THE COLLAPSE OF EUROPEAN DEMOCRACIES IN THE INTERWAR
YEARS: THE CASE OF SPAIN
Jordi Domenech
Associate professor
Department of Economic History and Institutions
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Abstract: this paper evaluates theories of democratic breakdown in the interwar years
by looking at the case of Spain. I analyse the role of unemployment and economic
crises, the revolutionary threat, agrarian interests and Gregory Luebbert’s theory of
political regime choices (liberal democracies, socialdemocracies and fascist regimes).
The Spanish case is particularly interesting because in comparative perspective the
impact of the Great Depression was mild, leaving the other three potential explanations
as main candidates. We find in general that although similar themes resonate, the
Spanish experience cannot be compared to the Italian and the German experiences. In
our view, the main distabilising factors of interwar Spain were problems of governance
related to incomplete state formation. We also find the role of monopolists of violence
and first actors was crucial, while problems of collective action prevent the adoption of
a “structural” explanation. The coup would have been successful had not the military
been divided between rebels and republican loyalists and had not Madrid been defended
by the international brigades.
Introduction
What explains democratic break down in interwar Western Europe? A second, related
question is: were all break downs caused by the same forces? Perhaps the most
commonly used explanation of democratic breakdown has to do with the impact of
economic crisis. Scores of economists for example have insisted that declines in output
have generally brought about regime changes and civil war (Miguel, Satyanth and
Sargenti, )., because durign the crises the opportunity cost of fighting is low. It is often
heard for example that the rise of the Nazis in Germany, which caused the destruction
of democracy in Germany, was intimately linked to the Great Depression and
unemployment ( but see King, Rosen, Tanner, and Wagner, 2008).
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A second hypothesis is that of the revolutionary threat or the red menace. This
view emphasises that democracy and fascism result from different class alliances
(Wellhofer, 2004, 1994; Linz, 1976). Galvanized by the impact of the Soviet
Revolution, most socialist parties and their followers swung to more extreme positions
(see Maier, 1975). The Communist party grew in most countries. The “red menace” in
turn mobilized the bourgeoisie and the landed elites, and the result was always the
triumph of fascism. Several authors have stressed that rather than the revolutionary
threat, what matters is the government threat to confiscate large estates and re-distribute
land (Gerschenkron, 1943; Moore, 1966; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006).
Gregory Luebbert in addition has provided a more sophisticated variant of this
same argument which takes into account the degree of political development before
WW1 (Luebbert, 1991). In Luebbert’s view, there are three main groups that matter
numerically: the middle class, the working class and the family peasantry. Before 1918,
very limited suffrage in many parts of Western Europe excluded the working class and
the family pesantry from politics. Only liberal democracies like Britain, France or
Belgium did gradually incorporate the working class in the polity, which as a result was
more fragmented but also more supportive of democratic institutions.
After 1918, the expansion of universal suffrage suddenly enfranchised the
working class and the family peasantry. As a result of being excluded in the past,
working class vote was very cohesive and directed towards socialist and communist
parties with little commitment to the stability of liberal democracy. A series of unstable
and short lived Lib-Lab governments ensued in the 1920s. After a period of
experimentation, political regimes bifurcated towards either socialdemocracy or
fascism. In Luebbert´s view, in Northern Europe, the socialists were willing or could
attract the family peasantry by renouncing to several policies of land re-distribution.
However, in countries like Spain, Italy or Germany, where the socialists were
committed to a strategy of re-distributing land to win the landless poor, the family
peasantry moved to the right to join the anti-socialist coalition, which became dominant.
In these countries, Fascism won.
The main question of this paper is thus: what lessons can we learn from the
Spanish case for the literature on democratic breakdown? Do all democratic
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breakdowns in Europe look similar or do we have different types? Why did the
democratic breakdown in Spain take the form of a civil war?
The impact of the Great Depression.
Although low by European standards, Spanish living standards did not suffer large
declines during the Great Depression. In fact, it is easy to show that the performance of
the Spanish economy in the 1930s was quite good in comparative terms. Graph 1
compares the rates of growth of GDP in Germany and Spain between 1927 to 1935.
Spanish GDP contracted by more than 2 per cent in 1931 and roughly 2 per cent in
1933. These numbers pale in comparison with German GDP which fell 8 per cent in
two consecutive years (1931-1932). Furthermore, the Spanish experience with
unemployment cannot compare to the German one. For example, unemployment peaked
at 671,161 in 1935, of which 258000 were not fully unemployed but rather worked
partime (Anuario Estadístico de España, 1935). Unemployment in Spain was therefore
roughly between 6 and 9.5 per cent of the gainfully employed population, well below
unemployment rates in Germany or the US.
