The Spanish International Brigadier as Veteran and Foreign Fighter

Extract

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.