Democracy without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting by Omar G. Encarnación (review)

In his new book, Omar G. Encarnación presents an engaging exploration of Spain’s unique model for democratic transition to democracy in the wake of dictatorship. He explains in his introduction that while other societies such as South Africa and Argentina have sought reconciliation or retribution after an authoritarian regime, Spain represents an exception in that the long-standing Franco dictatorship was not defeated by some external foreign enemy nor toppled from within. Rather, the regime was transformed internally by reformers within the authoritarian government that relied on the existing legal and political institutions, many of which survived the transition to democracy. Such a reformation from within, Encarnación argues, fomented a willingness by both the right and the left to forge a political consensus based on a shared desire to forget the past and establish an “amnesty for democracy.” In this way, the political class in Spain sought a “tabula rasa” that would delineate “new” Spain from “old” and allow for a re-imagining of Spain as a modern, progressive European country. The so-called “Pacts of Forgetting” between the right and the left was less an attempt at reconciliation and more a desire to purge a traumatic past that was perceived as an obstacle for Spain’s modernization and Europeanization.

Encarnación’s study approaches Spain’s transition period chronologically beginning with the years leading up to, and immediately after, Franco’s death and he concludes with an examination of the political consequences in modern day Spain and the lessons to be learned from a “transition without justice.” In Chapter 1, he explains the “uniqueness” of Spain’s “Pact of Forgetting” is that it was not focused on forgetting but more a desire to prevent the memory of certain historical events from “encumbering the transition to a new democratic regime.”¹ While the Pact of Forgetting attempted to unburden post-Franco Spain from the harsh memories of the dictatorship, its harsh repression of diversity or rebellious voices, as well as its own re-writing of history, Encarnación recognizes a paradox that resulted from a desire to set the past aside. By trying to set the past aside, he asserts, Spain allowed for the persistence of many material reminders, most importantly among them the Valle de los Caídos, of precisely that which society sought to forget. Moreover, the absence of any recognition of all the victims of the Spanish Civil War accentuated the uneven memorialization of the past during the transition years.

In Chapter 2, Encarnación addresses the years from 1977 to 1981 and what he terms the “rise of forgetting” during which the priority of the left was not to punish the old regime but to consolidate democracy through pragmatism. Beginning with King Juan Carlos I’s decision to put the country on a path toward democracy, an ethos of political consensus permeated the democratic transition. Encarnación recognizes yet another paradox of the Spanish transition where the process for political reform was anchored in the legal structures and mechanisms of the authoritarian regime the country sought to distance itself from. The notion of “change within continuity”² satisfied, states Encarnación, both the old regime’s desire for the transition to appear legal and the leftist opposition’s desire for a swift return of political and civil liberties.

In Chapter 3, Encarnación looks at the years of “disremembering” during the years in which the Socialist PSOE party ruled, 1982–1996, that ironically represent the height of Spain’s collective amnesia. Again, the author detects another irony in Spain’s transition to democracy where the PSOE, a primary target of Fran-coist repression because of its historically progressive politics, ushered in a policy of “desmemoria” (disremembering) following its landslide victory in 1982 that has come to be known as “el Cambio” (the Change). On one hand, declares Encarnación, the PSOE wanted to continue the...