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Political Ideology and Economic Modernization in Spain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Stanley G. Payne
Stanley G. Payne
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Extract

In his magisterial general history, Spain 1808–1939, Raymond Carr concluded that the failure of modern constitutional liberalism in Spain was above all “a political failure,” that is, more the consequence of political culture, status cleavages, and ideological divergence than the inevitable result of unadapted economic structures that could not support the formal political system. American reviewers such as Richard Herr and Gabriel Jackson were quick to take issue, arguing that political conflict in modern Spain had not been positively resolved because the economic structure had been too backward to permit it. They were obviously correct that the backwardness of the Spanish economy greatly hampered the civic processes of modern Spain—a point that Carr readily admitted in general. It is nonetheless largely true that modern Spanish politics have more often than not focused on issues of status and ideology rather than on specific conflicts over concrete economic issues.

Type
Review articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , October 1972 , pp. 155 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1972

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References

1 Carr, Raymond, Spain 1808–1939 (Oxford 1966), vi.Google Scholar

2 Malefakis shrewdly notes that in Mexico, for example, there were nearly 10,000 properties of more than 1,000 hectares each in 1940—an entire generation after the Mexican Revolution. These properties amounted to 61.9 per cent of total land surface, whereas in Spain (as of 1959) holdings of mat size amounted to only 5 per cent of the total land. During the 1930's, land distribution ratios in the worst “feudal,” “reactionary” ladfundist provinces of Spain were slighdy more equitable man the average at that time in “progressive,” “democratic,” “revolutionary” Mexico, staunch supporter of the lefrist Republic. Even worse conditions have ostensibly prevailed in Brazil, whose society seems unable to generate any kind of severe tension as measured by the standards of twentiem-century radicalism. So much for the myth of the supposedly uniquely inhuman, inevitably and spontaneously revolutionary conditions in the Spanish countryside, at least as measured by the pattern of land distribution (p. 72).

3 Further background on this problem will be found in de Camps, J. i Arboix's recent Història de l'agricultura catalana (Barcelona 1969).Google Scholar

4 Barcelona 1968.

5 For an interesting attempt to analyze and compare the relationship of highly diverse twentieth-century radical ideologies and regimes to the processes of industrialization and modernization, see Garruccio, Ludovico, L'industrializzazione tra nazionalismo e rivoluzione. Le ideologie politiche dei paesi in via di sviluppo (Bologna, 1969).Google Scholar Garruccio makes a stimulating (though to my thinking slightly inaccurate) effort at a comparative periodization of political and economic modernization in Spain and Italy (pp. 297'302).

6 The argument that a political regime is to be justified above all by its capacity for technological modernization has been made by Jesús Fueyo, director of the regime's ideological braintrust, the Instituto de Estudios Políticos, in his Desarrollo político y orden constitucional (Madrid 1964).