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3 Introduction Despite the estimated 20,000 books on the Spanish civil war, the literature still lacks a comparative perspective that breaks through the Pyrenees-like border that has isolated it from the rest of Europe and the world. Reflections on other major revolutions, counterrevolutions, and civil wars in global history can yield valuable insights into the Spanish conflict. Comparisons with the British civil war in the seventeenth century, French Revolution in the eighteenth , the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune of the nineteenth century, and, most importantly, the Russian and Chinese revolutions and civil wars of the twentieth century can place the Spanish conflict in perspective and throw new light on its outcome. Comparisons are inescapable in any history. Even when historians focus on one case, they inevitably compare. By avoiding comparisons, the implication is that the object studied is unique. Of course, every civil war is unique, but comparative history will help define what exactly is exceptional, which can only be known when similarities among cases are explored. Analysts of the Spanish civil war have employed comparative history, but they have often done so on political and, more recently, cultural grounds. They have compared the Spanish Second Republic (1931–36) to Weimar Germany (1919–33) and to the postwar period of liberal Italy (1918–22). The Spanish, German, and Italian left and right—especially their fascists—have frequently been equated and contrasted. While it is true that the extreme right helped destroy the Spanish, German, and Italian democratic experiments, these all succumbed for very different reasons. Neither Italy nor Germany suffered the full-scale civil war that introduced the new regime in Spain. All comparisons imply an agenda, but some will yield more fruitful results than others. The Russian and Chinese civil wars remain the most appropriate comparisons since each of these conflicts occurred during the twentieth century in agrarian nations that lacked a dynamic bourgeoisie, engaged foreign powers, and endured approximately three years. They confirm the twentiethcentury pattern or “general causes” that social or “proletarian” revolutions erupt in underdeveloped or “backward” nations. Like Russia and China, 1930s 4 introduction Spain remained a poor country, with per capita income similar to the level Britain had reached in 1860. More than half its population was tied to the farming sector, which contributed 60 percent of the country’s total production . Of course, many agrarian countries have undergone civil wars in the twentieth century. The Greek civil war (1941–49) is a possible foil to its Spanish counterpart, but it lasted nearly three times longer and did not possess the revolutionary or counterrevolutionary dimensions of the Iberian war, during which a radical social revolution challenged both property rights and traditional religion. A similar rationale explains why the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) will not be analyzed here. Although ethnic divisions in the Basque country and Catalonia contributed to the outbreak and the development of the Spanish civil war, they did not constitute its raison d’être, as in many contemporary wars in Africa and the Middle East. Spain should be analyzed not as a full-fledged member of twentieth-century bourgeois Europe, such as Italy and Germany after World War I. More than the fascist model, which in these two nations saw the domination of the party over the military, the Spanish counterrevolution repeated patterns found in nineteenth-century France, where the military repressed the revolutionaries of 1848 and the Paris Commune.1 As in 1848, the Second Republic of 1931 had to confront a host of problems that other European nations with much stronger economies than Spain’s had taken many decades to resolve. Issues of land reform for peasants, social welfare for proletarians, separation of church and state, subordination of military to civilian government, and the definition of the nation with regard to regional nationalisms were all on the overloaded agenda of the Second Republic . To complicate matters further, the Spanish Republic was unable to reestablish order after the revolutionary Asturias Revolt in 1934 as effectively as the French Third Republic had after the Paris Commune. The Spanish Second Republic could not attract the rural smallholders who proved to be—along with urban workers—the base of the French Third Republic. In fact, the victory in February 1936 of the coalition of the Spanish left, the Popular Front, once again unleashed radical forces. Ultimately, though, in twentieth-century Spain as well as in nineteenth-century France, antidemocratic and rural counterrevolutionary forces triumphed...

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