Stanley Payne

The Second Spanish Republic (193136) was the only new liberal democratic regime to emerge in Europe during the 1930s. Historians, however, have focused primarily on the Civil War of 193639 that followed, devoting much less attention to the parliamentary regime that preceded it. This book deals with the history and failure of the democratic polity in Spain through a detailed examination of the initiatives of its president, Niceto Alcal� Zamora. As civil servant, lawyer, politician and writer, by 1931 he had become one of the most successful men of Spain. He played the leading role in the downfall of the monarchy and the inauguration of the Republic, which he served for eight months as initial prime minister and then as the first president. Stanley Paynes study argues that the failure of the Republic was not inevitable but depended on the policy choices of its president and the key party leaders. Alcal� Zamoras professed goal was to center the Republic, stabilizing the new regime while avoiding extremes, but he failed altogether in this project. The Constitution of 1931 stipulated the double responsibility of parliamentary government both to the president and to a voting majority. Though Alcal� Zamora resisted strong efforts from the left to cancel the results of the first fully democratic elections in 1933, he subsequently used his powers recklessly, making and unmaking governments at will, refusing to permit normal functioning of parliament. This first critical scholarly account of the presidency of Alcal� Zamora casts new light on the failure of democracy in interwar Europe and on the origins of the Spanish Civil War.

Alcalá Zamora and the Failure of the Spanish Republic, 19311936

Anatoly M. Khazanov

These studies examine the ways in which succeeding democratic regimes have dealt with, or have ignored (and in several cases sugar-coated) an authoritarian or totalitarian past from 1943 to the present. They treat the relationship with democratization and the different ways in which collective memory is formed and dealt with, or ignored and suppressed. Previous books have examined only restricted sets of countries, such as western or eastern Europe, or Latin America. The present volume treats a broader range of cases than any preceding account, and also a much broader time-span, investigating diverse historical and cultural contexts, and the role of national identity and nationalism, studying the aftermath of both fascist and communist regimes in both Europe and Asia in an interdisciplinary framework, while the conclusion provides a more complete comparative perspective than will be found in any other work. The book will be of interest to historians and political scientists, and to those interested in fascism, communism, legacies of war, democratization, collective memory and transitional justice. This book was previously published as a special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions.

Stanley Payne

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