La libertad de investigación histórica, la Memoria como discurso histórico y las leyes sobre la historiauna compleja encrucijada

Abstract

The 20th century, a century that has gone down in history as an era marked by the magnitude of the tragedies and the used methods of destruction, saw in the 1980s the emergence and development of the discourse of Memory, which, as a policy on the past that takes shape in the present time, seeks both to acknowledge and remember the victims of traumatic events and to have a sense of public utility focused on the education of new generations and the prevention of future conflicts. However, tensions can arise between the politics of memory and the discipline of history, which researches and studies the events of the past in order to understand them, when determining the content and form of the historical narrative of those events. Thus, the aspiration that governments or interest groups may have in proposing a law as a means of sustaining and protecting a particular form of historical representation makes memory a politics of history that involves a form of legal-political intervention in the field of historical studies, since a historical narrative that does not conform to the stipulations of the law may be subject to criminal sanction. In this context, the role of the historian is ambivalent and can be either that of someone committed to a kind of "official truth" or, on the contrary, a researcher whose work may be considered offensive to the memory of the victims. This phenomenon of legislative intervention has been evident since the 1990s when, in a growing number of European countries, punitive legislation has been enacted as a way of preventing any questioning of historical issues, on the grounds that such questioning is a threat to public peace and a challenge to the historical and ideological consensus that existed after the Second World War. The result has been an increasing judicialization of history. The origin and paradigm of this legal intervention is the so-called historical revisionism - usually referred to as negationism - of the traumatic events of the Second World War, especially the Holocaust, which is why we have taken revisionism as a reference in our work, also devoting a section to explaining the characteristics of memorial policy in our country. However, the question of whether the recourse to the law to settle historical issues in general or to deal with revisionism in particular is acceptable and necessary, both from a historiographical and legal point of view, has prompted critical responses which we have collected here in an attempt to give as accurate a picture as possible of this controversy.