University of Nebraska Press Publication Date: June 1982 Hardcover ISBN: 080321961X

For more than forty years, the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) has dominated the political imagination of men and women throughout the Western world, because, as an apparent confrontation between democracy and fascism, it represented a dress rehearsal for World War II. Outside of Western Europe and the United States, however, the issues that divided Spain were eerily familar to her former territories overseas--the republics of Spanish America. There, the international implications of an ideological struggle were inextricably linked to local issues with deep historic roots--an age-old conflict between church and state, between oligarchs and a rising urban populationm, between the forces of latifundia and the pressures of a land-hungry peasantry, and above all, between civilian and military political classes.

This book is a major study of the Spanish civil war as an issue in the domestic and foreign policies of the Spanish-speaking nations of the Western hemisphere. As such, it refracts much that is already familar to the American reader through a new prism--the world of Spanish-American politics and culture. It also considers the legacy of the war, including large refugee populations and a political tradition of ideological violence that continues to afflict much of Spanish America today.

Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI.