The Spanish Identity Card
Historical Legacies and Contemporary Surveillance
by Pablo Ouziel
B.A., The University of Sheffield, 1998 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS
in the Department of Political Science
© Pablo Ouziel, 2009 University of Victoria
All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photography or other means, without the permission of the author.
The Spanish Identity Card
Historical Legacies and Contemporary Surveillance
by Pablo Ouziel
B.A., The University of Sheffield, 1998
Supervisory Committee
Dr. Colin J. Bennett, Supervisor (Department of Political Science)
Dr. Michelle Bonner, Department Member (Department of Political Science)
Supervisory Committee
Dr. Colin J. Bennett, Supervisor (Department of Political Science)
Dr. Michelle Bonner, Department Member (Department of Political Science)
ABSTRACT
Around the globe recent initiatives to implement new identity card schemes have proved contentious. In some countries governments have dropped these initiatives because of the fear of popular backlash, in others governments have gone ahead and implemented the new systems but have dealt with substantial popular opposition. Yet in Spain, in 2006 a new national identity card was introduced putting the country at the forefront of Europe in the implementation of new generation identity cards and there was barely any
opposition. To date more than 12.5 million Spanish citizens have received this new document and the cost of the project already exceeds 314 million Euros. So what explains these developments? Why has a new national identity card been introduced? Why has there been comparatively little opposition? To address these questions this thesis presents a qualitative-historical case study of Spain’s national identity card. This study will permit analysis into how global forces promoting new forms of identification (administrative, technological and corporate) are interacting with distinctive Spanish institutions, attitudes and legacies. Because there is a shortage of secondary literature regarding the topic, the study reviews policy documentation, legislative debate, media sources and survey data, and analyses the findings from a set of key informant interviews with individuals from the government, private sector, academia, NGO’s and the Spanish Data Protection Agency.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Supervisory Committee ii Abstract iii Table of Contents iv List of Tables v List of Figures vi
List of Interviewees vii
List of Acronyms viii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction Setting the Scene 1
Chapter One Surveillance Studies and Theories of Identification 8
Chapter Two The Legacies of Spain’s National Identity Card 30
Chapter Three DNIe: Spain’s Electronic National Identity Card 49
Chapter Four Perceptions of the DNIe System 81
Conclusion The Perfect Storm 116
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1. Historical Development of the Spanish National Identity Card Table 2. Laws, Orders, Decrees and Directives Regulating the DNIe Table 3. Possible Uses of the DNIe by the Business Community Table 4. Future Uses of the DNIe
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Examples of Spanish Identification Documents Figure 2. Physical Security Measures of the DNIe Figure 3. DNIe Deployment: Organizational Chart
LIST OF INTERVIEWS
Interview with the Operations Director for Security Systems, Indra Sistemas, S.A.
Madrid April 27th 2009.
Interview with the President of the Associación de Internautas (Cybercitizen Association).
Madrid, April 27th 2009.
Interview with the President of the Spanish subsidiary of GreenBit S.p.A.
Madrid, April 28th 2009.
Interview with the General Manager for the promotion of e-Administration at the Ministry of Public Administration.
Madrid, April 29th 2009.
Interview with the Assistant Director of e-confidence and with an external consultant of INTECO.
Leon, April 30th 2009.
Interview with executives from Madrid’s Data Protection Agency, whom were previously in the Spanish Data Protection Authority and participated in the agency’s approval process for the DNIe.
Madrid, May 4th 2009.
Interview with the President of AUI (Internet Users Association).
Madrid, May 4th 2009.
Interview with the Chief Inspector of IT for the National Police body.
El Escorial, May 6th 2009.
Interview with the President of the CLI.
Madrid, May 7th 2009.
Interview with the Chief of Services for the Information Society at the Ministry for Tourism, Commerce and Trade.
Madrid, May 7th 2009.
Interview with Jorge Ramió Aguirre. Academic.
Madrid, May 7th 2009.
Interview with a consultant at Pragis Technologies involved in DNIe related projects.
Madrid, May 8th 2009.
Interview with Marc Carrillo. The Consell Consultiu.
Barcelona, May 11th 2009.
Interview with the President of Idoneum Electronic Identity S.A.
LIST OF ACRONYMS
CCN National Cryptographic Centre CNI National Intelligence Centre DGP Directorate General of Police
DNIe Documento Nacional de Identidad Electrónico DNSD Delegación Nacional de Servicios Documentales eID Electronic Identification
EU European Union
FNMT-RCM Fabrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre
INTECO Instituto Nacional de Tecnologías de la Comunicación ISDEFE Ingenieria de Sistemas para la Defensa de España S.A. MAP Ministry of Public Administration
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
PIN Personal Identification Number PKI Public Key Infrastructure
STORK Secure Identity Across Borders Linked
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Dr. Colin J. Bennett for his patience and guidance throughout the development of this thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Michelle Bonner for accepting to be a member of the defence committee and Dr. David Lyon for being the external examiner. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Gary T. Marx for having provided valuable input throughout the writing process, and Dr. Amy Verdun for her support throughout the MA program.
Setting the Scene
In Playing the Identity Card, we are told that “[i]dentity cards are not just technologies; they are also contemporary tools of governance which may be used to address a multiple and shifting set of social and political problems” (Bennett and Lyon 2008, xi). Understanding identity cards from this perspective, this thesis sets out to explore the development and implementation of Spain’s new and compulsory Electronic National Identification Card (DNIe). To date, more than 12.5 million Spanish citizens have received this new document with seemingly little opposition. Yet across the globe, attempts to implement similar identity card schemes have proved contentious. For this reason, this thesis will investigate why the Spanish government chose this policy instrument, and why the population accepted it without much opposition.
The thesis will argue that the acceptance of the new identity card by the Spanish government and the population can best be explained in terms of the country’s historical legacies, the structural configuration of the state, and Spain’s political culture. It will also demonstrate that these societal attributes have made it easy for a ‘Security Cartel’ to shape the development and implementation of the national identity card without societal opposition. David Lyon has begun to explore a theory, which he refers to as the ‘Card Cartel’ (2009, 96), in which he claims that the implementation of national identity cards is socially shaped by powerful interests involving the state, corporations and technical standards. The thesis will show how such a cartel is operating in Spain, yet, it will argue that it is more appropriate to refer to it as a ‘Security Cartel’ than a ‘Card Cartel’, because
of the fact that the actors involved are not simply working on identity cards but are indeed major actors behind Spain’s broader securitization process.
Official explanations regarding the need for advanced card technologies have varied from country to country. Some governments have suggested these systems contribute to the ‘War on Terror’; others have emphasized their usefulness in combating illegal immigration or identity theft, while others still, have presented identity cards as ‘effecting tools’ in a country’s modernization process. In some cases these systems have been presented as single-purpose tools designed to meet a specific social need. In others, they have been presented as multipurpose tools designed to meet the needs of numerous interested parties. Frequently the purposes stated by different actors involved have been in contradiction with each other. According to Deborah Stone, “political actors
consciously frame a problem to make interests appear concentrated or diffuse, selfish or public” (Stone 2002). This she claims, allows these actors to present particular policy instruments as solutions to perceived problems, potentially minimizing opposition and facilitating a swift adoption by the population. In order to understand the Spanish DNIe, the thesis will analyze the official discourse regarding the country’s new national identity card. The analysis will show how the country’s historical legacies, the structural
configuration of the state, and Spain’s political culture have helped in shaping a well coordinated official message which, despite delays, contradictions and broken promises, has succeeded in supporting the implementation of the DNIe while avoiding societal opposition.
Some of the existing literature pertaining to surveillance and privacy has depicted the diffusion of identity card systems as a result of some common and broad transnational trends (Bennett and Lyon 2008, 9). It is clear from the research that such policy transfers from abroad have been instrumental in shaping the development of Spain’s new identity card. Studying these developments will provide insight into the structural configuration of the Spanish state and its permeability to foreign influence, it will also show how the ‘Security Cartel’ operates at both the national and transnational level in order to achieve its aim of implementing national identification cards.
When identity cards have been proposed in societies where there is a strong civil libertarian tradition, the proposals have frequently been met with heated and prolonged debate. A parliamentary debate has usually taken place, media debate has been constant, and prolonged social debate has ensued. Usually, throughout the process the official agency responsible for the protection of privacy rights, and numerous Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), have raised concerns about the intended plans. In Spain, on the other hand, the implementation of the DNIe has encountered little opposition. In order to understand the reasons for such lack of opposition, the thesis will explore the role of the Spanish media, the role of the country’s Data Protection Authority, and the role of the different NGOs involved in the process. The thesis will also analyze the lack of social and parliamentary debates regarding the adoption of the DNIe.
In addition to the previous issues discussed above, numerous voices around the globe have raised concerns about the possibilities of social control and profiling provided by these sophisticated national identification systems. Concerns have also been raised
about the possibility of technological failures and data losses, and the possibility that the systems can be implemented without guarantees against future function creep1. For this reason, the thesis will also examine the potential presented by the DNIe, for function creep, social control and profiling, data losses and data breaches, and technological glitches. Concerns which have been mostly ignored by the population as a consequence of the country’s historical legacies on the political culture of the society.
To address all the issues raised above, the following chapters present a qualitative-historical case study of Spain’s national identity card. Overall, the study analyzes how forces promoting new forms of identification (administrative, technological and corporate) are interacting with distinctive Spanish institutions, attitudes and legacies. The thesis begins with an overview of some of the existing literature on surveillance and identification, and then moves on to study Spain’s historical legacies as they relate to identification politics. The research then focuses on the adoption of the DNIe in Spain. Due to the shortage of secondary literature regarding this topic, the thesis reviews policy documentation, legislative debate, media sources and survey data. Once these have been presented, the findings from a set of key informant interviews2 are summarized, in order to present the perceptions of the DNIe system by those who have been involved in its development and implementation. The interviewees include individuals in government,
1 Function Creep, refers to the way in which information that has been collected for one limited purpose, is
gradually used for other purposes, which people may not have initially approved.
2 The methodology used for the key informant interviewing is advocated and explained in Dexter, L.A.
(2006) Elite and Specialized Interviewing, Essex: ECPR Press.
Page vii lists the interviewees, the date of the interviews, and the place where each interview took place. I would like to thank all the interviewees for the valuable contribution their input has made to this thesis.
academia, standards agencies, private sector, NGOs, and the privacy commissioner office in Madrid3.
Chapter One, Surveillance Studies and Theories of Identification, contends that advanced systems of identification are a form of surveillance, and offers an overview of the four main currents of thought currently found within the surveillance studies
literature. The chapter then moves on to explain how in recent years, some elements of the surveillance literature have been used in order to develop theories on the development and implementation of identity cards. The chapter finishes with an in-depth analysis of David Lyon’s theory of the ‘Card Cartel’, in order to provide a framework through which to explore the development and implementation of Spain’s DNIe.
Chapter Two, The Legacies of Spain’s National Identity Card, presents developments in Spain’s identification policy from its inception to the present day. Emphasis is given to specific time periods in which identification policies have been implemented or changed. These include, the time of the Spanish colonies, the 19th century when King Fernando VII created the Spanish police, the civil war and the subsequent dictatorship, Spain’s transition to electoral democracy, and the period of electoral democracy the country is currently experiencing. The purpose of the chapter is to explain the historical legacies that shaped the country’s national identification system.
Chapter Three, DNIe: Spain’s Electronic National Identity Card, explains the development and implementation of the DNIe, addressing the legal framework regulating
3 The University of Victoria Human Research Ethics Board approved the interview method on April 9th
2009, and from the 27th of April 2009, until the 12th of May 2009, interviews where conducted in both Madrid and Barcelona.
the identification system, and the technological and physical characteristics of the document. Then, the chapter introduces the actors involved in the development and implementation process, and outlines the stated objectives and costs of the DNIe. Finally, the chapter presents some of the stated benefits of the DNIe, and contextualizes its
adoption within broader governmental plans, and transnational interoperability initiatives. Chapter Four, Perceptions of the DNIe System, presents the summary of the data collected during the set of interviews recently conducted in both Madrid and Barcelona. The purpose of the chapter is to introduce the humans behind the decisions, by presenting their perceptions, opinions and doubts regarding the identity card project. Opinions expressed in a one-to-one interview can vary from prepared official statements presented through the media.
The conclusion of the thesis, The Perfect Storm, draws from the findings collected throughout the research, in order to define why the Spanish government chose this policy instrument, and why the population accepted it without much opposition. In addition to this, the conclusion offers a critique of the implementation and development process of the DNIe, and highlights the potential dangers associated with the system.
