Twenty Years of Turmoil: ITT, The State Department, and Spain, 1924–1944

Among the factors that have assured the success of units of “multinational†firms like the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, according to Professor Little, is the willingness of the parent's home government to use its diplomatic strengths to assure that a host government lives up to its contractual obligations, even after radical changes in its leadership. Using diplomatic correspondence of the United States with ITT and the Spanish Republic of the 1930s, he demonstrates the vital nature of these strengths at a time when the tensions between “communism†and “fascism†were new and vigorous, and reaches a startling conclusion about the sameness under the skin of the two ideologies where the rights of foreign concessionaries are concerned.