The Federalization of Spain by Luis Moreno

Author:Luis Moreno [Moreno, Luis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781135275730
Google: 8ehSAQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18703487
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2001-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

MAJORITY AND MINORITY NATIONALISMS IN SPAIN

As we saw in Chapter 1, nationalism manifests itself broadly in two ways. The first is majority or state nationalism, in which nation and state are considered to be identical, or when a single nation clearly prevails in a plural state, acting with a view towards national assimilation. The second case, minority or peripheral nationalism, is often the result of an uneasy ethnic or ethnoterritorial integration in the processes of state-formation, and involves the desire of sub-state communities to possess political structures of self-government.

By the end of the Peninsular War (1814), Spain was an ‘aggregate monarchy’, entering the liberal era with heterogeneous internal units, which lacked articulation (Elorza, 1975). Spanish nation-building in its early stages aimed to transfer sovereignty from the monarch to an institutionalized nation. This historical phase corresponded to the ‘institutional nationalism’ of the nineteenth century, having been preceded by the ‘Bourbon nationalism’ of the eighteenth century, and the ‘Habsburg paleo-nationalism’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (de Riquer and Ucelay-Da Cal, 1994).21

From the very beginning, the Spanish liberal nationalists undertook a task they thought historic: that of putting into practice a process for Spanish national construction. In Spain, the task of dismantling the cumbersome remains of the feudal past, supported by the efficiency of the French Jacobins, fell on the fragile shoulders of the nineteenth-century liberals. For them, centralism, liberalism, progress and uniformity were not only complementary but inseparable elements.22 However, nothing like the French Revolution of 1789 was to occur on a national scale in Spain.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the inability of Spanish liberal nationalism to articulate a coherent strategy for the country’s territorial particularities, in addition to the actions and reactions of the military caudillos, acted as a stimulus for federalism and regionalism, later peripheral nationalism and, eventually, separatism. In fact, during the nineteenth century in Spain, the authoritarian and arbitrary exercise of power was precisely the reason for the national state’s becoming a vehicle of imposition and repression, and thus the prime cause of the peripheral reaction.

The Restoration period (1876–1923) was characterized by a tough ideological and political struggle between majority and minority nationalisms. For Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (1876–1923), the true architect of the longest-lasting political regime in contemporary Spanish politics, the various nationalities should converge towards a common centre, integrating their ‘races’ into one nation. Thus, the Spanish state should tend towards the absorption of ‘the various nations which may constitute it’.23

The centralizing Spanish nationalism of the Restoration synthesized its political programme and vision through the concept of the homeland: ‘nor should one ask the homeland why, if she so orders it that at the foot of her flag a man should give his life, for she is for ever right about this also’. Note that Cánovas del Castillo identifies the homeland with the Spanish nation. But in the political practice of his time, such patriotic designs ended up being determined by the sovereignty of a people whose representative institutions (government and parliament) were corrupt and the instruments of an illegitimate self-contained political class.

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