Morten Heiberg – författare

This unique transnational history explores the extraordinary lives of left-wing volunteers who fought in not just one, but multiple conflicts across the globe during the mid-twentieth century. Utilising previously unpublished archival material, Heiberg, Acciai and Bjerström follow these individual soldiers through military conflicts that were, in most cases, geographically centred on individual countries but nonetheless evinced a crucial transnational dimension. From the Spanish Civil war of 1936 to the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979, the authors marshall these diverse case studies to create a conceptual framework through which to better understand the networks and recruitment patterns of transnational volunteering. They argue that the Spanish Civil War created a model for this transnational left-wing military volunteering and that this experience shaped the global left responses to a range of conflicts throughout the twentieth century.

On September 26, 1953, the Eisenhower administration signed three executive agreements with General Franco’s regime, which allowed the United States to install military bases in Spain in exchange for economic and military aid. The deal clearly favored US Cold War interests, and critics soon denounced that by signing the Pact of Madrid America had betrayed its own democratic credentials. The agreements stabilized the dictatorship and effectively converted it into a US satellite.During the transition to democracy after 1975, the US military presence in Spain was strongly debated. Many politicians and a large section of the Spanish public demanded a new foreign policy and a much higher degree of autonomy for Spain in the international system. However, as this book unravels, the UCD center governments of the late 1970s and early 1980s essentially gave up on their long-held claim to a new and more balanced relationship with Washington. This fact was carefully concealed from the public. Thus, it was only well into the mid-1980s, when the new socialist government gradually developed a more consistent foreign policy doctrine, that Washington fully realized that the bilateral relations had to be approached in an entirely different manner.For all these reasons, the present work is also a statement in the ongoing scholarly debate on the Spanish transition to democracy and the importance of foreign influences on this process. Finally, the book sheds new light on the role of King Juan Carlos in foreign affairs, just as it discusses Spain’s alleged role in the Iran-Contra Affair.

This book offers the first comprehensive study of Spanish foreign policy since 2000. Based on privileged access to some of Spain’s most important foreign policy actors – including Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos – the book offers an insider account of how Spanish foreign policy was shaped within the context of international diplomacy. It offers crucial new insights into the foreign policy of the PSOE governments (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, 2004 to 2011). The volume considers the changes on the international stage since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, showing how regional conflicts and tensions affected the policy agendas of the West. To increase security and prosperity at home, the 2004 Spanish socialist government reasoned that they could no longer rely exclusively on unilateral measures, old Cold War alliances or a ‘Spain-first’ approach. Against the backdrop of this changing world, the book explores the concept of ‘effective multilateralism’ put forward by the PSOE, in which Spain abandoned its hitherto unconditional support for the US and instead engaged in a series of multilateral collaborations with regions around the world. Above all, this study seeks to provide a new international history of contemporary Spain, demonstrating how domestic changes intersected with global transformations, and put forward the argument that diplomacy works.