Spain’s War on Terrorism in the Tradition of Jihadist Civil Wars

Following the criminal attack on the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo in February 2015, the Spanish Government promoted a parliamentary agreement with the main parties in the opposition for legislating against jihadist terrorism. ¹ After denouncing terrorism as ‘the worst enemy of democracy and liberties’, the text declares that its eradication rests ultimately on the coordination of ‘institutional responses’ on the part of united ‘democrats’. In practical terms, combating ‘the irrational and unjustified violence of terror’ is concretized through a combination of police action, judicial intervention and international cooperation. This set of measures is not justified merely on moral principles and the rule of law: the signers of the agreement also state that their ‘conviction stems from our own experience’ shared with Spanish citizens at large, who are presented as ‘very conscious’ of the ‘severity and harshness’ of terrorism after having ‘fought against’ it ‘for so long’.

Certainly, Spain has been notorious among European democracies for the endurance and intensity of terrorist activity, mainly by the Basque pro-independence organization ETA (Euskadi Ta Astakatasuna) [Basque Country and Freedom]. As in other countries like Great Britain, Italy or France, the phenomenon broke out in the late 1960s, when Spain was still under Franco’s dictatorship, but in this case it lingered throughout the last quarter of twentieth century and beyond, already under democracy and after the country’s integration in the EU. ² The document cited above actually goes on to summarize various agreements among political agents since as far back as 1987 and, in trying to keep up with emerging challenges, calls for adapting Spain’s legal framework to the requirements of the struggle against current international terrorist threats.

Behind this reasoning lies the confidence that, although with an important number of victims that need be publicly remembered, ‘terror’ in recent Spanish history has not been capable of impeding or setting back ‘the regime of liberties’: on the contrary, Spanish citizens ‘have succeeded in building and consolidating a solid democracy’ until the final defeat of internal terrorism, currently under way. The argument revolves around an idea of learning-by-doing towards efficiency: in facing the new, international terrorist challenges, Spain profits from its previous experience. The assumption of the whole approach, however, is that in spite of ‘new or different formulas [sic] adopted’ to curtail it, jihadist terrorism is not in essence qualitatively different from previous manifestations.

It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss whether the instruments for the struggle against jihadist terrorism should be differentiated from inherited policies. As a phenomenon of political violence, terrorism related to Islamic radicalism in particular or to religious fanaticism in the wider sense may not be very distinctive from other, more formally ideological manifestations. There is, nevertheless, a great conceptual difference between jihadist and previous forms of violent action against civilians: only the former brings along the spectre of civil war. The link between terrorist activity and civil war stems from the social constituency of the jihadi: in the last few years it has become customary to come across jihad networks formed by European citizens born and educated in democratic cultures framed by Western values. ³

This is not to deny that terrorist activities in the past, usually related to modern ideologies such as Anarchism, Socialism or Nationalist pro-independence identities, also aimed at overthrowing the existing social order, for which purpose terrorist activists and advocates had no qualms in exploiting social and political conflicts to the extreme of threatening the established institutional order. However, at the semantic and discursive level, none of those terrorist traditions were either shaped by or confronted with a language of radical cultural cleavage. By contrast, twenty-first-century jihadist terrorism is both justified and combated in the frame of a so-called clash or alliance of civilizations, and this major contextual change sets it apart in a qualitative way.Reference Huntington ⁴ Following this semantic difference it is possible to distinguish current terrorist trends from ‘historical terrorism’.

This classification does not claim a distinctive approach for the study of Islamic terrorism, but rather demands a more refined analytical framework in order to discuss terrorism as a whole. One basic premise of the present article is that jihadist terrorism should be defined as essentially modern in aims and means. In this sense, labelling Islamic activists alien outsiders reproduces without critical distance the ideological foundation of the civilization cleavage; much the same can be said about the jihadi: in spite of presenting themselves as utterly opposed to Western values and aiming at the demolition of a civilization, pro-Islamic terrorists draw in fact a significant part of their rhetoric from modern political and social discourse. What the present article wants to explore is precisely the connection between religious fanaticism and civilization clash, a relationship that is not new but rather looms large in Western history. Jihad rationality is neither a recent phenomenon, and is certainly not a specificity of Islamic religion: it can be found in the past of countries that today compose the European Union, and not only in the form of warfare justified by religious beliefs.

On its part, Spain stands out in the Western world as an extreme case of a tradition of jihadist approaches to otherness; on the other hand, it experienced several civil wars in the period conventionally considered as Modern history, comprising the period from the eighteenth century to the present. One purpose of this article is to call attention on the relationship between these two phenomena: to a tradition of fighting modern terrorism, Spain adds another, longer experience across modernity in warfare unleashed for the exclusion and ultimately the extermination of inner enemies. This link does not seem to have been substantially explored by intellectual or political elites up to the present, and this points to limitations and contradictions in the instituted ‘regime of memory’ of Spanish post-Francoist democracy, based as it is on the idea of a ‘common guilt and responsibility’ for unrestrained violence in the past and the need of ‘reconciliation’ for establishing democratic values and institutions on solid grounds. ⁵

