The Longest Shadow.(World Affairs)(Francisco Franco's legacy)

Byline: Sarah Wildman

Spain's failure to overcome its past says much about the state of the nation today.

Not long after he took office in March 2004, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero created a commission charged with the treacherous task of figuring out a way for Spain to come to terms with its violent and repressive modern history. Two years later, advice in hand, he proposed to honor the victims of the Spanish Civil War with a law of historical memory, a seemingly straight-forward idea that would for the first time officially, morally and financially acknowledge those who died in the Civil War and were persecuted during Francisco Franco's dictatorship.

Yet the law, which must be passed by Nov. 1, has stalled in debate over the benefits of exhuming the past. The political left says the law doesn't go far enough. The political right argues the law is unnecessary and divisive and will only lay the groundwork for more fighting. "The majority of Spaniards don't want to return to talking about the republic, nor Franco, nor do they believe it will serve anyone anything," Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy has argued.

If the law fails, as expected, Spain will remain one of the few democratic nations that have yet to have a reckoning with their past. Germany put Nazis on trial after the war, and subsequent generations have agonized over the Nazi era. South Africa gave those affected by apartheid a mechanism to redress their grievances. Argentina began investigating the extrajudicial assassinations of a decadelong "dirty war" soon after it ended. Even Chile, slow to take on the Augusto Pinochet regime, last year elected as president a victim and daughter of victims, Michelle Bachelet, in a symbolic act of resolution. But the Spanish law is an attempt to redress grievances without opening old wounds. It is not an attempt to punish perpetrators but to simply acknowledge the victims.

Unlike Nazism or, to a lesser extent, Stalinism, franquismo was never actually vanquished or rejected. It just died one day, along with Franco, in 1975. Three years of civil war and four decades of dictatorship were swept under an agreement known as the "pact of forgetting." A collective amnesia was coupled with a general amnesty for both those who served with Franco and those who fought against him. Overnight, many street names honoring the "Generalissimo" were changed, fascist monuments came down, and Spain became a fully functioning democracy and a vibrant member of the European community.

But Spain's failure to come to terms with Franco's legacy has meant that many Spaniards remain in a seemingly interminable battle with the memory of the dictator. When Franco died, those in the regions suppressed by his effort to create a unified Spain -- the Catalans and the Basques in particular -- were soothed by generous autonomy agreements in the new Constitution. Now education, health, policing and, in the Basque Country, taxation are all controlled by the regions rather than Madrid, and each of Spain's 17 regions is demanding even greater autonomy.