For two centuries, between the French Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the model for military mobilization in Europe was associated with the nation-state and conscription. Citizens played a key role in the defense of their state: the nation-state was considered the primary political unit of the international system and citizens were usually expected to fight for their own country. But non-state mobilization did not disappear. Transnational war volunteering continued throughout the 19th and the 20th century and such volunteers have played a central role in many European wars. Between WWI and WWII, within the anti-fascist movement, thousands of Europeans were spurred into action by the political struggles in their home societies. The Spanish Civil War represented one of the largest causes for which many people fought voluntarily. Around 40,000 international volunteers fought against Franco’s troops. The image of these volunteers is preserved in many books, movies and, in general, in public memory. The men of the International Brigades were “ordinary”, neither mythological heroes nor Kremlin mercenaries. Historians offered several explanations for this phenomenon: many a volunteer decided to go to Spain for one or more of the following reasons: ideological conviction, feeling of solidarity towards the Spanish people, adventurism, boredom, personal problems at home and, considering the lingering effects of the depression, escape from unemployment. Central to ideological war volunteering is the question of motivation.
This project’s aim was to examine contingent reasons for war volunteering and to study its long-term dimension in southern Europe. Even if material incentives seem to have been a recurring motivation from the early modern period onwards, we contend that individual motivations such as patriotism or political idealism, played a central role in conjunction with the persistence and the “reactivation” of the legacies and memories of former volunteers. Volunteering during the Spanish Civil War, for instance, formed part of a long tradition in southern Europe, dating back to the 19th century. This project’s overall objective was to carry out a transnational study of the legacies and the survival of the myth of Garibaldinism between the conflicts surrounding Italian unification (1861) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Following both a social and cultural history perspective, it analyzed how the legacy of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Southern Europe was very strong and was linked with social and political claims. There were three main questions addressed by this research project:
1. Is it possible to identify a long-term tradition of international armed volunteering linked with political radicalism between the 19th and the 20th Century?
2. Is it right to speak about a transnational Garibaldinism?
3. Is it possible to identify Garibaldinism as a bridge between different radical political creeds (e.g. Anarchism, Socialism and, later on, Communism)?
