Sunday, November 19, 2017

Choosing to forget injuries, at least for awhile

A few weeks ago I found myself in a discussion of how the Catalan independence movement was roiling Spain, a country where I'd just spent a delightful month. I quickly realized that I didn't know my ass from my elbow about contemporary Spanish politics. The historical reading I'd done on the country tended not to extend forward beyond the end of the Civil War in 1939 or perhaps the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. That was a long time ago; how did contemporary Spain come to be and how did the country work? After all, the place is not just a glorious historical artifact.

Tellingly, the only hint I got from a Madrid friend felt cryptic: "Nobody talks about it."

Seeking answers, I went looking for my preferred source of information -- a book, preferably in English since I'm linguistically challenged. Somewhere I happened on Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting by Omar G. Encarnación. The author, a professor at Bard College, is actually writing within a discussion among political scientists about what makes for a successful transition from authoritarian rule to democracy, but along the way he provides an accessible narrative of the modern Spanish political developments which are the backdrop of the current impasse.

The Franco regime won power in the 1930s and cemented its long rule through brutal repression of any hint of opposition. It might have been natural, as international circumstances changed, the dictator died, and Spain tried to emerge from being an European fascist throwback and pariah, for opponents to respond to any hint of that regime crumbling by seeking revenge. In fact, in the mid-1970s, the political classes did the opposite. They chose fully conscious "forgetting."

Spain suggests that in some cases a political solution that abridges, circumvents, and delays justice against the old regime might be preferable. This hard truth gets us to the question of why forgetting flourished in Spain in the first place. In Spain, the question about what to do about the past was approached not as an ethical or legal challenge, as the transitional justice movement is prone to do, but rather as a political dilemma. This entailed doing what was possible rather than what was right.

Franco's designated successor was the nominal monarch, but King Juan Carlos knew that royal absolutism wasn't going to fly. A politically nimble politician of the old regime, Adolfo Suárez, offered Spain's repressed Socialists and Communists democratic rights -- freer speech, elections, a written constitution (1978) -- in return for a broad agreement not to relitigate the Civil War. According to Encarnación, the opposition was almost as willing to keep silence as the former Francoists.

... the Pact of Forgetting aimed at arriving at something of a consensus about Spanish history, especially the Civil War. Although the memory of the Civil War remained polarized, for the main actors of the democratic transition the conflict came to be understood as a guerra de locos (war of collective madness) that produced no winners and losers, only victims. In this problematic formulation, both sides bore equal responsibility for the Civil War, which made it redundant to ascribe blame to any particular group in society. The important thing was to ensure that a similar conflict would never happen again, and the best way to achieve that result was to forget and to look to the future.

Both left and right simply wanted to go on -- to transform Spain into a "normal" European state. When the Socialists won power through election in 1982 (and the right allowed a peaceful transition of power), rejoining Europe, modernizing Spain in the eyes of the continent, remained their priority.

Throughout Spain's democratic transition, regional separatisms erupted around the transition's edges. Basque separatists blew up Franco's designated successor, Prime Minister Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, in 1973 while the old dictator still lived, a deed which certainly impacted the transition. But, though Carrero Blanco may not have been missed, ETA's bombings did not create broad support for regional separation. And ETA rejected what the rest of Spain was doing:

... like other revolutionary movements of the period, ETA members chose to distance themselves from the democratization process in Madrid in protest against what they perceived as an illegitimate transition to democracy, since neither the right nor the left approved of the principle of regional self-determination. Herri Batasuna, ETA’s political branch, branded the democratic transition “the pure continuity of Francoism”.

Majorities of Spaniards simply wanted an end to political violence.

Between 1979 and 1980, a period that coincided with the negotiation and ratification of the Basque autonomy statute, ETA killed 242 persons—one third of all those killed since the beginning of the transition

... the political class sought to solve the conundrum posed by the demands for self-governance by Spain’s separatist-nationalist communities. The failure to deal successfully with these demands in the 1931 constitution was widely seen in 1977 as having contributed to the failure of the Second Republic. ... The solution arrived in the form of a highly contradictory constitutional compromise that stresses the “indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation,” effectively eliminating the possibility for self-determination, alongside the recognition of a variety of “nationalities” in the Spanish territory and the right of any region to self-governance. This compromise opened the way for the creation of las autonomías, a system of regional self-governance distinguished by its asymmetry, with the “historic” autonomous regions (Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia) enjoying more autonomy than the rest. As such, the system remains closer to “regionalism” than to “federalism,” a term studiously avoided in the 1978 constitution ...

It is the residue of these compromises, and subsequent economic, political, and attitudinal twists and turns, that set up the Catalonia impasse today.

It was not until 2007 that the Spanish parliament passed the "Law of Historical Memory" which reckoned more openly with the painful past, apologized to Franco's victims, and led to removal of many Francoist monuments. This was at least partially enabled by the judge Baltasar Garzón's decision in 1998 that the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet could be held legally accountable for his crimes in his country. Spain's movement away from "forgetting" and toward openly engaging with its past involved a sort of positive blow-back from Latin American struggles for democracy. Encarnación quotes Carlos Castresana, the lead prosecutor in the Pinochet case, and latter head of the International Commission against Organized Crime in Guatemala:

"The truth about the past is the compensation that we owe those who made the miracle of our transition possible with the sacrifice of their silence. "

I'm sure there are better histories of this complex progression, but I was glad to find Democracy Without Justice in Spain to cast light on some of my questions. This was only possible because of access to academic libraries through my Erudite Partner; the book is beyond expensive which probably means it is less read than it might be.

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