As the economic crisis degenerates into a regime crisis in Spain, Sophie Baby’s book is a timely reminder of its history. By revealing the violence of a democratic transition idealized for too long and now called into question, his reflection echoes other situations of national pacification carried out by force.
In this work, Sophie Baby re-examines and re-evaluates in a relevant way a “ myth », that of Spain’s peaceful transition to democracy. She proposes to “ deconstruct this mythical representation of a peaceful transition which would have put an end to an age-old conflict between the two Spains » (p. 7). Against the dominant orthodoxy, against reading “ prison » and widely shared of a democratic transition negotiated from above, kept away from political violence, Sophie Baby reaffirms the centrality of “ violent act » in the process of rebuilding the political link in Spain. Far from considering this violence as an exceptional phenomenon, with no impact on the recent political history of Spain, the author breaks with a “ well-founded illusion » to take seriously the story of a democratic transition and a less sanitized, less consensual political reconciliation.
Peaceful democratization, a retrospective illusion
After an introductory chapter which reviews the methodology adopted in writing the text and the difficulty of defining the category “ violence “, the first part enlightens us on what the author calls “ the cycle of protest violence “. Using figures and comparative scientific production, a series of preconceived ideas are deconstructed. The first received idea is that of the character “ peaceful » of the transition. Unfounded, not based on any relevant element, it eludes the fact that the process of democratization, normalization, end of conflict, has in reality caused the death of many Spanish citizens (700 deaths), much more than the Italy of the “ years of lead “, and recorded more than 3,000 violent actions in seven years, between 1982 and 1975. These figures alone, according to Sophie Baby, are enough to put “ in question the peaceful label attached to the Spanish transition » (p. 50). The second received idea is that of violence monopolized by “ only Basque conflict “. In reality, violence had clearly become widespread at the time of the transition, driven both byETAthe extreme right (counter-terrorist violence) and the police. The third and final preconceived idea relates to the limitation of violence to the circles of political, military and judicial elites, violence of which only members of these circles would have been the victims. However, here again, Sophie Baby shows that violence has infused all social circles (students, workers, traders, etc.), thus affecting groups, civilians, to whom “ violent actors » assigned « a sociopolitical status “.
The second part of the work, entitled “ The State and violence », returns to the process by which the government and the reformists reinvested the monopoly of legitimate physical violence, the domain reserved solely for the state apparatus. Because what happened during the transition was a dispersion, a disorderly distribution of the right and the power to use force between the different actors involved in the process of reinventing the Spanish political contract. But reinvesting the monopoly of violence, a difficult task, will come up against the reluctance of centrifugal forces of “ inside » and “ out », reluctant to the idea of rallying a center and recognizing its legitimacy. And because the monopoly of physical violence and “ symbolic ” was contested from within and without, the state apparatus uses, in the name of preserving “ public order », of the peaceful democracy to come, and of the “ reason of state », of repressive means which will place violence a little more at its heart – violence which must be partly linked to the logic and justifications of the repressive policies inherited from the Franco regime, and whose transition, at its beginnings, was heavily burdened . This is how many civilians, more than a hundred, were killed by the police forces, and abuses of all kinds were committed by these same police forces, among other things in the name of the fight against terrorism. It is therefore logical that Sophie Baby, given the aggregation of violent events and behaviors that she identifies, writes that “ Francoism was the cradle of political violence and the transition the place of their flourishing » (p. 161).
Violence and negotiations
Sophie Babyé thus shakes certainties, scientific certainties which continue to inhabit, perhaps for a long time, the vast majority of works relating to this Spanish transition inaugurated by the disappearance of General Franco. And this is precisely the interest of his book: to evoke in renewed terms a transition about which we thought we had said almost everything, thereby authorizing the opening of a relatively wide space for debate and questions. And if there is a point, among others, in the Spanish transition and its posterity which deserves that we dwell on it to compare it with another case of peaceful transition (South Africa) whose terms were negotiated by the outgoing and incoming elites, it is indeed the violence with which the negotiations themselves were charged. Violence that the amnesties will first reveal, then the figure of the mobilized and ostracized victim, entered into “ the end of his disgrace » because it had become boring, but continued despite being sidelined to thwart the political reconciliation projects of the top-of-top.
