(Warning: speculation about Spanish history during the Franco era by
an amateur).
I’m currently in Spain, doing some research on
Franco’s cult of
personality. In preparing for this project, I recently read
Paul
Preston’s biography of Franco, which presents Franco as a selfish,
vengeful, and ultimately petty tyrant who caused the death of hundreds of
thousands of his compatriots. (If not for Hitler, Franco seems like he would
certainly have been in contention for the “worst person of the 20
th
century” award). Yet despite the evidence of Franco’s political cunning (nearly
four decades at the top of the Spanish political system
puts
him in the top 2-3% of all modern rulers in terms of sheer longevity), the
portrait that emerges from Preston’s biography is emphatically
not one of a decisive and Machiavellian
political leader, but one of “astonishing personal mediocrity” (Kindle Loc
17636), a ruler who constantly procrastinated important decisions, acting
reactively rather than proactively, and was rarely clear or even coherent about
his commitments, to the despair of allies and enemies alike. How could such a
person end up leading the winning side of a
bloody civil war and becoming
the effective ruler of Spain for more than three decades?
Preston argues cogently that luck played a large role, but it
struck me while reading his book that one possible key to Franco’s “success” (measured
simply by his ability to remain in power) is something that
Padgett
and Ansell called, in a classic article on the rise of the Medici in Renaissance
Florence, “robust action,” action that cannot be easily foiled or prevented
by your opponents. Since their ideas about what enables a political leader to
act in this way seem to me to illuminate Franco’s spectacular longevity in
power, it’s worth describing them in some detail.
Padgett and Ansell begin their article by noting that there
is something puzzling about Cosimo de’ Medici’s power in Florence. Cosimo was
clearly powerful, despite not holding formal political office, as his
contemporaries (including Machiavelli) appreciated keenly;
Yet the puzzle about Cosimo’s
control is this: totally contrary to Machiavelli’s portrait in The Prince of
effective leaders as decisive and goal oriented, eyewitness accounts describe
Cosimo de’ Medici as an indecipherable sphinx …
… Lest one conclude that this
implies only savvy back-room dealing, extant accounts of private meetings with
Cosimo emphasize the same odd passivity.’ After passionate pleas by supplicants
for action of some sort, Cosimo typically would terminate a meeting graciously
but icily, with little more commitment than “Yes my son, I shall look into that”
(pp. 1262-1263)
Cosimo “never said a clear word in his life” (p. 1308). But not only was Cosimo inscrutable; his actions, especially after 1434,
… appeared extraordinarily reactive
in character. Everything was done in response to a flow of requests that,
somehow or other, “just so happened” to serve Cosimo’s extremely multiple
interests. (p. 1263)
Padgett and Ansell argue, pace Machiavelli, that there were no “deep and ruthless
machinations” that explain Cosimo’s political success. Cosimo really was a “sphinx
without a secret” (a term coined by one of Franco’s ministers to refer to
Franco); his actions really were reactive, not the moves of someone who could
always see further ahead than his adversaries. But his actions were robust (not easily foiled or prevented) precisely
because he could not be pinned down by them: others had to reveal their
interests when acting in ways that he did not:
We use the term “robust action” to
refer to Cosimo’s style of control. The key to understanding Cosimo’s
sphinxlike character … is multivocality-the fact that single actions can be
interpreted coherently from multiple perspectives simultaneously, the fact that
single actions can be moves in many games at once, and the fact that public and
private motivations cannot be parsed. Multivocal action leads to Rorschach blot
identities, with all alters constructing their own distinctive attribution of
the identity of ego. The “only” point of this, from the perspective of ego, is
flexible opportunism-maintaining discretionary options across unforeseeable
futures in the face of hostile attempts by others to narrow those options.
