The ways we have looked at democracy and citizenship has changed significantly in the past century. Differences, also connected to distinct transition processes, have an effect on how democracy and citizenship are perceived today and on the quality of democracy in different countries. The process of democratic transition in Europe were varied; while some countries have stable democracies since the WWII (e.g., Germany and Italy), in others democratic regimes only appeared after the fall of authoritarian regimes in the mid-seventies (e.g., Portugal and Spain) or in the nineties, after the fall of the Berlin Wall (e.g., Czech Republic, Slovenia).

Since the signs of authoritarianism in a country's political culture are long lasting and taking into consideration that “the agenda of how ‘to deal with the past’ has become increasingly associated with the quality of contemporary democracies” (Pinto, 2010, p. 339) there are indications that the knowledge about the political past is still  scarce, particularly in younger generations. Spain and Portugal are specific examples of this framework (Hedke et al., 2008; Menezes et al., 2005). The survival of both authoritarian regimes until the mid-seventies also depended on the pragmatism that characterized their relationship with other European states and the United States, leading to an increasingly less blatant proclamation of the fascist discourse that was obvious until the early forties (Loff, 2008). Consequently, it is relevant to consider whether this shadow of the authoritarian past still accounts for the way we think of ourselves as citizens in a democracy.

This paper considers the specific case of Portugal and Spain, departing from their evident similarities, to understand to what extent schools are nowadays committed to fostering a democratic culture that integrates a critical historical consciousness of the totalitarian past, by critically looking at the connections between the teaching of national history and the organization of citizenship education, in both countries.

It makes particular sense to question how images of these pasts are depicted in the curricula, textbooks and teacher training, as well as to reflect if the past is overly discussed or concealed, criticized or whitewashed. In this sense, the analysis of history textbooks can indicate how a society actively and intentionally constructs its citizens and their memory given that textbooks can promote “a particularly intense kind of memory-making” (Brito, 2010, p. 360) that implies “on-going ‘cognitive battles’ over memory (...)  [between] competing ‘truths’” across time: “one political or generational cohort may opt for amnesia; another may decide it is time to pursue justice” (p. 365).

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