When Ideology Takes Precedence over Historical Understanding: The Role of the ‘Right' in the Spanish Interwar Crisis

Abstract

In a relatively recent book on interwar fascism, Michael Mann claimed that in Republican Spain, the main conservative political party, the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (Confederacio´n Espan˜ola de las Derechas Auto´nomas or CEDA) had been the 'main political destroyer of Spanish democracy'. Indeed, he went as far as to write that the CEDA's '''accidentalist'' trajectory' before July 1936 was 'far more damaging than the supposedly ''revolutionary'' trajectory of the anarcho-syndicalists or socialists'. 1 The reader will observe that the professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles described the 'revolutionary' trajectory of the Socialist Party as 'supposed', while the responsibility of the CEDA for the destruction of Republican democracy was presented as irrefutable.That Mann's study, an otherwise interesting and valuable examination of interwar fascism, puts forward such arguments is not infrequent. Although there are numerous comparative works on interwar European politics, few analyse Spanish politics between 1931 and 1936 recognizing its extreme complexity. To a great extent, this is due to the fact that many English-language studies on the Second Republic have not effectively assimilated the work of some very good Spanish historians after the death of Franco in November 1975. But it is also the case that Mann's arguments reflect a general narrative on the Spanish Civil War (and its origins) that has remained popular among foreign (and some Spanish) historians since the 1970s.