This book analyzes the polarization of political culture in a Spanish city, the northern industrial port of Gijón. Through an analysis of the mass mobilization of Spanish society and the failed efforts to incorporate the masses into a stable political system, the book aims both to elucidate the long-term origins of the Spanish Civil War and to shed new light on the transition to mass politics that confronted European countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process, the book explores new ways of understanding the formation of political identity in the emerging age of mass politics.

The challenge of popular mobilization generated varying degrees of political crisis across Europe, but Spain experienced a particularly acute form that led to unchecked polarization and civil war, the so called “two Spains” in mortal combat. The turning point for Spain was the disastrous war with the United States in 1898 that opened the first fissures in the monarchist regime after two decades of political stability. From 1898 until the Civil War, the country experienced an intensifying effort to achieve political legitimation that pitted the forces of the old elitist regime against emergent challengers who sought to organize the masses against them. Thus, a declining monarchist/Catholic establishment tried to defend its domination against both a republican democratic and a revolutionary class-based alternative. The struggle culminated during the Second Republic of the 1930s, when the republican attempt to incorporate the masses into a liberal democratic regime failed and the country became polarized into revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces. Instead of a coherent political program that could unite the country, its culture of polarization led to civil war.