked by an intensification of demands for religious orthodoxy and Castilian aspirations for political hegemony.

THE POLITICS OF RELIGION IN "GOLDEN AGE" SPAIN

The drive toward the imposition of religious orthodoxy in this period had its roots in the Christian fervor that accompanied the political aims of the Reconquest and was particularly potent in Castile. Though Christians, Muslims, and Jews had coexisted through most of the period of Islamic rule and much of that of Castilian, Portuguese, and Aragonese, Isabella secured papal authorization for the establishment of a state rather than an ecclesiastically based Inquisition. The persecution of heresy began in 1478. The first targets of the Inquisition were the converted Jews or conversos, many of whom had advanced socially and economically and were suspected of being insincere in their Christian beliefs. Then in 1492, the persecution intensified when the Jewish population was ordered en masse by the Crown to convert or leave Spain; some fifty thousand became conversos while another one hundred thousand departed. In 1502, the Catholic kings issued a similar order regarding the Muslims of Castille. As a consequence, large numbers of Muslim peasants left the Peninsula, though three hundred thousand stayed and converted to Christianity, becoming known as moriscos. As the Spanish Crown worked itself into position as defender of the Catholic faith in Europe, popular support for the imposition of religious orthodoxy grew. In 1609 under Philip III (1578–1621), the moriscos were expelled altogether. Over the course of three centuries the Inquisition brought about the execution of some three thousand persons suspected of various forms of religious heresy. Still, the inquisition was by no means a wholly centralized program. Regional courts carried out their repression in varying ways. In some areas, such as Aragon, there was shifting popular support and opposition to the Inquisition, and acts of sexual transgression were punished just as harshly as spiritual heresy (Monter, p. xi).

ECONOMIC DECLINE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

This pattern of religious persecution involving expulsion, forced conversion, trial, and torture, though modest in its scale in comparison to the deaths resulting in the religious wars of France and Germany, had a considerable impact on the economy of Castile. Most of the confiscated wealth ended up in the hands of the nobility and government officials who put the policies into effect. While the short-term benefit was the financing of some of the Catholic kings' and Habsburgs' foreign policies, the long-term effect was to stifle the economic development of many Castilian towns by depleting the very population whose commercial and manufacturing activity was greatest. The impact of morisco expulsion, however, was greatest in the countryside of Aragon, Valencia, and Andalusia, where a vital force of productive agricultural workers could not easily be replaced; rural economies foundered as a result. Though wealth poured into Castile from the Americas, and the cities of Seville and Madrid emerged as major urban centers, old weaknesses in the agricultural base and problems resulting from the aristocratic dominance of the social and economic structures counterbalanced the modest gains made in manufacturing and market development through the sixteenth century.

Ultimately Castile under Habsburg rule did not succeed in effectively exploiting the wealth from the Americas and in using that wealth to invigorate the domestic economy. The well-known bankruptcies and ultimate collapse of the Spanish economy in the seventeenth century resulted from a number of causes. The balance of state policies continued to favor the aristocracy, whose real economic privileges had barely been touched by the consolidation of royal power. The influence of the mesta in this period grew, and so too did the quantity of uncultivated land and the threat of famine. The enormous financial burdens that the Hapsburgs assumed in fighting Protestantism on the Continent coupled with poor fiscal policies further undermined the interests of the middle classes.

Also a factor in the intensification of the financial collapse that set in after 1600 was the rise of Madrid itself. Growing from 35,000 inhabitants in 1560 to 175,000 in 1630, Madrid's rapid development further upset the Castilian economy by accelerating the demand for and prices of subsistence goods needed to feed its vast population of poor residents (Ringrose, p. 67). Without a viable middle class to bolster demand from regionally produced manufactured goods and wine, the bulk of the city's discretionary income remained in the hands of the aristocracy, whose preference in consumption leaned toward luxuries produced abroad. Many of the specialized economies of towns surrounding Madrid fell into ruin in the seventeenth century as a result (Ringrose, pp. 71–73).

