ABSTRACT
With the new government constituted in Spain on September 4, 1936, headed by left-wing socialist Francisco Largo Caballero, it took power a cabinet more adapted to the circumstances of war. The new minister of state, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, would have to deal with a panorama that was more than complicated and whose reversal seemed to be almost an illusion.
Álvarez del Vayo, the main external face of the Republic throughout the war, never stopped denouncing the continuous violation of non-intervention by the fascist countries and, on the other hand, the absolute disdain toward the Covenant of the League of Nations by the member countries – mainly by Britain and France, from where the organization was being blocked. But the League was the only international forum to which the Spanish government had access, and through which it projected its foreign policy strategy and its conception of the place that the Spanish regime held within the political-ideological scene of the time. That is to say: on the side of the Western democracies and in the framework of respect for the norms of law subscribed to by the different states in the development of an increasingly interconnected world society, especially after a Great War that had shown the futility of an alleged isolationism around the issues that transcend national borders.
The Spanish Republic was forced to draw a parallel line of action in Geneva with regard to the Non-Intervention Committee, through which Western democracies directed their abandonment of their Spanish partner, while at the same time undermining international law of the time and destroying the Versailles order.
