Spanish Civil War
The newly established republic in the years before the war was a system where a so called "old spain" lost its power to "new spain." The Civil War was an effect of the unwillingness of "old Spain" to recede from the political scene. A main cause of the Civil War, then, was not (as it usually is) an emergence of a new social and economic class but the unwillingness of the traditional aristocracy, land owners, "old" army and the church to allow such modern political ideals to run the government. Furthermore, the new republic before the war supported a wide spectrum of modern political ideals which seemed to disagree on whether the republic was a means to achieve a more extreme goal, whether the republic was a satisfactory achievement of liberal aims or whether the republic was inadequate and needed to be replaced with a more extreme, authoritarian government. Moreover, "new Spain" seemed to be divided in aims but certainly was united in the fact that they bitterly opposed what "old Spain" stood for and vice versa. In effect, we can notice a see-sawing in decision making and policy in the years before the civil war between conservative reforms/laws and liberal reforms/laws which only served to aggravate those who wanted sta
The lack of a middle class caused this polarization of spain to be a serious problem whereas if there had been a large middle class, it would have created a moderating influence which would have made compromise a more likely possibility. The Civil War was a result of varied interests who could not mix. Like all those other things, once power fell in conservative hands again, their autonomy was repealed. Within Spain, we can notice an all or none situation where you cannot have a system who will attempt to appease both the extreme left and right while having a constitutional, middle of the spectrum system. Also, the republic held the army by civil law rather than by its own separate law. The effect of this was an awakened desire among the peasantry to ameliorate their situation adding to tensions in Spain. Furthermore, both the Basque Country and Catalonia were where most of Spain's industrialisation was occurring. Both the Basque and the Catalonian regions felt they had a separate identity from spain. Many rural peasants in spain were still in the grips of the church and the church's influence went quite far. Firstly, the peasantry was still impoverished and the agragarian reforms helped this only to a very limited extent. Finally, the element of regionalism contributed to tensions within Spain in that both Catalonia and the Basque regions seemed to have a quite separate identities from Spain and were not in line with the spanish system. An example of this was the passing of the agragarian reforms in 1932 where land from the wealthy land owners were distributed among peasants. This caused the emergence of a population of workers which were both regionalist and extreme left wingers. The fact that there was no moderating influence, such as a large middle class would have been, created an atmosphere where compromise was hardly possible. Opposition included pretty much everyone who did not belong in that category and included anarchists, socialists, Basque and Catalonians, and those in the grip of poverty.
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Acceptance Essays
