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Bunk, Brian D., 1968-; Pack, Sasha D.; Scott, Carl-Gustaf (ed.) / Nation and conflict in modern Spain: essays in honor of Stanley G. Payne
(2008)
Introduction, pp. xi-xviii
Page xiv
lasting "military-based regime" of the twentieth century.16 In his later work these compari- sons were elaborated. Franco himself was pictured as a kinder, gentler Tito.17 Both leaders had come to power through bloody civil wars, both adopted their personalized versions of "totalitarian" models, and both used massive repression to rule nations with powerful sepa- ratist movements. Anticipating The Spanish Revolution, Politics and the Military was critical of the left, especially of Manual Azafia, "a writer and intellectual of limited accomplishment" and an "ultra-liberal."18 At the same time, Payne admired Azafa's most incisive critic, the tough- minded conservative Catholic republican, Miguel Maura. Maura was "one of the few respon- sible, farsighted leaders produced by the Republic,"'9 a judgment seconded and reinforced in his latest work, The Collapse of the Republic.2° Following Adolphe Thiers' precedent of republican reconstruction after the Paris Commune, Maura's chief concern was to establish a "Republic of Order," similar to the French Third Republic. The Spanish Second Republic's failure to replicate the French model and its inability to maintain order in the 1930s, espe- cially in 1936, led to civil war. Similarly, the so-called Bienio Negro of 1934-35 was not a black period of rightist rule for Payne but rather the "dead center" of Spanish politics. During the Bienio, "it was the extreme left, not the extreme right that was ready for violent rebellion."21 Payne's third book, The Spanish Revolution, focused on that extreme left. As in his previous volumes, the author reaches back into Spanish history to find parallels. He sees the Catalan civil war of the 1460s as prefiguring the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Both were "touched off by a resort to arms by the upper classes in face of a strong latent revolutionary threat from the peasants and urban workers."'22 Global comparisons complemented the use of analogies in the Spanish past: Unlike in other Western European nations, "urbanization in Spain was not exactly a product of industrialization, but to a certain extent preceded it" in the nineteenth century.23 "On the basis of civic culture, literacy rates, and economic develop- ment, it might be hypothesized that by 1930 Spain was at the level of England in the 1840s and 1850s or France in the 1860s and 1870s. Neither mid-nineteenth-century England nor even France at the beginning of the Third Republic had to face such severe political tests as Spain underwent in the 1930s.''24 Rather as in the German states during 1840s, Spain in the 1930s had to confront simultaneously thorny issues of constitutionalism, national identity, and land reform. Furthermore, the Second Republic was burdened with decisions concerning religious, military, and social legislation. The Republic's desire to break with the past came back to haunt it. The Constituent Cortes of June 1931 unwisely exhibited a lack of continuity with its last predecessor, the parliament of 1923: "This is in sharp contrast to the rebuilding of representative government in more mature countries, such as France after 1944 or in Italy, Austria, and West Germany following long periods of dictatorship."25 The most relevant cross-national comparison in The Spanish Revolution was between Spain and Russia since contemporaries-particularly the Socialists, the major party of the xiv
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