Political Uses of the Recent Past in the Spanish Post-Authoritarian Democracy

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) pitted supporters of Spain’s democratic Second Republic, the “republicans,” who received aid from the Soviet Union, against right-wing rebels led by General Francisco Franco and backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, who called themselves “nationals.” The war produced a profound fracturing of the national community that was intensified by the dictatorship installed by Franco after defeating the republicans. The leitmotiv of the dictatorship was “Spain: One, Great and Free” (España: Una, Grande y Libre). In a country with strongly pronounced regional identities and separatist movements, “One” referred to a centralist administrative structure and the absence of all demands by regional separatists known as peripheral nationalists, such as the Basque, the Catalan, and other groups that speak a language other than Castilian Spanish and seek autonomy or independence from Madrid. “Great” invoked the heroic connotations of the Spanish imperial age. Finally, “Free” did not mean liberty, but rather national sovereignty with reference to the resistance against attempts of foreign powers to intrude into Spanish politics. By establishing an official nationalism that excluded the losers of the civil war, Franco’s regime deprived approximately half the citizens of their identity as Spaniards. This explains the urgent necessity of reconstructing the nation on a basis of reconciliation after the death of Franco in November 1975. The post-Franco change of regime took the form of a smooth, gradual, and relatively rapid reform process, which was characterized by concord among most of the parties involved. The formula employed was to dismantle the Francoist regime from within, using its legal and parliamentary structure against itself. The culmination of this process was the consensual writing of a new democratic constitution and its approval in a referendum by ample majority in December 1978, just over three years after the death of the dictator.