[684] Spain presented an ambivalent spectacle in the spring of 1939. On the one hand there was rejoicing among the Nationalists who had won the war and held great expectations for the future. Franco and many other Nationalist leaders genuinely believed that the moment was at hand for a rebirth of Spain. Economic destruction had not been overwhelming, and government leaders hoped for a revitalization of the Spanish economy during the next five years. Beyond that, Franco expected to lead Spain to a position of renewed influence in foreign affairs, and adopted the vague Falangist rhetoric about "the return to empire." The structure of the regime remained eclectic, with most of the top positions given to military men, Catholic conservatives, and monarchists. Though fascism was the new political vogue in Europe, Franco shrewdly avoided committing his government to a completely fascist program and system. The Falange was the official state party and had a nominal membership of 900,000 in a country of 25,000,000, but its leaders held only a minority of important positions. The most important figure in the regime aside from Franco was his brother-in-law Serrano Súñer, minister of the interior and chief dispenser of patronage.

On the other hand were the defeated left, who still commanded the loyalty of a large minority of the population. At the close of the war a quarter million leftist militants were imprisoned and during the next [685] two years most of them were brought to trial. This thorough-going purge was directed at all those who had held positions of leadership, initiative, and responsibility of any kind. Punishment was meted out on the basis of investigation, not blanket proscription. Most sentences involved moderate prison terms, but many were extremely harsh. The regime has subsequently recognized the figure of 40,000 executions during the five years following the Civil War, and the true figure may be higher than that. A total of 528,000 people fled Spain during the final months of the conflict, and only a little more than 100,000 returned during the course of 1939. Several thousand Republican soldiers took to the hills rather than surrender. They formed guerrilla and bandit bands in several of the more desolate parts of the country, but presented only a minor security problem in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Economic difficulties proved more difficult than Nationalist leaders had hoped. If actual destruction was not overwhelming, the dislocation that resulted from the war was severe. Shortages of skilled labor and supplies made it completely impossible to regain prewar production levels, general economic indices in the first postwar years standing at only about 80 percent of earlier figures. Spain's economic distress was then compounded by the outbreak of general war in Europe.
 

Signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 and the resultant German-Russian invasion of Catholic Poland, leading to a general state of war in Europe, filled most Spanish leaders with apprehension. It confirmed the repugnance felt by Catholic conservatives toward Nazism, and though he had signed the German-inspired Anti-Comintern Pact at the close of the Civil War, Franco himself seems at first to have doubted the likelihood of a German victory. This attitude changed after the fall of France in June 1940. Franco, Serrano, and most of Spain's leaders became convinced of the inevitability of a German victory. The problem was then one of accommodating Spain most effectively to the Nazi new order. Spanish forces occupied the international district of Tangier (which they held until 1945), and Franco made known to Hitler his willingness to enter the war on the side of Germany in return for major economic and military assistance, as well as cession of much of French northwest Africa. In October 1940 Serrano Súñer, identified somewhat inaccurately with a strongly pro-Axis line, was made minister of foreign affairs. Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 drew an enthusiastic [686] response among Spanish Nationalists. Franco immediately announced preparations to dispatch a Spanish "Blue Division" to fight on the Russian front. Between 1941 and 1943, 40,000 Spanish volunteers served there. More than 6,000 were killed, twenty times the number of Germans who fell assisting the Nationalists in the Civil War.

From the start, however, Franco carefully measured his pro-German orientation. Each change in the international situation increased his wariness, and he knew enough about war and Spain's own weakness to prefer continued neutrality (technically "non-belligerency," after mid-1940). In his famous day-long interview with Hitler at Hendaye in October 1940, Franco held his own with great effectiveness and made it clear that Germany would have to meet Spain's price. Hitler did not think it worth that. Though his interest in a joint German-Spanish attack on Gibraltar momentarily increased in the winter of 1941, the west Mediterranean was not important enough to his plans to bribe or force the Spanish regime into war. Between 1940 and 1942 there was no doubt that Spain was more friendly to the Axis than to the antifascist allies, and Franco himself came to hope for some sort of Nazi victory, if for no other reason than that he did not believe his regime would be permitted to survive by a victorious anti-German coalition. Spain also provided intelligence facilities and submarine supply stations for the German forces, but all the while Franco was careful to underline Spanish independence and maintain correct relations with the allied powers. At one point he indicated to the Germans that should their forces violate Spanish territory in a movement against Gibraltar or other allied positions the Spanish army would resist.