While Castile under Habsburg rule faced tremendous economic challenges, it was certainly not entirely rigid in its social character. The renowned seventeenth-century Spanish accomplishments in elite culture included elements, such as popular theater, that were accessible to those of modest means in the towns and cities of the realm. The theater of the siglo de oro, though produced largely for and subsidized by the dominant social elements, did not unilaterally reinforce existing hierarchies: many of the comedies, in fact, ridiculed aristocratic values and some even portrayed female assertiveness in a sympathetic light (McKentrick, pp. 196–201). Saints Day feasts, festivals, and autos de fe (religious pageants) provided more broadly shared leisure for the rural population.

POLITICAL CENTRALIZATION AND "ENLIGHTENED" REFORM

In terms of political centralization and bureaucratization, the Iberian Peninsula in the early modern period followed many general western European patterns. The Catholic kings and then the Hapsburgs put into place a system of royal councils to govern the state and a new civil service began funneling university-educated administrators into government for the first time. Still, the move toward a modern centralized state was thwarted by the continued insistence by Catalonia, Navarre, and the Basque Country that their ancient fuero liberties be respected by the Crown. Questioning the practicality of their union to an increasingly bankrupt Castilian Kingdom, both the Catalans and the Portuguese in 1640 rebelled against Spanish rule. While Portugal achieved independence, Catalonia was forced to settle for the Crown's renewed recognition of the region's historic liberties.

By the time that the Spanish Hapsburg line came to an end at the close of the seventeenth century, Portugal's independence was firmly established and Catalonia made another attempt to free herself. The Bourbon Philip V's (1683–1746) triumph in the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714) resulted in a dramatic advance in the project of political centralization. Catalonia lost her medieval liberties and was severely punished for having opposed the Bourbon ascendency to the throne. The final battles preceding Barcelona's surrender in 1714 remain among the most commemorated episodes in Catalan historical consciousness today. In the Basque Country the fueros remained intact as a reward for having supported the Bourbons in the war. The Bourbon Kings completed the process of politically integrating Aragon into the Castilian state by suspending the latter's cortes and drafting a new constitution that included none of the Aragonese-Catalan liberties.

Equipped with greater centralized powers, the new Bourbon rulers of Spain implemented policies engendering economic revitalization and middle-class growth. During the reign of Charles III from 1759 to 1788, reform endeavors were undertaken in agriculture, the church, education, and the finances of the state. The long-term problems of Andalusian agriculture were addressed through measures to control peasant rents, state-sponsored irrigation projects, and efforts to repopulate uncultivated lands. The mesta was disbanded as well. The Crown also made some progress in limiting the power of the church and in increasing the educational preparation of the priesthood. The government encouraged the development of secondary schools and established new academies for the training of engineers and surveyors, and implemented fiscal reforms, including the establishment of a national bank, standardization of coinage, and the introduction of paper money. Bourbon Spain in the eighteenth century clearly reflected the currents of enlightened despotism that moved through much of the continent, despite tendencies in earlier historiography to discount the influence of the Enlightenment in Spain.

Among the most important triggers of economic growth in the eighteenth century was the opening of ports throughout Spain to trade with the Americas. In the first decade of the new policy, trade increased tenfold. The process of industrialization in northeastern Spain gained full force in the eighteenth century. In Catalonia the agricultural economy underwent increasing conversion to viticulture, and the profits from the export of brandy were re-invested in the mechanization of cotton cloth production. Barcelona's expanding commercial activities placed it at the head of a western Mediterranean urban trade network that extended from Málaga to Marseilles (Ringrose, p. 44). Other trading networks also expanded on the Peninsula in this period and laid the foundation for two centuries of economic growth. With Bilbao as the dominant city, a northern Spanish urban network consolidated from Vigo near the Portuguese border to San Sebastián. In the interior of the Peninsula, a third urban network emerged with Madrid at its center. Composed of trade with specialized market towns and seaports, and fueled by the demand generated by the government administration and the military, luxury goods continued to figure as an important component of Madrid's overall commerce. A fourth network in the south included two economically powerful urban centers in Seville and Cádiz (Ringrose, pp. 46–50).

