Politics,Economic Interests and Filibustering: The Failure of the Spanish-German Treaty (1893)

The recent reaction of Western citizens to the distributional effects of globalization has brought back the nation-state concept and, with it, the notion of sovereignty to the political arena. ¹ Going back in history, this article studies the Spanish sovereignty claims made against the trade treaty signed in August 1893 in Madrid, which, had it been ratified by Parliament, would have reduced the barriers to the imports of a large number of German items for 10 years.

The many concessions granted to Germany through the treaty, which were expected to be applied to the rest of the countries with which Spain had signed or was to sign new agreements, equated to dismantling the protectionist tariff passed by the conservatives in 1891. However, the purpose of the Spanish liberal Foreign Affairs Minister, Segismundo Moret, was not exclusively to lower trade barriers. The treaty with Germany also sought to strengthen political ties with the Triple Alliance. By then, Moret had already made a formal approach, in 1887, by signing a bilateral agreement on Mediterranean policy with Italy. ² As part of this new political orientation, a trade treaty with Austria-Hungary was signed in 1892 and another with Italy in 1893, which, together with the German treaty, were finally raised for ratification to the Spanish Parliament in April 1894. In short, the German treaty was regarded as a tool of both commercial policy and foreign policy.

However, all the efforts of the executive to ensure that this treaty was ratified failed in the Spanish Senate, rendering it a type of ‘uncommon event’ that Robert Pahre considers worth studying in his comprehensive analysis of the successive waves of trade treaties in the nineteenth century. ³ More than 1000 bilateral treaties were concluded during the century and only 43 were rejected. Pahre therefore claims that the analysis of these rejected treaties can improve our understanding of international cooperation as much as the analysis of successful treaties. In this respect, the examination of the Spanish-German treaty makes several contributions to the historiography. First, the reaction to the Spanish Senate's reluctance to ratify the treaty provides evidence of what the literature has recognized as Chancellor Leo von Caprivi's new strategy. In contrast with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's stance of separating economics and politics in international relationships, for Caprivi, the non-agreement in one domain involved the dismissal in the other. ⁴ Thus, the German tariff war declaration, as highlighted by Javier Loscertales, ‘sealed the end’ of any political rapprochement. ⁵ In line with the German treaty's failure, those signed with Austria-Hungary and Italy were not passed either and the agreement with the latter on Mediterranean policy, due to expire in 1895, was never renewed.

Furthermore, exploring in detail the circumstances under which the treaty was signed by the Spanish executive and discussed later in Parliament adds evidence to the fragility of protectionist coalitions in late-nineteenth-century continental Europe. Cornelius Torp has referred to the sectoral confrontation over the treaties passed under chancellor Caprivi in the early 1890s to illustrate the instability of the celebrated textbook entente of ‘rye and iron’. ⁶ The mere signing of the Spanish-German treaty in August 1893 questions the durability of a similar coalition postulated by authors such as Jaume Vicens-Vives for the Spanish protectionist turnaround of 1891. ⁷ The adverse reaction of the Catalan cotton textile and the Basque heavy industries to a treaty that involved a substantial reduction of import duties on their items contrasts with the acquiescence of the Finance Minister, Germán Gamazo, who was, by then, the highest representative of the protectionist Castilian cereal producers in Parliament. The deputy he appointed to be part of the two-member ministerial commission to negotiate the treaty was also a prominent representative of Castilian interests. Tellingly, his only publicly declared concern was that the duties on cereals were left out of the negotiation. In our view, this suffices to question the existence of a stable alliance of agrarians and industrialists in Spain.

The study of the treaty also raises the question of how the ratification could be impeded when, in Restoration Spain, the executive was ensured comfortable majorities. From the outset, the Constitutional Bourbon Restoration (1875–1923) was planned as a political regime based on the turno pacífico (pacific rotation) between the two major parties, the conservatives and the liberals, who agreed on the alternation of power. The 1876 constitution invested the Crown with the authority to dissolve Parliament and to appoint a new prime minister who had the guarantee that the subsequent rigged elections would ensure his party a majority. ⁸ The answer to the question of why this majority did not translate into ratification is two-fold.

