The Reinvention of Spain: Nation and Identity since Democracy

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THE REINVENTION OF SPAIN

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The Reinvention of Spain Nation and Identity since Democracy SE BAS T I A N B A L FOUR AND ALE JANDRO QUI ROGA

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Sebastian Balfour and Alejandro Quiroga 2007

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The reinvention of Spain : nation, identity and nationalism since democracy / edited by Sebastian Balfour and Alejandro Quiroga. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–920667–4 (alk. paper) 1. Spain—Politics and government—1975–2. Nationalism—Spain. I. Balfour, Sebastian. II. Quiroga, Alejandro, 1972– DP272.R47 2007 946.083—dc22 2007020654 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–920667–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Preface This book analyses conceptions about nation and identity in Spain and their use in both everyday discourse and policy-making since democracy was restored in 1977. Its scrutiny extends across the spectrum of contemporary Spanish politics, from closet Francoists, through conservative and left-wing parties and governments, to regional nationalists of all hues. It looks into the kaleidoscope of expressions of nation and identity, from politics and political rhetoric to symbols and rituals. We began exploring this difficult and contested terrain several years ago. Since we set out on our journey, it has become even more of a political and conceptual minefield. The political system in Spain has become polarized over an array of issues, but none more so than the question of nation and identity. We look at these two concepts as they have been refracted through the lens of different nationalisms since democracy. Nationalism almost always relies on history for legitimacy and so inevitably we will be examining representations of the past and their impact on the present. The past is often the arena in which the struggles of the present are re-enacted. The power of national narratives, like that of religion, does not have to rest on veracity; they are real in the sense that they are unquestioned presuppositions embedded in identities and views of the world. But they are often part of an ideological or political agenda and give rise to competition, exclusion, or violence. In these cases there is an even more compelling reason to scrutinize the degree of their historical validity. We approach this polemical subject with, we hope, a suitable degree of modesty in the knowledge that it is complex and multilayered. It is likely that we will step on many toes, yet we have not skirted them or trodden lightly. We have sought to be rigorous and self-critical in our analysis, even though, like all scholars, we bring to bear on the subject our own ideas and theories. Throughout we have been explicit about the definitions and explanatory frameworks that have shaped our approach. For all the digging into the past, our main focus is on the present. While the much publicized idea that there is a crisis of identity and governance in Spain today should be treated with scepticism, there are real problems about social cohesion and the role of the state that cannot easily be addressed by politicians. The issues at stake are to do

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not simply with conflicting identities and histories but with problems arising out of the architecture of the state whose foundations were laid by the Constitution of 1978. The impasse in Spain has parallels in many other parts of the world. It is a symptom of a wider process of globalization and, in Alvin Toffler’s denomination, ‘glocalization’. There are no simple questions, let alone answers. Yet understanding the problem can be a way of reaching out to solutions. This involves deconstructing ideas, mentalities, and interpretations of the past that lie behind the conflicting demands of nation and identity. It means looking at structures of governance and their dynamics. It entails exploring scenarios of change and measuring these against existing conjunctures. In doing so we trust that this book will make a contribution to the task of disentangling a knot of many strings. We owe heartfelt thanks to many people who helped in the writing and production of this book. Our gratitude goes to José María Pérez ‘Peridis’ for his kind permission to reproduce two of his cartoons. We would also like to thank a number of colleagues and friends who generously gave their time to commenting on drafts of specific chapters, though we would stress that they bear no responsibility for any errors ´ of fact or judgement. These include Angel Viñas, Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas, Gregorio Alonso, Ferran Archilés Cardona, Sheelagh Ellwood, Fernando Molina Aparicio, and Diego Muro. Other people who have helped in the preparation of this book include Miguel Guerrero (who collected mountains of articles and chapters on our behalf in Madrid), Jaime Briones, Martin Farr, Eduardo González Calleja, Helen Graham, María Jesús González Hernández, Mari Carmen Fernández de Soto, Paul Preston, José María Quiroga, Luc Racaut, Mía Rodríguez-Salgado, Francisco Romero Salvadó, Iñaki de la Torre, and Chiara Thumiger.

Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviaitons of Political Parties 1. Is Spain a Nation? A Dialogue of the Deaf

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2. A Tale of Two Nations: Spanish Nationalism before Democracy (1808–1977)

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3. Spain Reconstituted, or the Semantic Battle of Nationalisms

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4. Spain: the View from the Left

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5. Spain: the View from the Right

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6. Houses of many Nations: Identities in Catalonia and the Basque Country

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7. Spain’s International Projection

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8. Spain Reinvented

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Bibliography Index

205 233

Illustrations Plate 1

Madrid streets named after Franco’s generals ( J.M. Quiroga and M.C. Fernández de Soto) Plate 2 Spanish flag in the Plaza de Colón in Madrid (J.M. Quiroga and M.C. Fernández de Soto) Plate 3 Burro català (Jaume Sala, Alex Ferreiro and Iñaki de la Torre) Plate 4 Zapatero removes Franco’s statue to the annoyance of the right. Cartoon about the battle over Francoist symbols (Peridis) Plate 5 Cartoon about the polemic over the wave of illegal immigration from North Africa (Peridis) Plate 6 Legionnaires raising the Spanish flag on Perejil (EPA) Plate 7 Aznar in the Azores summit (EPA) (Copyright holders are indicated in italics)

Abbreviations of Political Parties and Organisations AP BNG CEDA CiU EA EB ERC ETA HB ICV IU PCE PNV PP PSC PSOE PSUC UCD

Alianza Popular Bloque Nacionalista Galego Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas Convergència i Unió Eusko Alkartasuna Ezker Batua Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya Euskadi Ta Askatasuna Herri Batasuna Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds Izquierda Unida Partido Comunista de España Partido Nacionalista Vasco Partido Popular Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya Partido Socialista Obrero Español Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya Unión de Centro Democrático


1 Is Spain a Nation? A Dialogue of the Deaf This may seem a strange sort of question to ask outside Spain. Where else in Western Europe has there been such passionate national introspection? For generations of Spanish intellectuals, writers, and politicians, Spain has been a problem. Some even doubt its existence as a nation. The doubters and defenders have exchanged bitter diatribes. On both sides of the debate, claims are made that the long-standing dispute about the nature of Spain has been the cause of civil discord and civil war.¹ Yet the vast majority of Spaniards have gone about their lives without such national existential angst and the civil wars were fought over very different causes. The debate has been particularly complex during and since the transition to democracy because of the legacy of the Francoist Dictatorship. The unicultural, unipolar identity imposed by the regime deeply eroded the legitimacy of Spanish nationalism. Francoism contaminated the symbols of and debate about the nation with totalitarian meanings. The result is that Spanish nationalism has had to undergo an implicit purge and to disguise itself in many different forms. If by nationalism we mean an ideology that assumes or claims a territorially defined community to be a nation legitimized by history and enjoying (or seeking) sovereignty, then Spanish nationalism in the new democracy is alive and kicking (Núñez Seixas, 2004, 2005c). Chameleon-like, it resurfaces as patriotism, constitutionalism, solidarity, or as the expression of an immemorial and universal principle. Both state-wide right and moderate left deny its continued existence against accusations by regional nationalists that it is thriving. Yet it permeates everyday discourse, in the speeches of politicians, in weather reports, in football commentary, ¹ For example, Juan Luis Cebrian, ‘El problema de España’, Claves de Razón Práctica, 1997, 2–3.

