In June 1962, a diverse group of Spaniards met in Munich to celebrate the IV congress of the European Movement, an organization founded in 1947 whose goal was topromote European integration.

What began as a political meeting ended up as one of the most memorable milestones of national reconciliation in recent decades: for the first time in many years an anti-Franco majority put aside their differences to bet on a common project .

The birth of an idea

When the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed in April 1931, few could have foreseen the tragedy that was to come. For a large majority of intellectuals -journalists, writers, university professors- the "pretty girl" symbolized a healthy political change to put an end to Spain's endemic problems.

Prominent names in culture, such as José Ortega y Gasset, Gregorio Marañón and Ramón Pérez de Ayala, mobilized to form the Agrupación al Servicio de la República to defend the new regime. When the Civil War broke out barely five years later, a large part of them had renounced it.

During the three years that the war lasted, many of them went into exile in Europe or America, and from there they expressed different positions on the legitimacy of the combatants. One of the most recognizable was the so-called "third Spain", a malleable concept that evoked a rejection of both the militarism and fascism of the rebels and the methods of the revolutionaries on the Republican side.

The diplomat Salvador de Madariaga, who gave greater diffusion to this equidistant position, postulated himself as a mediator for peace and reconciliation during the war. For this he received criticism both from the left, which accused him of betraying the Republic, and from the right, which branded him as a "lackey of London" and foreign powers.

Others, such as José Castillejo, pedagogue and professor at the Institución Libre de teaching, denounced the failure of the Second Republic for its inability to create a social base with similar values, a common project for Spaniards of all political colors.

Madariaga's theorizing

For many of them, the Second Republic was a republic without republicans: it came unexpectedly in 1931, without referendum or popular enquiry , and found its main political actors divided. The right remained monarchist and the left, increasingly influenced by the Soviet model , preferred the revolutionary path. More than a democratic regime, the Republic functioned from the beginning as an ideological project of rupture, driven by sectors that understood legality as a transitory instrument to consolidate power. The true republicans were a minority, as became clear in 1936.

In a European context marked by crises, fascism and dictatorships, the Republic was seen by many as a transitory or undesirable regime. For some it was the prelude to revolution; for others, a bourgeois republic that had to be destroyed. Hence the succession of coups, strikes and conspiracies that would eventually lead to its collapse.

The idea of forming a "third Spain", far from being a simple attempt at reconciliation, aspired to an active mediation between the polarities of Spanish society, seeking an intermediate space for meeting and dialogue between citizens of different tendencies.

For Madariaga, the "third Spain" had two fundamental meanings: on the one hand, as a core topic interpretative core topic of Spanish history that questioned the dichotomy of the "two Spains" and explicitly condemned both the left-wing uprisings during the Republic and the coup d'état of 1936. On the other hand, and with greater force at this stage, as a projective attitude and a proposal oriented to the ideal of reconciliation and an internship solution for political restoration.

In the post-war period, the variety of exiles by civil service examination to Franco's regime was unavoidable: liberal monarchists, republicans, Christian democrats, socialists, social democrats, Basque and Catalan nationalists. To overcome Francoism, which fed on the exclusion of anti-Spain, proclaiming a reconciliation among all these tendencies was a core topic

Exile and the search for consensus

If the third Spain had a certain operativity in public life, it was by following a new path, core topic to distinguish itself from Franco's isolationism as well as from the communist and American blocs that had been consolidated in the Cold War: integration into Europe.

In a sense, Spain's isolation had spared the country from the onslaught of the two world wars. But international ostracism in the 1950s only perpetuated an increasingly anachronistic regime.

Salvador de Madariaga, core topic leader of Europeanism, emphasized the need to insert Spain into the European Communities.

Thus, on the occasion of the participation in the IV congress of the European Movement in Munich in 1962, it was possible to symbolically reconcile various anti-Francoist groups with the path of consensus. There were ex-Falangists like Dionisio Ridruejo, Poumists like Julián Gorkin, monarchists like Gil Robles and socialists like Rodolfo Llopis.

At the closing of the congress, Madariaga expressed the shared feeling that the Civil War had symbolically ended in the German city. The Franco regime reacted with virulence to prevent that image of unity among exiles from taking political or symbolic form within the country. It immediately described the meeting as a subversive conspiracy, orchestrated by "reds and separatists", and unleashed a propaganda campaign that presented it as an "anti-Spanish conspiracy". The government sanctioned the Spanish participants with arrests, internal banishments such as forced shipment to the Canary Islands, withdrawal of passports and police surveillance.

However, Munich promoted a culture of consensus and reconciliation that was later recovered and redefined during the Spanish Transition, promoting political movements to bring together socialists and monarchists in exile.

A lesson for today

Although it did not constitute a mass mobilizing force nor did it have formal Structures , the third Spain left its mark in several dimensions.

On the one hand, it provided an alternative ethical framework to the exclusionary confrontation of war and postulated the necessary coexistence of Spaniards. As the writer Josep Pla sardonically commented, you cannot cut a cheese in half and have one part of it be a ball and the other a gruyer. On the other hand, by making reconciliation an imperative after the fratricide, he prepared the ground for political reform. It thus incubated the consensus pacts that would crystallize in the 1978 Constitution.

Today, when societies are once again experiencing extreme forms of antagonism, the experience of the "third Spain" invites us to reconsider the viability of a political space based on dialogue and mutual recognition of previously irreconcilable positions. This heterogeneous group was united precisely in the rejection of the sad fatalism of the "two Spains". Although it never translated into a political project , its cultural bequest provided a core topic blueprint for plural coexistence at the dawn of democratic Spain.