Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

It was the purely defensive nature of these strategic plans, added to Chamberlain’s veto on sanctions, which prevented Flandin from acting against Germany at the time of the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936. By 1938 and 1939, these influences had spread demoralization and panic into most parts of French society, with the result that the only feasible plan for France seemed to be to cooperate with Britain in a purely defensive policy in the west behind the Maginot Line, with a free hand for Hitler in the east. The steps which brought France to this destination are clear: they are marked by the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935; the Ethiopian crisis of September 1935; the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936; the neutralization of Belgium in 1936; the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939; the destruction of Austria in March 1938; and the Czechoslovak crisis leading up to Munich in September 1938. Along these steps we must continue our story

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The Spanish Tragedy, 1931-1939

From the summer of 1936 to the spring of 1939, Spain was the scene of a bitter conflict of arms, ideologies, and interests. This conflict was both a civil war and an international struggle. It was a controversial problem at the time and has remained a controversial problem since. For twenty or more years, the bitter feelings raised by the struggle remained so intense that it was difficult to determine the facts of the dispute, and anyone who tried to make an objective study of the facts was subjected to abuse from both sides.

The historical past of Spain has been so different from that of the rest of Western Civilization that it sometimes seems doubtful if it should be regarded as part of Western Civilization. This difference is increased by the fact that, since the late fifteenth century, Spain has refused to share in the experiences of Western Civilization and, if many powerful groups could have had their wish, would have remained in its fifteenth- or sixteenth-century condition.

From the invasion of the Arabs in 711 to their final ejection in 1492, Spanish life was dominated by the struggle against this foreign intruder. From 1525 to 1648, Spain was in a struggle with the new religious movements aroused by Luther. Since 1648 it has been, except for brief intervals and for exceptional personalities, at war with modern rationalism and modern science, with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon, with modern democracy, modern secularism, modern liberalism, modern constitutionalism, and the bourgeois conception of modern society as a whole. As a result of more than a thousand years of such struggles, almost all elements of Spanish society, even those which were not, in theory, opposed to the new movements in Western culture, have developed a fanatical intolerance, an uncompromising individualism, and a fatal belief that physical force is a solution to all problems, however spiritual.

The impact of the bourgeois, liberal, scientific, and industrialized West of the nineteenth century upon Spain was similar to its impact on other backward political units such as Japan, China, Turkey, or Russia. In each case, some elements of these societies wished to resist the political expansion of the West by adopting its industry, science, military organization, and constitutional structures. Other elements wished to resist all westernization, by passive opposition if nothing more effective could be found, to the death if necessary, and to keep secreted in their hearts and minds the older native attitudes even if their bodies were compelled to yield to alien, Western, patterns of action.

In Spain, Russia, and China this attitude of resistance was sufficiently successful to delay the process of westernization to a date when Western Civilization was beginning to lose its own tradition (or at least its faith in it) and to shift its allegiance (or at least its behavior) to patterns of thought and action which were quite foreign to the main line of Western tradition. This shift, to which we have referred in the first section of this present chapter, was marked by a loss of the basic element of moderation to be found in the real tradition of the West. As ideological intolerance or totalitarian authoritarianism, for example, grew in the West, this was bound to have an adverse effect upon efforts to carry Western democracy, liberalism, or parliamentary constitutionalism to areas like Japan, China, Russia, or, the case in point, Spain.

During the nineteenth century, the elements willing at least to compromise with the Western way of life were not completely unsuccessful in Spain, probably because they received a certain amount of support from the army, which realized its inability to fight effectively without a largely westernized society to support it. This, however, was destroyed by the efforts of the “Restoration Monarchy” of 1875-1931 to find support among the opponents of modernization and by the Spanish defeat at the hands of the United States in 1898. Alfonso XII (1874-1885) came to the throne as a military reaction after a long period of revolutionary confusion. The defeat by the United States, like the Chinese defeat by Japan in 1894, or the Turkish defeat by Russia in 1877, widened the gap between the “progressive” and “reactionary” groups in Spain (if we may use these terms to indicate a willingness or a refusal to westernize).

