Politics,Networks and Community: Recruitment for the International Brigades Reassessed

Historians and public alike have long been fascinated by the 32,000 foreigners who volunteered to defend the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9. ¹ Their literary connections, anti-fascist credentials and the tragic romance of their struggle have helped guarantee their place in history, and inspired a commemorative culture that lasts to this day. Most served as part of the International Brigades, organised by the Communist International (Comintern) as part of wider Soviet intervention in the conflict, itself a response to larger-scale intervention on the part of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. ² They went on to play a starring role in the conflict, not just on the battlefield but also as symbols of anti-fascist solidarity that resonated far beyond Spain. Alongside efforts to commemorate their service, there exists a large historical literature exploring their backgrounds, their contemporary political importance, their experiences in Spain and contribution to the Republican war effort. ³ Yet despite extensive research, the fundamental question of why they volunteered continues to drive new investigations. This same question is also at the heart of an emerging field of research into the broader phenomenon of foreign fighters: those who take part in wars in which their home state is neutral, for reasons other than material gain. ⁴ A recent surge in the participation of foreign fighters in contemporary conflicts, most prominently in Syria and Iraq, has driven the question of motivation forward with renewed urgency among historians and political scientists alike. What, in other words, prompts individuals to personally intervene in foreign conflicts?

The motives of anti-fascist volunteers in the International Brigades cannot, of course, be directly compared to Islamist foreign fighters in Syria. Yet an emerging problem in recent literature on the International Brigades is that it is difficult to generalise about volunteers’ motives even within a Spanish context. Scholarship has adopted a distinctly transnational and biographical turn in assessing why individuals went to Spain. Building on previous approaches that focused overwhelmingly on questions of ideology – were the volunteers heroic anti-fascists or dupes of Moscow? – recent accounts have added new layers of nuance to our understanding of why individuals made this decision. ⁵ The emphasis rests on new appreciations of, in the words of Nir Arielli, a complex range of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors beyond ideological commitment. ⁶ Scholars such as Helen Graham have sought to view Spain within the broader transnational context of anti-fascist life trajectories, highlighting how exile and migration shaped volunteers’ lives before and after Spain. ⁷ The result is a better appreciation not just of individual decisions, but the myriad interconnections between Spain and anti-fascist resistance across Europe and the world. ⁸

Crucially, this scholarship has shown that transnational anti-fascist networks enabled recruitment for Spain. For the International Brigades in particular, these networks were based on the Communist International (Comintern), which along with national Communist Parties played a central role in arranging transport as well as the military and political organisation of the volunteers once in Spain. ⁹ Yet, while efforts to trace the contours of transnational anti-fascist networks are vital for understanding these processes, they stop short of offering a complete explanation of how these networks affected volunteers’ motivations. It is clear how they facilitated the recruitment process and journey to Spain, and led to the Party's role as a ‘gatekeeper’ across contexts, but much less clear how they relate to the actual decision to volunteer, particularly as scholarship continues to highlight the complex, disparate motivations individuals had for going to Spain.

Part of this difficulty in addressing motivation is methodological. While transnational biographies can do much illuminate the complexities of individual decisions, they can say less about collective, broad explanations of motive – in other words, not just why individuals volunteered, but why so many did. While, as Lisa Kirschenbaum and others have explored, many of the International Brigades’ leaders were part of a transnational Cominternian world, most rank-and-file volunteers were not direct participants in these networks. ¹⁰ They often did not have personal histories of exile, migration or international travel, making it difficult to directly link their decisions to transnational experiences. Yet this does not mean they were not integrated into these networks in important ways. Building on the work of scholars such as Brigitte Studer, who posit that interwar communism's transnational networks operated down to the ‘local’ or even ‘microsocial’ level, this account takes as its focus the nodes of these networks. ¹¹ In exploring these communities of the faithful from whence the vast bulk of volunteers came, this account reflects a wider dialogue regarding the cultures, networks and exchanges of interwar communism. Yet while it is possible, indeed necessary, to trace their connections to a broader transnational world, this account holds that it was the very local dynamics of politics, community and activism that hold the key for explaining why these particular people decided to help defend the Spanish Republic. This decision to volunteer, in other words, was far from being an internalised communion with conscience and personal circumstances, and instead was made within a particular social and communal context, alongside friends, family and colleagues – a reality hinted at in previous scholarship, but the consequences of which have not yet been explored.