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: LIBERAL REVOLUTION

The French Revolution (1789) and then Napoleon's (1769–1821) invasion (1808) disrupted the economic and demographic expansion of the first century of Bourbon rule in most of the peninsula. Between 1790 and 1820, Spain lost population, and trade and manufacturing dropped off sharply, partly as a result of the loss of the bulk of her American colonies. The conflict was complicated, with diverse factions opposing and supporting France for different reasons. Still, the subsequent portrayal by political and cultural elites of the War of Independence (1821) as a moment of Spanish unity contributed to the War's use as a rallying point of nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century and remained viable in the decades leading up to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) (Alvarez Junco).

The nineteenth century was politically and socially tumultuous, and was defined by a liberal revolution that transformed political, property, and church-state relations. Inspired by a range of liberal ideas emanating from France, the forces favoring sweeping change coalesced in Cádiz to produce a constitution in 1812 that limited monarchical power more extensively than anywhere else on the Continent. When the Bourbon Ferdinand VII (1784–1833) re-assumed the throne in 1814, these precepts, and indeed the constitution itself, were cast aside in favor of monarchical privilege. Through the reign of Ferdinand VII the polarized political factions adamantly favoring and opposing the ancien regime gained momentum. At one extreme were liberals who supported the 1812 constitution and significant limitations on monarchical power; on the other were traditionalists who viewed Ferdinand as the epitome of all that was wrong with the vacilating monarchs of the modern world. One traditionalist faction supported Ferdinand's more pious brother Charles over the succession of the King's daughter Isabel. This Carlist movement was centered in the rural mountainous regions of Navarre, the Basque Country, Aragon, and Catalonia. Carlists launched several protracted uprisings in the nineteenth century and remained a force of reaction emanating from the north of the peninsula up to and during the Spanish Civil War. However, by the 1840s the liberals had gained control of the political system.

The rest of Spain's nineteenth-century political history reflected the struggle of contesting liberal visions of the constitutional terms that would govern the relationships between state and society. Certainly a broad consensus in favor of the concept of constitutional limitations on the power of the monarchy had spread widely through the Peninsula over the course of the century.

As in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, Spain in the nineteenth century was also involved in a contested social struggle to democratize the emerging liberal order. New groups entering the political arena included army officers adhering to shades of liberal ideology and intervening in government through the use of a tool known as the pronuciamiento (military coup) and urban mobs who variously supported and opposed the military officers' leads. Added to these were Catalan factory workers who had organized collectively by the 1850s and Andalusian peasants, who, as a result of population pressure and the underpinning of the latifundista system that resulted from the 1837 nationalization and sale of church lands, were experiencing worsening living conditions. The liberal revolution in property relations had failed to create a new nation of stable farmers along French lines. It instead reinforced existing landholding patterns.

The Portuguese state, too, underwent dramatic change in the century that followed the Napoleonic invasion. After a long period of economic decline that had set in over the course of the sixteenth century, Portugal's colonial empire shrank, and in 1822, even Brazil was lost. Liberal ideologies had gained ground and experiments with constitutional limitation of monarchic rule eventually gave way to authoritarianism. A resurgence of liberalism ushered in a sixteen-year Republic that collapsed in 1926 and was replaced with what would become Europe's longest dictatorship.

The struggle to democratize the liberal order, 1876–1939. After a tumultuous six years of revolution (1868–1874), the period in Spanish history known as the Restoration (1876–1931) featured a modicum of political stability alongside economic growth and social polarization. Though the 1876 Constitution called for universal manhood suffrage, in fact the commitment to democracy was an empty one. Elections were quite openly subverted through the use of political bosses in the countryside who collaborated in the Liberal and Conservative parties' agreement to simply take turns in power. The loss of Cuba in 1898 as a result of the Spanish-American War (April–August 1898) came as a painful blow to Spanish confidence, setting off an intellectual movement that sought to define the essence of Spain and the best future path for the recovery of her grandeur. Ironically, the Generation of 98's reflections coincided with the assertion of regional political aspirations, which questioned the viability of Castilian dominance of the Spanish polity.

