ABSTRACT
The question of whether authoritarian states wage war more successfully than democracies has long been a source of argument for historians. At first glance the experience of the Spanish Civil War might suggest that advantage lies with the authoritarian state’s speed in decision making and the execution of orders. However, Republican Spain during the Civil War should not be compared to France, Britain and the USA in the world wars, because so much of the Republican government’s effort was aimed at re-establishing its authority and legitimacy in the face of the popular revolution which greeted the military rising. Moreover, in order to accomplish this difficult task and fight a war, the Republic had to stretch the concept of democracy to its furthest limits, concentrating power in the executive branch: a badly depleted Cortes, devoid of conservative and moderate deputies, met only occasionally to sanction all of the government’s decisions. The anarchists attempted to carry out their libertarian communist revolution in rural and urban areas, collectivizing land and the means of production, and to fight a revolutionary, rather than a conventional, war, which included the recourse to terror as a weapon. Actions such as these prevented the Republican government from assuming, from the start, the leadership of the war against the rebellious army, and were to earn the Republic much bad publicity abroad. The remaining factions and parties within the Republican camp, in order both to curb this revolution and create a more disciplined military machine, attempted, successfully, to recreate the Popular Front in wartime. The role of the Communist Party is particularly important in this regard. The communists were at the forefront of the attempt to re-establish the Republic’s legal control
over the whole of the territory controlled by its military forces. The communists also served as a link to the USSR, the sole foreign power to supply the Republican war machine in any significant form, which necessarily strengthened their hand within the Popular Front coalition.
The Spanish Republic barely survived the military coup of 18 July 1936. It did so in a very feeble position, not least because the army had played, up to the date of the rising, an important role in deterring revolutionary action. Most anarchists, whose principal organization, the CNT, lacked a centralized command structure, had viewed the Republic with extreme distrust since 1931. The material conditions of the CNT’s membership had not improved significantly with the coming of the Republic, and the state had continued to be identified as the ultimate source of oppression. Individual anarchists continued to feel duty-bound to rise against the state whenever possible. Without the strength of the army and of most of the members of the various police forces to prop up the state, power fell to the street. The first response of the Spanish government to the coup was to seek an accommodation with the rebels. This was attempted by Diego Martínez Barrio, whose deliberately moderate government lasted less than twenty-four hours. Negotiations having failed, however, there was no recourse but to arm the people organized in union and party militias, the decision being taken by the incoming prime minister, José Giral. This meant arming many who had long sworn to destroy all vestiges of the state, whatever its current guise. In other words, the government, by arming the militias, armed many of its most intransigent enemies, who used this opportunity to further their aims. For the CNT and FAI militiamen, who in Barcelona had to seize arms, the Generalitat having refused initially to arm the people, the opportunities to rebuild society along libertarian lines opened up by this set of circumstances could not be wasted. In the immediate aftermath of the rising the rebels did not seem, at least in Barcelona, to pose too great a threat. In the Republican zone, therefore, the war became a tale of a complete breakdown of authority and the subsequent attempt to rebuild it-a process which had many pitfalls.
