Romancing the past

Sixty years ago, thousands of men and women went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Are there any ideals for which we would take up arms today?

William Keegan, 28, unemployed miner, a Communist, persuaded hundreds of people in his village of Baillieston outside Glasgow to part with their co-op divvy for the suffering workers in Spain. Killed in action at Brunete, Madrid.

Felicia Browne, 32, painter and sculptor, graduate of the Slade, first English person to fire a rifle at the fascist troops led by General Franco. Killed 23 days later rescuing a fellow fighter wounded on patrol.

John Longstaff, 17, marched from Stockton to London at the age of 15 to demand a job in 1934. One of the youngest Britons to volunteer to fight in Spain.

Patience Edney, nurse, from a staunchly Tory family, began to think seriously about poverty as a result of church discussion groups. Flew to Spain where she trained nurses tending the troops maimed by Franco's forces.

Henry Burke, 26, actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the left's Unity Theatre. One of the first to volunteer. Left for Spain the day after the historic Cable Street battle with Mosley's British fascists, the Blackshirts. Died at the Crdoba Front in 1937.

Sixty years ago next month the first volunteers left Britain to fight the fascist uprising against the democratically elected Spanish government. They joined 40,000 other anti-fascists from 50 countries in forming the International Brigade to combat the troops of General Franco who had rebelled against a reforming government which had begun to work on behalf of the poor. Some 2,400 left British shores, among them individuals from Australia, Cyprus, Hong Kong and Ireland. A large proportion - 526 men and women - never returned.

It was an extraordinary demonstration of idealistic commitment perhaps unparalleled in 20th-century history. They were intellectuals and poets shocked by the burning of books by the Nazis. They were ordinary working people committed through the socialist ideology of the labour movement to a notion of international solidarity. They were unemployed veterans of hunger marches, bitterly and deeply critical of the society that had marginalised them. They were Christians outraged by the unprecedented destruction by aerial bombardment of a civilian target, the town of Guernica. They were members of the Labour Party angered by the British government's policy of obstructing arms sales to one side. The odd few were adventurers who didn't get further than Paris on the free tickets provided. It was, as the poet Louis MacNeice put it, "a rag bag army".

But could it ever happen again? What, if anything, would promote members of our cynical and selfish society to respond today in such a way?

Certainly it is hard to predict contemporary Britain might find resonance in the idealistic language of the time. "No Spanish orphan dies who is not mine," was one of the slogans of the volunteers, "quiet men of peace, roused to war" who referred to themselves as "the conscience of Europe". They went knowing the odds, quoting the words of an earlier idealistic gallowglass, Lord Byron: "They never fail, who die in a good cause." "The fascist bullet that gets me won't kill a Spanish worker," said one, Tommy Patten, as he left Co Mayo. In their ears rang the words of the fiery Communist orator, Dolores Ibarruri, La Pasionaria: "It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees." On their lips was the rallying call of their Spanish companeros "No Pasarn!" - they shall not pass.

Could it happen again? "History doesn't repeat itself," says Bill Alexander, one of those who did return, now aged 86. "The character of modern warfare has changed. Then it was largely men with rifles and machine guns; today it's a small number of highly trained people handling extremely complicated weapons." Moreover, he admits, "if you live in a society where self-interest is always put first, as it has been in recent years, that is bound to have had an effect on young people."

It is a view echoed by Paul Preston, professor of modern history at the London School of Economics and author of The Spanish Civil War 1936- 39. "The international context is different. What was happening in Spain had massive international repercussions." Fascism was a European wide- movement. So was the front to oppose it. "It's difficult to imagine anything that could today excite the imagination or provoke the fears it did. Moreover, the welfare state has undermined the power of the idea of solidarity in people's lives. In the 1930s solidarity was survival. The idea that 'in unity is strength' doesn't wash much in the 1990s after the revolution of individualism."

The shift which turned people from citizens into consumers began some time ago. Bill Alexander and his colleagues discussed the idea of a new International Brigade during the Vietnam war but already its time was past; and, in any case, "because of the climate and conditions Europeans would have been more of a hindrance than a help".

But others disagree. The film-maker Ken Loach, whose Land and Freedom is a moving story of heroism and betrayal set in the Spanish Civil War, sees the same impulse at work in the thousands of volunteers who went out to pick coffee in Nicaragua in the 1980s. "They went out of a similar sense of outrage," he says, "because the United States was committing the most appalling atrocities by proxy against a very poor, very small country which was doing no more than trying, in the best interests of its people, to lift itself out of the mess a dictator had left it in."

Picking coffee hardly compares with trench warfare. But Loach is unhappy with suggestions that the trips by members of Nicaraguan solidarity groups were little more than Club Red holidays for lefties. "They weren't asked to bear arms - Nicaragua had an army and it was fighting a guerrilla war which did not need large numbers of people as at the fronts in Spain," he argues. "But many of those who went to Nicaragua stayed in villages in the war zone and let it be known they were there. So if the Contras attacked they risked killing a foreign citizen. That was incredibly brave."

