Spain: A Unique History by Stanley G. Payne

Author:Stanley G. Payne [Payne, Stanley G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-01-07T05:19:00+00:00

Spanish Nationalism

The concept of the Spanish nation was clearly affirmed for the first time by the Cortes de Cádiz. Nationalism declares the sovereignty of the citizenry, as affirmed in the Constitution of 1812. It also declares the formation of a national community of equal rights, with all citizens equal before the law. A basic difference between modern nationalism and traditional patriotism is that the latter is largely defensive, while nationalism is proactive, future-oriented, and tends to take the form of a project, or a series of new claims.

Nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism assumed the project of affirming and developing the modern Spanish nation. This involved constructing a new liberal interpretation of Spanish history based on the medieval liberties of parliaments, rights, and fueros, with a special place for the failed rebellion of the Castilian Comunidades in 1520-21. It reached its highest expression in the massive multivolume Historia de España of Modesto Lafuente, which would continue to be reprinted well into the twentieth century. This presented a classic "liberal interpretation" of Spanish history, focused on the historical process of the development of the Spanish nation.10 Such a discourse would subsequently be modified in a more conservative direction, on the one hand, while radical liberals, on the other hand, would later change it in a more radical direction.

The doctrine of the nation was nevertheless not as fully and firmly developed and accepted in Spain as in France or even in Italy, though during the nineteenth century it seemed to make impressive progress, as revealed in the Moroccan war of 1859 and even to some extent in the final Cuban conflict of 1895-98. Nonetheless, the twentieth century would demonstrate the fragility of the nineteenth-century unified nation.

During the first half of the nineteenth century Catholicism was an obstacle to this process. Religion had provided one of the most important sources of Spanish identity throughout history but inevitably possessed a more universal and trans-Hispanic dimension, whereas to Catholic leaders nationalism seemed a radical and secular doctrine stemming from the French Revolution, which to a considerable extent it was. It has often been observed that the clergy were the most active and effective elite in fomenting armed resistance against the French; their appeal was religious, universalist, and also patriotic, but not truly nationalist. Carlists, for example, resisted the project of a modern Spanish nationalism, which they associated with liberalism and revolution, in favor of maintaining tradition. Only in the 1850s, with the nation seemingly firmly established, did Catholic writers and ideologues begin to develop their own interpretation of the historically Catholic nation, defining a kind of right-wing Catholic nationalism, more in line with the reading of nationalism by many Catholics in Poland.11 The traditional "Spanish ideology" was thus updated to embrace a form of modern nationalism, its leading avatar being Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and its vision of Spain expressed in a variety of textbooks.12 Moreover, by the end of the century, with liberalism more firmly established than ever, Carlism developed its own project of building a traditionalist Catholic nationalism.

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