Justice in Times of Transition: Lessons from the Iberian Experience1

Abstract

A key contention of the transitional justice movement is that the more comprehensive and vigorous the effort to bring justice to a departed authoritarian regime for its political crimes, the better the democratization results. This essay challenges this common assumption with empirical evidence from the Iberian Peninsula, where the global wave of democratization of the late twentieth century was born. In Portugal, political trials and bureaucratic purges intended to cleanse the state and society of the authoritarian past nearly derailed the transition to democracy by descending into a veritable political witch-hunt. In Spain, by contrast, forgetting and moving on prevailed, an approach that facilitated the country's emergence as the paradigmatic example of a successful democratic transition. Among the many lessons suggested by these counter-intuitive examples is that there is no pre-ordained outcome to any attempt at transitional justice. This is so because the principal factors driving the impulse toward justice against an old regime tend to be political in nature rather than ethical or legal. In Portugal, the rise of transitional justice mirrored the radicalism of the left-wing revolution that launched the transition to democracy. In Spain, the absence of transitional justice reflected the pragmatism imposed by the self-reinvention of the authoritarian regime and the political trauma inflected by the Spanish Civil War.