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European politics 20th May 2022

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A Never-Ending Story: Memory, Consensus And Democracy

“The ‘Law of Historical Memory’ was the result of a laudable effort (…) and a twofold strategy (…). On the one hand, to create a permanent debate on the past that would force the right to defend itself against more or less explicit accusations of connivance with Francoism. And, on the other, to encourage a retrospective anti-Francoism that would serve as a space for understanding with political sectors traditionally far removed from the PSOE, from Catalan and Basque independence to IU and its heirs. And establish with them a stable parliamentary bloc that would basically be nothing more than a negative coalition against the PP.”

“Open your eyes.What this country needs is another civil war, but the good guys win this time round”.

José Bergamín to Fernando Savater, around 1982 (F. Savater: Mira por dónde. Autobiografía razonada, Madrid, Taurus, 2003, p. 339).

Juan Francisco Fuentes | Between oblivion and memory: a long debate on tyranny and the civil war “Remembering civil wars was always a risky business”, states David Armitage in his book Civil Wars. A History in Ideas (2017). His study of civil war and the collective imagination constructed around it shows the reiteration of a number of factors in the way it is remembered and overcome in different eras and civilisations. One of these historical constants is the belief that civil wars generate spirals of violence and resentment that can become interminable if not cut off in time. Hence – Armitage recalls – the unworthy character that the Romans attributed to the “pestifera bella civilia”, wars without triumph or glory, in the words of Lucan; a curse for future generations, according to Horace. That is why, in the opinion of the Stoic Titus Labienus, “to forget is the best defence against civil war”. This view of the phenomenon as an unparalleled calamity that feeds back on memory had a powerful influence on political thought in modern Europe. This is indicated by the fact, noted by Armitage himself, that between 1450 and 1700, of the ten most read histories of Greco-Roman antiquity, five were about civil wars in Rome.

The same is true of tyranny, although in the reflection on its origin, its evils and its possible remedy, the classical Greek experience prevailed over the Roman tradition. Both cases coincide, however, in making memory – a selective, prophylactic memory – a key factor in a preventive policy that was to prevent a relapse into tyranny and civil war. Thus, after the end of the regime of “the thirty tyrants” established in Athens in 404 BC, the restored democracy granted a broad amnesty – the first in history, according to Nicole Loraux – and imposed a civic obligation “not to remember the evils of the past” in order to avoid their repetition. Only in this way, says an orator quoted by Xenophon in the Hellenics, could “the most dishonourable of wars” (the Peloponnesian War) be overcome, the wounds opened by tyranny be healed and civic and democratic law be consolidated on the basis of general reconciliation. This is what Nicole Loraux has called “forgetting in the memory of Athens”, remembering in order to forget for the sake of peace and coexistence.

There is an echo of this in some proposals made by Spanish liberals, well versed in the classical tradition, after the failure of the first two constitutional experiments in 1814 and 1823. A draft constitution drawn up in exile in 1819 included amongst its “general provisions” the obligation to cast “a thick veil over all opinions and functions prior to the constitutional act”. Its promulgation would be accompanied by a “conciliatory proclamation to the servile and liberal factions” and a decree warning that anything that “tends to divide [the] citizens into factions or parties and arouse national resentments against the conciliatory spirit of the law, which prescribes the forgetting of the past” would be “severely punished”. In 1826, still under the absolute monarchy of Ferdinand VII, a group of Spanish exiles in England again proposed a policy of national concord capable of facilitating a change of regime in Spain that they thought impossible by force. The plan was entitled “Minuta de decreto en que se manda celebrar el olvido de lo pasado” (“Minute of decree ordering the forgetting of the past”). Its third and last article stipulated that, once the longed-for reconciliation had been achieved, “public rejoicings and other solemnities would be held to remind [cva. added] Spaniards of the duties of concord and union”. In other words, along with “forgetting the past”, a policy of memory (“remembering”) would be promoted in the service of unity and concord amongst Spaniards. This apparent contradiction, the civic obligation to forget and remember at the same time, is probably explained by the fact that what is said to be forgotten is not the past in general, but the past, understood as a set of experiences and grievances that could not condition the future. In its neutral form, the past was therefore both what had happened and what had been suffered (pain, persecution, affronts…).

