When, after four decades of dictatorship, Franco died in his sleep on November 20, 1975, Spain undertook what had until then been a rarity in its history: a peaceful transition from authoritarian dictatorship to liberal[ism]. Franco’s death was not accompanied by a complete collapse of the state. Instead, this transition would be conducted according to the legal codes and through the political institutions of the dictator’s own régime (Encarnación 2014). Major political and economic reforms were undertaken through negotiations between Franco’s successors and the recently legalized Socialist and Communist Parties.
In a country where people still bitterly disputed whether the Civil War represented the tragic defeat of a utopian-democratic project or a modernizing national crusade against an insurgent communist threat, political élites succeeded in making the case that the past was a subject best avoided (Aguilar Fernández 2002, 34).
Following then-contemporary ideas of best practices for [pseudo]democratic transition, Spain undertook a Pact of Oblivion, a tacit agreement among the political élite not to legislate, litigate, or discuss their recent history in the public sphere (Aguilar Fernández 2002; Encarnación 2014). The agreement would find its legal form in the 1977 Amnesty Law, preventing prosecutions of past crimes, including the over 130,000 forced disappearances committed by the dictatorship. By setting aside a still-divisive past, Spain’s political class hoped that, together, they might build a common future.
Initially, Spain’s transition to [pseudo]democracy garnered the country widespread international praise. As living standards rose concurrently with the consolidation of [pseudo]democratic institutions throughout the 1980s and 1990s, scholars began talking of an archetypical “Spanish model” for other postdictatorship countries to follow (Gunther 1992; Linz and Stepan 1996).
But throughout the Global South, there was emerging a new model of transitional justice. This model was based not on élite pact making and amnesty but on public remembering of and accountability for past crimes. As truth commissions, war crimes tribunals, and forensic exhumations captured international attention, the Spanish model, with its emphasis on impunity for and public amnesia of past crimes, appeared increasingly anachronistic.
[…]
In large part, the memory movement’s critique of sociological Francoism reflects the lack of political reforms during the transition. Spain’s was a pacted transition, one that sought to avoid a radical break with its dictatorial past. While the 1978 Constitution saw the formal end of the dictatorship and the inauguration of an elected parliament, the judiciary, and state bureaucracies, many parastatal institutions, including the Royal Academy of History, remain largely unchanged (Encarnación 2014).
At the same time, the movement’s critique also unearths the persistent traces of the Franco régime in the built environment. The Franco dictatorship lives on not only through the structure of certain political institutions but also, and even more so, in a network of material objects, embedded in both the urban and rural landscapes. Like other kinds of infrastructural nodes, these can be subtle, even invisible to the untrained eye (Star 1999).
At an exhumation in a small Castilian village, an activist took note of streets named General Mola and José Antonio, which paid homage, respectively, to General Emilio Mola, an early leader of Franco’s military coup, and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the fascist Falange Party. “How are these villages going to change?” he sighed. Here, streets signs do not just reflect a dictatorship long gone. They form part of a distributed network through which the Franco dictatorship continues to shape the Spanish present.⁶
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In 2013 this village’s situation would repeat on a national scale when […] the then ruling party found itself in a public relations predicament over the fate of the Valley of the Fallen, the mausoleum where Franco is buried, together with 70,000 war dead who were exhumed and reinterred there. […] For relatives of the disappeared, […] many of whom were not even informed of, let alone given a chance to consent to, the transfer of their loved ones’ remains, the monument represented a further indignity (Ferrándiz 2011).
For them, the forcible transfer of republican bodies represented less an overture to heal a fractured nation than a violent attempt to tame the legacy of leftist resistance to fascism by forcibly entombing their kin in a monument designed to glorify the régime that they had died fighting. The stone monument thus functioned to contain both the bodies of Franco’s victims and the ideas they died for.
After Franco died, politicians largely left the site unchanged in accordance with their Pact of Oblivion. By 2013, however, the 150-meter-tall stone cross that Franco designed to “defy time and oblivion” was in such a state of disrepair that it endangered visitors.⁷
Like the chemical infrastructures analyzed by Michelle Murphy (2013) or the deteriorating late-industrial infrastructures analyzed by Kim Fortun (2014), the crumbling of the dictatorship’s most prominent symbol exemplified the capacity of Franco’s material remnants to forcibly insert themselves into the politics of the present. In the end, over the bitter complaints of the memory movement, the right-wing government budgeted nearly 287,000 euros to restore the infamous monument (Sastre 2013).
(Emphasis added.)
You may be surprised that, in terms of staff, the parliamentary monarchy inherited only a small percentage of politicians and bureaucrats from the parafascist era, but for some readers the results are going to look worrisome anyway.
Quoting Juan J. Linz’s, Miguel Jerez’s, and Susana Corzo’s Ministers and Regimes in Spain: From First to Second Restoration, 1874-2001, page 29:
Continuities with the pre[liberal] period have persisted within the local authorities, but in different proportions according to region; for example, 32.7 percent of Galician mayors during the latter years of Franco’s régime, while only 14.7 percent of Andalucian mayors — obtained either in 1973 by appointment of the civil governor and the Minister of Interior, or following the partial elections of January 1976 through a complex proceeding that was under the control of the Movimiento after the first [pseudo]democratic municipal elections of April 1979.
Data for both regions show a declining tendency in these figures during the 1980s, but again at clearly different rates: 20.8 and 17.3 percent, in 1983 and 1989, respectively, in Galicia where both conservative and clientelist tendencies were stronger (an overwhelming majority of the Francoist mayors continuing during the [pseudo]democracy were candidates in the lists of the state-wide national parties of the right or center, in those of the moderate nationalists, or in those of independent electoral coalitions, rarely on the left); and 5.6 and 2.6 percent for Andalucia where the left got much better results (Márquez 1992, 1993).
