SPANISH HISTORY PROGRAM
SHOCKED INTO MODERNITY: TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPAIN, 1898-2006
Number of sessions: 30
Length of each session: 1,5 h
Total length of the module: 45 hours
CONTENT
1. Old and New Traumas, 1898-1931
1.1 The Background: a century of civil wars, political instability with the lack of a “civic
culture”
1.2 Spain ceases to be a transoceanic state (1898): the need for a new perspective, in the face of
contradictory politics of “identity”
1.3 The search for "Regeneration": political and cultural pessimism and literary recovery
1.4 Spanish expansionism in Morocco as a substitute for participation in World War I: the
social cost of a low intensity war as against the economic benefits of neutrality
1.5 Parliamentary collapse and the challenge of new political alternatives
1.6 Militarism wins out: developmental dictatorship as a short-term working synthesis
2. The Great Local Spanish Debate surrounding legitimacy: Monarchy or Republic?, 1931-1939
2.2 The high point of Spanish cultural expansion in literature and the arts
2.3 The II Republic and its many contradictions
2.4 The increased rhythm of instability: right and left coups
2.5 Counter mobilizations: Popular front, conservative unity and the last failed coup, which
means war
2.6 A private Spanish affair becomes an international issue: the symbolic dimensions of the
Spanish Civil War as a collective psychological wound
2.7 The ideologization of culture, with the result of ongoing stasis
2.8 The unexpected “solution” to the socio-political debate: a seemingly fascist dictatorship
which wins the internal war
3. The Franco “régime”, 1939-1975
3.1 Spain's devastated economy and a bastard political system, impossible to define: the hidden
battle for the future
3.2 Franco and Hitlerian Europe, Franco and the Allies
3.3 The “régime” is saved by Allied contradictions, then by Perón, then by the Cold War and
U.S. strategic needs
3.4 From backward agrarian society to consumer economy
3.5 Preparing for the end: factional struggles inside the “régime”
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4. The “Democratic Transition”: overcoming the trauma of the Civil War, 1975-now
4.1 Franco's death and the definitive loss of empire (Western Sahara)
4.2 The new monarchy: improvising legitimacy and inventing democratic consensus as you go
4.3 Long term socialist government and apparent stability
4.4 The implications of European and NATO integration
4.5 The shallowness of the new political: the conservative reforming alternative to socialist
reform
4.6 Deep social changes: a society goes from Catholic conservatism to gay marriage and mass
outside immigration
4.7 Postmodern discontents against the visible triumph of “modernity”
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