ABSTRACT
The chapter offers a new perspective regarding the existence of a municipal tradition of ‘democratic’ political culture that can be traced back to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain. The journey starts with the 1812 Constitution, continues through the ‘Juntero’ movement, the progressive political actors in the 1830s, the federal republicans during the Sexenio (1868), the anarchists at the beginning of the twentieth century and during the Civil War and, the end of Franco’s regime. It describes proposals and episodes which, although they generally turned out to be ‘losers’ in the political struggles, contributed to situating the local space in the people’s collective memory as a privileged place for the definition and projection of alternative political projects where democracy, social revolution, communitarianism and local power end up intertwining and offering a theoretical and practical alternative to the models/proposals of representative democracy designed and/or wielded by the political elites from the spaces of central power. These municipalist-oriented movements and their struggles for self-government should be incorporated into the history of the construction of democracy in Spain, which will evidently entail a re-reading of not only the processes of democratisation but also contemporary Spanish history itself, at least in its political-institutional dimension.
