Politics and Policy in Democratic Spain

No Longer Different?

Paul Heywood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135231491
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Spain is different" was a favourite tourist board slogan of the Franco dictatorship. Is Spain still different? This volume provides an original series of analyses of how politics in democratic Spain has developed since the remarkable success of the transition to democracy.

PART I REFLECTING ON THE PAST, REVIEWING THE PRESENT

The Memory of the Civil War in the Transition to Democracy:
The Peculiarity of the Basque Case

PALOMA AGUILAR

In both Europe and the United States, the study of the impact of the past upon the present has become a central focus of research for sociologists, political scientists and historians alike.¹ After decades of concentrating on more tangible, or more structural, aspects of the link between historical evolution and political developments, many now stress the importance of the collective memory of societies, and of the different groups which comprise them. This interest in the use and abuse of the past has been prompted in part by the general resurgence of nationalist consciousness, which tends to legitimise current grievances by reference to historical events. Such events are all the more debatable the more remote they are.

The role played by the memory of the Civil War (1936–39) in shaping the transition to democracy in Spain as a whole needs to be contrasted with the specific aspects that this memory acquired in different regions of the country. Thus, in addition to underlining the importance of this memory in explaining how the change of regime came about, this article also offers a first approximation of the particular role played by the memory of the war in the development of the transition in the Basque Country. In order to do so, I shall refer not only to the Civil War itself, but also – albeit briefly – to the Franco regime, and chart the evolution of accounts of the war as well as the different uses made of them by leading political forces. Only in this way can the role played by the war in the years following Franco's death be properly understood.

In Spain, the traumatic memory of the Civil war helped ensure that both political élites and society in general did everything possible to avoid repeating those past errors which had put paid to Spain's only previous democratic experience, the Second Republic (1931–36). Thus, political adversaries tried not to transform the past into a destabilising tool, which many feared could render impossible any peaceful dialogue between the heirs to the ideological positions which had fought in the Civil War. All of this helps to understand the policy of national reconciliation that came about, based on the implicit recognition of collective culpability for crimes committed during the war and the unanimous desire that a similar drama should never be repeated. Thus, consensus was confirmed as the most legitimate form of negotiation between different political and social players.²

In the Basque Country too, the traumatic character of the memory of the struggle helps explain many of the attitudes adopted by the different protagonists in the transition. However, it is clear that this region represented the most atypical example within the Spanish context since, during this period of political change, maximalist and violent stances were not so clearly in the minority as they were in the rest of the country: indeed, levels of political and social mobilisation were far higher, especially when these began to decline in other areas. Moreover, the transition's two referenda – on the Political Reform Law (1976)³ and on the Constitution (1978)⁴ – produced the highest levels of abstention in the Basque Country, clearly demonstrating both the specificity of this case and the need for a detailed study of the role played by collective memory in this region.

This study seeks to analyse why such attitudes emerged, by demonstrating the existence of a unique memory of the war which, duly fashioned by Basque nationalist élites, generated lessons which were sufficiently distinct from the rest of Spain as to have a different political impact. This is not to claim that collective memory is the variable which best explains the delay in securing the transition to democracy in the Basque Country, but rather underlines the importance of attempts by political élites (in this case nationalists) to manipulate the past, and the repercussions of such attempts on the values and beliefs of a society trying to recover from a deeply complex memory.

THE MEMORY OF THE CIVIL WAR IN SPAIN AS A WHOLE

When the Civil War ended, the Franco regime tried to consolidate its rule on the basis of victory in the war. During its early years the political authorities refused to accept that it even was a civil war, claiming instead that battle had been waged against the ‘foreign invader’ and international communism. However, when a regime's foundational myth is a fratricidal conflict, its legitimacy is unlikely to be sufficiently solid if not reinforced by other elements. In practice, the notorious initial illegitimacy of the Francoist regime was such that, in those early years, it had to maintain its political authority through a strategy of repression and exhaustive political control. The regime's progressive withdrawal from that initial stance coincided with a period of economic liberalisation that allowed the country to benefit from the wave of prosperity that swept through the Western world during the 1960s. It was during this period that the regime's rhetoric stopped focusing directly on the war, placing greater emphasis instead on the economic achievements and social transformation that took place during this decade.

During this second stage of the regime, economic growth and prosperity, together with growing international recognition for Francoism, lent it a significant degree of legitimacy. This enabled the heroic version of the war that the regime had disseminated until then to be gradually replaced by a tragic vision in which the war was no longer presented as something necessary, but instead as an unavoidable accident. In the final stage of the regime, many considered this past a shameful episode and some even suggested that the best way to overcome it was simply to forget, since they were convinced that any open debate on the subject would re-open old wounds and threaten co-existence in Spain.