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in the names of streets and squares. It is, in Billig’s (1995) celebrated phrase, a banal nationalism. Most of its implicit manifestations attribute a common identity and destiny to the inhabitants of Spain, embracing all those who share a cultural heritage passed on through generations since the early Middle Ages, if not since Roman times. For the democratic right, nationalism is the sole purview of secessionist movements in the periphery. They are the deviant relatives of a national family project. Spanish nationalists, rightly or wrongly, subsume Catalan or Basque under Spanish. Spanish nationalist discourse has changed, of course. Even Francoist nostalgics only feel comfortable repeating the nostrums of the Dictatorship in private. Since the end of the Francoist regime, there has been enormous pressure to reconfigure nationalist discourse to meet the challenge of the new debate about nation and identity. The democratic right has had to deal with a bewildering array of reformulations about the nature of Spain. A flood of books and articles has appeared that challenge traditional interpretations, going so far in some cases as to question whether Spain is a nation at all. Indeed, the word ‘Spain’ is often replaced by ‘the Spanish state’, with occasionally absurd results.² In response, the right has been forthright. Spain has existed as a nation since the Christian Visigoths expanded into the old Roman province of Hispania and united its population in the fifth and sixth centuries (Real Academia 1997: 583–7). Yet when he was Prime Minister, José María Aznar admitted that Spaniards were suffering an ‘inferiority complex’ in the face of regional nationalisms (Prego 2002: 104–5). The new formulations argue very different configurations of the relationship between nation and state. Eschewing the traditional formula of a nation of regions, Spain is now claimed by many to be a nation of nations, or a nation of nations and regions, or a post-traditional nation state, or a post-national state. For the peripheral nationalists (by which we mean Basque, Catalan, and Galician nationalists in particular), it is merely a state of nations and regions. Definitions of national identity thus range from official, state-centred Spanishness to the negative, counter-hegemonic formulations in which Spanishness is ² Such as the statement ‘60 million foreign tourists bathed in 1996 in the ‘‘Spanish State’’ ’, quoted in Muñoz-Alonso (2000): 37. Muñoz, however, also seems to have a problem calling things by their name. Thus he refers to ‘men and doctrines who believed … that the cultural rights of some had to be limited in order to build a united centralist State’ when he means the Francoists (p. 39).

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seen as the Other (Jordan and Morgan-Tamasunas 2000). Is Spain a plural nation or is it a plural state? These are not merely philosophical and historical debates. The issue impinges directly on the institutional framework of state and sub-state in Spain and beyond that on the fundamental cohesion of Spain’s model of citizenship. It is indeed the central contradiction facing the Spanish state. And such is the dynamic of comparative grievance among autonomous communities that some commentators believe it will be difficult to find a solution that will satisfy the competing demands for devolution and national validation (Unzueta, El País 3 June 2004). The whole discussion has been galling for Spanish conservatives because their own identity is shaped by a deep-rooted belief in Spain as a historical and united nation. The sense of national disintegration and loss of social cohesion pervades their literature since the transition to democracy. Titles such as The Suicide of Spain, The Dark Hours of Spain, If Spain Falls … the Nationalist Assault on the State, What Remains of Spain, Defence of the Spanish Nation, Faced by the Exacerbation of Nationalisms and European Doubt³ express a collective existentialist anguish similar to that formulated in a very different context by the Generation of 1898. The angst has been deepened by the process of globalization, which has contributed to the erosion of ‘communities of fate’ by fostering multilevel governance as well as networks and opportunities for transnational communication. The extraordinary rise in immigration to Spain in the past few years may have contributed to this sense of loss of identity. Excluding illegal immigration, the number of immigrants rose eightfold between 1996 and 2006 to almost 4,000,000.⁴ Yet this seemingly pervasive apprehension of a national crisis of identity appears to be largely confined to political elites and the media associated with them. Opinion polls give a much more multifaceted picture of identity among Spanish citizens than the polarized interpretations advanced by journalists, intellectuals, and political elites from both Spanish and peripheral nationalist camps. A survey by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas in 2003 (Boletín 31, 2003) suggested that the relative strength of Spanish and regional identities varies across regions largely irrespective of nationalist claims or lack of them. Thus in ³ The bibliographical details of these books can be found in the bibliography. ⁴ For data on the number of immigrants from 1996 to 2005 see Garrido (2005: 129). For 2006, see Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Avance del Padrón Municipal a 1 de enero de 2006 .

