Striking Catalan pro-independence students march through Barcelona on the Catalan Secession referendum anniversary, October 1, 2018. Matthias Oesterle/Press Association. All rights reserved.

There is a lack of
understanding about what has really been happening in Catalonia over the past
year. Some left commentators have been quick to label this the ‘return of
Franco.’ Others have dismissed the police violence, the political prisoners and
the shutting down of a democratically elected government as a reasonable
reaction by a vulnerable state trying to prevent a damaging split.

In reality neither are true.
And at the same time both are true. It is the deep-lying institutional legacy
of the dictatorship – a legacy that never went away – that has risen to the
surface in Catalonia. And the reaction has been particularly extreme because
this is the most vulnerable the Spanish state has been since Franco’s time.

Over-reaction?

To outside observers, the mode
of arrival of 10,000 Spanish national police and Guardia civil in Autumn last
year, accompanied by threats to ‘cut off’ Barcelona’s power supply and place
the city under siege, did look like the response of a dictatorship. Well, it
looked somewhat like a comedy dictatorship. Spain commissioned three ships to
transport and accommodate officers, and the most visible one, moored in the
port of Barcelona, inexplicably came emblazoned with gargantuan images of the
‘Looney Tunes’ cartoon characters Wile E Coyote, Tweety-Pie and Daffy Duck.

Perhaps this is one reason why
linking Franco to this ‘Looney Tunes’ invasion seems hugely overblown; it is a
connection that – outside Catalonia – people find difficult to take seriously.

In order to fully understand
the Spanish government’s over-reaction, we need to grasp precisely what
happened following the transition from the dictatorship. The Spanish transition
was in many ways unique to Europe. Of the countries that were under the iron
heel of fascism in the twentieth century (Germany, Italy, Greece and Portugal
and Spain) only Spain deserves the description ‘postfascist.’ Italy and Germany
passed through different processes of cleansing fascism from government in the
post-war settlement; Greece and Portugal were exposed to processes of
reparation, memory and indeed criminal trials that helped expel fascism from
the establishment. This was not the case in Spain.

State
and monarch

It is Franco’s nationalist
flag, not the republican tricolour that remains the Spanish flag. Spain’s
national day is October 12, the anniversary of the arrival of Christopher
Columbus in the Americas. This is Franco’s “day of the race” that explicitly
celebrates the conquistador traditions of Spain and remains closely bound to a
colonial, anti-republican nationalism. The ongoing public funding of the Franco
Foundation, the preservation of the Duchy of Franco (a hereditary title gifted
to the Franco family by King Juan Carlos), the statues of the Dictator in
public places and the streets named after him, are all examples of the cultural
endurance of the emblems of fascism at the heart of the Spanish aristocracy and
the Spanish state.

Juan Carlos’ generosity to
Franco is not difficult to explain. As part of the 1978 constitutional
settlement, the position of the monarchy was re-established and Juan Carlos was
crowned the first Spanish monarch for four decades. In exchange for this
appointment, Juan Carlos swore allegiance to Franco’s ‘Principles of the
National Movement.’

When Juan Carlos’ son Felipe
made an unprecedented TV address on October 3 last year, his explicit
condemnation of Catalonia and its institutions for their disloyalty opened the
political space for the constitutional suspension of the Catalonia government.
The Spanish government’s tough clampdown in Catalonia is justified exclusively
on its opposition to Spanish statehood and the monarchy.

And this explains the dramatic
punitive turn against any insubordination shown to the monarchy in Spain. The
rapper Valtonyc was forced to flee into exile to Brussels to avoid a possible
three years of imprisonment for his anti-royalist lyrics. Another hip hop
singer, Pablo Hasel, is currently facing trial for ‘hate speech’ against the
monarchy.

Banning
yellow

The intolerance of
insubordination has significantly intensified since the October 1 referendum. A
major art exhibition on “Contemporary Spanish Political Prisoners” by the
artist Santiago Sierra was banned and removed by the authorities in Madrid
earlier this year. The spectacle of police confiscating yellow banners, ribbons
and balloons from football fans and the banning of the use of the colour yellow
by human rights activists is perhaps one of the most extreme and preposterous
manifestations of the state’s complete pulverisation of any discussion of the
political prisoners.

And yet, the ‘banning’ of the
colour yellow in public places mirrors precisely the logic of the ’78 regime
which has officially erased the public memory of political repression. The 1978
post-Franco settlement ensured that the new Spanish state would not officially
recognise Franco’s treatment of political prisoners, or even his mass graves.
Even now, the Spanish state actively works to oppose any efforts to record and
recognise the bodies.

Indeed, because the ’78 regime
enabled Franco’s elites to consolidate their power and then expand through a
combination of post-Franco privatisation and the preservation of close links to
the ruling parties, particularly the PP, corruption can be said to be integral
to the postfascist oligarchy. Moreover, it was the unavoidable fact that
corruption is integral to the regime that eventually brought down the Rajoy
government on May 31, 2018.

The 1977 ‘Amnesty Law’ gave an
official amnesty to Franco’s political prisoners at the same time as granting
impunity for crimes related to the regime. Civil servants who played a key role
in the Franco dictatorship, judges and police officers – including those who
had tortured countless civilians – quietly remained in place under the terms of
the post-Franco amnesty. This continuity of personnel, coupled to the
institutional amnesia about Franco’s mass graves – Spain had the second largest
number of ‘dissappeared’ in the twentieth century after Cambodia – ensured that
the institutional culture of fascism went unchallenged inside the state.

Crime
of rebellion

The ease with which Spain
convicts political prisoners and forces politicians into exile is a mark of the
endurance of the culture of the dictatorship in which the judiciary were
politically motivated and politically compromised. The crime of rebellion used
by Rajoy, and the current government to detain political prisoners was a nineteenth
century offence, brought back by Franco in the 1940s to prosecute and execute
thousands of opponents using his military courts.

We are not claiming that the
practice of imprisoning political opponents and forcing people into exile
remotely resembles the scale of violence experienced in the Franco period. But
it is crystal clear that this practice reflects the modus operandi of the
dictatorship very precisely.

This is certainly not fascism
either in its official guise, or in practice. But it is post-fascism. And it is
the post-fascist structure of power that explains why the independence movement
in Catalonia is not going to be broken easily.