Churchill and Roosevelt largely understood Franco's position. Neither Britain nor the United States wanted to complicate the military situation by adding Spain as an enemy. When the allied counteroffensive began in North Africa in November 1942, Franco was assured by Roosevelt that it was in no way directed against Spanish interests, which would be fully respected. Even before that point, however, Franco was working to dissociate himself further from Germany and Italy. After a minor intraregime political crisis, Serrano was ejected from the government and never again played a role in Franco's state. The treaty of friendship between Spain and Portugal that had been signed in 1939 was expanded into an Iberian Bloc agreement at the close of 1942, with the aim of protecting the interests and independence of the two peninsular states. By 1943, the Spanish regime had developed a three-war theory of the global conflict: in the war between Communists and anti-Communists in eastern Europe, Spain was declared to favor the German anti-Communists, where her own [687] troops had until recently been engaged; in the war between the Axis and Allies in western Europe, Spain was neutral; in the struggle between the western allies and Japan in the Far East, Spain favored the allies. Anti-Nazi refugees were given sanctuary in Spain and transit rights elsewhere, and the regime later extended Spanish citizenship to several thousand Sephardic Jews in the Balkans to try to save them from extermination.

Throughout the war, a delicate diplomatic contest was played between Spain and the two English-speaking allies over commercial relations and economic supplies -- particularly food and fuel -- for the beleaguered Spanish domestic economy. The years 1940 to 1945 were a time of extreme privation for most Spaniards, in some respects as bad or worse than the Civil War. In moments of allied weakness, economic shipments to Spain were increased to guarantee continued neutrality; once the allied star was in the ascendant, an increasingly tough line was adopted in economic relations.
 

When the war ended, hostility against the Spanish government was widespread among the victors. Franco for a while enjoyed the dubious distinction in international opinion of being the most hated head of state in Europe, a supposed fascist residue who regrettably had not been eliminated along with Hitler and Mussolini. The Soviet Union orchestrated an international campaign, which also had as lesser targets the supposedly pro-fascist governments of Argentina, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland. In March 1946 France closed its frontier with Spain, and at the end of that year a United Nations resolution condemned the Spanish regime. Ambassadors from all member states were withdrawn from Madrid.

Franco responded to the new situation with formal efforts to liberalize and regularize the regime. As early as 1942, Falangist writers had begun to emphasize that the Spanish system was not fascist or totalitarian in the central European sense. In 1943 a new Cortes, its members nominated by government agencies and elected through corporate and indirect suffrage by heads of families, assembled in Madrid. In 1945 offices in municipal government were made elective by heads of families and a new "Spaniards' Charter" (Fuero de los Espanoles) was proclaimed soon afterwards. It amounted to a Spanish bill of rights, enumerating civil liberties with the proviso that they might be suspended in case of emergency. The one thing that Franco might have done that would genuinely have mollified foreign antagonism, however--disbanding the Falange--he refused to do. The  [688] Falange provided the only organized political following fully committed to the regime, and Franco still found it indispensable.

International ostracism was intended to weaken the regime and make its overthrow by the left possible. It had the opposite effect, however, for the regime had managed to institutionalize itself to a certain degree, held all the levers of power, and by 1945 had as much popular support as the defeated leftist groups. The international campaign against it could be presented as the modern version of the Black Legend. The campaign was labeled a machination by the forces of anti-Spain and was used to rally support for the government. Since 1939 millions of Spaniards had reestablished themselves in life and were not eager for the disruption of a new political upheaval. In 1947 Franco received overwhelming nominal approval in a popular referendum for his Law of Succession. This established his full powers as head of state for as long as he chose, his successor to be selected preferably from the main line of the Spanish Bourbon dynasty, restoring the monarchy within the framework of the Franquist state. The decision rested with Franco, who retained authority to select an alternative candidate as prudence might dictate.

The hopes of the left for mounting pressure against the regime, leading to insurrection, were completely dashed. Several efforts by Communist and anarchist groups to organize guerrilla incursions from France in 1944-1945 came to naught, because they were routed through conservative Pyrenean peasant territory and received little or no support. Urban bank robberies and rural terrorism and banditry continued at a diminishing rate until about 1952. According to the Civil Guard, 2,166 bandoleros were killed between 1943 and 1952 and approximately 3,400 captured.