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Extremadura Spanish identity is considerably weaker than in neighbouring Castilla-La Mancha. Perhaps surprisingly, it is also far weaker than in Catalonia and equivalent to that of the Basque Country. As many as 20 per cent of Catalans questioned in the survey felt exclusively Spanish or more Spanish than Catalan, while at the other end of the spectrum only 16 per cent identified solely with their autonomous community.⁵ Twenty-five per cent of Basques felt uniquely Basque and 19 per cent felt more Basque than Spanish, while as many as 34 per cent felt equally Spanish and Basque, and 8 per cent more Spanish than Basque or only Spanish.⁶ This is endorsed by further data in the same survey. When asked whether their community is a region or a nation, 47 per cent of Catalans preferred to call Catalonia a region and 37 per cent a nation. In the Basque Country, the ‘vote’ was split equally at 37 per cent (while 14 and 12 per cent respectively chose neither option). The median across all the regions reveals that a majority of those questioned identified themselves as much with Spain as with their community, while exclusive identities were marginal, with only 14 per cent claiming to be solely Spanish and 6 per cent as uniquely belonging to their community. The figures underline the strength of dual identity, irrespective of nationalist narratives. In fact, they point to a different polarity altogether. More striking than the difference between Basque, Catalan, and Galician perceptions of identity and those of the rest of Spain is the disparity between regions with a strong sense of Spanish identity and those in which identity is shared equally between nation and region (Boletín 31, 2003; Gallego-Díaz, El País 14 January 2005). The reasons for this pattern go beyond our brief but they almost certainly are to do with a complex interplay of migration and immigration, tradition, and political and economic dynamics.⁷ For example, the regions with the weakest sense of regional identity are those with the fewest regional traditions (Moral 1998: 35, Table 2.2). ⁵ The figures for Catalonia are largely corroborated by the 2005 survey of the Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials of Barcelona (ICPS 2006: 83). ⁶ The figures for the Basque Country are largely corroborated by the sociological studies of the Political Science and Sociology departments at the Universidad del País Vasco. The Euskobarómetro in its May 2006 poll presented very similar results except in one category, in which 33 per cent of its respondents considered themselves exclusively Basque (Euskobarómetro, 2006a). ⁷ Regional nationalists cannot claim that the figures distort the strength of peripheral nationalist sentiment by including respondents from elsewhere who have moved to their regions for purposes of work because regional governments extend citizenship to all who live and work in their regions, irrespective of ethno-linguistic criteria.

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A comparison of this poll with data from a similar exercise carried out in 1991 indicates an overall reduction of 4 per cent in those claiming to be solely Spanish, a rise of 2 per cent in those feeling equally strongly about Spain and their region and exactly the same percentage of greater or exclusive regional sentiment. The change could be explained in part by the rise in meso-level government during the twelve years between the two polls. However, if we look at results in individual regions, a more complicated pattern emerges that again does not correspond to nationalist assumptions. For example, data from Extremadura demonstrate the greatest fall in Spanishness of all regions, while Catalonia shows a modest rise in Spanish identity. Similarly, the Madrid region shows a drop in exclusive national identity in contrast to a much more geographically peripheral region, Cantabria, where the sense of Spanishness doubled (García-Ferrando et al. 1994). Thus the claims of nationalists of all persuasions are not corroborated by empirical evidence of opinion polls, which suggest on the contrary the unwillingness of most individuals to absorb the exclusiveness of nationalist discourses, whether Spanish or regional. Finally, a comparison with cross country polls across the globe reveals a relative absence of Spanish nationalism among Spaniards. A UNESCO report of 2000 (based on opinion polls in 1995) on international public opinion and national identity lists Spain as second last before the Netherlands in ‘nationalistic feelings and pride in national achievements’. Yet 84 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement that ‘one nation is essential’, only 4 per cent below the mean average for all the countries in the poll, a much higher percentage than respondents in Great Britain (−18 per cent), Canada, and the Russian Federation (−12 per cent). As for the relation between identification with country and with region (combining neighbourhood, home town, and province), Spanish respondents rated region more highly than the average (though not as highly as Hungary, Austria, and Bulgaria), while their identification with Spain as a country was only 2 per cent below the average, demonstrating a far more positive sense of national identity than British, Dutch, US, Swedish, and German respondents, among others (Unesco 2000: 221–31, Tables 1–12). These findings again conflict with arguments from nationalists of both camps that identities in Spain are exceptional or undergoing a crisis. The apprehension of a loss of national identity is common to conservatives in many countries in Europe. It is not just due to fear of a ‘European super-state’ or the effects of immigration on traditional

