[274] Praetorian intervention in Spain in 1923, like praetorianism elsewhere, grew out of the coincidence of motive and opportunity. What seems important to emphasize is that the military disposition to intervene and the susceptibility of civilian government to intervention interacted in such a way as to make praetorianism not only likely, but nearly constant in the period between 1875 and 1936. Most of the time, the military was content to act merely as a powerful pressure group. But in 1923 and 1936 the military broke through the facade of civil supremacy and asserted its right to govern the nation directly. At all times, however, the army's extraordinary political power derived both from its determination to protect its corporate interests and from the insecurity of the liberal state.

The architect of the Restoration, Cánovas del Castillo, had consciously adopted the British model of civil-military relations: the army was to be small, only moderately professionalized, and apolitical, its leadership cadres drawn from the same social groups that produced the political leadership. Yet like liberalism itself, this model did not transplant well. For one thing, the Spanish officer corps was recruited not from the ruling oligarchy but from the traditional middle class. This meant that the political neutrality of the army would depend on a high degree of professionalization rather than on a similarity of outlook between civilian and military elites. Nevertheless, the dynastic parties attempted to select the military leadership on the basis of political loyalty and patronage rather than merit or expertise, with the result that the large majority of officers believed the state to be the greatest obstacle to military professionalization. Professional standards were further compromised by the size of the officer corps, which kept salaries low, retarded promotions, and prohibited technological modernization. The result was the opposite of what Cánovas had intended -- a faction-ridden and demoralized officer corps, the large bulk of which was resentful, politically disaffected, and prone to intervention.

[275] Through the Juntas de Defensa, bureaucratic officers attempted to protect their professional interests by eliminating the political favoritism that undermined institutional autonomy. With the ruling elites dependent on army support, the junteros were successful in imposing their will. Many of their professional grievances remained untreated, however, because military bureaucrats refused to countenance the other military reforms necessary to complete the process of professionalization -- most notably, personnel cutbacks and selection promotions based on professional achievement. The efforts of the dynastic politicians to respond positively to military demands were further complicated after the renewal of the Moroccan war in 1919, which created a faction of highly trained officers whose professional interests were diametrically opposed to those of the peninsular bureaucrats. The politicization of the War Ministry and the General Staff made internal resolution of these institutional issues impossible, forcing them instead into the national political arena, where they contributed to political instability.

The army was also politicized by the inability of the traditional elites to adjust to the rapid economic and social changes induced by the world war. The army was the institution by which the dynastic parties repulsed all domestic challenges to their power, especially after the end of the war. Far from being the guarantor of national defense, the army found itself frequently required to adopt the unheroic role of policing social disturbances. At the same time, the opponents of the existing social and political order attacked the regime through the army. Thus, while the civilian politicians reinforced their dependency on the army, the army itself was increasingly alienated from the state.

The military disaster at Anual in 1921 was a turning point for the parliamentary monarchy, for it deprived the dynastic politicians of their traditional support in the middle classes. At the same time, it deepened the factionalism in the officer corps, dramatizing the unreliability of the army as a guarantor of political stability. During the next two years, the dynastic politicians struggled to respond to the national demand for political reform, a task complicated by the heterogeneous character of the protest. While a consensus could be assembled on the need for change, there was little agreement on the degree or direction that change should take. Middle-class democrats envisioned a more responsive parliament, liberated from the control of the traditional interest groups and the king. The working-class parties, on the other hand, viewed political reform as only the first step toward a redistribution of economic and social power. The alliance between these groups, which emerged in 1917 and again after 1921, was at best uneasy. To the [276] traditional elites in the dynastic parties, it was an unreassuring foundation on which to base the regime. As a result, they were reluctant to turn their backs completely on their old allies in the military.

In any event, by 1923 the army was unwilling to be shunted aside. Although Primo de Rivera announced a few days after the pronunciamiento that the army had acted patriotically to prevent "the total collapse of Spain," ⁽¹⁾ in reality, the army supported the coup to defend its corporate interests. Like the patriotic language in the Junta manifesto of June 1, 1917, the regenerationist rhetoric of Primo's manifesto disguised the conservative professional goals of the majority of officers. In 1917, however, the mere threat of a coup had insured that the Juntas' grievances would receive a hearing. By 1923 the army perceived that only a military government could be counted on to secure military interests.