By the time of Franco's death in 1975 society had managed to reach, if not an uncontested account of what had happened during the Civil War, at least agreement as to the lessons to be derived from this traumatic experience. On the one hand, during the transition it was accepted that the two warring sides were equally responsible for the barbaric acts which had been unleashed. In this way, no one party bore more guilt than the other, since both sides had committed unjustifiable atrocities. On the other hand, the exorcism of past brutalities was possible thanks to the struggle being interpreted as a kind of ‘collective madness’. Finally, the principal lesson derived from the transition was ‘never again’. All forces – political, social, economic – had to ensure that Spain would never again witness a similar drama. Only in this way can we understand the full complexity which underlay both the generalised consensus which governed the transition up until the approval of the Constitution in December 1978 as well as the policy of national reconciliation which was attempted from the outset.

For something that had happened 40 years earlier, the dramatic memory of the war had a vivid presence during the transition. More than 70 per cent of the Spanish population had not experienced the Civil War directly, but this is the kind of event which is handed from generation to generation, coming to form part of the bitterness of collective memory – a transmitted memory, but one that is still alive and resonant. The endurance of the trauma derived from the war and the survival of certain Francoist legacies in Spanish political culture, can be traced in opinion polls of the period.⁵ It was when society perceived, consciously or unconsciously, and in a more or less justified manner, certain similarities between the situation in the 1970s and that of the 1930s, that the memory of the struggle re-emerged.

By the mid-1970s Spanish society had gone nearly 40 years without democratic institutions. Thus, at the time when parties, unions, elections and parliamentary life were all gradually starting to appear, many Spaniards had no direct experience of them. These institutions were not, however, new to Spanish history. A minority of Spaniards had known them during the Second Republic, which was destroyed, together with its institutions, during the Civil War. Throughout its existence the Franco regime reviled the Republican experience. The regime's arguments were not shared by a considerable portion of the Spanish people, but in the 1970s there were many whose view of the Republican period none the less remained critical, albeit for other reasons.

The Republic's weakness and excesses were widely criticised, along with a reluctance to accommodate minorities, the imposition of a nonconsensual constitution, its military and religious policy, and other issues. For many, the failure of the Second Republic, which culminated in the Civil War, was partially due to its own mistakes and, furthermore, to an institutional design that exacerbated these errors, along with an international context that, effectively, offered little help to a weak and incipient democracy.⁶ The memory of the Republic's collapse thus remained associated with the tragic experience of the Civil War; during the transition, when institutions that had been in place during the Republican period were revived, it was logical that Spaniards should recall both this failed experience and its ill-fated end.

This is why Spanish society tried so hard not to reproduce the errors that had put paid to the Second Republic, and thus avoided repeating its institutional design. The past demarcated what was and what was not possible in the political transition: given the uncertainties and caution which surrounded this period, any clue as to what might happen if certain institutions were established was seized upon. For history, logically, is a fundamental source of stability and legitimacy for democratic regimes. Every effort was also made to ensure that political adversaries did not turn the past into a political weapon which, many feared, would render impossible any peaceful dialogue between wartime opponents. It was a question of forgetting the rancour of the past, of letting bygones be bygones, of retaining the lessons of history without stirring them up so that, above all, a future of peaceful and democratic coexistence could be constructed.

For many people, however, this recourse to silence amounted to a form of resignation, and finally spilled over into frustration. Yet, the principal objective – the peaceful consolidation of democracy in Spain, something which had not previously been possible – was achieved. This allowed the transition to become the basic foundational myth of democracy and its memory to become a political resource of great importance. The events which cast the largest shadow over the process were directly related to the transition in the Basque Country: the notable increase in ETA's⁷ terrorist activities and the high level of abstention, in two of the three Basque provinces, in the constitutional referendum. The 1978 Constitution, a milestone in the transition from the dictatorship and proclaimed as the Constitution of Spanish reconciliation, was approved throughout the country, yet the campaign by Basque nationalists in favour of abstention enjoyed unexpected success in their own territory. Over and above the reasons given by the nationalists at the time to justify abstention, we need to ask why they, unlike other Spaniards, felt no obligation to support the policy of consensus and reconciliation. What role was played in the adoption of such a stance by the memory of civil war?

THE CIVIL WAR IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY

Throughout the Second Republic, the attitude of the PNV⁸ (Partido Nacional Vasco, Basque Nationalist Party) had not exactly been characterised by ideological coherence. Whilst its leaders formed an electoral coalition with the reactionary Carlists in 1931, in both 1933 and 1936 they decided to go it alone. By 1936, however, the party had moved much closer to the republican and leftist parties with whom the PNV collaborated during the war. This volte-face resulted in desertions from its ranks and something of an electoral slump. When the military uprising against the Republic came on 18 July 1936, the PNV – hegemonic in much of the Basque Country – found itself obliged, unhappily, to side with one or other of the warring factions. Initial doubts were dissipated when the Francoist forces that had triumphed in Navarre¹⁰ and Alava began to victimise individual members of the PNV. Moreover, it seemed far more likely that they could achieve their Statute of Autonomy – then awaiting approval in the Cortes – from the Republicans.

The first thing that needs to be emphasised in regard to the Basque Country as a whole, given the apparent oversight which tends to characterise the nationalist account, is the division produced in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Reflecting on The Past, Reviewing The Present
• Part 2: The Policy Process in Practice
• Abstracts
• About the Contributors
• Index