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perceptions but due to the rise of alternative identities in the periphery. British Conservatives, for example, are tussling with the problem of reinventing a problematic Englishness now that the party has lost its base in Scotland and Wales and after symbols of Britishness were deeply undermined by government reforms, in particular through the privatization and deregulation carried out by the Thatcher and Major governments (Kumar 2003: 264). Indeed, traditional nationalisms in Western Europe have had to grapple with multiple challenges that seem to threaten their existence. Reinventing national identity thus means trying to reconcile traditional narratives based on myths of common origin and continuity with a rapidly changing social, economic, and political environment where they have less and less meaning. Before we examine the conflicting models of Spanish nationalist and regional nationalists any further, the whole issue of nation and national identity in Spain needs to be measured against the wider theoretical debate that has only intensified in recent years. The concept of nation is itself one of the most elusive in political science. What constitutes a nation is the subject of wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory definitions (Prizel 1998: 12–14). Indeed, the central problem of the debate is the absence of any theoretical model that can overarch the disparate manifestations of nation, nationalism, and their causes. No one doubts that in the nineteenth century the construction of nation and national identity became a core mission of political elites of both states and minorities within states throughout Europe. The explanation for this surge of nationalism and its sources, however, has given rise to profuse discussion. Perhaps one of the most useful and balanced overviews was given in 1998 by Anthony D. Smith, who identified five basic approaches to the study of nationalism. Briefly, primordialists of all kinds see kinship, language, religion, and territory as the basic attributes of nation and national identity. Perennialists, on the other hand, tend to accept the modernity of nationalism but see nations as the expression of underlying, immemorial, ethnic and cultural identities. Ethno-symbolists also acknowledge the modernist contention that nations and nationalism are modern phenomena but stress that premodern structures such as cultural identities, symbols, and tribal loyalties form their sub-soil and were not simply constructed or invented by the political elites. Modernists maintain that nations are modern, elite-driven political constructs embedded in the process of modernization. Finally, postmodernists argue that national identities have become fragmented in the accelerating process of globalization and that new postnational identities are emerging.

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All these paradigms are considered in this book because they lie at the roots of the debate about identities in Spain. However, the modernist paradigm is used as the main explanatory framework, not least because it is most suited to the historical context of nation and nationalism in Spain. Spanish nationalism emerged only in early nineteenth-century Spain, while peripheral nationalist movements materialized as late as the end of the century, closely tied to the process of modernization, even if they claimed to be rebirths of some earlier movements. Premodern structures played a part in the construction of national identity, whether at the centre or in the periphery, but, as we shall argue, they tended to be too localized and apolitical to form its core. It is true, as Breuilly contends, that in their search to build nations, political elites plundered local identities, raising some to national status, even if they became distorted in the process. However, as he and other modernists argue, nations, state-led or stateless, and nationalisms were political artefacts above all and not merely psychological states or the sum of myths, symbols, memories, and so on (Breuilly 1993). Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ thesis stressed the cultural dimension of nation and nationalism but conceived of it nonetheless as part of a political project of nationalization or self-determination (Anderson 1983). And others, from Renan to Rogers Brubaker, argue that nation is a political claim, not a fact or even an analytical category (Brubaker 2004: 116). The modernist case rests on a historical causal analysis of the emergence of nations and nationalism. It stresses the political nature of both and their modernity; that is, their emergence in Europe from the late eighteenth century. Thus nations, nationalism, and national identity are linked to the process of modernization, whether as a product or as a reaction. Key to their development was industrialization, urbanization, social mobility, mass literacy, and the growth of social communication networks. Modernists also emphasize the role of the state above all but also institutions, political elites, intellectuals, and so on in the invention of tradition. Finally, they stress war and the creation of the Other as further crucial factors of nationalist mobilization.⁸ However, an issue that has not begun to be resolved in any of the explanations of nationalism is the distinction, if there is any, between patriotism and nationalism. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, has suggested that patriotism is a sentiment, while nationalism is an ideology (Nussbaum 1996: 23). ⁸ For example, Gellner (1983), Hobsbawm (1990), and Anderson (1983).

