From Olive Trees to Overcapacity by Adam K. Webb

From a different perspective, it might have been far better if the more justice-oriented blocs of the traditionalist coalition had won. The red-bereted Carlists, for example, gravitated to Franco’s side more by circumstance than conviction. They combined some eccentric legitimist ideas about the monarchy with a distributist economic vision. Their on-and-off struggles from the nineteenth century, with widespread popular support in the mountains of northern Spain, included a battle to defend local traditions, small scale property ownership, and the village commons. Their piety also made them the preferred branch of Franco’s coalition for the leftists to surrender to during the civil war; prisoners were treated quite chivalrously, while the fascist-inspired parts of the right were more likely to put them up against the wall in the village square.

I have no idea where I might look to find a living Carlist today. Moreover, the Carlists could probably not have redefined modern Spain on their own. But people like them were not few. A somewhat different lineup of forces a few decades ago, or the right kind of fracturing of the governing coalition after the war, and Spain might have been less hemmed in by false choices that have led it into its present dilemma. Whatever we might say in hindsight, though, reopening those kinds of debates will probably not happen within any one country today. It is, at the very least, a debate about the meaning of the “Europe” that we are supposed to be feverishly constructing.