CONTENTS
This erudite and substantial volume, whose title indicates precisely the book’s content, bolsters the author’s reputation as one of the most distinguished scholars of the Spanish right. Its subject, the conservative politician and intellectual, Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, may be interpreted as a sort of Spanish Max Weber. In his El crepúsculo de la ideologías (p. 1965), don Gonzalo attempted to adapt the Protestant work ethic to a Catholic nation. In fact, Fernández de la Mora desired the creation of a new hidalgo who «admire el trabajo manual» (p. 87). As Ministro de Obras Públicas (1970-1974), he would have the opportunity to build what he called «El Estado de Obras» (p. 286) by increasing spending on the construction of highways, railroads, and dams. He therefore shared with his fellow ministers who were members of Opus Dei a productivist vision of the nation.
The reinforcement of the work ethic was accompanied by a growing secularization during late franquismo. Ironically, this secularization undermined one of the raisons d’être of the Franco regime and quickly eroded the traditional national identity based on the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation. Franco («el máximo europeizador de nuestra historia contempóranea») and his regime (economically and socially the «más revolucionaria de la Historia de España») [p. 327] were justified by works, not faith.
Unlike most Spanish conservatives, Fernández de la Mora «siempre buscó la conciliación entre la tradición y la razón científica» (p. 16). He attempted to renew the political project of Acción Española by rejecting religious (Catholic) integrismo, which reduced «lo complejo a lo simple» (p. 207) and by renovating the monarchy or, at the least, a powerful state. He moved from a «perspectiva contrarrevolucionaria tradicional» to a «conservadurismo renovado» (p. 181). His authoritarianism led him to reject parliamentary and democratic projects that proposed to reinvent Spain. Well-connected in elite circles–both Falangist but especially monarchist–his views received wide publicity in the mass media and in specialized journals. The presence of various currents of the regime encouraged political and intellectual discussion and debate whether the counterrevolution should be fascistic, monarchist, traditionalist, Christian democrat, or, later, liberal.
His cosmopolitanism, which his biographer documents closely, rejected the postwar autarchy and like one of his most important mentors, José Ortega y Gasset, pushed for the «Europeanization» of Spain. Yet «el patriotismo orteguiano era entrañable y verdadero. Su consigna europeizadora no suponía extranjerización, sino españolización de la ciencia y elevación de nuestro nivel cultural hasta el de los pueblos que marchaban en la vanguardia de la civilización» (p. 148). In this context, don Gonzalo’s definition of the perfect disciple remains valuable: «no es el que rinde culto al maestro, sino aquel que le admira y vence» (p. 143). His vitalist enthusiasm for the franquismo of the 1960s was based on the fact that «el ritmo de crecimiento ha sido durante los últimos años el más rápido del mundo y que, según las previsiones, pronto alcanzaremos… un nivel de vida medio comparable al del europeo occidental» (p. 201). In 1967 he celebrated this growth and Spain’s acceptance of the modernity in his frequently re-edited El crepúsculo de la ideologías. «España ha experimentado en muy cortos años la revolución industrial, democratización económica y el cambio de mentalidad que en Gran Bretaña, por ejemplo, demoró un siglo. Eso explica que seamos una nación de 30 millones de habitantes cuya única ‘ideología’ es el desarrollo económico, vale decir, no ya una ideología propiamente dicha, sino un impulso racional y realista» (p. 251). At the same time, he was fearful that the «materialism» of democratic systems would lead to the dissolution of society. He remained fond of authoritarian and presidentialist regimes, such as those of the Meiji Restoration in late nineteenth-century Japan, French Fifth Republic and, of course, the franquista state.
Although González Cuevas convincingly demonstrates the astuteness of his subject, the biographer might have been more critical. It hard for this American reviewer to imagine how a thinker supposedly devoted to a «Aufklärung conservadora» and to reason could write that Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, who never distinguished himself in the hard sciences, was «el más relevante ejemplo español de hombre de ciencia en la transición del siglo xix al xx» (p. 113). It is difficult to reconcile Fernández de la Mora’s rationalism with his monarchism, which was based in the early sixties on his belief that «la Monarquía hereditaria es un soberano que no debe a ningún grupo, sino al mandato misterioso y providencial de la sangre» (p. 142). He seems to propose a double standard for murders during the Spanish Civil War: Maeztu «no murió como el frágil Lorca víctima de un oscuro crimen pasional en una hora de incierta confusión, sino como el sereno [André] Chénier, ejecutado [durante la terror de la revolución francesa] tras prolongada prisión y sumaria sentencia» (p. 156). While recognizing that «crímenes de guerra» must be punished, Fernández de la Mora objected to what he labelled «victor’s justice» of the Nuremburg Trials. However as the American Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, stated human justice is always imperfect, and some justice is better than none.
