The politics of victimhood: historical memory and peace in Spain and the Basque region.

• Author: MacDonald, Ross B.
• Position: THE DIFFICULT ROAD TO RECONCILIATION

Any society trying to transition from a history of violence to a future of peace struggles with reconciling the divisiveness of its violent legacy with the necessary cohesion and inclusiveness needed to build a peaceful future. The fields of historical reconciliation and transitional justice focus on the nexus where past traumas claw at the nascent reconstruction of politics and society. Both fields are concerned with at least two core questions. First, in order to constructively move into the future, to what extent must a society deal with its past? Second, how should a society in the pursuit of peace heed its past?

Although both the field of historical reconciliation and that of transitional justice seek to help societies confront divisive legacies of the past, each conceptualizes the problem in different ways and employs different strategies. The field of transitional justice recognizes the importance of retrospective accountability for ending cycles of impunity and for initiating peace. Transitional justice relies on the human rights framework, partly to emphasize universality and inclusiveness. In so doing, the field assists societies with eliciting the definitive truth about their legacies of violence by objectively documenting human rights violations, perpetrators and victims. (1) Similarly, the field of historical reconciliation guides struggling communities through a broad inquiry into conflicting historical narratives about their legacies of violence. (2) However, the historical reconciliation field advocates for a reconsideration of multiple, admittedly subjective truths as a means of building an inclusive political community. These differences and similarities are relevant for Spain, especially at this historical moment.

Spain has been the textbook case for understanding the relationship between building an inclusive future political community without having confronted its history of political violence. However, a careful consideration of Spain's history of violence over the last eighty years and the competing analyses of it actually demonstrates that, if unreconciled with its past, new cycles of impunity will ensue. In these cycles, in each new political context, those previously victimized use the past and their analysis of it to argue for their legitimacy as victims while at the same time justifying actions which do violence to others, in turn creating more victims and more deeply entrenched victim communities. Thus, contrary to conventional thinking, reconciliation in Spain and the Basque country will need to address the fact that victims of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) violence and victims of state counterterrorism methods have constructed competing historical narratives about their shared legacies of violence. In other words, it will be important for Spain to find ways to fit the objective truths of human rights violations into the more complex and subjective dynamics by which victims are also perpetrators.

In the 20th century, Spain experienced two key transitional periods and by many accounts entered a third beginning in 2006. Up until this third period, Spain has chosen not to open up the wounds of the past in either of the first two periods: (1) the 1936 to 1939 Civil War leading to the oppressive Franco regime and (2) the 1976-1982 democratic transition away from Franco's authoritarian rule. Arguably in the first period, as Spanish society transitioned from civil war to peace, Franco's authoritarianism made it impossible to consider its civil war past. It was not even a discussable choice. Yet in the case of the post-Franco democratic transition, Spain chose to forget, or at least to put aside, its history of violence from both the Spanish Civil War and the gross human rights violations of the Franco era. At that moment when Franco's regime ended, there was a wide social consensus that moving forward as a democracy required moving away from--that is, forgetting--the atrocities of the past.

Indeed, some key indicators suggest that not dealing with these legacies seemed to be working. Spain did successfully transition from an authoritarian into a democratic state. It took important steps towards creating the governance frameworks for building an inclusive future political community. The "new" Spain developed a fully functioning, multiparty political system marked by peaceful transfers of power. More importantly, Spain's system of asymmetrical federalism devolved power from the central government by granting some of the highest levels of regional autonomy to the historical territories, including the Basque region.

Yet, despite these important developments, Spain remained a conflicted democracy struggling to contain growing political violence from the Basque separatist group, ETA. (3) This ongoing political violence in the post-Franco era has challenged Spanish democracy in significant ways. First, it has created a conflicting normative framework in which democratic standards such as respect for civil rights and inclusion of multiple political ideologies are in direct conflict with devising appropriate responses to an armed separatist group employing terrorist tactics. (4) Second, the violence by ETA and the counterterrorism responses of the Spanish state have in themselves created politically polarized victim communities. Third, communities of victims have bunkered into opposing positions about the historical context in which the violence inflicted upon them should be considered.

Now, at the writing of this article, Spain and the Basque region are in a third moment of significance. Successful civil society efforts in the Basque region, the election of a moderate government in Madrid and the announcement of a permanent cease fire by the Basque separatist group ETA helped a populace traumatized by the Madrid train bombings be receptive to the desires of a more moderate national government to institutionalize peaceful relations in the Basque country. At this third historic moment, once again at issue is whether it is in the interest of Spain's peaceful future to address its past legacies of violence. Indeed, how should a peace process take on the history of reprisal and counter-reprisal by armed actors claiming respectively to represent the Basque people on the one hand and the Spanish people on the other? If opening up the past is warranted, what should be done? Should the Spanish state, for example, open up the files and exhume the mass graves of those killed in the Spanish Civil War? Should the human rights violations of Franco's authoritarian regime be examined, documented and officially confirmed? Should the post-Franco human rights violations by ETA and the Spanish state similarly be scrutinized?

Authors of this article argue that this third transitional moment in Spain's history represents an important opportunity to engage in the difficult but essential work of finally addressing the legacies of Spain's violent past. The pursuit of sustainable peaceful relationships between the Basque country and the Spanish government will require understanding the dynamics of recent historical periods and the ways in which their respective legacies of political violence and human rights violations have shaped the current conflict. Failure to do so will likely result in the same disruptive dynamics holding sway over Spanish and Basque society. The pursuit of peace will also require the engagement of civil society, given its recent history of success, to develop a positive, proactive vision of a shared future from the existing and intertwined disagreements, especially in victim's communities.

In this article, we consider the critical dynamics of the politicization of victimhood and consider their consequences for a peace process in the Basque country. There are four parts to the article. The first describes the political dynamics of victimhood by analyzing the factors contributing to the existence of diametrically opposed and politically mobilized victim communities in Spain. The second demonstrates that the history of self-perpetuating cycles of violence by both actors, ETA and the Spanish state, has led to diametrically opposed victims communities and undermined efforts to create a viable and inclusive democratic polity. The third shows how ETA violence and state violence have disrupted society and distorted the normative framework for ethical pursuit of peace. The fourth section explores recent developments in the region and their implications for the social and political integration of historically excluded victim communities into the Spanish state. The section particularly considers recently successful civil society efforts to involve citizens in defining normative frameworks for social cohesion. The final section briefly identifies the promise of a new era and the confluence of events that have helped create it.

In addition to reviews of Basque and Spanish government documents and reports, policy advisories from civil society organizations in the region and reports from international organizations such as Amnesty International, this article also draws on lengthy interviews with twenty-eight individuals in the Basque region. Participants in the interviews represent a wide range of experiences, perspectives and political affiliations. (5) The intent was to learn from the likes of politicians, academics, journalists, civil society representatives and government representatives about the prospects of peace in the Basque region.

THE CONFLICTED HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE: WHO IS A VICTIM?

How to work with victims and how to address victims' issues will be a critical factor for transitional justice and historical reconciliation in Spain and the Basque country, especially because of the existence of distinct victim communities. Certainly, the formation of various victims associations in the region reflects the vibrant nature of civil society and testifies to the strength of democratic...