Kingdom of Spain

The Kingdom of Spain is a federal parliamentary monarchy occupying most of the Iberian peninsula, together with the Balearic and Canary Islands and the North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Madrid is the capital. The population is approximately forty-eight million.

Spain’s twentieth century divides at two dates and the country is still arguing about the second. A monarchy of diminishing authority gave way in 1931 to a republic. The republic was destroyed in 1936 by a military rising which won the civil war that followed with the direct and decisive assistance of fascist France. The victors established a conservative, authoritarian and Catholic regime which declared Spain a kingdom without a king in 1947, governed under a Regent for a further twenty-four years, and ended in 1971 when the Regent died having already arranged for a Bourbon to succeed him.

The restoration was followed by a rapid and genuine transition. The Constitution of 1978 created a federal monarchy in which residual powers rest with seventeen Autonomous Communities, made Catalan, Basque and Galician co-official in their own territories, and was ratified by referendum. Spain then did what most states leaving a long dictatorship do not: it refused an amnesty, prosecuted the surviving officers of the regime, opened the mass graves and built the memorials. The reckoning began in 1979, has never formally concluded, and is generally regarded as the most complete accounting any European state has made with its own recent past.

It has one exemption, and the exemption is the size of the Crown. The King reigns because the Regent chose him. The dynasty’s title in Spanish law descends from a Law of Succession enacted by the regime that the same state has since found criminal, and no government has been willing to examine what follows. The Constitution’s ratification is offered as the cure. Republicans reply that a referendum on a constitutional package is not a referendum on a monarchy, that Spain has never held one, and that a reckoning with a single institution carved out of it is a reckoning with a hole in the middle.

Spain is a member of the European Concert and was not among its founding powers. It claims Gibraltar, restates the claim annually and does not pursue it. It holds Ceuta and Melilla, which Morocco claims, and defends them by an argument it refuses to accept from Britain.

Etymology

The name descends through Latin Hispania from a Punic original, most probably i-shepan-im, usually glossed as land of rabbits: Carthaginian traders are supposed to have mistaken the peninsula’s rabbits for the hyraxes of North Africa. The derivation is not certain, competes with several others, and is repeated in Spain with some relish precisely because it is unheroic.

The formal style is the Kingdom of Spain, Reino de España, restored in 1971 and retained by the Constitution of 1978. Between 1931 and 1936 the state was the Spanish Republic. Between 1947 and 1971 it was, in its own law, the Kingdom of Spain with the throne vacant and a Regent exercising the royal authority. The regime chose that formula deliberately: it wanted the legitimacy of monarchy without a monarch to constrain it, and it left the country a kingdom for twenty-four years in which no one was king.

Spain is also, in older constitutional usage, el Estado de las Autonomías, and in newer usage la Federación, and which a speaker chooses is a fair guide to their politics. The Constitution uses neither, and speaks of the Spanish Nation and the Autonomous Communities in the same sentence, which was the point.

History

Before 1931

Spain entered the modern period as a great power in retreat, and the losses that mattered most were in America.

It joined the Four Year War in 1779, a year after France, and fought Britain on two fronts, going on after the American war ended at Boston that October until the separate European peace of 1783. Bernardo de Gálvez’s Gulf campaign succeeded completely and took Florida. The Great Siege of Gibraltar, Spain’s principal military effort of the war and the longest siege in the history of the British armed forces, failed after three years and seven months. The pairing has never left Spanish memory: the war in which Spain won a province and lost a rock.

The Napoleonic period brought French occupation, a Bonapartist king in Madrid and a national rising. The Regency that held out was assisted from 1813 by a limited Gulf expedition against French and Josephist forces holding the Gulf posts, in which UKA and British forces acted as co-belligerents under separate commands. Spanish accounts treat the assistance as real and secondary, and the American accounts agree.

The nineteenth century was a long constitutional argument conducted partly by force, through Carlist wars, pronouncements, a brief First Republic and a restored monarchy. The American empire dissolved. Cuba remained, and in 1873 Spain prepared an intervention there which was abandoned when Britain threatened to invade, an episode Spanish historiography treats as the moment the imperial position became formally indefensible.

