years of democratic transition were spent in a permanent state of anguished necessity of having to choose the least bad of bad options, which culminated in the untruthful process that gave us back our freedom. But is has been a while since that situation of emergency has been overcome. The prosperous democracy of today is sufficiently mature to handle the truth, in spite of those who deny this with their words and deeds. Our silence today is no longer mandatory, as it was during the transition. The truth about the past is the compensation that we owe those who made the miracle of our transition possible with the sacrifice of their silence.
The Nature of the Transition
A second driving force behind the rise of forgetting in Spain was the nature of the transition, a far less studied factor and arguably a more compelling one than the traumatic past. For one thing, psychoanalytical explanations derived from the traumatic past cannot explain why, after fears about the past had vanished from the public consciousness with the consolidation of democracy by the early 1980s, both the government and the general public remained firmly wedded to forgetting. Ironically, the heady days of forgetting came not when public opinion showed Spaniards to be most fearful about the future (the earliest years of democratic transition, between Franco’s death in 1975 and the enactment of a new democratic constitution in 1978), but during the long reign of the Spanish Socialist Party during the 1980s and 1990s, when unprecedented political stability and economic prosperity prevailed.
Several aspects of the democratic transition of great consequence to how matters about the past were handled in Spain are highlighted in this study, the first being the limitations on political justice imposed by a transition to democracy born in the very structures of the authoritarian regime. Unlike other transitions to democracy that preceded it in Southern Europe (Greece and Portugal), and subsequent ones in Latin America and the post-communist world, the authoritarian regime in Spain was not defeated or humiliated in a foreign war, toppled from power by its foes in civil society, or brought to its knees by economic failure or external pressure. Instead, Spain’s authoritarian regime was gradually transformed into a democracy from the inside out by reformers operating within the authoritarian government, including, ironically enough, Franco’s hand-picked successor, King Juan Carlos, and relying on the authoritarian regime’s own legal and political institutions, many of which survived the transition to democracy virtually intact (see Carr and Fusi 1981; Maravall 1981; Malefakis 1982; Gunther 1992).
The ramifications of the democratic self-reformation of the authoritarian regime for the disposition of the past after Franco’s passing were significant. Implicit in the left’s acceptance of a democratic transition orchestrated by the authoritarian regime and assisted by existing legal and political frameworks was willingness to forgo retribution against the old regime. This exchange of “amnesty for democracy” was introduced with the 1976 Law of Political Reform, enacted by the Francoist parliament (without representation from the opposition), which simultaneously ended the authoritarian regime and put the country on the path toward democracy by legalizing political parties and independent trade unions and scheduling free elections, Spain’s first in four decades. Predictably, the law had nothing to say on the issue of political justice against the old regime. Amnesty for the old regime was institutionalized with a law by the new democratic parliament in 1977. The timing of this law in Spain is significant because, unlike other cases, it meant that amnesty was enacted not by the outgoing authoritarian regime but by its democratic successor.
A second focus of our analysis is the ethos of political consensus that permeated the transition to democracy and that accounts for Spain’s reputation as the paradigmatic example of a “pacted,” “brokered,” and “negotiated” transition (Share 1986; Linz and Stepan 1996; Gunther 2007; Encarnación 2008a). Numerous factors underscored elite consensus during the transition, starting with the urgent need for intra-elite collaboration in order to confront all the intractable problems that over the course of centuries had made democracy an uphill struggle—from finding a constitutional role for the monarchy, to meeting the Catholic Church’s demands for some kind of public function in the polity, to accommodating demands for self-governance from nationalist-separatist regions. The latter was especially taxing; after all, granting limited autonomy to the Basques and Catalans was a leading cause behind Franco’s uprising against the Second Republic in 1936, by projecting the sense that Spain was coming apart at the seams. Regional autonomy was even more explosive an issue during and after the democratic transition since Franco’s repression of Spanish ethnic minorities had engendered a separatist, terrorist movement in the Basque Country anchored around ETA that was determined to engage the state in a prolonged armed conflict with the goal of establishing an independent Basque state.
But the main inducement for consensus may well have been the desire of the political class to make the democratic transition an unambiguous marker between “old” and “new” Spain, with the old representing anything associated with pre-transition Spain and the new focused on democracy and Europe. This desire for remaking Spanish political identity was most intense within the left, which explains why the politics of forgetting flourished not during the transition during the late 1970s (when Spain was ruled by a center-right government led by former Francoist leaders who had every reason to fear any process of transitional justice), but rather under socialist rule during the 1980s and 1990s. During those years, the socialist administration endeavored to reimagine Spain as a modern, forward-looking European nation. The pact to forget aided this dual project of modernization and Europeanization by obscuring the things that for decades had set Spain apart from the rest of Europe, especially the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, and by encouraging a forward-looking culture that did not appreciate remembrances of the past, especially things in Spanish history—like the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship—that stood in the way of Spaniards’ perception of themselves as Europeans.
The Organization of the Study
The rest of this book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the Pact of Forgetting that stresses what the pact stood for, how it was made to operate, and what historical events it sought to obscure from the public memory. Chapter 2 revisits the years of democratic transition (1975–1981) for the purpose of illustrating how the transition to democracy conditioned the rise of the Pact of Forgetting by limiting the capacity of the democratic opposition to make justice demands against the old regime and by enhancing the ethos of consensus born with the transition. Chapter 3 examines the endurance of the Pact of Forgetting under the socialist administration of Prime Minister Felipe González (1982–1996), which implemented the policy of desmemoria (disremembering) to modernize political institutions and reinvent national identity.
Chapter 4 looks at the puzzling absence of civil society opposition to the rise of the Pact of Forgetting throughout the transition and consolidation of the new democratic regime, a discussion that emphasizes both societal complicity with the political class and the legacy of the transition. Chapter 5 explores the birth of the movement for the recuperation of the historical memory, an unintended consequence of General Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998 on orders from Spain. Chapter 6 discusses the enactment of the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, a dramatic reversal of a three-decade-old commitment to forgetting the past led by a new generation of left-wing leaders not politically socialized in the struggle against Francoism and not beholden to the political compromises of the democratic transition.
Chapter 7 mines the Spanish experience with coping with the past, together with comparative evidence from other democratizing states in Latin America and post-communist Europe, for lessons about scholarly debates on transitional justice and democratization. Much of
