The “Third Spain”: History, Memory, Metaphor, Myth, and Political Use (first part)

Abstract

The “Third Spain”: History, Memory, Metaphor, Myth, and Political Use (first part)

The concept of “Third Spain” began to be talked about in the 1930s. Then, the civil war and Francoism cancelled its traces and even its memory. The syntagm resurfa- ced timidly in the Republican exile and, surprisingly, not during the transition to democracy, but instead in the 1980s. Since then, the concept has been discussed occasionally, although without specifying its consistency and contours. The range of positions is wide: there are those who deny its existence or limit it to a small group of intellectuals in favour of a mediation during the civil war, those who identify it with the majority of Spaniards during that conflict, and those who identify it with post-Franco Spain. Starting from the first half of the 1930s and arriving at the present, this article, which considers the “Two Spains” scheme obsolete, reconstructs for the first time the cultural, political and historiographical debate around the “Third Spain”, the political uses that have been made of the syntagm and the reasons for its oblivion in certain moments of the recent Spanish history. The result is not only the outline of a history of the “Third Spain”, but also a different perspective to read the historiographic debate still in progress on the most controversial and “hot” topics of contemporary Spanish history.

Received: 04-05-2021

Admitted: 14-06-2021