The last great exile in our history was rich in political initiatives that linked the restoration of freedoms to the establishment of peaceful coexistence, on the understanding that, to be solid and lasting, the future democracy had to banish the sectarian and revanchist spirit of other occasions. The document in favour of national reconciliation approved by the PCE in 1956 and the manifesto of 1 April of that year drawn up by the Madrid university students opposed to Franco’s regime are well known. Its first words, “We, children of the victors and the vanquished…”, were in themselves a programmatic declaration, because they announced the emergence of a new political player, consisting of a handful of young people who had decided to make reconciliation on their own. The epistolary collection of Republican exiles also contains frequent allusions to the need to reach a sincere peace with former adversaries, as the socialist Luis Araquistáin – the main man responsible for the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the PSOE in the 1930s – stated in a letter written in May 1959, three months before his death: ‘For me there are only two kinds of Spaniards: those who want to make peace with the civil war and those who don’t’. In an interview published in the Cuban magazine Bohemia in 1957, Araquistáin himself had declared: “Many of yesterday’s enemies are already embracing each other individually and the day is not far off when we will all join in a collective embrace, more intimate and lasting than that of Vergara”. Around the same time, in a speech commemorating the proclamation of the Second Republic, its president in exile, Diego Martínez Barrio, urged Spaniards to “throw away the keys and the padlocks to the memories of the Civil War”.

Long gone were the days when a minister of the Republic, Álvaro de Albornoz, proclaimed in the Constituent Cortes of 1931, no doubt pointing to the right of the House: “No more pacts: if they want a civil war, let them have one”, assuming that those who started it would lose, as had always happened in the 19th century. The phrase was reminiscent of one that a deputy of the Liberal Triennium, Juan Romero Alpuente, had uttered in 1821 in not very different circumstances: “Civil war is a gift from heaven”. In contrast to its exaltation as an expedient means of bringing about real historical change – an interpretation that had significant supporters until 1936 – the opposite attitude gained strength in Republican exile, which followed in the wake of Manuel Azaña’s famous “peace, mercy and forgiveness”. It seemed to fulfil his wish that Spaniards should learn the lesson of the “muse of chastisement” so as not to make the mistakes that led to the last war (speech of 18.7.1938).

If the statement that ‘the civil war was a gift from heaven’ expressed a revolutionary will that was ready for anything, the idea of reconciliation that made its way during Franco’s regime, especially in exile, was part of an outline of a peaceful transition for which there are numerous testimonies from the 1940s, starting with the proposal for a ‘transition’ and ‘plebiscite’ that Largo Caballero worked on shortly before his death in 1946. At almost the same time, the PSOE in the interior sent a report to the British Embassy in Madrid in which it ruled out “a vertical fall of the regime” and advocated a political change carried out “in a methodical and staggered manner”. The term transition was to enter the anti-Franco vocabulary as a sort of third way between an iniquitous dictatorship and an impossible revolution. “The Spanish affair will still require a few years for the transition to mature”, wrote the anarchist leader Diego Abad de Santillán in 1959. Three years earlier, the Socialist leader Rodolfo Llopis referred in another letter to a certain professor from the interior – probably Enrique Tierno Galván – “whom everyone presents to me as the key man in the transition”. For the young Enrique Múgica, the “liberalising teams” from the dictatorship had to convince the “democratic opposition” that “the transition to the stage of freedoms will be effective”. This was what he told Dionisio Ridruejo in a letter in April 1955. Six years later, the liberal-monarchist group led by Joaquín Satrústegui drew up a document entitled Proyecto de transición a una situación política regular y estable (Project for transition to a regular and stable political situation). The following year, Satrústegui himself took part in the famous Munich meeting, which was the staging of a transition and reconciliation plan that had been conceived until then in an unfocussed manner. The leading role played by Rodolfo Llopis and José María Gil Robles at that meeting and their final embrace symbolised the commitment of the survivors of the Civil War to the supreme goal of reconciliation. Another prominent member of that generation, the socialist Luis Jiménez de Asúa – one of the fathers of the 1931 Constitution – said it very clearly in a statement to the magazine Ibérica in 1966: “We men in exile (…) can play the role of advisors, to prevent the new generations from stumbling over the same stones that wounded us”. There was a firm determination, therefore, that the past should serve as a guide in an increasingly near future.

