The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - ELTE BTK Történelem Szakos Portál

British government refused to give support to the Spanish Popular Front
government because of the participation of the PCE, since it was feared that the
party planned to construct a Bolshevik state in Spain.
The intention of this article is to show how the international alliances were
changed due to the involvement of European powers in the Spanish Civil War and
finally lead to the Molotov-Rippentrop pact in September 1939. Therefore, I will
analyse the international dimensions of six key events and show how they changed
political alliances in the international domain. Those key events are the outbreak of
the war on July 17/18, 1936, the installation of the International Brigades in
October 1936, the bombing of Guernica on April 27 th , 1937, the so called May
Events in Barcelona 1937, the withdrawal of all foreign troops in October 1938 and
the speech of Manuel Azaña in the end of the war in 1939.
The military coup, which was headed by General Francisco Franco on the
Canary Islands on July 17, 1936 and was translated to the Spanish mainland
one day later, started the Spanish Civil War. In reaction to the coup, anarchist
groups in Catalonia and Aragón declared the outbreak of a revolution and
collectivised factories and farms, while their owners fled to the territory
occupied by the Nationalist insurgents. Enrique Moradiellos notes that the
international dimension of this conflict set in one week later, on July 25, 1936
because all major international newspapers started to write about this event on
that day. 5 This marks the beginning of an international discourse about the
events in Spain whose main participants were the governments of liberal
countries, the left and right wing press, German and Italian exile communities
and international political networks such as the LSI and Comintern.
The French Popular Front government under Léon Blum reacted to the coup
d'état by first lending support to the Frente Popular against the insurgents. But, due
to internal pressure from French right wings parties, the government had to
withdraw its support, fearing that a similar coup might take place in France.
Instead, Léon Blum designed the policy of international non-intervention: all
European countries would join an international committee to control that neither
the Republicans nor the Nationalists in Spain received foreign aid. The French
initiative was motivated by the attempt to help the Spanish Republic by cutting off
supplies for the nationalist insurgents. It was believed in the first days of the war
that the Republic would be strong enough to win the conflict, if the insurgents did
not get any more support from Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. 6
Léon Blum passed on the idea to the allied British government, who took
over the initiative to found the Non-Intervention Committee (NIC). But the
conservative government under Stanley Baldwin did not share the French
interest in helping the Spanish Republic, it rather sympathized with the
5 MORADIELLOS, Enrique: El reñidero de Europa. Las dimensiones internacionales de la
guerra civil española. Península, Barcelona, 2001. 19.
6 KNOLL, Viktor: Zur Vorgeschichte des Abkommens über Nichteinmischung in Spanien
1936. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 35 (1987) No. 1, 25.
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