The period of ostracism was brought to a close by the manifest stability of the regime and even more by the intensification of the Cold War between the Communist world and the West. The French border was reopened in 1948, and foreign ambassadors returned to Madrid. The west European left remained intensely hostile, but military and strategic leadership in the United States became increasingly interested in making use of Spain in the western defense system. There was no doubt about the anti-Communism of Franco, who was, as conservative American politicians said with some slight inaccuracy, "the only commander-in-chief who ever completely defeated a Communist army." Franco received the first American military emissaries in 1949, and negotiations began in 1951. There could be no [689] question of bringing Spain into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization because of the opposition of the west European left. The result was a bilateral Spanish-American Pact in 1953 establishing a ten-year agreement for the construction and use of three American air bases and one naval base in Spain. It provided for American military and economic assistance and was renewed at reduced terms for snorter periods in 1964 and 1970.

The agreement with the United States has never been especially popular in Spain. Traditional and contemporary American attitudes are still resented by diverse elements of society. There has been considerable feeling that the United States was using Spain, involving it in a potential nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union without making it a full partner or ally. Spain was excluded from the Marshall Plan, and the economic assistance under the bases agreement has amounted to but a fraction of the aid given to much wealthier countries such as Britain and France.

Nevertheless the relationship with the United States did provide needed economic support, and even more, bolstered the prestige and security of the regime. It gave Franco a degree of respectability among the western powers for the first time and helped to stabilize Spain's position in the postwar world.
 

During the 1940s Spanish economic policy aimed at self-sufficiency, both because of the regime's quasi-Falangist ideology of independent self-development and because of the virtual impossibility of broadening foreign trade and gaining outside assistance under conditions of world war and international ostracism. Most of the economy was organized under a structure of national syndicates, with separate organizations for workers and employers. The state labor system, in a loose sense similar to that of Fascist Italy, precluded any form of independent union activity, and was developed by Falangist leaders as their main institutional function within the pluralistic regime. A rigid series of controls were established over virtually the entire economy, setting prices, wages, allocation of supplies, and import quotas.

A full ten years were required to recover from the effects of the Civil War, production indices finally regaining prewar levels in 1949-1950. During the 1950s industrial output expanded at a satisfactory rate, and after the miseries of the 1940s there was a sense of modest prosperity, at least in the cities. The percentage of national income devoted to wages compared favorably with that of other countries,taking into account Spain's level of economic development, as table 42 illustrates.

The Spanish economy depended heavily on imports of supplies and machinery to maintain its expansion (and even its equilibrium). Since export in the economy remained weak--limited to foods and raw materials--a steadily unfavorable trade balance persisted in the postwar period. This was aggravated by the high costs of unrationalized Spanish production artificially protected by a massive tariff. Even worse were the effects of runaway inflation, which began to reach ruinous proportions by the mid-1950s. Inflation was caused by several factors. Among them were deficit state financing, especially to fund the state industrial complex called the National Institute of Industry (INI), which accounted for 15 percent of all Spanish investment. Also important were the demagogic across-the-board wage increases for labor engineered by the Falangist minister of labor, José Antonio Girón (in office, 1946-1957). These did have some small effect in increasing labor's share of real income, but the great bulk of the increase was simply passed along in higher prices.

By 1957 the Spanish state was nearly bankrupt and the economy in jeopardy. Semi-autarchy and statist syndicalization were not working, and Franco, though relatively unsophisticated in economics, realized the need for change. To lead the reorientation, he selected economists and administrators who were members of the new Catholic secular institute, Opus Dei, ⁽¹⁾ several of them occupying the key financial, commercial, and economic posts in the new cabinet. In subsequent years these men, led by Laureano López Rodó, became known as the "Opus Dei technocrats." This is somewhat misleading, since their norms were not those of technocracy but of a form of state-coordinated, neoliberal market economy. This involved drastic reduction of government economic controls, coupled with the Stabilization Plan of 1959 to halt runaway inflation. The latter was an unqualified success and led to greatly increased economic expansion. The new program emphasized Europeanization of the economy, with greater international cooperation and major new opportunities for foreign (especially American) investment in Spain, hitherto greatly restricted. To stimulate and coordinate economic growth, the new economic leadership prepared a system of integrated public-private planning, based on that of France under the Fourth and Fifth Republics. The Spanish plans of the 1960s (1963-1967, 1968-1972) were considerably less precise than their French counterparts because of the inferior statistical data and instruments with which the Spanish worked, but in general terms they were equally successful.
 

Agriculture was still the Achilles heel despite a growth spurt in the first three years of the decade. During the remainder of the 1960s it stagnated. Hydroelectric facilities were being developed at an accelerated pace, with a major program of dam construction, but Spanish agriculture remained technologically backward. Between 1940 and 1964 the number of tractors in Spain increased from 5,300 to 130,000, but this was actually only a medium rate for a developing country. Even so, the decline in the relative demand for farm labor, together with increased mobility, produced a massive flow of emigration to jobs in the more industrialized European countries.