This is a simple yet important observation. Research into war volunteering across contexts has highlighted that individual decisions are shaped by communal values and expectations alongside personal circumstance. ¹² Ideological belief, in other words, should not be viewed as an internalised process, but rather the product of dynamic exchanges within broader communities and networks, which act collectively to determine expectations of members in moments of crisis. Crucially, as war volunteering is usually framed as a defensive act, ideology allows for expansive understandings of ‘defensive’, allowing for communal interests – and threats to them – to be broadly conceived. Anti-fascism allowed International Brigade volunteers to understand their actions as defending against the expansion of European fascism at its most important flashpoint, just as entirely different ideologies allowed British volunteers in the Boer War to understand their decision as ‘defending’ against a crisis of British imperialism. In each case, the capacity of ideology to mobilise recruits was not predicated on each recruit's individual response or understandings, but on the development of communal beliefs and pressures. Once the community framed volunteering as the appropriate response to a crisis, individual members faced pressure to conform to these expectations. ¹³

This explanation posits that the clustering seen among International Brigade volunteers was not incidental, but rather an indication of what actually drove effective mobilisation for Spain. This argument is not intended to sideline ideology from discussion of the volunteers’ motivations, nor to depoliticise their decision. Rather, ideology was vital in shaping the conditions that enabled recruitment. It was no coincidence that Bolshevik-style communism was able to mobilise so many foreign fighters, because it was well-suited both organisationally and culturally to the endeavour. The ability of Communist Parties to recruit volunteers was predicated on their success in developing itself not just as a traditional political party, but as a community, bound by shared experiences and struggles. The nature of interwar communist movements lent itself to this task across contexts, thanks to both active strategy and the rigorous demands of a communist way of life. ¹⁴ In Britain, success in building these ‘communities of the faithful’ was only ever local and incomplete, yet it was these spaces that saw the most effective recruitment for Spain. ¹⁵ This, it is held, offers an explanation not just of how individuals decided to volunteer, but also why recruitment for Spain proved successful across contexts, pointing to factors that underpin successful recruitment of foreign fighters more broadly.

The analysis presented here is based on a particular regional case study, Scotland. ¹⁶ Focusing on a single region balances the need to move beyond isolated studies of national contingents and acknowledge the importance of transnational networks and politics, while also maintaining a cohesive sample through which interconnections can be explored. The Scottish International Brigaders offer particular utility in this context. Their numbers, approximately 520, are substantial enough to support meaningful conclusions, yet not so large as to prevent detailed analysis. Moreover, Scotland saw particularly dense recruitment, providing the single largest regional contingent within the British Battalion. This suggests that the factors that underpinned successful recruitment for Spain were especially salient and effective in Scotland. Finally, the Scots who went to Spain counted almost no middle-class or literary volunteers among their numbers, and few were transnationally mobile before going to Spain. ¹⁷ This, it is held, makes them in some ways more rather than less typical of the International Brigades as a whole.

The connection between international communism and the International Brigades is well known. It has long been appreciated, for instance, that Comintern networks were vital in arranging the physical journey to Spain for prospective volunteers, through means both legal and illegal. The high proportion of communist recruits has also been noted across contexts. Yet a cursory glance across national contexts suggests that Communist Party strength offers useful but limited insight into volunteer numbers. ¹⁸ The Communist Party of France (PCF), for instance, had a membership 20 times greater than the CPGB, yet only four times as many International Brigade volunteers came from France compared to Britain. ¹⁹ This differential suggests two, non-mutually exclusive explanations of the connection between communism and volunteering. First, that communist beliefs were not the only factor in explaining motivation for volunteering in Spain. This is undoubtedly true, and previous scholarship has noted that many volunteers were not Party members, though this conclusion has limitations in this context. ²⁰ However, the second potential explanation has been neglected: that different communist networks were differently able to mobilise their members to go to Spain. That is, communism was constituted differently across contexts, and these variations affected the extent that recruitment for Spain was successful.

It is immediately apparent from Table 1 that the Scots who fought in Spain came from specific places within Scotland, reflecting previous scholarship showing that British volunteers came chiefly from urban, industrial centres such as London, Manchester and Liverpool. ²³ The Scots were even more heavily clustered than Britain as a whole, with half coming from Scotland's two industrial hubs, Glasgow and Dundee, and smaller numbers coming from Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Other Clydeside industrial towns are similarly prominent, albeit on a smaller scale. The Scottish coalfields are also well represented, particularly in mining communities in Fife and Lanarkshire.

Another way of considering this data is that among the Scottish contingent, 85 percent of volunteers lived nearby to at least five other volunteers. The volunteers, in others words, were usually in close physical proximity to one another. If anything, this is an underestimate, as Fife and Lanarkshire – which saw the least obvious geographic clustering – had much more fragmented industrial populations, with smaller clusters emerging instead in villages that were near to each other or urban centres. This level of clustering proves little in itself. Even Dundee, with the densest per capita recruitment, did not see an appreciable percentage of its population go to Spain, and the number of Dundonian volunteers does not necessarily show that there must have been interconnections between them. ²⁴ Nevertheless, the extent of geographical clustering is suggestive, and raises the possibility of more concrete connections between the volunteers.

This is reflected in patterns of trade union membership, which are comparable to Baxell's figures for Britain. The Transport and General Workers Union, for instance, was the most common affiliation for both British and Scottish volunteers. Mining unions mark the main point of departure: miners were the second-largest grouping in Scotland; in England they did not make the top 10. ²⁷ There were fewer Scottish members of the National Union of Seamen, while Boilermakers and Railwaymen were better represented. However, the similarities are more striking than the differences. Crucially, few specific connections emerge. Despite occupational similarities and geographical proximity, few volunteers shared a workplace or trade union branch. Most that did came from mining villages, where shared occupation is unsurprising. Beyond scattered exceptions – both volunteers from Peterhead, for instance, were seamen in their mid-30s – the workplace was rarely a space in which prospective volunteers developed connections with one another.

