So, this one is a bit late – let’s coordinate our schedules better next time – but buckle up, because I have some thoughts on this one.

About a third of my PhD thesis addressed this very fundamental question: why on earth did so many people, from so many places, decide that it was a good idea to go and fight in Spain during the late 1930s. The Spanish Civil War sees more foreign fighters – those who take part in conflicts in which their home state is neutral and are not primarily motivated by material gain – than just about any conflict in modern history. Tens of thousands of foreigners volunteered, with at least 35,000 fighting for the Republican side alone, with a smaller but still significant number fighting for their opponents, the Nationalists. Only the recent conflict in Syria has seen comparable numbers of foreign fighters take part, though the 20-year rule precludes any direct discussion of this particular group. For reasons that hopefully become apparent over the course of the answer, I’ll be focusing here on the Republican side. I’d also like to highlight that since this topic is so close to the heart of my own research, I’m going to be going well beyond the usual AskHistorians approach of summarising the current state of the literature, and draw a lot on my own, mostly unpublished research. As such, this answer, hopefully, reflects the historical consensus of the future.

Ok, so I may be overselling this one. I’ll dial back the italics.

There’s a reason I’m hyped though. The choice to fight in Spain has long fascinated historians, and with good reason. The foreign volunteers’ motives appear distinct from the usual pressures to take up arms – they were not defending their homes and families, they did not stand to gain financially nor did they owe Republican Spain any personal loyalty. Eighty years later, it seems almost completely irrational, harkening back to a noble, almost chivalric ideal of risking one’s life for the sake of purely-held beliefs. This, rather logically, meant that understanding these beliefs dominated early academic studies of the foreign volunteers in Spain. Debate over the nature – and purity – of these beliefs dominated a lot of the Cold War-era scholarship, with two broad schools of thought emerging: what I think of as ‘celebratory’ and ‘revisionist’ approaches.

Celebratory approaches – often written by those who had gone to Spain, or with a close personal connection to the conflict – highlighted the extent that the volunteers were motivated by the desire to oppose fascism. Many, such as those living in exile from Germany and Italy, had experienced fascism first hand, and saw the chance to continue the fight in Spain. Others were internationalists, who saw the expansion of fascism abroad (and the growth of domestic fascist movements at home) as a threat that crossed national borders – nowhere would be safe so long as fascism was in power. Although the volunteers came to become anti-fascists in different ways, they shared this common belief that it was a menace that had to be fought sooner or later – either today in Madrid, or tomorrow at home. Spain, in this worldview, was readily appreciated as the key theatre of the anti-fascist struggle at the time – as nation after nation succumbed weakly to fascism and dictatorship in the 1930s, Spain seemed to show that if fascism were resisted, in arms if necessary, a united popular effort could hope to defeat it. Fascism, in other words, no longer looked inevitable or invincible in Spain. As such, for those keenest to fight against it, Spain was the logical place to go.

In contrast, revisionist accounts were a bit skeptical of this idealistic explanation. Without impugning the motives of every volunteer, they pointed out that significant numbers had less ‘pure’ reasons to be in Spain – some were bored, or unemployed, seeking adventure or money. This, as more source material has become available, has not stood up all that well – while some certainly fell into this kind of category, most did not, and in any case there was no reason that someone couldn’t be, say unemployed AND a staunch anti-fascist. The more fundamental part of the revisionist case, however, was political: that while ordinary volunteers might have been idealistic, the project itself was not. The International Brigades, the units in which about 90% of Republican foreign volunteers served, were recruited, organised and led by the Communist International (Comintern), as part of wider Soviet efforts to support the Republican cause. This, in the words of one early revisionist scholar, made them a ‘Comintern Army’, doing Stalin’s bidding – and, in the eyes of a good Cold Warrior, this was an inherently Bad Thing. What revisionist accounts did do, however, was explore many of the less nice sides of foreign volunteering – Stalinist paranoia, political repression, executions, desertions and so on. But they did not manage to really shift the debate surrounding your question very far – that is, why did people volunteer in the first place?

More recently, scholarship has taken a bit of a transnational turn. These accounts place more emphasis in the place of Spain in wider life trajectories, such as the paths of exile I mentioned earlier, but also highlighting the role that Spanish veterans played in ant-fascist resistance across Europe. Much of this scholarship is rather biographical, seeking to understand individual decisions in more depth, highlighting a complex range of push (ie reasons to leave home) and pull (reasons to go to Spain) factors that were at play. This has led to more nuanced explanations of these decisions, that do a fair bit to reconcile the competing narratives of celebratory/revisionist scholars, acknowledging both the reality that most volunteers were motivated by anti-fascist beliefs, as well as revisionist skepticism that this was the whole, unvarnished picture. However, I personally have two main problems with this approach. This first is representative – namely, that such biographical approaches tend to overemphasise individuals who led interestingly transnational lives. Many, if not most, volunteers were not romantic exiles lurking in bars in Montmartre, but relatively ordinary, working-class individuals who were not particularly mobile before going to Spain. This is an even bigger problem when we want to talk about the bigger picture – it’s wonderful to have such a deep appreciation of a handful of special snowflakes, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us a lot about all the other snowflakes.

(continued below)

In short, ideology.

The Spanish Civil War was seen as an early fight against fascism. Spain had moved away from being a monarchy with the Second Republic in 1936 and had begun to implement a myriad of socialist reforms, moving power and money into the lower class, supporting farmers and women, and disrupting the status quo the upper classes had enjoyed. The military, among others, were disadvantaged by these changes, leading to the coup by General Francisco Franco and his supporters that begun the Civil War.

Officially, other countries did not send much aid or get particularly involved with the war in Spain. On the fascist, or Nationalist side, there were arms and weaponry provided by Hitler Germany, and Franco allowed the Third Reich to practice bombing runs in northern Spain, leading to the events that inspired the famous “Guernica” by Picasso.

On the socialist side, or the Republicans, involvement came from many countries but was not very organized. Much of the foreign aid came from the International Brigade, an organization that brought together soldiers from around the world who wanted to fight against fascism. Franco was intent on suppressing the youth, artists, regional dialects—and young people from other countries felt that an injustice was being done and came to try to help. This is the reason you see it in writings from foreign authors of that time, especially since many artists and writers fled Spain during this time and were sharing what was happening in their home country within these artistic communities.

Interestingly, in the US we don’t learn much about these events in public school, instead focusing on Hitler and WWII. It’s important to note here that the reason Spain wasn’t even involved in WWII is because of the relationship between Franco (and his fascist dictatorship) and Hitler. And when WWII ended and the atrocities of the Holocaust were being investigated, the world seemed to forget about the early fight against fascist in Spain. Franco remained a dictator until his death in 1975.