December 21, 2017

Democracy in the Twenty-first Century

Marco Armiero e Stefania Barca

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its consequences in the early years of Francoism is certainly the most discussed topic of Spanish history in the last 80 years. Particularly since the year 2000, the historiography about this era has expanded continuously, intertwined with the emergence of a social movement to recover "historical memory" focused on exhuming and recognising the victims of Francoism. The war and post-war years, however, have scarcely been analysed from the perspective of environmental history, despite the fact that this discipline was establishing itself in Spain during the very same years. This thesis addresses this research gap, applying an environmental history approach to examine how the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Francoist victory and state-building efforts transformed the nation's socio-ecological relations and landscapes, both materially and symbolically. It combines environmental history with approaches from political ecology and the history of science, and builds on an extended documentary analysis of archival primary sources, combined with oral history. It seeks to unveil the socio-ecological legacies of the war and early Francoism, connecting history explicitly to debates about socioenvironmental conflicts today through issues including property regimes of urban water management, water quality and pollution burdens, overexploitation of fishing stocks and discussions about autonomy, self-sufficiency and degrowth.

Conceived as a compilation of research articles, this thesis contributes to the theoretical discussions emerging upon combining environmental history with political ecology and geography. While reinforcing the spatial and political aspects of environmental history, its contribution also strengthens the historical dimensions of political ecology and geography. It explores how the war revolutionised water property regimes in Barcelona, transformed urban water infrastructure in Madrid, and disrupted the Llobregat river socio-ecological system. Moreover, by underlining the long application of the state of war in Francoist Spain (1936-1948), it examines autarkic political, social and economic reforms as state-building efforts intimately linked with war and militarism. Autarky is interpreted as a political and ecological project that intertwines the search to increase national self-sufficiency with social repression and control. Along these lines, this thesis examines the materialisation of the autarkic project in the expansion of the Spanish fishing fleet to contribute to feed the nation, and in the militarisation of the national border in the Pyrenees Mountains. Lastly, it explores the circulation of the discourses of self-sufficiency through space and time.

In short, by using the case of the Spanish Civil War and the budding years of Francoism, this thesis seeks to open up Spanish environmental history both in topics and approaches, resolving the tension between the public interest and the massive development of the historiography about the war and the dictatorship, on the one hand, and the lack of environmental history research about both, on the other.

Keywords: Environmental History; Spanish Civil War; autarky; Fascism; Francoism; Political ecology