Iberian anarchism in twentieth-century history

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces a Special Issue exploring the history of Iberian anarchism in the twentieth century. It highlights the paucity of research on Portuguese anarchism in general, and argues that the well-established field of Spanish anarchist history can profit from greater insight into the development of anarchism in Iberia as a whole. The essay then showcases the five articles which comprise the Special Issue, drawing particular attention to their methodological contributions in fields such as urban space, biography, and transnationality and how these can help to recover historical perspectives marginalised by incomplete narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Anarchism
• Iberia
• Spain
• Portugal
• historiography

In 1926, members of the União Anarquista Portuguesa (Portuguese Anarchist Union, UAP) wrote to El Productor, then one of the leading newspapers of the Spanish anarchist movement, to complain that its coverage of Portugal was characterised by an “ignorance” which belied any rhetoric of “doing away with the influence of borders […] through relations and reciprocal knowledge.”¹ The letter went on to ask: “Is it not sad, comrades, that we continue to be forever unknown (systematically, it seems) to the anarchists of other countries?” The following year, Spanish and Portuguese anarchists would come together to form the Federação/Federación Anarquista Ibérica (Iberian Anarchist Federation, FAI). However, the organisation never truly bridged the two movements (Garner 2016), and even after establishing these formal ties their relations remained characterised, more often than not, by mutual ignorance (Gonçalvez 2020).

While the history of Portuguese anarchism itself remains, for various reasons, largely underexplored (Duarte 2021), it is notable that the comparatively well-established historiography of Spanish anarchism has tended to mirror the movement’s own lack of attention towards its allies on the western side of the peninsula. As Evans and Yeoman (2016) have noted, even as histories of global and transnational anarchism have proliferated (Turcato 2007; Hirsch and Van der Walt 2010; Shaffer 2020; overview in Bantman 2023), notions of Spanish “exceptionalism” have tended to preclude the integration of Spain into such studies, or vice versa, meaning that “new approaches” are still required to situate Spanish anarchism in its international context. Bringing the historiographies of Spanish and Portuguese anarchism into a dialogue about Iberian anarchisms confronts this problem on two levels: firstly by exploring what was, despite the difficulties noted by the UAP, a key site of transnational contact and exchange; and, secondly, by highlighting the striking and informative parallels in the trajectories of both movements, for all Spain’s supposed uniqueness. Both achieved remarkable levels of influence among their respective countries’ workers, which allowed entire countercultures to flourish within anarchist strongholds such as Lisbon, Barcelona and other focal points across the Iberian and Ibero-American world; both fought long and bitter struggles against right-wing dictatorships which sent many militants into exile or forced them to adapt to desperate circumstances; both also had to struggle against growing Communist influence which would come to obscure, especially in the Portuguese case (Guimarães and Freire 2010), the importance they once held in the working-class movement.

Just as those UAP militants realised almost a century ago, the invocation of “reciprocal knowledge” in the abstract is insufficient. With this in mind, scholars of twentieth-century anarchism in Spain and Portugal gathered (in-person and virtually) for an international symposium in June of 2022 at the University of Leeds, UK.² Throughout the day, attendees from Europe and North and South America followed anarchist lives through local and transnational networks, into liminal spaces and the intimate realm of the interpersonal and the subjective. We were grateful to Professors Richard Cleminson and Pamela Beth Radcliff for bringing their experience and expertise to bear on a plenary session, and to Professor Radcliff for providing a keynote address. This special journal issue showcases some of the work explored during the symposium, offering not only new knowledge but also innovative new methodologies and a thoughtful reconsideration of old ones. These contributions should point the way to fruitful avenues of research on Iberian anarchism and other fields where voices have been marginalised by archival silences and incomplete narratives.

Diogo Duarte opens the special collection with an article that sheds light on the vastly understudied Portuguese anarchist movement, which was in fact the dominant political culture among the working classes in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, Duarte argues convincingly that the history of contemporary Portugal cannot be understood without reference to anarchism; his exploration of the anarchist city and its confrontations with the Portuguese state are a reminder that histories of revolutionary social movements can also uncover the ways in which hegemonic societies have re-shaped themselves over time in response to challenges. Duarte’s article employs an innovative conceptual framework to bring the history of anarchism in Lisbon, Barreiro and Porto into dialogue with urban history, adding to anarchist historiography’s contribution to the study of space (Goyens 2009). This can also be read as a useful counterpoint to the centrality of Barcelona when we think about the role of anarchism in the struggle over the city (Ealham 2010); analogous urban struggles were, in fact, taking place in cities at both ends of the Iberian Peninsula.