In 1898 Spain lost a short war to the United Kingdom of America and with it Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines. The defeat was total, humiliating and generative: the writers who responded to it are still called the Generation of 98, and the modern Spanish habit of national self-examination begins there. The loss is long settled and does not affect relations with the Realm.

The Republic, 1931 to 1936

The monarchy of Alfonso XIII had survived the loss of the empire, a bloody colonial war in Morocco and its own complicity in a military dictatorship during the 1920s. It did not survive the municipal elections of April 1931, which returned republican majorities in almost every city in Spain. Alfonso XIII left the country without abdicating, and the Spanish Republic was proclaimed on 14 April.

The Republic lasted five years. It wrote a constitution of considerable ambition which separated Church and state, gave women the vote, provided for regional autonomy and began an agrarian reform. It also governed a country in which those reforms were regarded by a substantial minority as an assault on religion, property and the unity of Spain, and it governed during a world depression.

The record is neither the tragedy of pure victims its defenders later made of it nor the chaos its enemies described. The Republic held free elections, alternated power peacefully between left and right, and was the most democratic government Spain had ever had. It also presided over church burnings it failed to prevent, a rising in Asturias in 1934 that it suppressed with the army and considerable brutality, and a final year in which political murder became ordinary. It was a democracy in serious trouble, and it was overthrown rather than collapsing, and Spanish historiography since the reckoning has been careful to keep both halves of that sentence.

The Civil War, 1936 to 1939

A section of the army rose on 17 July 1936. The rising failed in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and the industrial north, and succeeded in Old Castile, Navarre, Galicia and much of the south and west. Spain split roughly in half and the war lasted two years and eight months.

It was decided from outside. The rebels had the better part of the professional army but were cut off from their African garrisons and short of aircraft, transport, fuel and credit. Fascist France supplied all four. French transport aircraft ferried the Army of Africa across the Strait in the first weeks, which is the single act without which the rising would probably have failed; French aircraft, armour, fuel and instructors followed for the duration; and the debt was settled after the war in ore, foodstuffs and political obligation.

The most notorious act of the war was carried out by French aircraft. The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937, on a market day, against a civilian population of no military significance, was conducted as a deliberate experiment in the destruction of a town from the air, and its results were studied and applied in Europe three years later. Picasso’s painting of it hangs in Madrid and has never been lent to France.

The Republic’s foreign position was the mirror image and it was fatal. The parliamentary powers declined to sell it arms, under a policy of non-intervention observed by everyone who was not intervening. There was no Soviet Union to supply it. The Russian Republic, authoritarian, anti-communist and hostile to everything the Spanish left represented, supplied nothing at all. International volunteers came in tens of thousands and could not make up the difference. The Republic lost because one side was armed by a great power and the other was not.

Both sides killed prisoners and civilians in numbers, and the article does not balance them into equivalence. The rebels’ killing was systematic, was directed from the top, was intended to remake Spanish society by removing part of it, and continued for a decade after the fighting stopped. The Republic’s was largely uncontrolled, was worst in the first months, was progressively suppressed by its own government, and ended with the war. That distinction is the settled finding of Spanish courts and is not a matter of political opinion in Spain.

The Regency, 1939 to 1971

Madrid fell on 28 March 1939. The victorious commander, General Rafael Montero, held power for thirty-two years thereafter and until his death.

The regime is best described as conservative, authoritarian and Catholic, and this is not a softening. It was not a fascist state on the French model, and it destroyed its own fascist party as an independent force within five years, absorbing it into a single official movement in which soldiers, monarchists, landowners and clergy all held positions and none held control. Its organising principles were the unity of Spain, the authority of the army, the social teaching of the Church as it understood it, and the exclusion from public life of everyone who had supported the Republic. It had no programme for transforming society and did not want one. It wanted Spain quiet.

It achieved that by means the Spanish state has since found criminal in open court.

The killing continued until roughly 1950 and is now judicially established at between 120,000 and 150,000 people executed or disappeared after the fighting ended, in addition to the war dead. Some 90,000 remain in unmarked graves, of whom roughly two thirds have been identified since exhumations began. A system of prison labour put several hundred thousand political prisoners to work on canals, railways and monuments, including the basilica the Regent built for himself in the hills north-west of Madrid and in which he was buried. Catalan, Basque and Galician were driven out of schools, courts, publishing, broadcasting and public signage, and both Basque and Catalan came closer to extinction in those years than at any point in their history.

