Chapter 23: The Franco Regime in Perspective

"the calculated ambiguity and procrastination of Francos personal style and modus operandi installed a certain polyvalent character in the regime from the beginning. Hence one of its earliest theorists wrote soon after Francos death:

It turns out to be difficult to understand Francoism because its very development relied on ambiguity and changes of direction. The political forms that Franco established did not undergo direct continuous development, but under- went pauses and superpositions. .. . I have sometimes thought that preoccupation of his against the force of chance led him to play with two decks when he spread his cards on the table, to have available the greatest number of combinations. . . .'

Any typology is rendered complex and confusing by the two metamorphoses of the Spanish regime, whose history may be divided into three periods: (1) the semifascist, potentially imperialist phase of 1936 to 1945; (2) the decade of National Catholic corporatism from 1945 to 1957 that witnessed the further irremediable subordination of the fascist component; and (3) the developmentalist phase of so-called technocracy and a sort of bureaucratic authoritarianism from 1957/59 to the end.? This in turn has raised the question, frequently answered in the negative, as to whether Franco had any consistent doctrine or ideology other than the conservation of personal power at all costs. He himself never produced a significant work of theory, reserving his doctrinal statements for public speeches, while the Fundamental Principles of 1958 differ fundamentally from and in some ways directly reject key aspects of the Twenty-six Points of 1937.

Certainly Franco never defined in theory a clear-cut formal ideology comparable to any of the major political theologies of the twentieth century, but he always possessed a fundamental set of beliefs whose basic priorities and values changed comparatively little. His political attitudes stemmed to some extent from his Catholic and military background but only took full form during the decade 1926 to 1936, the time in which most of his political and economic reading was concentrated. He believed in nationalism, central unity, the Catholic religion, strong authoritarian government without political parties, and a program of modern economic development determined as much as possible by political and nationalistic priorities, with social reform a secondary byproduct of economic growth. Francos nationalism was grounded in Spanish tradition, aspects of which he revered. He was fundamentally monarchist in political principles, though he was also tempted by some of the more radical ambitions of fascism before 1943, temptations to which he never fully succumbed."

"It has been frequently observed that Franco’s thinking was defined as much by what it opposed as by what it espoused. He was firmly convinced that a fully developed parliamentary party system could not work in Spain, and he was equally opposed to Marxism, cultural liberalism (“Masonry), laicism, materialism, and internationalism. He apparently neveceased to have certain misgivings about the opening up of economic policy after 1959,° however gratifying its immediate technical achievements.

The Primo de Rivera dictatorship made a major impression on his thinking, and in most respects Franco always regarded himself as continuing the same policies while avoiding the basic “Primo de Rivera mistake” of failing to institutionalize an authoritarian nationalist regime. The Civil War trauma provided a unique opportunity for Franco and from his own point of view created a fundamental legitimacy of its own"

"Yet Franco was a conscious and determined economic modernizer, how- ever limited his grasp of economics. He always held that effective social and economic policy was vital for any contemporary state, absorbing doctrine from both conservative and Catholic corporatism, from economic nationalism, and from fascistic national syndicalism. He was not as totally oblivious of the potential contradiction between economic modernization and cultural traditionalism as it may have seemed, but hoped to contain the problem, as have Communist regimes, by partially sealing off the outside world. When Spains economic limitations made this impossible, the cultural erosion of the regime greatly accelerated.

Franco always emphasized his willingness to reconsider individual policies as distinct from fundamental principles, but it is not clear that an absolute distinction was always maintained. Critics maintained that the only abiding “fundamental principle” was the maintenance of Francos personal power. Though that may be something of an exaggeration, in the ultimate sense it was true enough. One thing that Franco would never concede or truly compromise was his personal prerogative, influenced above all by the examples of Primo de Rivera in 1930 and Mussolini in 1945. He realized that though individual policies may be relaxed or even changed, a personal dictatorship cannot be disbanded halfway, for that would ultimately leave, the dictator no choice but to flee abroad, an enterprise which he judged hazardous in the extreme."

