How did Mussolini and Hitler establish another Fascist Dictatorship that outlived them both?
Civil wars, conflicts between people from the same country, might not be international and can happen within the borders of a state but sometimes they can be bloodier and count more casualties than even in wars between two countries. In the civil wars of the 20th century, one can find more and more the characteristics of foreign powers intervening in the inter-state conflict to influence the outcome for their vested interests.
This text focuses on the Spanish Civil war, a conflict mainly between the left anarchists and their efforts to prevent the enemy, the Fascists, from taking over. At the end of the 1930s, the Nationalist forces of Francisco Franco won the war and established the third radical right authoritarian regime in Europe. It’s impossible, nevertheless, to argue that Franco would have won without the help of the two pre-existing nationalist authoritarian regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. The two questions that the article answers are why Italian and German forces intervened and most importantly, how did they change the whole outcome of the war.
Mussolini’s Initiatives
To begin with the Italian forces, the first and most important factor that led Benito Mussolini to take military action and influence the outcome…