First, the opposition to the treaty of well-organized economic interests, mainly Catalan and Basque associations, found an echo within the liberal party. Without the support or abstention of certain liberals, the composition of the committee to report on the treaty would have never become dominated by senators supporting tariff protection. According to Borja de Riquer, the groups of interests pressured politicians through mass citizen mobilization. ⁹ The response to this mobilization was a strong commitment of deputies and senators to the economic interests of the province that they represented. This coincides with the idea of Oriol Luján that, for the mid-nineteenth-century Spain, the interactions between the represented and representatives continued outside the election process and that, when conveniently mobilized, citizens considered congressmen to be accountable to them. ¹⁰ Furthermore, the fact that economic interests succeeded in derailing the treaty contributes to qualifying the idea that the Spanish policymaking was immune to the demands of pressure groups. According to José Varela-Ortega, the Parliamentary majority ensured by rigged elections allowed the executive to remain oblivious to any pressure from economic interests. ¹¹ The lack of ratification refutes this idea by showing how the representatives committed to the protectionist interests of their provinces found channels to constrain the executive's will. ¹²

However, even if the desertion of some liberals made the setting up of a protectionist committee possible, the liberal executive continued to count on a majority in the Congress and Senate. Therefore, the question remains regarding how the ratification was eventually derailed. In order to find the answer, a reference is needed as to how the committee exploited a new and effective form of filibustering.

Marcus Kreuzer has qualified the thesis that, in contrast with the separation of powers in the UK, the German Parliament was absolutely subordinated to the executive in the German Empire (1867–1918). ¹³ In his view, this subordination does not hold up when considering the informal constitutional practices of the Reichstag and Bundesrat in the late nineteenth century. Among these practices, the possibility for the legislative committees to rewrite bills and the fact that no time constraints could be applied to parliamentary debates, enabling filibustering, constituted ways of empowering Parliament over the executive power. By the 1890s, practices of filibustering through the raising of countless amendments to bills and subsequent long defences in the plenary were common in the Spanish Parliament. The tactic to hamper the German trade treaty was novel in that it took the form of intense activity by the committee responsible for reporting on it, which opened an ambitious public hearing, enough to ensure that its report was not delivered within the deadline for ratification agreed with Germany.

Beyond the absence of ratification that this dilatory tactic caused, the contention surrounding the treaty projects an image of an active Spanish Parliament before the First World War, which, in turn, perfectly fits with the idea of Javier Moreno-Luzón that, if the relevance of the Parliament was once neglected, this was because the historiography simply echoed the adverse reaction of contemporaries to the political regime that lost the last remains of the Empire in America. ¹⁴

In the following pages, I first examine the composition of the executive that signed the German treaty, revealing the absence of the Spanish agrarian-industrial coalition opposing it. I then address the issue of the goals and content of the treaty, and how its opponents in Parliament resorted to the sovereignty claim. Finally, I analyse the new form of filibustering that allowed the Spanish Senate to derail the ratification of the German treaty.

The Signatory Cabinet

Spain was a latecomer to the dense network of bilateral trade treaties that, originating in the Cobden-Chevalier treaty of 1860, was woven around France. This treaty, signed by the UK and France in 1860 included significant reciprocal reductions on import duties and the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) clause, which ensured that both countries would benefit from future reductions granted to a third country. The fact that the exchanged duty reductions could be applied to the imports of any third country having MFN treatment, together with the fear of the UK capturing the French market, fostered the signing of bilateral treaties between the rest of European countries and France.

Spain joined this network of bilateral treaties in the late 1870s and reached its highest level of integration in the mid-1880s. Highly important for this integration was the treaty signed with France in May 1882, whereby the two countries exchanged significant concessions. Spain agreed to cut duties for many manufactured items and France, in exchange, agreed to further reduce duties on the Spanish imports of wine. Soon after, the Spanish reductions agreed in the treaty were included as a second column of duties in the tariff passed in July 1882. A first column with higher duties was to be applied to the countries that had no treaty in effect, while the second column was then applied to the countries that enjoyed the MFN clause in their relationship with Spain, which, in the mid-1880s included the whole of continental Europe and the UK. ¹⁵ More modest concessions were exchanged with Italy, Sweden-Norway and Switzerland (July 1883) and Germany (August 1883). In this way, duties in the second column of the 1882 tariff plus the even more reduced duties listed in the above-mentioned treaties constituted the Spanish conventional tariff, that is, the tariff of actual application to countries with conventions or treaties in force until the protectionist reform of 1890–1891.