The publication after Franco’s death – or even before – of the memoirs of some prominent political figures of the 1930s – Azaña, Largo Caballero, Chapaprieta, Madariaga, Alcalá-Zamora, Martínez Barrio, Gil Robles… – was intended to fulfil the purpose declared by Jiménez de Asúa in 1966: to provide the new generations with a preventive memory of a tragedy that was not to be repeated. Those of Juan Simeón Vidarte, socialist deputy and secretary of the Constituent Courts of the Second Republic, bore an eloquent title, which today would cause a scandal: Todos fuimos culpables (We were all guilty) (1978).

Democratic transition and memory

There was no amnesia or silence in the democracy that emerged from the transition, contrary to what certain de facto powers in our historiography with great political and media influence maintain. On the contrary, the “weight of the past”, as one specialist has written, became “overwhelming” (Aguilar Fernández, 1996). In the words of Santos Juliá, Spaniards in the last quarter of the twentieth century “have been literally inundated with all kinds of books, (…) memoirs (…), documentaries, videos, exhibitions”, etc., referring to the Civil War and Franco’s regime. Allusions in the press and in political discourse were frequent even in the earliest and most problematic moments of the transition. “What we communists want with all our hearts”, declared Santiago Carrillo in his first television message during the election campaign of June 1977, “is that there should never again be a civil war in Spain”.

In those elections, Felipe González would say years later, the Spanish people voted “for no civil war”, which was very much in everyone’s memory, but which only the extreme right, by reminding Carrillo of the victims of Paracuellos, made an electoral banner of, with little success. This may be the key to understanding the complex role of memory in the democratic transition, wielded with a pedagogical intention to make consensus and reconciliation possible, “casting into oblivion” (Santos Juliá) that part of recent history which conflicted with that objective. What was not done, except by the most radical sectors of the right and the left, was to use the Civil War as a political weapon against the adversary. This non-aggression pact was based on the will to overcome that collective trauma and put an end to what Alfonso Guerra, interviewed by María Antonia Iglesias, called “a circular history”. Experience had shown that the desire to make amends for an unhappy past could fatally lead to its repetition.

To break this vicious circle, memory had to become the ‘muse of chastisement’ invoked by Azaña in 1938: a catalogue of errors to be avoided and an incitement to overcome old grievances. Marcelino Camacho, Communist deputy and secretary general of Comisiones Obreras, gave an example of the latter when he defended the 1977 Amnesty Law and the political process that led to it from the rostrum of the Cortes: “What seemed impossible a year ago, almost a miracle, to emerge from the dictatorship without serious traumas, is being achieved before our eyes” (Diario de sesiones, 14.10.1977). It is not surprising that what had happened since Franco’s death seemed to him to be “almost a miracle”, because in a very short time Camacho had gone from being sentenced to twenty years in prison for illegal association to becoming a member of a democratic Parliament elected on the list of a party, the PCE, which six months earlier had still been illegal. Precisely because he was a victim – and a very recent one at that – of Franco’s repression, he remembered a policy of persecution of his adversaries that a large majority of the Cortes, by voting in favour of the law, intended to banish forever. “The amnesty”, Santos Juliá will rightly say, “did not lead, then, to silence, but to remembrance”. Not even the growing pressure of terrorism and the fact that amongst the beneficiaries of the law were numerous members of ETA, fully active and unwilling to lay down their arms, spoiled the desire to make a clean break with the violence of both sides.

