The Illusion of Statehood

In October 1936, as the Spanish Civil War turned a tension in peripheral Europe into a European disaster, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy signed a series of agreements detailing the need for a common action to prevent the creation and consolidation of a Catalan State. The backdrop to the revolutionary charades, the self-evident dangers of totalitarian states, and the conservative enthusiasms of Francos Spanish nationalists lay in the potential of Catalonia seceding. What would be the internal and international implications? The postwar world of 19191923 created political patterns that gave heart to many sub-state nationalisms patterns that hardened into conflictual shape, especially after the rise of Hitler in early 1933. Contributors to the volume trace the convictions of journalists, observers and diplomats that a Catalan split-off was inevitable. But Catalan politics blew in quite another way, later reacting to Soviet dis-interest and Britishindecisiveness, amo