As a first step, this reform was defended as a means to offset the declining prices of grain imports resulting from technological advances in transport. In the late 1880s, the grain invasion from Russia and America triggered by the drop in long-haul transport costs that had affected Europe since the 1870s started to affect Spain, thus adding Castilian agriculture demands for protection to the historical ones of the Catalan textile industries. In response to the cereal interests, in December 1890, the conservative party in power, led by Antonio Cánovas, raised duties on grains and cattle. ¹⁶ The second step was the substantial increase in duties on industrial items included in the tariff bill passed in December 1891, which, to a large extent, might be regarded as an attempt to encourage France to negotiate. This country had denounced the treaty signed with Spain in 1882 in January 1891, which meant that, from February 1892 onwards, if a new treaty was not agreed upon, Spanish wine would have to pay the duties resulting from the tariff reform then in progress in the French Assembly, which proposed a sevenfold increase in the duties. In the negotiations, France requested cuts in 171 of the 373 tariff headings in the new 1891 tariff. In exchange, Spain asked for a substantial lowering of French barriers to Spanish wine. However, France's interest in the Spanish market was much lower than Spain's in the French. In 1890, Spain received only 5 per cent of total French exports, while France received 45 per cent of total Spanish exports. ¹⁷ Thus, unsurprisingly, after five months of negotiations, from January to May 1892, no treaty was achieved. On 1 June, the Spanish executive agreed a modus vivendi whereby the inalterable French conventional tariff (the duties in the second column of the French 1891 tariff) was exchanged for the Spanish conventional one (the second column of the Spanish 1891 tariff plus the reduced duties listed in the treaties signed with Italy, Germany, Sweden-Norway and Switzerland in 1883). That same year, Spain signed treaties with reciprocal reductions with Sweden-Norway (June) and the Netherlands and Switzerland (July), which, however, included much fewer concessions than Spain had shown to be willing to grant France. Out of the 373 headings that made up the new Spanish tariff, these treaties included a total of 51 duty reductions. Moreover, in June 1892, the duties in the second column of the new tariff were temporarily granted to all the countries with negotiations underway. In any case, the combined effect of the 1891 tariff and the poor concessions included in the three new treaties preluded an imminent and significant increase in Spanish customs. ¹⁸

This was the scenario when the liberals replaced the conservatives in power on 11 December 1892. The new executive, led by Práxedes M. Sagasta, supported the passing of the treaties negotiated by the conservatives with Sweden-Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland a few months earlier, which were finally ratified by Parliament in August 1893. Meanwhile, negotiations began with other countries such as Belgium, Germany, Italy and the UK. In an endeavour to promote new treaties, Segismundo Moret, a significant free trader, quickly gained prominence. In December 1892, he was appointed Development Minister and, later, in April 1893, he was also appointed as Foreign Affairs Minister. Interestingly, Germán Gamazo, a significant supporter of the Castilian agrarian protectionism, was simultaneously appointed Finance Minister. In this way, the two ministries with direct competences in the negotiation of trade treaties fell into the hands of two dissenting men in terms of trade policy.

Spanish literature has widely studied the rivalry between Moret and Gamazo, two politicians who disagreed not only on the tariff issue. They militated ideologically on the left and right wings of the liberal party, respectively, and both aspired to succeed Sagasta as its head. ¹⁹ Thus, it is more than telling that Gamazo did not oppose the notorious trade liberalization that Moret sought from the very beginning via treaties, preferably, through negotiations with Germany. Gamazo's lack of opposition allows us to infer that there was an initial agreement between them on the issue of negotiating with Germany, which, in turn, considering that the Spanish concessions would take the form of reductions in industrial duties, confirms his profile as a sectoral rather than an integral protectionist. In this way, the stance of Gamazo on the treaty with Germany backs the opinion of scholars who, in line with José Varela-Ortega, question the existence of a durable coalition of agrarian and industrial interests in Spain, similar to Torp's sceptical view of the German marriage of rye and iron. ²⁰ Furthermore, similarly to how the duty reductions on cereals in Caprivi's treaties led to the foundation of the German Agrarian League in 1893, the threat to reduce duties on industrial items through the Spanish-German treaty led to the foundation of the Liga Vizcaína de Productores (Biscay League of Producers), created to defend the interests of the Basque iron industry. This League then joined forces with the association Fomento del Trabajo Nacional (National Labor Promotion) of Barcelona, mostly representative of cotton interests, in its opposition to the treaty. Meanwhile the Liga Agraria (Agrarian League), of which Gamazo was a prominent member, showed no signs of solidarity. Gamazo's inaction explains why, as noted by Ignacio Arana, the Basque iron businessmen ended up distrusting him ²¹ and their representatives in Parliament ended up branding him as a ‘neo-free trader’. ²²

