The Carlist Wars and the Spanish Civil War: The History of the Conflicts that Divided Spain in the Last 200 Years

Thinking of Spain as a modern nation state today distorts the complicated reality that the Iberian Peninsula faced in the past. Spain was a nation in progress, consisting of regions united under the Spanish crown, but with strong regional identities based on different historical and cultural experiences. The largest entities were the kingdoms of León and Castile, but Spain also included the kingdoms of Navarre, Andalusia, Granada, Jaén, Aragon, and Valencia. There were also the principalities of Asturias and Catalonia, the lordship of Vizcaya, and both Guipúzcoa and Alava were “exempted provinces.” Navarre, Aragon, and Catalonia had separate Cortes, which were versions of parliaments (Parker 18-19). This complex system of entities granted privilege to local power structures over the concept of a unified nation and made administration difficult, because there were few standards that applied to all of Spain. Many of the regions had special laws that respected and allowed traditional institutions, administrative patterns, and cultural patterns. These local and regional rights were called fueros and were fiercely defended against centralization.
The Spanish Civil War has exerted a powerful impact on the historical imagination. Without question, the conflict was a key moment in the 20th century, a precursor to World War II, and an encapsulation of the rise of extremist movements in the 1930s, but it was also a complex narrative in and of itself, even as it offered a truly international theatre of war. It marked one of the seminal moments, along with the 1929 Wall Street Crash, between the two apocalyptic wars of the early 20th century, and since it occurred between 1936 and 1939, Spain proved to be a testing ground of tactics, weaponry, and ideology ahead of World War II.