Fascism and Right Authoritarianism in the Iberian World - The Last Twenty Years

Abstract

To many observers during the late 1930s, the expansion of the Axis powers was closely connected to the development of the Spanish Civil War. Yet despite the passionate interest of so many writers and intellectuals in the Spanish conflict, scholarly inquiry was delayed by two full decades and, when it finally emerged, coincided chronologically with the development of the 'fascism debate' during the 1960s. By that point, there was mounting attention +o the Spanish variant of fascism, and also to the evolution of the Franco regime, the last major dinosaur of the fascist era to survive. Thus the bibliography on Spanish fascism, virtually non-existent in 1960, had become comparatively extensive by the time of Franco's death in 1975, while the Spanish regime had become proportionately the most broadly studied authoritarian system in the world after that of the Soviet Union. The years immediately following its demise in 1975 produced an outpouring of books on contemporary history in Spain. Though many of these dealt with the recent history of the left and of the opposition to the Franco regime works that in most cases could not have been published earlier considerable new literature also appeared on the dictatorship and its various components. Yet all this was highly uneven in both quality and coverage, and was often rather personal, politicized and/or journalistic. Serious scholarly publication has proven somewhat spasmodic, and within Spain has been mostly monographic or specialized, heavily concentrated in certain areas such as Church-State relations while passing over some dimensions altogether. Comparative analysis, moreover, is poorly developed in both Spanish and Portuguese historical study, which concentrates almost exclusively on domestic issues. Broadrange interpretative studies are also uncommon, though the younger generation of scholars shows somewhat greater interest in this than their predecessors.