And there were the children. Infants were removed from imprisoned republican mothers and from unmarried women, registered as the natural children of approved families, and given away. It began as policy in the 1940s, under a doctrine that the children of the defeated could be saved from their parents’ politics, and it continued as a private trade in maternity wards long after the politics had gone out of it, into the 1980s. The Church’s institutional involvement was direct, through the orders that ran the maternity hospitals and the clergy who signed the registrations, and it has never been satisfactorily explained by the Spanish Church.

In 1947 the regime enacted a Law of Succession declaring Spain a kingdom, leaving the throne vacant, naming Montero Regent for life and reserving to him the right to designate the person who would occupy it. Spain was thereafter a monarchy without a monarch, which suited the regime exactly.

The Second Great War

Spain was neutral in the Second Great War and was not impartial.

The Regent owed his victory to France, and France was the aggressor. Supplies crossed the Pyrenees to the French war economy throughout, and several thousand Spanish volunteers went north and fought in French uniform. Spain did not enter the war and the Allied powers did not force the issue: a neutral Spain leaking supplies was judged preferable to a belligerent Spain astride the western Mediterranean and the approaches to the Atlantic, which would have made Gibraltar untenable and closed the sea. The calculation cost Allied lives and was made knowingly.

What followed was not what the regime expected. France, the aggressor, was defeated, partitioned at the Versailles Conference, and then rebuilt, reconstituted as a constitutional empire and readmitted to Europe. Spain, which had only leaked, was left out of everything: excluded from the reconstructed League of Nations until 1955, from reconstruction credit entirely, and from the alliance system that formed after 1949.

The obvious grievance never took hold, and the reason is the thing itself. Spain’s settled verdict on those years is that it backed the wrong side and knew it at the time. The isolation is understood domestically as having been deserved and, in retrospect, cheap: the country that supplied the aggressor paid in a lost decade, while the aggressor paid in partition. The grievance a Spaniard is most likely to express about the postwar period is directed at the Regent, for having put Spain in a position where isolation was the correct treatment.

The end of the empire

Spain gave up what remained of its overseas possessions between 1945 and 1952, faster than any other European power and against the instincts of the regime that did it.

The Moroccan protectorate, Ifni, the Saharan territories and the Gulf of Guinea colonies were relinquished in a sequence of settlements concluded under sustained Allied pressure, and the pressure was explicit about its terms. Spain bought its rehabilitation with the empire. A regime that had called the African possessions the foundation of national greatness surrendered them in seven years because the alternative was to be treated as France had been treated, and Montero, whose own career had been made in the Moroccan wars, signed the instruments himself.

Ceuta and Melilla were not surrendered. They had been Spanish since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, before Morocco existed as a state, were held to be constitutionally part of Spain rather than colonies, and were expressly excluded from the settlements.

The restoration and the Constitution

Montero designated his successor in 1969. He passed over Don Juan, son of Alfonso XIII and the legitimate heir, who had spent thirty years criticising the regime from Portugal, and named instead Don Juan’s son, educated in Spain under the regime’s supervision. Montero died in November 1971 and the young man was proclaimed Alfonso XIV three days later.

The expectation, held by the regime and by most foreign observers, was that the new King would preside over a softened continuation. He did not. Within four years he had dismissed the regime’s last President of the Government, appointed a reformer, and put the dismantling of the system to the Cortes that the system had created, which voted itself out of existence in 1976.

The reason the transition could go as fast as it did is not to the King’s credit and is not usually disputed. The Spanish army was in no position to stop it. Its founding act had been to win a civil war with the help of fascist France, and France had gone on to start the Second Great War, lose it and be partitioned for it. An officer corps whose legitimacy rested on that association had spent twenty-five years watching the association become the worst thing a European institution could be associated with. In 1936 the army could destroy a republic. In 1975 it could not credibly threaten one, and everybody involved knew it.

