History and the democratic state

Precisely a year after Franco's death, the Nationalist ex-combatants' confederation sent a letter to all those holding mayoral office in Spain with a reminder to commemorate the occasion. On the same day, 20 November 1976, the editorial in the liberal newspaper El País invoked the 1930 command of the country's most eminent philosopher of modernity, José Ortega y Gasset, made in the aftermath of the fall of General Primo's earlier military regime: ‘the state does not exist. Spaniards: reconstruct your state!’ Ortega had been calling for a republic and for the monarchy of Alfonso XIII to be toppled, and there is some irony in the fact that his call should be remembered when the hopes for democratisation in 1976 depended on the legitimacy of another monarch, King Juan Carlos. The fact remained, however, that in the turbulent wake of the dictatorship's demise, powerbrokers nationally and internationally perceived that the new political order had to be seen to be based on explicit social consent if its stability was not to be compromised.

The role of memory in processes of political legitimation is never more important than during transitions to democracy. Hence, the enthusiastic sponsorship across the political spectrum of the Amnesty Law of 1977, as discussed in Chapter 9. Though politically rational, consigning the conflictive past to ‘oblivion’ through a tacit ‘pact of forgetting’ seemed, nonetheless, to some observers at the time and many others since to have favoured those who had supported and participated in the Franco system.