To those, like President Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who once suggested European Marxists working in his country should go home and start their revolution there, Loach responds: "The true revolutionary is an internationalist because revolution is indivisible. If it's not immediately on the cards in your own country you go wherever you can and do what you can."

But revolution is out of vogue nowadays. (Loach knows that only too well; when he proposed a film about an industrial dispute to Channel 4 recently he was rebuffed with "strikes aren't sexy any more".) Where there is dissent it is unlikely to be focused on structures, parties and factions as it was in the Thirties. Today the nearest we come to that is a loose coalition of single-issue groups coming together over roads protests or animal rights.

"We live in a much more fragmented world," says Helen Graham, a historian at Royal Holloway College, author of Socialism and War. "The post-industrial, post-modern world needs no large cohesive labour structures because all the other old monolithic structures have gone too. There is once more an underclass but it is much more marginalised and its members are much more isolated. In Spain the rights and wrongs couldn't have been clearer; it was fairly emotionally simple even if it was intellectually complex. There were many fronts in Thirties Europe but only one war - against attempts by dominant elites to put the clock back and disenfranchise ordinary people."

The clarity of that was evident enough in the Thirties to another Scottish miner, Charles Goodfellow, who had served in the trenches of the First World War before going to Spain: "The years in the last war were nothing to this," he said, "but I know I am on the right side this time." But in contemporary history it is there only for the specialist. The former Labour leader and International Brigade supporter Michael Foot sees it today in the former Yugoslavia. "Attacks on Croatia and Bosnia bear a close resemblance," he insists, as did the "non-intervention" policy which was once again a cloak for refusing to allow one side to arm itself. "The formation of organisations in Britain like the Bosnian Defence Committee paralleled that of the Aid to Spain movement."

But few British volunteers were evident in Bosnia, only the odd mercenary. There was a classic simplicity about Spain. A democratically elected government was overthrown by the army. The battle lines were clear. On one side stood the poor and against them were ranged fascism, big business, the landowners and the church. Bosnia, with its long history of internecine feuding, is altogether more complex.

"You can't say that because we didn't go to fight in Bosnia we are a cynical, dispirited and demoralised society," says Loach. "It's not as simple as that. There's no doubting that working people have become demoralised. Defeat breeds defeat. But people who have been clobbered don't necessarily give up, they regroup in different ways. There is a paradox: there is a sense of demoralisation but when the chips are down people will still say 'No More'. Recently 2,000 young people met in Berlin to support the [rebel Mexican] Zapatistas in Chiapas. That kind of thing gets no coverage in the press; it's always a counter-culture, but there's nothing to suggest that people aren't still outraged by injustice."

And yet something has changed. The historian AH Halsey, thinking of the Thirties, recalls a vivid contemporary sense of "the inevitable march of history towards the dream". Yet there were two dreams. Communists saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as an inevitability. But fascists thought the same thing too about their thousand-year reichs. The dynamic of those two competing certainties produced a climate today where the world has proclaimed the end of history and sees capitalism as the only inevitability.

There are those, like Loach, who resist this. "That's the false consciousness we get all the time," he says impatiently. "It's what they want us to believe: that this is the inevitable state of things. But it's blatantly untrue. This sense of inevitability is entirely manipulated. A lot of people are working very hard to preserve global inequality. It's not inevitable; a lot of people are getting up very early every day to make it happen."

Michael Foot also cautions against fatalism. "I don't think international solidarity has disappeared altogether," he says, "there are a lot of people on the left who believe that the claims of international solidarity are still as great as they ever were." Not many, perhaps, but then there were not, relatively speaking, that many who went to fight in Spain. "A lot of people thought that those who went and fought in Spain were a strange bunch," Foot recalls. History has transformed them from that into heroic figures - a process Loach warns against. Such myth-making only serves to disempower ordinary people in the present. "Part of the trick [by those who control the levers of power]," he says, "is to romanticise the past so that the present can't compete".

There was certainly nothing romantic about the journey to Spain as Bill Alexander remembers it. "We didn't see it as helping someone else with their war. It was our war," he insists. Internationalism and solidarity were not empty rhetorical devices. The Germans and Italians in the International Brigade were exiles from fascism in their home countries. "In Britain we'd seen Mosley hoping to follow in the same path as Hitler and Mussolini, all of which deepened our concern and anger. The decision to volunteer didn't arise overnight. It was a process. As the poet C Day Lewis put it at the time: 'We went because our open eyes could see no other way.' I think that if young people today felt called to play their part on the side of humanity they would." It would seem churlish to contradict him.