My previous post reflected on the authoritarian dictatorships in Portugal and Spain during much of the 20th century: Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal, Franco’s in Spain. Both resulted from opposition to attempts to move from traditional monarchic rule to a liberal democratic republic. This post provides context for both the failed attempts at liberal democracy and the strength of the reactions against them by turning back to what happened in the 19th century in both countries. To accomplish that in a single post, I need first to define some essential concepts, using terms that unfortunately are often misused and abused in current political discourse.

Liberty, Rights, Liberalism, and Anti-liberalism

In The Constitution of Liberty, political philosopher (and Nobel-winning economist) Friedrich Hayek defines the “state of liberty or freedom” as “the state in which a man is not subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another or others.”[1] With some important caveats, this is a pretty good starting point for discussing political freedom and liberty. The first caveat is that we have to replace Hayek’s “man” with “person,” to get rid of the implicit cultural gender bias that Hayek shares with Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Second, we have to acknowledge that “coercion” is a loaded term that needs careful unpacking. Third, we must deal with the reality that political freedom only becomes an issue in a societal context, so the sphere of activity in which one person can exercise liberty is bounded by the spheres of freedom of others.[2]

In a particular social order, or civil society, the rights accorded an individual define and protect that person’s sphere of free action, his or her liberties. Rights set and clarify the boundaries of liberty. Despite the claims about natural rights made by 18th century Enlightenment thinkers—including the Founding Fathers of the United States—all rights are grounded in the social context of being human and are shaped by the social order in which one lives. In class-hierarchical societies, such as medieval feudalism, rights depend on a person’s class. For example, feudal lords have more extensive rights than peasants or tradesmen, who in turn have more rights (a larger sphere of action free of coercion) than do serfs and slaves. The dominant religion in a feudal society typically has a clerical hierarchy that assigns rights according to one’s place in the hierarchy.

In the context of societies evolving out of feudal class hierarchies, liberalism refers to the extension of rights (and the liberties defined by those rights) to those who previously were denied them. The reaction to preserve traditional rights for select groups, rather than accept the extension of those rights to others, is antiliberalism or reactionary conservatism.[3] I will use the word liberal to describe persons or actions that support liberalism. I use antiliberal to refer to persons or actions opposing the extension of rights beyond those classes and groups that held them in the past.

Rights in 19th Century Portugal and Spain: Tradition Versus Expansion

With this bit of political theory in hand, we can get back to what I learned about Spain and Portugal during this trip. As related by the many experts who explained Iberian history as we toured from Lisbon to Barcelona, the politics of 19th Century Portugal and Spain are mind-numbingly complex. Which King Alfonso/Afonso did what, and why, to which Pedro or Ferdinand or Juan/Joäo made sense when I heard it, but an hour later that detail became entangled with a hundred others. As I reviewed historical timelines and Wikipedia entries to untangle the data into information, a common theme emerged:

In broad terms, the sociopolitical histories of Spain and Portugal during the 19th Century are stories of (a) liberal efforts to expand the rights of groups previously restricted from exercising certain liberties versus (b) the antiliberal reaction against those liberal efforts by those seeking to maintain traditional restrictions of rights to groups with higher status.

Most of the time, the liberalizing efforts were aimed at transitioning a government from more-or-less absolute monarchy to a parliamentary monarchy in which the coercive powers of king, aristocracy, and church were to be restricted by rights guaranteed in a written constitution. At times, more-radical liberals pushed for an end to monarchy in favor of a republic, but in 19thCentury Iberia, republicans were quickly suppressed. I have to qualify the monarchic tradition in Portugal and Spain as “more or less absolute” because Iberian monarchs always had to deal with a traditional and powerful aristocracy. In both countries, the formal role of the aristocracy in governance had been represented since medieval times by a cortes, which functioned (when it functioned) as a kind of advisory council to the monarch.

In Portugal, if the monarch was weak or the royal succession was in dispute, one or more aristocrats would rebel and take over the throne. Sometimes the rebellion began a new dynasty; sometimes it quickly succumbed to an heir from the old line or to another aristocratic challenger. In Spain before 1469, multiple kingdoms and dukedoms changed boundaries periodically, as local rulers fought or married each other. That year, Isabela of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon married and, calling themselves the Catholic Monarchs, united most of Spain under their combined rule. Their grandson became the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, as well as the first Habsburg king of Spain, Charles I. But Charles’s great-great-grandson, Charles II, died without children, and the next Spanish king was decided via a grand melee among European monarchs and aristocrats known as the War of the Spanish Succession.

But by the beginning of the 19th Century, the existential threat to Iberian monarchs was neither Islamic Moors nor ambitious aristocrats. It was a former French corporal from Sicily—that unholy French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon invaded Spain and put his brother Joseph-Napoleon on the Spanish throne. When Napoleon’s army moved west toward Portugal, the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil, making Rio di Janeiro the new capital of the Portuguese empire. By the time Spanish forces, often conducting major guerilla operations, together with their  British allies, defeated the imperial French forces in the Peninsular Wars, new sociopolitical forces were stirring in Iberia, as they were across Europe. A rising middle class was increasingly restive and seeking a larger sphere of political freedom and political participation. Even among the aristocratic class were many who accepted and supported the imperative to broaden political representation and societal rights—or risk the kind of radical revolt that had occurred at the end of the 18th Century in North America and France.

In Portugal, these liberal voices called for King Joäo VI to return from Brazil and end the autocratic regency of the British soldier Marshal William Carr Beresford. Joäo sailed back to Lisbon and, before stepping back on Portuguese soil, agreed to the demands of the liberal faction to abide by the Constitution of 1822. Under this constitution, Joäo would be a limited monarch working with a reinvigorated and expanded Cortes, now in the role of a modern parliament. But Joäo’s wife and younger son Miguel, on arriving from Brazil, sided instead with the reactionary faction that sought to maintain the old “absolute” monarchy and its alliance with the Catholic church. With the backing of this antiliberal coalition, Miguel usurped the throne after Joäo’s death.

