In any case, with regard to Francoism, we have seen that during the Civil War and in the postwar period, many observers and political analysts particularly known for their anti-fascist commitment noted the existence of some or all of those factors that defined the concept of ‘totalitarianism’ at some stage of the regime’s history (especially at the beginning). Therefore, they advocated that Franquismo should be regarded as a specifically Spanish variant of European fascism originating in the interwar period. They believed that a full definition of fascism should consider the counter-revolutionary and violently repressive social function exercised in each national case by different coalitions of right-wing forces that created their own fascist solution to address their respective crises and protect the interests of the ruling classes.
However, the definition of Franquismo as a specific Spanish variant of fascism (‘clerical fascism’, ‘fascism of the military barracks’, ‘clerical-military fascism’) ceased to be shared by all political scientists, sociologists and historians interested in the theme from the 1960s, once the survival of the regime had been proven despite international condemnation by the Western world during the Cold War (Spain joined the UN in 1955). In the context of the great socio-economic and cultural changes experienced by Spain in that decade of development, and in view of the transformations inside the regime and in its international political activity, many analysts began to see the invalidity of this identification or, at the very least, its problematic consistency with the fascist totalitarian model (especially given that all had been defeated in 1945). We should not forget that by then the regime was remarkable in its similarities to other political models in full force in the postwar period (from Salazar’s Portugal to Latin American caudillista and military dictatorships and similar regimes in recently decolonized Arab and Asian countries).
It was in 1964 when a different and alternative definition of the nature of the Franco regime emerged in the academic (and political) world. Its main author was a Spanish sociologist based in the United States, Juan José Linz, who formulated the concept of ‘authoritarian regime’, taking as his reference and counterpart the previous concept of ‘totalitarianism’.38
According to Linz’s analysis, the Franco regime was a prime example of ‘authoritarianism’ because the five defining basic features of that category of political analysis would be clearly different from those of a totalitarian system.
1 The regime would enjoy a degree of ‘limited political pluralism’ within its own internal ranks (the political game between the so-called ‘Francoist families’: Falangists, Carlists, Catholics, monarchists, etc.).
2 The regime lacked ‘an elaborate and leading ideology’ of messianic features that required knowledge and study by the population, while maintaining ‘a peculiar mentality’ (an archaic Catholic conservatism).
3 The regime would eliminate the need for ‘intensive or extensive political mobilization’ framed by the state bodies in favour of the promotion of ‘apathy’, the demobilization and the passive conformism of the population.
4 The official single party would have subordinate functions and its claim of absolute dominance of the state would be halted by the effective resistance of other institutions equal to or greater in power and influence (such as the army and the Church).
5 The authoritarian dictator, in contrast to the totalitarian, ‘exercises his power within badly defined but actually fairly predictable formal limits’, which therefore are not unlimited.
This attempt to define a concept expressly applied to the regime of General Franco had many supporters in the field of sociology (Amando de Miguel) and political science (Guy Hermet) and among historians (Stanley G. Payne, Juan Pablo Fusi and Javier Tusell). But it also caused much academic debate with undeniable political overtones. Some critics felt that this conceptual revision could be understood as a form of acquittal of the Franco regime as it focused on the more benevolent character of the regime in its developmental phase (forgetting the first philo-totalitarian phase of civil and world war). Similarly, certain inaccuracies that weakened the scope and rigour of the concept were noted: the questionable comparison between a fascist ‘ideology’ (precise, defined and closed) and an authoritarian ‘mentality’ (broad, blurred and open to many ideological components); the relative nature of the ‘limited political pluralism’, which only affected the ruling classes and obscured the fundamental political agreement in that group; and the possible confusion between ‘demobilization’ (such as apathy induced by the authorities) and the lack of rejection or opposition from the masses, forgetting the existence of a non-conformity drowned out by the fear of repression.
However, the fundamental criticism of the authoritarian model focused on the lack of references to classes and social groups that supported the regime or benefited from it (or, vice versa, classes and groups that suffered the effects of the regime and were excluded from its benefits). In other words, it censured the strictly political-formalist character of the definition and its lack of attention to the social and class dimensions of political regimes.