To consider that reconciliation, consensus and amnesty were a betrayal of those defeated in 1939 is to ignore their contribution from exile to a new, pragmatic and conciliatory policy and a new language, which included, as we have seen, the very word transition. Even in the word consensus, hardly used in Spanish political vocabulary until the 1970s, it is easy to recognise Manuel Azaña’s melancholic reflection on the inability of Spaniards to build a state “by common consent” (“The Libertarian Insurrection and the Barcelona-Bilbao axis”, 1939). The continuity between the Spain of exile and the new democracy was, therefore, greater than is claimed. Although already in the transition there was a policy of memory, practised at the highest institutional level, aimed at the recognition of this historical debt. Such was the significance of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia’s trip to Mexico in November 1978 and their cordial meeting with Dolores Rivas Cherif, Azaña’s widow. An act charged with symbolism, of which the public was informed through information and photographs published in the press, an essential part, like the greeting between Suárez and Pasionaria a year earlier, of the new iconography of reconciliation. It was the tribute that the restored Monarchy paid to the Republican exile and to the memory of the former President of the Republic as the source of a historical legitimacy that the democratic transition made its own. Without renouncing other legitimacies and other narratives of the past.

This a la carte memory, a reflection of the social and political pluralism of Spain at the time, did not deprive Spaniards of their right to remember; quite the contrary. Certainly, a palliative conception of memory prevailed, which prevented the still recent traumas from endangering the agreements required at that political moment. But the criticisms that have been made of the transition on this point are incongruous with the prurience of democratic authenticity that supposedly animates them. First, no democracy can impose a single way of remembering the past without contradicting its pluralist nature and limiting essential rights and freedoms. The second incongruity consists in claiming the memory of the Spain defeated in 1939, while at the same time disregarding the legacy of its main representatives, who fought for a sincere reconciliation, based on the desire that old grievances should not frustrate the coexistence between former adversaries and the construction of a democracy “by common consent”, as Azaña demanded in 1939.

From historical memory to democratic memory

The rise of the so-called memoria histórica, not only in Spain, responds to multiple and complex circumstances, both national and international. The evolution of the syntagma in English, Spanish and French, as can be seen in the graph generated from Google Ngram Viewer (Graph 1), which could be extended to other languages, shows a sustained increase in its use since the 1980s.

In the case of the Spanish language – which also includes works published in Latin America and digitised by Google Books – the rise would be much more pronounced, no doubt due to the prominence of the term in the Spanish political debate. This can also be seen in the graph that registers its use by the newspaper La Vanguardia between 1976 and 2021

The historical framework in which to look for the reasons for this phenomenon, both inside and outside Spain, is therefore situated between the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

One of them was what Stathis Kalyvas called the “boom in the study of civil war” after the end of the Cold War, caused by the overwhelming predominance of civil wars over those that took place between states. These, according to Armitage, constituted only 5% of those that broke out after 1989. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe also brought with it the discrediting of the concept of revolution, which shifted the focus of the social sciences towards war. War conflicts, especially civil conflicts, took on in a certain way the disruptive role that the old revolutionary theories had attributed to the class struggle. That said, this creative interpretation of war could already be recognised in Lenin’s numerous references to it in his works, for example, when he defined it as a “powerful accelerator of events”. The Spaniard Luis Araquistáin also thought so in 1934, at the height of the “Bolshevik turn” in Spanish socialism: “At the point things have reached, it is to be feared – or perhaps to be wished – that civil war cannot be avoided: only then would the charged Spanish atmosphere perhaps be purified”.

In the last third of the 20th century, the decline of the industrial working class, the crisis of classical Marxism and finally the collapse of Soviet communism led to the emergence of a post-Marxist left that replaced a class discourse with an identity construct and social struggles with “cultural” battles. Memory filled the vacuum left by the end of the “grand narratives” (Lyotard) and provided the intellectual substratum for a rupturist, rather than revolutionary, project. In the Spanish case, the Republic and the Civil War became an epic reference point of diffuse and contradictory ideological contours, in which its main protagonists would hardly have recognised themselves. The memory of the war and of anti-Francoism thus sublimated a revolutionary consciousness that was very difficult to put into practice in a stable democracy and in a society like Spain’s, fully integrated into developed Europe. As in Romero Alpuente’s time – “the civil war is a gift from heaven”-, the historical obstacles to revolution seemed to give way to the imaginary of the civil war as a transforming myth… of the past.

