This historiographical intervention draws on recent scholarship to explore the role of the Spanish Civil War as an episode that dramatically highlighted for contemporaries the complex intertwining of civil wars and interstate rivalries that had been under way off and on in various parts of Europe over the course of the previous two decades. The article also considers how studying the Spanish Civil War in an international context can help sharpen how historians think about the intersection of ideology, national politics, and international relations in the course of the period stretching from the Russian Revolution to the outbreak of the Cold War. Describing the era as that of a European Civil War has been one prominent trope. Another, related, approach has depicted this as a period of ideological war. This essay proposes that the term ‘ideologized warfare’ offers a subtly distinct approach that offers some advantages of its own in understanding the dialectic between national and international frameworks of conflict as it played out during these years and as it came into dramatic focus on the Iberian peninsula in the late 1930s. 1
This article provides an analysis of Francisco Franco's personal secretary's collection held by the Archivo General de Palacio (AGP) in Madrid. It contains a series of documents mainly written during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) in which many individuals from diverse areas around the world showed their support for Franco and/or requested a variety of things. The analysis of these and other sources allows us to reposition the figure of Franco as one of the most important reference points in the counterrevolutionary sphere of the time on both sides of the Atlantic. Furthermore, this work highlights the global scope of the Spanish Civil War in its capacity to condition the agendas, emotions, attitudes, and political horizons of people from the most diverse backgrounds. Finally, the article explores how the conflict acted as a distorting mirror of political life in European and Latin American countries. This contributed to the radicalization of broad social and political sectors who, motivated by the fear of an imminent revolutionary outbreak, moved closer to fascism.
