Spanish echoes during the Greek Civil War

The Greek Civil War (1946-1949) provided an appropriate context for the reemergence of the ‘Greco-Spanish’ language to which Greek monarchists and liberals were prone in the previous decade. The most typical example was the intense speculation in 1947-1948 that communist International Brigades, like those which had fought alongside the Spanish Republicans, were about to join the communist Democratic Army of Greece. The issue was probably fabricated by Franco’s intelligence in order to create international sympathy for his regime. 

As regards the internal dimension of the two conflicts, some feared the repetition in Greece of one of the crucial features of the Spanish Civil War. In August 1946, the US ambassador in Athens, Lincoln MacVeigh noted, that the anti-communist crusade of the Greek government, which rested on all-inclusive definition of ‘communism’, threatened to spark in Greece ‘the same kind of ideological civil war which occurred in Spain […] by confirming the alliance of large numbers of democrats with the extreme left’. The monarchist prime minister Konstantinos Tsaldaris was favorably disposed toward the Francoist regime and towards Franco personally; nevertheless, he acknowledged that ‘Greece must always conduct its international relations in alignment with the United States’. In all events, a substantial portion of the country’s political, economic, social, and intellectual elite did not conceal its admiration for Franco and, moreover, did not hesitate to associate its own anti-communist struggle with the Caudillo’s ‘crusade’ a decade earlier.

The connection between the two civil wars was also clearly drawn by the (Communist) KKE, albeit for precisely the opposite reasons—namely, to equate its guerrilla campaign with the anti-fascist struggle of the Spanish Republicans. In June 1947, the KKE daily Rizospastis warned the government that its repressive measures, especially in the countryside, would lead to ‘the hispanisation of Greece’ – ‘a situation of total civil war, like the Spanish [one] of 1936, from both a domestic and an international point of view’. 

The pervasive ideological polarization of the two conflicts, weighed heavily on the perceptions of foreign governments. For the western powers, the common aim of their policies in Spain and in Greece was to ensure the defeat of ‘communism’; for the USSR any assistance to the Spanish and Greek leftists ought to pose no danger for Soviet security and overall strategic objectives. The Francoist regime, on the other hand, consistently attempted to construct parallels between the two civil wars in order to enhance its perceived legitimacy in the eyes of the international community, particularly in the “West”.

TDS/LH/DF