G D P g r o wt h i n S p a i n a n d G e r m a n y , 1 9 2 7 - 1 9 3 5
12
10
G E R MA N Y
8
6
4
S P A IN
2
0
19 2 7
-2
19 2 8
19 2 9
19 3 0
19 3 1
19 3 2
19 3 3
19 3 4
19 3 5
-4
-6
-8
- 10
In graph 2, I have plotted the evolution of real wages between 1917 and 1935 in
three of the most important industrial sectors in Spain. Interestingly, real wages fell in
1933, 1934 and 1935 for workers in the textiles and metal industry, two of the most
quiet groups of industrial workers during the Second Republic. That said, the real wage
3
cuts were modest indeed. In the most revolutionary, Asturian coal miners, real wages
grew consistently during the 1930s.
Real w age grow th, 1917-1935 (1913=1)
2 .1
1. 9
1. 7
C a t a la n t e xt ile s
1. 5
B is c a y me t a l ind us t ry
1. 3
1. 1
A s t uria n c o a l mine rs
0 .9
0 .7
0 .5
19 17
19 19
19 2 1
19 2 3
19 2 5
19 2 7
19 2 9
19 3 1
19 3 3
19 3 5
The “red menace” (class theories of democractic breakdown)
A second argument concerns the conservative reaction to the “red menace”. As a
consequence of the October Revolution, working class parties and organisations moved
to the left and used the threat of revolution to obtain concessions from liberal
democracies. One of the consequences of this process is strong coalition formation in
the centre-right and right. The revolutionary threat cannot account for the destruction of
democracy in Germany because the SPD, although it became increasingly more radical,
was more committed to reform than to revolution (Luebbert, 1991). The case of Austria
or Italy however conform more closely to the hypothesis of polarization and “red
menace” leading to democratic breakdown.
However I would argue the case for Spain looks far less compelling, despite the
extraordinary visibility of episodes like the Commune of October 1934 in Asturias or
the riots of the anarcho-syndicalists action groups. In the 1930s, the Communist share of
vote was always very low. The revolutionary National Confederation of Workers (CNT)
lost more than half of its membership after 1932. The legendary Anarchist Iberian
4
Federation (FAI) never had a large mass of followers and the riots it organised had very
poor popular following.
On the other hand, the perception that strike activity is associated with a
revolutionary threat is found wanting. In the interwar years, large increases in social
conflict after WW1 were associated with regime changes in Germany, Austria or Italy.
But what matters is that democratization everywhere increased strike activity. High
GDP per capita and democratization (measured by Polity IV) strongly linked with more
strikes. The most strike prone countries in the 1920s were Germany, Austria and
Britain. Structural change or crises were not related to higher striker levels. Table 1
presents the rank order correlations for 15 European countries between 1925 and 1935.
Table 1. Rank order correlation matrix, 15 European countries 1925-1935
(N=165)
Spearman rank rho
Population
% INDUSTRIAL
GDP CAPITA
Deviations from trend
Industrial emp change
POLITY IV
PRO WORKER seats %
Strikers/pop
0.09
0.3*
0.23*
-0.03
-0.09
0.33*
0.04
Sources: GDP capita and GDP growth from Angus Maddison, his dataset is accessible at
www.ggdc.net/maddison; employment change from Mitchell, European statistics; Polity IV from the
Polity IV database available at www.systempeace.org/polity/polity4.htm; pro-worker seats from Flora,
Handbook, and and MacKie and Rose, Electoral history.
Notes: means * statistically significant at least at the 10 % level
A second argument is that collective action in Spain looks indeed weaker than
expected when compared with other relevant European experiences. Union density
levels were low even if we take into account the level of development (graph 2). The
scatter plot of GDP per capita against union density shows how peak union density in
1932 was above the fitted line, however other countries had peak union densities at
greater distances from their fitted levels. Moreover, to a great extent the extraordinary
mobilization of the rural landless workers was caused by the tight union control on the
rural labour market. Except for very cohesive groups like the miners or the Catalan
vinyard sharecroppers, both having a long history of collective action, there is no reason
to think Spanish workers were organised enough to sustain a revolution in front of a
state that had lost minimal capacity in the transition to the republic.