Even before considering more informal ties, a strikingly high proportion of card-carrying Scottish communists fought in Spain. Based on membership figures from September 1937, nearly 15 percent of Scottish communists fought in Spain, including nearly 20 percent of the Dundee membership, 18 percent in Glasgow and over a quarter in Greenock. ³² Even using the membership figures from mid-1938 – some 3,070 including approximately 500 women – over 10 percent of male Scottish communists went to Spain, not accounting for age or fitness. ³³ While a minority, it was nonetheless a remarkable mobilisation of a small organisation.

Yet while extraordinary in it its own right, using formal membership to strictly categorise and delineate the CPGB mobilisation for Spain acts to obscure their wider role. During the main period of recruitment for the International Brigades from December 1936 to May 1938, Party membership in Scotland grew from 1,800 to nearly 3,000. ³⁴ However, this expansion masked a great deal of fluidity in individual and regional experiences before and during the conflict. ³⁵ Many drifted in and out of the party during the 1930s, often unable to afford membership dues while unemployed. ³⁶ In 1939, 14 percent of Scottish members were known to be in arrears with their dues, which actually represented ‘a definite improvement’. ³⁷ This was just one way in which individuals might leave and return to the Party. Disagreement about policy, personality clashes or migration could all interrupt membership. Some, such as Glaswegian William Hunter, had previously been expelled, or, like George McDermott, had let their membership lapse. At least 25 Scottish volunteers – almost 10 percent of the CPGB total – fell into these categories.

Yet the very ambiguity of many volunteers' relationships with the Party is itself significant, and reflects the reality that the boundaries of communist networks and influence cannot be neatly drawn. For these and other individuals, their relationship to the CPGB was liminal – integrated into its orbit, but not with full or permanent membership of the Party itself. ³⁸ Moreover, relying on membership numbers to explain recruitment patterns disguises the extent to which the Communist Party influence actually mattered in a local sense. Membership figures alone were rarely a completely accurate predictor of how many volunteers a district could recruit. By May 1937, London had over twice as many members as Scotland, yet at most 520 went to Spain. ³⁹ In other words, at least as many Scots went to Spain as Londoners, despite London's larger membership base. While there is clearly some connection, such mismatches indicate that this connection is more complex than simple arithmetic.

This disconnect between regional membership and mobilisation for Spain points to important qualitative differences in the way that the CPGB operated across Britain. A growing body of research into British communism has explored the extent to which the CPGB operated in ways that transcended the usual boundaries of party politics. ⁴⁰ Thanks to the commitments demanded of members, as well as the encouragement of cultural, social and leisure activities tied to the Party, being a communist could become its own, unique way of life. This was far from universal – individual experiences depended on local Party organisation, as well as its basis and leadership. It is this very lack of a universal communist experience, however, that points the way forward to understanding the variable effectiveness of the recruitment of volunteers for Spain. Mobilisation was most effective in the spaces and places in which the Party was able to constitute and maintain itself at the centre of a wider community.

There are numerous examples within Scotland where membership figures did not reflect CPGB presence and influence. In Glasgow, they were noted to be ‘far from commensurate with Party's influence and prestige’. ⁴¹ The CPGB's only contemporary MP was elected in West Fife, and thousands of Fife miners had been members of the Communist-controlled United Mineworkers of Scotland. ⁴² Yet in September 1936, the Fife District had just 232 members. This was partly due to the blacklisting of CPGB members by the official mining union and pit owners, meaning that most Fife communists faced unemployment. ⁴³ Similarly, the Vale of Leven had only 47 Party members in July 1937, yet was singled out by Stuart Macintyre as an archetypical ‘Little Moscow’, where the CPGB enjoyed unusual social and political clout. ⁴⁴ Clearly, the Party could count on influence beyond the relatively limited circles implied by its membership figures in these locales. Opposite examples can also be given: Kilmarnock had one of the largest concentrations of Party members in Western Scotland, with 72 members in July 1937, higher than nearby towns such as Greenock (34), Paisley (38) or Clydebank (62). ⁴⁵ Yet while the latter three towns all saw multiple volunteers go to Spain, none were recruited in Kilmarnock, indicating limitations when it came to mobilising this membership base. ⁴⁶ Such examples indicate the need to appreciate communist strength in terms of influence rather than membership – and, importantly, whether this influence could translate into mobilisation.