Regional nationalism. In both Catalonia and the Basque country, modern political nationalism took shape in the late nineteenth century. Emerging somewhat earlier, and serving as a model for the Basques, Catalan nationalism had its roots in the linguistic continuities of everyday life, but also in a varied number of other factors and circumstances. The Catalan language, though sharing much with Spanish and other Romance tongues, was distinct and remained the dominant if not exclusive language in the majority of households in every social stratum of the region through the nineteenth century. Catalan predominated especially among the popular classes, which responded favorably to the elite-driven romantic cultural movement of nationalist rediscovery that began in the 1830s and was known as the Catalan Renaixança. By the end of the nineteenth century a series of explicitly Catalanist groups emerged, but none as powerful as the Lliga Regionalista that was founded in 1901. At first representing a broad coalition, it was soon reduced to its core of support among the upper ranks of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie and Catalan Carlists. Still, Catalan nationalism was broad based and its forms varied along the political spectrum from radical to reactionary.

Basque nationalism also had its roots in historical experience. The three Basque provinces, Álava, Vizcaya, and Guipúzcoa, along with Navarre, retained their fueros as they were incorporated into the Spanish state. It was the formal abolition of the fueros in 1876 followed by the Spanish state's attempt to raise tax quotas in 1893 that set off Basque nationalism and led to the creation of the Partido Nacionalista Vasco, the PNV. Much more explicitly Catholic in its orientation than the Catalan variant, Basque nationalism was also distinct in its emphasis on the construct of race over the much more linguistically oriented identification of Catalanism. The growth and intensification of collective identities based upon social class and ideology fueled the emergence of these nationalist identities in the periphery of the peninsula during the Restoration.

ECONOMIC CHANGE AND WORKING-CLASS PROTEST

Modern working class protest took shape in Spain over the course of the nineteenth century in response to industrialization and the commercialization of agriculture and as an outgrowth of the larger European movement. Since industrialization developed in distinct regional centers, working-class organization began as a local and regional phenomenon. Thus, the first trade unions appeared among textile workers in Catalonia in the 1830s and contributed to a broad-based labor movement in the 1850s. In 1879, the Spanish Socialist Party (P.S.O.E.) was founded in Madrid. Though the Socialist federation of trade unions (General Union of Workers) was formed in 1888, in Valencia, Murcia, and Andalusia, the labor movement that developed was much more explicitly anarchist in its orientation. This was especially the case among the landless peasants of Andalusia, where the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) spread widely. While Spain remained behind the leading nations of Europe in its agricultural productivity, considerable increases in the output of the rural economy accompanied industrial growth and the urbanization of the nation's most important cities. Migration from rural Andalusia to industrialized Catalonia added to the fervent mix of ideological currents among the working classes. By the turn of the century, Spain was embroiled in class warfare, especially in the industrial centers of Vizcaya and Asturias, where industry was based on mining and metallurgy, in the textile region of Catalonia, and in the latifundia areas of the south. Some of the most bitter battles were fought, as in 1909, on the streets of Barcelona where anarchism mixed with violent strains of anticlericalism. In 1910, the anarchosyndicalist trade union, the CNT, was formed and began quickly to gain widespread support among workers.

Through the second decade of the twentieth century, especially as World War I inflation far outstripped wages in Spanish cities and Andalusia, labor unrest intensified. The dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja (1870–1930) from 1923 to 1931 temporarily forestalled further conflict by suspending the constitution, repressing labor organizations, and reversing the very limited Catalan regional autonomy that had been achieved over the course of the previous two decades. Still, the Primo regime's political repression only resulted in further ideological polarization between left and right. When municipal elections in 1931 swept Republicans into office, King Alfonso XIII (1883–1941) abdicated and the Spanish Second Republic was born.

Reflecting the profound shifts in political culture that had taken shape over the course of the previous century, the Second Republic moved to contain spreading anticlericalist violence and worker unrest by implementing policies of secularization and reform. The Second Republic instituted freedom of religion and the church was separated from the state. Other efforts included a modest restructuring of the Spanish army and a program of land reform to address the problems of the Andulsian peasantry. The Second Republic also granted womens' suffrage and instituted civil marriage laws and the right to divorce. Though essentially moderate, these reforms failed to go far enough to satisfy the left, while they were perceived by the right as extreme and dangerous to the future of the Spanish state. The election of a Popular Front government that included communists coalesced the disparate forces positioned against the regime. The church, the army, large landowners, and a host of rightist groups, including the Spanish Fascist Party, threw their lot together to overthrow the democratically elected government. The conflict was heightened by the European context of fascist victories and democratic decay.

