Spain: A Unique History

Chapter 5: Identity, Monarchy, Empire

5 Identity, Monarchy, Empire 93 The crisis of identity that overtook the Western world in the late twentieth century had a particularly severe impact on Spain. The long dictatorship of Franco had stressed unity, centralism, and Spanish nationalism, but its consequence was to discredit the very idea of Spanish nationalism, and to some extent even of the Spanish nation, in the succeeding generation of democracy, individualism, and hedonism. During the final decades of the century the country was filled with more claims for new kinds of “fractional” nationalism—which may variously be termed micro, peripheral, or deconstructive—than in any other Western land, the great contrast being that there were few spokesmen for a Spanish nationalism. Many commentators then opined that a single or united “Spain” had been little more than a figment of the imagination, that the country had never been more than a loose community of regions governed normally by a monarchy, and later on occasion by artificial despots in Madrid. This was an extraordinary climate of opinion that could not be equaled in any other European country, with the alarming exception of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As deconstructive discourse mounted, it provoked a reaction in a series of works that affirmed a common historical identity of the diverse regions of Spain, even prior to the united monarchy, and insisted that from the sixteenth century on the country had constituted an increasingly united nation.1 The internationally famous Historikerstreit—the controversy among the historians—in Germany was in some ways surpassed by the broad controversies about Spanish history, both with regard to earlier eras and also to the twentieth century. It seems clear that despite the political fragmentation of the peninsula under the impact of the Islamic conquest and the following long struggle, a common cultural, religious, and juridical heritage from the Visigothic era remained. There was some sense of common identity at least among the elites of the medieval Spanish principalities, but the question is the extent to which this went beyond the religious and the geographical. The problem was first extensively examined in José Antonio Maravall’s El concepto de España en la Edad Media (1950), though some historians conclude that he exaggerated the conscious sense of common identity, particularly with regard to political issues. The philosopher Gustavo Bueno argues that the elites of the HispanoChristian states thought of themselves as forming something analogous to a separate peninsular political community or “empire,” as something absolutely independent from trans-Pyrenean rulers.2 This was certainly the case among some of the elites in certain periods, but probably posits more of an “ideal type” than an empirical historical description. There is no question that medieval elites often referred to their principalities as forming part of “España,” the term that in its several spellings and versions (Espanha , Espanya, etc.) developed with the rise of the new vernaculars. On various occasions the medieval chronicles referred to the Spanish rulers collectively as reges Hispaniae, but this can be read as a merely geographical reference. Medieval writings also refer to Spain as a collective entity in other ways, using expressions such as “toda España,” which may be found with some frequency in Latin, Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese texts. The new word for its inhabitants—“español” and “españoles”—developed during the twelfth century, expanding from Pyrenean Aragon, though the conclusion of some that it was originally a Provençal word from beyond the Pyrenees has not been substantiated.3 From that time the term was recorded as the family name of a certain number of individuals, as well. Medieval writing also frequently referred to “las Españas” in the plural, something that would continue to be found until the eighteenth century; in the Middle Ages, though, it was common to refer in the plural to any number of European countries , which in modern times would be known only in the singular. Identity, Monarchy, Empire 94 The sense of community or special relationship that existed among some of the elites of the Spanish Christian kingdoms was also reflected in the ambition of the rulers of Asturias-León-Castile to claim or establish a broader hegemony over them all.4 The extent of these claims varied, sometimes being merely rhetorical, at other times referring only to the present kingdom itself, at still other times more vaguely to the entire peninsula. Alfonso II, with the...