Overall, the thesis is designed to contribute to the political science and sociology literature on identity cards, by contributing a new case study to this growing body of literature. Much has been written about the implementation of identity cards in various countries other than Spain, but this research constitutes the first qualitative-historical case study of identity card development in the country. For this reason, the research is
contributes to an understanding of how international trends in identity card systems apply to the Spanish DNIe. Theoretically, the thesis also provides a contribution to the surveillance literature by exploring the theory of the ‘Card Cartel’ within a specific country case study. Finally, the thesis on a personal note provides an opportunity to revive Spain’s historical memory, in order to explain how present policy regarding identity is conditioned by past experiences.
Chapter One
Surveillance Studies and Theories of Identification
Most citizens view compulsory national identity cards as a piece of plastic carried in the wallet, which facilitates self-identification when interacting with different state and private agencies (Clarke 1988). Nevertheless, the reality of this policy instrument is far more complex, as it offers governments an identity management system that can govern people’s identities throughout their entire life cycle. The compulsory nature of the cards, and the use of unique identifiers connected to powerful searchable and networked databases, offers these complex systems of identity control management the ability to single out or even harass visible minorities and those with alternative lifestyles. For these reasons, “identity cards contribute to the process of surveillance as ‘social sorting’” (Bennett and Lyon 2008, 9), and offer the means for potentially undemocratic and unaccountable surveillance.
“Surveillance” is not a simple analytical category and is susceptible to a number of definitions provided by numerous scholars. Throughout this thesis, surveillance is understood as “the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction” (Lyon 2007, 14). Associated with the post-enlightenment political demand for equality, which came about with the expansion of democracy, surveillance was first presented as a means towards granting people access to the political process of the growing European nation-states. In this sense, surveillance was closely linked to “the growth of military organization, industrial towns and cities, government administration, and the capitalistic business enterprise” (Lyon
1994, 24). Traditionally, therefore, surveillance has been closely tied to the development of capitalism and the subsequent bureaucratization of the organizational structures of society.
The field of surveillance studies clearly has its roots in the ideas of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Marx contributed the focus on surveillance as an aspect of struggle between labour and capital. Weber on the other hand, concentrated on the methods used by modern organizations to store and retrieve data as part of their quest for efficient bureaucracy. From this body of work, different streams of thought have evolved
attempting to describe how and why surveillance is a central feature of modern societies. In this sense, there are four streams of thought, which are currently wrestling between each other in an attempt to describe developments in surveillance. The first stream sees surveillance as part of bureaucratization. The second understands it to be a
quasi-independent social force associated with the notion of discipline. The third considers that surveillance is driven by technological developments, and the fourth, views surveillance as part of the securitization process. In recent years, elements drawn from these four streams of thought have merged, in order to present theories on the development and implementation of identity cards. Understanding the four streams will provide a gateway into understanding the politics of identification and identity cards.
Surveillance and Bureaucratization
The first stream of thought in the surveillance literature finds its roots in the thinking of Max Weber, who viewed bureaucratization as the most overt manifestation of
formally rationalized societies. From Weber’s point of view, rationalization has driven modern societies towards an increasing reliance on efficiency as the means to effective governance. In this sense, state bureaucracies operating with “formalistic impersonality” focus on efficiency and specialization as the means to achieving specific social goals. Through this process, according to Weber, the bureaucracy acquires administrative knowledge and know-how, which grants it a modern form of power. This argument Weber defends, by arguing that in the modern world “domination is in everyday life primarily administration” (Weber 1922; Weber 1918).
Exploring the social consequences of bureaucratization, Weber argues, that a bureaucratic machinery relatively autonomous from political and popular control is gradually developing. He attributes this growing trend towards bureaucratic autonomy to the technical superiority of the bureaucracy, which he claims has no regard for the individual and instead focuses on executing its goals through purposive-rational means (Weber 1922; Weber 1919). The power obtained by the bureaucracy through this process, according to Weber, creates a social dependency on bureaucracy for the functioning of the modern state. Through this dependency, the bureaucracy is granted the power to produce authoritative decisions about people, by using “personal information as the raw material for this production” (Rule et al. 1980, 49). It is in the use of personal information as a raw material for the functioning of bureaucracy, that scholars have identified the relationship between bureaucratization and surveillance.
According to these scholars, the statistical measures, which are collected by the bureaucracy using surveillance mechanisms, are applied to create the standards and
norms which govern the lives of individuals. This in turn, leads to strict definitions of right and wrong being separated from law and being decided by statistics. Nevertheless, because rational grounds determine that those elevated to authority have a right to issue commands, surveillance mechanisms are seen as legitimate and whole populations adhere to being surveilled (Weber 1957, 328). As whole populations accept the rules imposed on them through surveilled statistical means as fair and impartial, the process has the dual effect of allegedly maximizing efficiency while also constructing mechanisms of social control.
In the early 1970s, James Rule, inspired by Weber’s bureaucratization theory, published a widely acclaimed study of Private Lives, Public Surveillance4, in which he outlined how developments in computerization were accelerating the bureaucratization process. In his account, Rule described the shift from paper to computer files within the bureaucratic context, and emphasized how large scale bureaucratic surveillance processes were not only limited to government, but were also rapidly gaining ground in commercial contexts. These developments according to Rule could be traced back to the cardinal value of efficiency, taken for granted in modern societies, and could be useful in explaining the role of bureaucratization in shaping our lives.
Under the assumption that “individuality can be rescued from mass society through customized production” (Lyon 2006, 7), whole populations have accepted bureaucratic surveillance as a necessary requisite of modern existence. The outcome of this has been that while citizens have become more visible to an impersonal set of
bureaucratized watchers – who subject them to increasingly profound and widespread monitoring – a “paradoxical spectre of opaque transparency” has developed. Within this spectre, as organizations both private and public are able to see more of the citizenry, they slowly recede “behind a plethora of alphanumeric archives and databases” (Ogasawara 2008, 120), making it hard for the citizen to see the organizations. In addition, as more personal information becomes available, more and more personal information is requested.
The most important concern which has been raised by scholars in this stream of thought has been to question why citizens should just sit idly watching as their personal data moves through the bureaucratized structures of both private and public sectors without much ability in shaping its use (Rule 2007, x). Considering Nicos Poulanzas’ claim that bureaucratic organization is “closely interwoven with the dominant ideology” (Jessop 1990, 226), and Weber’s emphasis on the fact that bureaucracy is made possible by the fact that bureaucrats are able to earn a salary derived from the population, it makes sense that those studying surveillance within the context of the bureaucratization of society, should raise doubts about its legitimacy. Why shouldn’t citizens have more control over the nature and extent of bureaucratic surveillance practices?
