Prelude to War: Lessons from the Second Spanish Republic

“The Second Spanish Republic has many parallels with modern American politics. Much like its counterparts in Spain, the American left of today is no less preoccupied with terraforming the cultural landscape.”

In his 1930 work History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote that “[t]he attacking side is almost always interested in seeming on the defensive. A revolutionary party is interested in legal coverings.” To seize power, radicals often advance under the guise of seeking rather modest objectives, chief of which is to defend “democracy.” In doing so, they wield the democratic state—its elections, courts, and constitutional rights—to bludgeon their opponents, even though the end goal is to do away with pluralism itself.

Nowhere was Trotsky’s paradigm more evident than in the short-lived Second Spanish Republic of 1931-39. Spain entered the 20th century a shadow of its former self. Having lost Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines to the United States in 1898, Spain ceased to be a major colonial power, marking the end of a long decline that had begun when Spanish colonies in the Americas declared their independence after Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula. As a neutral nation in the First World War, Spain avoided much of the ensuing unrest that toppled empires and unleashed large-scale partisan violence elsewhere in Europe. Spanish society was nevertheless rife with ideological and economic tensions, made worse in the 1920s by Madrid’s protracted war against Berber tribes in the Rif region of northern Morocco.

Although a few liberal reforms, such as universal suffrage for men, managed to take hold in the 19th century, Spain remained largely rural and Catholic. The industrial revolution failed to penetrate Spain to the same extent as it did much of Western Europe. By 1930, agricultural workers, most of whom were impoverished peasants toiling under a handful of wealthy landowners, still accounted for nearly half of the population. The literacy rate stood at a mere 71%. In comparison, literacy in Great Britain was around 80% in 1860. While the countryside stagnated, urban areas saw the rise of militant labor movements that frequently employed violent strikes and assassinations.