The Constitution of 1978 was drafted by a committee of seven, agreed across the whole spectrum of the new Cortes, and ratified by referendum on 6 December 1978 with 88 per cent in favour on a turnout of 67 per cent. It established a parliamentary monarchy, a bill of rights, and a genuinely federal territorial settlement: seventeen Autonomous Communities holding residual powers, an enumerated and limited list of exclusively federal competences, a Senate constituted as a territorial chamber with real power over territorial legislation, and a constitutional guarantee of the Communities’ position that the central state cannot revoke by ordinary majority.

That last provision is why Spain’s regional question is quieter than the country’s history would predict. The Communities were not granted autonomy as a concession a future government could withdraw; the powers are theirs by constitutional right, and Madrid holds only what the Constitution lists. Catalan, Basque and Galician nationalism remain substantial forces, govern their Communities regularly, and press continually for more. Independence is a minority position in all three and has been since the 1980s, and the reason usually given by voters who have considered and declined it is that they already have what independence was for.

The reckoning

In 1977 the new Cortes debated an amnesty for the acts of the regime, on the reasoning that has governed almost every comparable transition: that the past could not be prosecuted without endangering the present. The bill was defeated. It was opposed by the left, which had most of the victims, and by enough of the centre to sink it, and the argument that carried was made by a deputy who had spent eleven years in the regime’s prisons: that a state which begins by declaring certain crimes unexaminable has told its citizens which of them do not count.

What followed took thirty years.

The Accounting Act of 1979 established a tribunal with jurisdiction over acts committed under colour of authority between 1936 and 1975, disapplied limitation periods for killing and disappearance, and required the state to search for the dead. The Madrid trials ran from 1980 to 1994 and produced 611 prosecutions and 388 convictions, mostly of men in their seventies and eighties, and mostly for killings after the war rather than during it. Twelve were ministers. The Regent’s principal security chief was convicted in 1983 and died in prison in 1989.

The exhumations began in 1982 and have not stopped. Roughly two thirds of the ninety thousand have been recovered and identified, the work is done by the Communities under federal funding, and the annual report to the Cortes is a fixed parliamentary occasion.

The basilica north-west of Madrid, built with prisoner labour and holding the Regent’s tomb, was the hardest single question and took eleven years to answer. Montero was exhumed in 1994 and reburied in a family plot without ceremony. The site was reconsecrated as a memorial to all the dead of the war and the repression together, which satisfied nobody entirely and has been visited by four million people since.

The stolen children were the last and are the least resolved. A commission reported in 2004, a registry was opened, and DNA matching has reunited some thousands of families. Prosecutions largely failed because the doctors, nurses and religious who did it were dead. The Church issued an apology in 2011 which is widely regarded in Spain as inadequate, and the question of the orders’ records, many never opened, is still before the courts.

Spain’s reckoning is studied elsewhere and is generally judged the most complete a European state has made with its own past. Spaniards are less impressed by it than foreigners are, for the reason set out below.

Geography

Spain occupies about 506,000 square kilometres, five sixths of the Iberian peninsula, with Portugal to the west, France and Andorra across the Pyrenees to the north-east, and Gibraltar at the southern tip. It includes the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands off the African coast, and Ceuta and Melilla on the Moroccan shore.

It is the most mountainous country in western Europe after Switzerland, and the defining feature is the Meseta Central, a tableland at six to seven hundred metres covering most of the interior and ringed by mountains on every side. Madrid sits in the middle of it at 650 metres and is the highest capital in Europe. The Meseta is dry, hot in summer, cold in winter and thinly populated, and the emptiness of interior Spain is now a political subject in its own right: several provinces have population densities below those of Lapland, and the phrase la España vaciada, the emptied Spain, names both the fact and the grievance.

The great rivers run mostly west to the Atlantic: the Duero, the Tagus, the Guadiana and the Guadalquivir. Only the Ebro runs east to the Mediterranean. Water is the country’s central resource question and its most reliable source of interregional friction, since the wet north and the irrigated, intensively farmed south-east have opposed interests and the Constitution gives both a hearing.

The Strait of Gibraltar is fourteen kilometres wide. It is one of the busiest waterways in the world and it is also the frontier across which income per head falls further and faster than anywhere else on earth, which makes it the principal route of irregular migration into the Concert and Spain’s most persistent practical problem in Concert politics.

