ABSTRACT
It is customary for scholars to offer reassessments of watershed events at regular intervals, not least because our historical perspective of them is constantly changing. This is especially true of events such as the Spanish Civil War (1936), which, because of its multiple political and ideological dimensions, has been the focus of numerous revisionist histories since it ended over sixty-five years ago. When it broke out in July 1936 most people outside of Spain paid scant attention to a conflict that seemed remote to world affairs. Nor did many know or even care about the origins or possible consequences of the conflict. Yet all this changed when Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union got involved in the fighting and Spain’s internal war was overnight transformed into an event of much wider significance. Because the Civil War was now being viewed as the stage on which the major ideological struggles of the day – particularly between fascism and communism – were being played out, many foreigners believed that they, too, had a stake in the outcome of the struggle. At the time, there was no end to the interpretations given it: for some it was a contest between Christianity and atheism, others saw it as a showdown between fascism and democracy, while still another group pictured it as a dialectical confrontation between capitalism and socialism. Given that both outside observers and participants alike were intent on depicting the war in such dichotomous terms, it was to be expected that early interpretations of the war tended to be reductionist and two-dimensional. More surprising, perhaps, was the fact that the ideological overtones of the conflict would persist long after the war had ended.