There were also circumstances in national politics that enhanced the role of historical memory in the discourse and strategy of a sector of the Spanish left. The electoral victory of the PP and its arrival in government in 1996 and, especially, its absolute majority four years later led to an increasing use of the past as a way of questioning the democratic legitimacy of the ruling right. The PP parliamentary group’s support for a non-legislative proposal, voted on 20 November 2002, “declaring and urging the public authorities to make moral reparation to the victims of the civil war who disappeared and were murdered for defending republican values and to recognise the right of their relatives and heirs to recover their remains, name and dignity” was of little use. The resolution, approved unanimously on a “historic day” (El País, 21.11. 2002), was far from fulfilling the purpose declared by the representatives of several parliamentary groups. And in particular by the spokesman of the Popular Group, Manuel Atencia Robledo, of “removing this issue from the political debate, [and] putting an end to it, as Mr López Garrido has said (…), for the benefit of all, for the benefit of the victims and for the benefit of future generations, and all in the spirit of the [sic] integration of our Constitution and our democracy” (Diario de sesiones, 20.11.2002).

The opposite happened. The generational change in the leadership of the PSOE, culminating in the election of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero as secretary general, accelerated the crisis of the old consensus of the transition on this and other issues. Once in government, President Rodríguez Zapatero promoted the approval of a law which, in its final formulation (Law 52/2007 of 26 December), began by appealing to the “spirit of reconciliation and concord, and of respect for pluralism and the peaceful defence of all ideas, which guided the Transition”. The so-called “Law of Historical Memory” – an apocryphal, unofficial name – responded to a laudable effort to recover the bodies of thousands of victims of the Civil War and early Francoism who were still waiting to be located, identified and buried with dignity. But also to a double political strategy that entailed unquestionable risks for the stability and solvency of our democracy. On the one hand, to create a permanent debate on the past that would force the right to defend itself against more or less explicit accusations of connivance with Francoism. And, on the other, to encourage a retrospective anti-Francoism that would serve as a space for understanding with political sectors traditionally very distant from the PSOE, from Catalan and Basque independentism to Izquierda Unida and its heirs. And to establish with them a stable parliamentary bloc, which, in essence, would be nothing more than a negative coalition against the PP.

The fact that, fifteen years after the enactment of Law 25/2007, historical memory continues to occupy a central place on the political and legislative agenda can be interpreted in several ways. The first is that, despite the grandiloquent arguments used to justify the measure, the problem is far from being solved. Not only because of its complexity, but also because of the political and electoral profitability obtained by leaving it permanently open. A paradigm of this was the operation to transfer Franco’s mortal remains on the eve of the November 2019 elections. If the concrete results of the application of the law in its strictly humanitarian purpose were rather modest, from the point of view of the political agenda setting its success has been unquestionable: the subordination of the political debate to a dispute that reduces the opposition’s room for manoeuvre and favours the maintenance of this anti-PP front, however heterogeneous it may be. It should be said, however, that the left and its pro-independence allies are not the only beneficiaries of the intense emotionality and strong polarisation generated by the so-called historical memory. The rise of Vox owes much to this new framework of Spanish politics consolidated in recent years.

It is, in any case, a dynamic framework, conditioned by the “cultural battles” of the moment and by an upward reformulation of the debate on the past that has been so successful for its promoters. Hence the serious accusations levelled against the 1977 amnesty, branded a “law of the end” by its detractors, and the Draft Law on Democratic Memory approved by the Council of Ministers on 20 July 2021, the main novelty of which is its name. The change from “historical memory” to “democratic memory” represents a qualitative leap in the treatment of recent history for political purposes and in the democratic validation of anti-Francoism of all kinds. Including terrorist groups and extreme left-wing organisations, many of them Maoist or Trotskyist-inspired, which fought against the dictatorship. The bitter discussion between the Popular MP Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo and Pablo Iglesias, Vice-President of the Government, in the Spanish Parliament in May 2020 about the FRAP membership of the Vice-President’s father was related to this crucial question: whether membership of an organisation such as the FRAP should be a cause for reproach (Álvarez de Toledo) or pride (Iglesias). And, ultimately, whether the concept of democratic memory was applicable to groups that had practised terrorism and that, far from fighting for democracy, aspired to replace Francoism with a dictatorship of the opposite sign.