Surveillance and Discipline
Those surveillance scholars who are influenced by the work of Michel Foucault see surveillance as a quasi-independent social force designed to discipline. In Discipline
of convicts, has developed in the modern era from "Monarchical Punishment" to
"Disciplinary Punishment". The first, according to Foucault involves the repression of the population through brutal public displays of executions and torture. The second, on the other hand, gives "professionals" such as psychologists and parole officers, power over the prisoner. To Foucault, Monarchic punishment “was a spectacular expression of potency, an ‘expenditure’, exaggerated and coded, in which power renewed its vigour”. Disciplinary Punishment on the other hand, was about the parading of an ostentatious examination, in which “the ‘subjects’ were presented as ‘objects’ to the observation of a power that was manifested only by its gaze” (Foucault 1978, 187-188).
The rise of disciplinary power in the modern era, according to Foucault, coincided with the rise of “an art of the human body”. Discipline provided a policy of coercion through which the human body entered a machinery of power that explored it, broke it down and rearranged it. “A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was being born” which defined how to control others so that they would operate as those in power wished them to do. For Foucault, the outcome of discipline was the production of “subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (Foucault 1978, 138). According to him, the strength of discipline could be found in the fact that it focused on the smallest details of human life.
The strand of surveillance theory, which draws from Foucault’s work, is
Foucault takes Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon”5 design for prisons, and compares it to the structures of modern society. In the Panoptic prison, a single guard watches over prisoners, yet prisoners are not able to see the guard. Foucault claims that this is different from the dungeons of pre-modernity, in that although offering brightness, it also creates a visibility trap, through which modern society exercises its controlling systems of power. According to Foucault, the increasing visibility provided by panoptic surveillance, leads to a concentration of power, which allows institutions to track individuals throughout their entire life cycle. Foucault claims that panopticism can be found in many areas of modern society – such as prisons, schools, workplaces, and the home. He also claims, that this implicit surveillance creates the impetus for self-control, as self-discipline is preferred to discipline by an external source.
Anthony Giddens has built on Foucault’s vision of surveillance as a social force designed to discipline by insisting that surveillance must be analyzed independently, and not merely as a product of capitalism or bureaucracy. For Giddens, there are four
institutional dimensions of modern society: capitalism, industrialism, military power, and surveillance (Giddens 1985). In his critique of modernity, Giddens argues that the most defining property of modernity is that societies have become disembedded from time and space. In pre-modern societies, space was the area in which individuals moved, and time was the experience while moving. Nevertheless, in the modern world social space is no longer defined by the space in which one moves. In order to explain this, Giddens speaks
5 The original panoptic idea was developed by Jeremy Bentham and was advertised as “being appropriate
for any context in which supervision was required; for ‘… punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education’” (Lyon 1994, 65).
of virtual space and virtual time. According to Giddens, this disembedding from space and time has created problems in the field of knowledge. Whereas in pre-modern societies knowledge was held by the elders who were definable in time and space, modern societies rely on expert systems, which are not present in time and space, but which nevertheless, must be trusted (Giddens 1990).
In the modern world, according to Giddens, the “possession of knowledge confers power in the way in which ownership of property did in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries in industrial society” (Giddens 1981, 256)6. For this reason, he argues, that surveillance systems, while carrying out their task of accumulating coded
information and directly supervising social life, may eventually become powerful
systems of domination (Giddens 1985, 13). This phenomenon, Giddens claims, is leading to a situation in which technocrats coordinating the surveillance operations of
organizations, are replacing “industrialists or business leaders as the grouping responsible for taking the policy decisions which affect the whole of society” (Giddens 1981, 257).
Building on the notion of modernity defined by Giddens, and contributing to this idea of surveillance as a more independent social force designed to discipline, Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson have described what they define as a ‘surveillant
assemblage’. As surveillance systems evolve, according to Haggerty and Ericson, what modern societies are witnessing, is the convergence of what were once discrete
surveillance systems, into this assemblage, which “operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows”. These
6 To make this argument Giddens is paraphrasing Daniel Bell sociologist and a professor emeritus at
flows, which include auditory, scent, chemical, visual, ultraviolet and informational stimuli, are then “reassembled into distinct ‘data doubles’ which can be scrutinized and targeted for intervention” (Ericson and Haggerty 2000, 606). This situation according to Ericson and Haggerty, is leading modern societies towards “the progressive
‘disappearance of disappearance’ – a process whereby it is increasingly difficult for individuals to maintain their anonymity or to escape the monitoring of social institutions” (Ericson and Haggerty 2000, 619).
Despite the fact that scholars understanding surveillance as a disciplinary social force are very aware of its power, it is understood from this perspective that surveillance developments are a social construct. In this sense, it is not only those in power who are advocating for such assemblages to be built. The population’s desire to access services or to see justice done, in one way or another, accounts for much of the popular demand for the extension of the surveillant assemblage. This process seems to indicate that the “soul training” component of the modern Panoptic society, as described by Foucault, has transformed individuals in such a way that they have shaped their behaviour in a prescribed direction.
Surveillance and the Technological Imperative
This stream of surveillance thought as a technological imperative stems from the work of Jacques Ellul, and in particular from his theories into the technologic of
modernity. In his work, Ellul separates himself from mainstream analysis, which refers to technology as including both the artefacts and the processes, and instead, refers to
technique within the technological society, as “the totality of methods rationally
arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” (Ellul 1964, p. v). According to Ellul, la technique constructs the social world needed by machines, and thus integrates machine into society. Focused on means rather than ends, la technique seems to erode human agency as it seeks to function in the most efficient way. In fact from Ellul’s perspective, la technique has overpowered man and has become the centre of society due to the fact that there is no other social force powerful enough to stop it.
In this new order, according to Ellul, the physical world, its social institutions, and ultimately human nature, must be transformed in order to adapt to the incoming demands of the new technologies. In effect, this technological invasion does not involve the simple addition of new values to old ones, but instead what takes place is that “the old civilizations collapse on contact with the new” (Ellul 1964, 121). Ellul sees everyone in society as an accomplice to la technique, benefiting from its developments and having to deal with its potential risks. According to him, for those looking to resist it, brute force is completely inefficient, and the only way to combat it is to distinguish “between what we can welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with our last ounce of strength as dehumanization” (Ellul, 1989, p. 140).