This notwithstanding, the decade of the 1960s opened a relatively prosperous era of mass consumption and greatly increased living standards for most Spaniards. By 1970, the per capita income of the thirty-three million inhabitants of Spain was between $700 and $800, well above the level of $600 used by economists to distinguish between residents of developed and underdeveloped countries. Spain had an almost evenly triangulated occupational structure, the work force divided in approximate thirds between industry, agriculture, and service employment.

The Franco regime was pluralistic from its inception, but a sharp distinction was drawn between pluralism within an authoritarian system and the competition or opposition of groups outside the regime. All opposition was proscribed politically at the start of the Nationalist movement and a rigid repression was maintained for approximately the first decade after the Civil War.

A Republican government-in-exile was established, first in Mexico City and subsequently in Paris. During the 1940s, underground opposition movements were maintained by the CNT, Communist party, Socialists, and regionalist groups. These were also associated in varying degrees with the guerrillero and bandit groups of the period. Their high point came at the close of the Second World War, which was widely expected to portend the overthrow of the regime. These hopes were dashed, and the morale of opposition groups had sagged by the close of the decade.

During the 1950s the regime became more permissive with private as distinguished from public dissidence. Wholesale amnesties in the late 1940s and the 1950s emptied the prisons of the majority of remaining Civil War political prisoners. Small opposition circles might meet fairly freely among themselves so long as they did not engage in open or direct activity against the regime. Such opposition groups increased in number but also in impotence, because of their proliferating fractionalization. Meanwhile, the several hundred thou- [695] sand political exiles increasingly lost touch with the realities of life in Spain.

Juan Linz has divided opposition and potential opposition into three categories: legal, a-legal, and illegal. The legal opposition is composed mainly of small dissident groups of Carlists and Falangists, dissatisfied with the course of the regime and its failure to adopt their own ideology. They are of little political importance and are tolerated by the regime as long as they do not become too vociferous.

The a-legal opposition is composed of nominally respectable elements who were in one way or another associated with the Nationalists in the Civil War but are more liberal in orientation than the regime. They are mainly Christian Democratic successors of the prewar CEDA, and several groups of monarchists. Though more restricted by the regime than the legal opposition, they as a rule have been rapped on the knuckles rather than vigorously repressed.

The illegal opposition is composed of successors of the defeated leftist and regionalist groups. Though police pressure against them eased in the 1950s, they are still subject to arrest, beatings, and long prison sentences. The leftist groups continue to be divided not only among themselves but even within each group. Regionalist groups are split between moderates and revolutionaries, and the Communists are divided between Muscovite, Maoist, and Castroite groups. Disorders of the late 1960s were primarily the work of university students and, more spectacularly, of the Basque separatist-Marxist group, ETA (Basque Land and Liberty). In general, the opposition has remained fractionalized and impotent.

At the close of the Civil War, Franco expected to preside over a rebirth of Spanish greatness and influence. The obstacles in his path were more difficult than he supposed, but his regime achieved order and stability and ultimately helped to make major social and economic development possible. During the first half of the regime's history his major accomplishment was to preserve Spain's neutrality and independence in the Second World War. His diplomacy proved skillful in the extreme. Though he had begun by proclaiming the revival of empire, he moved gracefully into decolonization in Spanish Morocco, ceding the independence of the Protectorate (and its incorporation into the new Moroccan state) immediately after the French evacuated their zone in 1956. The coastal enclave of Ifni was yielded in 1969 and Spanish Guinea was granted independence in 1968.

[696] Franco firmly believed that he received an historic mandate to govern Spain for his lifetime, but when he reached the age of seventy-five in 1967 he was fully aware that that life would not likely be extended much longer. Hence several changes were made to institutionalize the regime and prepare for the post-Franco succession. In a referendum of 1967, the nominal Spanish electorate approved an "Organic Law" that slightly reorganized representation in the Cortes, opening 108 of the 565 seats to direct election by heads of families and married women. Secondly, the National Council of the Movement (as the Falange had been known since 1945) was converted into a kind of consultative senate of the Spanish legislature, half its members to be chosen indirectly by local Movement groups.