Crucial for maintaining discretion
is not to pursue any specific goals [my
emphasis]. For in nasty strategic games, like Florence or like chess,
positional play is the maneuvering of opponents into the forced clarification
of their (but not your) tactical lines of action. Locked-in commitment to lines of action, and
thence to goals, is the product not of individual choice but at least as much
of others’ successful “ecological control” over you … Victory, in Florence, in
chess, or in go means locking in others, but not yourself, to goal-oriented
sequences of strategic play that become predictable thereby. (pp. 1263-1264)
Padgett and Ansell insist that “not pursuing specific goals”
is not merely a matter of strategic ambiguity. What is needed is a more radical
lack of commitment to specific interests, or rather, a more radical
incommensurability of one’s various interests, which they denote by the idea of
“multivocality:”
But robust action is not just a
matter of behaving ambiguously. Others are too shrewd not to see through
behavioral facades down to presumed self-interested motivations. To act
credibly in a multivocal fashion, one’s attributed interests must themselves be
multivocal. (p. 1307)
In other words, in the face of unpredictable and changing
conditions, too much commitment to specific objectives is damaging to one’s
survival in power, as it allows others to predict your moves and to credibly
paint you as acting selfishly against the interests of potential allies. To be
sure, only some people are in a position to act in this way; not just anyone
can “succeed” by acting reactively and inscrutably:
Of course, robust action will not
work for just anyone. For the flow of requests to be channeled, only some
network structures will do. And for the resolution of judge and boss to be
credible, coherent interests must remain opaque as far down as it is conceivable
to peer. Contra Machiavelli, even Cosimo himself did not set out with a grand
design to take over the state: this assumption reads history backward. … Cosimo’s
political party first emerged around him. Only later, during the Milan war, did
Cosimo suddenly apprehend the political capacity of the social network machine
that lay at his fingertips. (p. 1264)
Most of Padgett and Ansell’s article then describes
precisely the sort of network structure that makes robust action possible.
Roughly speaking, their argument is that the Medici coalition contained
inherently contradictory interests, yet it was constructed in such a way that
its component parts could only act together through Cosimo: “Robust action by
the Medici was credible precisely because of the contradictory character of
their base of support,” yet “[t]he result was an awesomely centralized
patrimonial machine, capable of great discipline and “top down” control because
the Medici themselves were the only bridge holding this contradictory
agglomeration together” (p. 1307). By contrast, the coalition of Medici
opponents was both far more “coherent” and narrow in terms of the interests it
represented (and hence more predictable in its actions) and less susceptible to
centralized control (and hence less effective and disciplined).
Now, there are many differences between Franco and Cosimo de’
Medici. But the overall strategies that allowed Franco to survive in power
during one of the most difficult periods in European history do present some
interesting similarities to the strategies Padgett and Ansell describe in their
article.
Let’s start with Franco himself, who if nothing else seems
to have shared something of Cosimo de’ Medici’s inscrutability. Preston recites
a litany of descriptions emphasizing this aspect of his character:
He was abundantly imbued with the
inscrutable pragmatism or retranca of
the gallego peasant. Whether that was because of his origins as a native of
Galicia, or the fruit of his Moroccan experiences is impossible to say.
Whatever its roots in Franco, retranca
may be defined as an evasion of commitment and a taste for the imprecise. It is
said that if you meet a gallego on a staircase, it is impossible to deduce if
he is going up or down. Franco perhaps embodied that characteristic more than
most gallegos. When those close to him tried to get hints about forthcoming
ministerial changes, they were rebuffed with skill: ‘People are saying that in
the next reshuffle of civil governors so-and-so will go to Province X’, tries
the friend; ‘Really?’ replies the sinuous Franco, ‘I’ve heard nothing’. ‘It’s
being said that Y and Z are going to be ministers’, ventures his sister. ‘Well’,
replies her brother, ‘I haven’t met either of them’. The monarchist aviator
Juan Antonio Ansaldo wrote of him ‘Franco is a man who says things and unsays
them, who draws near and slips away, he vanishes and trickles away; always
vague and never clear or categoric’. John Whitaker met him during the Civil
War: ‘He was effusively flattering, but he did not give a frank answer to any
question I put to him. A less straightforward man I never met.’ Mussolini’s
Ambassador Roberto Cantalupo met him some months later and found Franco to be ‘icy,
feminine and elusive [sfuggente]’. The day after first meeting Franco in 1930,
the poet and noted wit José María Pemán was introduced by a friend as ‘the man
who speaks best in all Spain’ and remarked ‘I think I’ve just met the man who
keeps quiet best in all Spain’ (‘ Tengo la sospecha de haber conocido al hombre
que mejor se calla en España’). (Kindle Locations 113-130).
