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Francisco Cambo and the Modernization of Spain: The Technocratic Possibilities of Fascism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Philip V. Cannistraro  and
James W. Cortada
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Extract

Spain entered the twentieth century as a relatively underdeveloped nation still deeply rooted in her traditional past. Spanish life had barely begun to experience the stresses of social and economic transformation that recent scholars have identified with the modernization process. Toward the end of the last century, Spanish industry grew at a rapid pace, particularly in the Basque and Catalan regions, but the nation as a whole continued to lag behind the rest of Western Europe in the years before 1914. Although the recently formed trade union movements expanded in response to the new complex of urban-industrial problems, their organizational and political strength remained ineffective until World War I. In the other regions of Spain an agrarian economy, replete with strong anarchist movements, dominated and determined a social order in which provincialism, widespread subsistence living standards, and extensive illiteracy persisted.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , January 1975 , pp. 66 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1975

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References

1 Black, G. E., The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York, 1966), pp. 85, 116Google Scholar.

* See Clark's, John P. review of Sam Dolgoff's The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-management in the Spanish Revolution (1936–1939) in this issue, p. 114Google Scholar.

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3 Cambó's more important books include Elementos para el estudio del problema ferrovaria en España (Madrid, 1918)Google Scholar; Viut meses al ministeri de foment (Barcelona, 1919)Google Scholar; En torno del fascismo itatiano (Madrid, 1924)Google Scholar; Las dictaduras (Madrid, 1929)Google Scholar; Per la concòrdia (Barcelona, 1930)Google Scholar. The best biography of Cambó is by Pabón, Jesús, Cambó, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1952–1969)Google Scholar, but even this author scarcely deals with Cambó's ideas on fascism.

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9 Details on the assassination are in Ullman, Joan Connally, The Tragic Week: A Study in Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875–1912 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Some historians, however, feel that the regime had nothing to do with it and attribute the attempt to an extreme left-wing Catalan agitator; cf. Oliveira, Antonio Ramos, Politics, Economics and Men of Modern Spain, 1808–1946 (London, 1946), pp. 384–391Google Scholar.

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35 For quotes, Cambó, , Las dictaduras, pp. 136–138Google Scholar; and Centellas, , Las dictaduras y el señor Cambó, p. 151Google Scholar for comments on the simplistic quality of dictators.

36 Centellas, , Las dictaduras y el señor Combó, pp. 89–96Google Scholar for a dictator's personal qualities and pp. 101–104 for its relevancy to Spain's dictatorship.

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48 Ibid., p. 52.

49 Ibid., pp. 79–85; Manuel, Frank E., The Politics of Modern Spain (New York, 1938), pp. 52, 60Google Scholar. For the fascist trappings in Spain in the 1920's see Manuel again, pp. 52–56.

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