The qualitative variation in communist influence is reflected in the absence of significant clustering along the lines of volunteers’ union membership. This is likely not due to poor record keeping – the Party had every motive to collect this information, as it was useful leverage when negotiating with the labour movement. ⁴⁷ Rather, this reflected structural factors pertaining to how the Communist Party operated within the labour movement. Most unions implemented some form of anti-communist discrimination. Although their actual effectiveness varied, and did not altogether prevent communist penetration, such measures did preclude the sort of community building that could take place around local branches. ⁴⁸ In Glasgow, the Party failed to ‘draw active Trade Unionists into Branch meetings and Branch life’ and despite many individuals’ success in achieving positions of influence in local trade unions, there were ‘active and influential Trade Union comrades’ who over ‘a period of years, have failed to recruit a single new member’. ⁴⁹ As such, while the CPGB claimed significant influence in the Glasgow Trades Council – ‘60 delegates and a majority on the Executive Committee’ – it was not a sphere for active Party building. ⁵⁰ While the labour movement remained strategically important, success was achieved through the placement and promotion of key individuals, not creating and sustaining communities and networks that could provide a solid basis for recruitment, for either the International Brigades or the Party itself. In a wider British context, this observation helps explain why some significant hubs of CPGB industrial influence – such as among engineers in Sheffield – saw very few volunteers for Spain. ⁵¹

The emergence of Party-based communities was not the product of the Spanish Civil War, but reflected longstanding trends in strategy and recruitment. As Thomas Linehan has noted, political, family and social ties often became inextricably intertwined as a result. ⁵² The process of conversion and recruitment described in contemporary sources is often deeply intimate, the product of individual and group relationships, social activity and earnest proselytising. This was a constant, tireless process: a letter from Lily Murray to her sister Margaret updated her on several such cases.

Ida we are getting more and more into our way of thinking and I think we will soon have her ‘one of the fold’. They have had her to YCL meetings and J. Moir has also had his sister, who is progressing favourably! ⁵³

Alongside such efforts, social and political spaces influenced by the Party and YCL emerged in youth and sporting groups such as Clarion Cycling Clubs, forming a milieu in which many future volunteers were active participants. ⁵⁴ Jimmy Crichton recalled that the Musselburgh Clarion Cycling Club branch he helped found underwent a factional split when it started organising Aid Spain activities, with the Catholic and apolitical members leaving and setting up a new club. In Crichton's eyes, political activity was an integral part of the club's purpose and he was more willing to see it split than compromise. ⁵⁵ Chris Smith's hiking group was similar – it was never ‘just hiking’, rather they ‘always made a point of holding a meeting somewhere, doing something, selling the YCL paper’. ⁵⁶ John Lochore recalled that local Socialist Sunday Schools, along with members of his hiking club, were a ready source of recruits for the Youth contingent of the 1936 Hunger March, many of whom went on to Spain. ⁵⁷

Few of these spaces were absolutely dominated by the Party. This was part of their utility – they offered an avenue to expand membership and influence. This was explicitly recognised by Party strategists. In a circular directed to Fife branches in March 1936, instructions were given on how to achieve their recruitment quotas. The onus was placed on exploiting the social and professional connections of existing members:

The mining fractions in East and West Fife and the Rail and Textile fractions in Kirkcaldy to arrange special meetings for the purpose of discussing the Party and its importance to the workers in those industries. Sympathisers and contacts to be invited with the objective of recruiting them to the Party.

Specially prepared recruiting meetings organised by branches in each Area. Each branch member to be responsible for bringing along TU, Co-operative or labour Party contacts; members of Study classes etc, Youth from sport organisations. ⁵⁸

This was to be followed up by engaging socially with recruits:

We draw attention to the importance of Social activity by our Branches, which the Secretariat and Area Committees will do everything to encourage…

Social activities have a two-fold value; not only is the work of the Party lightened and its contacts widened, but a source of income is created for assisting in carrying on the general Party activities. ⁵⁹

It is within this context that volunteers’ own descriptions of the recruitment process need to be placed. While – for reasons explored further below – few volunteers admitted that their peers explicitly influenced their choice, it is also clear that their decisions were not being made in isolation. John Dunlop even claimed that background checks were unnecessary, as most recruits ‘were already known to each other from their home towns’. ⁶⁰ Of the Scots, George Murray put it most succinctly.

I was active in left-wing politics and of course when the Spanish War started all my mates were of like opinion more or less. A lot of them were going to Spain, you know, and I decided to go too. It was one of the things you did at that particular time. ⁶¹

Hugh Sloan, of Methil in Fife, provides an example of how a Party member might forge connections with would-be volunteers across Scotland. Sloan knew several local activists who went to Spain, including his foster brother George Smith, and fellow communist Malcolm Sneddon. ⁶² Sloan lived in Dundee in 1933, where he ‘acquainted [him]self’ with local CPGB members such as future political commissar Arthur Nicoll. This led to his appointment as the Dundee YCL secretary, in which capacity he recruited several future volunteers to the Party, including William McGuire and John Kennedy. His involvement in the NUWM from 1930 also brought him into contact with organisers and Hunger Marchers across the east of Scotland, including future volunteers Fraser Crombie and Tommy Bloomfield of Kirkcaldy and Jock Tadden of Dundee. ⁶³ In all, Sloan mentioned pre-existing relationships with nine other volunteers, including Hunger Marchers, Party members and local colleagues, friends and family.

