Many of the forms and practices of interwar internationalism
This article argues that refugees and the Christian humanitarian organizations supporting them, particularly Catholic ones, helped to construct the Cold War West. Christian NGOs valued these refugees, not only for their needs or their suffering, but for the power of their stories. Refugees’ stories served to encapsulate and dramatize the horrors of communism, transforming it from an abstract ideological threat to a vivid personal danger. Their suffering and sacrifice, and the efforts to relieve this suffering, helped to forge ties of solidarity across Western Europe and North America. Christian groups fuelled this solidarity through the dissemination of information about communist persecution and the courage of refugees seeking to escape it, mobilizing the faithful to contribute through donations, prayers, and relief campaigns. The vision of the West which emerged from these campaigns emphasized religious freedom as the cornerstone of Western societies. It promoted solidarity across national borders by emphasizing Christian unity, although there were tensions between different denominations and Catholics were often the most active supporters of anti-communist humanitarianism. It also, strikingly, had little to say about democracy, something that becomes particularly evident when we examine the participation of Franco's Spain in Christian refugee relief.
This book tells the story of the experts who sold the idea of Franco’s ‘social state’. Despite the repression, violence, and social hardship which characterized Spanish life in the 1940s and 1950s, the Franco regime sought to win popular support by promoting its apparent commitment to social justice. This book reveals the vital role which the idea of the social state also played in the regime’s ongoing search for international legitimacy. It shows how social experts, particularly those working in the fields of public health, medicine, and social insurance, were at the forefront of efforts to promote the regime to the outside world. By working with international organizations and transnational networks across Europe, Africa, and Latin America, they sought to sell the idea of Franco’s Spain as a respectable, modern, and socially just state. In doing so the book also seeks to disrupt our understanding of the modern history of internationalism. Exploring what it meant for Francoist experts to think and act internationally, it challenges dominant accounts of internationalism as a liberal, progressive movement by foregrounding the history of fascist, nationalist, imperialist, and religious forms of international cooperation. The case of Spain reveals the contested and heterogenous nature of mid-twentieth-century internationalism, characterized by the tumultuous interplay of overlapping global, regional, and imperial projects. It also brings into focus the overlooked continuities between international structures and projects before and after 1945.
Summary. The Mikomeseng leprosy settlement in Spanish Guinea (present-day Equatorial Guinea) was widely promoted during the 1940s and 1950s as the embodiment of the Francoist 'civilizing mission' in Africa. Its prominence reflected the important role which colonial health and social policy played in establishing the legitimacy of the Franco regime, and particularly in helping to overcome its international isolation in the immediate post-war era. But a major protest by leprosy sufferers in 1946 revealed the everyday violence underpinning life in Mikomeseng, showing how the language of welfare and social justice which pervaded Francoist propaganda masked the reality of a coercive colonial system. The image of Mikomeseng as the embodiment of benevolent colonial rule was constructed by Francoist experts and officials around a brutally repressive institution, one which encapsulated the violence of Spanish colonial rule in West Africa and of the Franco regime as a whole.
In October 2019 the remains of Francisco Franco were exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen, the vast mausoleum constructed after the Spanish Civil War in the mountains outside of Madrid, and moved to a municipal cemetery. Even in an era of apparently ubiquitous 'memory wars', the controversy surrounding a fascist-era dictator and his victory monument surprised many who had not been following the long-running debates about historical memory within Spain. The event made headlines around the world, briefly drawing attention to the history and legacy of a conflict which, despite being very well known, is not always well understood. The Spanish Civil War is one of the iconic events of Europe's twentieth century. From its outbreak in July 1936 it captured the attention of the world. It has been depicted in countless novels, poems, films and works of art, often produced by those who witnessed it first-hand. And its memory has lived on both inside and outside Spain since the end of the conflict, although in very different ways. The scholarship on the Spanish Civil War is vast. During the Franco era and its aftermath much of the most important historical research emerged from abroad, but over recent decades Spanish historians have built on these foundations to transform our understanding of the conflict. The ways in which the Spanish Civil War is understood and taught by European historians has not always kept pace with this new scholarship. Surveys of the period or edited collections on particular themes of European history often pass over the case of Spain or rely on a limited and often outdated English-language historiography. University curricula often include the Spanish Civil War in modern Europe survey modules or as part of courses on the Second World War, fascism or the interwar crisis. But, again, they often rely on a limited scholarship which doesn't necessarily reflect new developments in the field. University libraries, in the United Kingdom at least, are full of dog-eared copies of Hugh Thomas's survey of the Spanish Civil War, originally published in 1961, but too often lack decent collections of more recent scholarship. For many European historians, and by association for many of their students, the Spanish Civil War and the debates surrounding it are much less familiar than contemporary issues such as Italian and German fascism, Stalinism, Vichy and its memory, the Holocaust, collaboration and resistance and so on. The purpose of this roundtable is therefore twofold. The first is to provide European historians who don't work on Spain with an introduction to some of the key issues and debates currently shaping scholarship on the Spanish Civil War, with a particular focus on situating these debates within their broader European and global contexts. We hope that it showcases some of the innovative new approaches and perspectives which are currently helping to deepen our understanding of the conflict. The second is to provide a teaching resource which can be used to give students an accessible introduction to ...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.