“Evolution Without Revolution”: Narratives of Rupture and Reconciliation in Spanish and Portuguese Democratization

The Spanish democratic transition that took place in the 1970s is as celebrated as it is controversial. The hegemonic narrative about how and why it was produced rejects the idea of rupture as such. Spanish democracy was not born through a political revolution, and in contrast with several other modern democracies, the Spanish one does not claim to have in its DNA any traces of the 18th- and 19th-century liberal revolutions. Spanish mainstream political culture is a striking example of how it became increasingly hard to use the concept of revolution as a synonym for deep, positive structural change. The contrast with the Portuguese democratization is quite stark. Starting a couple of years earlier, in April 1974, the Portuguese regime change serves as a counterexample for the Spanish transitional model. While the Portuguese became “arguably the most radical transition process” of the last three decades of the 20th century, the Spanish case was, “in contrast, one of the least radical democratic transitions” (Fishman 19), as if its virtue would lie in its non-radicality. Prevented from sustaining itself on the rejection of the dictatorship it intended to overcome, the Spanish Transition sought to legitimize itself through the celebration of peace and reconciliation, a moral point of view pervasively present in institutional interpretations. However, such celebratory narratives about the Spanish Transition became the object of intense criticism because they obliterated any reference to transitional justice, which became central in conflict resolution and democratization studies, as well as for international law.