‘The Spanish are a wonderful people’: the International Brigades and their cross-cultural encounters with Civil-War Spain, 1936-1939

Abstract

This thesis investigates the cross-cultural encounters which took place between the multinational fighters of the International Brigades and the people, places, politics and institutions of civil-war Spain between 1936-1939. Although the approximately 35,000 individuals who rallied to the transnational fighting unit have long been the focus of considerable attention, existing accounts of their service tend to relegate Spain itself to the status of a more-or-less incidental backdrop to a far wider-reaching struggle against global fascism. In contrast, this thesis places Spain at the very centre of its analysis. In particular, it focusses on the volunteers’ relationship to the wider Republican war effort, their antifascist allies in the loyalist zone, the Spaniards within their own ranks, the enemy on the field and the civilians of the rearguard – amongst them considerable numbers of women and children. Taking its cue from the new military history and its emphasis on the cultural aspects of war, it sets out to investigate how these encounters ultimately shaped the volunteers’ attitudes, identities and actions as transnational soldiers. It also explores the important opportunities they created for those same soldiers to exercise an impact on the wartime society of the Spanish Republic. By homing in on the neglected meeting-points between a transnational fighting force and the domestic context within which it operated, the thesis demonstrates how thousands of combatants are capable of imagining – and indeed making – war in their own image. Above all, it argues that the volunteers of the International Brigades were engaged in a creative process of constructing an imagined antifascist community in arms as well as placing themselves at its helm in their capacity as compassionate soldiers engaged in a just struggle for the ‘Spanish People’.