ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests how autarky, the state's strategy of economic self-sufficiency, can be explained by the particular conception of the nation which the regime sought to foster. The obvious brutalities of 'economic self-sufficiency', which contributed to the devastating scarcities of the 1940s, derived from this determination to punish, while the pursuit of autarky itself facilitated the intervention of the state at all levels in society. The chapter argues that autarky under the Spanish dictatorship can only be more fully explained by looking at the will of the Franco regime to shape society very brutally through the imposition of a particular view of Spanishness. In the post-1939 period the concepts were built upon the various meanings of the traditional dichotomy in Spain of degeneration and regeneration. The nature of Spanish nationalism in the immediate post-Civil War period can be discerned by a broad understanding of what autarky and regeneration meant in the context of complete social and political domination.
