The Spanish Conflict of the 20th Century: from Disputes about the Future to Disputes about the Past

Abstract

The state of conflict, originating in the 19th century, became an integral characteristic of Spanish reality in the 20th century and remains relevant to this day. The semantic center of the Spanish conflict was the Spanish Civil War of 1936—1939, when a dispute about alternative projects for the future and value guidelines turned into the tragedy of the split of the country. The conflict of the Francoist stage is associated with resistance to the regime and the formation of an opposition. Four key phases can be distinguished in it — the post-war state, the period 1945—1956, the expansion of the opposition during the period of the second Francoism and the search for compromises at the stage of late Francoism. The stage of democratic transition, as well as the period from the early 1980s to the end of the 1990s characterized by the “freezing” of the conflict and its reformatting. At this moment, the dispute about the future of Spain was actually resolved and the conflict was transferred from values and alternatives of the future to the presentation of accounts for the past. Disputes about the past, accounts for the crimes of the civil war and the Franco regime became the basis of a new conflict at the turn of the 20th — 21st centuries and continue to remain relevant in Spain to this day. This article is devoted to the analysis of the specifics of the ongoing Spanish conflict, its content and expression, as well as its characteristic semantic transformations.