Retarded Modernization: Spanish Social Policy before Franco, 1820–1939

Abstract

The output of social legislation in Spain up to the early 1920s substantially mirrored that north of the Pyrenees. Indeed, in certain areas, such as education and public health, the country was among the pioneers. It was in the effective implementation of all these innovations that Spain was a laggard. The cumulative outcome was that, in common with other Mediterranean countries, a distinct welfare system emerged in which widespread and secular social protection was comparatively late in establishment. In Spain’s case this was in no small measure due to the absence of a modern party and parliamentary system and, critically, the profound deficiencies of governance. The wranglings between liberals and conservatives about the appropriateness of state-supervised provisions were played out within a welfare regime intransigently dominated by a strongly traditional, largely catholic charitable ethos (what in Spanish is still referred to as asistencialismo). Fundamental, too, was the chronic failure to resolve the land question, whose modernization could have laid the foundations for mass industrial take-off.