Spain: A Unique History (46 page)

Following World War II these experiences not only stimulated an enormous amount of new historical study but also a concern with "historical justice," a settling of accounts with past history. This stemmed from two factors. One was the greater elaboration, sophistication, and democratization of juridical practices, which had become more extensive than ever before, and the other the severity of the traumas inflicted by the military conquests, occupations, civil wars, and dictatorships of the era. People had sometimes been subjected to equivalent, or even greater, affliction, in other historical periods, but the levels of consciousness and meliorism had increased by the mid-twentieth century, and the expectations and standards of justice were higher than in times past. Moreover, the new phenomenon of totalitarianism and the mega-atrocity of the Nazi Holocaust seemed to raise organized political criminality to a much higher level. When such concerns had first arisen after World War II, postmodernist theory had not yet appeared to explain that all perception is subjective and that objective standards in complex human situations do not exist. Finally, it was argued that prosecution of the new legal category (but common historical phenomenon) of "war crimes" and the punishment of those responsible for dictatorship and mass murder was a necessary part of civic reeducation in order for democracy to flourish in the future and to avoid the situation that had developed following World War I.
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The best example of contemporary historical justice has been the prosecution of Nazi war crimes and the serious efforts made by the citizens of the West German Federal Republic to come to terms with Germany's horrendous recent past. If the political processes of de-Nazification were not completely effective, nonetheless the development of West German democracy — together with ongoing efforts at objective historical study, serious education, prosecution of perpetrators, and efforts to compensate the victims — was generally successful and has made Germany the most commendable example of what the Germans call
Vergangenheitsbewdltigung
, coming to terms with the past. This process was not instantaneous and had its own ups and downs, while before the end of the twentieth century a countermovement had begun to "normalize" that history. On the scholarly level, this took the form of the relatively well-known
Historikerstreit
— the controversy among the historians — while more broadly there has been more and more of a tendency of Germans to see their forebears of the Nazi era as victims, as well, particularly of mass bombing from the West and monstrous Soviet atrocities from the East. The existence of a society composed both of many heinous perpetrators and of numerous victims is probably not without precedent. Of course there were many different Germans — many were major perpetrators, while others were indeed victims, either of their rulers or of the rulers' foes. By comparison, defascistization in Italy was half-hearted, producing only a limited number of prosecutions and then, after only about three years and on the initiative of a Communist minister of justice, came to a complete end.
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In the countries occupied by the Soviet Union, defascistization was to a large extent a matter of punishing those whom the Soviets considered their principal enemies. Fascists or ex-fascists deemed useful to the Soviets were not punished and even, in a few instances, rewarded.

World War II ended in much of Europe amid scenes of apocalyptic disaster. The democratization of Spain and Portugal took place under very different conditions, amid the greatest prosperity and well-being in the history of the two countries. The Portuguese dictatorship was overthrown by force of arms and more than a year of political conflict ensued, together with a series of political arrests (at first, more than under the dictatorship) and certain gestures of punishment for notables and activists of the preceding regime. This transition was nonetheless typically Portuguese in the very limited amount of violence that occurred. The political process soon developed into a genuine parliamentary democracy, and the prosecution of notables of the Old Regime quickly came to an end.
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The circumstances and character of the democratic transition in Spain, by contrast, were unique. If the Spanish disaster of revolutionary civil war amid relatively normal peacetime conditions during the 1930s had been unprecedented, so were the terms of the Spanish democratization. Prior to that time, all institutionalized modern European authoritarian regimes that had existed for as long as a decade or more only lost power as a result of external war.
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The Spanish Transition presented the first example of a democratization from the inside out, in which the laws and institutions of the authoritarian regime were used to carry out a complete transformation into a democracy. At a press conference in 1974 (shortly before the death of Franco), the historian Ricardo de la Cierva, then the reformist director general of popular culture, was asked by Spanish reporters if any such case had ever existed, and La Cierva confessed, rightly enough, that he was not aware of any.

During the Transition the country moved legally and relatively peacefully from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy. None of the regularly organized political parties engaged in violence, although the Basque terrorist organization ETA, the extreme Left, and also, occasionally, the extreme Right, did so. Violence was totally extrasystemic, unlike the situation under the Second Republic, when major systemic forces, such as the Socialists, and then finally much of the army, engaged in it. By 1975 the anarchosyndicalist movement, once the source of much violence, had simply been eliminated by modernization.

Thus Spain continued to be different, but now in a completely positive way. In earlier generations the country had differed both because of a lingering traditionalism, on the one hand, and because of persistent efforts — from 1810 to 1931 — to introduce advanced new modern political systems for which the country's social and cultural structure was not fully prepared. An effective synergy was achieved for the first time after 1975.

This created a new "Spanish model" of democratic transition, not the courageous but futile models of 1808-14 and 1820 (which also had been widely and almost always unsuccessfully emulated elsewhere), but an eminently productive pattern that became in effect the new model for world democratic transition. It was emulated in Latin American countries and also in nearly all the Communist countries of Eastern Europe and in central and northern Asia, though — depending on the cultural heritage and/or level of development of these countries — some of them failed to become functioning democracies, moving into a different kind of twenty-first-century authoritarianism. Everywhere, except in Yugoslavia and Romania, something equivalent to the Spanish model was pursued, in most cases achieving democratic success.

