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- Reinventing America on the battlefields of Spain or following the party line: conflicting perceptions of the Spanish Civil War in the present and in the pastPublication . Lopes, AntónioIsolationism and neutrality are two of the recurrent themes in the study of the history of the U.S. foreign policy in the interwar years. The trauma of the Great War, which had swept away 130.000 U.S. lives and had cost $30 billion, had led public opinion to strongly oppose any involvement with European affairs. Besides, the urgent need for economic recovery during the dismal years of the Great Depression did not leave Roosevelt much room for manoeuvre to influence international events. His positions regarding the intentions of the Fascist states remained, at best, ambivalent. These facts notwithstanding, about 2800 U.S. citizens crossed the Atlantic and rushed in to help democratic Spain, which was on the verge of becoming one more hostage in the hands of the Fascism. They joined the other British, Irish and Canadian volunteers and formed the XV International Brigade. 900 Americans never returned home. This alone should challenge the commonly held assumption that the American people were indifferent to the rise of the Fascist threat in Europe. But it also begs other questions. Considering the prevailing isolationist mood, what really motivated them? With what discursive elements did these men construct their anti Fascist representations? How far did their understanding of the Spanish democracy correspond to their own American democratic ideal? In what way did their war experience across the Atlantic mould their perception of U.S. politics (both domestic and foreign)? How far did the Spanish Civil War constitute one first step towards the realization that the U.S. might actually be drawn into another international conflict of unpredictable consequences? Last but not the least, what ideological, political and cultural complicity existed between the men from the English-speaking battalions? In order to unearth some of the answers, I intend to examine their letters and see how these men recorded the historical events in which they took part. Their correspondence emerged from the desire to prove their commitment to a common cause and spoke of a common war experience, but each letter, in its uniqueness, ends up mirroring not only the social and political background of each individual fighter, but also his own particular perspective of the war, of world politics and of the Spanish people. We shall see how these letters differ and converge and how these particular accounts weave, as in an epistolary novel, a larger-than-life narrative of outrage and solidarity, despair and hope.
- The last fight let us face: communist discourse in britain and the spanish civil warPublication . Lopes, AntónioI sought to analyse the ways in which, within the context of the tensions and antagonisms that characterised British democracy in the interwar period, Communist discourse evolved from 1920 onwards and how it succeeded, thanks to the People’s Front line, in overcoming some of the resistance it had met in its earlier stages. After years of insistence on the centrality of the working class in the revolutionary process, by the mid-thirties the discourse of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) began seeking to expand the number of possible articulations so as to construct a new political identity—the ‘people’—encompassing groups or classes that had hitherto been excluded from the political equations of the Communist leadership. Since its inception, the party attempted to retain its strictly proletarian character. But now the new hegemonic tasks that the People’s Front entailed were incompatible with the notion of one single natural class agent or of one single class identity. The party had to learn how to reach out to more subject positions (the intellectuals, the petty bourgeoisie, etc.) and had to do so by means of establishing an equivalential chain (usually under the guise of ‘all democratic forces’) whose cohesion was believed to be guaranteed by the existence of an antagonistic frontier separating the ‘democratic’ camp from the ‘Fascist’ one. In the course of the construction of such a broad identity, Spain soon became one of the nodal points that permitted the consolidation of this equivalential chain. In this study I also tried to demonstrate that discourse is to be regarded neither as a flat surface of tightly knit signifiers nor as an impenetrable monolith of meaning systems. It is, above all, an inherently dynamic phenomenon, with its own condensations and dispersions along the historical continuum. Yet this does not mean that discourse is wholly inconstant. Actually, although it can grow to accommodate further signifiers and to cover a larger variety of practices by different subject positions in the context of a hegemonic project, it neither loses its internal stability nor dissolves into nothingness. It has its own mechanisms of self regulation and compensation, and therefore keeps tending towards equilibrium. I tried to show how signifiers were passed down the chain of command, all the way from Comintern officials in Moscow to the International Brigaders on the front, and how they were negotiated at the level of the different practices, demands and interests—which varied from one subject position to the next—without substantial entropic losses. But this did not operate in one direction only. I also sought to demonstrate how discursive practices at the local branches of the CPGB and on the Spanish battlefields had a determining effect on the definition of the discursive strategies of the party’s hegemonic project. Despite significant differences in context and variations in the constitution of the identity of each individual involved, communist discourse retained a remarkable degree of consistency, which also accounts for the vitality and cohesion of the party in this difficult period in the history of Europe. This is not to say that it was devoid of contradictions or lacunae (think of, for example, the party’s positions towards parliamentarism, the Labour Party, the issues of nationhood and the problem of war). Although it is usually defined as a relational totality that establishes the parameters of each meaningful action (both linguistic and non linguistic), discourse is in fact characterised by a structural incompleteness which derives, on the one hand, from the dislocations the social is continuously being subjected to and, on the other, from the very impossibility of encompassing the infinite play of differences. The discourse of the CPGB sought to suture those lacks by investing, from the outset, in a closed symbolic order, but the minute it started to make concessions in order to dilate its political space, older systems of meanings had to be discarded (the theory of Social Fascism, for example), that closure (the dictatorship of the proletariat) deferred sine die, and a new set of signifiers adopted—which also led to a whole series of new practices. The People’s Front represented such a challenge and the war in Spain constituted the ground where that challenge would be met.