The Academic Resizing of the War in Spain

Contemporary European History (2020), page 1 of 4 doi:10.1017/S0960777320000259 RO U N D TA B L E A R T I C L E The Academic Resizing of the War in Spain David Jorge El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, Mexico [email protected] Eighty years after both the end of the war in Spain and the beginning of a new war on European soil, we are facing a situation of both accelerated information and of reductionism in the stories about the past, often for very ‘presentist’ motivations. In such a context, it is even more difficult than usual to anticipate the place that the Spanish conflict will occupy in academic study and social debate in the next two decades, the period remaining until the conflict’s 100-year anniversary. But historians seeking to re-evaluate or ‘re-size’ the Spanish war face two primary tasks: to place Spain back at the heart of our understanding of the interwar European crisis and to develop a robust interpretation of the war, one which can challenge presentist distortions of its history and help Spain build a healthier society around a fairly shared understanding of the past. For decades the Spanish war was primarily approached from abroad, geographically far from the wounds and passions left by the event in the life of the country. However, over the last twenty years Spanish historians have increasingly taken the lead in exploring the paths first trodden by overseas Hispanists during the late Franco era and the early years of Spain’s democracy. After the pioneering trail laid by Manuel Tuñón de Lara (from his exile in Pau), the work of Spanish historians such as Julio Aróstegui, Enrique Moradiellos, Ángel Viñas and Fernando Hernández Sánchez has enriched and expanded the frameworks used to explain the conflict, breaking down versions and myths that had been repeated like mantras even though they were not supported by relevant documentary evidence. Foreign historiography, with a few exceptions, has been full of prejudice and clichés, marked by the romanticism of a paternalistic vision of Spain, or by individual cases or well-defined groups (the International Brigades have had a prominent position in this regard). Except in cases like Paul Preston’s or Helen Graham’s, little has been contributed to a renewed and rigorous vision of the general meaning of the Spanish war. This is apart, of course, from the pioneering contributions that emerged during late Francoism and the early years of democracy, although of a more general nature and often limited in their possibility of accessing sources, from the – debatable – vision of Gerald Brenan to the classics of Hugh Thomas, Gabriel Jackson, Stanley Payne, Edward Malefakis, Herbert Southworth and Ian Gibson (and within the contributions on contemporary Spain that stretch beyond the period of the war itself we should mention Raymond Carr, Pierre Vilar and Walther Bernecker). Interestingly, the importance and significance of the Spanish case in the world of the time has been diluted by the heroic or novelised stories with the war as their background, from Hemingway to Orwell to recent films, garnering commercial success but of little or no historical interest. After a historiographical boom about the war between the late 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, dominated by the two key sub-themes of the war’s international dimension and the repression on both sides, there seems to have been a decline in studies about it. At first, Franco’s repression, in the heat of the first movements to recover historical memory, shifted the focus of research more towards the question of social implications. Subsequently, and driven by presentist debates within Spanish politics, the questioning or defence of the process of transition to democracy has been gaining ground. Within these debates, often with deficient – if not a complete lack of – argumentative rigour, histories of the war and of Franco’s dictatorship have emerged triumphant as part of a simplifying narrative of the past that serves the objectives of the current hegemonic narrative. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 187.207.99.183, on 06 Jul 2020 at 01:27:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777320000259 2 David Jorge Spain and the Interwar Crisis The essential role of the Spanish war in the progressive interwar crisis has been underestimated in both international and national historiography. Internationally, this was largely due to the fact that it was not useful for the ideological purposes of the Cold War. This also explains Franco’s success in staying in power, in what was one of the first precedents – although not recognised as such by international historiography – of the emerging bipolar world order. An isolated Franco was no threat (except to Spaniards themselves), contributing to the new international scenario as an anti-communist bulwark at a fundamental geostrategic location. Unfortunately for the cause of Spanish democracy, the nonintervention set in motion in 1936 would be followed, again driven fundamentally by the British, by the non-liberation in 1945. Within Spanish historiography, it was due to the emphasis that was placed on the description of the Spanish conflict as a mere civil war, something which constituted a distortion of the real character of the dispute; again, London was fundamental in this characterisation. This double dissociation of the Spanish case from the general crisis