Tucson Humanities Festival 2017
Forces Unleashed: Why The Spanish Civil War Still Maters
27 Feb 2018
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What were the main causes of the Spanish Civil War?
Thank you very much. Can you all hear me? Okay. If you're here for the Grateful Dead concert, that's next week. So thank you all for coming out tonight. I'm a little overwhelmed by the number of people, so I will try and keep on track. So on the board here are a few words that, if you're of a certain age, will remind you of how you'd put these things together to a song.
Three of these things are just like the other. One of these things just isn't the same. But actually, this is kind of a teaser, because this all explains how I got to be here talking about the Spanish Civil War. And you can ask me about that, if you can remember it, in the question and answer period. But my goals for tonight are threefold. First, I want to talk a little bit about
how the Spanish Civil War came about and what it was, keeping in mind that I'm going to do that in about two and a half minutes, not 30 or 40 weeks, so it's going to be fairly succinct. The second is, why did it matter in 1936? What made the Spanish Civil War turn out to be what it was? And three, today, sitting here in 2017,
What lessons can we learn from what happened in Spain just over 80 years ago? So I'm going to begin with three series of images. This is Madrid, April 14, 1931, the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. People celebrating in the streets in the Puerta del Sol, right under the, which one of these is the?
The famous clock in the Puerto del Sol, where when you go to Madrid, you meet everybody. The second image, Madrid, May 15, 2011. A different kind of manifestation, a different kind of gathering. This one, also celebratory, but huge. attempt to wrest control of civil society back from a government that seemed to be going down the wrong track.
And this one, these were taken just about a week ago, Barcelona and Madrid demonstrations in favor of Catalan independence. And I think that's probably where I'm going to try and end up tonight and get into a lot of trouble. I'll try and say something.
The last time I gave a lecture on the Spanish Civil War here in this venue, the last class of the course, 14 people raised their hands and they said, explain Catalonia. And I said, that's the next class. So let's see what our point of departure was. Helen Graham, distinguished British historian a number of years ago in a little book called
a precise history, a concise history of the Spanish Civil War called the Spanish Civil War a fratricidal war in Europe's backwater. Now, we know Spain's surrounded by water. It was backwards. And a civil war is always to some sense fratricidal. Today, Spain's still surrounded by water. Is it a backwater? Is it fratricidal? I'll try and say something about that before we get to the end.
Of course, this war, this fratricidal war in Europe's backwater quickly became something else, not because of what was going on in Spain, but what was going on in the world around it. The war got swept up into the forces of the left and the right and became something quite different. It galvanized.
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Chapter 2: Why was the Spanish Civil War significant in 1936?
Third, from the beginning, what you have to understand is that Spain was unified very quickly. It was the first European country to be unified. The unification was fairly artificial.
And what was never resolved in this process of unification was how to deal with the fact that there were people on the peninsula who had a long tradition of independence, autonomy, and who had different cultures and different languages. This is something that, as you know if you read the newspapers, has been yet to be resolved. And the fourth is,
Great tension in Spain between traditional agrarian rural society and the rise of metropolis, the rise of cities and what that tension produced. Back to April 1931. April 1931 is the moment of crisis in the Bourbon monarchy. It's not the only crisis in the Bourbon monarchy.
There were crises in the Bourbon monarchy since the Bourbons took over dynastic rule in Spain, and they went all the way through, all the way through to the 19th century. The Spanish Civil War isn't actually the first Spanish Civil War. There were three Carlist Wars before the Spanish Civil War. So what happens on April 14, 1931, however, is that after elections,
The forces of the monarchy, the people who voted for the monarchy, outnumbered the people who voted for installing a republic. But the vote was so close that the King of Spain decided to take a holiday. So he left the country. He left the country without abdicating. He left the country probably thinking that this would get resolved fairly quickly and he'd be back.
He actually never came back to Spain. And from that point on, Spain enters into its second period of Republican government, only the second period of Republican government, which total, I think, two and four and six, eight years out of 150 years until we get back to the restoration of democracy in 1975. The Second Spanish Republic takes
the place of the monarchy and begins a series of attempts to undertake a number of serious, long-overdue reforms. As a matter of fact, they were so serious and so overdue that when the 1931 Constitution was written, If you compare the 1931 Constitution to the one that was written in 1978 after Franco died, they're essentially the same document. What has changed is the period of time.
So we're going to talk for a couple of minutes about making sense of the Spanish Republic until July 18, 1936. when there was either an alzamiento nacional, a national uprising, or a counterrevolution, or a coup, depending on what your political affiliations are. Now, here's what we know about the Second Spanish Republic. It accomplished a lot.
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Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from the Spanish Civil War today?
All of the people who supported the Republic knew that they didn't want a monarchy. There was very, very, very, very, very little agreement about the shape and the nature of democracy that was going to replace the monarchy. That became one of the problems. And the republic was always pulled.
Those forces of reform and reaction, oligarchy, liberalism, centralism, regional autonomy, all of those pulled the republic back and forth for its six-year history. What they did accomplish was a series of reforms institutionalized in the Constitution that only divided the country more, probably for good reasons, and also inflamed the forces of the oligarchical status quo.
Among them were a reform of the military, Spanish military was way over-officered. Agrarian reform, reforming the education system, reforming the electoral system, making all this all-state schools in Spain lay schools and pulling away the control of the Catholic Church. All of these caused a number of tensions, a number of plots to begin to figure out how we can rid ourselves of the Republic.
The plot that took place on July 18, 1936 was concocted by a number of generals. working in secret to overthrow the government in what they assumed would be a rapid coup and capitulation. So let's look for a moment what happens when the war starts. And we'll start on the side. I always like to start with the good guys.
We'll start on the side of the legitimately elected government, which was now forced to defend itself. What we know is that, in point of fact, the Republic had two great advantages. One, it was a legitimate government. Two, It held all of the Spanish resources. It held the country's gold reserves. And it had a number of military garrisons that were loyal to it.
What the war became, however, was something quite different. Had this actually been a civil war, the Republic would have won. because of what was going on in the world. Remember, we're only a decade and a half, decade and a half, two decades away from World War I. And we're on the cusp of World War II. And you have in Europe forces that are beginning to make known their desires to
lay siege to Republican, mostly leftist governments. Of course, the one thing I forgot to mention that's in between those two is, oh, by the way, there was a Russian Revolution. And that played a fairly big role in the right's desire to quash any kind of left-wing uprising. What the war became was, very simply,
Germany and Italy pouring human and financial resources into Spain to prop up the nationalist cause and give them what they needed to win, mostly material, mostly technical support. If you can call the Luftwaffe technical support, that's essentially what they got. Now, of course, you could say, but wait a minute. Spain's a democracy. Where's England? Where's France? Where's the United States?
Where was England? Where was France? Where was the United States at this particular time? That's what we're going to talk about in a couple of minutes. So first of all, there are internal issues. And this is what they are.
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