Ideologized Warfare: The Spanish Civil War and the Intersection of the National and the International in Europe's Armed Conflicts, 1917–1949

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