Making Spaniards." Primo de Rivera and the Nationalization of the Masses, 1923-30.

Shubert, Adrian

Making Spaniards." Primo de Rivera and the Nationalization of the Masses, 1923-30, by Alejandro Quiroga. Basingstoke, United Kingdom, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, xi, 234 pp. 69.95 US (cloth).

The title of Alejandro Quiroga's short but suggestive study calls to mind two recent classics of modern European historiography: Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, 1976) and George Mosse's The Nationalization of the Masses (New York, 1975). Yet, it differs from those books in important ways. First, it appears thirty years afterwards, a reflection of both the damage done to Spanish historiography by the Franco regime and the subsequent highly self-enclosed nature of history writing in Spain. Second, while Mosse and Weber explored the creation of citizens over a century or more, Quiroga limits himself to a much briefer period: the seven-year-long dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Third, unlike the peasants who became Frenchmen under the Third Republic and the German masses who were nationalized by the Second and Third Reichs, few Spaniards were "made" by the Primo de Rivera regime.

The tale Quiroga tells about making Spaniards is one of failure. Chapter after chapter, on the army, the education system, the Somaten militia, and the official Union Patriotica party, ends with the refrain that the outcomes of the initiatives undertaken by the regime were "unclear," "patchy," failures, or even "negative," and "counterproductive" (pp. 91, 107, 108, 127, 144). Overall, he concludes that "the results of this process of state nationalization were patchy ... the regime failed to turn the National Catholic conception of Spain into the hegemonic one, let alone create any sort of consensus among Spaniards about the nation and the Dictatorship" (p. 184). Of course, seven years is too brief a time for such a complex cultural process to take root, but Quiroga emphasizes the ways in which the new state agencies functioned: the inadequacy of their resources, the way they antagonized people in the public sector such as teachers, the abuses and corruption they generated, and the way in which they alienated key supporters, especially Social Catholics.

If this were all the book did, it would be interesting, but inconsequential. However, Making Spaniards does have an important point to make, one hidden by its misleading title. Primo's dictatorship was not simply a curious interlude between the increasingly dysfunctional liberal monarchy and the Second Republic. It failed to make many Spaniards, but its ambition gave birth to a concept of Spain and Spanishness that would have a much greater impact than the regime itself, and this is the real story Quiroga has to tell.

Primo de Rivera oversaw the blending of elements from various strands of Spanish political thought--liberal and theocratic nationalism, regenerationism, military nationalism, Maurism, social Catholicism, and new versions of Carlism--into something new: National Catholicism. This was "a significantly fascistized Spanish variant of the radical right which went beyond the postulates of both liberal conservatism and reactionary traditionalism, and bid for an authoritarian and centralized state" (p. 72). Primo also drew on the example of Mussolini, but did not simply copy it. Indeed, in some ways, both ideologically and practically, Primo's creation was the inverse of Mussolini's. While Fascist nationalism was secular in theory, but relied on Church support in practice, Primo's concoction started with a Catholic conception of the nation, but his insistence on the primacy of the state ended up alienating the Church.

In National Catholicism, Primo de Rivera created a "rich and complex ideological legacy" which was inherited by Francisco Franco, and Franco used it, especially after the defeat of the Axis in 1945 made maintaining his fascist trappings impolitic (p. 187). Quiroga is correct to conclude that "in many respects Francoist National Catholicism was ideologically born during the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera" (p. 188).

Franco's version was certainly longer lived than Primo's, but one can argue that when it came to "making Spaniards" it was not much more successful. This is a comparison Quiroga does not attempt, which is a shame. He points to the emergence of new political options, such as Republicanism and Basque and Catalan nationalism, in 1930 and 1931, immediately after the collapse of the Primo regime as evidence of the failure of its nationalization agenda. Precisely the same point can be made about the immediate aftermath of the Franco regime in 1975 and 1976, coincidentally the years in which Mosse's and Weber's books were published.

Adrian Shubert

York University