of the time has led to mischaracterisations of both historical processes, since they were intrinsically interconnected and fed back into each other in a way that fundamentally influenced their essential features. The international dimension of the Spanish war was essential to its genesis, development, outcome and consequences. It was an international war on Spanish soil. And it was perceived as such at the time. The adulteration of its meaning constitutes an a posteriori interpretation, accommodating the new political and ideological needs of the 1940s. And, in this sense, non-intervention was nothing more than the specific application of British appeasement to the Spanish case. This appeasement reflected a core British foreign policy line. With the application of nonintervention to Spain, this line was reinforced with legal trappings that nevertheless had an extremely weak legal basis (being merely the support from various national governments for the original French declaration of non-intervention) and were in open contradiction with prevailing international law. As a result, it contributed decisively to breaching the dam holding back the aggression of the revisionist states which sought to challenge the Versailles order, setting them firmly along the path of aggression and conquest. By abandoning China, Ethiopia and Spain, the Western democracies left themselves exposed to the aggressors, emboldening their revisionist resolve to build a new world order. Collective deterrence crumbled because of the democracies’ tepid appeasement. In France the international position was defined by fear. In the United Kingdom it was driven by prejudice or ideological preconceptions, coupled with an underestimation of the social demands from societies undergoing a process of later development or nationalist attacks on a political status quo struggling to preserve itself through successive concessions. Both countries demonstrated weakness in the face of those states which challenged the existing international order. The international law which underpinned the Versailles order – whose backbone was the Covenant of the League of Nations – was guaranteed by respect for national sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence, not by the defence of one type of government or another. National sovereignty was guaranteed through the Covenant of the League, but the defence of democracy or a set of ideological values was not a core part of the international order built after the First World War. British appeasement cannot be reduced to opposition to Nazi expansionism in Central Europe. Such a conception is misleading in time, in meaning and in objectives. Appeasement emerged immediately after the Conservative Party came to power in the autumn of 1931, allowing the consolidation of Japan’s aggression against China in Manchuria (as it would in the later case of Italy’s aggression against Abyssinia). Its main objective was to forestall a new war, which could alter the status quo of Versailles (favourable to the interests of the British Empire), and which implied an arms race for which London was not prepared. In the case of Spain, the objective of non-intervention was to limit the conflict to the country’s borders, preventing it seeping onto European soil even though an international war was already taking place. In the autumn of 1937 the British government shifted the multilateral decision-making framework from Geneva to nearby Nyon, coinciding with a meeting of the League of Nations. After the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 187.207.99.183, on 06 Jul 2020 at 01:27:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777320000259 Contemporary European History 3 aggressiveness shown by Italy with its submarines in the Mediterranean, London redoubled its efforts to separate Mussolini from Hitler. In view of the failure a year later in Munich – another decisional detour – the second appeasement option was chosen: a four-way agreement between the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Germany. It soon became clear that the agreement signed in Munich was a dead letter, one which Chamberlain proudly displayed as he stepped off the plane back in the British capital, under the – briefly – celebrated slogan ‘peace for our time’. The United Kingdom backing down closed a circle that had been opened eight years earlier with Lord Cecil’s statement on 10 September 1931, that ‘there has scarcely ever been a time in the world’s history when war seems less likely than it does at present’. A commentary that was consigned to history only a week later when the Mukden (Manchurian) incident occurred, which constituted the first breach of the collective security system. The policy of appeasement undermined the rights of China, as it would later do with Ethiopia, Spain and various Central European states, breaking all the international rules of the game throughout the 1930s. Cecil and Chamberlain’s proclamations were perfect examples of appeasement, in what was its starting and its end point. They were two moments and two sentences in which were symbolised the path towards a Second World War. The ideological triangle of the interwar period (liberal democracy–communism–fascism) was projected onto the Spanish stage. On the one hand, this was done through the disdain for the system of collective security through which the liberal democracies shaped the Versailles order. On the other, it was done through Soviet conceptions