To be sure, Franco, unlike Cosimo, made lots of public
speeches during his life and said many well-documented things to ambassadors,
ministers, and other political leaders. But one point that Preston’s biography
brings out well is that it is very difficult to construct a coherent position
for Franco from his public statements (though Preston tries valiantly). For one
thing, he seems to have had no problems disregarding the truth when it was
convenient for him to deny it, and he was alarmingly willing to change his
position as circumstances or audiences changed. He could say anything with
apparently complete conviction: he could be a monarchist one minute, a Falangista
the next, and then assert his claim to being a true Spanish democrat. Yet Preston
never quite succeeds in establishing that there was one thing Franco “really
believed” underneath all the bullshitting and incoherence, some ideological
commitment or fundamental interest beyond his maintenance in power that could
account for the many different things he said. His key political talent,
Preston notes more than once, was for “shroud[ing] his intentions in a cloud of
nebulous vagueness” (Kindle Location 14849-14850). Since no one could be quite
sure about his real commitments, these could be “read” in a variety of
different ways at the time – as fundamentally sympathetic to the Falange, or
fundamentally conservative and Catholic, or as those of an anti-communist
warrior.
One obvious way in which Franco avoided being pinned down to
some particular goal was by often acting through intermediaries, which made it
possible for him to deny responsibility. For example, he was cautious not to
seem to have sought the posts of commander in chief or head of state; as Preston
puts it, “[w]ith his customary caution, Franco preferred to let others make the
running and wait for the new honour to be thrust upon him” (Kindle Locations
4093-4094). But as with Cosimo de’ Medici, the point is not that Franco had plotted
for a long time to gain supreme power; on the contrary, his early life
suggested that he was destined to be a career military man. He was promoted rapidly,
and enjoyed his many positions – in particular, he appears to have been very
happy as director of the military academy in Zaragoza. For a while it was even
a bit iffy whether he would participate in the military rebellion that led to
the civil war; it was only when circumstances made supreme command clearly possible
that we can even speak of Franco pursuing that option at all, and then only in fairly
indirect ways.
More broadly, Franco’s terminal unwillingness to ever close
off options made it seem like he was constantly procrastinating important
decisions. The most obvious example of this is the question of restoring the Spanish
monarchy (one aim of the military rebellion that led to the civil war), which
Franco successfully postponed for decades, in part because it would commit
himself to a definite course of action, splitting his coalition. But the same
was true of his neutrality-cum-covert-support for Germany and Italy in WWII (Preston
has some amusing passages where Hitler and Mussolini rage against Franco’s
inability to make clear commitments to enter WWII on their side), or of his actions
during the civil war.
The latter provides one striking example of the contrast
between robust action and non-robust action. Franco was highly dependent on
material support from Germany and Italy for his war effort. And Mussolini and
Hitler both had serious doubts about Franco’s abilities to lead the nationalist
side to victory. So early on, German and Italian military forces sent to aid
the nationalist side were only nominally under Franco’s command. But when the one
of the
three
divisions of Black Shirts sent by Mussolini was
defeated at
Guadalajara, in part due to Franco’s failure to keep his word to mount a simultaneous
attack in the
Jarama front,
Mussolini was
too committed to Franco’s
victory to do anything about it except continue supporting Franco, and even
accede to put the Black Shirts under Franco’s command. As Preston puts it:
Mussolini could see that he had
been used but he had little choice but to continue supporting Franco.
