Question

Why is the Spanish Civil War called a ‘proxy war'?

Answer 1

in the general sense, but the combatants are somewhat misidentified. The conflicting great powers were Germany and the USSR. The Spanish Civil War had complex causes within Spain, but roughly speaking there was a troubled transition from the monarchy to a socialist Republic in 1931, following the onset of the world-wide Great Depression. The monarchists then allied with Catholics and fascists to rebel against the Republicans, who allied themselves with the communists.

Initially, there was significant external moral and a little bit of practical support for defending the Republic from the Western democracies: for example, there was the famous "Abraham Lincoln Brigade" of volunteers from the United States, and who were supported from home by such contemporary luminaries as Dorothy Parker, Woodie Guthrie, and Ernest Hemingway. The famous English writer George Orwell ("Animal Farm," "1984") served as a volunteer with the Republicans, and this service, and his eventual disillusionment with socialism, had a profound affect on his writing career.

However, the viciousness of the war, and the fact that the internal combatants were fairly evenly matched, tended over time to drive out the moderates and radicalize whoever was left. Additionally, the European powers became interested. Stalin (the head of the USSR) became interested in supporting the Communists, as it looked like a chance to generate a Communist ally on the other side of Germany and France, which would make any future military conflict with Germany almost automatically a two-front war for Germany -- very useful! In addition, it fit with the then goals of Communism of becoming an international governing force, leaving behind the "19th century" notion of nations.

In response, and in part to give his commanders and weapons designers some practical battlefield experience, Hitler (the head of Germany) began to assist Franco and the Spanish Nationalists, who were close to being fascists, although there were significant differences. (One of the most famous incidents that resulted was the aerial bombing, by German warplanes, of the Spanish town of Guernica, the first time ever that civilian populations had been bombed from the air. There was widespread outcry over this barbarism, and Picasso painted a famous painting protesting it, but ironically enough less than 10 years later the Allies would be raining far greater devastation on the cities of Germany and Japan with nary a whisper of moral qualm.)

The support of the external powers, combined with the discouragement of moderates, ended up significantly strengthening the fringe groups, and eventually the conflict came down to Franco and the Nationalists versus the Communists. Since in the end neither the Western democracies nor the Spanish people themselves had any stomach for a genuine communist country, particularly not one taking its orders from Moscow, the communists lost and Franco won, just before the opening of the Second World War.

Franco presided over a strange sort of dictatorship until his death in 1975, in which Spain was in general an ecoomically free country with good civil rights -- people did not often vanish in the night -- but in which political rights were severely curtailed, because Franco always had the final say in anything. Near his death Franco planned out and executed a restoration of the monarchy and the transition of Spain to a constitutional monarch, like England, which it remains to this day. Spain remains one of the very few cases in which a dictator actually did tremendous service to his country, healing it from a catastrophic civil war without a round of terror and repression, fostering a healthy and modern economy, and engineered a peaceful transition after his death to a republic.

Answer 2

"people did not often vanish in the night"
Um. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Spain)

Also, Orwell never became disillusioned with Socialism, he remained a Socialist until he died. It did cause him to not trust the USSR, however.