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Southern Europe?
According to mainstream discourse of the Cold War, post-1945 Western Europe was essentially a homogeneous historical space fully integrated into modern industrial society. But as Southern Europe? makes clear, Western European societies were in fact divided by deep political and economic inequalities. While nations in the north embodied consolidated democracies, Spain, Portugal, and Greece were at times all authoritarian regimes. Deeply afflicted with underdevelopment, these countries were cut off from the "economic miracles" other Western European states were experiencing. With its weak democracy, Italy held a contradictory position between the struggles of the Iberian and Greek peninsulas and the progress of its neighbors beyond the Alps. Now, old inequalities long believed to be things of the past have resurfaced, and a new debt crisis appears to be splitting the continent apart along historic lines. This book raises the important question of whether studying the geopolitics and social history of southern Europe might be a valuable analytical tool for understanding these contemporary financial catastrophes.
Crescent Remembered
Contemporary Spain and Portugal share a historical experience as Iberian states which emerged within the context of al-Andalus. These centuries of Muslim presence in the Middle Ages became a contested heritage during the process of modern nation-building with its varied concepts and constructs of national identities. Politicians, historians and intellectuals debated vigorously the question how the Muslim past could be reconciled with the idea of the Catholic nation. The Crescent Remembered investigates the processes of exclusion and integration of the Islamic past within the national narratives. It analyses discourses of historiography, Arabic studies, mythology, popular culture and colonial policies towards Muslim populations from the 19th century to the dictatorships of Franco and Salazar in the 20th century. In particular, it explores why, despite apparent historical similarities, in Spain and Portugal entirely different strategies and discourses concerning the Islamic past emerged. In the process, it seeks to shed light on the role of the Iberian Peninsula as a crucial European historical "contact zone" with Islam.
A Balancing Act
This book reveals the development, strategy and extraordinary success of Britains secret services in Francos Spain during the Second World War. The main claim of this study is that British pressure, exercised above all through their intelligence services, led Franco to distance himself from the Axis cause and eventually embrace that of the Allies. Starting from a virtually non-existent base, the British rapidly built up a complex intelligence network in Spain that stretched from Corunna to Barcelona and from Bilbao to Gibraltar. As Spain was a non-belligerent, spy networks including those of the Germans, Italians, Portuguese and British proliferated in the Iberian Peninsula. Double-agents ab...
The Last Survivor
This book proposes an interpretation of Francoism as the Spanish variant of fascism. Unlike Italian fascism and Nazism, the Franco regime survived the Second World War and continued its existence until the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Francoism was, therefore, the Last Survivor of the fascisms of the interwar period. And indeed this designation applies equally to Franco. The work begins with an analysis of the historical identity of Spanish fascism, constituted in the process of fascistization of the Spanish right during the crisis of the Second Republic, and consolidated in the formation of the fascist single-party and the New State during the civil war. Subsequent chapter contributi...
Reclaiming al-Andalus
Reclaiming al-Andalus focuses on the construction of the scholarly discipline of Orientalist studies in Spain. Special attention is paid to the impact that the elaboration of a series of historical interpretations of the legacy left by Muslim and Jewish culture in Spain had over the writing of national history in the period of the Bourbon Restoration. A historiographical account of Spains Orientalism tackles the problematized issues that both Arabist and Hebraist scholars sought to address. Orientalist scholarship thereby became inextricably linked to different interpretations of the historical shaping of Spanish national identity. Political circumstances of the day impacted on the approach ...
From Franco to Freedom
This book brings together recent research by a group of specialists in history and sociology to provide a new reading of the late Franco dictatorship, especially in relation to its political culture. The authors focus on the election of local, trade union and national representatives, the work of the first Spanish sociologists, the struggle over administrative reform, the role of the media and the intellectuals, as well as the evolution of the dictatorships political class and its response to the regimes decline. Not only are the politics of the late dictatorship scrutinised, but also the mechanisms that were deployed to control the fast-changing society of the 1960s and 1970s. In examining ...
Beyond Folklore?
This book analyzes the promotion of subnational identities undertaken by Spanish fascism and the Franco regime between 1930 and 1975, as well as their patterns of survival, accommodation and adaptation. It examines the proactive attitudes of the various actors committed to the dictatorship – from Falangists to Francoist intellectuals to Catholic conservatives – alongside their repressive or annihilating approach to regional cultures and languages. As in most Fascist regimes between 1922 and 1945, a narrative of the ethnocultural, ethnoterritorial and historic diversity of the nation persisted, with differing degrees of intensity and different tendencies. These discourses and practices we...
Madrid's Forgotten Avant-Garde
This book explores the role played by artists and intellectuals who constructed and disseminated various competing images of national identity which polarized Spanish society prior to the Civil War. The convergence of modern and essentialist discourses and practices, especially in literature and poetry, in what is conventionally called in Spanish letters "The Generation of '27", created fissures between competing views of aesthetics and ideology that cut across political affiliation. Silvina Schammah exposes the paradoxes facing Madrid's cultural vanguards, as they were torn by their ambition for universality, cosmopolitanism and transcendence on the one hand and by the centripetal forces of nationalistic ideologies on the other. Taking upon themselves roles to become the disseminators and populizers of radical positions and world-views first elaborated and conducted by the young urban intelligentsia, their proposed aim of incorporating diverse identities embedded in different cultural constructions and discourse was to have very real and tragic consequences as political and intellectual lines polarized in the years prior to the Spanish Civil War.
The Crucible of Francoism
The July 1936 coup d'tat against the Spanish Second Republic brought together a diversity of anti-Republican political and social groups under the leadership of rebel Africanista military officers. In the ensuing Civil War this coalition gradually came under the rule of Generalissimo Franco. This volume explores the hypothesis that the violence and combat experiences of the war were the fundamental ideological crucible for the Francoist regime. The rebels were a group of reactionary and anti-liberal forces with little ideological or political coherence, but they emerged from the conflict not only victorious but ideologically united under the dictator's power. Key to understanding this transi...
The Road to Anarchy
The Road to Anarchy is the result of an exhaustive investigation into the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the democratic years of the Second Republic. By analysing the course of the CNT in terms of its role in the labour conflict and the internal life and approach of the organisation (its ideology, its practice, its internal conflicts, the role of the individual and the weight of history) this book dismantles the long-held view that the CNT orchestrated three insurrections against the Republic. Key is analysis not only of the violence of the anarchists, but also that of the state. Two crucial themes emerge: the political struggle within the organisation, ...
