01-04-2012
30-09-2014
Discourses on the memory of significant periods of political and social oppression in the 20th century are a very important and unavoidable part of the public debate in most contemporary societies. Collective memory has become the subject of intense political and cultural debate over the last 40 years. The memory policies developed by the state and several of its agencies (mainly in education, the armed forces and cultural institutions) on these issues are not only central to the production of these discourses, they are also the central object of this debate (cf. Vinyes, 2009). State policies on what is officially described as the promotion and preservation of collective memory, as well as reparations for the damage caused to groups and individuals who are legally defined as ‘victims’ of regimes of political and social oppression (cf. Barkan, 2000), are one of the most complex mechanisms in processes such as nation-building in an era of mass culture and, inevitably, in political and symbolic debates on the interpretation of social reality (Traverso, 2000). On the other hand, these public policies are currently considered one of the many instruments that exist to guarantee the quality of democratic societies (Vinyes, 2009). Post-authoritarian Portugal, as well as Spain, provide interesting case studies in this context because the process of coming to terms with a dictatorial past was evolving while other European societies were still being confronted with the aftermath of the Second World War, the memory of Nazi fascism, the Holocaust and collaborationism. In both countries, a phase of intense liberation of memory was followed by a period of reconciliation strategy in Spain (Aguilar, 1996) and a devaluation of the memory of the resistance in Portugal (Loff, 2010). The two processes of democratic transition produced contrasting performances on these issues on the part of the Portuguese and Spanish states in their various dimensions. The Portuguese case, which has not been studied as much as the Spanish case, is the main object of analysis in this research project. The social sciences have produced solid work on various aspects of the political regimes of Salazar and Franco, without being able to avoid the current discussions on, for example, the responsibilities of the Spanish Civil War, moral repression and the dignity of its victims, which have become central aspects of the political and social debate in Spain (especially around the discussion of the Historical Memory Law of 2007), and in Portugal about the political nature of Salazarism and the 1974/1976 Revolution, colonialism and the Colonial War, political repression and resistance movements. Analysing the Spanish literature on the subject conveys the idea that the fundamental elements of the debate on memory are present in a wide range of social studies, remaining a central component of the debate on the role of central, regional and local authorities in memory policies. In Portugal, however, although historical research on the authoritarian regime has made very significant progress over the last two decades, the role of the state in commemorating the anniversaries of the 1974 democratic revolution (cf. Loff, 2010) and the representations of the authoritarian period in question has not been studied, despite the obvious public relevance of the controversies on the subject in Portugal. Different sources (oral, written, autobiographical, fictional, documentary, iconographic) were mapped as the basis for this project, all of them produced/preserved/materialised in various media (publications, oral archives, media, the Web, museums, ...). Although it was conceived as an international project, all the documentary research will be carried out here on Portuguese material for the reasons given in both the Literature Review and the Plan and Methods document. Eight Portuguese researchers, who have been studying the Portuguese dictatorial regime, have come together to apply their historical, anthropological and sociological perspectives to this object of study; four of them are young researchers who are preparing their doctoral dissertations, interweaving memory and social, political and generational identities, clearly shaped by the oppressive nature of the dictatorship, in which three Spanish historians of great prestige accompany them in the study of the Franco era. The Principal Investigator has worked almost continuously over the last 20 years on the comparative study of Portuguese and Spanish issues. Also involved are 3 leading research units (two Portuguese and one Spanish) and 4 internationally respected consultants (two Italian, one Spanish, and the Director General of the National Archives of Portugal - Torre do Tombo.
FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia
PTDC/HIS-HIS/121001/2010
Memory policies
Damage compensation policies
Public policies
Representations of the authoritarian past
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto FLUP Portugal S
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona
CIIE/Faculdade de Psicologia e Ciência da Educação