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Yet patriotism nowadays is suffused with nationalism. This is what politicians tend to invoke when they seek to justify a policy or position with an underlying political ideology and a more or less clearly defined Other against which to rally public opinion. Indeed, it is difficult to separate the two terms (Álvarez Junco 2001a: 263). It would be more accurate to locate feelings of attachment to nation as part of a spectrum ranging from a passive cultural identification, at one end, to the fullblown nationalism of Us and Them at the other. Whatever the strength of feeling attached to it, nationhood continues to provide a backdrop for political discourse, cultural products, and symbolism, and in many, sometimes implicit, ways citizens are daily reminded of their place in a world of nation-states (Billig 1996: 8). The recent literature on nation and nationalism in Spain, apart from the traditional or regional teleological accounts outlined above, tends to work within a modernist perspective, arguing that Spain neither deviates widely from nor conforms closely to the analytical modernist model explaining the emergence of nationalism in Western Europe. The first articulation of modern nationalism, according to both Pérez Garzón and Portillo, was the Cádiz Cortes in 1810, the civil government set up, in the unoccupied territory during the Napoleonic peninsular invasion, to replace Spain’s absolute monarchy. The Constitution of 1812 established the sovereign power over monarch and church of the nation and its citizens as represented by democratic institutions at the centre and in the provinces (Portillo 2000; Pérez Garzón 2000: 64–8). Beyond the textual affirmation of the modern nation, the Cádiz liberals constructed a myth of the Peninsular War as a national and popular uprising against foreign domination, the expression of a new national identity (Álvarez Junco 2001a). For most of the nineteenth century, however, the centralist model predominated among the conservative liberal Moderados, and the liberal monarchists of the Restoration, although its ability to impose itself on society was limited. Among historians and sociologists there is a broad modernist consensus that socio-economic modernization took place in Spain from the second half of the nineteenth century but that it was a relatively slow process generating considerable tensions and asymmetries that stimulated regional nationalisms.⁹ There is disagreement, however, over the extent of political modernization. Most argue that the state and its ⁹ See, for example, Linz (1973), Fusi (1990a, b), and Riquer i Permanyer (1994).

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agencies failed to impose themselves on society, relying instead on local institutions and elites to carry out some of the functions of governance. The relative weakness of the liberal state resulted in a limited nationalization of the masses, not helped by the relative absence of wars against foreign powers and the state’s failure to impose universal military service (Álvarez Junco 2001b). This provided fertile ground for the growth of regional nationalism, although, as Fusi (1997: 234–6) points out, local and regional identities could not always be easily conflated. Other historians, while acknowledging the relative weakness of state mechanisms, argue that the process of nationalization had been much more advanced. A modern liberal political culture and sense of national identity and patriotism had been successfully disseminated in most parts of Spain, particularly in the cities, by the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Thus regional nationalism emerged in an already politicized environment. The relative merits of the two theses are discussed in Chapter 2. The modernist perspective also dominates the analyses of regional nationalisms at the turn of the twentieth century. Two very different models emerge. Basque nationalism is seen as a reaction against modernization, while Catalan nationalism, in its various forms, was an affirmation of modernity against the failure of the Spanish state to bring about political and cultural modernization. The Basque movement, confined at first largely to urban areas of the Vizcaya province, was a defensive response by sections of the middle class and small business to industrialization, which was sweeping aside small industry and sucking in large numbers of immigrants, who were seen as a threat not just to social cohesion but also, in the eyes of the founder of Basque nationalism Sabino Arana and his followers, to a supposed racial purity.¹¹ The Catalan movement, on the other hand, embraced different projects. It was in part a response to the political and cultural hegemony of the Restoration elites, which continued to subordinate Catalan politicians to the dynastic parties (Riquer in García Rovira 1999). Catalonia was seen as a model of modernity for a backward state and society and it could only exert its influence in this direction by converting its interests lobby within the state into a political movement outside it. But it was also a cultural movement affirming cultural and linguistic solidarity across class barriers and seeking autonomy, if not independence. ¹⁰ For bibliographical details see Chapter 2. ¹¹ Díez Medrano and Gutiérrez (2001).