For the purpose of this article, what matters is that, facing no internal cabinet opposition, Moret found enough latitude to redirect the Spanish trade policy, which he addressed by focusing on the negotiations with the Triple Alliance countries. His strategy soon became evident. Spain, which had already signed a trade treaty with Austria-Hungary on 8 December 1892, signed another with Italy on 6 August 1893 and a third with Germany on 8 August. With this latter country, in addition, Spain committed, on 9 August, to passing the treaty by 31 December 1893. Unfortunately for his plan, the overlapping of an accident suffered by the Prime Minister, Sagasta, with the confrontation between the Spanish and Moroccan troops in Melilla kept Parliament closed from August 1893 until April 1894. ²³ Thus, the executive found itself in trouble at the end of 1893. The new conventional tariff was supposed to come into force on 1 January 1894, but the concessions that they included could not be applied to countries whose treaties were pending Parliamentary approval. The German case was particularly worrying, since, as previously mentioned, there was a commitment to ratifying the treaty by 31 December, something that Germany had already done on 14 December 1893. The treaties signed with Austria-Hungary and Italy had yet to be ratified by both sides and, moreover, an interim agreement of reciprocal MFN treatment reached with the UK on 18 June 1893 was still awaiting parliamentary debate. In this situation, the executive decided to grant the Spanish conventional tariff (inclusive of the duties in the second column of the 1891 tariff plus the duty reductions agreed in the treaties with Sweden-Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland ratified in August 1893) to all of them. The extension was implemented through a decree issued on 31 December. ²⁴ Importantly, on 30 December, an agreement through the exchange of notes had been reached with France, meaning that the decree granting the Spanish conventional tariff would also be applicable to this country. ²⁵

This was the context when, on 4 April 1894, the Parliament reopened. By then, Gamazo had abandoned the cabinet, tired of the opposition to his plans to balance the budget. However, Moret continued as Minister of Foreign Affairs in a legislative term that would be characterized, both in the congress and the senate, by a heated controversy on trade policy, most significantly on the suitability of the treaty signed with Germany.

Intentions Behind and Reactions Against the German Treaty

Two complementary reasons explain why Moret decided from the outset to prioritize the German treaty. On the one hand, he sought to strengthen political ties with the German Empire and, on the other, he intended to use the treaty as a tool to counteract the protectionist turnaround of the conservatives. As regards international politics, Moret's desire to give Spain a more active role on the European stage supported by ‘the close friendship of the most powerful monarchical states’ was no secret. ²⁶ As previously mentioned, he had formally approached the Triple Alliance by signing a treaty on Mediterranean policy with Italy in 1887, thus starting what the historiography regards as a non-formal, almost secretive membership of Spain to this entente. ²⁷ With this entente's support, mainly from Germany, Moret aspired to dissuade France from backing the republicans in Spain and from extending its dominance in the North of Africa. ²⁸ However, his bonds with Germany were not purely ideological. As documented by Loscertales, Moret was a good friend of Arthur Gwinner, an influential German personality who had been consul in Madrid in the 1880s and, later, while working in Germany's banking sector (he became manager of the Deutsche Bank in 1893) channelled investment from Germany towards Spain. ²⁹ An example was the Compañía General Madrileña de Electricidad, a subsidiary of Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), of which the Spanish Minister was appointed chairman. Moreover, Moret's supporting press organ, El Día, received German subsidies from 1886 to 1895, on the decision of Bismarck. ³⁰

In the trade policy field, it was well-known that Moret was one of the most active members of the Spanish Free Trade Association and the contents of the treaties signed with the countries of the Triple Alliance were perfectly aligned with his commercial preferences. ³¹ The three treaties included many and substantial reductions in the duties of the second column of the Spanish 1891 tariff, with the significant exception of the agrarian headings, so as not to upset Gamazo. In total, the duties on 246 tariff headings of the 373 that made up the new Spanish tariff were to be reduced enough to correct the protectionist turnaround of 1891, as the conservatives denounced in Parliament. The criticisms focused on the German treaty, described as ‘a dynamite bomb within the tariff’ ³² and equated to ‘the destruction of the tariff system of 1891’. ³³ This treaty included the highest number of duty reductions (150 out of 246), thus, it is not surprising that Javier Loscertales regards it as Moret's ‘through-the-back-door’ attempt to dismantle the protectionist 1891 tariff. ³⁴

