Anxiety over Spain's political instability began long before the Civil War. Already in the nineteenth century, the nation's political turmoil suggested to thoughtful Spaniards that their country was somehow unsuited to a modern parliamentary system, while its failure to match the industrial revolution of other Western European countries made them question its capacity for economic progress. Why the inability of Spain to adopt modem civilization? Explanations were legion.

The troubles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries arose ostensibly from a continuous conflict over the form of the political constitution and the relations between church and state. Spain became divided between liberal anticlericals and conservative Catholics. For Spaniards of either camp, the simplest explanation for the dissension was to blame it on their opponents. By the end of the nineteenth century many conservative patriots and devout Catholics found the cause of Spain's troubles in the secret plotting of freemasons, who they believed had been working since the Enlightenment to instill anti-Christian and anti-Spanish doctrines among the people and the rulers. On the other side liberal Spaniards blamed the machinations of reactionaries, in particular the Jesuits and other militant clergymen. Both sides, that is, were satisfied with a simplistic plot theory of history.

More profound thinkers sought less artificial explanations. Among these Miguel de Unamuno, then a young professor of classics at the University of Salamanca, set the stage for later theories in a series of articles he published in 1895 entitled En torno al casticismo (On the Essence of Spain). In his childhood in Bilbao, Unamuno had lived through the violence that accompanied the Revolution of 1868 and the [29] First Republic of 1873. During his adolescence he was dismayed, as many Spaniards were, by the ineffectual parliamentary monarchy that was reestablished in 1875. In 1895 Cuban patriots rebelled against Spanish sovereignty, initiating a dismal struggle that ended with the United States intervention in 1898 and the loss of the few colonies that still remained of Spain's once glorious empire. Moreover, Catalan and Basque regional movements were threatening the unity of the homeland itself. Spain indeed appeared constitutionally unsuited for the modern world.

Unamuno struggled with the problem. He denounced the facile explanation of the conservative chauvinists:
 

Every day Spain hears the bitter complaint that a foreign culture is invading it and submerging the pure Spanish element [lo castizo]. Little by little, the malcontents say, this European invasion is undermining our national character. Like a river that never runs dry, its level is rising and at present is in flood stage, to the consternation of the millers, whose dams are overflowed and whose flour has most likely been rotted.⁽¹⁾

According to Unamuno, the trouble with the lamentations of Spain's traditionalist millers was that their traditions were no more essentially Spanish than were the European ideals of their liberal opponents. The medieval institutions they glorified were as much the product of historical accident as the modern constitutions they decried.

The true tradition of Spain, Unamuno maintained, was in the lives of the mass of people, who went on plowing and reaping at the end of the nineteenth century as they had before, back to Roman times. This "intimate character of the people" or "intrahistory," as he called it, was expressed in their language. Spaniards spoke various tongues, but Unamuno recognized Castilian as the national language because Castile had unified Spain. Although born among the green Basque hills facing north to the sea, he had come to love the harsh landscape of Castile which surrounded him at Salamanca. Spain's national character he found revealed in Castilian literature, especially that of the masters of the Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Santa Teresa, San Juan de la Cruz, Cervantes, and Calderón. Their works revealed Spaniards to be both mystical and practical by nature, and democratic in their instincts. What was wrong with the country in his day, Unamuno felt, was that its leaders, both conservatives seeking models in Spain's past and liberals copying foreign countries, had lost sight of its intrahistory, with disastrous results. Spain needed another rising of the common people, the pueblo, as it had risen against [30] Napoleon in 1808, to eliminate its effete ruling class of both political persuasions.

Unamuno's call for the discovery of the true Spanish character fell on eager ears, especially after Spain's defeat by the United States in 1898 revealed how incompetent its leaders were. Intellectuals searched their history for their national character, hoping they would learn how to reconcile it to the demands of the contemporary world. One of these was the young philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. Ortega had studied in Germany, where he experienced the ideological current stemming from Nietzsche which held that every society needed authoritative leaders. According to Ortega, European societies were divided between the lower classes, whose ancestors had been present under the Roman Empire, and a directing elite, descended from the Germanic tribes who overthrew that empire. Unfortunately for Spain, he believed, the barbarian migrations had brought to this corner of Europe the weakest, most corrupt, most Romanized of all the Germanic peoples, the Visigoths. Unlike the Franks in France, they did not establish a proper feudal system and inculcate the relationship of lord to vassal. Therefore Spaniards never developed the art of commanding, and their descendants could not provide Spain with a true elite. Spain had no backbone and was able only in spurts to engage in great endeavors, like the conquest of America. España invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain), Ortega entitled his book (1921).

