At the time of the Spanish Civil War much contemporary commentary about the International Brigades was consistent with the view that what was taking place on the Iberian Peninsula was part of a larger struggle between democracy and fascism. Sympathetic reporting highlighted their positive military contribution and the selfless sacrifices in what later was tagged as the ‘curtain-raiser’ to the Second World War. From the 1980s scholarship about these foreign fighters for the republic was framed quite differently. In these cases the volunteers’ war experiences tended to be placed within the contextual narratives of their own national groupings or were applied in relation to the impact of the returned veterans from Spain on the post-war politics in their own home states. In several current analyses of the civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the unexamined historical figure of the Spanish International Brigadier has been utilised as a foil against which to catalogue the pernicious and destabilising role of foreign fighters in these on-going civil wars.
My intention is to examine the outcome of an analysis whereby the brigadista experience in Spain is placed at the intersection of two broader debates that have current salience. The first locates the international veterans in the Spanish Civil War as part of a transnational, even globalised, category of the twentieth-century war veteran. The second is largely prompted by a discourse about how Western nations should deal with their own citizens who have become foreign fighters in wars that are being fought in other places. The intersection of these two approaches may not necessarily produce new material but can mark out a differently nuanced chronology in the telling of the International Brigade story.
Literary studies of war writing often highlight the commonalities in the soldiers’ responses to war. For example, Yuval Harari (2008) has identified a post-Napoleonic genre on war participation that lauded the authenticity of the soldiers’ experience based on the authority of the ‘flesh-witness’. In a similar vein, Samuel Hynes (1997) notes that the sense of hyper-realism often experienced by ordinary soldiers comes from the realisation that their own small lives had been transfigured by being part of the meta-narrative of major events. This sense of the un-ordinariness of their soldierly selves sets them apart from others and, according to Hynes, is the prompt for the ‘one-book man’ to put pen to paper.
Historians in general shy away from the totalising stance. It is the case, however, that historical writing, by and about soldiers, tends to follow a standard sequence: enlistment, combat, demobilisation, home-front reinsertion and, of course, memory. Similarly, as Ángel Alcalde and Xosé M. Núñez Seixas (2018) note, despite half a century of wars in a variety of places, and with participants from a range of social backgrounds, soldiers share strong elements of a transcendent identity as veterans, both in their own self-definition and in their acknowledgement by the state and by their fellow citizens. The recognition of these factors brings an awareness of the ‘global dimension’ of veteran identity and, even within what is a cultural and politically constructed category, of a ‘shared veteran history’.
A group of distinguished cultural historians of war were asked to reflect on the nation-based studies each had written in order to consider how veterans might be conceptualised as a transnational category and what the ‘connections that bound veterans’ communities together’ (War and Society, 2019) could be. Perhaps not surprisingly there was no unanimity on definitional methodologies and scope; however, there was consensus that the unprecedented number of war veterans in the twentieth century guaranteed them an important place in modern history and that their existence offered a ‘vital lens’ through which to track large changes in war and society. Among a number of interesting problematics raised in the historians’ discussion there are several that can be applied here: whether the veterans’ war was won or lost (Grace Huxford, on Korea) and what was the effect of the veterans’ ‘afterlife’ at war's end (Gary Baines, on South African Defence Forces). The significance of the ‘afterlife’ here is not about the simple re-insertion of the veteran into a previous civilian existence but denotes the ways in which the legacy of war and combat is carried over into the next episode of the soldier's life.
The increasing visibility of foreign fighters in civil conflicts in Afghanistan and the Levant has escalated concern in what in the most alarmist terms has been described as the ‘foreign fighter glut’ (Michael Noonan & Phyl Khalil, 2014). In general, though, many commentators agree that transnational volunteers have a major influence on military outcomes, and that their presence ratchets up the level of violence in the modes of combat. In many cases they bring their previous military experience to such engagements and transnational recruits serve as an enabling factor in the spillover of sectarian violence into Western Europe. The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism noted that in the year ending September 2015 some 30,000 foreign volunteers were serving in Syria from 104 countries. In September 2014 the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution (no. 2178) condemning foreign fighters, terrorists and the groups and individuals who join them. Similarly, a number of governments have recently enacted legislation to strip citizenship from individuals identified as foreign fighters and make mandatory the detention of individuals suspected of planning to enlist in a foreign war.
