On 19 July 1936, Spains Prime Minister Jos Giral sent a telegram to Lon Blum, Prime Minister in the French Popular Front government, appealing for assistance. The fascist rebels were consolidating their victories in Seville, Crdoba, Granada and Cdiz, and in the eyes of the Republic they were as strong as ever. The telegram read: SURPRISED BY DANGEROUS MILITARY COUP STOP BEG YOU TO HELP US IMMEDIATELY WITH ARMS AND AEROPLANES STOP FRATERNALLY YOURS GIRAL. The need for weapons had forced both sides of the conflict for Spain to seek foreign aid, which quickly turned the war into an international problem. Three neutral governments were key in the playing out of the Spanish Civil War: France, the United States, and Britain. Their role in determining the fate of the country was critical.
Upon receiving Giral's plea, Blum's first instinct was to come to the aid of the Republic. It seemed to run against the country's goals to allow yet another democratic neighbor to fall, and the prospect of a third fascist state on France's borders was far too threatening to ignore. In a mere six days, however, Blum was to change his mind. A fervent domestic opposition from the right along with left-wing strikes and riots instilled fears of civil war in an unstable France were he to help the Republic. Blum even claimed that, had he intervened, 'Spain could not have been saved, but France would have gone Fascist.' Furthermore, the rightist press in France fiercely attacked his plans, claiming that helping Spain's government would be risking war with Germany and Italy ' likely even more fearful that a Republican victory would be communist in nature.
Yet what tipped the scales for Blum was British influence. After the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact broke the French network of alliances in Eastern Europe in 1934, France was forced to depend almost completely on British support. Blum was warned by the British Foreign Office that if as a result of assistance to Spain war resulted (presumably with Germany or Italy), Britain would not help, and that it was likely that helping the Republic would only encourage Hitler and Mussolini to aid the Nationalists. Once the British made their position clear, the fear of losing their support was enough to incline France towards non-intervention. Additionally, in an attempt to rationalize their decision, the French government hoped that by successfully carrying out the non-intervention the Spanish war would end out of a lack of arms and ammunition, giving the Republic a much better chance to suppress the military uprising. On 2 August 1936, then, Blum's government proposed a policy of 'Non-Intervention' to include French, British, German and Italian governments and any others who became involved in the conflict. 27 nations signed the agreement, including all European nations except Switzerland, and after numerous delays the Non-Intervention Committee, organized by the British Foreign Office, was finally set up in London on 9 September 1936.
However sound such claims in its favor may have seemed at the time, the Non-Intervention efforts proved to favor the rebels to a much greater extent than the Republicans. Its most critical failure was in assuming that all nations, including dictatorships, would abide by the code. This allowed both Hitler and Mussolini to completely ignore it fairly overtly and come to the aid of the Nationalists while the Republic was virtually without help (see Italo-German Aid) ' Claude Bowers, the American ambassador to Spain, called the Committee 'the most cynical and lamentably dishonest group that history has known.' Indeed, a majority of historians agree 'the Non-Intervention Committee achieved virtually nothing' because it did not act to enforce its purpose (Preston, 159). Its establishment, however, did allow many nations to ignore the question of the war in Spain, thus decreasing any chances of foreign aid for the falling government. Had it not been established, major powers that could have helped the Republic would not have had an agreement that dissuade them from reconsidering intervention. The French establishment of the Non-Intervention Committee was therefore critical in tipping the balance of foreign influence towards the Nationalists, whose aid from Germany and Italy was crucial for victory.
Britain's role was not, by any means whatsoever, limited to persuading the French to not help the Republic ' a decisive act in itself. On 31 May 1937, Manuel Aza'a, the President of the Republic, remarked,
'[Spain's] greatest enemy until now has been the British government. All the schemes devised for non-intervention and their consequences have damaged the government and favored the rebels. Their hypocrisy has become so obvious that is seemed infantile cynicism' (Preston, 160).