of alliances and enemies (which explains its commitment to collective security – with entry into the League of Nations – and to the Popular Fronts as an anti-fascist bastion), as well as through the transposition to Spanish soil of Stalin’s personal concerns and of the movement against any heterodox whim within the international communist movement. Finally, the Axis came into being in Spain through the conjunction of the geostrategic interests of Rome and Berlin. If Japan had already shown its aggressiveness in Manchuria and Italy in Abyssinia, Germany’s expansion into Central Europe was preceded by Nazi intervention and experimentation on Spanish soil. In 1938 Hitler took over from Mussolini as the great eroder of the international order. The Versailles revisionist states challenged the determination of the democracies in Spain. By abandoning their counterparts in the republican government, the democracies conclusively demonstrated their weakness in the face of aggression while consolidating impunity as a practical principle in international relations. The War and Challenges in Spanish Society The aforementioned double dissociation between the Spanish and international scenes led to a perception, both internally and externally, of Spanish exceptionalism. This dissociation and perception explain to a large extent the degree of anomaly that exists in Spain when it comes to dealing with the past. Spain was not only left under a regime that was out of date in the Western world, but it was also left out – or at least very much on the periphery – of the socio-cultural evolution of the Cold War. New times bring new interpretative values, paradigms, approaches and perspectives. The concerns and questions raised by the new historiography naturally differ from those of traditional historiography. Interests change as the social reality changes, be it national or international. Today, one might ask how anomalous it is that a century later there is still no minimum agreement about the meaning of the Spanish war. The challenges in terms of the complex, frustrating and yet necessary dialogue between academia, media and society are enormous. Along the same lines, it is also worth reflecting more rigorously on the dialectic and the tensions between scientific knowledge of the past, the movement to recover historical memory, the impact of both on present-day society and their mixture and confusion. In the face of presentist interests which have tended to use and abuse history of the war, historians have not been able or have not known how to present an equally solid and didactic account. It should also be noted that, given the enormous amount of work done on the Spanish war (far beyond any other national issue and internationally only comparable to global conflicts such as the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 187.207.99.183, on 06 Jul 2020 at 01:27:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777320000259 4 David Jorge two World Wars or the Cold War), it is essential to distinguish the relevant from the superfluous. The battle over the historiographical narrative becomes more complicated the more we confuse the relative importance of certain aspects. It is a task in which historians have often become as much or even more lost than ordinary citizens. The minimal agreement that could be reached on the general significance of the conflict has been undermined by contamination and distortion for presentist purposes. The proliferation of propagandistic works about the war has generated noise over which historians’ progress reconstructing the past is hard to hear. Spain is still a society divided by the war, a division accentuated by the Franco dictatorship that lasted almost forty years. Spain has gone against the grain in terms of defeating and denouncing fascisms in the rest of the world. This is why there is a need for a ‘psychological break’ to overcome a ‘psychological border’ with Francoism. Making Spain a healthier society, in terms of coexistence and consensus around a shared past – however traumatic that may be – must be the social objective of historiography from now on: in other words, it is the main reason to continue advancing the reconstruction and interpretation of the Spanish war. Finally, it should be pointed out that efforts to construct a shared historical narrative must resist the temptation to seek ‘impartiality’ or ‘equidistance’, something which has too often seen false objectivity as the best way towards mutual understanding. But true understanding cannot be obtained in this way. The transition to democracy was one thing; the process of democratic consolidation is another. We should not confuse times, contexts or generations. Spanish society as a whole probably does not want to confront the history of the war; it is probably unaware that the war can never be left behind until it is approached as what it is, as history. Narratives of ‘impartiality’ or ‘equidistance’ have failed to bring about mutual understanding because the success of a story based on a misunderstandings and misrepresentations can hardly be convincing and shared in the long run. Cite this article: Jorge D (2020). The Academic Resizing of the War in Spain. Contemporary European History 1–4. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S0960777320000259 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 187.207.99.183, on 06 Jul 2020 at 01:27:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777320000259