The talks on the treaty began in Madrid in February 1893 and ended in August after a process that was not free from difficulties. On the Spanish side, the negotiating agency was a committee with representation of the Foreign Affairs, Finance and Development Ministries. Under Moret's control, this committee enjoyed considerable latitude to counteract, by reducing duties, the protectionist swerve of 1891. However, despite the Spanish willingness to grant generous concessions, the negotiating process was tricky. In exchange for the Spanish 150 duty reductions, the German committee offered 19 reductions. If only aesthetically, the unbalanced number of traded concessions foreshadowed difficulties for Parliament in passing the treaty and these anticipated difficulties, coupled with the German reluctance to go further in terms of concessions, explain why the negotiations ended up stalling. Eventually, in July, Germany required the transfer of negotiations to Berlin and for them to be held exclusively between the Spanish ambassador and the German Foreign Affairs Ministry. Moret became alarmed and instructed the ambassador to ‘absolutely avoid the rupture’. ³⁵ On 2 August 1893, the ambassador in Berlin informed the Minister that an agreement had been reached and, the day after, the Minister asked the Spanish committee to meet the German committee to approve it. On 5 August, the Spanish-German treaty was approved in Madrid, on 8 August it was signed, and, through a declaration of 9 August, Spain agreed to ratify it by 31 December 1893. The final content of the treaty, which maintained an exchange of 150 for 19 reductions, reflected the much more powerful negotiating position of Germany. The virulent rejection that this treaty aroused in Spain validates the view that the German negotiators had tried to ‘excessively’ exploit their advantage. At least, this was the opinion of a contemporary German economist, Max Westphal. ³⁶

At the beginning, the signing of the treaty went unnoticed, with very few references in the press and no official news or publications related to its content. ³⁷ It took more than a month for data on the reciprocal concessions, albeit incomplete, to appear in the press and protests started in Catalonia. ³⁸ Throughout the autumn, as more details became available, the campaigning of the Catalan textile and Basque iron interests against the treaty intensified. A large protest meeting planned to be held in Barcelona was eventually frustrated because of the state of siege in the city after the anarchist attack on the Liceo theatre on 7 November, with 15 deaths and dozens of wounded. The meeting was then moved to Bilbao, which, for the first time, became the centre of the Spanish protectionist agitation. The meeting was eventually held on 9 December 1893, attended by 117 Catalan and 155 Basque businessmen and with 446 adhesions from many other locations across Spain. ³⁹ Among the attendees and those who sent messages of support, there were 32 deputies and nine senators, which foreshadowed complications in the Parliamentary procedure. The main conclusion of the meeting was the need ‘to prevent the approval of the treaties already signed by the executive by all possible means’. ⁴⁰ It was also agreed to establish ‘a permanent central body’ in defence of business interests and, more specifically, in defence of protectionism. As a result, the Liga Vizcaína de Productores (Biscay League of Producers) was founded in Bilbao at the same time as the Liga Nacional de Productores (National League of Producers), promoted by the Fomento del Trabajo Nacional to give the protest national coverage, was founded in Madrid. ⁴¹

In the following months, meetings and events against the treaty multiplied in various cities, especially in Catalonia and the Basque Country. At the beginning of April, Barcelona's press highlighted how the abundant attendance of deputies and senators, conservatives and liberals, and their strong statements against the agreement would make it difficult for the government to ratify the agreement. ⁴² In the words of Borja de Riquer, the protectionist associations chose the strategy of pressuring politicians through ‘continuous citizen mobilization’. ⁴³ This strategy was expected to amplify their influence on policy decisions in that the citizen mobilization might involve representatives of different parties. It had already been tested by the Fomento in the 1870s and 1880s, especially in relation to trade policy and even before, according to Luján, in mid-nineteenth-century Spain. ⁴⁴

Another highly interesting point is how, by then, the associations bringing together the Catalan bourgeoisie, such as the Fomento, still trusted the functioning of the Restoration system. Political Catalanism was not yet strong enough to provoke a confrontation as serious as that described by Angel Smith for the years that followed the loss of Cuba in 1898. ⁴⁵ Proof of this is the defeat of the Lliga de Catalunya and the Centre Catalá when, in a large meeting held at the headquarters of the Fomento, both tried to modify the report against the treaty to be raised in Parliament for not considering its content harsh enough. ⁴⁶ On the contrary, the Fomento hoped to prevent its ratification in Parliament itself, counting on the avowed protectionism of the conservatives and an expected division of the liberals, because of the pressure of economic interests on their representatives. ⁴⁷

When the discussion on the treaty started in Parliament, the press had already publicized the mutual concessions included in the treaties with Austria-Hungary, Italy and Germany. The official references to them were scant and the ins and outs of the talks, which would be unveiled during the parliamentary debate, were still unknown. However, the awareness of the difference between the numerous reductions granted by Spain compared to those obtained, particularly from Germany, was enough to spread the idea that unbalanced concessions could not be the result of a clumsy negotiation but rather of a deliberate desire to counteract the protectionist turnaround of the conservatives in 1891. ⁴⁸ In fact, this very intention was acknowledged in the report that the committee addressed to the Foreign Affairs Minister accompanying the draft of the German treaty: ‘In the extensive duties annexed in the agreement, a good part of the customs tariffs established on 31 December 1891 have been broken down and reformed’. ⁴⁹

This was the idea also held by the conservatives and liberal protectionists in Parliament, which they elaborated based on an exhaustive comparison between what France had requested in 1892 and what Germany was offering in 1893. The comparison revealed how the reductions granted to Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy corresponded, to a large extent, to tariff headings for which France had unsuccessfully demanded reductions. ⁵⁰ Out of the 171 headings for which France had demanded reductions, these treaties included 92 (75 included in the German treaty). Moreover, for one third of these 92 headings, the duty was set at the same or an even lower level than in the French treaty of 1882.

