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During the Spanish Civil War one of the most decisive forms of intervention was, paradoxically, an act of collective non-intervention. The policy of Non-Intervention, formally adopted by twenty-seven European nations in August 1936 and administered by a London-based committee until the war’s end, stands as a landmark of diplomatic failure and moral abdication. It was a policy designed not to prevent foreign interference, but to license it selectively; not to uphold international law, but to subvert it for reasons of political expediency.