The liberal faction responded by calling for his older brother, Pedro, to return from Brazil and accept the role of constitutional monarch. Pedro was quite happy being Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, which his father had declared a separate state from Portuguese lands.

Nevertheless, Pedro abdicated the Brazilian throne in favor of his son (Pedro II of Brazil) and returned to Portugal, landing near Porto, which was the stronghold of liberal sentiment (that is, support for a parliamentary monarchy). Porto endured a long and deadly siege by the Miguelite forces, but eventually the liberal forces, led by aristocratic military men supportive of the liberal cause, defeated Miguel’s navy and army.

There were more ups and downs between the liberal and antiliberal factions, but eventually Miguel was exiled to Genoa and never succeeded in building a large enough backing to again challenge Pedro and his heirs. Throughout the remainder of the century, a succession of revolts and military coups d’etat kept Portugal’s parliamentary monarchy from making much progress in modernizing the country’s infrastructure and putting the national finances on a sound footing. The first railway line in Portugal did not open until 1856. The net effect was to keep both more-liberal (that is, pro-republican) and antiliberal (favoring a stronger monarch and a weakened Cortes) sentiment in ferment.

Meanwhile, in Spain, after seeing off the French army of invasion in 1812, thereby winning the long and bloody Peninsular War, Spain’s liberal revolutionaries dumped King Joseph Bonaparte and reconstituted the Cortes of Cadiz as a representative parliament with delegates from all over Iberian Spain and the Spanish overseas possessions. This Cortes adopted a liberal Constitution (the Constitution of 1812) that made Spain a parliamentary monarchy. However, when Ferdinand VII returned to the throne in 1814, he pitched the constitution and re-established the traditional absolute monarchy.

Spain spent much of the remainder of the 19th Century enmeshed in the liberal versus antiliberal struggles known as the Carlist Wars.

The name derives from supporters of a claimant (pretender) to the throne, Don Carlos, brother of King Ferdinand VII. After Ferdinand’s death, the succession went to his elder daughter Isabella, who was still a child. So her mother, Queen Maria Christina, ruled as Regent in the parliamentary monarchy established by the liberal Constitution of 1837. The political faction supporting this parliamentary monarchy were called the Cristinos, after Maria Christina. The Carlists were the antiliberal faction, demanding a return to autocratic monarchy.

This “liberal versus antiliberal” interpretation of the Carlist Wars is complicated by a second dimension in which tradition opposed innovation. The Cristinos wanted to strengthen the national government by ending much of the traditional regional variations in laws and customs that were important in Catalonia, the Basque provinces, and Galicia. The Carlists supported maintaining these regional traditions, so the Catalans, Basques, and Galicians largely sided with them.

For both Portugal and Spain, these decades-long struggles between liberalizing the monarchy to expand rights and preserving traditional restrictions on rights meant that growing economic and societal problems were left to fester. As the century ended, both countries were far weaker, poorer, and facing more serious social problems than in their former glory days. The clamor for change would continue into the early 20th century, when both countries would try abandoning their constitutional monarchies for democratic republics. The failures of those liberal attempts led directly and disastrously to the antiliberal and autocratic dictatorships of Salazar and Franco.

Is the Past in Iberia Prologue for America’s Future?

Once I had come to understand the past two centuries of Spanish and Portuguese history in terms of enduring conflict between liberal and antiliberal views on how society would distribute rights and political freedoms, I wondered about parallels with my own country. Of course, there are important differences: America has been a republic since the rebellion against King George III and his conservative Parliament. We haven’t fought over the transition from absolute monarchy to a parliamentary one. But just about the time I began making sense of 19th Century Iberian political history, I finished reading Robert Kagan’s Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing American Apart—Again. Kagan argues—with strong documentary support—that from the Colonial period up to the present, America has had strong antiliberal movements opposed to the liberalizing ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and supported—albeit imperfectly—by the U.S. Constitution (particularly as that constitution has been amended over time). American antiliberalism has several major components: Christian nationalism (America should be a Christian nation in which Christians and their beliefs have special status) and White supremacy (denial of full rights of citizenship and liberty, in Hayek’s sense, to those of ethnicities other than Western European).

In both Spain and Portugal, more than a century of gradual, up-and-down progress toward liberal civil societies ended with the sudden, violent overthrow of their struggling republics and the establishment of autocratic dictatorships that lasted for decades. In America, will more than a century of gradual, up-and-down progress toward realizing the ideals of a liberal society for all, as expressed in our Declaration of Independence, end with the violent overthrow of our liberal republican government? And if America slips into authoritarian rule, how long will that last?

[1] Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Pg. 11.

[2] And Hayek’s wrestling with how best to set these boundaries is part of what makes The Constitution of Liberty an important study even today, more than 80 years after its first publication.

[3] Corey Robin, in The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, argues that conservatives have always been reactionaries—opposed to their era’s attempts at expanding rights to groups previously denied them. So the term “reactionary conservative” would be redundant in his view. Robert Kagan, in Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing American Apart—Again, cuts conservatism more slack (he sometimes refers to “liberal conservatives” to refer to right-of-center liberals) and so prefers the term “antiliberalism.” After more than a decade of trying to determine what really matters to American conservatives, I side with Robin. Interestingly, Hayek appears to side with Robin and me, at least according to the postscript he added to The Constitution of Liberty entitled “Why I am Not a Conservative.” The political theory I’ve adopted in this set of posts owes much to all three authors.