One of the first and most refined proposals to overcome Linz’s thesis was the work of sociologists Salvador Giner and Eduardo Sevilla-Guzmán. In 1975, trying to combine the social aspects (content) with the formal political aspects (container), both authors formulated the concept of ‘modern despotism’ as a political system distinct from totalitarianism and traditional autocratic regimes. In their view, the Franco dictatorship fulfilled all the characteristic features of the model:
A typical case of modern despotism was Franco’s Spanish state, as well as the Portuguese regime of Salazar, which lasted until 1974, and a good number of contemporary African or South American dictatorships. In all cases of modern despotism we find: (a) a mode of domination of the class in which power is exercised for the ruling class and, on its behalf, by a despot or a reduced elite; (b) a series of service communities – police, civil servants, members of a single party, clergy – who always obey the leader or leaders; (c) a restricted political pluralism to that class within these service communities; (d) a political formula of government that includes an ideological façade and the tolerance of a certain degree of ideological pluralism among the factions that make up the coalition’s dominant forces; and (e) a popular majority from which is required passive obedience, and which is economically exploited by the dominant classes.
While the concept of ‘modern despotism’ gathered and expanded in a social sense the features embedded in an ‘authoritarian regime’, other criticisms of this notion were much more radical in their rejection of the original political formalism. In essence, returning to and renewing the Marxian interpretative tradition, these criticisms insisted that the definition of Franquismo could not omit its social function to constitute a historic solution to a grave capitalist crisis through a reaction of counter-reformist and counter-revolutionary forces to tackle the threat of workers’ mobilization. In this sense, according to the argument of the Italian sociologist Gino Germani in 1969, the following should be considered: ‘Both the basic objectives and the historical significance of the Franco regime are typically fascist. That its policy formulation can be characterized as authoritarian is, surely, important, but not least its fascist substance.’39
Following these lines of reasoning, British Hispanist Paul Preston also repeatedly called attention to the risks of exclusively identifying fascism with the squalid Falange of prewar Spain, since it ‘obviates the need for examination of the fascist features of other rightist groups and of the Franco regime itself’ and there is the potential ‘to forget both the trappings and Axis alliances of Francoism and the activities of its repressive machinery between 1937 and 1945’.40 Probably one of the most accredited representatives of this interpretative line is the historian Julián Casanova in one of his first works on Francoist repression, originally published in 1992. His reasoning in favour of seeing the fascist nature of the Franco regime for social reasons rather than political crit
eria deserves to be quoted extensively:
The social function of fascism thus becomes the fundamental criterion for identification and understanding. […] the counter-revolutionary coalition which took up arms in Spain in July 1936 to bring down the Republic, fulfilled the historic mission, pursued the same purpose and, above all, fought for the same ‘benefits’ as the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany. […] Thus understood, fascism is for the historian something more than a style of politics, with a distinctive ideology, that knows how to mobilize the middle classes and appeal to the feelings of the community – with the consequent rejection of the concept of ‘class’ as an organizing principle of society – in a crisis situation. We, rather, have a counter-revolutionary process, a violent and extreme expression of a movement of reaction, which emerged in almost all European countries in the interwar period to deal with the advance of the left and labour parliamentary conquests, the fear of the revolution and the crisis of the liberal state. […] A substantial difference, however (between the Spanish case and the Italian and German cases), resided in the nature of the executing arm of that reaction. In a society where the army had shown its capacity on multiple occasions to protect the interests of these classes by force, there was no need to invent another procedure. […] A primary ingredient, therefore, of the historical mission of the Franco regime, which emerged from the victory in the war and inextricably linked to memories and consequences of it, was the aim of eradicating social conflicts endangering the very existence of the industrial bourgeoisie and the landowning classes. The reform project of the Republic, and all that that form of government meant, was wiped out and spilled over the graves of thousands of citizens. […] In all three cases (Italy, Germany and Spain), the social function of fascism was to stabilize and strengthen capitalist property and ensure the social and economic domain of the capitalist class.41
However, in the opinion of a wide range of historians from different ideological leanings, the ‘social function’ or ‘historical mission’ of the Franco regime does not in any way justify its consideration as fascist. One reason is that the stabilization of the ‘capitalist property relations’ (‘function’) and strengthening of the ‘social and economic domain of the capitalist class’ can be and historically has been performed under very different political forms (‘developmentalist’ or traditional military dictatorships, conservative or progressive democratic regimes, liberal or authoritarian oligarchies, fascism, etc.). In other words, the reproduction and continuity of a model of bourgeois social domination and capitalist economic accumulation is always exercised and developed under different and diverse means and political formulas (systems of relationship of power between classes and groups, rulers and ruled) – institutions, furthermore, that, due to the relative autonomy of the sphere of political power, have an impact on the specific evolution of this model of social domination and its economic basis.