Influenced by the work of Ellul, Langdon Winner speaks of modernity as saturated with the technical values of efficiency, rationality and productivity. From this mindset, Winner argues, developments in new technologies in tandem with media dissemination exponentially generate and exploit the self-generated need for
technological artefacts. In the 1980s, in an attempt to discredit the myth of neutrality in technological progress, Winner asked the question ‘Do Artefacts Have Politics?’ (Winner 1986, 19-39) to which he responded that there are two ways in which they do. First, he claimed that the process of technological development is critical in determining the politics of an artefact. He supported this view by pointing to the “instances in which the very process of technical development is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction, that it regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others” (Winner 1986, 25-26). Second, he referred to two types of political artefacts that correlate with particular kinds of political
relationships: Those that require a particular sociological system, and those, which are strongly compatible with a particular sociological system (Winner 1986, 29). From this analysis, Winner developed his concept of accretional determinism, frequently referred to in the surveillance literature as function creep. Winner emphasized that frequently new technological artefacts put into operation in a particular social setting, require adaptive responses by the social system, and that additional systemic effects result from the artefact’s location within a complex network of other technologies. This process
according to Winner, inevitably leads towards new technological implementations down the road, as “technological development proceeds steadily from what it has already transformed and used up toward that which is still untouched” (Winner 1986, 174). Because of the fact that throughout the process, human activity is forced to incrementally adapt to fit the requirements of the system, Winner argues, that what should be analyzed
is the cumulative effects of all the technologies rather than focus on the impact of a single artefact.
Winner does not take an extreme purist view of technological determinism7, which sees the technical base of a society as the fundamental condition affecting all patterns of social existence. Nevertheless, he does claim that if we are to really observe how modern technologies shape our lives, “how strongly we feel their influence, respect their authority and participate in their workings, one begins to understand that, like it or not, we have become members of a new order in human history” (Winner1986, ix). This spectre to Winner deserves in-depth analysis, but he argues that society seems applied as a collective to “technological somnambulism”8 as it “sleepwalk[s] through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence” (Winner1986, 10).
Many sociological studies into surveillance in the late twentieth century have been influenced by this view of surveillance as a technological imperative. Gary Marx’s
Undercover: Police Surveillance in America and Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty’s Policing the Risk Society, are two good examples. In the concluding chapter of his book,
Marx states:
The study of undercover police is ultimately about much more than cops and robbers: it is one strand of the new surveillance. Powerful new information-gathering technologies are extending ever deeper into the social fabric and to more features of the environment (Marx 1988, 206).
7 Technological determinism is a reductionist approach to the relationship between social and technological
development aspects. The theory presumes that the development of society’s social structure and cultural values is driven by technology.
8 He gives three reasons for why technological somnambulism takes place: 1) the fact that people view
technology as a tool, which can be put down after use. 2) The fact that those that make the technology are separated from those who use it, which results in little effort being devoted to studying its possible effects. 3) The fact that technology seems to create new worlds in which to live, without much attention from those who are going to live in them.
These powerful information-gathering technologies, which Marx observed penetrating the fabric of society during the 1980s, in the early stages of the 21st century are deeply ingrained in the daily activities of modern life.
Surveillance and Securitization
The fourth stream of surveillance thought, studies the way in which securitization and risk have recently entered the surveillance discourse as drivers for its expansion. The concept of securitization was developed by Ole Waever of the ‘Copenhagen School’9, and its main aim was to shift attention away from the objectivist analysis of threat assessment, and focus instead on the multiple and complex ways in which security threats are internally generated and constructed. Through this perspective, “the security analyst focused on securitization stands back and surveys how the general public, and their leaders, ‘construct’ security threats and challenges” (Dannreuther 2007, 42). Didier Bigo has been instrumental in shaping this area of the discipline. Through his work, Bigo has rejected notions of exceptionality in securitization discourse, and instead has
suggested an alternative point of view. According to Bigo, “securitization works through everyday technologies, through the effects of power that are continuous rather than exceptional, through political struggles, and especially through institutional competition within the professional security field in which the most trivial interests are at stake” (Bigo 2002, 73).
9 The Copenhagen School of security studies centred on the ideas by Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de
In 2002, Bigo argued that internal security forces – the police and immigration and customs officials – had successfully securitized a nexus between immigration, crime and terrorism, which had led to popular revulsion and xenophobia towards immigration (Bigo 2002). In his work, Bigo openly rejected Foucault’s concept of the panopticon, and claimed instead that this securitization mindset, had created a ‘ban-opticon’ by which profiling technologies determined who was placed under surveillance and who was free from such intervention. In this sense, he emphasized how these developments had contributed to the securitization, not only of terrorism, but also of citizenship and migration. Bigo’s work has been instrumental in shaping the stream of thought which views surveillance as part of a broader securitization process.
Although securitization was already in motion prior to September 11, 2001, since that date, advanced industrial societies have made an extraordinary leap of faith, and have gradually shifted from being welfare states, to becoming securitized societies. This
process some claim, has been carried out through the adoption of risk society10 practices. In this kind of society, everything that can be counted counts and everything that moves must be measured (Lyon 2007, 69). In addition, traditional police focus on deviance, control, and order is “displaced in favour of a focus on risk, surveillance, and security” (Ericson and Haggerty 1997, 18). Through this process, predictability and the reduction of uncertainty become the goal, and the idea that ‘maximum security’ is a desirable objective, becomes the mantra. In the meantime, world leaders actively claim that
10 “Risk society" is a term that emerged during the 1990s to describes a society that is organized in response
to risk. The term is closely associated with several key writers on modernity, in particular Antony Giddens and Ulrich Beck.
‘maximum security’ can be attained through the use of increasingly sophisticated techniques, which are readily available in the marketplace (Lyon 2003, 46).
Under these conditions of uncertainty, which require the securitization of the risk society, political actors are expected to respond. “To do nothing in the face of recognized risks is politically impossible,” yet “risk politics” lacks any “rules about how new risks should be handled” (Grande and Pauly 2005, 26). In response, official discourse shifts towards emphasis on fears, threats and dangers, while it offers “knowledge and
technologies that allow people to allay their fears and take action” (Ericson and Haggerty 1997, 88). In effect, what takes place, is that risk discourse tells people “what to do and who to be” (Ericson and Haggerty 1997, 98). In the meantime, as guaranteeing security justifies “placing ‘normal’ conditions on hold” (Lyon 2003, 15), the corporate-security complex – taking advantage of the opportunity – becomes an aggressive driver of the project for globalized mass registration and surveillance (Webb 2007, 195).