The next part of the article deals with discursive ambiguities and obliterations surrounding the public usage of the concept of terrorism in modern Spain and relates them to the ideological consensus established during the transition to democracy. The interplay between politics and religion at the origins of Western terrorism is then related to contexts where Liberalism emerged from intolerant Catholic political cultures. The third part of the paper summarizes the history of modern Spain by means of placing its recurring civil wars – the War of Succession in the eighteenth century, the Carlist Wars in the nineteenth and the Spanish Civil War in the twentieth century – as milestones in the evolution of a rather unique imperial power founded on Catholic confessional intolerance towards a modern nation-state along the lines of Western Liberalism and democracy. In reflecting on the links between civil conflicts and religion I call attention to the overlapping of traditional faithful/unfaithful exclusions and modern dichotomies friend/enemy. In the conclusion, I argue in favour of overcoming the regime of memory of post-Francoist democracy and of devising a new one capable of accounting for the interplay between holy war and civil war in modern history and its moral and political implications.

Changing Regimes of Memory and the Public Usages of Terrorism

Terrorist activities can only be the subject of legitimate institutional response once they are classified as such. This perquisite places conceptual definition at the core of any war on terrorism. The problem, however, is that conceptual definition is itself also prone to warfare, in the form of struggles for the meaning and semantic scope of words and terms. Like other modern concepts, terrorism covers a semantic field riddled with ambiguity, and its varying usages and definitions tend to be contested.Reference Fletcher ⁶ Ambiguity and contestability can be traced not only in space but also in time: terrorism has a history, which includes its changing conceptualization within each national political culture.

The twentieth century has witnessed important variations in the qualification and semantic scope of terrorism and this has in turn affected not only its legal status but the political culture of citizens and societies as a whole. The case of Spain is illustrative enough. In 1937, the Minister of Justice of the Spanish Republican government Juan García Oliver had no qualms in defining himself as a terrorist when recollecting his involvement in retaliations for the killings of union leaders and agitators back in the 1920s. García Oliver had been an Anarchist militant who, together with other comrades from the libertarian union CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) [National Confederation of Labour], resorted to violent self-defence against attacks from gunmen paid by the Catalan organization of employers. ⁷ It is true that he was portraying himself as a terrorist one decade after those events, during the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War, when the struggle for the defence of the Republic had utterly reshaped the contours of many concepts and even their legal scope; yet the episode shows that the meaning attributed to the concept was far from negative and straightforward.

Right after the Spanish Civil War, the usage of the term was completely reversed by the Francoist authorities. As spots of guerrilla activity lingered – especially in mountain areas and regions bordering France – the new authorities treated so-called maquis as ‘bandits’ but also ‘terrorists’.Reference Romeu Alfaro ⁸ Their repression, carried out by the military, was directly connected to a wider legislation of retroactive effect that legalized putting on trial citizens for their political involvement during the Second Republic. ⁹ The enforcement of this legislation eventually overlapped with the rise of urban-based and workers’ and students’ protests in the 1960s. ¹⁰ By leaving untouched the underlying conception of terrorism, this long-term policy adapted to new repressive legislation that reached even beyond Franco’s death, into the transition to democracy.

The example shows that the definition of terrorism is not restricted to contexts of democracy but also finds its way into authoritarian legal frameworks, which usually define as terrorist all kind of threats to the institutional order that involve selective violence over civilians (and military alike) irrespective of their political aims. It also accounts for the paradox that Spanish freedom fighters of the 1930s could be declared terrorists in the 1940s. What makes the case of twentieth-century Spain singular, however, is not so much that defenders of democracy could be repressed as terrorists, but rather that this latter identification has resurfaced in the public sphere well after the transition from dictatorship. In effect, as recent as 2011, a historical dictionary that includes entries on several major figures of Franco’s regime portrayed a high-rank military official and political cadre of the dictatorship – who was appointed chief of the force in charge of the repression in the countryside – as having ‘developed a very important activity against the squads of bandit-terrorists commonly known as maquis’. ¹¹

Although subject to criticism in the public sphere, cases like this point to the re-emergence of discourse from a pre-democratic context that do not seem to take into consideration the legal and cultural changes occurred after the dictatorship. ¹² Their proliferation expresses the growing weaknesses and limitations on the part of the regime of memory instituted along with the transition to democracy. In turn, its sequels affect the quality of social life under democracy: the unrestrained usage of degrading terminologies may reawaken traumas on the side of the victims and their heirs.

Public denunciation, on its part, seems to be falling short of keeping at bay the contradictions emerging from the display of the regime of memory. In January 2001, the government awarded an infamous torturer from Franco’s dictatorship, Melitón Manzanas, a posthumous medal for his services to society as a victim of terrorism. This shocking decision was taken following a piece of legislation on ‘solidarity with the victims of terrorism’. ¹³ The news set ample sections of public opinion on fire, especially among victims of state repression under Franco, and the ensuing debate escalated into judicial and legislative initiatives by outraged political parties and representative institutions. ¹⁴ All this social and political mobilization was of no avail, however: twice – in 2003 and 2008 – the Tribunal Supremo (supreme court) of Spain confirmed the legal base of the award to Manzanas, who was comisario jefe (head commissar) of the feared Brigada Político-Social – the secret police force, created in 1941, in charge of repressing opposition movements – of San Sebastian, in the Basque Country, when he died in a terrorist attack by ETA in 1968.