One requirement of the Spanish model was rejection of the politics of vengeance, which meant eschewing any political or judicial quest for "historical justice." At the time, this was fully accepted by all the major political actors, with the partial exception of the Basque Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), still anchored in archaic habits. The Left was just as eager to embrace this policy as the Right; standard rhetoric and posturing notwithstanding, the democratic credentials of the Spanish Left were also dubious, and they were eager to start with a clean slate. A conscious decision was made to eschew any new attempt at historical justice, for there was general awareness that this had been carried out in a vindictive fashion by the Republic in 1931-32, and later with much greater brutality by the Franco regime. Leaders of the Transition appreciated the fact that another such effort could hardly be made with impartiality, and almost undoubtedly would do more harm than good.

Generally speaking, this feature of the Spanish model was also followed in other countries. Very little effort was made to indict or prosecute the personnel of the preceding authoritarian regimes during the course of the democratizations of the 1980s and 1990s. The Czechs introduced a process of "lustration," as they called it, to deal with some of the major wrongdoers of the past, especially those associated with human rights abuses, but ultimately the Czechs made little use of it. In Germany there was more of an effort to purge Communist personnel from the East German universities, but little else. In the new Baltic republics and in central Asia, the successor regimes were primarily filled with ethnic nationals in place of Russians, but criminal indictments were few and far between. Only in time did Chile and Argentina finally initiate a process of prosecuting a small number of major figures of the preceding regimes. Generally, energetic pursuit of "historical justice" was not a policy of the newly democratic and/or postcommunist regimes.

Another feature of the Spanish Transition was great attention to recent history, featuring all manner of new publicity and research, with much new scholarly publication and even more journalism. The amount of attention in Spain, however, would seem to have exceeded that found in some of the other cases. Partly this was simply due to the fact that Spain was a larger country than many, its broader market supporting a great volume and variety of publications and other publicity. This is one aspect in which there was some analogy with Russia, for in Russia, too, during the first relatively freer, if chaotic, years under Yeltsin, a great deal of new critical publication about recent history occurred. At the opposite extreme would be found some of the Asian successor states, particularly Mongolia, where there seems to have been less interest in investigating the recent past.

One difference between the Spanish case and many of the new democratic systems was that at first, not as much developed in the way of fabrication of new national myths in Spain to gloss over or explain away the negative aspects of the recent past. In postfascist Italy and in France, after the fall of the Vichy regime, there quickly developed hegemonic new myths of the national "resistance" to Fascism and Nazism, which greatly distorted historical reality, considerably exaggerating the extent of the resistance and glossing over the widespread complicity with the preceding authoritarian regimes. In many countries, myths of national victimhood abounded. The Austrians, the majority of whom had been relatively enthusiastic in their complicity with Nazism, developed a new national historical image of Austria as simply the "first victim" of Hitler, fostering a new cult of national self-esteem. In newly democratic Japan, there was a considerable tendency to overlook the massive atrocities of the preceding military regime and portray the Japanese as little more than the innocent victims of atomic warfare. Of the postcommunist countries, Russia has arguably been the site of the most fanatical nationalism and renewed self-delusion, as various forms of victim theories abounded. Similarly, in the successors to some of the East European Soviet satellites the emphasis was almost exclusively on the undeniable victimization of these countries by the Soviets, but this was emphasized to preclude full consideration of their own past during the World War II era, of the roles of their own native dictatorships, and in some cases of extensive complicity by some of their citizens in the Holocaust. In several instances there were public tributes and memorials to members of the Waffen SS or its collaborators, or even of a major war criminal like Marshal Antonescu of Romania. Nothing has been carried to this kind of extreme in Spain.

At the same time, sectors of Spanish political life have promoted myths and interpretations of their own, in some of the regions equivalent to those in other countries. Surviving franquistas, though not great in number, have continued to promote their vision of Franco as national savior and as administrator of a benign modernizing system. Similarly, the camouflage of Republican politics initiated during the Civil War itself became part of the permanent self-image of the Left with its mythic and routinely falsified invocations of Republican "democracy," combined with the glossing over of the revolution. Catalanists, particularly the Left-leaning Catalanists, have preserved their equally distorted myth of "Catalanist democracy." Basque nationalists arguably live in the greatest denial of all, with their delirious myths of Basque history and their portrayal of Basques as perpetual victims, ignoring the historical reality that what took place in the area (which they term the greater Basque country) was in reality a civil war among Basques. They equally ignore the persistent efforts of the PNV to betray the Republican cause during the war itself and its continuing attempts during the following decade to intrigue with all and sundry among the foreign powers to bring about the partition of Spain.

Among some of these sectors there have also been limits to their own partisan view of the past. Most apologists for the Franco regime do not deny that its policies of repression were originally extreme. The more serious Socialist historians also recognize the considerable deviations from democratic practice that took place among the Socialists of the 1930s. It was also typically Spanish that there was no totally hegemonic point of view about these matters, at least until the rise of political correctness ideology at the close of the twentieth century.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that the success of the Transition led to what might be called the cult or myth of the Transition, which tended to raise it to very grand dimensions indeed. The Transition was not always quite as smooth and fully consensual as it has been made out to have been. It had more rough spots and a certain number of failures, despite an impressive level of success. And, with the passage of time, as would probably be inevitable in the contemporary age, it came to be challenged by a countermyth, by a new sort of "Black Legend of the Transition," purveyed primarily by the extreme Left. According to the countermyth, the Transition consisted in large measure of a sinister manipulation by former franquistas, seeking a means of getting the entire Old Regime off the hook. Weak leftist elites collaborated in appeasement and, in order to obtain a transition to a new democratic system, agreed to a "pact of silence," wherein all the crimes of Francoism would be completely ignored and go unpunished. Again, according to the countermyth, Spain therefore could never be completely "democratic" until all residues of Francoism had been purged, including the institution of monarchy itself.
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