Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Democracy without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 130; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/polq.12409

1538-165X

Gerard Alexander,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Omar G. Encarnación argues that Spain defied norms concerning transitional justice by sidestepping issues of culpability from its civil war and dictatorship (1939–1975). In the mid-1970s transition to democracy, the left and the right agreed to what amounted to a “pact of forgetting” (el pacto del olvido) in order to focus on democratization, economic development, and Spain's integration with its European neighbors. Encarnación investigates the details of Spain's “forgetting” and concludes with a consideration of its implications for larger claims about the importance of transitional justice. His descriptions include discussion of the 1977 amnesty law, the decision to leave intact public celebrations of the civil war victors (such as the Valle de los Caídos monument in which Francisco Franco is buried), and the sanitizing of almost all official references to the war and its aftermath. In the process, Encarnación reviews a great deal of post-transition political discourse and practice concerning Spain's modern history. He advances explanations, for example, for why the left accepted the pact (pp. 55–70), although his evidence is throughout more essayistic than methodical. The book considers the Socialist government's 2007 law of “historical memory,” which lightly revisits some portions of the pact of forgetting. Encarnación mentions the charge by some Spanish conservatives that this law was pursued more for partisan reasons than for a true concern with the past. The project certainly had several hallmarks of that: it was pursued at a time when the Socialists were politically precarious rather than strong; it emphasized an issue that united the Spanish left while dividing the right; and it was not obviously primarily about “memory” in a serious sense, as only Spaniards 70 and older in 2007 were old enough to have been even preteens in 1950 (former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was born more than two decades after the war ended).