Interestingly enough, legal argumentation by the judges derived from an interpretation of the ‘shared guilt and responsibility’ regime of memory: they regarded the award as an effort towards the ‘overcoming of old conflicts’ reaching back to the 1930s and, after invoking the ‘principle of reconciliation’ behind the democratic transition of the 1970s, declared that the right of profiting from democracy should not be ‘limited to those who survived the dictatorship, excluding those who did not have the chance to witness the recovery of liberties’. ¹⁵ Things did not end there, though. After the conservatives lost power in 2002, a new parliamentary vote with ample support – only rejected by the conservative Partido Popular, then in the opposition – forced a reform in the legislation on solidarity with victims of terrorism following human rights principles. ¹⁶

As this whole process shows, the inherited regime of memory is at a crossroads between two different and rather incompatible approaches: one stresses the oblivion of past misdeeds in the name of overcoming violence inherited from the traumatic 1930s as the precondition for democratic consensus; the other advocates recognition of freedom fighters and transitional justice as mandatory legal principles and sources for a healthy civic culture. In other words, the ‘shared guilt and responsibility’ memory regime is being increasingly pressured from the outside by the institutionalization of the Human Rights paradigm at a global scale, so that the invocation of a rather vernacular ‘spirit of the transition’, instead of being effective for the devising of policies, is becoming a source of conflicts when dealing with issues of transitional justice. ¹⁷

Explaining the crisis in the current regime of memory by means of the influence of an alternative approach from outside is a partial and incomplete perspective, though. The ‘reconciliation’ paradigm is also in a process of degeneration from within the cultural framework that produced it in the first place. And it is precisely terrorism, its definition and historical evolution, what is behind the growing incoherence between discourse and policy on the traumatic past: being defined as a victim of terrorism is what prompts the Spanish authorities to honour individuals irrespective of whether they were freedom fighters or agents of repression. By so doing, however, the whole regime of memory instituted after Franco’s dictatorship is at a stake: when dealing with victims of terrorism the whole issue of shared guilt and reconciliation is completely outflanked and replaced with a semantics of repentance and apology; moreover, acknowledging violent actions against an authoritarian regime as terrorist is a way of implicitly endorsing the regime of memory established before democracy, based as it was on the utter humiliation and harassment of those defeated in the 1936–1939 civil war. Concern for terrorism by the Spanish authorities and the public opinion at large has thus also been pressuring the integrity of the established regime of memory from the inside. In the case of Melitón Manzanas, the fact that the victimizer was ETA, an organization notorious for its terrorist activities also under post-Francoist democracy, surely influenced the government’s decision and the judge’s justification.

This reflection should not however distract from assessing that context influences the definition of terrorism; in other words, terrorism is better understood historically, and as both a political and a discursive phenomenon. In the longer term, the concept of terrorism has been determined by ideological struggles, postcolonial wars and the expansion of the nation state and international political networks.Reference Laqueur ¹⁸ One important change following this overall trend is that throughout the twentieth century, self-definitions as terrorist have vanished from the language of political radicalism. ¹⁹ Spain is no exception here. ²⁰ On the other hand, there is also a stark continuity in this sequence, for never before in the history of pro-independence or revolutionary terrorism has the language of civil war dominated the relations between violent groups and the state. In effect, already prior to the Cold War period, terrorism was assumed to be a side-effect of ideological conflicts and alternatives within societies, not against western civilization as a whole.

In other words, before the arrival of jihadist terrorism, the absence of a language of civil war coincided with justifications of terrorism devoid of theological referents. Yet this is not to imply that until the emergence of Islamic radicalism terrorism lacked religious undertones or referents: religion and politics have always combined in terrorism, but producing semantic and discursive variation depending on. A historical perspective on terrorism should be able to sort that logic out.

Terrorism was born in the West. It relates to the rise of democratic discourse within the public sphere of Liberalism and to the growing contradictions between the demand for universal suffrage and the strict limitations in the recognition of political rights for the majority of the population in a political system founded on popular sovereignty. In this sense, it is a post-1848 phenomenon.Reference Sperber ²¹ True enough, terrorism was originally linked to modern ideologies, especially Anarchism; yet the shaping of its activities did not depend only on the availability of revolutionary ideals and the restrictions of political citizenship but also on the cultural setting of Liberalism and its critical alternatives established throughout the nineteenth century.

In its context of origin, terrorism was coined and practised especially in societies with non-pluralist public spheres where traditional powers profited from an inherited consensus on meta-political (i.e. theological) and infra-political (i.e. moral) issues. In such kind of setting, the lack of a tradition of religious tolerance together with the exclusion of popular majorities fuelled the translation of political controversies and disagreements into an inherited language of confessional exclusion. Political instability, on its part, acted as a retroactive mechanism of politicization for ideological and moral dissent. Radical standpoints, on their part, quickly escalated into contempt for all existing social institutions, and this fostered the overlapping of ideological and meta-political tropes both in discourses favourable and unfavourable to order.