The Non-Intervention Committee chairman, British Conservative Lord Plymouth, constantly met urgent problems by adjourning the Committee, allowing both Italians and Germans to continue to openly assist Franco, and stalemated the group with slow moving, irrelevant discussions that amounted to inaction. This left the Republic at a clear disadvantage. Additionally, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, credited with doing most of the work in convincing Blum not to intervene, decided to apply an arms embargo without waiting for other powers to respond, thus setting the trend for the rest of the rest of the democracies. He admitted to preferring, on balance, a 'fascist' victory to a 'communist' victory ' even though the refusal to sell arms to the Republic in fact strengthened the communists and weakened the forces of the capitalist center and left (see Soviet aid). In fact, a majority of British diplomats favored Franco: Sir Henry Chilton, British Ambassador in Spain in 1936, was openly hostile to the Republic; and his replacement in 1937, Sir Robert Hodgson, called the Republicans 'communist-controlled hordes, inspired by the Comintern and supported by largely alien human scum' (Preston).
It is most likely the same fear of Bolshevism and European conflagration pushing Britain towards Hitlerian appeasement that was also fueling their non-intervention efforts in Spain. Despite a public opinion poll as late as January 1939 which indicated that 70% of those polled in Britain considered the Republic to be the legitimate government, British officials did not reflect such a view. For reasons of class and education, they were much more sympathetic with the anti-revolutionary aims of the Nationalists, as the were with those of Hitler and Mussolini. Non-Intervention was their reassurance that they would not be helping the forces of revolution. Neville Chamberlain subsequently went even further in 16 April 1938 with the signing of the Anglo-Italian Pact, which allowed the Italians to keep troops in Spain despite the Non-Intervention Agreement. Their attitude to fascism and the Spanish Civil War appeared to be based on a reasonable desire to avoid war and a secret hope that they might be able to achieve that goal by turning Hitler and Mussolini agains the left in Europe. It also did not help that Britain had enough commercial interests in Spain (mostly in the form of mines, sherry, textiles, olive oil, and cork) to not be sympathetic to the Republic. Britain was essentially willingly signing away the fall of democracy in Spain.
The United States, the last of the three key neutral powers, took on a much discreet diplomatic role in the Spanish Civil War. However, despite the government being too concerned with Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to take heed of foreign conflicts, the press fiercely debated the conflict. Liberal, Protestant, and left-wing groups favored the Republic; right-wing, businesses, the Hearst press, and the Catholic Church ' particularly Father Coughlin ' supported the rebels. It was the latter that made Roosevelt decide to not aid the Republic out of fears of losing Catholic support, despite Elanor's sympathies with Spain's government. On 7 August 1936, William Phillips announced the United States would 'scrupulously refrain from any interference whatsoever,' and the President presented the formula of a 'moral embargo' of arms sales to Spain as a means of maintaining international peace, effectively extending the 1935 Neutrality Act to the Spanish Civil War.
The Neutrality Act, however, did not reflect the modern role of oil as a war commodity as vital as ammunition. Franco received 3.5 million tons of oil on credit during the war ' well over twice the amount of Republican imports. Thorkild Rieber, the President of the Texaco Oil Company and a Nazi sympathizer, diverted five tankers headed for Spain to the Nationalist port of Tenerife, which had a large refinery, upon hearing of the fascist uprising. He supplied 6 million dollars on credit to the Nationalists in oil and was only punished with a small fine by the U.S. government. Again, genuine attempts at non-intervention were turning into active support for Franco and a complete lack of aid for the Republic.
Corporate support was not limited to oil. U.S. investments amounted to 80 million dollars in 1936, and British and American businesses took part in active resistance and boycotting of the Republic, disrupting its trade with legal action and delaying credits on the banking system. Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Rio Tinto Zinc company, Ford, Studebaker, General Motors, and DuPont of Nemours all aided the Nationalists at some point during the course of the war. American and British businesses interests were to be a great contribution to the final Nationalist victory. In 1945, Undersecretary at the Spanish Foreign ministry Jos' Maria Doussinague clearly stated that 'without American petroleum and American trucks and American credit, we would have never won the civil war.' On the other side of the ocean, American Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles regretted that 'of all our blind isolationist policies, the most disastrous was our attitude on the Spanish Civil War.'
Despite some good intentions from the three major neutral powers, non-intervention was, to a great extent, a failure in helping the Republic. It gave a clear advantage to the rebels, who were able to receive aid from the fascist powers of Europe as well as from businesses interested in a strictly capitalist government in the Iberian peninsula. France, Britain, and the United States, in the midst of their inaction, were writing the death of a Republic that still expected some form of help from the West. In the words of Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs Julio 'lvarez del Vayo: 'Not a day passed until almost the end, when we did not have fresh reasons to hope that the western democracies would come to their senses and restore us our rights to buy from them. And always our hopes proved illusory.'
