Non-Intervention Committee
불간섭 위원회 (스페인 내전)
The international committee set up in London on British and French initiative to supervise the Non-Intervention Agreement of August 1936, which was to stop foreign arms and men reaching the Spanish Civil War. It first met on 9 September 1936 and was eventually supported by 27 states, including Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. Germany and Italy aided the rebels from the start and the Soviet Union aided the Republic from October, so the agreement was not kept, while the Republic, the legal government, was cut off from buying arms and isolated internationally.
In depth
Agreement and committee
Non-intervention was a joint diplomatic initiative of the French and British governments, part of the policy of appeasing European fascism, aimed at preventing a proxy war in Spain from escalating into a European war. France declared non-intervention unilaterally on 7 August 1936. The socialist prime minister Léon Blum feared that openly aiding the Republic could provoke civil war in France, and depended on British support. The committee first met in London on 9 September, attended by every European country except Switzerland, whose neutrality kept it away; Ivan Maisky represented the Soviet Union. The British representative, the Earl of Plymouth, was accused of often adjourning meetings to the benefit of Italy and Germany.
Failure
A plan to control materials entering Spain, put forward in early 1937, subjected the Republic to severe international isolation and a de facto economic embargo; German and Italian observers mocked it as immediate and decisive support for the Nationalists. Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union consistently broke the agreement, France occasionally did, and only Britain largely kept to it. The question of foreign volunteers was much discussed with little result. Britain and France recognised Franco's government on 27 February 1939, and Clement Attlee denounced "two and a half years of hypocritical pretence of non-intervention". The historian Xabier Irujo argues that the committee's purpose was not non-intervention but managing German and Italian intervention so as to avoid a world war.
Meaning for the communist movement
The Soviet Union first agreed to non-intervention, then sent arms to the Republic from October. The Comintern and the communist parties attacked non-intervention as hypocrisy that shielded the fascist states' intervention, and made support for the Republic a touchstone of the anti-fascist Popular Front. The Blum government's adherence to non-intervention became a source of conflict between socialists and communists within the French Popular Front.