It is not then by chance that Southern and Eastern Europe became the hotbed of the crudest manifestations of the ‘propaganda by deed’ – as Anarchist terrorism defined itself – in the late nineteenth century. There, given the limitations to the exercise of freedom and the tradition of imposing orthodox worldviews, radicalism counterattacked with a thorough rejection of the dominant social values mimicking the same intolerant tone. In spite of their openly lay, pro-scientific and even anti-clerical discourse, libertarian and revolutionary claims often reproduced the confessional language of faithful/unfaithful dichotomies. Developed inside cultures shaped by utterly exclusionary confessions, Anarchism in particular was markedly cast in a rhetoric plagued with religious overtones. This added to a growing consciousness of what Arno Mayer aptly described as ‘the persistence of the Old Regime’:Reference Mayer ²² even well under Liberal legitimacy, Christian Orthodox and Roman Catholic creeds were reproduced by clerical organizations exerting a pervasive influence over education and other means of social control, a structure that ultimately rested upon the maintenance of autocrats and aristocrats representative of the ancient règime. The maxim ‘neither God nor State’ thus was coined to be put in practice by exerting selective violence against the figures that embodied at once the values and powers of traditional and modern society.

Spanish Liberalism falls squarely into this hosting of early historical terrorism. Spain was nevertheless singular compared to Italy and the territories in the Austrian and Russian empires, not only because of its enduring public sphere and representative institutions throughout the nineteenth century and its early condition as a nation state, but because the merging of the religious with the political in language favoured ideological blending.Reference Portillo ²³ Spanish Liberal discourse was actually the cradle of a reformulation in traditionalist political theology that would eventually contribute to the foundation of totalitarian legitimacy in the twentieth century.Reference Spektorowski ²⁴ Profiting from a long-lasting institutional and cultural tradition as the so-called Catholic Monarchy, Spain’s Liberal public sphere produced an innovative translation of the inherited religious definition of the unfaithful into the modern language of the political friend/enemy distinction.Reference Pizzorno ²⁵ Spanish Anarchism, on its part, was most socially extended phenomenon among European countries, and notorious for its organizational capacity and intensely violent orientation.Reference Herrerín ²⁶ Behind its explicit scientific rhetoric, in fact Spanish libertarian discourse quickly adapted a language of martyrdom and unlimited sacrifice plagued with religious reminiscences.

To sum up, the interplay between religious fanaticism and political violence against civilians is not specific of societies dominated by Islamic beliefs but rather a constitutive dimension of modern terrorism, both historical and present-day; albeit with contextual differences, it can be traced to modernization processes incertain traditional institutional and cultural settings. The relevance of this insight for current political analysis should not be underestimated. Post-Cold War understandings of terrorism do not pay much attention to the complex relations between politics and meta-politics in the language of historical terrorism, and tend to overlook the role of national public spheres in the development of specific forms of terrorist discourse and action.Reference Elorza ²⁷ This double lack of consideration may be intentional: it is certainly functional to rather simplistic ‘Us/Them’ approaches to jihadist terrorism. Ultimately, however, such an attitude blocks the transmission of a collective memory on historical terrorism relevant for public debates on a problem acquiring global dimension and concerning twenty-first century citizens at large, and not only the military, police and judicial forces in charge of combatting it.

A critical perspective on historical terrorism sheds light on the contradiction in current approaches which tend to define Islamic fanaticism as a completely distinctive phenomenon explained by means of a civilization clash while treating jihadist terrorism as just another manifestation of a long tradition of selective violence over civilians. Such a perspective ultimately draws upon the fact that, in its various contexts of emergence, historical terrorism was not identified with radical ‘otherness’ in cultural terms. In the case of Spain, for example, members of clandestine organizations such as Mano Negra (the black hand) and Anarchist ‘men of action’ responsible for the first bombings in the late nineteenth century were fought against because they were seen as embodying the dissolution of the social bond, that is, as a moral hazard; they on their part regarded themselves as committed to class struggle in the name of revolutionary ideals. In neither of these portrayals, however, did terrorism appear as embodying a clash between civilizations or as launching a civil war, a term that was saved for a specific type of social conflicts and situations. It is time to turn towards this concept and its relations to past jihads.