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Graph 1. Union densities and GDP capita, 1925-1939
60
50
40
30
R 2 = 0 .12 5
S P A IN 1 9 3 2
20
10
0
2000
2500
3000
3500
4000
4500
5000
5500
6000
6500
G DP pe r c a pi t a
In fact, in the early months of the civil war, only a small proportion of these
workers volunteered to defend the republic. About 120’000 men volunteered in the
Republican side out of a potential elegible population of roughly 4.5 million, i.e. 3 per
cent of all males between 18 and 45 years old in the Republican zone.1 This for example
can be contrasted with the 40 to 60 thousand international brigadists that participated in
the war. The Republican authorities resorted to paying some of their soldiers and soon
felt the need to resort to mass conscription of males, and ended up mobilizing males
between 18 and 44 years old, giving a total number of drafted citizens in the Republican
zone of 1.7 million, about 40 per cent of all 1930 elegible males in the “Republican”
provinces as of July 1936, 50 per cent of elegible males in the “Republican” zone as of
July 1937, and 55 per cent of all elegible males in the Republican zone as of October
1937.
1
My own calculations using the population census of 1930 using population broken down by age for each
of the provinces in “Republican” Spain (according to front lines between July 1936 and July 1937). As
the census breaks down the population of each province by each year of age and makes it very laborious
to calculate the relevant elegible population for each of the provinces, I have assumed the national
average of the fraction of men between 18 and 44 years old (roughly 0.6) and the male population in each
province applied to all provinces. The figures therefore need to be taken as guess-estimates. Moreover,
they are probably an underestimate of the true fraction, because many people left the republican side
(althought this might be counterbalanced by the flow of people fleeing the national side). Number of
volunteers from Seidman, Republic of Egos, p. 40, Salas Larrazabal and Salas Larrazabal, Historia
general, pp. 120-24; Alpert, “Soldiers”, p. 63. The cut-off age of 44 was taken because the Republican
authorities conscripted all men from 18 and 44 years old at some point during the war (contrasts with the
conscription up to 32 years old for the Nationalist side).
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The family peasantry as pivotal group
A second hypothesis is that the family peasantry acted as the median voter shifting the
polity to the right. In the Spanish case, it is argued that although that the Nationalists’
coup won where the Right was strong (Luebbert, 1991). Indeed, the potential
contribution of the family peasantry to the victory of the Right in 1933 was important. It
is generally argued that it was the agrarian legisltation (law of municipal boundaries and
land reform) passed in late 1931 that alienated the small land holders of the centre-north
of Spain. Therefore, we can compare then the elections of 1931 with those of 1933 and
1936 to gauge the size of this pivotal group. In the 1931 elections, the right could only
gather 15 per cent of the vote. The proportion of vote went up to 34 per cent in 1933
and 31 per cent in 1936. Therefore, a maximum estimate of the contribution of those
opposing agrarian legislation was between 15 to 19 per cent of total votes. The rightist
groups and parties belonging to the CEDA were not calling themselves fascists but they
probably would have sponsored similar anti-union and socialist legislation and would
repeal most of the 1931 legislation.
Table 2. Family peasantry as pivotal force. Percentage of total votes.
1931 election
Left
Republican Left
Conjunción Republicano
socialista
1933 election
22 %
14 %
1936 election
Popular Front
30 %
34 %
23 %
31 %
85 %
Centre Right
Right
Source: Colomer (2002).
15 %
46 %
To what extent did this group favour the rebels’ cause? There is a need to do
more research on the “industrial organization” of the rebel army, but it is important to
notice here that Franco relied heavily on professional Moroccan soldiers and relied on
conscripted soldiers from the National regions to a lesser degree than the Republicans
(Seidman, 2002).
Landed interests
If the participation of working class institutions and the family peasantry had a limited
participation in the destruction of democracy in Spain, landed interests on the other
hand could have been a far more decisive group with a high degree of internal cohesion
and abundant resources. Edward Malefakis, among others, blamed the agrarian reform
7
as the final cause of the Spanish civil war. This is indeed also the message of more
encompassing contributions like those of Moore (1968) or Acemoglu and Robinson
(2005).
However, in most of the historiography the links between the coup and the
interests are not fully clear. Moreover, landed interests could supply only a limited
amount of the capital and labour inputs needed in the war effort. It is generally accepted
that German and Italian support was crucial for the rebels’ cause.
Conclusions
TO BE WRITTEN
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