Generations and National Narrative in Spanish History: From the 1950s to the Present

This paper explores how national narratives of the past are shaped by the present context. During the Franco regime, the dominant failure paradigm reflected the pessimism of civil war and dictatorship.  Thus, the question of why Spain had failed to follow a “normal” path to modernity dominated Spanish historiography in the 1960s and 1970s. The Transition to democracy in the 1970s provided a new reference point that opened a more optimistic set of “origin” questions, culminating in “success” instead of “failure”. If Spain had been “backward” and “different” for almost 200 years, how had it so quickly “normalized” into European patterns?  This apparent paradox helped generate a revisionist historiography and a new narrative of Spain’s modern history, arguing that Spain had followed the same basic European path of modernity, albeit at a different pace. While the revisionist narrative was a welcome corrective to the “failure” paradigm, we are now in the midst of another generational paradigm shift. The revisionist moment of optimism has given way to a more critical re-evaluation of past achievements and a re-framed debate about the longer trajectory of 20^th century Spanish history, with conflicting master narratives that assign distinct political meanings to the Transition and what it produced. Undoubtedly, the view of the past looks very different in 2016 than in 1978. What we should be able to do as historians is realize that these moments are not permanent, and that the next generation will look at the past with fresh eyes.