"Whereas opponents usually labeled the regime as “fascist” or “totalitarian” during its early years, these appellations had become less persuasive by the 1950s. In 1956 an unsympathetic critic such as Herbert Matthews defined it as perhaps not fascist but certainly “fascistoid.”* During the 1960s even that attenuation seemed inadequate, and other phrases of description such as “authoritarian regime,” “corporatism, “authoritarian- conservative”* and “a unitary limited pluralism” ® were employed."

"That the Spanish regime was obviously authoritarian, not totalitarian, is first of all simply an inescapable fact, for it did not attempt to control the entire economy and all social, cultural, and religious institutions. "

"José Antonio Primo de Rivera was aware of at least some of the problems involved and abandoned use of the term “totalitarian state,’ ? while Franco qualified his own vague usage during the Civil War by referring with even greater ambiguity and in fact downright confusion to its supposed invention by the builders of the united Spanish monarchy in the fifteenth century. In the first years of the Spanish regime the term tended to refer to the concentration of all political power and the fostering of a single and consistent doctrine of national unity.* That structural totalitarianism could only describe something like the Soviet state but not the nascent Franco regime was grasped by the Jesuit theorist Azpiazu— more systematic than some of his fellow countrymen—in the midst of the Civil War.

Yet if the regime never was nor was intended to be structurally totalitarian, it at first absorbed a good deal of fascistic doctrine through the incorporation of the Falange and the latters program. From 1937 to 1945 the Franco regime was doctrinally at least a semifascist state, the categorical fascism of the FET as state party being mitigated above all by thconfessional nature of the regime—creating the strange hybrid known to some as clerical fascism and to Amando de Miguel as fascismo frailuno (friar-fascism)—and also by the explicit syncretism avowed by Franco from the outset.

The early regime was an extreme form of dictatorship, in juridical structure (or lack of it) nominally the most arbitrary in Europe until after the end of World War II. Politically and institutionally, however, the place of the FET was even weaker than that of the Partito Nazionale Fascista in Italy, where from the first the party was subordinate to the state rather than vice versa. The military hierarchy, on the other hand, had a special relationship to the state, even though not directly institutionalized, that found no counterpart in either Germany or Italy."

"The similarities between Mussolinis system and the early Franco regime during its first eight years are rather greater than is sometimes thought. Both employed subordinated state fascist parties that were merged with and subsequently incorporated nonfascist elements. Both permitted limited pluralism in national society and institutions under executive dictatorship. In neither case was the institutionalization of the regime developed primarily by revolutionary fascist ideologues but rather by monarchist or semimonarchist figures of the radical right in conjunction with fascist moderates. Though Franco enjoyed much more complete executive authority than did Mussolini, he eventually converted the form of his regime into that of monarchy, which already existed in Italy. In both cases the challenge of militant fascist national syndicalism was soon faced and thoroughly subordinated (in the sbloccamento of Rossoni’s national syndicates in 1928, and the suppression of Salvador Merino’s attempt at a more integral and autonomous radical national syndicalism in 1940).

The sequences of development of the two regimes were also somewhat parallel, finally diverging radically at the level of foreign policy. In both cases, an early coalition phase without official institutional structure (Italy, 1922-25; Spain, 1936-37) was followed by a phase of institutionalization (Italy, 1925-29; Spain, 1937-40) that was in turn succeeded by a period of equilibrium which was longer in Italy than in Spain. All this is of course a fairly common pattern for new systems, but should not lead one to overlook some fundamental differences in policies and ambitions. Mussolini made a somewhat greater effort at ideological development, and always harbored certain socially revolutionary goals that required more continuing effort at political mobilization. Foreign policy and inter- national context marked the ultimate points of divergence, for the eventual structure of the Spanish regime was to a large extent dependent on world affairs. Whereas Mussolini tried to play an independent role from 1933 on, Franco accepted the need to wait on events. Had Hitler won the war, there seems little doubt that Franquism would have become less conservative and rightist and more radical and overtly fascist in form. Acceptance of the term fascist was fairly common though never official during the first year of the Civil War, and all the trappings of “Franco! Franco! Franco!” in the early period were simply imitations of Italian Fascism (or occasionally National Socialism), including various agencies and institutions of the party and regime such as the Vicesecretaría de Cultura Popular (derived from the Italian MinCulPop) or the Auxilio de Invierno (from Winterhilfe)."

