Spain and the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century

With hindsight, it is clear that German aircraft made a crucial impact on the course of the Spanish Civil War. It is revealing that, of the few comments Göring made at the Nuremberg Trials about the Spanish Civil War, he emphasized the need to test 'his' Luftwaffe as a motive for Germanys intervention. Although neither this comment nor his claim that he urged Hitler to intervene in Spain can be substantiated from the available evidence, a kernel of truth emerges from Görings boastful statement. Luftwaffe planes and pilots were undoubtedly trained in Spain. Bombing raids on Spanish cities such as Madrid and Barcelona were often undertaken without any military targets in mind, but simply to frighten the Republican population into submission. Such raids were the first examples of the suffering that many European cities were to experience after 1 September 1939. The major Republican cities, however, are not usually remembered alongside Warsaw, Rotterdam or Coventry. This sad fate was reserved for a small Basque market town previously known only to Basque nationalists. Guernica, of which barely anything was left after the annihilation raid of 26 April 1937, became a foretaste of things to come.

In the disarmament conference, the Spanish position followed the same script. The demand was made for the greatest possible disarmament compatible with a guarantee of internal public order and the fulfilment ofбinternational obligations. As a minimum programme, a drastic and efficiently controlled reduction in arms was advocated. In the defence of these proposals, the Spanish diplomatic corps was again especially active. Madariaga chaired one of the committees set up to consider disarmament, that of aerial disarmament, and took the initiative in the process that would lead to the creation of the Group of Eight, consisting of the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. As democratic powers without great military capacity, all of them shared with Spain the resolute desire to go down the path of disarmament and support every initiative to reinforce the principle of collective security. For that same reason, they were especially concerned that the negotiations take place with the greatest clarity and transparency, without their being hijacked by the tendency of the Great Powers to solve their differences in parallel meetings.
The truth was that the Group of Eight could not do much in the face of the initiatives of the Great Powers, nor did the latter seem able to reach a minimum basis of agreement. Trapped between the French insistence on security issues, the German concentration on equal rights and the more flexible British position, the conference on disarmament dragged on throughout 1932 without any positive progress.

In September 1931, at almost the same time that Lerroux made a flamboyant presentation of the principles of the Republic*s foreign policy in the Geneva forum, Japanese aggression began in Manchuria. The conference on disarmament began its sessions five months later. These would be the two great tests to which the League of Nations would be put, and they would also constitute the first great challenges that the new Republican diplomatic corps would have to face.

As far as the conflict in the Far East was concerned, the Spanish position constituted a sound defence of the Leagues principles, led principally by the man who would be the Spanish representative in Geneva during the greatest part of the Republican period, Salvador de Madariaga. ...he soon began to be known as "Don Quijote de la Manchuria".

Above any other consideration, Republican leaders had a clear, coherent, modern and progressive concept of what Spanish foreign policy should be. This does not necessarily mean that successive governments were able to construct upon this base a well-defined or articulated programme. The nucleus of this concept was their conviction that the foreign policy of the Republic could be nothing other than an outward projection of the democratic principles that inspired domestic policy; this would endow it with coherence, credibility and prestige. And because of its location, bridging two continents and two seas, as well as its history and culture and the size of its population, Spain could and should occupy a privileged position among nations.

This does not mean, of course, that deficiencies in the foreign action of the Republic have been ignored. These include the inexperience of the new people in charge of Republican diplomacy, the discontinuity resulting from the existence of fourteen governments and ten ministers of state in only five years, the inadequacies of the infrastructure, the inertia of the bureaucracy, the lack of programmes and the absence of mechanisms of coordination. To these should be added the budgetary consequences of the economic crisis and the resulting priority given in government expenditure to the Republican policy of domestic reform. Above all, the violence of the internal conflict weighed like a millstone on the foreign policy of the Republic. It absorbed nearly all the available time and energy, encouraging international problems to become a vehicle of national politics, thus reinforcing the traditional tendency of Spaniards to look inwards and distance themselves from European problems.

Both in its circumstances and in its ideas, Republican foreign policy was the exact opposite of that of Primo de Rivera. In a largely stable international context, Primo de Rivera carried out a policy that, for all its bombast, entailed a timid challenge to the international status quo. In a much more fluid and problematic international situation, the Republican government relied on a policy of collaboration in order to maintain this status quo. Nevertheless, there was one aspect in which the two converged and diverged at the same time. In both cases, an attempt was made to raise Spain from the alleged prostration in which she lay, projecting the country outwards and aspiring to play a significant role in international relations. But while the Dictatorship constituted a first and contradictory expression of conservative regenerationism, the Republic did likewise, but of progressive democracy

...Franco was very fortunate in militarily engaging the Red Army not to have provoked a formal Soviet declaration of war against Spain, which would have left Britain and the United Statesafter she entered the Second World War in December 1941 little choice but to follow suit. However, Serrano Suñer calculated that the Franco regime, in sending this Spanish unit to fight on the Russian front, had done enough to curry favour with the Third Reich without sorely provoking the Allies, as he explained many years later: Really with the Blue Division we wanted to go a little way towards fulfilling our obligation to Germany without provoking the Allies.

For much of the twentieth century Spain was a mere shadow of her former imperial and international self; a dependant of the Anglo-French bloc before the Second World War and a satellite of the Anglo-American bloc after that conflict, she mostly lived on the tolerance of the Great Powers and on the periphery of their concerns and confrontations. True, between 1936 and 1939, Spain attracted unwonted international attention as the cockpit for such warring foreign ideologies as Fascism and Communism. However, the very fact that the Spanish Civil War was hijacked by these external forces, that their intervention and nonintervention determined its course and dictated its conclusion, demonstrates dramatically Spains inability to control her own fate. When not a mere plaything of the first-rank powers, she became their playground or at least their battle-ground.

Because of the relative proximity of Italy to Spain, deliveries of war matériel had a much greater impact on immediate operations than those received by Republican Spain from the Soviet Union. According to the official Italian military history of the Spanish Civil War, the timeliness of deliveries was often more crucial than their scale given that one side or the other might have had to give in or seek a compromise peace if necessary supplies had not been received in time.112 The fact that the Italian air force could protect the Italian merchant ships carrying supplies ensured a rapid and virtually uninterrupted supply. Nearly 80,000 Italians fought in Spain of whom nearly 4,000 were killed. The Italians supplied 759 aircraft, 6,600 cannons, mortars and machine guns, 157 tanks, 7,400 motor vehicles, 1.8 million uniforms, hundreds of thousands of rifles and 7.7 million shells,
and 319 million small-arms cartridges. This was costed at 8,500,000,000 lire (£95,000,000 in 1939 terms; £2,375,000,000 in 1995 terms), although the generous payment deal was of 5,000,000,000 lire.113 By November 1937, the scale of the economic strain was causing Mussolini considerable anxiety.