Since the Middle Ages, and especially since the sixteenth century, Ortega argued, Spain's history had been one of decadence. Its empire had gradually broken away, and now even the periphery of the peninsula seemed destined to fly from the Castilian core. This was logical in Ortega's eyes, for without a common goal every country would disintegrate, and Spain's lack of leaders meant no one was pointing out its proper goal. Particularism had taken over, not only the political particularism of geographic regions like Catalonia and the Basque Provinces, but the selfish particularism of social groups: the army, industry, the church, the crown itself. No one was interested in the common good, everyone only in his private aims, which he sought to achieve by direct action. Deprived of leaders, the masses took over authority which in a properly constituted society would belong to their superiors.
 

In Spain the "people" have done everything, and what the "people" have not done has been left undone. But a nation cannot be only "people"; it needs an eminent minority, just as a live body is not only muscle but also nervous system and cerebral center.⁽²⁾

[31] Thus Ortega's explanation of Spain's misfortunes was opposed to Unamuno's. For Ortega the lack of an elite was the cause; for Unamuno the cause had been the stifling of the common people.

Unamuno and Ortega spoke as philosophers, familiar with the past of their country and concerned with its future. They were not primarily historians. Since the Civil War two younger members of their generation have written major historical works aimed at discovering the origin and nature of Spain's modern character. The first was Americo Castro, a student of literature before turning to history, who published España en su historia in 1948 (an English version appeared in 1954: The Structure of Spanish History). Castro, following the pattern of existentialist theory, believes that the history of every nation is determined by the unconscious inbred thought processes of its people, what he calls its "functional structure." This can best be discovered through a close study of its national literature. "It is ... desirable, when we wish to write the history of the existence of a people to listen to the people as they feel themselves existing."⁽³⁾ One is reminded of Unamuno.

Castro concludes after a lengthy study of the literature written in Spain that the functional structure of Spaniards was the product of the nine-hundred-year-long interaction of the three peoples who inhabited the peninsula in the Middle Ages: Christians, Jews, and Moslems. Three characteristics stand out in the Hispanic consciousness, according to Castro: an ever-present feeling of insecurity; a passionate religiosity; and a characteristic that he calls "integralism," which consists of an inability to isolate oneself from the world in which one lives in order to observe it objectively, that is, rationally and scientifically. The calculating rational spirit behind modern Western culture is so alien to Spaniards that they cannot adopt modem political forms, economic drives, or scientific methodology except in a forced and superficial way. What he finds wrong with contemporary Spain is that it has tried to mold itself to foreign rational ideas and institutions. Castro feels Spaniards should parade their own qualities with pride, not shame. They alone of modem Europeans have a culture that holds that "the only calling worthy of a man is to be a man, and nothing more."⁽⁴⁾ Castro left Spain after Franco's victory and long refused to set foot in the country. Nevertheless he provided strong intellectual support for the traditionalist position that accused the liberals and revolutionaries of trying to impose foreign political systems on Spain. His conclusion that Spain's character is incompatible with modern forms of life seems to exclude his country forever from contemporary Western life.

[32] Another outstanding medievalist who accepted exile after 1939, Claudio Sanchez Albornoz, denounced Castro's fatalism. In his España, un enigma histórico (1956) he affirms the existence of a Spanish national character, much as Castro does, but he finds it in existence long before Castro does. For him it goes back far beyond the Christians' interaction with Jews and Moslems during the Reconquest. The Spanish character was already distinguishable when the first Romans arrived. It had been formed by Spain's ecology, the barren land and harsh climate of Castile. Later history slowly modified it; the Romans tempered it, the Visigoths sharpened it, the Jews made it intolerant.

Sanchez Albornoz does not find Spain's character fundamentally alien to the modern world. Three historical accidents account for Spain's failure to follow Western evolution: the Arab invasion and conquest of the peninsula, Colombus' discovery of America, and the accession of Charles V in 1517. The first was responsible for the birth of Spanish particularism because it destroyed the unity of Spain that Romans and Visigoths had labored for nine centuries to achieve. The other two events prolonged the sense of honor and scorn of manual work that was typical of the Middle Ages, America by filling Spanish minds with the dream of easy wealth and Charles V by destroying the budding industry of Castile through taxes to pay for his European wars. After Charles, Philip II's crusade against the Protestants forged chains which Spanish thought was subsequently unable to break. Sanchez Albornoz, although a devout Catholic, traces the rise of contemporary civilization to the appearance of the bourgeois ethic and Cartesian rationalism. Because Charles V stunted the middle class and Philip II used the Inquisition to kill the spirit of inquiry, Spain did not develop the worldly outlook of modern times.

