A Difficult Nation? History and Nationalism in Contemporary Spain

The aim of this study is to show how the concept of Spain prevailing today originates from the nationalist ideology of the nineteenth century. The creation of this concept served both to justify the new power relations established during the liberal revolution and to give coherence to its political independence from other states and nations. For historiography, the emergence of the concept of the “Spanish nation” had decisive consequences. From monarchical history ad usum delphinis, there was a change to a teleological interpretation of Spain’s origins which served to justify the formation of the nation-state then under construction vis-à-vis feudal and absolutist powers. Historiography, as part of liberal and romantic thought, was the architect of a temporal, determinist construction, in which the Spanish nation and the nineteenth-century nation-state were inextricably interwoven into an age-old eternal reality. Hence, the historical concept of Spain contained a meta-history that imposed an essentialist new memory, which has subsequently been reproduced at different levels in the history of the country’s autonomous regions or in local history, as variations on the principal narrative. ¹

Such an account of history did not emerge from an earlier national reality. In effect, the state was born out of different entities (feudal states, principalities, kingdoms) amassed by the dynasties of the old regime through successive wars, marriage alliances and accidents of fate. The concept of power was regarded as the patrimony of a few interchangeable people, inheritable or conquerable depending on their strengths and ambitions. This power had been geographically attributed as Spanish or Hispanic but had never had any national significance. It was in the year 1812, the same year that the first Spanish constitution, the so-called Cádiz Constitution, was drawn up, that Spain was defined for the first time as a sociopolitical concept, as identifying a community called “the Spanish nation” which defined itself as “the coming together of all Spaniards from both hemispheres” in reference to the citizens who lived both in the metropolis and in the inherited colonies of the old empire. ²

This was the first social pact between the people who, protected under one state, were no longer subjects but became instead citizens, since the Spanish nation—as laid down in Article 2—“is not, nor can be the patrimony of any family or person.” However, this early concept of nation already contained different perspectives: not only the traditionalist and federal viewpoint, but also, above all, the Americanist perspective, which would very soon see itself made irrelevant for the official representation of the nation, with the colonies cut off in successive wars of independence. So the Spanish nation, once constituted, was immediately greatly reduced in geographical, demographic and cultural terms. As a result, according to the new constitutional text of 1837, the interests that defined the nation’s sovereignty belonged exclusively to the Peninsula. Moreover, in the name of these national, peninsular interests, equal conditions were denied to the territories of the Antilles and the Philippines, which remained part of the Spanish state.

Thus Spain as a nation was established, not only on the basis of ideas, but, above all, on the basis of governing interests that nationalized church and common property, abolished customs duties and protected markets. ³ Due to the diminishing role of Spain’s ruling classes in the international arena, Spain’s territory shrank significantly between 1812 and 2000; nevertheless, the assumption of a stable nation with its unchanging territory still persists. The present-day Constitution, in force since 1978, does not define territorial borders but does establish in Article 2 “the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation, the common, indivisible land of all the Spanish people.” Between 1812 and 1978, the borders had changed so much that neither the “Spanish nation” (as defined by political sovereignty) nor the subsequent nationalism that...