Catholic Jihads and Spain’s Modern Civil Wars

If traditional religious cleavages were somehow and with local varieties channelled into the modern political language of friend/enemy, the rise of the Western world was also spotted with constitutional crises that could lead to armed clashes between opposing sides, a situation coined as civil war. Well before and beyond that of terrorism, civil war is a foundational concept in the western tradition of political thought.Reference Wood ²⁸ Inherited from Antiquity, the term was originally used for assessing extreme examples of partisan struggles among citizens in self-governed political communities. Re-appropriated as part of the emerging language of politics in the Renaissance, since then it was increasingly chosen for assessing violent confrontation between followers and detractors of the traditional order in revolutionary contexts.Reference Armitage ²⁹

This does not mean, however, that the concept gave meaning to historical processes that could not involve or follow closely confessional conflicts.Reference Hill ³⁰ Actually, the semantics of civil war surfaced along with the religious wars during the Early Modern period.Reference Holt ³¹ In the context of the Reformation, confessional conflicts erupted following the enforcement of the ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ maxim: as princes were assumed to have the right of imposing religious orthodoxy on their subjects, for decades European societies sunk into massive harassment of confessional minorities and interstate warfare for religious supremacy, triggering unrestrained violence in the name of fanatic beliefs and legitimizing mass killings of the unfaithful. This was far from being a new phenomenon, for holy wars had been launched throughout the Middle Ages, especially in the form of Crusades that, in trying to recover territories overtaken by infidels, portrayed the religious ‘other’ as utterly inimical to the survival of one’s own community of believers. To the extent that jihad can be taken as synonymous with holy war, Christianity and Islam share a common tradition of exclusivist rhetoric following a ‘faithful/unfaithful’ dividing line.Reference Steffen ³² The relative novelty of the European wars of religion of the Early Modern period resided nevertheless in that they replaced external aggression with intracultural exclusion.

Eventually, in the eighteenth century, the cultural transformations of the Enlightenment formally separated the language of confessional fanaticism from that of citizenship building, effectively cleansing the concepts of civil war and revolution of religious overtones. What makes of Spain a rather unique but outstanding case in this general picture is its long-lasting intertwining of holy war with civil war beyond the Early Modern period and into Modern history. The background for the former is quite well-known. The Early Modern wars of religion not only coincided with the political ascendancy of Castile in Europe but were to a large extent inextricably interwoven with the imperial aspirations of the Spanish kings of the Habsburg dynasty. Prior to this, the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula – Castile, Aragon and Portugal – had already witnessed recurrent resort to a rhetoric of holy war throughout the Middle Ages as justification for territorial expansion.Reference O’Callaghan ³³ What demands more specific reflection is the enduring connection of a jihadist rationality in the name of Catholic orthodoxy with social and political exclusion in modern and contemporary history, epitomized in subsequent episodes of civil war and their opposing discourses on citizenship.

The recurrent medieval holy wars in the Iberian Peninsula entailed long-lasting consequences reaching beyond ideological developments. Especially in the case of Castile, confessional orthodoxy left a constitutive mark on the overall political and cultural configuration of the so-called Catholic Monarchy, featuring institutional innovations such as the Inquisition, transferred from the Roman Papacy to monarchical authority in the late fifteenth century. Social control succeeded in preventing the Iberian Peninsula from hosting religious heterogeneity at the cost of distorting the conditions for a public sphere.Reference Villacañas ³⁴ Ideologues of Habsburg supremacy were on their part active in building a legitimation of imperial aspirations that degraded political constituencies in favour of confessional identity shaped in an exclusivist theological language.Reference Fernández Santamaría ³⁵

The will to impose Catholic orthodoxy throughout Western Europe tended to encroach constitutional traditions and touched upon delicate issues of legitimacy in its territorial domains. Eventually, however, as military efforts exhausted economic resources and accelerated the decline of Habsburg hegemony, the territories of the Peninsula, which had avoided confessional conflict during imperial expansion, fell victim to civil war.Reference Fernández Albaladejo ³⁶ After a series of backlashes in the century-long holy warfare, the War of Succession (1700–1715) strengthened the peninsular core of Habsburg’s composite monarchy and, although in the form of dynastic conflict, bore important constitutional consequences, such as the demise of the inherited constitutional framework of the territories of the old kingdom of Aragon in the eastern territories of the peninsula.

The civil war that brought to power the Bourbon dynasty took place in a wider context of transformations in the relations between religion and politics in the West. Habsburg decadence coincided in fact with the acknowledgement of commerce as an alternative source of power within the emerging interstate relations, a novelty that bore important underpinnings for the very definition of human interaction and the status of this-wordly versus transcendent goals.Reference Hirschman ³⁷ With the assertion of commercial society as a stage in human evolution, the concept of civilization started to reshape the understanding of cultural cleavages.Reference Goudsblom ³⁸ The decline of Spain in Europe on its part paved the way for a structure of international relations that for the first time placed states as sovereign units demanding unlimited allegiance from their population.Reference Teschke ³⁹ The simultaneity of these trends empowered on one side subjects as individuals moved by their interests but expanded and intensified on the other state-sponsored bio-political management of societies.Reference Agamben ⁴⁰

In Spain, the specific combination of geopolitical needs and inherited patterns of confessional discourse produced a singular institutional and cultural evolution. Having lost the bulk of its European strongholds, the Catholic Monarchy had to build from scratch a position as a nation-state in the emerging European setting. The accession of the new dynasty of French origin not only brought about a more centralized and coordinated political structure but also helped introduce Spain into the intellectual trends the wake of the Scientific Revolution.Reference Astigarraga ⁴¹ The will to recover grandeur outside and overcome decadence inside while keeping untouched religious orthodoxy fostered the adoption of advanced bio-political measures inspired by a rhetoric that combined traditional meta-political semantics with a new language of collective civilization and individual interest. Emulating also Dutch, British and French imperial redesigns for its transatlantic colonies, the Bourbon authorities unleashed an ambitious programme of moral regeneration of their subjects inspired in the ideal of commercial society.Reference Vázquez García ⁴²