Franco had first appointed a vice-president of government in 1961, and eight years later, in 1969, he took the much more momentous step of naming a successor: Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón, grandson of Alfonso XIII. This designation, to take effect only upon Franco's death, bypassed the direct heir to the throne, the prince's father, Don Juan, who had been at odds with Franco since the aftermath of the Civil War and was deemed too liberal. Prince Juan Carlos, born in 1938, had been educated in Spain since 1954 and pledged his acceptance of the fundamental laws and structure of the Spanish regime. Thus Franco attempted to guarantee the "installation" (instauración) of a corporative-authoritarian monarchy as the continuation of his regime and avoid the "restoration" of a liberal constitutional monarchy by D. Juan on the model of the old Alfonsine system, which would have repudiated the structure and ideology of the dictatorship.

At the end of 1971 Franco entered his eightieth year and was about to become the oldest ruling dictator in modern history. His rule was less vigorous than twenty years earlier, but his regime was still not seriously challenged from within. Strikes had been granted de facto legality since 1964, and all remaining Civil War political prisoners had been granted amnesty in 1966. Prior (but not eventual) censorship of all publications was lifted in 1966, and in 1969-1970 the government budgeted more for education than for military expenses for the first time in Spanish history. The church, whose relations with the regime had finally been regularized in a formal concordat of 1951, had tended to dissociate itself more and more from the government throughout the 1960s, hoping to avoid entanglement in the problem of the political transition.

The mainstay of the regime, as always, was the army. The size of both the army and police forces had been reduced in the 1950s and 1960s, and by 1970 were considerably smaller than under the Republic. Yet Franco had always maintained a special relationship with the [697] senior commanders of the army, and they remained firmly committed to the security and continuity of the regime.

Thirty years after the Civil War Spain had become a more modern country and less at odds with itself. Spanish society was highly depoliticised, though urban workers were restive and the number of strikes had shot upwards since the early 1960s. Workers wanted genuine syndical representation and improved economic conditions. The intelligentsia was as usual discontented with the political and cultural situation, but was the only group in society pressing for actual political change. Continued economic development remained largely at the mercy of favorable international conditions, and the problem of political freedom and representation had not been solved. The viability of a corporative-authoritarian structure in the 1970s after the passing of Franco thus remained an open question, but memories of the Civil War left most Spaniards with no desire to return to the bitter strife of the 1930s.

[711] There is as yet no complete history of Spain in the Franco era. The best one-volume treatments will be found in George Hills, Spain (New York, 1970); [712] Jacques Georgel, Le Franquisme (Paris, 1970); and Carlos Seco Serrano, Epoca contemporánea (Barcelona, 1968), vol. 6 of Historia de España. Considerable data is also given in Max Gallo, Histoire de l'Espagne franquiste, 2 vols. (Verviers, 1969). My Franco's Spain (New York, 1967) provides a short summary to 1966. Franco's wartime diplomacy is treated at some length in Crozier's biography of Franco, but see also C. B. Burdick, Germany's Military Strategy and Spain in World War II (Syracuse, 1968). The second half of Trythall's biography of Franco gives a lucid exposition of the regime's politics. An informative account of the late 1950s and early 1960s will be found in Benjamin Welles's Spain: The Gentle Anarchy (New York, 1965). The Equipo Mundo's Los noventa ministros de Franco (Barcelona, 1970) offers interesting data on the governmental elite, and R. Fernández-Carvajal, La Constitución española (Madrid, 1969), expounds the formal legal structure of the state.

Charles W. Anderson, The Political Economy of Modern Spain (Madison, 1970), analyzes economic policy and development in the late 1950s and 1960s. A general description of the economy has been written by Ramón Tamames, Introducción a la economía española (Madrid, 1967). Xavier Flores, Estructura socioeconómica de la agricultura española (Barcelona, 1969), is perhaps the best treatment of the agrarian system. Juan Muñoz, El poder de la banca en España (Madrid, 1969), is an extensive critique of the financial system, while C. Iglesias Selgas, Los sindicatos en España (Madrid, 1966), describes the formal structure though not the functioning reality of the syndical system.

Study of contemporary Spanish society should begin with the Fundación FOESSA's Informe sociológico sobre la situación social de España 1970 (Madrid, 1970). Insights into the structure of religiosity may be obtained from J. M. Vázquez, Realidades socio-religiosas de España (Madrid, 1967).
 

1. Opus Dei, founded in 1928, became the first secular institute in the Catholic Church. Nearly all its members are laymen who have taken special religious vows, and their goal is the restoration of Catholic values and influence in contemporary society. In Spain they became particularly influential in education and economic affairs during the 1950s and 1960s. They are not, however, a monolithic group and do not function as a political unit.