Abstract
In December 1945 the Spanish dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde was in dire trouble. Seven months after Nazi Germany’s surrender, the victorious Allies were gearing up to drum the Franco regime out of the postwar international community over Spain’s wartime relations with the Axis powers, a process that had started the previous August with the dictatorship being branded in the Potsdam Declaration as the one neutral state that should be excluded from the new United Nations Organization (UN).1 Francisco Franco had no one to blame but himself for his current desperate situation. Whether out of gratitude for military aid rendered during the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, ideological affinity with fascism or a pragmatic desire to stay on positive political and economic terms with the European continent’s most powerful state—at least until Germany was pulverized by the Soviet Union, the US and UK—or, most likely, a combination of all these factors, for the first several years of World War II Francisco Franco maintained a pro-Axis “non-belligerency” until the Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad prompted him to shift to a more equitable neutrality. Indeed, Franco had met with Hitler at the French Basque border town of Hendaye and been photographed and filmed with der Führer—the film and pictures would come back to haunt him in peacetime—and he had allowed both the transfer of thousands of Spanish workers to German factories and the formation of the Division Azul to fight alongside the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front when Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.2
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Notes
Glyn Stone, “The Degree of British Commitment to the Restoration of Democracy in Spain, 1939–1946,” in Christian Leitz and David J. Dunthorn, eds., Spain in an International Context, 1936–1959 (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), p. 210.
See e.g. Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (New York: Basic Books, 1994)
Christian Leitz, Economic Relations Between Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain, 1936–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
Christian Leitz, “Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain, 1936–1945,” in Sebastian Balfour and Paul Preston, eds., Spain and the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1999)
Wayne H. Bowen, Spaniards and Nazi Germany: Collaboration in the New Order (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000)
Angel Vinas, Franco, Hitler y el Estallido de la Guerra Civil: Antecedentes y Consecuencias (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2007)
Stanley Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany and World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography, p. 522. Antonio Salazar’s photograph offered a silent rebuke to Franco for his folly in cozying up to the Axis, as the Portuguese dictator had pointedly maintained a benevolently pro-Allied neutrality, the product of both pragmatic calculation and the precedent of Anglo-Portuguese amity dating back to the 14th century. As a result, the Salazar regime, although far right-wing, faced none of the postwar ostracism that dogged Francisco Franco. See e.g. Joaquim da Costa Leite, “Neutrality by Agreement: Portugal and the British Alliance in World War II,” American University International Law Review, v. 14, n. 1 (1998), pp. 185–199
Christian Leitz, Sympathy for the Devil: Neutral Europe and Nazi Germany in World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2001)
Letter from President Roosevelt to US Ambassador Norman Armour in Spain, March 10, 1945, quoted in E. Ralph Perkins, ed., Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS] 1945, volume V, Europe (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1967), p. 667.
Quoted in David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 308.
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Quoted in Stanley Payne, The Franco Regime: 1936–1975 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 192.
Christian Leitz, Nazi Germany and Neutral Europe During the Second World War (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 2000)
For an overview of Spain’s immediate post-war predicament see Florentino Portero, Franco Aislado: La Question espanola (1945–1950) (Madrid: Editorial Aguilar, 1989).
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Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography, p. 597; R. Richard Rubottom and J. Carter Murphy, Spain and the United States Since World War II (New York: Praeger, 1984), p. 14.
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Quoted in Javier Tusell, Spain: From Dictatorship to Democracy, 1939 to the Present, transl. Rosemary Clark (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 113.
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Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success In World Politics (Cambridge, MA: Perseus/PublicAffairs, 2004), p. 111
Don W. Stacks, Primer of Public Relations Research, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2011)
“Soft power” was first introduced in Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), pp. 32–33
See for example Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalization as Hybridization,” International Sociology, June 1994; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
Roland Robertson, Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage Publications, 1992)
Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, “Introduction,” in Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, ed., Decentering America (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), p. 8.
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
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Herbert Schiller, Mass Communications and American Empire (New York: A.M. Kelly, 1969), p. 1
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds. (New York: International Publishers Co., 1971), p. 182.
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© 2014 Neal M. Rosendorf
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Rosendorf, N.M. (2014). Introduction. In: Franco Sells Spain to America. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137372574_1
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