Protestantism as a transnational ideology

The Spanish Federal Council of the European Movement (SFCEM), founded as a Spanish organization to favour the integration of Spain in Europe, was composed of representatives of various political organizations of the Republican government in exile. Correspondence between the President, Salvador de Madariaga, and the members of the Basque and Catalonian delegations discloses one of the most critical issues of the time: how to organize the Spanish regions after the fall of Franco’s regime. This article explores how the ideas of a Spanish federation – defended by Madariaga – and the interest of the nationalist groups collided during the decades of 1950s and 1960s. The result was a harsh debate on separatism between the Basques and Catalans, who saw Franco’s Spain as the representation of centralism and repression of their identities, and other Spanish exiles.     

Spain and the Partition Treaties (1697–1700)

This study takes an analytical approach to the diplomatic strategy adopted by the Spanish monarchy in confronting the challenge it faced associated with the Partition Treaties that were signed by Louis XIV, William III and the United Provinces in 1698 and 1700. By consulting Spanish sources to complete the understanding of the diplomatic process, this study analyses the political action that Spain mobilized in its defence around 1700 and describes the evolution of Spain's foreign policy as the product of the mistrust that had developed between the main powers of Europe. This mistrust was politically answered by Madrid with Carlos II's last will and other planned measures to ensure the viability of the project that contained a turning point in the policy underlying the alliances of the monarchy. Although, like that of the other powers, Spain's manoeuvrability was restricted, this study concludes that Spain was able to create policy action plans and rationally implement them; moreover, the dynamics resulting from the negotiation and signing of the Partition Treaties led the monarchy to oppose them at all costs and naturally led to the choice of a French heir as its only solution.     

Being a nation through the crown. Banal monarchism and nation-building in Spain, 1833–68

ABSTRACT

Studies on nationalism have rarely given importance to the role played by the monarchy. In the Spanish case, studies have principally underlined its negative impact at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article aims to approach the origins of this political and cultural junction between the crown and the phenomenon of nationalism in Spain. A process that took place during the reign of Queen Isabel II (1833–68) and that followed very similar times and formulas to its neighbouring countries. It is first discuss the challenge that the monarchy faced in resignifying and relocating itself politically and symbolically in the nineteenth century. On this path, the crown found in the nation a perfect partner. However, liberalism also used the historical legitimacy of the monarchy to construct a nationalist discourse where monarchical identity was a structuring and undeniable piece of the national essence. Then, the author studies two typologies of strategies undertaken by them to convey their idea of nation, to mobilize people and to engender national loyalty: royal travel and images of the monarchy – both literal and figurative – used by the state. A comparative perspective with different European cases is always follow, particularly with Queen Victoria.     

The Nixon and Ford Administrations and the Future of Post-Franco Spain (1970–6)

What was the value of Spain to the United States in the last years of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco? Unlike the Western European states, Washington had specific military interests in Spanish territory: military bases that were part of NATO's defensive strategy even though Spain was not a member of the Alliance. Since 1953, the Francoist system had been the guarantor of the political stability essential for the proper use of the bases. With the dictator's death approaching, maintaining stability in post-Franco Spain was the main concern of the US government. The maintenance of the bases as well as the Spanish policy of the European NATO members who, for the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were capable of ‘making shoddy decisions of heroism so long as they don't have to pay for them’, would be essential to keep Spain stable.     

The landscape of Metztitlan,Mexico: Power and control in a sixteenth century Spanish administrative painting

ABSTRACT

The concept of landscape has been studied mostly as the view of a space with particular interest in its aesthetics, originating at the turn of the sixteenth century. However, I argue that in fourteenth century northern Europe, the concept was focused on polity rather than aesthetics. This article examines this lesser-known tradition by analysing the painting of Metztitlan, a sixteenth century town in Mexico, and arguing, first, that unlike all the other representations in the Relaciones Geográficas to which it belongs, it is the only landscape, and second, that this painting is associated with an administrative procedure common in Spain to gain control over imperial lands. I review European practices regarding the representation of towns under the Spanish Crown. Then, I present the results of the fieldwork carried out to locate several heights which probably served as vantage points to paint the landscape. Based on this research, I analyse the intentions of the painter to argue that it should be considered within the same tradition as the paintings made in Spain by Flemish painter Anton van de Wyngaerde, as part of the Spanish Empire's Germanic tradition of describing places with the intention of exerting control over them.     