Government and politics

The Crown

The King or Queen of Spain is head of state, is politically neutral, and exercises no discretionary power that has survived into practice. The Crown proposes a candidate for the presidency of the Government after consulting the parliamentary parties, promulgates laws, and is commander-in-chief in a formal sense.

The incumbent is Queen Isabel III, who acceded in 2014 on the abdication of her father Alfonso XIV. Alfonso XIV reigned for forty-three years, was designated by a dictator, dismantled the dictator’s state, and presided over the trials of the men who had chosen him, which is a sequence without a close parallel anywhere.

The Cortes Generales

The Congress of Deputies has 350 members elected by proportional representation in provincial constituencies for four-year terms, and sustains the Government. The President of the Government is head of the executive; the incumbent is Elena Sanchís, in office since 2025.

The Senate has 204 members and is, unlike its counterpart in most parliamentary states, a working chamber. It is constituted territorially, each Autonomous Community returning members through its own legislature, and it holds a genuine veto over legislation touching the distribution of competences, the financing of the Communities and any alteration of the territorial settlement. The design was the price of the 1978 agreement and it has functioned as intended: the central government cannot legislate the Communities’ powers away, because the Communities sit in the chamber that would have to consent.

The Autonomous Communities

The seventeen Communities are the federal units. Each has its own statute of autonomy, parliament, government and administration, and each holds the residue of power: the Constitution lists what belongs to the federation and what is held jointly, and everything unlisted is the Community’s.

They run health, education, housing, policing in three of the seventeen, social services, culture, language policy, agriculture and much of the tax base. The Basque Country and Navarre collect nearly all taxation raised in their territory and remit an agreed sum to Madrid, an arrangement inherited from historic fiscal privileges and preserved in 1978. Catalonia does not, which is the largest single grievance in Spanish territorial politics and the subject of a renegotiation continuously in progress since 2010.

Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia are additionally recognised in their statutes as historic nationalities, a term the Constitution uses and pointedly does not define.

Parties

Politics is conducted between a social democratic party and a Christian democratic one, which alternate, together with a left party to the first’s left, a liberal party in the centre, and the nationalist parties of Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, Navarre and the Canaries, which hold the balance of power more often than not and use it to extract territorial concessions rather than to enter coalitions.

There is a republican current, running through the left and the nationalist parties rather than forming a party of its own, which is discussed below.

There is no significant party of the far right. The reason usually given is that the reckoning removed the possibility: a movement that would need to defend or minimise the regime cannot easily be built in a country where the regime’s crimes were established in open court, by name, with the bodies produced in evidence. Whether this is durable is a live argument among Spanish political scientists, several of whom observe that it rests on a memory rather than on a mechanism.

The question of the Crown’s title

This is the unresolved question of Spanish public life, and the article does not settle it.

The Spanish Crown’s title in law descends from the Law of Succession of 1947, an act of the regime, under which Montero as Regent designated Alfonso XIV. Every subsequent step is regular. The starting point is not.

The state’s answer is that the Constitution of 1978 refounded the monarchy on a new basis. The Crown exists because the Constitution says it does, the Constitution was ratified by 88 per cent of those voting, and the 1947 Law was repealed with the rest of the regime’s legislation. Whatever the origin, the institution now rests on the consent of the Spanish people, expressed in the ordinary way.

The republican answer has three parts and they are not easily dismissed. The referendum of 1978 was on a package containing the bill of rights, the Communities and the monarchy together, and nobody who wanted the first two could vote against the third; Spain has never put the monarchy to a separate vote and no government has proposed one. The reckoning disapplied limitation periods, voided the regime’s judicial acts and reversed its convictions, on the principle that an unlawful authority cannot confer lawful title, and it made an exception for one act. And the exception is not incidental: it is the act that determined who would be head of state.

The Crown’s own position is silence, which is constitutionally correct and politically unsatisfying to everyone. Neither Alfonso XIV nor Isabel III has addressed the question in public. Alfonso XIV came closest in his abdication message in 2014, in a passage quoted since by both sides.

Polling finds consistent majorities for retaining the monarchy and consistent majorities for holding a referendum on it, which are not contradictory positions and are held together by about a third of respondents. No government of either party has been willing to call one. The standing private argument against, made by senior figures in both large parties and never in public, is that the monarchy is probably safe, that the campaign would not be, and that Spain’s last constitutional argument was settled at a cost it does not wish to revisit.

