User:Johann/sandbox6

Background

Spain in the 19th century

Spain's history since the 16th century was characterized by its resistance to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that profoundly influenced many of its neighbors to the north, and as late as the Victorian era Spanish society opposed modern secularism, democracy, liberalism, and constitutionalism. Spain found itself in very different conditions from the rest of western Europe, and was falling behind the other world powers technologically, economically, and militarily — including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Anglo-American countries. Moreover, Spain found itself in this condition at a time when the other powers that did embrace modernism had undergone political change and became less confident in their own status, which meant that the effort of modernizing Spain brought with it the influx of new radical and totalitarian ideologies, such as communism and derzhavism, making the country all the more volatile in the early years of the 20th century. Spain's monarchy was able to suppress the westernizing forces in Spanish society until the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s destabilized the country, setting it on a long course for the rest of the century that culminated with the Civil War in 1926.

The upheavals of the Napoleonic era led to the independence of South America, Central America, and Mexico, and this, combined with the defeat in the Spanish–American War of 1898, reduced the formerly great Spanish Empire to a few small bits in Africa. Significant portions of the African territory awarded to Spain by the Berlin Conference in 1884 was outside of direct Spanish control at that time. Meanwhile the Spanish Army, which had become oversized over the centuries, took up a massive portion of the national budget while being left with little to do after the loss of the empire. Much of the Army was sent to defend Spanish holdings in Morocco, where its leaders quickly decided to take on a mission of expanding further beyond the coast into the Moroccan interior. This gave the officers the opportunity to gain promotions through merit and to justify the fortune being spent on the Army as living conditions in the country declined. The growing discontent among the Spanish working class in the large cities was opposed by the ruling elite of wealthy land owners, the Catholic Church, the monarchist factions (divided between the Legitimists and the Carlists), and increasingly the officer corps. There was a disproportionately high number of officers, and money was constantly being wasted, with the Spanish Army becoming the most inefficient in western Europe.

In this situation, the Army launched its conquest of Morocco in 1909 with support from King Alfonso XIII, who had risen to the throne in 1874 as part of the military's response to revolutionary agitation. The defeat in the war of 1898 widened the disagreements between the progressive and reactionary factions of Spanish society, and the Rif War would increase this even further. A string of Spanish defeats, leading up to the Disaster of Annual, which became one of the worst defeats in Spanish military history, caused a public outcry and demands for an investigation into the Army. Alfonso XIII tried to block these efforts and made himself unpopular. The scandal led to the majority of seats in the Congress of Deputies going to the Left in the 1923 Spanish general election, which resulted in Alfonso XIII abdicating under pressure and going into exile in France. A new government was formed by a coalition of parties from the Left, with some representing the liberal bourgeois intellectuals while others stood for proletarian socialism.

The Second Republic

The Liberal Party initially led the government of the Second Spanish Republic that emerged in April 1923. Although it was dominated by the liberal bourgeois, which made efforts to enact constitutionalist, laissez-faire, anti-militarist, social, and parliamentary reforms, the new government was immediately put into a difficult position between the Right and the far Left. Unlike in other western countries, Spain had not by then developed a tradition of parliamentary democracy or political liberalism, and half of the population was illiterate, so the prerequisites for developing a non-totalitarian, liberal, and democratic state did not exist. The liberal group faced increasing pressure from the proletarian Left in the middle of the 1920s, which opposed their laws defending private property, and began making an alliance with the Right, abandoning their original anti-militarist and anti-Catholic position. There was a divide among the socialists as well, with a small faction that believed Spain had to go through the process of liberalization and industrialization before it would be ready for socialism, and a more radical majority that called for revolution, led by Luis Guido. These dynamics were made more complex by the tension between Castilian centralism, which was associated with the monarchy and the Army, and regional separatism in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, and elsewhere. What industry Spain had was concentrated in Catalonia and the Basque Country, so separatism also became connected with revolutionary socialism.