A War For Our Times

The Spanish civil war in twenty-first century perspective

The war with its flashes of gunfire has opened our eyes. The idea of political alternation has been replaced for ever by that of extermination and expulsion, which is the only valid response against an enemy which is wreaking more destruction in Spain than any ever caused by a foreign invasion.

We ourselves are the War. (Freikorps diary)

In Spain today the civil war, triggered nearly seventy years ago, is still "the past that has not passed away" and a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, internationally renowned for his championing of human rights, is currently debarred for reasons connected to his bid to investigate the crimes of the Franco dictatorship born of that war. In the UK, Garzón is better known for his bid to have another military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, extradited from Britain to answer for the forced disappearance and murder of some three thousand Chileans under his regime (1973–90). Franco was responsible for ten times that number of "disappeared", as well as tens of thousands more extra- and quasi-judicial killings. Yet outside Spain there is still relatively little public awareness of this dimension of the war. The focus has remained instead on high politics and diplomacy: on the rapid military intervention by expansionist Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, bent on displacing Anglo-French hegemony in Europe – which turned Spain into the antechamber of continental, and ultimately, world war.

But it is the long shadow of the world war which is now bringing back centre frame the most disquieting aspects of what happened in Spain. The tectonic shift in Europe since 1989 has permitted an unprecedented empirical excavation of the continental convulsion of 1939–45 (more accurately, 1938–47), and is now beginning to reveal to a broader public the stark truth already known by specialist historians – that this was a war waged predominantly upon civilians; moreover millions of them were killed not by invaders and strangers, but by their own compatriots, including their own neighbours. A war of intimate enemies and local massacre, then, which occurred across Europe and whose intensity derived from their being culture wars as much, if not more, than of wars of politics: or, rather, they became possible as mass political conflicts by dint of their profound cultural roots. By "culture" what is meant here is the core narrative of how society is organized and how it is reciprocally explained by its inhabitants with reference to a set of collective values deemed appropriate to underpin it.

These protean conflicts were the microcosmic manifestations in daily life of "impersonal" processes of social transformation deriving ultimately from industrialization and urbanization. By the end of the nineteenth century their impact was becoming more evident, directly or indirectly, in the east, centre and south of the European continent too, an impact much accelerated by the effects of mass wartime mobilization – in the factories probably more than at the military front itself – during the Great War of 1914–18. This was a war which, before the event, had been envisaged by many, including among Europe's traditional landed and imperial elites, as a "clamp" that would hold at bay, or even neutralize, the unintended social consequences of the industrial change which was already acting as a dissolvent on older forms of social and political order. But the "event" itself was rather different to how they had imagined. The acceleration of home front labour mobilization and mass military mobilization to meet the needs of modern industrialized warfare changed the balance of power forever across the continent. Indeed from nearly a century's distance now, we can see how much of the economic mobilization and social shift which preceded the conflict was already actively influencing what would be the war's mediumterm social and political outcomes. But, in the immediate term, the Great War produced a sort of stalemate or hung result – fatally wounding the continent's old order of empire, elite rule, social hierarchy and deference, yet not finishing these off entirely.

In the 1920s and 30s there thus erupted a maelstrom of becoming. People were on the move physically, the demographic shift intensified by military mobilization and war work. And their ideas, their very sense of their own lives, were often on the move with them. Who should now speak through politics? Which counted for more – the new political rights conceded by emerging or developing constitutional systems, or duties and notions of service deriving from an older, and rigidly hierarchical, social order? What privileges – political, economic and cultural – could wealth still command over those whose only "capital" was their newly acquired membership/citizenship of a state or nation? How might secular ideas of community coexist with religious culture and values? Especially since these latter had not, by and large, been free-floating, but rather integral to bolstering and maintaining traditional (and therefore usually hierarchical) relations in the villages or small towns in which most inhabitants of continental Europe – central, east and south – still lived.

The conflicts of the European inter-war period were most saliently and predominantly ones that emerged from the meanings made by this still overwhelmingly rural majority, in which should be included the many inhabitants of provincial and market towns, in their encounter with encroaching social change – even if for many this remained a dull-rumoured one. Pre-existing economic tensions, especially where mass landlessness was present, became much more conflictive in the new atmosphere where the knowledge of mass war dead primed the emerging language of political rights. But even where no issue of landlessness obtained, the same questions loomed: how would new forms of politics, the fruit of new circumstances, address and reconfigure interests within the rural world itself? Those of the landed, with those of the ubiquitous, complex array of others of modest and middling means – whether landowning peasantry, tenant farmers, estate stewards and retainers, provincial officials, police and the broader commercial and service classes of the locality. A community of economic interest, even in the face of an uncertain future, was far from self-evident here, until a perception of it became solidified through a gradually emerging common set of social fears and...