Yet even volunteers with less extensive histories of political activism still tended to know one another. Steven Fullarton, who ‘wasn't a member of any party at all’, convinced his friend, William Gauntlett, to join him in April 1938, and they knew two other neighbours who were already in Spain. ⁶⁴ Brothers volunteering together were also relatively common, such as Daniel and George Gillan of Dundee and James and John Miller of Alexandria. ⁶⁵ Family, local and Party loyalties were often intertwined: Donald Renton and William Cranston of Portobello were brothers-in-law as well as members of the same CPGB branch. ⁶⁶ The impact of others’ choices did not need to be immediate, with David Stirrat recalling his ‘emotional involvement’ after his close friend, Tommy Flynn, ‘had gone to Spain early on and been killed’. ⁶⁷ Conversely, while Jimmy Maley was the first volunteer from his branch, he noted that ‘quite a few’ later ‘followed [his] example’. ⁶⁸ In fact, in almost all cases in which relevant evidence exists, it is clear that the subject had pre-existing connections with other volunteers. By piecing together these sources, it is possible to begin to sketch the extent of these networks.

Figure 1 is a depiction of the largest network uncovered to date, featuring dozens of interconnected individuals across Scotland. It divides volunteers into rough geographic clusters by placement and colour, with Glasgow (red) and Edinburgh (blue) below, and Fife (orange), Dundee (green) and Aberdeen (cyan). ⁶⁹ Relationship strength is represented by line thickness, signifying ‘acquaintances’, ‘political associates’, ‘friends’ and ‘family’. Many individuals depicted here were CPGB members, with well-connected local and regional leaders such as Bob Cooney and Peter Kerrigan also integrated into broader national and transnational communist networks. ⁷⁰ Yet it is noteworthy that these connections encompass many less prominent individuals, including non-members. It is also noteworthy that such a broad network could be recreated using an immensely limited source base. Relatively few volunteers left behind sources that speak to their pre-Spain lives, and senior communists are overrepresented among those that did. ⁷¹ Far from showing the limits of personal connections between volunteers, this diagram represents the visible tip of a much larger iceberg, defined by the limits of the source material rather than the networks’ actual extent.

What we know about the recruitment process supports this interpretation. While it is well-known that recruitment was organised in Britain by the CPGB, in liaison with the Comintern and PCF, much less is known about how precisely this was achieved. The CPGB, fearing prosecutions under the Foreign Enlistment Act (1870), was careful to keep public discussion of the recruitment process vague. One of the few direct written calls came not from the CPGB, but from Socialist League member H. N. Brailsford, who circularised many of his contacts encouraging them to go to Spain in December 1936. As noted in the margins of the CPGB's copy, being so explicit made his missive ‘illegal’. ⁷² Instead, it appears that the Party relied primarily on word of mouth for its recruitment campaign – while publically effusive in its praise of volunteers, details of how prospective volunteers might actually reach Spain was only discussed in private. ⁷³ Over time, local Party officials – such as Fred Douglas in Edinburgh or George Middleton in Glasgow – became known in certain circles as the person handling local applications.

In practical terms this meant that the call for volunteers, particularly in the crucial early months, was transmitted almost entirely through the Communist Party's existing networks and contacts, with the Party utilising its hierarchy of local and regional officials to sound out and vet potential recruits. A series of reports compiled by Glasgow police as part of an aborted attempt to investigate violations of the Foreign Enlistment Act confirm this pattern. Glasgow communist James Smellie, for instance, who had a change of heart upon reaching Paris and returned home, told police that he had been asked to consider volunteering by a local CPGB organiser named Joseph Gerrard, who then took Smellie to be interviewed by George Middleton. ⁷⁴ The intimate – Gerrard was well-known to Smellie, having recruited him to the Party in 1934 – and hierarchical nature of this process suggests another way of looking at the network depicted in Figure 1: it shows not just the extent of pre-existing acquaintance among the volunteers, but is also a map of how concrete knowledge of how to volunteer was spread in Scotland. In this respect, the conclusion that the Scottish International Brigade contingent was largely drawn from Communist Party social-political spheres is unsurprising, because these were the spaces in which Party officials could effectively and conveniently transmit their call for volunteers.