"The defascistization of the Franco regime began as early as 1942 and proceeded in several stages. The first was that of the 1940s, more precisely from 1942 to 1947, when the FET was deemphasized, the system of monarchy established, and gestures made toward representation and civil rights through the introduction of a corporate and controlled Cortes and the Fuero de los Españoles. The second phase was that of 1956-58, when any form of Falangist restoration or major new institutionalization was ruled out, the regime moved from nationalist autarchy in economic policy to an internationalist semiliberalism, technocratic bureaucracy became the order of the day, and the fascistic program of the FET was thrown out in favor of the bland Principles of the Movement. The final phase began with the reforms of the 1967-68 which redefined the Movement as a vague national “communion,” after which it was deprived of most of the remaining vestiges of its continuity and ultimately faced with total political reorganization if it intended to survive. "

"Thus a decade after his death, an article in a leading upper-middle- brow American publication would declare: “What he actually accom- plished was the proto-modernization of Spain. . . . Franco left Spain with institutions of technocratic economic management and a modern mana- gerial class which have enabled what was once a poverty-stricken agricul- tural country at the time of its civil war to acquire productive resources and a standard of living approximating those of its southern European neighbors. Can this be what its civil war was about?”

Francos legion of critics decry the superficiality of any such conclusion, insisting that the great achievements of Spanish society under his rule came either in spite of his regime or at least were not directly promoted by it. In some respects such qualifications are undeniably correct, though they are often applied too categorically. One of the better approaches is that of Walther L. Bernecker, who has divided some of the major develop- ments during the regime into three categories: those planned and engi- neered by the regime, those not directly designed but simply taken ad- vantage of once they began to develop, and those that were unforeseen and potentially counterproductive to the regime.”

Even Francos enemies have sometimes tended to give him a measure of credit for his World War II diplomacy. Ironically, as has been seen in chap- ter 13, he may have deserved less praise in this regard than has been offered by some of his opponents. Only in 1942 did Spanish diplomacy fully acquire the characteristics often imputed to it. Though Franco did keep Spain out of the war—a fact for which all Spaniards could ultimately be grateful—he fell far short of designing and implementing an optimal policy of neutrality.

Similarly, though economic modernization was always a primary goal of the regime, evaluation of its role in this regard is also complex. It is fre- quently observed that the major phase of growth came after the alteration in economic policy in 1959, which partially renounced the statism and autarchy (sometimes called “fascist economics’) of the first two decades. This is absolutely correct, but overlooks the significant growth already achieved during the decade 1948-58. It is true that the international lib- eral market economics fueling European expansion in the 1950s and 1960s was not the sort of economic development planned and preferred by Franco, and to that extent the liberalization policy falls into Ber-neckers second category, that of adjustment to developments not within the parameters of the regime’s preferred policies. Yet not all authoritarian regimes, whether of left or right, have been willing to make such adjustments, and in that regard the creative pragmatism of the regime must be recognized."

"It is idle to insist, as do many of Francos critics on the left, that a utopian progressive democracy would have produced better government for Spain. That goes without saying, but substitutes a strictly theoretical value judgment for an empirical comparison. Historical analysis and utopian desires are two different things. No such democratic utopia was at hand in Spain in 1936, which in fact had produced quite the opposite. Electoral democracy had resulted in absolute polarization between left and right, eliminating virtually all centrist liberal influence and thus creating a latent authoritarian situation before Franco appeared on the scene. His regime must thus be judged not by utopian invocations which have no contact with reality but in terms of historical alternatives that actually existed. These were few and in no case idyllic. Had the Nationalists lost the Civil War, it is difficult to conclude that the result would have been political democracy. The revolutionary wartime People's Republic was not a liberal democracy, but was driven by powerful revolutionary forces determined to proscribe the other side altogether. Its mass political executions were as extensive as those by Francos supporters. The effect of the Civil War, irrespective of the victor, was to temporarily banish democracy from Spain. Francos solution was very far from optimal—indeed at first one of the worst feasible responses (the best having been Miguel Mauras proposal for a centrist constitutional “national Republican dictatorship”). Nonetheless, the strength of the subsequent dictatorship was not derived from its rigorous repression alone, however important that was, but also from the knowledge in much of Spanish society that the alternative had not been very different.” An evolutionary authoritarianism was in a certain sense about as much as the Spanish could expect from the impasse into which they had maneuvered themselves."

