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Overcoming the Violent Past in Spain, 1939–2009

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2012

Pablo Sánchez León
Pablo Sánchez León
Affiliation:
Departamento de Derecho Constitucional e Historia del Pensamiento y de los Movimientos Sociales y Políticos, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y de la Comunicación, Universidad del País Vasco, Campus de Bilbao, C/ Barrio Sarriena s/n, Leioa, 48940 – Vizcaya, Spain. Email: psleon@gmail.com
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Abstract

Although part of a wider cultural and political phenomenon in world democracies, the revival movement on memory from traumatic past events has in the case of Spain strong contextual bearings. Drawing on the concept of ‘regimes of memory’, this article discusses two successive patterns of supply and demand of discourse and policies on memory from the end of the 1936–1939 Civil War to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Describing the rhetoric of ‘total victory’ under Franco's dictatorship, and later of ‘collective and shared guilt’ under democracy, it outlines a dialectics between hegemonic and non-hegemonic discourses on collective trauma that helps explain the rise and decline of regimes of memory in general, as well as the current orientation of public debates in Spain towards a new regime of memory based on a claim for ‘instituted remembrance’ of the traumatic past.

Type
Focus: European Civil Wars
Information
European Review , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , 04 September 2012 , pp. 492 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2012

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References

References and Notes

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