International Brigades volunteers have hardly been silent on their motives for enlisting, yet their narratives present certain interpretative difficulties. For instance, a common refrain is that they went to ‘defend democracy’ in Spain. As Tom Buchanan points out, it is worth interrogating exactly what ‘what kind of democracy anti-fascists were seeking to defend’, with contemporary audiences bringing assumptions about the nature of democracy that were not necessarily shared at the time. ⁷⁵ Moreover, we need to be especially cautious when assessing the context and prominence of such claims. Even contemporary sources such as letters do not offer unambiguous insight into motivation, but need to be treated as representations to an audience, shaped by the desired self-image of the volunteer and the expected reactions of recipients. ⁷⁶ Oral history, another key source on volunteers’ motives, has particular drawbacks in this regard. Most volunteer testimony follows the ‘recovery’ mould of oral history, with the primary goal of preserving voices that might otherwise escape the historical record rather than engaging critically and actively with the narrative being told. ⁷⁷ Respondents were given free rein to tell their stories as they wished, and as such it is unsurprising that the motivations that resonated best in a post-war climate – such as the defence of democracy and the prevention of the Second World War – are most common. ⁷⁸ Veterans sometimes skipped over factors such as personal relationships and their social sphere, either out of privacy or believing it was uninteresting to their audience. ⁷⁹ Equally, these narratives often avoid topics that might cast their decisions in a different light. Eddie Brown's testimony, for instance, does not mention his wife, although his friends considered at the time that their deteriorating relationship ‘may to a certain extent have accounted for his decision to go to Spain’. ⁸⁰ Any difficulties were compounded when his wife eloped to London after falling pregnant with a fellow Perth communist during his absence. Clearly, his silence did not reflect its irrelevance, but rather an understandable desire to avoid a painful episode.

In exploring the social basis of volunteering, it is important to avoid stripping individuals of agency, and it is difficult to conclude that any Scots were compelled or ‘conscripted’ to serve in Spain. ⁸¹ Yet, external pressures could still exist. Fostering the social expectation of military service, for instance, could be a powerful tool in sustaining voluntary recruitment. This requires a society or specific community to collectively accept the necessity and justification for the conflict, fostering an atmosphere in which not enlisting is inconsistent with maintaining status and standing as a community member. Such pressure is compounded by success – the choices of friends, family and colleagues acting as a powerful impetus to conform. Notably, Britain relied on impetus created by communal appreciations of patriotism and empire to sustain voluntary recruitment in conflicts such as the Boer War and the First World War. Although enlistment did require a voluntary act, peer pressure and the prospect of social inclusion or exclusion constituted significant external influences. While the Communist Party could not compel enlistment, they could foster similar social pressure to enlist in certain spaces throughout Scotland.

The CPGB's ability to foster and sustain such pressures reflected the longstanding use of social and personal connections for Party-building purposes discussed above. By using such tactics, the Communist Party had done more than develop revolutionary cadres. They fostered groups of friends. The role of social expectations and peer pressure alongside ideology in underpinning military recruitment is well established in other contexts. Yet while the importance of social and familial interconnections in understanding the recruitment process for Spain has been acknowledged in some individual cases, historians have tended to treat these as isolated examples. ⁸² Yet, as indicated by the extent of pre-existing networks described above, these circumstances were far more universal than hitherto appreciated. Most individual decisions to enlist cannot be regarded as distinct from the decisions made by volunteers' peers.

This alters any understanding of the decision to fight in Spain. It means that volunteering became in part a group decision, based on collective rather than individual understandings of the conflict's meaning and importance. The involvement of friends meant that going to Spain was no longer a venture into the complete unknown, as individuals could rely on much the same support networks as at home. Indeed, the collective decision to act in solidarity might strengthen existing bonds of friendship and comradeship, representing a highly positive emotional experience that could sweep up the undecided or less committed. ⁸³ Yet equally, once there was a collective decision that volunteering was the appropriate response to the war in Spain, the pressure to follow through and commit to this course of action was doubtless considerable, and any individual defying this decision risked losing respect or standing. It is not intended to frame these pressures either positively or negatively, but rather point out that given the social context in which the decision was being made, they were inevitable.

In such contexts, volunteering could become a way in which to demonstrate commitment, both in an abstract political sense but also to the group identity, making the decision to enlist as much about maintaining social standing and reputation as fulfilling a personalised political imperative. In many ways, volunteering in Spain cut right to the heart of what it meant to be a member of the Communist Party at the time. Adherence to the Party was not just a matter of accepting the desirability of various political goals, but also accepting the need for ‘revolutionary self-sacrifice’ in order to achieve them. ⁸⁴ As participants in a transnational exchange of ideas on what it meant to be a communist, anti-fascist or revolutionary, prospective volunteers had numerous ways to build an identity and purpose in ways that reinforced the call to arms. Aside from formal methods of transmission such as lectures and required reading material, actual and prospective communists were part of a cultural space in which collective values were reinforced through both socialisation and action. First- and second-hand knowledge of the Soviet Union and the idealised new Bolshevik man filtered down from the likes of Kerrigan and Cooney, while representations in communist publications, films, activism and mass events all served to foster a transnational ‘sense of identity and shared belonging’. ⁸⁵ Donald Renton was hardly atypical in ‘literally worship[ping] the Soviet Union’ when he left for Spain. ⁸⁶

