When Was the War in Spain? Liberal State, Illiberal Justice in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The article analyzes increasingly militarized state power and public order in twentieth-century Spain, discussing these in the context of other European states’ disciplinary regimes, with their ubiquitous social-Darwinist dimension in an era of accelerating urbanization, industrial change and emergent mass societies. The article offers a dissection of the often problematically opaque term ‘liberal’, arguing that wherever Spain or other twentieth-century European states were positioned on the dictatorial-through-parliamentary-constitutional spectrum, they all came to be ‘gardening states’ (Bauman). Each state's goal was to sculpt its population as part of a nationalist project – nationalism being the norm, whether named as such or not. Francoism is analysed in this framework, as a hybrid war-born political order blending old-style, top-down military control with new forms of populist mass mobilization from below, the latter enabled and accelerated by the war of 1936–1939. The article defines the Franco dictatorship as fascist in the 1940s and totalitarian for far longer, until macro-economic changes – which its cupola believed for a long time need not affect the deep form of Spanish society – hollowed out Francoism's own ideological categories (and its ‘disciplinary’ efficacy), but not its obsession with social control, which it called ‘social peace’.