La "Terza Spagna": storia, memoria, metafora, mito e uso politico (prima parte)

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 resurfaced
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.