As the private sector introduces it products, many of the technologies being offered are not new technologies, they are repackaged “algorithmic models of identification that ha[ve] long been used to identify unknown and uncertain
characteristics in the worlds of consumerism and commercial management” (Amoore 2008, 24). In addition, many of the technologies used in the ‘war on terror’ have been developed long before 9/11, but “widespread discomfort about big-brother technologies” stalled their commercialization (Klein 2007). Under the new risk scenario, however, government agencies have welcomed private-sector collaboration, the reason being that apart from providing the technical support and technological infrastructure, these
companies also offer governments “a way around some of the laws and accountability mechanisms” that have traditionally restricted such developments (Webb 2007, 195).
The outcome of securitizing the risk society, according to those observing surveillance through this stream of thought, is that two key trends have developed, “the integration of different surveillance systems, and their globalization” (Lyon 2003, 8). The ‘pre-emptive surveillance’, which Gary Marx (1988) described decades ago, has today become a reality. Under the conviction that by knowing more we will be safer, the new preventive policies no longer address individuals but factors; “they deconstruct the concrete subject of intervention, and reconstruct a combination of factors liable to produce risk” (Castel 1991:288; Zureik 2003, 39).
Surveillance, Identification and Identity Cards
The previous sections of this chapter have discussed the various currents of thought presently engaged in the surveillance debate. This section on the other hand, sets out to explain how the surveillance literature has come together in recent years in order to explain developments in identification politics and identity cards. It is the idea that
“identification is the starting point of surveillance” (Lyon 2009, 4), which serves as the guiding principle underlying this line of analysis. Nevertheless, it is in John Torpey’s work on the development of the passport and his idea of “the monopoly of the legitimate means of movement”, where this research into identification politics and identity cards begins.
In The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Torpey argues that “in the course of the past few centuries, states have successfully usurped from rival claimants such as churches and private enterprises” the monopoly of the legitimate means of identity. Torpey claims, that “because nation-states are both territorial and membership organizations, they must erect and sustain boundaries between nationals and non-nationals both at their physical borders and among people within those borders” (Torpey 2000, 1). Passports and identification cards, he argues, have been central to this process.
Torpey’s theory of the monopoly on the means of movement, builds from Karl Marx’s theory on the monopoly on the means of production and Max Weber’s theory on the monopoly on the means of violence. Torpey contends that these two theories leave out another important monopoly that must be understood: “the capacity to travel where one wills” and “sorting out who belongs where” (Lyon 2009, 97). According to Torpey, these two important issues were monopolized with the creation of the international
passport in the aftermath of the First World War. This development, Torpey claims, “bore witness to the emergence of a system of controls over international movement that took as its baseline assumption ‘one country to a person’” (Caplan and Torpey 2001, 10).
Apart from depriving people of the freedom to move without adequate authority, Torpey argues that this monopoly of the means of movement has also created a situation whereby people have become dependent on states for the possession of an ‘identity’, which Torpey adds, people find difficult to escape from and which “may significantly shape their access to various spaces”. It is this demand for identification, which has
stimulated the development of increasingly sophisticated techniques “for uniquely and unambiguously identifying each and every person on the face of the globe” (Torpey 2000, 4). Today’s sophisticated identity card systems are in many cases a key element of such developments.
In today’s world, national identity card schemes create a situation where by the “border is everywhere”, as it is both portable because citizens carry their identity cards, and virtual, due to the centralized databases which hold the information (Lyon 2005, 66). As this process has expanded unchecked, “there has been a major expansion of laws, policies, and procedures mandating that individuals provide personal information” (Marx 2001, 323). In this sense, through these cards, governments have institutionalized
identification, and although one of the claimed functions of these systems is to keep the principle of universal equality, what has originated is a selective process of “segregated inequality” (Castells 2003, 337). Through this process, those who have a card deserve to be counted, and those who do not are automatically excluded or scrutinized.
Parallel to the above-mentioned developments, the historical role of identity cards as ‘tools of detection’11 has shifted towards making them also into ‘effecting tools’ through which a range of services can be delivered (Hood 1983, 91). In addition, the modes of identification deployed within them have changed. The functions of today’s identity cards have been altered to such an extent, that they “have less in common with historical identity schemes than they do with mathematical models used to identify in other spheres” (Amoore 2008, 25). According to Bennett and Lyon, today’s identity cards
11 ‘Tools of detection’ refers to “a set of tools for examination, inspection, monitoring, watching and
are “not only forms of identification and transaction; they are also fully integrated ‘smart agents’ of data processing” (Bennett and Lyon 2008, xi) of which the card is just the overt manifestation. In effect, these cards are an essential part of the growing “impersonal, anonymous world dominated by large bureaucracies” (Rule 2007, xi), and without a doubt, contribute to the social sorting process, which has become an integral part of the ‘surveillance society’12.
Although developments in identification politics can be traced back centuries, and national identity cards have been operating in many countries for decades, in recent years, the lingering threat of possible terrorist attacks, has given a boost to the
implementation of national identity cards across the globe. The idea that these cards offer governments “a single means of entry into the myriad databases that currently incorporate personal records of many different kinds” (Stalder and Lyon 2003, 91), has granted the cards a role as effective policy instruments in the “war on terror”. For this reason, law enforcement agencies have received these cards with great enthusiasm.
Notwithstanding the benefit of identity cards for conducting law enforcement operations, it seems apparent that those who have benefited the most from this growing demand for identification are the corporations engaged in card development and
implementation. Considering the fact that new national identity cards require biometric13 technologies and other components, which can only be supplied by high technology companies (Lyon 2009, 104), government initiatives on this front “represent very
12 The concept of a Surveillance Society refers to the ways in which our whole way of life in the
contemporary world is suffused with surveillance, due to the widespread, systematic and routine ways in which personal data are processed (Lyon 2007).
