Iberia

Abstract

Abstract The creation of the Portuguese New State in the early 1930s and the Spanish Civil War of 1936– 9 have long dominated writing about the history of the two Iberian countries in the first half of the twentieth century. Uncovering the roots of the New State and the causes of the civil war have absorbed attention in much the same way as tracing the origins of Fascism in Italy and the Nazi movement in Germany. The Portuguese and Spanish Republics have been scrutinized for evidence of failure as closely as the Weimar Republic or the Italian constitutional monarchy. And the miserable teleology of democracy’s displacement by dictatorship is all too similar. In the Spanish case it is particularly poignant because of the terrible destruction of life and resources in the civil war that forged Franco’s dictatorship. By the time the European war began in September 1939, Spain was already devastated.