Patriotism and neutrality. The Spanish Parliament and the Great War, 1914–18

The Spanish government decided to be not involved in the First World War despite the pressures received by the two sides, a decision that converted Spain in a special Neutral State, formally outside of the fight but deeply involved under different perspectives. The operations of espionage and smuggling conducted by the belligerents in the Spanish territory call the sovereignty of the State into question. In an effort to reduce these violations, the Spanish government adopted measures limiting freedom and parliamentary powers constitutionally guaranteed. Thanks to the researches carried out in the historical archives of the Cortes of Madrid, the study aims to describe the Parliamentary response to executive infringements on individual liberty and parliamentary rights, focusing on two main aspects. First, I’ll describe the way in which the Spanish deputies attempted to preserve the authority and institutional primacy of the Parliament against executive power during the IWW. Secondly, a special attention will be dedicated to the debates about the law introducing “extraordinary powers” of public authority in 1918. The result of this analysis allows also to better verifying the conventional depiction of the Spanish Parliament as passive and irrelevant at the end of the Restoration’s age.