Law and judiciary

Spain is a civil law jurisdiction of the continental type, with codified private, criminal and administrative law descending from the nineteenth-century codes and much rewritten since 1978.

The Constitutional Court in Madrid rules on the constitutionality of legislation and in practice spends most of its time on the boundary between federal and Community competence, which is the busiest constitutional frontier in Europe. The Supreme Court heads the ordinary judiciary. The National Court retains the jurisdiction over the acts of the regime conferred by the Accounting Act of 1979, which has never been repealed and under which cases are still occasionally opened.

The judiciary’s own conduct under the regime was examined by the reckoning and the finding was severe: the courts had functioned throughout as an instrument of the repression, military tribunals had tried civilians for the whole period, and no judge resigned. Convictions handed down under the regime were voided in bulk in 1985 rather than reviewed individually, on the ground that individual review would concede the tribunals had been courts.

Foreign relations

The European Concert

Spain joined the European Concert at its founding in 2027 as a member and not as one of the five founding powers, a distinction Spanish commentary notices more than the Concert’s institutions do. Membership is broadly popular and the Concert is more trusted in Spain than most national institutions, which is common among members that entered a European order after a dictatorship.

Spain’s Concert priorities are the southern frontier, agricultural and water policy, and cohesion funding for the interior and the south. Its persistent difficulty is that the Concert’s external border in the Strait is Spain’s problem and everybody’s rule.

Gibraltar

Spain has claimed Gibraltar since 1713 and has never withdrawn the claim. It is restated annually before the League’s decolonisation committee and is not otherwise pursued.

The Spanish case is territorial rather than moral. Utrecht was a negotiated peace and Spain signed it; the argument is that Article X ceded a town and its fortifications and nothing else, that Britain has since occupied an isthmus the treaty expressly withheld, that the decolonisation principle requires the restoration of territorial integrity, and that the population of Gibraltar is not a colonial people entitled to self-determination but a population introduced after the original inhabitants were driven out in 1704.

The frontier was closed by Spain at the end of 1954, after a royal visit to the Rock on the 250th anniversary of the capture was treated in Madrid as a provocation, and it stayed closed for thirty-one years, which is fourteen years longer than the regime that closed it.

That the restored monarchy kept it shut until 1985 is the part Spaniards find hardest to explain, and the article states it plainly. The closure had become the one piece of the regime’s foreign policy with genuine popular support, reopening would have been the new democracy’s first visible retreat, and successive governments judged they could not afford it while everything else was in flux. The Agreement of Algeciras in 1985 supplied the necessary cover: Spain reopened the frontier and obtained in exchange formal recognition of its position on the isthmus without conceding sovereignty, joint civil use of the airport, and a labour regime for the Campo de Gibraltar. It could be presented as a settlement rather than a surrender, which is what it needed to be.

The claim has been dormant since. Approximately sixteen thousand residents of the Campo de Gibraltar, one of the poorer regions of the country, now cross to work on the Rock each day, and no Spanish government has been willing to take an action that would cost them their livelihoods in pursuit of an objective it does not expect to achieve. This is understood in Madrid and is not said aloud.

Ceuta and Melilla

Morocco claims Ceuta and Melilla and has done since 1956. Spain refuses, and the grounds of refusal are the difficulty.

The Spanish position is that the cities have been Spanish since before Morocco existed, that they are constitutionally Autonomous Cities of Spain rather than colonies, and that their inhabitants are Spanish and wish to remain so. That last argument is the one Spain rejects when Britain makes it about Gibraltar.

Spanish diplomacy answers that the cases are not alike, since Ceuta and Melilla were acquired before the Moroccan state existed and their populations were not installed after an expulsion. Moroccan and British diplomacy both reply that this is a distinction of dates rather than of principle. The point is made to Spanish representatives at the League every year, immediately after they have finished the Gibraltar submission, and the exchange has become a fixed and slightly embarrassing feature of the committee’s proceedings.