The conviction that these reductions would eventually be extended to Spain's most significant trade partners, France and the UK, was a source of additional concern. Spain's weak negotiating position meant that, to avoid a discriminatory treatment in these markets, concessions to Germany would end up being extended to these two countries and, thereby, ‘there would be an almost complete return to the system that prevailed before 1890’. ⁵¹ Accordingly, the rejection that the German treaty aroused when Parliament was reopened on 4 April 1894 was all but unexpected.

From the very beginning, the conservatives declared trade policy as the centrepiece of their partisan opposition ⁵² and the debates surrounding this issue monopolized the parliamentary agenda during the legislative term, being particularly controversial in the Senate. ⁵³ In this chamber, on 4 April 1894, the Duke of Tetuán addressed an interpellation on the state of the commercial relations with France to the Finance and Foreign Affairs ministers. The next day, the Prime Minister raised a bill to validate the decree issued on 31 December, whereby the new Spanish conventional tariff, which, as previously mentioned, meant the application of duties in the second column of the 1891 tariff plus the reductions agreed with Sweden-Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland, had been temporally extended to the Triple Alliance countries, France and the UK. Also on 5 April, Moret raised the bills aimed at ratifying the treaties signed with Austria-Hungary, Italy and Germany. ⁵⁴ In the presentation of the latter to the Senate, the Minister underlined its significance as ‘the basis on which the new conventional tariff law of Spain will be founded’. ⁵⁵ In this sense, the treaty was expected to become one more piece in the chain of treaties with which Chancellor Caprivi planned to avoid the increase in customs barriers that would have otherwise resulted from the extinction of the French-centred network of treaties in 1891. ⁵⁶

Eventually, the discussion in the Senate prevented the Spanish treaty from becoming one more in the chain in 1894. The Duke of Tetuán's interpellation started on 6 April and lasted until 16 April. From the beginning, the German treaty was at the centre of the debate. References to it were also constant during the debate on the bill to validate the decree issued in December 1893, which occupied the Senate agenda from 30 April to 19 May 1894. However, the confrontation between the executive and the protectionist forces did not reach its climax until a second interpellation of the Duke of Tetuán, this time a specific interpellation on the German treaty, which was debated in the Senate from 5 to 23 June 1894.

Throughout these debates, the sacrifice of tariff sovereignty was an argument repeated by the opponents of the German treaty. There were complaints that ‘the nation has disposed of its freedom and even its sovereignty in this respect’, ⁵⁷ by ‘compromising tariff freedom for ten years, tying the hands of the Spanish government’. ⁵⁸ To these sovereignty claims, the official response was always the same. Treaties will allow us to ‘strengthen not only economic but also political ties’ which could be ‘the solution to many serious issues’. ⁵⁹ Sagasta insists on this point when, late in the interpellation on the German treaty, he criticizes the opposition with respect to issues which were ‘essential, issues referring to our international relations and which could depend on the maintenance or rupture of the good relations of Spain with other powers’. ⁶⁰ The blockade that Sagasta blames the Senate for, the tactic that the next section examines, is reprehensible in that it prevented Spain from ‘being seen in a good light by the other foreign powers’. ⁶¹ And close to the end of the legislative term, Sagasta continued to maintain that ‘we cannot reply with silence, slights or disdain, because this would create a difficult situation for us in Europe. There is no nation, however powerful it believes itself to be, that is able to isolate itself from the other nations’. ⁶²

A New Form of Filibustering

In the 1890s, the passing of any piece of legislation in the Spanish Parliament had to be preceded by its examination by an ad-hoc committee. The Senate rules of procedure established that its members should be periodically divided by lots into seven sections (Article 65) and that these sections, when necessary, had to elect the senator who would represent each section in a specific committee, whether it was constituted to report on a certain bill, a law proposal or any other type of legislative initiative (Article 71). The committee chose its own chairman and secretary and was entitled with wide latitude to request official documents and carry out public hearings in order to report on the assigned legislative issue. Committees were not dissolved until the report was delivered, this report being the text, instead of the original piece of legislation, to be discussed on the plenary.