Perhaps above all, the ideal Bolshevik was willing to forgo safety, and sacrifice for a common cause. In the words of Glasgow-Irish volunteer Sydney Quinn, having accepted and preached the need to confront fascism in the years prior to Spain, now ‘you’ve got to put your life where your mouth was’. ⁸⁷ This was perhaps felt particularly acutely in Scotland, where manifestations of domestic fascism were rare and broadly unsuccessful in the 1930s, meaning that the Spanish Civil War was often individuals’ first chance to strike a direct blow against fascism. ⁸⁸ Indeed, while Nir Arielli has posited that foreign fighters across contexts share a personal ‘search for meaning’ in their motives, a ‘search for agency’ seems apt here – the desire to take direct action against a hitherto distant or untouchable enemy. ⁸⁹ Maintaining a communist identity in this context also became bound up with their other concerns – in particular a masculine, ‘hard man’ self-image rooted in Scottish working-class identity, which required standing by one's friends, particularly in a fight. ⁹⁰ The gendered nature of the call to arms is reflected by the absence of women among the Scottish contingent. Annie Murray was the only Scotswoman who served with the International Brigades themselves, as part of the British medical section. Another, Kay Welton, attempted to volunteer, writing to Edinburgh communist Tom Murray asking him to take her with him to Spain, explicitly as a ‘fighter’ and not ‘in a nursing line’. ⁹¹ Although many Scotswomen shared the volunteers’ sympathy for the Spanish Republic, there was not the same communal expectation that women's sympathies were best expressed by volunteering.

Crucially, once made in a social context, the decision to volunteer needed to be followed through – someone who decided to volunteer in isolation might abandon the project while disappointing only themselves, but for most volunteers, abandoning the decision meant disappointing their friends: an altogether different prospect. The social context of such decisions, in other words, was a vital factor in converting latent sympathy into direct action. It is not difficult to imagine how, in the charged political atmosphere of the time, these pressures might multiply and accumulate, as more and more individuals chose to go to Spain. As recruitment for the International Brigades reached its zenith over the winter of 1936–7, volunteering was widely discussed and considered in CPGB circles. The centrality of this particular period for Scottish recruitment is hard to overstate. It represents the point at which a trickle of isolated individuals turned into a critical mass, with groups volunteering together becoming common. The importance of this phenomenon for Scotland compared to the rest of Britain is highlighted by arrival patterns. Nearly half of all Scottish volunteers left between December 1936 and February 1937. In contrast, recruitment in England, Wales and Ireland was more evenly spread, with approximately a quarter arriving in these months. ⁹² This points to a recruitment rush of particular intensity in Scotland, with decisions to volunteer cascading throughout tight-knit communities, and collective enthusiasm outweighing doubts.

In this atmosphere, choosing not to volunteer could become the decision requiring considerable justification and soul-searching rather than the other way around. These pressures are most visible among those who considered going to Spain, but eventually chose not to. Especially for those whose close friends were considering going to Spain, refusing the call was a difficult decision, and one that they usually sought to frame as beyond their control. William McVicar claimed that a friend convinced him to volunteer, despite the risk he would be prosecuted for deserting the RAF. He went to pains to point out, however, that the final decision was not his, but his local comrades’, who concluded that ‘they couldn't guarantee that [he] could get out of the country before the RAF would start lookin’ for [him]’. ⁹³ James Allison of Kirkcaldy was open about the extent he sought to save face, admitting he was not ‘an awfy brave man’. When two friends decided to volunteer, and looked to Allison to join them, he seized on reasons to avoid joining them, claiming that ‘I wid like tae go but I know if I was oot there I widnae eat and they would need tae send me hame’. ⁹⁴ In contrast, Aberdonian John Lennox had already volunteered when his then-girlfriend threatened to dump him if he went. While clearly disappointed at the time, Lennox cheerfully admitted that after their long, happy marriage, he could not regret missing out. ⁹⁵

An unsympathetic reading might suggest that some individuals were seizing pretexts to avoid following through on a daunting prospect. Several claimed that they were thwarted by the official ban on volunteering in January 1937, a ban many others ignored. ⁹⁶ However, this is speculative, and the point is not to question their sincerity. What is telling is that they all felt it necessary to provide justification in the first place. For those integrated into a communist milieu, for whom the vital nature of the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades was deeply impressed and whose friends were making the decision to fight, not going was not simply a matter of polite refusal or ignoring the call. To maintain their social and political standing, not to mention their own self-image, they needed a concrete, external justification for staying. Moreover, these accounts also help confirm that participation in communist politics was linked to belonging to the requisite social circles, and this in turn meant that for those embedded in the movement, the choice to fight in Spain was a product of group dynamics. While personal circumstances and ideological beliefs were clearly not irrelevant, the presence of others in the decision-making process meant that it was impossible to avoid making an active decision so long as volunteering was continually being discussed and acted upon by one's peers.