13 Biometrics refers to methods for uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical
significant procurement opportunities” (Stalder and Lyon 2003, 86) for a select group of private corporations. In fact, the required card technology is “produced by businesses that now constitute a significant and growing portion of the high technology market” (Bennett and Lyon 2008, 16). Nevertheless, this is not what has been communicated to the population at large. The average citizen, influenced by the media hype about the ‘choice’ between ‘liberty’ and ‘security’ (Lyon 2003, 35), and by the systematic stress from authorities on the usefulness of the biometric identity card14 (Piazza and Laniel 2008, 205), has just regarded the ‘card’ as the overt manifestation of authority (Bennett and Lyon 2008, 3).
It has also been noted by many scholars, that current developments in identity politics in one country are “nearly always influenced by events elsewhere” (Bennett and Lyon 2008, 18). As bodies such as The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the European Union seek to standardize global identification systems, many countries are collaborating with each other, in order to develop interoperability initiatives.
Although the process of harmonization is not anywhere near complete, research data reveals how governments supported by corporations and standard bodies, are moving towards a globally interoperable network of national identification systems. The process is being carried out without much regard to the social sorting possibilities of these systems, or to the long-term impact of the databases containing the master files of the biometric identifiers being collected (Lyon 2005, 74).
14 Biometric identity card refers to the fact that many national identification systems collect what is known
The ‘Card Cartel’
Building on the idea of the monopoly on the means of movement already presented by Torpey, David Lyon has developed a theory around the structures and individuals operating in the creation and implementation of new identity card systems. Claiming that a political economy perspective seems to be missing from many accounts on such systems, Lyon has attempted to explore “the corporate as well as the
administrative and governmental aspects of national identification” (Lyon 2009, 90). Echoing Torpey’s concept of monopoly, but inserting into it Rose’s and Foucault’s concept of governmentality being achieved through multiple forces, Lyon suggests that “what is emerging today may best be understood as a kind of ‘card cartel’ or more clumsily, an oligopolization of the means of identification” (Lyon 2009, 96). This oligopoly involves the state making the citizens more visible, corporations providing the know-how for the managing of identities, and technical standards bodies achieving interoperability (Lyon 2009, 109).
Lyon argues that national identity cards involve more than a direct relationship between the state and the citizen, and that for this reason “what it means to be a ‘citizen’ is changing, as the means of identification help to define and produce citizens in fresh ways” (Lyon 2009, 92). For Lyon, therefore, it is imperative to open up these relations for close inspection in order to determine whether this theory can be substantiated and to what extent on a country-by-country basis. Studying Spain, where the cards have recently been implemented with scarcely any opposition, offers an ideal testing ground to
determine how it has integrated with Spain’s historical legacies, the structural configuration of the Spanish state, and the country’s political culture.
Both Bennett and Lyon have emphasized that the implementation of new identity card systems “is heavily contingent upon policy choices, influenced by culture,
institutions and history” (Bennett and Lyon 2008, 18). Spain’s recent past is marred in abuses of human rights, the fruits of a painful dictatorship in which the dictator was never ousted, and many of his policies remained in place after his death, including the Spanish identity card. For this reason, the country offers an ideal environment in which to test the interaction between Lyon’s hypothetical card cartel, and Spain’s historical legacies, the structural configuration of the state, and the country’s political culture. What role has
each of these played in the implementation of Spain’s Electronic National Identification System? More importantly, the focus on a specific case study offers us the opportunity to
evaluate the high-flying micro-sociological theories discussed in the previous sections of this chapter. Grounding these theories within the case of a concrete surveillance
instrument, applied in a particular society, by specific actors interacting with the
historical legacy of a brutal and recent dictatorship, offers an interesting contribution to the growing literature on identity cards. Following this line of thought, chapter two of this study addresses Spain’s historical legacies, and Chapters three and four will offer a case study of the country’s new national identity card, which will highlight how these historical legacies have helped shape a state and a political culture ideal for the implementation of a highly sophisticated national identity card.
Chapter Two
The Legacies of Spain’s National Identity Card
According to Pierre Piazza, under a policing logic, national identity cards have traditionally been used to homogenise a vocation for the Nation State by reassuring allegiance to a specific set of values. Through the colonization of the individual’s
identity, these cards have been able to consolidate the belief in communal belonging, and through a shared administrative experience have developed a “material as well as
symbolic consistency to the idea of the nation as a united collective” (Piazza 2004, 17). For this reason, Piazza considers identity cards critical in constructing the modern citizen.
There are very few historical accounts of Spain’s identification politics,
nevertheless, the little historical inquiry available, reveals how the country has in the past implemented numerous forms of identification. Historical analysis also reveals that the control of identity in the country has traditionally been closely tied to religious, political, ethnic and class repression. Figure 1 presents examples of some of the identification documents, which have been used in Spain over the years.
Identification in Spain Prior to the National Identity Card
Early forms of identification in Spain can be traced back to the 16th century, in which national identity began to be formed under the pressures of centralization, imperial ambition, and religious dissidence. In response to “the peninsula’s long-term occupation by Islam, and to bolster its claims to the New World, sixteenth-century Spain
ostentatiously assumed the mantle of Defender of the Faith” (Fuchs 2003, 1). The fall of Granada to the Catholic kings, the expulsion of the Jews, and Columbus’s discovery of the Americas in 1492, all served to consolidate an expansion in which King Philip II aligning with counter-reformation orthodoxy implemented the national myth of pure Christianity. During this period, as the King persecuted heretics and infidels in the name of the ‘true’ church, “a new vein of humanist historiography conveniently occluded Spain’s Moorish past and touted an unchanging ‘Gothic’ nation that stretched back to pre-Roman times” (Fuchs 2003, 1).
Throughout the sixteenth century, the state and the church gradually defined the boundaries of Spanish identity. First, they excluded descendants of Moors and Jews from positions of power in civil and religious institutions, through the estatutos de limpieza de
sange (blood purity statutes). Subsequently, they implemented “a series of increasingly
repressive laws against Moorish cultural practices, aimed at erasing all traces of the Moriscos’15 ethnic identity. These measures culminated with the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain (1609-14)” (Fuchs 2003, 3). Nevertheless, it was the European discovery of the Americas on October 12th 1492, which led to the creation of the first
documents for identification in the country. Faced with the constant emigration of large numbers of converts to the Americas, the Catholic Kings through edicts and
cédulas16 prohibited “new Christians” from entering the new continent. The intention of such measures was to guarantee that America would not be contaminated with Jewish or Moorish blood. Only Christian descendants with at least four generations of clean blood were granted cédulas to enter the New World (Goldberg 1981, 183). The cédulas were mainly issued to sailors who travelled back and forth from the new continent, and served as the official document to verify individual identity and right of travel (Caballero and Izeddin2004). Although Spanish historians refer to this cédulas as precursors to the national identity card, it is clear from their double function as identifiers and controllers of movement, that they resemble much more the modern passport. In this sense, from the
cédulas it is possible to identify, following Torpey’s analysis, the Spanish monarchy’s
early attempts at monopolizing the means of movement. At the same time, the
exclusionary nature of these documents aligns with the concept of ‘segregated inequality’ described by Castells, also in the previous chapter.
