Ironías de la Historia española: observaciones sobre la política pos-franquista de olvido y memoria

Abstract

The Spanish post-dictatorial politics of memory are marked by a series of displacements, diversions or ironies: The political elites of the post-Franco period used the legacy of the dictatorship to entrench a politics of silence in the service of post-dictatorial stability, thus basing a new democratic regime on a political habitus instilled under authoritarian rule. The focus of the pacto del olvido (pact of oblivion) on forgetting the Civil War served as a screen hiding other, potentially more upsetting issues that had to be forgotten. By stabilizing democracy through silence, the post-Franco democracy created a civil society space that allowed the irruption of memories into the public domain. Memories intruded into politics by means of burial rituals serving as an expressive political practice; thus it was the dead who broke the silence of Spanish politics. These political burial rituals not only galvanized the transformation of Spanish memory politics from forgetting to remembering, but also prompted its spread beyond the boundaries of national politics to local, regional, and transnational politics. In 2007 the state responded to this challenge by enacting a law that proclaims to recognize and broaden the rights of victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship. The law is part of a rearguard battle in which the state acknowledges that a politics of forgetting is no longer legitimate, but seeks to stem demands for justice. But rather than imposing a renewed closure on the crimes of the past, the law will spark further demands for compensation, punishment and additional forms of remembering.