This paper has dealt with a specific case study, Scotland. As such, any wider conclusions must be tempered by the possibility that Scotland was unique. This is, however, unlikely. There are indications that similar patterns of clustering and interconnections between International Brigade volunteers occurred across other contexts. Within Britain, the observations made here help explain regional patterns of recruitment, and it is no coincidence that the two major British hubs of volunteering, Scotland and London, were also those in which the CPGB had maintained the most stable presence over the interwar period. ⁹⁷ Though interpersonal connections have not been adequately explored, the concentration of volunteers from New York, in the American case, or Vancouver in the Canadian, represent potentially similar patterns of recruitment along the axes of politics, class and geography. ⁹⁸ Such examples are complicated by the prominence of migrants and exiles in the North American and other contingents. While this does not in itself preclude the importance of networks and community among these contingents – indeed, Michael Petrou notes the importance of communist-affiliated ‘ethnic language and cultural organizations’ as a source of ‘community and support’ among such migrants – it is a notable difference between contexts. ⁹⁹

Perhaps most intriguingly, the largest foreign contingent in Spain – the French – provides suggestive evidence regarding the ways in which communism might be differentially organised and experienced. Although the PCF had won almost 15 percent of the vote in 1936, and by 1937 counted some 300,000 members, this was a recent phenomenon, with membership growing tenfold since 1933. As Rémi Skoutelsky has shown, almost half of French communists in Spain had been members prior to this expansion. ¹⁰⁰ In this light, the recruitment of thousands of volunteers among the 30,000 ‘old guard’ French communists also represents an intensive mobilisation among specific communist networks and communities, pointing again to key qualitative differences in the way communist parties could build and sustain influence in difference spaces. In other words, a mass party is likely to be less effective than a smaller, tight-knit group in mobilising transnational volunteers, precisely because expansion means diffusing the networks and communities that underpin recruitment.

Building on other research findings, this sheds light on a much broader question: why did Spain attract so many foreign volunteers, and by extension, what factors are crucial in enabling the large-scale recruitment of foreign fighters in conflicts? One important distinction that emerges is between ‘spontaneous’ and ‘recruited’ foreign fighters. Those who first journeyed to Spain were qualitatively and quantitatively different than those who came to join the International Brigades. These early months saw small numbers of more mobile, better-resourced individuals who volunteered for their own reasons, usually in isolation from others. ¹⁰¹ Their decisions were internalised, making for very personal motivations, be it adventure, material gain or ideology. Other high-profile conflicts might expect to see comparable numbers of disparate, self-motivated volunteers. Their sheer diversity – thanks to self-determined and varied motivations for fighting – makes establishing patterns difficult, and in Spain's case, has led to a deceptive heterogeneity in how the volunteers are imagined and represented.

However, following the Comintern's decision to actively organise recruitment in October 1936, volunteering changed profoundly. The volunteers became both more numerous and more cohesive in terms of class, background and beliefs. Certainly, aid in making the journey to Spain was an important factor that enabled working-class participation in particular, though, as this account has argued, taking a purely functional approach to recruitment networks offers only a partial explanation of this phenomenon. Other conflicts have seen similar efforts, such as the Machal in the Israeli War of Independence. ¹⁰² The key question becomes why the Comintern was so well placed to recruit volunteers for Spain. Part of the answer is clearly ideological, with communism and anti-fascism particularly well suited to transnational mobilisation. These ideologies are inherently internationalist, meaning that volunteers could readily understand that in defending the ‘Spanish people’, they were also protecting their own homes against future fascist expansionism. Significantly, Spain was readily appreciated as the decisive anti-fascist battlefield between 1936 and 1939, dwarfing the scale and stakes of struggles at home. While non-internationalist ideologies have the capacity to cross borders, they are far more reliant on circumstances and perception. While anti-communist Swedish nationalists – especially those in the military – readily appreciated the need to help defend Finland in 1940 as an extension of their own interests, few anti-communists living further away felt the same urgency. ¹⁰³ Ethnic or diasporic connections might also serve to motivate specific groups to fight in a foreign conflict, but such connections are strictly bounded. ¹⁰⁴ Communism and anti-fascism, in contrast, were truly global ideologies, linked by well-resourced and coordinated transnational networks.

Just as important as ideology, however, was the nature of interwar communism itself. Thanks to their doctrine and ethos, communist movements tended to contain disproportionate numbers of individuals for whom direct action was appealing. What has emerged here as being particularly vital, however, was the communist way of life, which shaped members' social circles alongside their political activities. Communism, in other words, was often a community as much as a party. This meant that in exceptional circumstances, the community could be mobilised to defend itself and its interests. In fact, the exceptional level of Scottish recruitment for the International Brigades can best be understood as a by-product of the Communist Party's relative success in adopting a community-led approach to party building in Scotland. ¹⁰⁵ This combination of widespread, well-established ideological communities and a conflict appearing as the decisive battlefield for a global, internationalist ideology is distinct in modern history, and offers the best explanation for the unmatched scale of the International Brigades. Not only had the Comintern laid the groundwork for an effective transnational recruitment network, the doctrines it espoused were particularly effective in fostering the kind of political communities that could underpin mobilisation. Only the recent rise of pan-Islamism offers a parallel to these factors, and it is suggestive that these mobilisations – on a similar scale to Spain – may also feature similar patterns of clustering and interconnections among recruits. ¹⁰⁶