Why Do So Many Historians Fail to Understand the War in Spain? By Helen Graham
The war of 1936-39 in Spain had much in common with the many other conflicts being waged in societies across Europe after the First World War, as those who sought to maintain old hierarchies clashed with those striving for change. Yet the evident similarity is one that English-speaking historians often seem oblivious to. What explains their curious blind spot?
I
n the early 2000s, a popular British history magazine commissioned me to write an essay on the war of 193639 in Spain. But when I filed my piece, they told me they couldn’t publish it because their readers “wouldn’t recognize in it the war they knew.” In my essay, I’d analyzed the conflict in Spain in the context of the many related ones catalyzed across continental Europe by the war of 1914-18. In the end, I argued, these were all conflicts between those who wanted to preserve the hierarchical social and political structures of the pre-1914 European world and those who sought to achieve some form of social and political change—whether by reformist or revolutionary means. Everywhere, Spain included, such conflicts arose from a broader context: accelerating urbanization, industrialization and, crucially, the accompanying processes of increasing migration from countryside to city. The magazine’s response seemed unusual. My “Europeanizing” perspective was not new in academic circles, although it wasn’t until later that it began to reach a more general readership—largely as a result of Mark Mazower’s book Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1998). Mazower painted a picture of Europe between 1918 and 1948 in the throes of rapid structural change, a process accelerated by the First World War and consummated by the Second. Social and political conflict across the continent, he argued, virtually always sprung from the changing relationships between urban and rural populations. He also connected the violence that Europeans brought on each other with the long
history of imperial violence inflicted on colonized populations; the idea that, as Aimé Césaire wrote, Fascism and Nazism were “colonialism come home.” All of this was also true for Spain, even though the country had not been a belligerent power in the First World War. The military coup in July 1936, after all, was perpetrated by officers from the colonial army of Africa, who designed their “occupation” of Spain as a pushback against the levelling effects of an urbanizing and industrializing society. Once Spain’s military coup began to falter in the face of urban resistance, its instigating officers welcomed the Nazi and Italian Fascist intervention that would see it escalate to a battlefield war. (The golpistas had not envisaged a war of that kind, even though they had intended to inflict “exemplary” violence on civilians who opposed them.) As it was, the coup itself also triggered a dirty war in which civilians used lethal violence against each other. Here, in fact, the Spanish case prefigured the Second World War in Europe as a series of internal wars waged by civilians on other civilians. These wars—catalyzed by Nazi occupation and expansionism but not reducible to the Nazi agenda—would help shape postwar Europe. My own Europeanizing magazine essay on the conflict in Spain would become a book, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (2005), which has sold over 50,000 copies in English and been translated to German, Portuguese, Greek, and Turkish. Unlike those magazine editors, its readers have had no trouble recogniz-
ing and understanding the relationship between what happened in Spain and the violence across other areas of Europe in the crucible of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s. And yet for historians that continues to be a hard nut to crack. The editors’ comment from almost twenty years ago about “a war we do not recognize” still describes an enduring blind spot among British and North American Europeanists. To be sure, most have long assimilated Mazower’s perspectives—but they somehow still have trouble applying them to Spain. Over the past two decades, this curious inability has given rise to other, equally curious phenomena. For one, the war in Spain, and the extreme nationalism to which it gave rise under Francoism, almost always remain “invisible” in what are otherwise wide-ranging and sophisticated transcontinental studies of political and social violence in twentiethcentury Europe. Still today, standard Anglo-American works of comparative European history tend to mention the conflict of the 1930s in Spain only in passing, referencing great-power diplomacy in the “run-up” to the Second World War. If, unusually, an attempt is made to go into particulars, references tend to bypass the past thirty years of specialist historiography on the topic. No comparative Europeanist would consider this acceptable if they were writing about Germany, Italy, or Russia. The fact that it still goes unremarked where Spain is concerned indicates that, in the minds of most British and American Europeanists, the country’s history inhabits some sort of “antiquarian niche.” December 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 13