In fact, as Ana Campos highlights in her article, the similarity of struggle in both countries was sufficiently compelling to bring working-class Portuguese exiles onto Spanish battlefields in 1936–1939, fighting against an authoritarian reaction which many interpreted as an iteration of the same enemy they had faced across the border. Campos’s article also offers a long overdue affirmation of the possibilities offered by personal biography and memory as valid historical resources. As a form of social history, history-as-biography “rescues the plurality of the past” (Bolufer, Burdiel, and Sierra 2016). It is thereby through this approach that one can highlight complexity and destabilise entrenched narratives within Iberian anarchist history. For example, individual stories such as that of Manuel António Bôto contribute to the necessary work of placing Spanish anarchism in broader context (Evans and Yeoman 2016), further repositioning Spain less as “exceptionality” and more as continuity of the struggles with which Bôto and other Portuguese anarcho-syndicalists were intimately familiar. Biography is also a window onto the intricacies of individual lives such as that of Bôto, marked by his individual subjectivities, his local activist experience in Barreiro, and his transnational movements and solidarities. Biography therefore offers a way of approaching the “scalar complexity” (Antentas 2022; Bantman and Altena 2015) that must be addressed in histories of working-class internationalism.

This complexity is also the subject of Alex Doyle’s article, which problematizes the well-established “cross-fertilization” (Ackelsberg 2016) between the anarchist movements in Spain and Cuba and instead highlights the intricate entanglements of class, nationalism, and imperialism on the island. Rather than a straightforwardly “generative” phenomenon which could produce a cosmopolitan movement based around proletarian unity and shared opposition to US neo-imperialism, the transatlantic flow of working-class immigrants from Spain frequently collided with, or even exacerbated, a nationalist tendency within the Cuban labour movement. This tendency claimed origins in the anti-colonial struggle and the fight to overturn discriminatory practices which favoured Spaniards, but was perceived by the Spanish anarchist émigré, Luis Barcia, as a pernicious nativism which would only provide justification for the US intervention and impede the emancipation of all the island’s workers. Doyle offers an important contribution both to the continual work of decentering European anarchism and exploring its role in (post-)colonial contexts (Hirsch and Van der Walt 2010), and to ongoing conversations about anarchism and the national question (Gutiérrez and Kinna 2023; Levy 2004).

Henry Brown’s contribution to this special issue entails a similar concern with the collision between anarchist ideals and challenging historical realities. The crucible of the Spanish Civil War, those three years of “highly idiosyncratic” anti-fascist hybridity (Bjerström 2021), forced many anarchists into what Brown calls the “liminal space” of military experience. However, as Brown highlights, the Popular Army was a space of contestation within which we can identify a peculiar but distinctly anarchist military subculture. In his effort to recover the agency of these anarchist combatants, Brown integrates first-hand testimonies in the form of memoirs and oral history with more traditional documentary sources, much in the same way as Ana Campos’s article. This grounds his analysis in the realm of personal experiences and subjectivities, including masculinities. As has already been noted, these personal, subjective, and gendered dimensions can help historians to destabilise entrenched narratives and open much-needed new avenues of research in Iberian anarchism, not least because of inherent methodological obstacles created by the destruction, dispersion, and disappearance of much of the anarchist archival record through war, exile, displacement, and reprisals.

In the fifth and final article of this special issue, Charlotte Byrne offers another innovative approach to such archival silences, this time centred on the history of sexuality. Byrne’s interdisciplinary methodology harnesses creative writing, in dialogue with the limited existing historiography about Spanish anarchism and lesbianism (Cleminson and Vázquez García 2007), to bring queer anarchist women out of the obscurity imposed on them by posterity. Given the unsurprising scarcity of first-hand testimony about sapphic love from this period, novel approaches are necessary to afford these women the space they deserve in anarchist history-writing (De Groot 2010). Byrne’s contribution makes a case for the interdisciplinary use of historical fiction in this endeavour, because it bridges historiography and literature. She weaves analysis of contemporary photographs and anarchist print culture, and reflections about (auto/)biographical sources, into her creative historical fiction writing practice. In this way, Byrne is able to identify – and therefore portray in her own novel – the complex subjectivities of queer anarchist women in the past.

Drawing on different but frequently overlapping approaches, each essay contributes to a shared goal of rectifying historiographical silences and processes of marginalisation. With this in mind, through this special journal issue we propose not a history of “exceptional” Spain and peripheral Portugal, but a history of Iberian anarchism in all its idiosyncrasies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities [AH/R012733/1].

Notes

1. “La U.A.P. contesta a unas alusiones.” El Productor, Barcelona, 12 February 1926.

2. “Anarchism in the Iberian Peninsula,” the 2022 symposium that led to this Special Issue, was organised by Sophie Turbutt and Joshua Newmark (University of Leeds). We are grateful to the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (AHRC) and the Past & Present Society for funding the symposium.