According to Sanchez Albornoz, an intellectual minority has admired European ideas since the eighteenth century, but they have been unable to spread them to society at large. The result has been civil conflict. In sum, Sanchez Albornoz sees much the same reasons for Spain's troubles as Castro does, but he finds the origin of the Spanish character earlier. And he is more optimistic. He foresees Europe eventually reunited in a universitas Christiana, and then Spain will take its place in the new order as an active and dynamic partner.

Despite the diversity of these four interpretations, they have much in common. All of them seek the explanation for Spain's modern difficulties in its national character. Spaniards, they maintain, are different from the rest of Western Europeans. There is a homo hispanus, as Sanchez Albornoz says, who is proud, antirational, mystical, violent, and individualistic, and therefore unsuited to modern science and modern political and economic forms. Their explanations are not materialistic (although Sanchez Albornoz finds the major cause of the Spanish character in the austerity of the geography), or based on class conflict [33] (although Unamuno desires a popular rising and Ortega laments the lack of a virile elite). They derive in part from German thinkers like Nietzsche and Wilhelm Dilthey, who were in revolt against French rationalism, but they seem strangely out of touch with modern historical thought. They all agree that the Spanish character was formed before the seventeenth century, and they all find its most characteristic expression in the people of Castile. For them Castile is Spain and Spain is what it is today because of factors present before the Enlightenment and the rise of modern industrial societies and parlimentary governments. In the end they all belong to the same intellectual generation, the "Generation of '98." Spain's apparent incompetence in the world of their day, which the defeat at the hands of the United States and the later collapse of the Second Republic highlighted, filled them with anguish. But the belief that Spaniards have a unique character that accounts for their troubles is not limited to one generation or even to Spanish writers. It has become a commonplace in analyses of modern Spain.

Since the end of the Civil War, the best Spanish historians have turned from the Kulturgeschichte of Germany to the French posi-tivistic school of history founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. Febvre and Bloch called for the study of the factors affecting the lives of a people, geographical surroundings, economic conditions, social structure, and popular psychology. The center of Spanish historical activity moved from the University of Madrid, where the dead hand of political orthodoxy was stifling imagination, to that of Barcelona. The man primarily responsible for this development was Jaime Vicens Vives. Already an accomplished historian before the Civil War, he was forced to teach in obscure schools after the war because of his presumed support for the Republic. In 1948 he won the chair of modern history at the University of Barcelona. A man of tremendous energy, in the following year he founded a Center of International Historical Studies, through which he undertook to spread the lessons of Febvre and Bloch. Around him he formed a group of historians devoted to revising Spanish history, free from the concept of an unchanging national character and the prejudice that limited the history of Spain to that of Castile. At the end of his life--he died prematurely in 1960--Vicens Vives had turned to the history of Spain since the eighteenth century, writing almost single-handed the section on this period in the five-volume Historiasocial y económica de España y America (1957-59), which he edited.

For Vicens, the problems of Spain were to be studied in the distribution of property, in poverty and hunger, and in the relations between lord and vassal, bureaucrat and subject, priest and believer, employer and employee, capital city and province, Castilians and Catalans. These are factors, he says, "which are not so different from those [34] experienced by neighboring Mediterranean countries, and for this reason it is doubtful that Spain is an historical enigma, as Sanchez Albornoz believes, or a constant soul-searching, as his opponent [Castro] affirms."⁽⁵⁾ Vicens Vives has inspired a reconsideration of Spanish history. As he says, Spain is part of Europe and shares its evolution. We must try to place Spain within the broad patterns of modern history: the industrial and technological revolutions of the last two centuries and the appearance of popular sovereignty. But European developments react in Spain in ways determined by local realities, both geographic, that is physical, and human, that is historical. We cannot ignore the question of Spain's setting and heritage posed by Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Castro, and Sanchez Albornoz. Such a study will show, I believe, that the instability of modern Spain has been the product of contemporary factors, not of an inherited national character.

1. Miguel de Unamuno, En torno al casticismo ("Colección austral," Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1943), p. 15.

2. Jose Ortega y Gasset, España invertebrada (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1948), p. 126.

3. Americo Castro, The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 46.

4. Ibid., p. 630.

5. Jaime Vicens Vives, Aproximación a la historia de España (2nd ed., Barcelona: Editorial Teide, 1960), pp. 24-25. There is an excellent English edition: Approaches to the History of Spain, trans. and ed. Joan Connelly Ullman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).