ABSTRACT
Following the uprising in Spain in July 1936, the government of the Republic, as might be expected, sought the support of similar (i.e. democratic) regimes in its most immediate and natural sphere of international interaction: France and the United Kingdom, two states that still retained the status of imperial powers. The defense of this condition would mark the line of foreign policy followed by the Foreign Office during the entire decade of the thirties, starting with the arrival to power of the Conservative Party in the autumn of 1931, with the first chapter of the appeasement that constituted the tolerance toward the Japanese aggression in Manchuria (and which, toward Spain, translated into a persistent work of corruption with regard to the character of the republican regime, since its very proclamation).
The European abandonment of the Spanish Republic was orchestrated through two forums: on the one hand, the League of Nations; on the other, the Non-Intervention Committee, an illegal organization in the best of cases (and only in virtue of the non-binding nature of International Law, its main weakness both then and now) embedded into the Foreign Office headquarters, and whose nature was in open contradiction with the organization in Geneva. The non-intervention policy, whose essential objective was to delimit the conflict to the Spanish borders avoiding its expansion beyond them, and whose consequence for the Republican cause was the deprivation of the supply of weapons for their self-defense against an internal uprising and external aggression, marked the fate of democracy in Spain. In addition to those two bodies, multilateral conferences (Nyon 1937, Munich 1938) or bilateral initiatives (several Anglo-Italian agreements) would take place, which did nothing but highlight the disdain toward the two aforementioned forums.
