Fighters against fascism
ALEJANDRO QUIROGA recommends a book that tells the stories of international soldiers who signed up to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and questions what motivated them
The International Brigades have occupied a central place in British historical memory for decades. The 35,000 men and women who travelled from all over the world to defend the democratic Second Spanish Republic have been the object of a vast literature, and remain a key part of the popular imagination of anti-fascism in interwar Europe. Giles Tremlett’s book provides a comprehensive narrative history of the Brigaders, while exploring the volunteers’ role in Spain and beyond. A connoisseur of the Iberian past, Tremlett has authored a number of books on Spanish history while working for The Guardian in Madrid.
The International Brigades takes a chronological approach, and each of its 52 short chapters deals with a particular event of the Spanish Civil War and introduces a number of volunteers who take centre stage in the narrative. Their adventures and misadventures are intertwined with the development of domestic political struggles and international disputes caused by the conflict. The final chapter is particularly revealing, showing the anti-fascist activities that some International Brigaders went on to during Second World War and the very successful political careers they enjoyed on both sides of the Iron Curtain
In fighting fascism in Spain, International Brigaders challenged the appeasement policies of the British government
after 1945. The result is a lively, hugely readable, scholarly book, combining archival material with a wealth of secondary sources.
For decades, academics have debated the motivations, impact and legacy of the International Brigades. In Britain and the United States, a Cold War mentality still prevails which holds that the volunteers decided to go to Spain due to communist sympathies. Aside from the empirical limitations of this view – only around half of International Brigaders held communist affiliations – this argument does not fully explain why thousands of men and women from very different social classes and countries chose to risk their lives for the Republic. Tremlett suggests that anti-fascism was the only political and moral category almost all Brigaders fitted in to. Faced with the crucial binary choice between fascism and antifascism, the volunteers in Spain fought a battle for the future of their own countries – many of them already under rightwing authoritarian regimes.
In the case of Britain, the Cold War anti-communist narrative has remained popular for so long precisely because recognising the crucial anti-fascist component of their Brigaders underscored the tolerance and, at times, sympathies of the British government towards Hitler and Mussolini before the outbreak of the Second World War. In the UK, the volunteers recognised the threat of fascism well before the British government did. In fighting fascism, the International Brigaders challenged the appeasement policies of the British government, which included the military, economic and diplomatic suffocation of the Spanish democracy and the acceptance of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s interventions in the war. Appeasement also meant that the Brigaders faced a hostile response from the British government when they returned home.
Tremlett is right to point out that the International Brigades “deserve to be remembered not just by those who sympathise with their mostly leftist politics, but by anyone who believes western democracies were right to fight fascism in the Second World War”.