European in Both the Spanish

European

In both the Spanish and Greek Civil Wars in the twentieth century, a central issue was opposition to communism, bringing left and right into conflict. Both conflicts also came to involve a war between fascism and communism at some level. The Spanish Civil War was treated as a distant issue by the American government, while this was not the case with the Greek Civil War, which became the target of the Truman Doctrine, a policy that justified American intervention in support of any regime fighting against communism.

The Spanish Civil War began in 1936, after several years of tension and unrest as the country was first provided with democratic reforms and then had them taken away. When reforms were abolished, a general strike occurred in 1934 and an armed uprising began in some areas. The elections of 1936 were the immediate catalyst for the start of the Civil War, with conflicts between the left and the right over the elections. The left established a coalition of political parties made up of the socialist party, the Communist Party, the Esquerra party, and the Republican Union Party, all to emerge under the name of the Popular Front. The Popular Front called for agrarian reform, the end of political blacklists, and amnesty for political prisoners. On the other side, right-wing groups formed the National Front. Each side fronted candidates and prepared for the elections. The Popular Front won the election, but this did not satisfy the National Front and other elements, notably the military, in the country. The Civil War would develop later in the year, after months of continued disturbances and an attempted military coup in July.

Given that the people had elected the Popular Front, it might be assumed that they would settle down after the election and not agitate against the government, but this is not what happened. The disturbances that continued were actually reactions against the policies of the center-right governments that had rules since December 1933, governments which had revoked laws fixing wages and conditions of employment. In the country, the peasant workers were il-treated by the landowners, and the center-right governments supported the landowners over the workers. The peasants worked for wages at the starvation level. Contemporary commentators saw the shifts that took place during the two periods (1931-1933, and 1933-1935) as disastrous, first favoring one side, then the other, creating tensions that would not be overcome easily. As a newspaper commented at the time,

These errors prepared the triumph of the Popular Front, a triumph that was due less to the real strength of the left, considerable though it was, than to the lack of political understanding of the right.

The Civil War began July 17, 1936 when the Spanish army rebelled against the Second Republic, with a central goal being to destroy all left-wing organizations in the country. The leaders were inspired by General Francisco Franco, and from the first, they approached the matter as one that allowed them to kill all perceived enemies and so cast out all Bolshevik influences. Historian Peter Anderson writes,

The immediate origins may be found in the failed military coup of July 1936 which left part of the country in the hands of Franco and his fellow rebels and the rest under the control of supporters of the Second Republic. The context for the revolt was provided by the structural problems that beset Spain. Conflict had worsened with the polarisation of politics during the Spanish Second Republic from 1931 to 1936. This sharp division came mostly in response to events in Spain but also in reaction to the radicalisation of European politics. Above all, however, it was the intransigence of the right and the military which was at the heart of the causes of the Civil War.

Anderson sees the army as having pushed the country into Civil War, with its failed military coup being the primary source of instability. However, the country was unstable before that, though not yet irretrievably so. The army had long considered itself the protector of order and as charge with defending the country from its internal enemies, and once the Republic was established, the army reacted by becoming more and more Aintransigent in the face of unrest and of attempts to reform its structure," More and more, the army used brutality to suppress movements it saw as dangerous, such as the 1934 strike by Spanish miners in the Asturias region, at which time Franco stated that he was waging a "frontier war against socialist, communism, and whatever attacks civilization."

Such an attitude created an atmosphere in which military leaders believed that they were Spain and that any opposition was foreign and to be eliminated. The army was supported by the landowners in the south:

Landowners had become infamous during the Republic for dismissing the requests of their hungry workers, for more work or better wages, with the expression 'Let your Republic feed you.'

The landowners benefited from easy profits from farming and had control of huge estates, a result of the sale of Church land and communal lands by the state in the nineteenth century. One result was the creation of a huge mass of landless workers living on low wages and facing a political system controlled by the landowners. The only way peasants could see change would be through land reform. Another source of instability was the economic depression of the 1930s. It was during this period as tensions increased between workers and landowners that there was an increase in left-wing union membership, with the Socialist Party in particular gaining members.

The civil war in Greece began in 1944 after a period of German occupation during World War II. The Germans left in September 1944, after which Great Britain helped the former Greek government return to power. The war had produced two major resistance movements, one the Communist National Liberation Front (EAM) and one the People's National Army of Liberation (ELAS). Many members of ELAS did not cooperate with the British after the war, causing more tensions between left and right.

Unlike the internal tensions in Spain, the civil war in Greece was not a result of the internal battle between left and right in the same way:

Two months after liberation, the Greek people were in the midst of the most bitter civil war in the history of modern Greece. This civil war was not the result of insoluble problems within Greece. It was a by-product of the hidden war that the Allies waged against each other at the same time that they fought against Hitler.

During the war, long-standing conflicts between Britain and Russia emerged over disputes about the Turkish straits to Manchuria, where British and Russian forces had clashed since the time of Catherine the Great. Stavrianos states that this conflict "explains the civil war in Greece in 1944 just as it explains the renewed outbreak of civil war after liberation."

At the same time, there were internal conflicts emerging as the war ended. In March 1944, a truce was announced between ELAS and EDES (the Greek Democratic National Army), but there was also a broadcast from a secret radio station about the establishment of an EAM-ELAS Political Committee of National Liberation (PEEA), seen as "a direct challenge to the authority of the Greek Government-in-exile, as an alternative communist-controlled administration was thus formed as a rallying point for all Greeks."

On March 31, 1944, a group of Greek military officers called for the formation of a new government to represent the ideals of the PEEA, and some Greek military units mutinied, declaring allegiance to PEEA and refusing to obey orders from superiors. The revolt then spread. The communist-inspired revolt spread. It is not clear if the communists intended to establish a new government, and it is not certain why they wanted to destroy the Greek forces in the Middle East. Kousoulas writes,

It seems that under the circumstances, the revolt was a tactical mistake. This is partially correct. Their decision to give the signal for the uprising had been prompted by the expectation that the Germans would evacuate Greece during April 1944 at the latest. They apparently thought that if at the time of the evacuation the Greek Government in Egypt would be fighting an uprising of the Greek armed forces, EAMELAS would be the only significant political and military force in the evacuated areas of Greece. To their discomfiture the evacuation did not occur until the next October, a condition which allowed the British Government to react effectively.

Much of the impetus for the civil war came from back-and-forth battles between the allies, notably Britain and Russia. The Russians adhered to the British line until March 1944, when it supported PEEA and denounced the Tsouderos government. The United States at the time kept to a policy of seeing Greece as primarily a British responsibility, though the U.S. gave support to the British line and sent some American personnel. This would eventually change with the creation of the Truman Doctrine. After the statement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, both Greece and Turkey were provided with aid to counter the Soviet threat.

When the war ended, circumstances in Greece were unfavorable to the maintenance of civil peace:

EAM was in control of nearly all Greece. Its leaders numbered many excellent liberals, the most eminent being Professor Svolos, a Socialist; but the Communists were clearly dominant. The returning Greek army was under the control of rabid, uncompromising monarchist officers... Had the issue of Greek sovereignty been left to these two Greek forces, there is no doubt of the outcome. The ineffectiveness of the returned Greek monarchist army was shown when, at the end of 1944, civil war broke out in Greece. ELAS surrounded the monarchist army and immobilized it from the outset.