The Nationalist uprising of July 1936 led by General Francisco Franco marked the beginning of a protracted and complex struggle. The Spanish Civil War involved considerable fragmentation on the Republican side and desperate struggles on the part of Spain's de jure government to maintain control of a social revolution set off by military revolt. Competing militias formed around trade union groups, and anticlerical violence pulsated through major cities. In Barcelona in May of 1937, a smaller civil war broke out behind Republican lines between anarchosyndicalist and communist militias. The conflict was a bloody one that ended in anarchosyndicalist defeat. The Spanish Fascist Party, the Falange, took a leadership role in the uprising against the Republic, and General Franco's forces were aided by Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) and Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) in the struggle. The Republicans, internally divided and aided by Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) and by the volunteer International Brigades, were outmatched, and met defeat in 1939 after three long years of war. The struggle to democratize the liberal order had ended in defeat.

THE FRANCO REGIME: DICTATORSHIP AND ECONOMIC MODERNIZATION

The Spanish Civil War brought the Franco Regime to power and an abrupt change, through repressive dictatorship, to Spanish society. A single-party state, featuring a fascist-inspired system of vertical syndicates, was designed by Franco as an "organic" alternative to supposed "inorganic" marxist and liberal-capitalist political models. Under Franco, all power rested in the dictator's hands and a program of ideological mobilization was effected through propaganda organizations that targeted youth, university students, and women. All of the rights accorded women under the Republic were rescinded and pronatalist policies were promulgated. Trade union activities outside the vertical syndicates were extinguished, strict press censorship was instituted, and autonomous regional structures of the Republic dismantled. The regime also outlawed the public use of Catalan in the professions, in education, and in the arts. Expressions of Basque nationalism and culture were likewise forbidden.

In the first ten years of the Franco regime, real wages and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell to levels as low as 50 percent of those obtained before the war. Everywhere economic misery was the order of the day with rationing remaining in effect throughout the 1940s. The Franco regime's policy of economic autarky sharply limited the prospects of recovery. Only after the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 did the regime begin to distance itself from fascist rhetoric. It was not until 1957 that Franco embraced an alternative to the fascist ideal of national economic independence and replaced Falangist advisors with neoliberal technocrats committed to economic modernization. The technocrats' 1959 Stabilization Plan, after an initial recessionary period, bore fruit in a spectacular economic recovery extending from 1961 to 1973, the so-called "economic miracle." During those years Spain's industrial sector grew dramatically and the Gross National Product (GNP) per capita more than doubled (Maxwell and Speigal, p. 7), partly funded by a booming tourist industry that brought cultural revolution as well as hard currency. Spain moved quickly in the 1960s to participate in the general expansion of consumer society that was taking place across western Europe. Moreover, the economic boom led to broad social changes, from the transformation of peasant into farmer in the north to the exodus of landless laborers from the rural south.

Such changes had not come about without pressure on the regime. Though Franco normalized relations with the west in the 1950s by playing its anti-communist Cold War card, the Catholic church began to distance itself from the regime and even defend the Catalans and Basques against linguistic and more generalized cultural repression. Censorship was eased somewhat in the early 1960s and proconsumerist policies were designed to dampen student and worker unrest. Still, opposition to the regime built, and clandestine political and trade unionist activities spread widely. Political imprisonment and violations of human rights in Spain remained common throughout the final decades of the dictatorship.

The Catalans and the Basques mounted some of the strongest movements in opposition to the Franco regime in its final years. The regime's policies of cultural and linguistic oppression had unintentionally strengthened the collective identities of Basque, Catalan, and other regional groups within the Spanish polity. Regionalist nationalist symbolism served as a potent rallying point for demonstrations of opposition to the dictarship. Regionalism's mass appeal played an important role in the formulation of a consensus among Spaniards that Spain after Franco should become a pluralist state. Still, an important exception to the overwhelmingly peaceful and federalist aims of regional nationalist movements in late-twentieth-century Spain was the appearance in this period of the Basque separatist terrorist movement, ETA, which began a campaign of assassination designed to de-stabilize the regime. Several other terrorist groups emerging in the final years of the regime contributed to an atmosphere of political and social tension.

