ABSTRACT
The so-called interwar years were anything but peaceful. Fighting continued across Europe long after November 11, 1918 and resumed in Spain in 1936. Elsewhere, there were campaigns of colonial “pacification” and even conquest; and existing countries like Abyssinia and China were attacked. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik triumph in Russia gave rise to fears first of direct Russian invasion and then of the spread of communist ideas, undermining the established order. Revolution and counter-revolution were the order of the day. We should not, however, see the Second World War as the inevitable continuation of the First, or as the culmination of an ideological struggle between ideological extremes unleashed by the earlier conflict: neither the Great Depression’s role in unsettling the postwar order nor different countries’ paths to war and revolution should be underestimated, as an examination of Spain and Portugal in the interwar years will demonstrate.