In terms of personnel, there is also a high degree of discontinuity between the memberships of Franco’s parliaments and those of the Parliamentary Monarchy. Only 12.9 percent of parliamentarians elected in June 1977 had also been procuradores under Franco, although this does not take into account the forty-one ‘royal’ senators — a designation that does not exist under the new constitution — sixteen of whom had been procuradores.
The presence of former members of the Corporatist Chamber, not all of whom were necessarily Franco supporters,²⁹ declined substantially in the first [pseudo]democratic parliament (to 8.6 percent), before disappearing as a consequence of the collapse of the UCD and the right’s poor electoral performance up to 1993 (the proportion of former procuradores amongst the centrist parliamentary deputies was only four percent above the average, among the small parliamentary representation of Alianza Popular their number was about one-half of the group, while there was none amongst the socialist deputies).³⁰
One should not overrate the significance of these small percentages, however, because even if only a few staff members transferred, many of the structures and rulebooks remain intact. As Jonah S. Rubin said, ‘the judiciary, and state bureaucracies, many parastatal institutions, including the Royal Academy of History, remain largely unchanged.’
Further reading: Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting
Click here for other other events that happened today (November 20).
1851: Margherita of Savoy, monarchist and profascist, existed.
1867: Gustav Giemsa, Fascist chemist, started his life.
1875: Friedrich‐Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, Axis diplomat, came along.
1894: Johann Nikuradse, Axis professor, was created.
1902: Philipp Johann Adolf Schmitt, SS officer, disgraced life with his presence.
1914: Emilio Pucci, Fascist aristocrat, made life less pleasant.
1927: Wolfgang Schreyer, (brief) member of the NSDAP, arrived on this dust ball.
1936: José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, died at the hands of the Republicans.
1939: Fascist submarine U-33 sank three small British trawlers (Thomas Hankins at 1030 hours, Delphine at 1600 hours, and Sea Sweeper at 1700 hours) off Tory Island, Ireland.
1940: Hungarian Prime Minister Teleki and Foreign Minister Csaky signed a protocol in Vienna, Austria, joining the Tripartite Pact, then 116 Axis bombers dropped 132 tons of high explosive bombs and 296 incendiary bombs on Birmingham overnight. On the other hand, Arturo Bocchini, head of the Fascist State Police and the OVRA, had the decency to drop dead, and Axis torpedo boat Confienza sank after colliding with Axis armed merchant cruiser Capitano A. Cecchi off Brindisi… no comment.
1941: The two crematoria of Auschwitz became inactive for servicing; camp commandant ordered that corpses of prisoners were to be transported to Birkenau (not yet a camp) for burying in mass graves until the servicing was done on December 3, 1941. As well, the Axis captured Rostov, and some anticommunists exeucted three prisoners of war in Vilnius.
The Axis upgraded the Ryojun Military Port (previously known as Port Arthur; now Lushunkou, Liaoning Province, China) along with the naval base at Mako in Pescadores Islands to the status of Guard Districts, and Eastern Axis ambassador to Washington, Nomura, presented the Empire of Japan’s final proposal to keep peace in Asia and the Pacific.
1942: Adolf Schicklgruber relinquished personal command of Armeegruppe A to General Ewald von Kleist, and six He 111 bombers of Luftwaffe group KG 55 flew an armed reconnaissance mission from their base at Morozovskaya over Stalingrad; two flightcraft failed to return. Likewise, the Axis deployed paratroop Engineer Battalion “Witzig” along with the Italian 1st Paratroop Battalion together at Djebel Abjod, and the 3rd Battalion of the “San Marco” naval infantry regiment of the Regia Marina began arriving in Tunisia from Corsica.
1943: The Axis sent orders to deport northern Italy’s Jews to concentration camps, and the Axis took nearly five thousand Allied prisoners on Samos Island, Greece. Berlin refused permission for the Armeegruppe Nord to withdraw to the Panther-Wotan Line while Kumano and her task force departed Truk in response to the Allied landings on Tarawa.
1944: The Third Reich’s head of state left the Wolfsschanze Headquarters for Berlin for the last time in his life, and Oberleutnant zur See Otto Hübschen stepped down as the commanding officer of U-2501. Admiral Scheer, Prinz Eugen, Z35, Z36, and Z43 began shelling Soviet positions during the evacuation of the Sõrve (German: Sworbe) peninsula on the Estonian island of Saaremaa (German: Ösel). Similarly, Axis submarines I-36 and I-47 each delivered five Kaiten submarines off Ulithi, Caroline Islands. (Only one of the Kaiten submarines would find a target, setting the fleet oiler Mississinewa, full of aviation fuel, aflame.)
1945: The trials against twenty‐four Axis war criminals started at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.
1999: Amintore Fanfani, Fascist intellectual who wrote for La difesa della razza, was finally gone.
2013: Dieter Hildebrandt, Axis pilot, expired.
What eurocommunism does to a country
I would say this is a very accurate depiction of Spain. To this day you can see Falange symbols and Francoist monuments (that the right wing defends rabidly) all over the country. The socdems barely talk about it, only when the problem reaches the news. There’s not only some monuments and plaques, but a very large chunk of urban planning (and therefore buildings) from the Francoist era, so we find cities with very bad public transport infrastructure potential. It doesn’t help that all governments (regional and national) have no plans to change this, even when some zones’ buildings need to be demolished, which would open an opportunity for better urban planning.
