Moaist Revolution and the Spanish Civil War: 'Revisionist' History and Historical Politics

Abstract

THE Spanish general election of March 1996 was a close contest between the centre-left Socialist party (PSOE)—in power for more than thirteen years—and the centre-right Popular Party (PP). The previous decade had seen the development of an underlying consensus, both of principle and policy, between the main constituents of Spanish politics. During this period a mixed economy, liberalised public culture, equality of opportunity, progress towards social justice, and recognition of regional autonomies, had moved to a secure zone beyond partisan dispute. Despite—though also because of—the continuing depredations of the Basque separatists of ETA, bridges were constructed over the turbulent rivers of a deeply divisive past. In the solid centre of politics now lay a lodestone of constitutional gravitas which seemed at once to be the coping-stone of ‘La Transición’—Spain's slow and deliberate journey from dictatorship to democracy, and from relative poverty to a consumer society, to which many observers (the present writer among them) wonderingly attached the word ‘miraculous’.