"One of the planned goals of the regime was achieved: a greater spirit of cooperation and social solidarity was created through the introduction of national corporatism, broad economic growth and eventual redistribution of income, and proscription of partisan politics. All this was consciously programmed by the regime from the start, and its accomplishment was reflected in the conclusion of a prominent American anthropologist in 1975, “It is clear that the organic solidarity of Spain as a whole has in- creased.”* The regime's relation to the enormous improvement in the educational level of Spanish society is more equivocal. Since nearly all Spaniards were educated either in state or state-subsidized schools, it might seem that this too was a conscious part of the regime's moderniza- tion program, but educational development as a top priority was adopted only in the last phase, and then because it seemed an ineluctable counter- part to economic modernization and political stability. Even after the General Education Law of 1970 educational expenditures still did not compare favorably with many other industrial countries, and thus educa- tional modernization would fall into the second category."

"Paradoxically, another feature of institutional modernization achieved by Franco was the relative depoliticizing of the military, even though the regime began as a military government and even though Franco was also explicit in his reliance on the military to avoid any destabilization. He always maintained a special relationship with the military hierarchy while holding them at a certain distance, manipulating them, switching and ro- tating top posts, and generally avoiding any concentration of power among them. The fact that military men held so many cabinet positions and other top administrative posts, especially during the first half of the re- gime, tended to obscure the fact that Franco sought to avoid any military interference in government and eliminated any possibility of an indepen- dent corporate or institutional role for the military outside their ownsphere of the armed forces. Officers who held positions in government bureaus or institutions or who sat in the Cortes did so as individual administrators or representatives of military background who participated in coordinated and integrated state institutions, not as independent corporative representatives of the armed forces. The relative demilitarization of the political process was accompanied by steadily increasing demilitarization of the state budget, due not so much to Francos respect for education (uncertain at best) as to his disinclination to spend money on a professional and technological modernization of the armed forces which might have altered their internal balance."

"From its own point of view, the regime's great domestic failure lay in its inability to sustain its neotraditionalist cultural and religious policies. This failure was the almost inevitable counterpart of social and economic trans- formation on a massive scale, compounded by the momentous changes within the Roman Catholic Church as a whole in the 1960s. Franco was not unaware of the contradictions that might result, and hence his great initial reluctance to alter economic policy and lower national barriers in 1959. Continuation of the regime itself was made impossible not so much by the mere death of Franco—for the passing of Salazar had scarcely brought the Portuguese dictatorship to an end—as by the disappearance of the system of Spanish society and culture on which it had originally been based in 1939. Francoist society and culture had largely been eroded away even before the Caudillo physically expired. Moreover, the absence of any clear regime ideology after 1958 made it impossible for any consensus in support of a Francoist orthodoxy to develop among the regime's political and administrative elites in its later phase."

"In some ways the aftermath of the regime was more extraordinary than the long history of the regime itself, for the democratization brought about by King Juan Carlos and his collaborators between 1976 and 1978 was unique in the annals of regime transitions before then. After his resignation as director general of popular culture in October 1974, Ricardo de
la Cierva was asked at a press conference in Barcelona for an historical example of an institutionalized authoritarian regime that had transformed itself into a democracy without formal rupture or overthrow, as the more advanced aperturistas proposed to do in Spain. He replied that he was studying that very question at the moment,™ but the answer was of course that no such example existed.* Never before had the formal institutional mechanisms of an authoritarian system been used peacefully but systematically to transform the whole system from the inside out."

"It will not do to suggest, as have a few, that Franco can be given credit for the tolerant and democratic Spain of the 1980s. A dictatorship is not a school for democracy, and Franco was not responsible for the democra- tization of Spain. While permitting limited liberalization, he fought any basic alteration to the last, only accepting the prospect to some degree in the very last weeks of his life for lack of personal energy or political alter- natives to do otherwise. Despite this, some of his fundamental poli- cies and achievements ironically became indispensable prerequisites for successful and stable democratization without rupture or violence. One of the most important of these preconditions was inherently negative, though quite significant, for the depolarization and depoliticization of Spanish society pursued by the regime after 1945 did leave behind it a situation in which a new start could be made, free of the extremism of the Civil War generation."