Narratives of success and portraits of misery: Football,national identities,and economic crisis in Spain (2008–2012)

ABSTRACT

This article explores the propagation of national narratives through football in both the Spanish and the European media in the period 2008–2012. The Spanish national team's victories in the 2008 and 2012 Euros and the 2010 World Cup resulted in the consolidation of a domestic “narrative of success” that depicted Spain as a flourishing, modern European country. Yet as the economic crisis increased, Spanish governments, mass media, and corporations promoted this narrative of success as a “compensation mechanism,” aiming at making up for the country's dire financial situation. In the European media, the initially benign portrait of Spaniards was gradually transformed into a new representation that depicted Iberians as slackers and scroungers of European Union funds. The article shows the re-emergence of derogatory stereotypes as a manner of making Spaniards scapegoats for the economic crisis, while reinforcing nationalist narratives among Europeans.     

Neutrality and submarine warfare: Germany and Spain during the First World War

The Spanish government maintained official neutrality during the Great War because deviating from neutrality would supposedly endanger the nation’s already limited political and social stability and even threaten the survival of the monarchic regime. In August 1914 there were no direct Spanish interests in the conflict and no benefit to be obtained from any intervention by Spain, which was very weak in military terms and in the international arena. Nevertheless, Spain’s geographic location and its commercial dependence on the Entente made it especially vulnerable to the pressures of France and Great Britain, both of which attempted to take advantage of the services that Spain could offer in the economic war; Spain’s importance increased with the prolongation of the fight. Germany, in contrast, could not hope for more from Spain than its strict neutrality because of its highly important political and economic ties with the Entente and its defencelessness before England and France, from which Germany could not protect it. Because Germany could not wait for Spain’s participation next to her, the primary target of German diplomacy had to be to resist the influence of the Entente and maintain Spanish neutrality while preventing Spain from inclining towards favouring the Allies. To achieve this objective, Berlin fed, with vague promises, the idea that a Spanish collaboration would be rewarded with the annexation of some territories. On this basis, we can begin to study German–Spanish relations during the Great War, which came to be determined by incidents that were caused by the submarine war. The dependence on the Entente also helps to explain the last evolution of the relations between Germany and Spain, which could follow no other policy than that imposed by the final development of the war: taking up a position near the winners and distancing from, and nearly rupturing ties with, Germany. Using both Spanish and German documentation allows us to reach different conclusions that aim to contribute substantially to understanding the relationship between Spain and Germany during the Great War.     

Thomas Jefferson on the Character of an Unfree People: The Case of Spanish America

Thomas Jefferson perceived the people of Spanish America during their revolutionary struggles of the 1810s through the lens of national historical development, formulating an ambiguous attitude toward them. Although welcoming their independence movements, he questioned their ability to establish free, self‐governing republics believing that they needed to undergo a process of political maturation so that they could develop a republican character. As well as regarding the newly liberated countries of Spanish America as potential allies of the United States, Jefferson expressed concern about their becoming its economic and political rivals. Experiencing the new states as scenes of permanent military conflicts, he even suggested temporary restoration of metropolitan control over them by Spain.     

