A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain

by Paul Preston William Collins, 768 pages, £30

For more than four decades, Paul Preston has produced voluminous and incisive work on the history of Spain. As the leading British historian in the field, he has written on the Second Republic (1931–36), the Civil War (1936–39), the Franco dictatorship and the late 1970s transition to democracy. His latest contribution to the analysis of Spain’s past is a comprehensive political and social history spanning from the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1874 to the present day.

Preston’s main thesis is that corruption and political incompetence have had a corrosive effect on Spain’s political and social cohesion since the late 19th century. This argument could be seen to strengthen the stereotypical British view of Spaniards as naturally inclined to corruption and authoritarianism. The book does not, however, adopt a clichéd view of a benighted Spain but instead explores how the dishonesty and ineptitude of political, military and ecclesiastical elites led to different forms of social violence and discrimination. Nor does Preston suggest that Spain is exceptional in terms of governmental incompetence and corruption. As he states in the preface, recent years have also witnessed “lies, governmental ineptitude and corruption” in Britain.

The book opens with an examination of the myths of Spanish national character, focusing on the exotic, semi-oriental stereotypes of passion, violence and eroticism promoted by European romantics in the 19th century. Critical of these conventional representations, Preston provides more mundane factors to explain the connections between social inequality and violence, political incompetence and corruption. A tradition of mutual mistrust between the army and civil society, the lack of a state apparatus popularly accepted as legitimate, and the perpetuation of old forms of politics, social influence and patronage are some of the elements that regularly come out in the author’s analysis. Unsurprisingly, the dictatorships of General Primo de Rivera (1923– 30) and General Franco (1939–75) appear as the most corrupt, violent and unequal periods of Spanish history, when military regimes allegedly established to ‘save’ the nation ended up defending the interests of fairly small segments of society.

The author acknowledges that the gap between the people and the elites was reduced during the first years of the Second Republic and the socialist governments of the 1980s and 1990s, yet Preston also traces the continuity of corrupt, violent and ineffectual practices in these democratic regimes.

It is particularly interesting to read Preston’s analysis of 21st-century Spain, a terrain he has previously seldom explored. The title of the last chapter, ‘The Triumph of Corruption and Incompetence, 2004–2018’, is unambiguous. Here, again, the author thoroughly investigates dozens of recent corruption cases, involving conservatives, socialists, Catalan nationalists, bankers, policemen and the royal family.

This is a fantastic, well-researched and superbly written history book that brings to light the all too contemporary issue of political elites’ dishonesty and ineptitude.