Franco’s Spain and the Politics of International Health

Liberal international health organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Health Organization (WHO) played an important role in Spain’s post-war search for legitimacy, and social experts served as a vanguard for Spain’s integration into the United Nations system. The idea of international health as a technical, apolitical field was particularly important in enabling the Franco regime to overcome its outsider status. At the height of Spain’s diplomatic isolation after 1945, a fierce battle raged at the WHO over the question of Spanish membership, which saw it excluded from the new organization. But the WHO was one of the first international bodies Spain was admitted to in the 1950s, paving the way to full United Nations membership. Spain’s rapid integration into the WHO reflected the success of the Franco regime in exploiting the ‘technical’ and ‘apolitical’ language of international health to overcome international political opposition.

Exporting Francoist Modernity

Social experts played an important but contested role in Francoist attempts to establish Spain as an influential power in Latin America during the 1940s and 1950s. By encouraging Spanish experts to form ties with their Latin American colleagues, the Franco regime aimed to promote an image of itself as modern, scientific, and technically advanced on the one hand, and as socially progressive on the other. Despite the significant resources dedicated to this task, the Francoist narrative was strongly resisted both by Latin American leftists and by exiled Republican social experts who promoted a more collaborative model of Ibero-American identity. Nevertheless, Latin America did offer a route through which Francoist experts were able to engage with wider forms of international health and welfare. In areas such as social security, it also provided an opportunity for the regime to promote its vision of Francoist modernity to the outside world.

Axis Internationalism

This chapter explores the relationship between Spain and the Axis powers during the Second World War. Spanish experts were involved in intensive exchange with Nazi Germany during the war. This formed part of a wider pattern of cooperation between Axis, Axis-aligned, and neutral states under the auspices of the Nazi ‘New Order’. This chapter argues that the scientific networks, conferences, and organizations promoted by Nazi Germany represented a form of ‘Axis internationalism’, which appropriated the language and practices of pre-war internationalism to promote the idea of collaborative continental order under Nazi leadership. Spanish experts, like many of their European counterparts, were willing to embrace Axis internationalism as a new, and in many ways improved, form of international cooperation. Their work highlights how internationalist structures and ideas, particularly within the ‘technical’ and humanitarian fields of health and medicine, could be appropriated by political projects from across the ideological spectrum.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the book and its core arguments. It introduces the history of Franco’s Spain, the nature of the regime, the idea of the Francoist ‘social state’, and Spain’s relationship with foreign powers and international organizations during the 1940s and 1950s. It introduces the history of internationalism and the scholarship surrounding it, exploring how the case of Spain furthers our understanding of the contested nature of internationalism, the continuities between pre- and post-1945 internationalism, and the role of technical experts and expertise. It also provides an overview of the book’s chapters, its use of sources, and its chronology.

Spain’s Catholic Internationalists

International Catholic organizations and networks provided a welcoming environment for Spanish intellectuals and experts, and a crucial conduit for Franco’s Spain to engage with the outside world in the aftermath of the Second World War. Health and humanitarian organizations played an important part in Spain’s post-war engagement with international Catholicism, particularly the nursing group Salus Informorum and the Catholic charity Caritas. Spanish women enjoyed a prominent role within these international activities, despite the political and professional marginalization of women in Franco’s Spain. But there were important limits to Spain’s involvement in post-war Catholic internationalism. During the immediate post-war period, therefore, Catholic internationalism represented one of the primary ways in which Franco’s Spain engaged with the outside world, at the same time as the country remained semi-detached from the global Catholic mainstream.

Epilogue and Conclusion

Integrating the history of Franco’s Spain into the history of twentieth-century internationalism sheds new light on both subjects. The importance of international cooperation, international organizations, and international networks for Francoist elites reflects the extent to which Spanish nationalism during the early Franco era was framed and shaped by the history of internationalism. And examining the perspective of experts from an authoritarian nationalist regime serves to broaden and deepen our understanding of the fascist, right-wing, and conservative ‘dark side’ of internationalism. The Epilogue explores how the international activities of Spanish social experts developed after 1959. A new generation increasingly accepted the immutability of the post-war international system, seeking to adapt Spain to the world rather than adapting the world to Spain. They were even more internationally active than the previous generation, but were no longer necessarily ‘Franco’s internationalists’.

‘Generous, Selfless, Civilizing’

This chapter reveals the colonial dimension of Franco’s social state. Spain’s African colonies were geographically tiny, but were of extraordinary symbolic value for the Franco regime. Despite the brutality and neglect which characterized Spanish colonial rule, it sought to promote Francoist Spain as a responsible European colonial power committed to African development. Social experts were at the heart of this process. Their professional training and research in the fields of colonial and tropical medicine brought them into contact with international networks of European and North American colleagues. This chapter explores the international and inter-imperial dimensions of Spanish colonial health, charting both its ambitions and its failures. In doing so, it sheds new light on the entangled histories of international and colonial health, and of imperialism and internationalism more generally.