Between political emancipation and creole hegemony: Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans (c. 1791)

Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans inaugurates a tradition of nonconformist political writing against Spanish colonial rule during the second half of the eighteenth century, a period characterized by the Crown’s attempt to reorganize several aspects of the colonial administration. As an ex-Jesuit living in exile after the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all Spanish territories in 1767, Viscardo had a political as much as a personal motive in designing a project that would cut the colonial ties between Spain and the New World. His plans for emancipation included the instauration of a monarchical form of government, but his design was out of touch with reality and would have hardly been taken seriously by the inhabitants had a British-backed expeditionary force reached the coasts of Chile and Peru, as he had planned. While Viscardo’s Letter may have stirred a sense of creole patriotism some years after his death, the political scruples of the ancien regime based on social privileges and racial distinctions were too strong to be dismantled by mere ideals of freedom, justice and equality. Thus, effective political participation was restricted to the creole elite, whom Viscardo saw as the legitimate guarantor of social order and economic prosperity.     

José Zorrilla in Mexico: Transatlantic Romanticism and the Question of Artistic Labour

This article explores the strategic use of literary form in the Mexican writings of José Zorrilla. The article focuses on México y los mexicanos (1856), a letter Zorrilla wrote to his fellow Spanish Romantic playwright, Ángel de Saavedra, the Duke of Rivas. Zorrilla’s México y los mexicanos is a rare piece of epistolary writing in Spanish Romanticism as well as one of the first literary histories of Mexico. Often overlooked in the letter, however, is Zorrilla’s economic critique of the precarious condition of artists in both Mexico and Spain. A conservative moderado, Zorrilla could not air his concerns publicly without the threat of retribution from his fellow conservative colleagues in Spain. Zorrilla thus used the epistolary form, the article argues, in order to surreptitiously introduce the economic plight of artists into mainstream Spanish as well as Mexican political discourse. Read in this context, Zorrilla’s letter makes visible the fundamental role a transatlantic Romantic vision of labour played in shaping nineteenth-century political discourse in both the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America.     

Perpetual peace and shareholder sovereignty: the political thought of José de Carvajal y Lancaster

This article contributes to the recent historiography on Enlightenment plans for European peace by shedding light on the political and intellectual work of the neglected Spanish minister and intellectual José Carvajal y Lancaster. The article begins by outlining the intellectual context surrounding the War of Spanish Succession, and proceeds to analyse the ways that Carvajal deployed, both in his texts and in power, Enlightenment ideals to reform the Spanish Empire and achieve perpetual peace in Europe. The ideas of his first work, his Testamento Político, revealed the ways that the logic of joint-stock companies could catalyse the reform of the Spanish Empire. His measures in government, in turn, illustrated how international cooperation could be mutually beneficial, but turned on his fraught relationship with the future Marquis of Pombal. Finally, his text Mis Pensamientos, written in 1753, envisaged a formal commercial and political coalition between the Spanish and the British Empires. Carvajal’s vision for European peace was at once utopian and clear-eyed, and the ideas behind his plan persist as demanding questions for our age.     

The Calibanisation of the South in the German public ‘Euro crisis’ discourse

This article highlights the renaissance of the essentialist topos of the ‘lazy and irrational’ ‘Südländer’ (Southerner, Southern countries, South) in the German political and media discourses during the ‘Euro crisis’. It argues that it served to legitimate the political and economic measures taken in Southern European countries that pushed them into still more peripheral positions within the European Union (EU) and deepened the cleavage between North and South. Culture, or better culturalism and racism as its political ideological version, thus were used as a trap, as an intellectual battleground for justifying extremely complex economic and political decisions in a simplistic fashion throughout a crucial period of European history. The article furthermore demonstrates how a postcolonial reading may productively decode the processes of Othering taking place within Europe itself, especially between the so-called core and peripheral countries.     