Guadalajara had smashed the myth of fascist invincibility and Mussolini found
himself committed to Franco until the myth was rebuilt. Equally, however galling,
it was now clear that it made more sense to work with Franco for a Nationalist
victory than independently. Shortly after his letter of exculpation [a letter Franco
wrote to Mussolini to explain why the promised forces did not materialize during
the battle of Guadalajara], Franco had requested help for a huge assault on
Bilbao. Ignoring remarks made by Roatta [the Italian ambassador commander of the Black Shirts in the civil war at the time] about
the miraculous appearance of the necessary forces for Bilbao which had never
materialized during the battle of Guadalajara, Mussolini ordered his commander
henceforth to obey the instructions and directives of Franco. Italian forces
would henceforth be distributed in Spanish units and subject to the command of
Franco’s generals. When Cantalupo informed him of this on 28 March, Franco was
delighted. The Italian Ambassador found him as if ‘freed of a nightmare’.
Franco asked him to inform the Duce of his ‘joy at being understood and
appreciated’. (Kindle loc 5320-5329).
Franco had (whether by design or not; Preston is of two
minds about this) managed to shape the “choice context” of Mussolini so as to
induce him to commit himself to Franco’s victory, while retaining some freedom
to pursue his own independent policy, despite his material dependence on
Italian and German aid.
But what enabled Franco to avoid commitment to specific
goals while others could not? What made it possible for him to say to
Don Juan (the exiled
heir to the Borbon throne) in 1954, that “I don’t find governing an onerous task”
and “Spain is easy to govern”? (Kindle loc 14428-14429). Part of the answer to
this question – in a sense the more superficial part – is that, as Preston
notes, Franco was very good at gauging the price of people:
For nearly forty years he would use
[his very extensive formal powers] with consummate skill, striking decisively
at his outright enemies but maintaining the loyalty of those within the Nationalist
coalition with cunning and a perceptive insight into human weakness worthy of a
man who had learnt his politics among the tribes of Morocco. The ability to
calibrate almost instantly the weakness and/ or the price of a man enabled
Franco to know unerringly [a bit of poetic license, but we’ll let that pass] when
a would-be opponent could be turned into a collaborator by some preferment, or
even the promise of it – a ministry, an embassy, a prestigious military
posting, a job in a State enterprise, a decoration, an import licence or just a
box of cigars. (Kindle loc 6251-6255).
And like any other successful dictator, he then used this
knowledge to play people against one another and thus prevent them from
coordinating against him:
The ‘families’ of the Nationalist
coalition would be manipulated like friendly tribes, bribed, enmeshed in
competition among themselves, involved in corruption and repression in such a
way as to make them suspicious of one another but unable to do without the
supreme arbiter. (Kindle locs 7395-7397).
Divide et impera
is, of course, the oldest trick in the book; and Franco was good at it, in the
(base) sense of using it well to remain at the top of the political system
despite not being very much loved, or even very much respected, by those below
him. In a revealing anecdote, Preston notes the clever way in which Franco used
the corruption of his ministers as an instrument of control:
Franco showed no interest in
putting a stop to graft as opposed to using knowledge of it to increase his
power over those involved. He often repaid those who informed him of corruption
not by taking action against the guilty but by letting them know who had
informed on them (Kindle locs 14795-14797).
Here we see also a way of not foreclosing any options: both
the denouncer and the denounced remain dependent on Franco, yet the onus of action is put on them, not on Franco.
A similar logic of inaction applied to his agents of repression during the
civil war and beyond:
Franco was aware that some of his
subordinates enjoyed the bloodthirsty work of the repression. His
Director-General of Prisons, Joaquin del Moral, was notorious for the prurient
delight he derived from executions. General Cabanellas protested to Franco
about the distasteful dawn excursions organized in Burgos by Del Moral in order
to enjoy the day’s shootings. Franco did nothing. He was fully conscious of the
extent to which the repression not only terrified the enemy but also
inextricably tied those involved in its implementation to his own survival.
Their complicity ensured that they would cling to him as the only bulwark
against the possible revenge of their victims. (Kindle locs 5169-5174).
