ABSTRACT
The Italian–British flirtations did nothing but further agitate the nerves on Europe. But Mussolini never abandoned his resolve to do what seemed right to him at every moment. He had already learned from his former admirer and later admired Hitler that the agreements were not there to comply with, but rather to be broken as necessary. The year 1938 saw the shift between the fascist governments in the leadership of the erosion of the international order.
In the meantime, London sought to accentuate the purely national character of the conflict in Spain (that is, insisting on its denomination as “civil war”) and promoted the withdrawal of international fighters fighting on the Republican side. The Spanish government, aware that the presence of the International Brigades would not be enough to alter the course of the war, accepted the suggestion by seeking – without much faith – to pave the way for a possible change of position for the European democracies once foreign intervention took place on just one side.
However, following the failure of the first objective of the British Appeasement noted in the unsatisfactory results derived from Nyon, French confidence was desired to be regained while simultaneously attracting the aggressor countries to a common ground. The search for such a four-party agreement, a new appeasement alternative, led to the Munich Agreement.
The European democracies gave themselves up to a new war that they had already started losing. The Soviet Union turned towards its own solution, which would be embodied in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Spanish Republic was compelled to resist in agony. Its ultimate collapse separated the destiny of Spain from that of the rest of the continent.
