Divided Loyalties: the Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain's Civil Service Trade Unions, 1936–9

1992 ◽  
Vol 65 (156) ◽  
pp. 90-107
Author(s):  
Tom Buchanan
Desertion ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 38-48
Author(s):  
Théodore McLauchlin

This chapter develops the account of desertion primarily in the context of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939, which clarifies the role of several variables through Spain. It looks at many different organizations on both the rebel side and the Republican side in order to examine the impact of different armed group characteristics on desertion. It uses the Spain case study to understand desertion dynamics in a particularly fascinating civil conflict. The chapter focuses on the Republican side, analyzing the dynamics of its relatively high rate of desertion at various points in the conflict. It demonstrates norms of cooperation and coercion at the micro level to statistically assess individual soldiers' decisions to fight or to flee.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 428-446
Author(s):  
Layla Renshaw

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was triggered by a military uprising against the democratically elected Popular Front government. Away from the battlefield, this war was characterized by the politically-motivated murder of thousands of civilians, many of whom were buried in clandestine graves throughout Spain. Following Franco’s victory and subsequent dictatorship, there were strong prohibitions on commemorating the Republican dead. A radical rupture in Spain’s memory politics occurred from 2000 onwards with the founding of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory and other similar pressure groups that have organized the exhumation and reburial of the Republican dead. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in communities in Castile and León, and Extremadura as they underwent mass grave investigations. It examines the experience of theft and dispossession that occurred as part of the Francoist repression of Republicans. Accounts of these episodes focus on stolen and looted objects robbed from the dead during the killings, from the graves’ post-mortem, or from surviving relatives as part of the systematic dispossession of Republican households that occurred during the war and immediate post-war period. These narratives surface with frequency during the investigation and exhumation of mass graves. Despite the fact that many are lost forever, these stolen possessions can function as powerful mnemonic objects with a strong affective and imaginative hold. The narratives of dispossession explore themes of survival, the experiences of women and children, and the impact of slow violence. By invoking theft and stolen objects, these stories highlight forms of trauma and forms of memory that may not be represented fully by the dominant investigative paradigm of the mass grave exhumation with its inherent focus on death, cataclysmic violence and the tangible, physical traces of the past.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-92
Author(s):  
Sioban Nelson ◽  
Paola Galbany-Estragués ◽  
Gloria Gallego-Caminero

Accounts of Spanish nursing and nurses during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) that appear in the memoirs and correspondence of International Brigade volunteers, and are subsequently repeated in the secondary literature on the war, give little indication of existence of trained nurses in country. We set out to examine this apparent erasure of the long tradition of skilled nursing in Spain and the invisibility of thousands of Spanish nurses engaged in the war effort. We ask two questions: How can we understand the narrative thrust of the international volunteer accounts and subsequent historiography? And what was the state of nursing in Spain on the Republican side during the war as presented by Spanish participants and historians? We put the case that the narrative erasure of Spanish professional nursing prior to the Civil War was the result of the politicization of nursing under the Second Republic, its repression and reengineering under the Franco dictatorship, and the subsequent national policy of “oblivion” or forgetting that dominated the country during the transition to democracy. This policy silenced the stories of veteran nurses and prevented an examination of the impact of the Civil War on the Spanish nursing profession.


2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 702-721 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Foster ◽  
Peter Scott

This article considers the attitudes to the single currency of public service trade unions, illustrating this through a number of nationally based case studies. We examine claims about the impact of EMU on welfare states and public expenditure, and particularly the extent to which the governance of EMU attests a ‘neoliberal', marketising approach towards the public sphere. We find that any such tendency has been offset by the recent resurgence of forms of national-level bipartite or tripartite economic and social coordination, managing the effects of EMU through social dialogue. The subsequent section of the paper develops a categorisation of four main trends evident in European public service trade unions'response to the single currency: enthusiasm, altruism, scepticism and resistance. The dominant attitude to date has been acceptance. We highlight dangers for democratic legitimacy within public sector unions in cases where leadership support for EMU has exceeded that of the membership, and indicate some potential areas for future public service union influence in the EMU.


2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-246
Author(s):  
VJERAN PAVLAKOVIĆ

AbstractIn summer 1936 Vladko Maček's priorities lay with rebuilding the Croatian Peasant Party after its six years of illegality under King Aleksandar's dictatorship in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Yet the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) was to have a polarising and radicalising effect on Croatian society. Both communists and supporters of the fascist Ustaša movement looked to Spain as a model for resolving the ‘Croat question’ at a time when Croats were becoming increasingly frustrated with Maček's passivity. As a propaganda war raged in the press of the radical left and right, the Croatian Peasant Party tried to ignore the conflict. Maček's failure to realise the impact of the war in Spain on the political situation in Croatia is indicative of some of his weaknesses as a leader in difficult times. The Croatian Peasant Party missed the opportunity to take a strong moral stance against fascism during the Spanish conflict, and Maček's fence-sitting from the 1930s onwards permitted the more extreme ideological movements in Croatia to take advantage of the rapidly changing conditions of a Europe engulfed in war.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-130
Author(s):  
Sergio Lobejón Santos

In the years immediately following the Spanish Civil War, the domestic poetry market underwent a lengthy and traumatic transformation stemming directly from the conflict and the Francoist regime’s implementation of systematic censorship. The death and exile of many of the preeminent poets from previous generations, along with the closure and relocation to Latin America of many publishing houses, left a considerable cultural void which would be partly filled with translated texts, most of them from authors writing in English. This article outlines some of the main results of a comprehensive study into the impact of censorship on the Spanish translations of English-language poetry between 1939 and 1983. Although the quantitative data point to a high authorisation rate for translated poetry, the regime used several mechanisms to curb the public’s exposure to ideas deemed harmful which profoundly impacted the translation and reception of those texts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Gresilda A. Tilley-Lubbs

When I studied in Spain in 1969 and 1970, I knew about the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), briefly mentioned in my Spanish history books; General.simo Francisco Franco declared victory. I knew Spain through my graduate studies in Spanish literature and through Michener’s book Iberia (1968). In 2000, I met Jordi Calvera, a Catal.n whose post-war stories conflicted with that idyllic Spain. I returned to Spain in 2013, still with no idea of the impact of the totalitarian dictatorship based on fear and silence through which Franco ruled until his death in 1975, leaving a legacy of fear and silence. In Barcelona, I met a group of adults in their eighties who shared Jordi’s experience. My intrigue with these stories led me to learn more about the war, the dictatorship and the aftermath by interviewing people whose lives had been touched by those years. Through a layered account, I present some of the stories and examine my oblivion. Keywords: Critical autoethnography, autoethnography, ethnography, Spanish Civil War, Franco’s totalitarian dictatorship


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