Democracy Without Justice in Spain. Omar G. Encarnacion
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broadly displayed at the 1962 Munich Congress, a gathering in which prominent figures of the Republican exile, including many old socialist hands, declared their desire for “political prudence” in any process of political change in Spain and renounced all active and passive violence before, during, and after the transition to democracy (Aguilar 2002: 103).10 Numerous position papers presented at the Munich conference made reference to the Civil War as a fratricidal war, and discussed the need to overcome this conflict through reconciliation rather than recrimination, together with a desire to avoid any repetition of the tragedy at all cost. These commitments, according to Aguilar (2002: 103), were greatly influenced by the “ghosts” of the Civil War, since what brought together the representatives of the Republican exile to Munich was having lost the war and being forced to live their lives outside of Spain. The conference concluded with a speech by Salvador de Madariaga, former ambassador to France during the Republican period, who noted to great applause that “The Civil War that began in Spain on 18 July 1936 and that the Franco regime has maintained artificially through censorship, the monopoly of the press and radio and victory parades ended in Munich the day before yesterday, 6 July 1962” (Aguilar 2002: 104–5).
As left-wing leaders began to assert themselves in domestic politics during the early 1970s, they displayed a keen desire to set aside the ideological battles of the past. This was in keeping with the view that heightened political polarization had caused the collapse of the Republic and the Civil War. Socialist elder Enrique Múgica in an interview with El País during the opening of the PSOE’s first party congress held in Spain in 1976 noted that “This country has to leave behind the many decades of conflict, translated into bloody antagonism, and it has to formulate a dialectic of class in terms of peaceful co-existence.”11 PCE leaders made analogous statements. Perhaps the most eloquent words were those of Santiago Álvarez, a communist leader tortured and sentenced to death by Franco. In exhorting his fellow communists, the most important source of domestic opposition to Franco’s regime since the end of the Civil War, to moderate their political demands, he noted:12
This memory of the past obliges us to take these circumstances into account, that is, to follow a policy of moderation. We feel responsibility for this process of democratization and the need to make a superhuman effort so that this process is not truncated. This is a unique moment in Spanish history. After more than a century of civil wars and a vicious cycle of massacres among Spaniards, which began after the War of Independence and ended in June 1977 with the first elections based on universal suffrage, this is the moment when it is possible to end this cycle and to open a period of civilized life, politically speaking. In this sense we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of expressing opinions that might be misunderstood, which could be, or appear to be, extremist.
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