In numbers close to those cited by the ICCT in Syria, there were some 35,000 volunteers in republican Spain from around fifty countries. The first were European exiles displaced by the surge of Nazism and fascism in their home countries. By contrast with the claims made for present-day foreign fighters, it is doubtful that those in Spain possessed superior military prowess or that their presence raised the overall quotient of combat violence. The often retold story of the first foreign volunteer units marching through Madrid to take up positions around University City in early November 1936 undoubtedly lifted the spirits of Madrileños backing the republic, but the claims that these foreigners brought up-to-date military training and the knowhow of trench warfare is an overegging of their expertise. There were veterans of the Great War among them but the majority were strong, young, working-class males, unquestionably committed to the republican cause but with little military training and unlikely to have held a rifle before arriving in Spain. The casualty rates of International Brigadiers at the end of December 1936 stood at around 50 per cent. International units were used as shock troops at certain times but overall their casualty rates remained horrendously high, estimated to be between 20 and 30 per cent.
The International Non-Intervention Control Agreement, signed by twenty-seven governments in February 1937, made recruiting volunteers to enlist in Spain or assisting their passage illegal. All practical attempts to restrict such travel were ineffective, as were the Foreign Enlistment Acts in Commonwealth countries and the US Neutrality Act, reformatted in 1937 to specifically include Spain. Above all, the outbreak of the Second World War rendered irrelevant legal matters relating to foreign volunteering in Spain.
The International Brigades were withdrawn in the forlorn hope that this would prompt the League of Nations and the Western powers to force Franco to withdraw German and Italian forces. At the final passing out parade, on 15 November 1938, the international veterans, in tattered uniforms and with comrades aiding the injured, marched through Barcelona in the formations of their national battalions. Their flower-strewn way was lined by thousands of cheering and weeping Spaniards. Prime Minister Negrín greeted the departing soldiers as ‘brothers and compatriots’, promising them honorary citizenship when the war was over. But it is the eloquence of La Pasionaria that has echoed down the decades. Her long and moving speech addressed first Spanish mothers and wives to urge them to remember always the ‘the brave men of the International Brigades’. To the latter she said ‘when the olive tree of peace is in flower, entwined with the victory laurels of the Republic of Spain – return to our side for here you will find a homeland . . . you will find the love and gratitude of the Spanish people who will cry out with all their hearts: long live the heroes of the International Brigades’. The tenor of the farewell was of profound sadness. Madrid had not been the tomb of fascism. And those who had sacrificed that it might have been so, knew that in Franco's post-civil war state there would be no honour for the fallen, international or republican, and no leeway for reconciliation with the defeated.
The coming of the Second World War was transformative for many International Brigade veterans. In their post-war ‘afterlife’ they were canonised by the international left as premature anti-fascists and living symbols of political solidarity and self-sacrifice. The formation of international associations of International Brigadiers, families and friends provided respect and recognition, and individual veterans exerted influence through left-wing networks in Europe and the United States for democratic reform in Spain. In August 2002, for example, the New York division of the American Lincoln Brigade Association backed the successful effort of the Spanish Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory to bring a case against the Spanish government to the UN Working Group on Forced Disappearances.
In the Spanish Cortes in November 1996, after suffering electoral defeat, Felipe González used the final piece of Socialist Party (PSOE) legislative business to extend Spanish citizenship to the surviving International Brigadiers. It fulfilled the historic promise made in 1938 but, equally importantly, made clear the formal link between Spain's republican past and the present-day Spanish democracy. Though it was passed with bipartisan support, once sworn into government José Mariá Aznar's People's Party (Partido Popular; PP) scuppered the arrangement by adding a proviso that in order to take up Spanish citizenship the foreign volunteers must renounce their existing citizenship. This meant that these very elderly veterans would have had to relinquish the pensions and entitlements available in their home countries. Without a doubt the strategy was mean spirited. The intent was to insult the visiting veterans, and it broke the bipartisan parliamentary consensus that had smoothed the way for the promulgation of the new constitution. But in practice the withdrawal of support did not matter too much: these ex-International Brigadiers, elderly men and women, were ecstatic to be welcomed back to democratic Spain after the long period of dictatorship. When José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's PSOE government took office again in 2004 he set up a commission to make amends to Spain's victims. Articles 20–1 of the 2006 Law of Historical Memory extended citizenship to the now very few surviving members of the International Brigades. The honour was conferred in separate low-key ceremonies by the Spanish ambassador in the veterans’ home countries.
There is virtue in viewing the narrative of the International Brigades in Spain using a larger focus. Integrating their experiences with those of twentieth-century war veterans and comparing them with present-day notions about foreign fighters does not replace the existing nation-based analyses but can usefully highlight a differently nuanced narrative.