With this in mind, our story starts on 5 April 1894, when the sections in the Senate, half of whose members were elected from among the large taxpayers and the other half, made up of hereditary nobles and senators appointed by the Crown, were randomly selected. The rigged elections in Restoration Spain ensured a wide majority for the head of the party appointed by the Crown as Prime Minister, Sagasta in 1892, so the liberals ended up dominating four out of the seven resulting sections. ⁶³ The liberal dominance of the sections led the press to report good prospects for the German treaty bill and, by the same token, the press was surprised when, on 9 April, four senators who were publicly against the treaty, three conservatives and a liberal dissenter Basque businessman, Víctor Chávarri, a key figure, according to Loscertales, for understanding the ratification's failure, were elected. ⁶⁴ This left the three pro-treaty liberal senators in a minority within the committee. ⁶⁵ A few days later, the former Finance Minister José García-Barzanallana and the Marquis of Mochales, two well-known conservatives, were elected as chairman and secretary, respectively, of the committee in charge of reporting on the convenience of ratifying the pending trade treaties. The victory of the protectionist conservatives could not have been possible without the support of some liberals, and so the press reported the composition of the committee as ‘a government defeat’. ⁶⁶ El Imparcial called for the immediate resignation of Moret. The executive met that very night and, according to El Liberal, Moret blamed the ‘defeat’ on the defection of a number of liberal senators who had either voted for the conservatives or had stayed in the corridor so as not to participate in the election. ⁶⁷ For this reason, he stepped down, although his offer was not accepted.

To understand the concern that the unexpected composition of the committee raised among the treaty supporters, it is worth insisting on the wide latitude that, once constituted, any Senate committee enjoyed. Any committee was entitled to collect information and deliberate on the text of the proposal for as long as it deemed necessary. The lack of a time limit for the committee stage made the government fear instantaneously the possibility that an intended delay in the reporting on the treaty might end up frustrating its approval. In other words, from the very beginning, the government feared that the wide prerogatives of the committee in charge of reporting on the Spanish-German treaty were put at the service of filibustering practices. By then, filibustering constituted a popular parliamentary device in Spain, with many examples of endless speeches and the raising of countless amendments used as a tool for legislative obstruction. The operation of the committee in charge of reporting on the German treaty was to usher in a variant in the Spanish filibustering practice, which Prime Minister Sagasta would refer to as a ‘new obstruction machine’. ⁶⁸

This ‘new obstruction machine’ was designed to avoid accusations of the committee breaching the Senate rules of procedure. Thus, it met immediately and started to work hard on the report so that nobody could claim inaction. But its plan did not respond to the urgency with which the government needed the report. The committee started by opening a public (oral and written) hearing, arguing that the interests harmed by the duty reductions granted to Germany had not been appropriately considered by the ministerial negotiating committee. ⁶⁹

The public hearing started on 16 April, only five days after the committee's constitution and, in this first session, the president set a limit of half an hour for each intervention, in order to ‘ensure that the hearing was not too extensive and that no one could fairly say that we seek to make it last for longer than necessary’. ⁷⁰ The hearing ended on 22 May, after 22 sessions, in which 125 representatives of a wide range of interest groups, from industrialists to merchants, and even members of the Spanish Free Trade Association, took part. The better organized the group, the stronger its attendance. Thus, 67 Catalan and 33 Basque representatives participated and, expectedly, the proportion of opinions against the treaties became overwhelming: 14 opinions in favour of treaties in general versus 50 against; six opinions in favour of the German treaty versus 56 against; one opinion versus seven for the Austria-Hungarian treaty and one opinion versus 12 for the Italian one. ⁷¹ Once the hearing concluded, the committee decided to summarize and publish these opinions before reporting.

In the meantime, the situation had become trickier for the Spanish executive. Starting in 1892, up to 10 extensions of a modus vivendi whereby the two countries exchanged MFN treatment were agreed on. ⁷² The last extension set the deadline on 15 May. When the deadline was reached, Germany cancelled the modus vivendi and the Spanish exports started to pay the duties of the German 1890 general tariff. When, on 20 May, the Spanish executive responded by applying the duties in the first column of the 1891 tariff, Germany levied the duties on Spanish imports by imposing a 50 per cent surcharge. It was a declaration of a tariff war against a supposedly friendly country that showed, once more, Spain's weak negotiating position. Moreover, the German executive announced that it would consider the treaty unsigned if it was not ‘ratified by Parliament during the current legislative term’, ⁷³ a statement that sufficed for the conservatives to regard the treaty as ‘definitively dead’. ⁷⁴ Not surprisingly, a heated debate followed in Parliament, which, as previously mentioned, reached its peak in the Senate.