Indeed, in Spain as in South Africa, the violence of the transition was also reflected in the very act of pacifying, of reconciling victims and executioners, in the strategic choice of proceeding with the rebuilding of links whose blindness will generate years later a revitalization of victimhood claims. To make possible the advent of a peaceful society and a peaceful relationship with the Other, the Spanish and South African political elites resorted to forced reconciliations, calling for a legal device, amnesty, which substantialized political considerations (priority national unity) and marginalized ethical and judicial considerations (refusal or reluctance to judge criminals). But these amnesties, because they erase traces of the past and are an injunction to forgetting, are today generally abhorred by the victims, international institutions for the defense of human rights and by international criminal law.
Memory and forgetting
This is precisely what Paloma Aguilar, Odette Martinez Maler and Danielle Rozenberg have shown, for example, regarding the reception by the Spanish victims of Francoism, the pact of silence and the amnesty law. This amnesty-amnesia law, passed on October 14, 1977 by the Spanish Parliament in “ name of the necessary reconciliation » began to be contested at the end of the 1990s by the “ defeated by the dictatorship and the transition “. And with the arrival of the socialists in power who opted for a “ counter-model of reconciliation “, THE “ pact to forget the democratic transition » began to collapse, notably with the law on “ historical memory » of 2007. However, if this law made it possible to break the pact of forgetting the transition, if it allowed families of victims to find the bodies of loved ones prisoners of mass graves, if, finally, this same law made possible, in particular through Judge Baltasar Garzon, the opening of a narrow judicial space assigned to the unveiling of the truth about the victims of the Franco dictatorship, it very quickly knew how to show the Spaniards the limits fixed in the possibility of questioning the painful past. The withdrawal of Judge Garzon from the investigation into the disappearances of the dictatorship, in addition to being proof of it, became the symbol of the violence that the Spanish democratic transition has and continues to exert on the victims and families of victims.
And what can we say about the Commission? Truth Reconciliation » South African posed today as an example but so much criticized by victims who, for many, did not hesitate the day after the official birth of the rainbow nation (rainbow nation), to resort to the law and the judiciary to express and make their suffering audible ? Contrary to what the world media and South African media in particular showed, for a plethora of victims, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created more injustice and suffering than peace and social cohesion. Many of the victims did not recognize themselves in the values held by the commission, values which the commission said were held by the entire South African society. Because she then kept away from discussions and reparation measures the victims whose “ physical integrity » had been preserved, the commission reinforced the feeling of injustice felt by groups who felt wronged by decisions considered arbitrary. While it is true that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was undoubtedly an institution “ popular “, she was also particularly “ criticized for its work guaranteeing impunity » to those who had agreed to submit to it.
Thus coming together, through their respective experiences of negotiated exit from conflict, on the mixed, even contested results of these same experiences, the Spanish and South African cases lead the observer to re-examine the naturalized notions of “ democratic transition » or “ peaceful transition “, since these, in addition to being very differently understood by political and social actors, who do not assign them the same meaning and the same practical consequences, are very often sources of misunderstanding and cause of marginalization for many people. victims. If the work Sophie Baby, insofar as it breaks with the explanatory ready-to-think and conceptual ready-to-wear surrounding the Spanish democratic transition (because it takes an original look at what is happening in the period leading to pacification), allows in part to do this work, it would also be interesting in the times to come and in a comparative perspective, to consider the posterities, the “ later lives » processes of pacification and reconciliation to understand what they say about the current situation of forced reconciliations, the reality of the discourses and practices of peace and consensus which they claim to carry.