Primo's patriotic phrases were not necessarily hypocritical. Like military men everywhere, Spanish officers tended to equate their interests with those of the nation. From the belief that the survival of the state depended on the preparedness and expertise of the military, it was easy to extrapolate that an injury to the army was, by definition, an assault on the nation itself. Since officers found it difficult to tolerate any deviation from their own perception of where the national interest lay, they could not accept as legitimate the popular demand for a withdrawal in Morocco, nor even the official policy of a reduction in military expenditures. In their view such policies were the equivalent of treason. If the politicians lacked the will to resist the pressure from the left, it was up to the army to safeguard vital national interests.

The sense of corporate identity forged during 1923 would endure. But once the common enemy had been eliminated, corporate solidarity disappeared. After 1923 many of the conflicts that contributed to the collapse of the parliamentary monarchy reemerged. This is not the place for an extended analysis of military policy and military politics under the Dictatorship and the Second Republic. Nevertheless, the events of the period under discussion formed the background and shaped the parameters of the extended constitutional crisis of the 1920s and 1930s, in which the "military problem" played a significant and seemingly intractable role. It may be worthwhile, therefore, to conclude this study with some tentative observations about the way in which the crisis in civil-military relations between 1917 and 1923 prefigured the pattern of events that led to military rebellion and civil war in 1936.

As a way of understanding the motives and opportunity for military intervention, it seems useful to stress once again the intimate connection [277] between military professionalization and political modernization. The key to neutralization of the officer corps was its thoroughgoing professionalization; objective institutional norms to regulate appointments and promotions and financial support for the development of professional expertise would have gone a long way toward eliminating the praetorian tendencies in the Spanish army. Such measures, however, had to be accompanied by extensive personnel cutbacks, which were possible only if the government commanded extensive political support. Without popular backing, no government would dare risk an assault on vested military privilege. Conversely, in the absence of a professionally satisfied army, no regime could consider itself safe from military intervention.

This dilemma was inherited both by General Primo de Rivera and by the provisional Republican government of April 1931. Primo de Rivera in fact possessed few options. Having come to power through the tacit consent of the officer corps and lacking constitutional legitimacy for his new regime, he was no more able than the dynastic politicians to legislate autonomously on military matters. Furthermore, Primo was acutely aware of the military factionalism that had made the formulation of a coherent military policy so difficult. Undeceived by the impressive unity of September 1923, Primo consolidated his support in the peninsular army, where juntero sentiments had survived the dissolution of the Juntas the year before. Merit promotions were not restored, the senior hierarchy was ignored, General Berenguer was convicted (and then quickly pardoned), the General Staff was abolished and the Staff Corps converted into a "service." Military bureaucrats filled lucrative civil posts. Most important of all, Primo decided to withdraw from the interior of Morocco.

At this point, the discontent of the africanistas exploded into near mutiny. After a disastrous retreat from Xauen in 1924, Primo was forced to reverse himself; he had underestimated the degree to which power within the officer corps had shifted across the Straits. After 1925, the dictator pursued a frankly proafricanista policy. The African army, especially the shock units, was retrained and expensively equipped, merit promotions were restored and the closed scale abolished. When the Artillery Corps rebelled, Primo dissolved it and, in an attempt to smooth over intercorps rivalries, revived the General Military Academy.

But factionalism was stronger than institutional solidarity by the late 1920s. Abortive coups were led by Generals Weyler and Aguilera, whose services Primo had disregarded, and by disaffected junior officers, especially in the Artillery Corps, where republicanism was a [278] coefficient of injured privilege. Denied the support of the army, Primo had no alternative but to resign. His successor, General Berenguer, seemed most likely to unify military opinion but had no better luck. When the Republic was proclaimed in April 1931, nearly all of the faction-ridden officer corps was willing to withhold judgment until the new regime should reveal its military policy. As in 1923, most officers had few political ideas beyond the equation of military interests with those of the nation.

Unlike Primo de Rivera, the new Republican government possessed extensive popular support. Furthermore, the new War Minister, Manuel Azaña, had retained his early interest in military reform. Using the democratic foundations of the new government to give him the leverage he needed, Azaña launched a vigorous attack on the institutional deficiencies that had defied earlier generations of military reformers. Initially, his program was as popular with officers as it was with civilians because of his expressed commitment to the complete professionalization of the Spanish army. Azaha promised to depoliticize military promotions and appointments and to provide the army with modern equipment and training with the funds released by his radical reduction of the active list. The Republican army of the future would be small, efficient, and democratic.