In this regard, it is worth noting that even the most orthodox Marxist tendencies of the 1930s appreciated the qualitative political differences of fascism with other more or less dictatorial and repressive bourgeois regimes. In 1932, the then communist Spanish theorist Santiago Montero Díaz (he turned to fascism later) underlined the contrast and ‘antithesis’ between triumphant Italian Fascism and the traditional capitalist political systems, aside from their common class regimes:
Fascism means a new conception of the bourgeois state to maintain its class domination over the proletariat. […] Essentially different from a parliamentary liberal state, distinct also from a simple absolute power, fascism has meant simply the most brilliant attempt to give bourgeois society a political structure that will preclude the existence of any revolutionary organization. […] The fact was that [since 1922 in Italy], a new power was going to embark, with sails unfurled, in a new direction in history; absolutely new methods to defend old absolute objectives. The laborious, violent gestation of the seizure of power, fighting the revolution day by day and factory by factory, that plan for the conquest of the state, full of bullet-riddled flags, of illustrious demagogues and patriotic hymns, mobilizing masses and winning factions, did not resemble anything, absolutely nothing of the rotten government, nor the low palace coups such as that of [Miguel] Primo de Rivera (in 1923), that only the ineffable ignorance of some sectors can compare to the Mussolini conquest, heroic and criminal, nourished by arrogance and betrayal. […] There is no actual difference; there is antithesis. The arrests, tactics, and the field of operations are different. […] With regard to various European dictatorships, either they have, behind the screen of a Primo de Rivera, the will of an absolute king, the personal powers of a Pilsudski or a Carmona [Portuguese general in charge of the dictatorship in 1926], they do not have, as refers to the seizure of power or the state, any essential contact with fascism. They will perhaps have some of the features of violence, some of its shock troops or some of its ways of addressing and cutting the knot of social problems.42
In response to this set of reasons, the definition of fascism on the exclusive basis of social (or historical) functions and regardless of the specific political format seems to be an example of reductio ad extremum, ineffective and confusing for its all-inclusiveness and absence of content to discriminate different cases of political regimes historically crystallized and socially similar in its function. Precisely that ‘inflationary use’ that invalidated the scientific-social potential of the concept is also the cause of the devaluation of the ‘fascist’ voice as a mere label of denigratory political denunciation.43 Thus, starting a long time ago, in everyday language and even the media, to be fascist meant total opposition to the democratic system or the demands of workers’ trade unions, acceptance of the use of violence as a political instrument and the suppression of dissent as an expeditious method of government, including all cultural action considered displeasing. In July 2008 the singer Iggy Pop attained widespread press coverage with his resounding statement: ‘Rock should be fun; without that, it becomes fascist.’ It was a perverted and ‘inflationary use’ of the word that simply serves to relativize and minimize the significance of a truly fascist and totalitarian dictatorship (such as Nazi Germany, for example), equating it to any regime with a capitalist base (or other imaginable) to some degree prone to the use of force against its internal dissidents and real or potential enemies.
In view of these conceptual difficulties in the interpretation of fascism, the latest trend in historiography on Franquismo consists of shading the fascist character (stricto sensu) of the regime without neglecting its social and class meaning. The fascist component of the reactionary coalition forged during the Civil War under the leadership of Franco was clear and evident, but it had no majority nor decision-making capability at the end of the war. In the words of Ricardo Chueca and José Ramón Montero, ‘Spanish society in the 1930s was fascist, as much as it could or needed to be.’44 That was true largely because, as had already been appreciated by President Azaña, the basic social structure of Spain in the 1930s was too archaic and backward to produce forms of an unequivocally ‘modern’ political organization and practice associated with Italian and German fascism, which were emerging in much more developed and diversified societies. This was no obstacle to the reactionary coalition’s taking advantage of fascism’s most novel and appropriate features for the Spanish war situation: violent, repressive and coercive civil functionality, attractive organic corporate and anti-democratic rhetoric, and its illusory imitation of inclusive participation of the masses in the politics of the regenerated nation.
In this innovative interpretative line are several historians of different orientations, such as Santos Juliá (‘fascism under a canopy, in military uniform’), Manuel Pérez Ledesma (‘a dictatorship by the grace of God’), or Antonio Elorza. The latter is also the author of a definitive synthesis that is worth quoting for its conciseness:
Franco’s regime would have been a personal dictatorship, a Caesarism, with a military base, with a counter-revolutionary and arc
haic orientation, and a strictly fascist content in its ‘permanent state of exception’, in the politics of repression of opponents and dissidents, and until 1966, in the politics of information and elimination of freedom of thought. […] One should place Franquismo amongst military dictatorships (like Caesarism, not like praetorianism), and different to the civilian dictatorships of Hitler or Mussolini. […] Fascism was there, in the symbols and in the repressive methods, but the regime was above all else a military dictatorship.45
Also included in this school should be the neo-Marxist historian Julio Aróstegui, who in 1986 recovered the classification of authoritarian political regime and leader as part of a reactionary and restorative social project:
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