Moreover, the war of 1898, by depriving Spain of much of its empire, left its oversized army with little to do and with a reduced area on which to batten. Like a vampire octopus, the Spanish Army settled down to drain the lifeblood of Spain and, above all, Morocco. This brought the army (meaning the officers) into alignment with the other conservative forces in Spain against the scanty forces of bourgeois liberalism and the rapidly growing forces of proletarian discontent. These conservative forces consisted of the Church (meaning the upper clergy), the landlords, and the monarchists. The forces of proletarian discontent consisted of the urban workers and the much larger mass of exploited peasants. These latter groups, which had no real acquaintance with the Western liberal tradition and found it of little hope when they did, were fertile soil for the agitators of proletarian revolution who were already challenging the bourgeois liberalism of the West.

To be sure, Spanish individualism, provincialism, and suspicions of the state as an instrument of the possessing classes made any appeal to the totalitarian authoritarianism of Communism relatively weak in Spain. On the other hand, the appeal of anarchism, which was both individualist and antistate, was stronger in Spain than anywhere else on earth (stronger even than in Russia where anarchism received its most complete verbal formulation at the hands of men like Bakunin).

Finally, the appeal of Socialism was almost as strong as anarchism, and much more effectively organized. Socialism to many discontented Spaniards (including many bourgeois intellectuals and professional men) seemed to offer a combination of social reform, economic progress, and a democratic secular state which was better fitted to Spanish needs than anarchism, Bolshevism, or laissez-faire constitutionalism. The weak link in this Socialist program was that the democratic, non-totalitarian state envisaged by the Socialist intellectuals in Spain was quite compatible with Spanish individualism (and basic democracy) but quite at variance with Spanish intolerance. There was a legitimate ground for doubt that any such Socialist state, if it came to power in Spain, would be tolerant enough to permit that intellectual disagreement which is so necessary for a democratic society, even one directing a Socialist economic system. The bourgeoisie of Spain, relatively few in numbers because of Spain’s economic backwardness, were in a difficult position. While the bourgeoisie of England and France had attacked the forces of feudalism, bureaucratic monarchy, militarism, and clericalism, and had created a liberal, secular state and a bourgeois society before they were themselves attacked by the rising forces of proletarian discontent on their Left, the bourgeoisie of Spain could see the proletarian threat from the Left before they were able to overcome the vested interests of the Right. As a result of this, the bourgeoisie tended to split into two parts. On the one hand were industrial and commercial bourgeoisie who supported the liberal ideas of laissez-faire, constitutional parliamentarianism, private property, antimilitarism, antibureaucratic freedom, anticlericalism, and a limited state authority. On the other hand were the intellectual and professional bourgeoisie who would have added to this program a sufficient degree of social reform, democracy, economic interventionism, and nationalization of property to put them into the Socialist camp. Both these divisions of the bourgeois group tended to move further to the Right after 1931 as the growing pressure of proletarian revolution threatened both private property and liberal democracy. The bourgeois liberals feared the loss of private property and, to save it, hastily abandoned their earlier antimilitarism, anticlericalism, and such; the bourgeois Socialists feared the loss of liberal democracy, but they found nowhere to go because liberal democracy could find no real basis in the fanatical intolerance of Spain, a feature as prevalent on the Right as on the Left. In truth, both bourgeois groups were largely crushed out, and their members practically exterminated, by the Right because of their earlier allegiance to antimilitarism, anticlericalism, and antimonarchism, and by the Left because of their continued allegiance to private property. Strangely enough, the only defenders these bourgeois found outside their own group was in the small but well-organized body of Stalinist Communists, whose ideological preconceptions of the natural course of social development were so strong that they insisted that Spain must pass through a period of bourgeois liberal capitalism and industrialization before it would be ripe for the later stage of totalitarian Communism. This point of view, explicitly stated in Stalin’s letter to the Spanish Left-wing Socialist leader, Largo Caballero, on September 21, 1936, warned against premature efforts toward social and economic reform’s for which Spain’s degree of industrial development made it quite unready, and called for general “anti-fascist” support for a liberal state against the “reactionaries” of the Right. In consequence of this point of view, the Communists in Spain were almost as willing to exterminate the revolutionaries of the Left (especially the anarchists, “Trotskyist” Communists, and left-wing Socialists) as they were to eliminate the reactionaries of the Right.