H-UNSC: THE SPANISH QUESTION

The Historical United Nations Security Council reconvenes in 1946, only months after the founding of the organisation itself, to take up the so-called Spanish Question — the matter of whether and how the international community should respond to the persistence of the Franco regime in the wake of the Allied victory over fascism in Europe. The Council in this period is composed of its original eleven members, with the great-power vetoes already shaping every line of every draft.

Delegates will navigate the early architecture of Cold War rivalry, the unfinished business of denazification, the diplomatic position of a Spain that had remained nominally neutral, and the precedent that any action against Madrid would set for the Council’s future engagement with member states’ internal affairs. Source material includes the Potsdam communiqué, the Tripartite Declaration of March 1946, and the report of the Sub-Committee on the Spanish Question.

H-UNSC is a fast, tightly procedural crisis committee — small in number, weighty in consequence, and unforgiving of imprecision.