Yet I suspect the deeper reason for Franco’s ability to act
robustly went beyond Franco’s particular political tactics. What enabled him to be so effective at using divide et impera seems to me to be the fact that his supporting coalition –
made up variously of Falangists (Spanish fascists), Carlistas, other
monarchists, conservative Catholics, and the military – was inherently
contradictory (as was the supporting coalition of the Medici in Padgett and
Ansell’s view), yet could only act together through him. For example, Falangists
were skeptical of the monarchy, and in theory had a reformist economic
programme, a promise of a grand “social revolution” to which other conservative
elements of the coalition were implacably opposed. Monarchists differed among themselves about who should be placed on the throne, and differed about when the
monarchy should be restored. The army, which was the group best positioned to
overthrow Franco (its senior commanders having “elected” him in 1936 as
Generalissimo), had its own divisions and in any case was fearful of another
civil war. And so on. Yet Franco’s inscrutability – which, interestingly, was
not nearly as much in evidence when he was merely a career military man, and
could thus afford to have opinions – allowed him to represent all of these disparate
interests with enough credibility that those concerned could at least pretend
to themselves that Franco was ultimately working for their ultimate aims. (Of
course, you’d need a proper network analysis to make the Padgett/Ansell claim rigorously;
for one thing, we’d also need to know whether the various components of the
Francoist coalition had few linkages with one another, so that they could act
together only through him. This I can’t tell on the basis of the evidence in
Preston’s book).
Signs of Franco’s excessive commitment to a particular goal
or group were sometimes even interpreted by shrewd observers as political
mistakes. For example, when in 1945 Franco’s public support of the Falange
seemed to be attracting much international
criticism,
José María Pemán
wrote in his diary: ‘if they had told me that Franco had a lover it would have
seemed bad, not to say strange, but this is worse: he has got a conviction.’ But,
as Preston notes, “[i]n fact, the normally shrewd Pemán was wrong. Franco may
have had an emotional commitment to the Falange but it did not undermine his
capacity for ruthless calculation. He had in fact worked out that there was
more benefit to be derived from keeping the Falange. Not only was it a massive
bulwark of support but international criticism of it also helped him capitalize
on mass resentment of foreign ‘interference’.” (Kindle locs 12440-12446). I am not sure
that Franco “worked out” these benefits consciously, but it is interesting to
note that Pemán saw the sign of
commitment
to a cause as a political mistake because it would box Franco in and close
off certain courses of action. Franco’s political strength lay precisely in credibly
not being for
one or another part of his coalition, and this was made possible because
he seems to have had
no firm
underlying convictions beyond, perhaps,
his commitment to a picture of himself as savior of Spain. (Was his support for the Falange in 1945 sincere, or the result of a calculated gamble? Is this
question even answerable?). Or conversely, we may say that because his
self-image as savior of Spain could “contain multitudes” without being
threatened (Franco was rarely bothered by inconsistency) that his interests
were themselves “multivocal” in the Ansell and Padgett sense.
We might also look at the eventual decay of the regime
through this lens. By the end of the 60s socio-economic changes (including
rapid economic development) had eroded the original Francoist coalition, and
key “ideological” questions had been finally settled (e.g., the succession was finally
settled on Don Juan Carlos - the current King - in 1969; the “falangist”
revolution had been definitively shelved; etc.). Franco was thus less and less
able to represent a diversity of interests “mutivocally;” he had, in a sense, finally
been boxed in by his own success. This made Franco less and less relevant as
the lynchpin of the major coalition that controlled the state, and the institutional
changes he had intended to perpetuate his regime did not last. (This is an
important contrast to the story Padgett and Ansell tell about the Medici).
If anyone had now the ability to represent
contradictory interests “multivocally” and engage in robust action, it was Juan
Carlos, who seems to have learned a few things from Franco. Apparently when
Franco told Juan Carlos that he had finally decided to settle the succession on
him, “Juan Carlos replied ‘rest assured, mi general, I have learned much from
your galleguismo (Galician craftiness).’ As they both laughed, Franco
complimented him, ‘Your Highness does it very well.’” (Kindle locs
16666-16669). Both Franco and many other people could project their ideas
onto the king, who turned out, unexpectedly for a lot of people, to be a
leading force in the transition to democracy. (Or am I completely off here?)
Ultimately, all this suggests to me the limits of appealing
to belief in explaining political
action. To attempt to explain Franco by reference to his specific ideas is to miss the possibility that it
was their basic inconsistency that
made him able to avoid being "boxed in."
Update 2/3/2013: Fixed some typos.