The United Kingdom of America

Relations with the UKA are good, ordinary and untroubled. 1898 is long settled and is not raised. The Realm stands outside the Concert as its external patron, has consistently declined to take a position on Gibraltar on the ground that it is a European matter, and Spain has been content with that silence and has never pressed for more.

Defence

The Spanish Armed Forces number approximately 120,000 and are configured for territorial defence, maritime patrol of the Strait and the approaches to the Canaries, and expeditionary contributions to League operations.

The army’s relationship with the state is the most closely regulated in western Europe, for reasons that need no explanation. The Constitution assigns it no role as guarantor of anything, officers are subject to the ordinary courts, military jurisdiction over civilians was abolished in 1978, and the promotion system was rebuilt in the 1980s specifically to break the internal patronage networks that survived the transition. The reforms were not resisted. An officer corps whose institutional memory is of having won a war with fascist French assistance and then having been unable to prevent anything for forty years does not command the deference required to resist.

Spain is a member of the Atlantic Treaty Organization and hosts allied basing on the Atlantic coast and in the Canaries. It is not a nuclear power and its accession treaty forecloses the question.

Economy

Spain has a nominal product of approximately A£1.42 trillion and a per capita figure near A£29,500, which places it in the middle rank of Concert economies: comfortably developed, persistently behind the north-western European average, and unable to close the gap.

The shape of that gap is the regime’s principal surviving legacy. The autarky of the 1940s and 1950s was an economic catastrophe conducted on doctrinal grounds, in which a country cut off from credit and trade attempted self-sufficiency and produced hunger, rationing until 1952 and a decade of no growth at all. Policy was reversed in 1959 by technocrats the Regent did not much like and could not do without, and the fifteen years that followed produced growth rates among the highest in the world, from a base that should never have been so low. Spain lost roughly a generation of development between 1939 and 1959 and has never made it up.

The modern economy is services-heavy. Tourism is the largest single sector and brings some eighty million visitors a year, a number Spaniards regard with a mixture of gratitude and irritation that has lately become a political subject in Barcelona, the Balearics and the Canaries. Agriculture is highly productive, heavily irrigated in the south-east, and the largest consumer of a water supply that climate change is reducing. There is a substantial motor industry, mostly foreign-owned. Spain is among the leading producers of wind and solar power in the world, which is the one field in which its geography is an unambiguous asset.

The persistent weaknesses are a dual labour market in which permanent and temporary employment carry radically different protections, an unemployment rate that has not fallen below eight per cent in fifty years and doubles in every downturn, low productivity growth, and a north-south and coast-interior divide that the emptied interior has turned into an electoral force.

Demographics and society

The population is approximately forty-eight million, concentrated overwhelmingly on the coasts and in Madrid. It is among the oldest in Europe, with a fertility rate near 1.2 and a life expectancy among the highest in the world, and it has grown since the 1990s only through immigration, principally from Latin America, Morocco and eastern Europe.

Spanish society is markedly more liberal than its recent history predicts and than the country was in 1975. The transformation of the position of women, the legal position of homosexuality and the practice of religion all happened faster in Spain than anywhere else in Europe, and the usual explanation is that a society which has recently established in court that its previous moral authorities were criminal does not defer to them for long afterwards.

Languages

Castilian Spanish is the national language and is spoken by essentially everyone. Catalan is co-official in Catalonia, the Balearics and, as Valencian, in Valencia; Basque in the Basque Country and part of Navarre; Galician in Galicia. Each is the ordinary language of administration, schooling and public life in its own Community, and each Community determines its own language policy.

All three were suppressed under the regime and driven from schools, courts, publishing and public signage. Their recovery is regarded in Spain as the plainest measurable success of the 1978 settlement, and the numbers support it: Catalan and Galician have more speakers now than at any point in their history, and Basque, which was in genuine danger of extinction, has reversed its decline and is now acquired by a majority of children in the Basque Country.

The federal arrangement is not free of friction. Castilian-speaking families in Catalonia and the Basque Country periodically litigate the language of instruction, the Constitutional Court hears such cases regularly, and the resulting judgments satisfy nobody. This is an argument about balance and not about existence, which is a considerable distance from where it started.

Religion

Spain is culturally Catholic and no longer practising. About half the population describes itself as Catholic and under a fifth attends with any regularity, in a country where attendance was compulsory in practice within living memory.

