Abstract
Although not frequently, perpetrators occasionally confess to past acts of violence in dictatorships and civil conflicts. These take the form of dramatic performances with a script, actors and acting, a stage, timing, and an audience. These confessional performances despite the expectations raised by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission have not tended to lead to settling accounts with the past, but rather to unsettling them. This chapter argues, however, that confessional performances, and particularly the role that audiences play within them, have the potential to deepen democratic practices of participation, contestation, and expression. That process of “contentious coexistence,” however, has not until recently emerged in Spain. The chapter considers why.
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Notes
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In D. A. Rustow’s (1970) classic article, he sees democracy as a process of accommodation that includes as much division and conflict as consensus and cohesion. In fact, democracy only needs consensus over the rules of the game. The expression of public disagreement, peaceful conflicts, and public discussions are the essence of democracy.
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We have not found equivalent calls for violence by either the main Republican military commanders or by the main Republican civil authorities. In fact, some of the most prominent Republican leaders, such as Manuel Azaña, president of the Second Republic during the Civil War, discussed later in the book, and other relevant authorities of the Republican side, publicly condemned the atrocities committed by those in their own ranks and did their best to limit violence much earlier than the Francoists (Payne 2012: 107). See a recent study of the differences between Republican and Francoist violence by Espinosa (2010).
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According to the latest estimates, Republican violence caused around 50,000 casualties compared to 100,000 casualties by Francoist violence during the war and approximately 40,000 in the post-war period (Espinosa 2010).
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In exile, many Republicans held the contending view that Francoists had committed most crimes and Republicans had restricted their violence to only that necessary to defend the legal government. This account also suffers from oversimplification and distortion, but further discussion of it falls outside the focus of this book.
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This agreement relates to the social realm. In politics, the agreement not to use the past as a political weapon began to crumble in 1993, and even more so in 1996, when candidates engaged it for electoral purposes (Aguilar 2004).
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Payne, L.A., Aguilar, P. (2016). Unsettling Accounts. In: Revealing New Truths about Spain's Violent Past. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56229-6_2
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