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Spain championed measures aimed at the imposition of civilization over the commoners.Reference Sánchez León ⁴³ Reforms could be implemented profiting from a long tradition of confessional uniformity and social control reoriented from religious orthodoxy into a rhetoric of progress and market exchange. The effort would soon find limitations, though. First, it was politically rejected in 1766, when the population of Madrid and other towns revolted against policies on new customs and urban supply market reforms.Reference Sánchez León ⁴⁴ Then, in the aftermath of the riots, it gave birth to an anti-reform rhetoric the cultural and political identity of the populace. On the background of a belated reception of republican ideals of civic virtue, Enlightenment thought was forced to share in the public sphere with an emerging traditionalist discourse.Reference Sánchez-Blanco Parody ⁴⁵ At the same time, and following state policies against jobless and other subaltern groups, ‘neocolonial’ perceptions of social alterity extended and got embedded in discourse.

As pro- and anti-Enlightenment positions became entrenched, reforms were increasingly short-circuited in the second half of the century. As everywhere else, the outbreak of the French Revolution put the whole modernizing agenda and discourse on the defensive. In contrast with much of continental Europe, however, in Spain, popular mobilization succeeded in organizing resistance to the French troops and paved the way for a constitutional crisis that did not, however, amount to a social revolution of its own. The ensuing 1812 Constitution, although it recognised citizenship, still reproduced much of the language of corporations and meta-political referents of the Old Regime: it not only subsumed individual rights in a traditional collectivist frame but declared Catholic religion as the fundamental identity of the newly declared political community.Reference Alonso ⁴⁶

In practice, a complex and enduring language was forged during the Napoleonic Wars combining political and religious semantics for the definition of basic identity features. In the longer run, violent extinction waged against foreign invaders and their followers was reoriented inwards: actually, the concept of civil war was explicitly employed when recalling the ongoing ideological divisions within the nationalist forces fighting against the French armies.Reference San Miguel ⁴⁷ True enough, such definition appeared as formally devoid of confessional dimension, but not precisely out of secularization: the consensus on the constitutive Catholic nature of the emerging ‘Spanish Nation’ was complete among Spanish Liberals. Liberal language as a whole was born in a cradle of confessional intolerance that would be eventually channelled towards ideological self-adscriptions.

After 1814, a reactionary rhetoric infused by explicitly religious fanaticism was restored, quickly acquiring the contours of a fully-fledged ideological discourse. Moreover, the restoration of the ancient régime by Ferdinand VII mobilized a social base of its own that, especially in the 1820s, committed itself to terrorize Liberals and the population at large in coordination with police repression from above.Reference Luis ⁴⁸ Paradoxically, the short-lived Liberal takeover of 1820–1823 had a similar impact on anti-absolutist identities, which inaugurated a long tradition of pronunciamientos – a violent and often bloody practice combination of military coup and civil mobilization to be continued in post-absolutist contexts.

The demise of the Old Regime after 1833 was on its part not without a very high cost in terms of ideological and political consensus: it actually triggered the outbreak of a civil war between defenders and detractors of Liberalism. Named after Fernando VII’s brother and candidate to the throne Charles, the so-called Carlist War (1833–1840) already fits the stereotype of a jihadist modern civil war: a reactionary and traditionalist mobilization shaped to a large extent by a rather modern language of sovereignty and rights, capable of producing loyalty among different social sectors, civil commitment for terrorist attacks and political takeover and military organization in the territory.Reference Lawrence ⁴⁹ Despite its warfare scenarios were restricted to rural areas in Catalonia and the Basque Country, the Carlist social geography spreaded throughout the country and created an ambience of counter-revolution that motivated permanent collusion of political and meta-political tropes in Liberal public discourse. On top of that, aside from important sequels in economic and human resources, the peace settlement of 1840 did not end with the sources of anti-Liberal identification: traditionalist discourse survived, adapting itself to the public sphere of representative government, where it played as background for neo-Catholic intellectual developments. ⁵⁰

Jihadist guerrilla-style activities by Carlist followers were not the only expressions of political insurgence revealing the strength of traditions of intolerance and the presence of religious semantics in the modern ideologies of nineteenth-century Spain. Reactionary movements took turns with popular radical upheavals, very different in ideological orientation and degree of civil violence but subject to even more ruthless repression by Liberal authorities, which included non-selective bombings of urban quartiers and towns, ad hoc executions without judicial guarantees, resort to exception tribunals, collective penalties for individual offenses, so-called ‘infamous penalties’ such as public whipping and other morally degrading and stigmatizing rituals, deportations to gulag-style island prisons and different means of civil death that echoed the resilience of a long-term tradition of harassment of otherness to the extreme of physical extermination.Reference Sánchez León ⁵¹ This catalogue of measures was not simply traditional any more, though, but rather expressed the evolution towards a definition of social and political dissidence as unlawful and demanding effective suppression, even calling for the adoption of public order experiments devised against nationalist insurgency in the remnants of the Spanish empire in Cuba and the Philippines.Reference Anderson ⁵²

