Spain is a notable exception to the implicit rules of late
twentieth-century democratization: after the death of General
Francisco Franco in 1975, the recovering nation began to
consolidate democracy without enacting any of the mechanisms
promoted by the international transitional justice movement. There
were no political trials, no truth and reconciliation commissions,
no formal attributions of blame, and no apologies. Instead, Spain's
national parties negotiated the Pact of Forgetting, an agreement
intended to place the bloody Spanish Civil War and the
authoritarian excesses of the Franco dictatorship firmly in the
past, not to be revisited even in conversation. Formalized by an
amnesty law in 1977, this agreement defies the conventional wisdom
that considers retribution and reconciliation vital to rebuilding a
stable nation. Although not without its dark side, such as the
silence imposed upon the victims of the Civil War and the
dictatorship, the Pact of Forgetting allowed for the peaceful
emergence of a democratic state, one with remarkable political
stability and even a reputation as a trailblazer for the national
rights and protections of minority groups.Omar G. Encarnacion
examines the factors in Spanish political history that made the
Pact of Forgetting possible, tracing the challenges and
consequences of sustaining the agreement until its dramatic
reversal with the 2007 Law of Historical Memory. The combined
forces of a collective will to avoid revisiting the traumas of a
difficult and painful past and the reliance on the reformed
political institutions of the old regime to anchor the democratic
transition created a climate conducive to forgetting. At the same
time, the political movement to forget encouraged the embrace of a
new national identity as a modern and democratic European state.
Demonstrating the surprising compatibility of forgetting and
democracy, "Democratization Without Justice in Spain" offers a
crucial counterexample to the transitional justice movement. The
refusal to confront and redress the past did not inhibit the rise
of a successful democracy in Spain; on the contrary, by leaving the
past behind, Spain chose not to repeat it.
General
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