‘The Most Developed of the Underdeveloped Nations’. US Foreign Policy and Student Unrest in 1960s Spain

Throughout the 1960s, Spanish students staged a strong opposition against the dictatorship of General Franco. Also during this decade, the U.S. Foreign Service in Spain began to pay great attention to these students for two key reasons. On the one hand, student protests posed a threat to US defensive interests in a country with a high strategic value during the Cold War in southern Europe. However, on the other hand, campus agitation could lead to positive effects for the United States if students’ expectations of social change were channeled toward national development in a context of order and political stability. So, how could student activism and idealism be directed toward a controlled modernization of Spain? This article attempts to answer this question by studying American programs aimed at disseminating the principles of modernization theory in Spanish universities as an instrument to (1) influence students’ political and intellectual socialization and to immunize them against radical ideologies and (2) channel students’ aspirations towards constructive and responsible reform of their country's socioeconomic structures.     

Shaping Women: National Identity Through the Use of Language in Franco'S Spain

In my article I show how a very particular identity was created for women during the period of Franco's Spain. I will draw upon a varied range of materials from official discourses, particularly the Sección Femenina (the women's branch of Falange); the Álvarez Enciclopedia and other texts such as songs, poems and the popular press. Following Foucault (1980: 30) I analyse an identity based on oppressive discourses whose power ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning process and everyday life’. The nationalistic stress of this discourse is one that encourages women to create a new image of Spanish femininity that should be ‘different’ from the liberated portrayal of women coming from Europe, mainly through the path of growing tourism. The language of these discourses is somehow baroque, elaborated, energetic and highly dramatic. It tries to seek attention through an unnecessary and badly misorientated dramatism. It is cryptic and manipulative and claims to be poetical, but its main intention is to confine women indoors and to make them look at the world through the curtains or from a closed window. On the other hand it made women feel they were the representation of a unique matriarchal nationalism making them appear as the heroines of an essentialist national metaphor: women mothers of the nation. Inherent in Franco's equation of women = femininity = nation is a contradiction that defines women as ‘indoor heroines’ and bases nationalism in a naturalised representation of gender where women are a gendered representation of this nationalism.     

Grain Markets,Free Trade and the Bourbon Reforms: The Real Pragmática of 1765 in New Spain

The Real Pragmática of 1765 of Free Grain Trade was one of the most influential events in eighteenth century Spanish political and economic history? But was it influential in the Americas? Despite the abundant scholarship on the Bourbon reforms, we do not know much about the application of the Pragmática or more broadly about policies that affected domestic grain trade in the Americas. In this article I argue that the Pragmática was influential in increasing the participation of the viceroy in matters of wholesale and regional grain trade. Such changes in policies as applied in New Spain involved both pragmatism and a centralization of power, rather than a dogmatic support for free trade policies or a staunch support of traditional doctrines. In this I believe that New Spain did not differ from contemporary Western European countries, in which free trade was constantly being negotiated between different actors and authorities of various levels.     

Small but powerful: networking strategies and the trade business of Habsburg-Italian merchants in Cadiz in the second half of the eighteenth century

Abstract

Lombardian merchants played an important role in long-distance trade between the Italian and the Iberian Peninsulas since the Middle Ages, in contrast to widely held beliefs and historiographical neglect. The eighteenth century witnessed the intensification of this role. Instead of being worse off after Lombardy passed from Spanish sovereignty to being ruled from Vienna, the Lombardian mercantile community in Cadiz made use of the institutional framework offered by the imperial maritime policy of the Habsburgs, which compensated for a lack of their own commercial institutional framework. Making use of different social strategies, which combined kinship, cultural and transnational co-operation, Lombardian merchants skilfully connected Spanish America with Habsburg Central Europe through the Mediterranean, despite the fact that their degree of formal integration into the Spanish trading system was limited. This occurred in the episode of growth that followed the Bourbon reforms in Spain after the 1760s. Although their business networks reached a wide geographical area, Lombardian merchants also acted as intermediaries for the incorporation of the Triestinian traders into long-distance maritime trade networks, and therefore contributed to linking both ends of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.     

