Spain leaves the League of Nations

Five weeks after the end of the civil war, the Spain of General Francisco Franco broke with the League of Nations. On 8 May 1939 the Council of Ministers in Burgos, chaired by Franco, decided that the country would withdraw. The same day the Foreign Minister, General Francisco Gómez-Jordana, Count of Jordana, sent the League’s Secretary-General, Joseph Avenol, a brief telegram: on behalf of the Spanish government he had the honour to inform him that Spain hereby gave notice of its withdrawal from the League of Nations, in accordance with Article 1, paragraph 3, of the Covenant. In Geneva the notice was recorded on 9 May, and that is the date that appears in lists of League members; some sources give the date of the decision, 8 May. Spain had been one of the organisation’s founding members. Its departure surprised no one: from the start of the civil war the Burgos government had regarded the League as a hostile institution, and its new allies in Rome and Berlin had left it long before.

Spain in Geneva

Spain, neutral during the First World War, joined the League in January 1920, as it was beginning its work, and at once took a non-permanent seat on its Council. In Madrid the League was for years a source of prestige and, at the same time, of ambition. In 1926, when Germany was being admitted to the League and promised a permanent seat on the Council, the government of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera demanded the same for Spain. When it did not get one, it gave notice of withdrawal in September 1926. It retracted the notice in March 1928, before the two-year period had expired. This was Spain’s first divorce from Geneva, and it ended in reconciliation.

The Second Republic, proclaimed in 1931, made the League one of the pillars of its foreign policy. Its constitution invoked international law and renounced war as an instrument of policy. For several years Spain’s voice in Geneva was the writer and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga, an advocate of collective security who played an important part in the dispute over Manchuria and in the Abyssinian crisis; in the autumn of 1935 he chaired the committee that searched in vain for a peaceful way out of the Italo-Ethiopian dispute.

The Republic seeks help

After the outbreak of the civil war the Republican government turned to the League many times. In September 1936 the Foreign Minister, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, told the Assembly that the bloodstained fields of Spain were already battlefields of a world war. In December 1936, at the Republic’s request, the Council met, but it confined itself to endorsing the policy of non-intervention conducted by the committee in London, outside Geneva. In May 1937 the Republic presented documents in Geneva on the part played by Italian divisions in the Battle of Guadalajara, and in September 1937 the Prime Minister, Juan Negrín, argued before the Assembly that the non-intervention agreement tied the hands of the lawful government rather than those of the intervening Germans and Italians. The League adopted resolutions, but nobody proposed sanctions against the states supporting Franco. Britain and France had no wish to risk a conflict with Mussolini and Hitler over Spain, and the League’s secretariat preferred to keep the organisation away from an issue that could tear it apart.

The League’s largest involvement in Spain was the international commission that from the autumn of 1938 supervised the departure of the volunteers of the International Brigades, after Negrín had announced their withdrawal in Geneva on 21 September 1938. The League also helped to save works of art. The most valuable paintings from Madrid’s Prado, which the Republicans had moved out of reach of the bombing, first to Valencia and then to Catalonia, were taken to Geneva in February 1939 under the supervision of an international committee and deposited at the League’s headquarters. In the summer of 1939 they were shown at a great exhibition in Geneva, and in September, with war already raging in Europe, they returned by night trains across France to Madrid – into the hands of the government that had just left the League.

The Burgos decision

Franco’s side had no representation at the League and viewed it with hostility. Francoist propaganda portrayed Geneva as a platform for the “Reds”, Freemasons and democracies, which for three years had lent their voice to the Republic. When Britain and France recognised the Burgos government on 27 February 1939, it became the lawful representative of a League member, but it had no intention of making use of that membership. In the statement justifying the decision of 8 May, the government accused the League of hostility towards “National Spain” and of giving refuge to those who had sought its destruction.

The decision was also a gesture towards Spain’s allies. On 27 March 1939 Spain had joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was announced at the beginning of April, and on 31 March it had concluded a treaty of friendship with Germany. Japan and Germany had left the League in 1933, and Italy in December 1937. According to Spanish historians, Franco was thereby keeping a promise made to Mussolini, who had demanded that his victorious ally make an unambiguous choice of camp. Nor was Spain the only state leaving Geneva in the spring of 1939. Peru gave notice on 8 April, and Hungary – which had also joined the Anti-Comintern Pact in February – on 11 April. On 7 April Italy invaded Albania, a League member since 1920, which within a few days ceased to exist as an independent state, and the League did nothing.

The Covenant of the League of Nations provided for a two-year period of notice. Formally, therefore, Spain remained a member until May 1941, but from 9 May 1939 it took no part in any of the organisation’s work.

Significance

Spain’s withdrawal did not alter the balance of power in Europe, but it was a telling sign of the times. By May 1939 the League of Nations had in practice ceased to deal with politics. The crises that were leading to war – the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, the demands on Poland, the annexation of Albania, the Anglo-French–Soviet negotiations – were played out in direct talks between the powers, and no one thought of convening the Council. The departing states belonged for the most part to the camp that challenged the Versailles order, and their exit from Geneva signalled which side they would take.

Franco’s Spain did not, in the end, enter the war. After 1 September 1939 it declared neutrality; in June 1940 it changed this to “non-belligerence”; and in 1941 it sent the volunteer Blue Division to the Eastern Front. The League, whose only significant act during the war was the expulsion of the USSR in December 1939 after its attack on Finland, dissolved itself in April 1946. Its successor, the United Nations, shut its doors on Spain: in December 1946 the General Assembly declared that Franco’s regime had been imposed on the Spanish people by force with the help of the Axis powers and recommended that ambassadors be withdrawn from Madrid. Only the Cold War changed the West’s attitude to the anti-communist dictatorship. In 1950 the UN revoked the recommendation, and in December 1955 Spain became a member.