The double normativity of the Constitution of 1978: the Transition as an Evolutionary Moment of the Spanish Social Being

Abstract

In this article there is a criticism of the thesis that defines the Spanish political transition as a successful attempt to put an end to the "law of the pendulum" that had been governing our constitutional history. On the one hand, this thesis underestimates the conditions of the Spanish situation of 1978, marked by the transit between two worlds, the modern one that inherited and the emerging postmodern, which would become an unquestionable reality from 1989. In addition, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 was drafted at a time when the political-normative conceptual assumptions of the dominant constitutional paradigm in Europe after World War II were declining. Likewise, the thesis ignores the specific spanish differential feature:  the civil war of 1936-1939 and the subsequent rupture and radical separation of Spanish modernity into two distinct historical sections: one initiated with the French Revolution and culminated in the most absolute destruction of the pre-existing political and social order; and another  that starts in 1939,  since the (re)construction of zero of a radically new pattern of society and culture, with which the Spaniards encountered in December 1975 when they assumed their full political protagonism in a situation unprecedented and completely devoid of precedents in our national constitutional tradition.