The Church’s position is the most damaged of any national institution and the damage is self-inflicted. It blessed the rising in 1936, described the war as a crusade, supplied the regime with its moral vocabulary for thirty-five years, and was directly implicated through its orders and clergy in the removal of children from republican and unmarried mothers. Some of the clergy resisted, particularly in the Basque Country, and were shot for it, and the Church did not defend them.

The reckoning reached the Church later than the state and less completely. The apology of 2011 is regarded as inadequate, several archives remain closed, and the argument over the orders’ maternity records is still in the courts. A younger and largely blameless clergy now serves a country that associates their institution with a regime none of them were alive for, and says so.

Culture and daily life

Spain keeps a daily rhythm later than the rest of Europe and has debated changing it for decades without doing so. Meals, work and television all run one to two hours behind the continental pattern.

The country’s cultural self-understanding is regional before it is national, and the Constitution’s territorial settlement formalised something that already existed. A Spaniard’s first identification is generally with a city or a Community, and the national one sits above it without much friction outside the three historic nationalities. Festivals are local, enormous and frequent, and are the principal expression of civic life in most of the country.

Football is the dominant sport and its two largest clubs carry political history nobody involved is allowed to forget. Spanish cinema and literature since 1978 have returned to the war and the regime continually, to the point where younger Spanish writers complain publicly about the expectation, and the complaint is itself now a genre.

Food is regional to a degree that resists national description, and the Spanish position is that there is no Spanish cuisine, only the cuisines of the places in Spain.

Symbols

The flag is three horizontal bands of red, yellow and purple, the yellow twice the width of each of the others, in a proportion of 2:3. The field is plain and carries no arms.

The design is a settlement and everyone in Spain reads it as one. The proportions are those of the Rojigualda, the red and yellow flag of the Bourbon monarchy, which the regime also flew for thirty-five years. The colours are those of the Republic of 1931, whose flag was red, yellow and purple in equal thirds and which republicans had flown at demonstrations throughout the dictatorship. The 1978 flag is the Republic’s colours in the monarchy’s proportions, and the compromise was reached in the constitutional committee in a single afternoon after weeks of deadlock, on a proposal made by a monarchist.

The arms were deliberately removed from the field. The Rojigualda had carried the royal arms for most of its history and the regime had carried its own device on them, and the drafters concluded that a flag altered by every government to say whose Spain it was should stop saying it. The arms exist and are used by the state, on documents, buildings and the ensign: quarterly Castile, León, Aragon and Navarre, with Granada in base, between the Pillars of Hercules bearing the motto Plus Ultra, and ensigned with the royal crown. The crown is on the arms and not on the flag, a distinction the drafters made explicitly and recorded in the committee minutes: the arms are the state’s and the flag is the nation’s.

The flag is mildly contested rather than bitterly so. A minority of republicans still fly the equal-thirds tricolour, holding that the compromise absorbed their symbol rather than honouring it, and a smaller number on the right decline to fly the purple at all. Neither position is common, and the ordinary Spanish view is that the flag is the only object in the country on which both halves of the twentieth century are visible and neither wins.

The anthem is the Marcha Real, among the oldest in Europe, and it has no words. Lyrics have been written for it repeatedly, including by the regime, and none has ever been adopted. The last serious attempt was abandoned in 2008 after five days.

Constitution Day, 6 December, is the national day, and it commemorates a referendum rather than a battle, an accession or a discovery.

Trivia

See also

• Gibraltar, claimed by Spain since 1713 and not pursued since 1985
• France, the fascist power whose intervention decided the Civil War and whose defeat discredited the Spanish army
• The Four Year War, in which Spain took Florida and failed before Gibraltar
• The Second Great War, through which Spain was neutral and not impartial
• The European Concert, which Spain joined at its founding as a member rather than a founding power
• The Republic of Cuba, lost in 1898 along with Porto Rico and the Philippines
• The United Kingdom of America, with which 1898 is long settled
• The Kingdom of Morocco, whose protectorate Spain gave up in 1950 and whose claim on Ceuta and Melilla it refuses

Spain · Federal Monarchy · Europe · Foreign Nations · Unresolved Questions