Unrestrained punitive measures could be upheld and executed without producing much social opposition given the structure of the Spanish public sphere under Liberalism, where both major parties – moderado and progresista – often shared in procedures of exclusion and harassment of the opponent as part of a wider intolerant perception of political space, which included resorting to abuse and illegal courses of action both when in power and opposition. Given the much-limited political franchise, exclusionary politics tended to dissociate government and parliament from public opinion, favouring legitimacy crises, especially in urban environments whenever disenfranchised inhabitants were capable of collective action for demanding self-government and citizen participation.Reference Sánchez León ⁵³ Order and political unity were, however, easily restored by combining an overall consensus on national identity identified with Catholic confession.

Political crises produced unintended outcomes in the longer run, though. A civic memory was distilled that offered its own critical interpretation of the post-absolutist world of liberties as incomplete and plagued with unwanted legacies prompting new collective hazards. Initially nostalgic of the original 1812 settlement – mythified as successful in unifying all Liberals around a more ‘democratic’ constitution – this growing sensibility slowly developed into a rhetoric that eventually profited from ideological innovations in favour of universal suffrage and civic virtue in a redefined political community giving wide recognition to territorial self-government.Reference Peyrou ⁵⁴ Building on a radical vindication of individual rights, emerging republicans and democrats openly opposed to all forms of ideological intolerance and military repression; commitment to the establishment full citizenship also offered a path-breaking defence of the civil space against clerical and confessional monopolization.Reference Peyrou ⁵⁵ When the parliamentary monarchy collapsed in 1868, these groups of democratic and republicans had a chance to rebuild the whole edifice of liberties on alternative foundations. Their dogmatic interpretation of civil rights as absolute, inalienable and imprescriptible would, however, set limits to political agreement and policy-making, bearing consequences for the stability of the short-lived democracy of the 1870s.Reference Serván ⁵⁶

The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a new consensus among Liberal elites that once again restricted political franchise but at the cost of legalizing corruption and putting off social justice. The Catholic Church retained a monopoly in education while the rising working-class movement oriented self-organization towards respectability, especially among Socialists. Many of these cultural and political features could be found elsewhere in continental Europe and America, but in Spain they tended to be either justified or criticized through a common language embedded with religious and political semantics and within a public sphere that hosted both Liberal and Anti-Liberal ideologies and rhetoric, from the left and right-wing.

It was in this context that Spanish modern terrorism was born. Anarchist men of action emerged in the wake of the military crashing of popular movements of the 1870s and proliferated through the late nineteenth century amid colonial wars that escalated military conscription and the repression of division of all kinds. In such conditions, innovations in public order tended to be shared between outward and inward repressive forces. After the loss of the remnants of empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific in 1898 and profiting from neutrality in the First World War, internal repression did not slow down but rather increased hand in hand with the unravelling of so-called ‘social question’.Reference González Calleja ⁵⁷ Since early in the twentieth century, neocolonial adventures in North Africa quickly re-enacted bio-political experimentation, shaped now in a language of civilization and involving massive killings of unruly Muslims.

Throughout the peninsula Social and political disorder, now supplemented with nationalist agitation in Catalonia, eventually urged on its part a military solution for securing victory in the dirty warfare between Anarchist gunmen and the employers’ informal gangs. The resort to dictatorship during the 1920s fell short of producing long-term stabilizing effects, however, and rather exacerbated inherited trends on the different agents and discourse: it radicalized Anarchist outlooks while temporarily moderating Socialist unions, and expanded anti-monarchic sensibilities; yet it also helped clarify an openly anti-modern rhetoric envisaging fascist-like alternatives to citizenship and the parliamentary system while transferring inherited revolutionary trends in left-wing ideologies into a renewed language of collective political citizenship and regional self-government.

The demise of the monarchy and the establishment of democracy after 1931 unravelled all these different traditions, merging political and meta-political semantics in a much renovated public sphere. Accumulated memory of past misdeeds imputed to corrupted Liberal elites and tyrannical traditional powers helped reshape the whole political culture in favour of the definition of an inclusive popular-civic community and a public sphere free from confessional overrepresentation. This favoured alliances, especially among parties and unions from the Left, but not to the extent of significantly downplaying their ultimate revolutionary aims. A Republican–Socialist coalition assured the enforcement of social and political reform, but its anti-clerical policies eventually triggered the reorganization of much of the conservative field into an extremely reactionary political party hosting the renewal of traditional and novel Catholic rhetoric into a brand new discourse that repudiated parliamentary politics and aimed at imposing confessional orthodoxy justified on principles of ‘democratic’ majority.Reference Cruz ⁵⁸ On the opposite side, the 1929 crisis and the Nazi takeover in Germany exacerbated, among working-class unions and left-wing parties, a deep feeling of menace in the collective power and the very identity of the working-class and citizenship values, triggering the re-emergence of a revolutionary rhetoric plagued with scatological overtones -- critical of the pitfalls of parliamentary politics for collective emancipation.