On 5 June, a legislative interpellation regarding the state of trade relations with Germany was raised by the conservatives in this chamber. Its presentation lasted five days and the subsequent debate a full month, during which a desperate attempt to break the committee's alleged filibustering took place. On 18 June, a group of liberal senators raised an incidental proposition ⁷⁵ to discuss the need to set a deadline for the delivery of the committee's report, which the conservatives labelled as ‘a parliamentary coup’. ⁷⁶ Reflecting the liberal majority in the plenary, the debate on the proposition was accepted, with 127 yes votes against 73 no votes. However, in practice, this strategy had an unwanted effect. On the same day, on the basis that the incidental proposition violated the Senate rules of procedure, the conservatives raised a proposition of ‘inadmissibility’, whose debate took up the whole of the session of 19 June. ⁷⁷ Even if this proposition was defeated, the inappropriateness of discussing the incidental proposition raised by the liberals continued to dominate the debate on 20 June and, importantly, during these three days, the committee considered that the suspension of its tasks was justified. The debate on the German treaty continued for another three days, until 23 June and, eventually, assuming that it was headed nowhere, on 2 July the Prime Minister accepted that ‘the treaty with Germany and the other treaties were not going to be approved in this legislative term’. ⁷⁸

On 11 July 1894, Sagasta read in Parliament the decree that ended the legislative term. The treaty with Germany had failed and, proportional to this failure, the political hangover proved intense. A few days later, the three minority members of the Senate committee published a protest in the press, ‘to clear their conscience’, against the majority members, who, instead of fighting the treaty, had ‘opted for the easy victory of resisting the presentation of the report’. ⁷⁹ In response to this article, on 20 July, the committee's secretary signed the report on the German treaty to testify to the ‘industriousness’ of the majority members. Another newspaper published a summary of the report, which later appeared in full in book form. ⁸⁰ On the German side, as already said, the failure of the trade treaty cooled political relations with Spain, in line with Caprivi's strategy of subordinating the political rapprochement to the economic rapprochement. ⁸¹ It is not insignificant that the German consul in Barcelona, Richard Lindau, who had taken part in the negotiations, linked the trade treaty's failure with the isolation in which Spain was going to find itself, in the case of needing ‘the support of the powers’ in the face of unforeseen events, such as those recently occurring in Melilla. ⁸²

When, in November 1894, the Parliamentary sessions began again, Sagasta declared in the Senate that it had been impossible to resume negotiations with Germany, despite the executive's interest. Consequently, the tariff war resulting from the treaty's failure continued until July 1896, when the conservative government granted the lower duties in the second column of the 1891 tariff in exchange for the elimination of the 50 per cent surcharge on the import of Spanish items. The MFN treatment would not be agreed until, by exchange of notes on the 12 February 1899, amid the liquidation of the remnants of its empire, Spain sold the Caroline, Palau, and Mariana Islands to Germany. ⁸³ The agreement came into force on the 1 July 1899.

Conclusion

The treaty signed by the Spanish liberal executive with Germany in 1893 was regarded as a tool, both for reversing the protectionist turnaround taken by the conservatives in 1891 and, based on this economic agreement, for tightening political ties with the Triple Alliance. When the treaty derailed, both goals faded, thus providing a clear example of how, during Caprivi's chancellery, the absence of a trade agreement entailed non-political support.

Interestingly, the study of the process leading to the treaty's failure makes some other historiographical contributions. First, the personal composition of the executive that promoted the negotiation allows us to discard the existence of a durable agro-industrial protectionist coalition in late-nineteenth-century Spain. In December 1892, the most significant representative of the protectionist interests of Castilian cereal producers in Parliament, Gamazo, became Finance Minister in the same executive where Moret, a leading member of the Spanish Free Trade Association, became Foreign Affairs Minister. The fact that Gamazo's acquiescence was formally required for Moret to begin negotiations with Germany, in which Spanish concessions were to involve cuts on industrial duties, suffices to reject the idea of a coalition. The same way that treaties reducing duties on cereals broke the entente of ‘rye and iron’ in early 1890s Germany, the lonely fight of Spanish industrialists against a treaty that threatened to reduce duties on manufactures reveals the fragility of the sectoral entente that had supported the Spanish protectionist reform of 1891.

Second, the delaying tactic implemented in the Spanish Senate, seeking to ensure the treaty's derailment, provides evidence that, as argued for other continental European countries, even with no clear division of powers, Parliaments counted on legislative practices to effectively curtail the executive action before the First World War. Finally, the non-ratification proves the existence of an active Parliament, where the representatives acted in response to the claims of those they represented, thus enabling the groups of interest to influence policymaking in Constitutional Restoration Spain.