The impossibility of changing the past through a certain way of remembering it and the desire, despite everything, to try to do so create a vicious circle from which it is very difficult to escape if one believes, illusorily, that current politics can have retroactive effects on history. Nothing will be able to erase those events, much less alter their outcome, according to the cynical boutade of José Bergamín that heads these pages: “What this country needs is another civil war, but the good guys win this time round”.

4 Conclusions:

1- Spain is no different. The debate on the memory of the Civil War and Francoism has given a new lease of life to the old cliché of the Spanish exception. It is the narcissism of the small anomaly, which was so hard to dismantle and which is back in the wake of a political debate contaminated by very short-term strategies and alliances. But the long history of civil wars and the political thinking that emerged around them demonstrates that the way in which the democratic transition dealt with the last civil war and its aftermath conforms to an old historical canon, whose antecedents go back to distant times and civilisations and are recognised in Spain’s own liberal and republican tradition. The exhaustive map of the situation drawn up by Xosé M. Núñez Seixas (Las guaridas del lobo) on the posthumous cult of dictators in post-totalitarian Europe presents a problem quite similar to the Spanish case with Franco.

2- The other memory(s). The main problem posed by the concept of historical memory is the attempt to abolish the plural and contingent nature of the experiences remembered and to create in their place a sectoral and often sectarian memory, established as the official truth. It cannot even be said that this narrative integrates that of the defeated left in 1939. It is rather its negation. The totalitarian impulse of an imposed memory can be better understood if we remember these words that the Count of Mayalde, director general of Security in the early Franco regime, pronounced in 1940 at a banquet-homage to Heinrich Himmler, visiting Spain: “If there is a people of historical memory, it is the Spanish” (ABC, 24.10.1940).

3- “Mai més un 34”. This statement by the old Tarradellas on the unilateral proclamation of the “Estat Català” by Companys in October 1934 sums up the lessons that the main Republican leaders drew from their political experience in the 1930s. The socialist Luis Araquistáin made his own inventory in a lecture entitled Some Errors of the Spanish Republic (Toulouse, 1947). The resounding failure of the 2017 attempt at independence in Catalonia highlighted the consequences of having forgotten Tarradellas’ advice and of replacing historical facts with certain political myths.

4- Memory and politics: a toxic relationship, with collateral damage. The events of October 2017 in Catalonia are not the only episode in recent Spain that warns of the perverse nature of what Alfonso Guerra called a “circular history”. The attraction to the 1930s, pointed out by reputable Catalan journalists after the appointment of Quim Torra, in 2018, as president of the Generalitat, is also behind the radicalisation of part of the Spanish right. It considers the founding pact of the transition to be broken and advocates a return to the epic and intransigence of the old days. Vox is the Spanish version of the Catalan independence movement’s “ho tornarem a fer” and proof that the radical right also has a “historical memory”.

and 5. A never-ending story. Building a political project on the basis of an obsessive and partisan memory of the past entails serious risks for coexistence and for the viability of a future worthy of the name. Hence the attempts, already accredited in classical Greece, to use reconciliation as a firewall against a traumatic history that can otherwise lead to an endless loop of exclusion and confrontation. Consensus on the past can only be established on a lowest common denominator, beyond which shared experiences divide far more than they unite. Moreover, the aim of legally imposing a unitary and indivisible conception of memory is difficult to fit into a pluralist democracy – strictly speaking, there is no other way – even if it has the backing of a legitimate, but circumstantial, parliamentary majority. It may be that the ultimate aim of that majority is none other than to perpetuate itself in power by creating, through “memory”, a citizenry in its own image and likeness.