A workers’ upheaval in Asturias in 1934 launched after the entry of the fascist-oriented Catholic party into the conservative cabinet was firmly repressed by calling in the colonial army, which turned contention into massive extermination.Reference Shubert ⁵⁹ Political reaction from the Left urged for unity and paved the way for to the successful building of a Popular Front that eventually won the 1936 elections. A new coalition could now re-assume reform policies; by then, however, languages of radical exclusivism spilled all available political discourse on both ideological sides.

It was now the time for reactionary forces to take the offensive and declare unlimited war on both democratic values framed in the republican tradition and citizenship rights inherited from Liberalism. The July 1936 coup d’état, precisely by failing to succeed in the short run, quickly adopted the contours of a jihad where fanatic Catholic followers terrorized the population of localities falling on their side by harassing and executing not only the main representatives from the Left or of Republican allegiance but even commoners and average civilians randomly accused of abstaining from committing to confessional loyalty.Reference Preston ⁶⁰ Massive killings came hand in hand with a rhetoric that presented enemies as the negation of eternal, Christian, national Spanish identity, and so utterly non-human and disposable. The hegemony of meta-political tropes in the rhetoric of Francoist forces included the recovery of traditional self-images and languages, epitomized in the definition of the warfare effort as a Crusade that legitimized extermination in the name of a mixture of Catholic orthodoxy and modern reactionary ideology.Reference Reig Tapia ⁶¹

It was in the aftermath of this civil war that terrorism was redefined by the new anti-democratic authorities, and eventually transferred into post-Francoist democracy as part of the legacy of practices launched by opposition forces against the dictatorship.

Conclusion: The Memory of Past Jihads and the Future of Citizenship

The specificity of the Spanish Civil War should not occlude the wider implications of its extermination rationale, founded on declaring political and ideological opponents as enemies in a radically cultural sense, with religious beliefs acting as a civilization cleavage that deprived them of any civil status as members of a refunded national community mirrored in an anti-modern, mythologized past. This places the 1936–1939 civil war in an exceptional position as an early comer in the current trend of holy wars. And that in turn allows for underlining that jihad is not an exclusively Islamic phenomenon even in the modern period, but has a Western history of its own.

Other conclusions relate to the struggle against international terrorism. Spain’s record of anti-terrorist policies is certainly a positive repository of experiences useful for current wars on terror. It seems, however, that there is another, longer-term experience that can be pointed out: in the context of current Islamic holy war against the West, Spain’s recurrent past jihads offer a vantage point from which to get insights for argumentation and the devise of policies.

One problem for profiting from this supplementary tradition is that intellectual and political elites do not take past experience of jihadism into consideration. That is partly due to the epistemological implications of its assessment, which involves to begin with the rejection of ideologically-biased approaches to terrorist threats: following this paper’s focus on Spain, jihad should be regarded as an internal issue of Western culture instead of a civilization hazard. Holy war and its modern terrorist expressions are better understood from the western tradition of political thought and using concepts such as civil war. A whole lot of theoretical issues still remain to be addressed and reflected on this issue, though.Reference Tenhouten ⁶²

Lack of recognition of the past jihads is not, however, merely intentional and ad hoc, but has much to do with the transmission of collective memory and the availability of accounts alternative to the Gran Narratives of modernization. That is, it has to be with the regime of memory instituted in democratic Spain. Just as citizens during the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century profited from patterns of collective memory for raising their awareness of the endurance of traditional and religious conventions in their respective political cultures, twenty-first century citizens require at the very least the supply of a perspective on Spain’s modern history capable of overcoming lineal and self-indulging assumptions.Reference Sirera ⁶³ In other words, enhancing the consciousness of a jihadist past involves a complete reworking of civic memory and historiography.

The issue is complex and contingent, however, for it touches upon moral and political issues. Overcoming the sources of violence always entails some form of recognition of otherness. Failing to get critical distance from simplistic ‘Us/Them’ dichotomies, on the contrary, will continue to embed demagogic discourse and decisively erode Western citizenship.Reference Moscoso ⁶⁴ In sum, struggling against new terrorist hazards requires not only police and military measures but also civic empowerment and awareness, and this in turn demands rising the standards of historical culture among citizens.

It is at this point that the current regime of memory appears as not just faulty but counterproductive. Paradoxically, the same regime of memory that has been preaching reconciliation between victims and victimizers from the 1930s has for over three decades been part of a wider political culture that rejects any recognition of the sources of indiscriminate violence over civilians after the 1960s. At the same time, parallel to the elaboration of narratives of historical catch-up and modernization and a rhetoric of shared guilt, the struggle against terrorism has for decades now fostered a kind of identification with democratic values that echoes irrational self-adscriptions prone to ideological manipulation by the media and politicians. What we may label as democratism hosts a pattern of memory so selective that risks honouring in its name torturers while flanking and ignoring the victims of instituted repression against liberties. Human Rights justice and culture demands a very different kind of historical thinking, and a brand new regime of memory in which the interplay between civil war and holy war will have to be taken into account.