POLITICAL TRANSITION AND DEMOCRATIZATION

The transition to democracy after the death of Franco in 1975 was facilitated by his successor, King Juan Carlos I (1938–) who favored liberal reform. In 1978, the Spanish Cortes ratified a new constitution that created a parliamentary monarchy featuring broad freedoms and a guarantee of autonomy to historic subnationalities and regions. Apart from a failed military coup attempt in 1981, Spanish political culture since the transition has exhibited respect for pluralism and the rule of law.

In 1982, a moderate European-style social democratic party, the P.S.O.E., won an overwhelming majority in Spanish parliamentary elections. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Felipe González, a process of political decentralization took place as autonomy was granted to a series of Spanish regions, including Catalonia and the Basque Country, and military reform placed the armed forces under civilian control. Spain joined the European Community (now part of the European Union) in 1986 and became a leader of the poorer nations of western Europe within that structure. Dramatic economic growth in the late 1980s brought the further spread of consumerist values, the growth of the middle class, and the rapid expansion of the tertiary sector of the economy.

The European-wide economic recession of the early 1990s led to a sharp rise in business failures and unemployment. Under investigation for financial corruption, the P.S.O.E. lost the parliamentary elections of 1997 to the center-right Partido Popular (PP), which formed coalition government with the Catalan nationalist Convergencia i Unió (CiU) Party, creating an alliance that cut across the divides of the Civil War and early Franco periods. Still, significant problems persisted, especially with respect to the achievement of European Union fiscal goals and the definition of the constitutional limits of regional autonomy. In addition, the profound disagreement between the Spanish state and those who supported the ETA terrorist movement remained a particularly violent and unresolved problem.

Portugal's history has in many ways paralleled Spain's in the twentieth century. The Portuguese First Republic, established in 1916, was never fully democratic and depended on the support of liberal army officers. In 1926 a military coup that drew simultaneously upon ideas of regeneration and millenarianism brought the Republic to an end. From 1932 to 1969 Antonio de Oliveira Salazar ruled as an authoritarian premier. Salazar, like Franco, sought above all else to preserve traditional Catholic values and began his rule by pursuing policies of economic autarky. By the late 1950s, though, Salazar had begun to accept foreign capital as a means to accelerate industrial growth. Yet the economy continued to lag behind that of Spain and Europe. Significant waves of outmigration in the 1970s contributed to slow demographic growth in a nation that was still largely agricultural.

In Portugal, too, by the time of the dictator's death, the transition to democracy occurred with relative ease. The 1974 "Revolution of Flowers" brought a parliamentary democracy to power, though one that included a continued role for the military in government. Since the establishment of democracy, centrist and rightist parties have dominated national politics.

CONCLUSION

The social history of the Iberian Peninsula has followed a course that in a great number of ways mirrors that of western Europe. Participating in the urbanization processes and vibrant Mediterranean commercial capitalism of the Middle Ages, the peninsula played a leading role in the creation of the transatlantic world economy. The financial and imperial collapse of the early modern period, previously used to mark the start of Spain's long decline, did not in fact forestall the emergence of powerful regional economic networks and the beginnings of industrialization in the second half of the eighteenth century. Middle-class growth and the spread of liberalism in the nineteenth century roughly paralleled the social and political course followed by a number of western European nations, though some differences, of course, remain.

Much of the Iberian Peninsula's twentieth-century history has featured more variation from the western European pattern, at least in political terms. Remaining neutral in both World Wars and experiencing a much longer period of right-wing dictatorship, economic recovery and the growth of postwar European consumer society came later to the Peninsula than to those regions of Europe participating in the Marshall Plan (1948–1952). The liberalization of social and sexual mores was delayed until the transition to democracy in both Spain and Portugal in the mid-1970s. Though in the last quarter of the twentieth century the Iberian Peninsula came to share in all of the main characteristics of western Europe's economic, social, political, and cultural structures, the region continues to adhere to more specific Mediterranean patters of leisure, public sociability, and culinary practice.

See alsoThe World Economy and Colonial Expansion (in this volume);Fascism and Nazism (volume 2);Catholicism (volume 5); and other articles in this section.

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