It is only three centuries later, under the monarchy of Fernando VII, that new forms of identification appear in Spain, as the first police corps is created on January 13th 1824 – the Policía General del Reino (General Police of the Kingdom)17. The original objective of the police is closely linked to the process of state building, and arises out of the need to have a body capable of maintaining order at a time when all other social
16 The cédula is an official certificate, which is commonly referred to as the precursor to the identity card. 17 The creation of the Spanish police follows Spain’s independence from Napoleonic rule and the
bodies have effectively lost their hegemonic force (Frühling 2003, 18). Parallel to the creation of the police, the King orders the creation of an identity leaflet, which is referred to as the internal passport and grants movement within Spain to those who can obtain it. The document is not compulsory, and it provides little value in terms of identification because it does not include a photograph. In addition to the creation of the internal passport, the King also granted the police the power “ to create a register of the citizenry, which includes, age, sex, status, profession and nature of the inhabitant” (Caballero and Izeddin2004).
The internal passport was abolished in 1854, by the Royal decree of February 15th. At that point, a new document is introduced, the cédula de vecindad18, which was a document issued by the authorities to the heads of families registered in their place of residence. All travelers are requested to travel with a valid cédula de vecindad. In addition to controlling travel, the document is compulsory in order to sign contracts whether public or private, and notaries are not able to validate contracts unless the document is shown. In this sense, the official property registry cannot register any property unless the identity document of the owner is shown and its information
introduced in the legal documentation. The type of cédula granted to a citizen, varied in accordance to the annual taxes paid by its holder, and it has little value as an
identification tool because it only provides a signature. The main objective of the cédula according to some historians was to guarantee the payment of taxes (Zejalbo Martín, 2007). The need for verifying identity was overcome by other means of identification
18 This had serious consequences for women, since they were not considered heads of households and
issued by different State organisms and by public and private associations.
Nevertheless, in 1937, the cédula incorporated a photograph of the holder and began to serve as an identification document.
Implementation of the First National Identity Card
The first National Identity Card in Spain was implemented by Decree on March 2nd 1944. As this section will show, its creation marks the beginning of the end for the armed guerrillas still fighting Franco’s Nationalist forces. Article three of the Decree stated that the document would prove the identity of the individual and it could be demanded for that purpose. In relation to other forms of identification, the decree clearly stated that although other forms of identification could serve to demonstrate employment or profession, they could not in anyway substitute the National Identity Card, or exempt citizens from its acquisition (Zejalbo Martín, 2007). Since then, the card has witnessed seven changes over the years. Table 1, shows the historical development of the Spanish National Identity Card.
Table 1. Historical Development of the Spanish National Identity Card19
Although this thesis is primarily concerned with the new Electronic National identity Card, which was launched in 2006, it is important to study the identity card’s development since 1944. Due to the fact that Francisco Franco Bahamonde – Spain’s autocratic dictator – introduced the national identity card, it is important to understand the conditions under which the document was introduced, and how the document progressed through the dictatorship and the country’s transition to electoral democracy, to its present state. Analyzing these developments will provide a better understanding of how Spanish
19 The information collected in the new Electronic National Identity Card is not shown in this table, because
citizens in 2006 began to receive their new Electronic National Identity Card without much opposition.
The Nightmare of Oppression
On July 18th 1936 a military coup put an abrupt end to the Spanish Republic and marked the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Due to little popular support received by the rebel forces coming up from the South, the use of force was more brutal than that practiced by other dictatorial regimes. It marked the beginning of what was to come, as General Franco assumed control of the military junta in the early months of 1937, and made terror and death into a spectacle designed to get his message across to the whole of the population (Casanova et al., 2002, 85).
During the more than forty years that followed from 1936 until the Constitution of December 29th 1978 – after which democratic elections were held – hundreds of
thousands died defending the legality of the Spanish Republic. More that 600,000 were exiled and jailed and hundreds of thousands ended up in labour camps. Through political, judicial and policing means, a regime of terror was implemented (Fàbregas i Guillén 2007, 19). The social shock of National-Francoist terror and social control lasted well into the 1950s and 1960s as violence became the backbone of Franco’s dictatorship (Casanova et al., 2002, ix). With terror institutionalized by the repressive legislation of the new state, and with a clear agenda to deal with nationalist, religious, ethnic, and class conflicts, the regime manifested itself by eliminating citizens’ legal rights (Casanova et al., 2002, 81). This led to a society which could only aspire to survive.
The cleansing of Spanish society concentrated on the working rural and urban classes, groups, which the regime considered the “carriers” of the liberal “plague” (Richards 1998, 36). It was this focus, which gained Franco the support of the Catholic Church, and led Francoist psychiatrists to look for the communist gene in their
examinations of Republican prisoners (Richards 1998, 13). From 1939, the number of people escaping from the repression was substantial; politicians, officials, ex-combatants of the republic, or innocent citizens fled into exile or went to hide in the mountains. Considering the fact that “even by the most conservative of estimates the average number of deaths by firing squad was ten per day during the seven years between 1939 and 1945” (Richards 1998, 30), it was not surprising that people chose to escape. Without even accounting for the thousands of deaths caused by hunger and disease in the different penitentiary centres, “50,000 people had been executed in the decade following the end of the war” (Casanova et al., 2002, 20). Perhaps the most vivid account of these dark years comes from Gonzalo de Aguilera, one of Franco’s press officials who stated the following:
“Our programme consists… on the extermination of one third of the Spanish male population. With this the country will be clean and we will get rid of the proletariat. This is also convenient from the economic perspective, there will never be unemployment again in Spain” (quoted in Richards 1998, 50).
Following the war, with the clear message by the regime that there would be a permanent military state in armed peace, a minority part of the defeated forces took to the mountains, to continue the fight in hope that soon the democratic countries of Europe would come to their rescue. Sadly, the western democracies left the guerrillas isolated,
