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Spanish Politics: Democracy after Dictatorship Omar Encarnación Polity Press (Cambridge, 2008) 192 pp. ISBN: 978-07456-3993-2
In this book, Omar Encarnación unravels - in an analytically insightful way - the experience of a country with one of the most successful democratic transitions in Europe namely post-Franco Spain. Although the 'paradigm' in the literature of Transitional Justice' emphasises the cathartic function of trials, policies of lustration, truth commissions and more generally a comprehensive scrutiny of a society's violent past, the book 'Spanish Politics' puts forward a refined and provocative theoretical argument that democratic consolidation can be achieved without coming to terms with the past', provided that strong democratic institutions are established in the emerging democracy which, subsequently, offer the basic instruments for prospective truth-seekers.
The Spanish Civil war (1936-1939) left the country in ruins with approximately 500,000 dead, a deeply divided society, and the beginning of a remarkably long-lived dictatorship under Franco (1939-1975). The death of Franco (1975) signalled the beginning of a successful process of democratic consolidation, which became known - sarcastically sometimes - as Santa Transición ' (Holy Transition). The book focuses on tackling two puzzling and interrelated questions: How can a deeply divided society with virtually no previous democratic experience set the founding tenets of a successful and widely recognised democracy? Subsequendy why does an established democracy remain reluctant to debate the traumatic experiences of its distant past related to the legacies of the civil war and the dictatorship?
'Consensus' was the central ingrethent of the Spanish recipe for democratic consolidation. But how did it become possible for groups formerly in conflict to reach fundamental consensual agreements ranging from the recognition of the Communist Party, the granting of pardons to the enemies of Franco' to...