Azaña did not achieve his goal, largely, it seems to me, because his commitment to military professionalization was compromised by his desire to "republicanize" the armed forces, a goal that deprived the military of its institutional autonomy by politicizing the War Ministry. Advised by officers whose interests had suffered under the Dictatorship, the new War Minister systematically reversed nearly all of Primo de Rivera's legislation and a large number of his promotions on the grounds that they had been illegally made. Azaha refused to consider whether those policies and promotions had been professionally sound, so eager was he to expunge every trace of the previous regime. This shortsighted attitude meant that political, rather than professional, considerations were still the basis for decision making in the Ministry. As long as this was the case, the professional dissatisfaction that had nurtured factions of junteros, africanistas, and ministerial favorites in the past would persist into the future. Once the initial widespread support for the Republican regime had begun to erode, the way was clear for a recurrence of praetorianism.

Azaña thus repeated the mistakes of his predecessors under the parliamentary monarchy. Like them, he distrusted professionalization as a vehicle for securing the political neutrality of the army. Instead, he favored a system in which the loyalty of the army was secured through [279] a high degree of political commitment and identification with the nation as a whole. From his point of view, the political reliability of the army during the first critical months of the new regime was too important to be left to chance. Thus he ignored his own decrees establishing strict seniority in appointments and promotions and placed officers of known Republican sympathies in the most sensitive military posts. In some cases, this led to the elevation of officers whose past careers were less than illustrious; more aggravating to the officer corps, however, was that it isolated a number of the most prestigious and talented officers from the leadership cadres. Many of these officers, africanistas who had risen rapidly during the Moroccan wars of the 1920s, were basically apolitical, willing to serve loyally any government that would respect the professional autonomy of the army. Instead, Azaña provided them with a motive for intervention by stripping them of their merit promotions and enacting "reforms" detrimental to military efficiency, such as the closed scale. At the same time, these policies did not completely satisfy the bureaucratic faction in the officer corps, either. As always, juntero loyalty evaporated at the first sign of professional discontent, which, given the low level of professionalization, was inevitable. By 1933 restless junior officers had joined the Spanish Military Union (UME) in order to protest stagnation, working conditions, and favoritism. In mid-1936 General Francisco Franco warned the prime minister, Santiago Casares Quiroga, that Republican military policies had resuscitated the factionalism and lack of "internal satisfaction" that had nurtured the Juntas de Defensa in 1917. Franco spoke emphatically of the need for justice and equity with regard to promotions and appointments if "civil struggles" were to be averted. ⁽²⁾ The army, in other words, was once again prepared to intervene to protect its corporate interests. A month later, over half the officer corps joined the military rebellion against the government.

Some interesting parallels emerge from a comparison between the origins of the military rebellion of 1923 and that of 1936. In both cases, the opportunity for military intervention was provided by the weakness of civilian government in a country in which uneven economic and social development hindered the formation of a broad consensus on political issues. Out of this basic condition, a similar pattern in civil military relations emerged. With one political minority attempting to impose its will on other minorities, the temptation to use the army, or a part of it, as a political ally proved irresistible. This stimulated a policy of appeasement, which politicized institutional decisions and encouraged competing groups of officers to influence policymaking.  Once it became clear to officers that their professional concerns would [280] be subordinate to political considerations, a defensive military response to protect corporate interests became highly probable. Because the civil-military conflict took place within the context of a constitutional struggle, in each case the military reaction -- a pronunciamiento -- was cast in ideological terms. Portraying itself as a messianic or regenerative force, the army in fact emerged as the champion of an interpretation of Spanish history that, not surprisingly, included an extensive political role for the military. It remains to be seen whether the social and economic development of the last twenty years will enable Spaniards in the post-Franco era to eliminate praetorianism by constructing a political system based on popular consent and civil supremacy.

1. CM, Sept. 17, 1923, p. 2.

2. Luis de Galinsoga and Francisco Franco-Salgado, Centinela de occidente, pp. 203-6.