4 - The Civil Wars in a Nutshell: Historical Overview

Summary

It is striking that all three full-on European civil wars of the 1940s took place in southern European countries, following in the wake of the region’s last such conflict – the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). There is a suggestive echo here of the 1820–21 revolutions, which had begun in Spain and spread to Italy and Greece.¹ In that earlier sequence, the unrest had followed the upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic occupations of Spain and Italy. In the twentieth-century instance, the outbreaks either preceded continental-scale warfare (in Spain’s case) or began in the very midst of brutal foreign occupations. Even in the case of Spain, the country’s civil war very rapidly became intertwined with the broader, continental and global rivalries between Communism, fascism/Nazism, and liberal democracy.