The German Secret State Police in Spain: Extending the Reach of National Socialism

Germany encroached in Spain's internal affairs that followed providing military support the Spanish Civil War in the interest of pursuing National Socialist objectives through the establishment of an extensive apparatus of National Socialist organisations in Spain, including the Gestapo. Cooperation was officially established between Spanish and German police on 25 November 1937, which was extended to the Spanish political police on 31 July 1938, when they entered into a secret agreement with the German Gestapo for mutual assistance. The Gestapo trained the Spanish ordinary police and political police to contribute to maintaining the Franco regime in control of Spain, just as the Gestapo in Germany was charged with investigating and suppressing all forms of anti-state tendencies, and exported its methods and proceedings to Spain under the guise of contributing to the struggle against the alleged danger of worldwide communism. In addition to cooperation with Spanish police on suppressing dissent against the Franco regime, other functions related to serving the interests of National Socialist Germany, which deployed the Gestapo for various purposes while Spain constituted an extension of National Socialist Germany's sphere of influence. This was ensured through the Gestapo maintaining a presence in Spain until 1945.     

Revolutionary versus Reactionary: Contrasting Portuguese and Spanish Civil-Military Relations during Democratisation

The military is an important factor for the success or failure of democratisation processes. Portugal and Spain provide two paradigmatic cases. Despite their socio-economic, political and cultural similarities, these countries developed very different civil-military relations which significantly impacted their transitions. After having handed power over to a civilian dictator, Salazar, the Portuguese military eventually caused the downfall of his authoritarian Estado Novo regime and steered the transition to democracy. In contrast, the Spanish military, which had helped Franco defeat the Second Republic, remained loyal to the dictator’s principles and, after his death, obstructed the democratisation process. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, this interdisciplinary article contrasts the challenges posed by the military and the policies implemented by the Iberian governments to depoliticise and control it. It shows that the failed coups d’état in these countries helped tighten civilian control and paved the way for democratic consolidation. Using a policy instruments comparative framework, this paper demonstrates that not only the attitudes of the military but also the tools used to keep them under control were substantially different in Portugal and Spain. Historical legacies from the Spanish Civil War, Second World War and Colonial conflicts, as well as contextual factors, serve to explain this variation.     

A New Diplomatic History and the Networks of Spanish Diplomacy in the Baroque Era

Diplomatic history has undergone profound alterations during the last century. According to the old model built by Mattingly in 1955, diplomatic history was the analysis of international and political relations within a national context. Subsequent studies analysed how diplomacy evolved towards a more institutionalised and professional scheme (established in eighteenth-century European diplomacy). However, was this conclusion an inevitable one for Early Modern and Baroque diplomacy? This essay intends to retrace the steps that have been taken towards a new history of diplomacy, by early-modern historians in general, and by Spanish historiography in particular, as well as to assess the idea that what made a difference for Spanish Baroque diplomacy was the extent of networks that allowed cultural transference, the capacity to influence others, rather than the institutional extent of connections and practices. Which people or processes promoted the circulation of ideas, information, and culture, within and outside the Spanish monarchy, during the seventeenth century? This question will form the focus of the second part of this essay, in which the author analyses several specific cases of Spanish ambassadors in Europe: their networks of communication, their building of stereotypes, their informal diplomatic practices, and their use of ceremonial practices.     

On fascistization: Mussolini’s political project for Franco’s Spain, 1937–1939

‘Single party, single militia, single worker’s union, on these three pillars the great Spain of tomorrow will be built’, wrote Mussolini to Franco in August 1937, only four months after the new single party, Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS, was created. From the Duce’s point of view, all the political tools developed to achieve a brilliant present and a greater future were the result of Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The political implementation of fascism, the single party, corporativism, propaganda and economic modernization were considered to have been derived from Italy’s military and diplomatic involvement in Spain. But, surprisingly, that political presence has largely been undervalued by historians examining the political construction and nature of Franco’s Spain. This article re-evaluates the importance, and limits, of Mussolini’s political project in Spain: fascistization.