Don Gonzalo’s defense of Franco’s «no beligerancia» during World War II was seriously flawed. Franco’s position supposedly maintained Spain «fuera del conflicto; algo permitió la mediación tras el armisticio franco-alemán, la protección de las minorías sefarditas en los Balcanes, la salvación de millares de fugitivos centroeuropeos» (p. 154). Neglected in this list of the virtues of Spanish «neutrality» is the regime’s military, diplomatic, and political commitment, participation, and contributions to a future Axis victory; its reluctance to help Jews until the last year of the conflict when it saw–quite tardily–an Allied victory as inevitable; finally, the «millares de fugitivos» which Spain saved were often Nazis and their close collaborators. As late as 1961 Fernández de la Mora continued to trust his regime’s own propaganda and its victimist excuses. He therefore attributed the isolation of his country after the Second World War not to its leadership’s errors and miscalculations but rather to the «antiespañolismo un poco legendario que desde la Contrarreforma [que] ha prevalecido en las minorías dirigentes de Occidente» (p. 154). He ignored the many services to Nazism and the anti-Semitism of Martin Heidegger and don Gonzalo’s own friend, Carl Schmitt. Indeed, in 1979 to celebrate Schmitt’s ninetieth birthday, don Gonzalo called him «el más importante teórico del Estado del siglo xxx [sic], y uno de los vértices de la intelectualidad europea contemporánea» (p. 370). In May 1933 Schmitt joined the NSDAP and declared the racist Nuremberg Laws «the constitution of freedom»[1]. In 1936 he added that Jews–many of whom he had befriended and worked with during the Weimar Republic–were sterile intellectual parasites who had nothing to offer the Aryan Germans.
Repeating the faulty analyses of fascists, extreme rightists, and the Caudillo himself, Fernández de la Mora overestimated the benefits of authoritarian rule and consistently underestimated democratic regimes of Western Europe and North America. Thus, after the birth of the Fifth Republic in 1958 he wrongly predicted that liberal democracy was in decline, if not disappearing. Ironically, like the protesting students in Paris in 1968, whom he compared to the Russian nihilists of the late nineteenth century, he identified the Gaullist state as a soft variety of fascism or, at a minimum, authoritarian rule. His centralism prevented any sympathy for regional autonomies. In fact, he blamed in part the federalist Francisco Pi y Margall for the «atraso intelectual de la izquierda española» and preferred the more statist–at least in his reading–Karl Marx. As Minister of Public Works, in 1972 in a speech celebrating the XXXV anniversary of the «Liberación» of Bilbao, he triumphantly affirmed: «Todo lo conseguido es fruto de la unidad, clave de la paz interior y el trabajo fértil. Hemos superado los regionalismos suicida» (p. 286).
His centralist position would have prevented democracy from taking root in contemporary Spain. In that sense, he remained committed to the regime that «nace de aquel acto decisivo del 18 de julio» (p. 261) which eventually «coincidía en la superación dialéctica tanto del liberalismo como del socialismo marxista, ya que aunaba el logro de las libertades concretas, reales, con el de la justicia social más estricta» (p. 305). His franquista technocratic state fulfilled the visions of Joaquín Costa and Juan Bravo Murillo. He proved less willing to promote the Transición than other prominent conservatives, such as José María de Areilza, Luís María Ansón, Torcuato Fernández Miranda, Rafael Calvo Serer, and Manuel Fraga Ibibarne.
During the early years of the Transición don Gonzalo predicted that Spain would follow the paths of the more backward Portuguese and Chilean revolutions, and it was no accident that he became a counterrevolutionary mentor for the regime of Augusto Pinochet. In 1976 he saw revolutionary Popular Fronts arising in France, Italy, and, of course, Spain. Yet Santiago Carrillo had made it clear for years that the PCE had abandoned any revolutionary pretentions. Ultimately, don Gonzalo failed to assess precisely the changes produced by the modernization that he had done so much to advocate and accomplish. His analysis focused too much on the state and not enough on society. Thus he could write in 1971: «Si ahora se debilita la coherencia del Sistema, lo más probable es que al cumplirse las previsiones sucesorias se desembocara en el estado demoliberal, que nos llevó a la penosa situación del julio de 1936» (p. 293). To the contrary, most Spaniards, including the military, were convinced that a Western-European variety of constitutional monarchy could continue the economic growth and social stability to which they were accustomed. They rejected his authoritarian direction, and he eventually but reluctantly accepted the new liberal democracy. Indeed, its virtue was that–under the guise of popular consent–elites in the monarchy, political parties, trade unions, media, and Church continued to lead it from above. The PSOE governments of the 1980s invalidated Fernández de la Mora’s fears that this party would behave as it had during the Second Republic. Indeed, as Ramón Tamames observed, it continued «el Estado de obras» (p. 412).
Despite his analytical and political missteps during Transición, Fernández de la Mora acutely examined the advent of certain new problems. Integration into the European Economic Community increased prosperity but weakened Spanish national identity. Secularization encouraged birth control, and Spain’s birth rate plummeted to among the lowest in the world: «Se enfrentaba a inmigraciones masivas, con el agravante de que los emigrantes del origen musulmán no podían ser culturalmente asimilados» (p. 416). While containing a good deal of truth, this last statement contradicted don Gonzalo’s increasing commitment to economic liberalism and, by implication, immigration in the 1980s and 1990s. Finally, his critique of «partitocracia» was far-sighted: «La actual experiencia española demuestra que un régimen de partidos sin crítica, ni alternativas viables, degenera automáticamente no ya en partitocracia, sino en, lo que es peor, cleptocracia» (20).
This stimulating work is based on a deep reading of primary and secondary sources and will prove indispensable for the study of politics and culture in post-Civil War Spain.