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The Spanish–American War of 1898 and the consequent loss of the remnants of the Spanish Empire, as we shall see in Chapter 2, brought these tensions to the surface. In the prolific historiography generated by the centenary, there is a relatively high degree of consensus about the impact of the defeat and loss of empire. The crisis of 1898 had a profound influence on conceptions of national identity. For a brief moment, the war had mobilized public opinion as well as drafted peasants and labourers in remote parts of Spain around a myth of national identity as an imperial nation. The defeat deeply undermined traditional rhetoric about nation and crystallized a growing crisis of identity in a society undergoing profound socio-economic changes. It also radicalized the different nationalist discourses and projects of national regeneration and regional autonomy (Balfour 1997; Pan-Montojo 1998). Thus by the end of the nineteenth century no single narrative of history and concept of identity monopolized nationalist discourse. Neither Spanish nor regional nationalism was able to impose a hegemonic or exclusive identity. Instead there was a range of collective loyalties subject to shifting levels of identification (Núñez Seixas 2005c). The modernist approach thus offers not only a structural but also a cultural explanation of nationalisms in Spain. Historians have tended to identify three dominant discourses or political projects for nationalist affirmation in the first half of the twentieth century. One was a liberal, civic nationalism, which culminated in the progressive Republican governments of 1931–3 and 1936–9. During the first administration, the national diversity of Spain was recognized and home rule through a statute of autonomy was awarded to Catalonia. The Basque Country was granted a similar statute in 1936, while Galicia voted for home rule in the same year but fell almost immediately to the Nationalist rebels at the beginning of the Civil War. A counter-project was NationalCatholicism, to which Catholics and conservatives increasingly adhered, which sought to impose by authoritarian means a uniform nationalization or españolización based on a traditional religious, linguistic, and cultural identity. This was seen by the right as the only solution to the broader internal socio-economic and nationalist crisis and was part of the authoritarian counter-revolutionary movement spreading throughout Europe. The third was the assertion by regional nationalists in the Basque Country and Catalonia of a distinct history and identity and the demand for autonomy or independence (Boyd 1997). The tensions generated by the competition between these different movements played an important part in the ideological validation of the military coups of

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1923 and 1936 and the dictatorships of Primo de Rivera and Franco (Quiroga 2007). The last paradigm we need to consider in relation to contemporary Spain is postmodernist. Beyond disputing the validity of objective and testable truths, postmodernists seek to deconstruct national identities, claiming that traditional narratives do not reflect the fragmented, hybrid, and ambivalent nature of identities (e.g. Baudrillard 1994; Bhabha 1994). In any case, identities are not intrinsic or imposed but strategic constructions that are constantly being renegotiated. Thus what is Spanish is a continuously shifting concept embracing both plurality and contradiction (Labanyi 1995: 397) Globalization, the postmodernists argue, has intensified the challenge to these traditional narratives through decolonization, immigration, asylum-seeking, and the cultural transmission of a manufactured identity by US-dominated multinational capital (Flynn 2001). Thus we are seeing the emergence at the same time of unicultural consumerism across borders and multicultural societies within postnational states. Military, economic, and technological globalization also erodes the traditional sovereignty of the state as it collaborates increasingly with other states within multistate institutions such as the European Union. On the other hand, this process has entailed devolution to, and representation of new political actors at sub-state level, enabling the promotion of different cultures and languages, and stimulating resistance to state-led national identities (Guibernau 2001). The discussion of nation and identity in Spain has tended to be inward-looking, a battleground between Spanish nationalisms and regional nationalisms. Integration into the EU stimulated debate about identity because it aroused (and continues to arouse) anxiety among españolistas that any surrender or pooling of sovereignty would undermine Spanishness.¹² The opportunity provided by the EU for representation of regional nationalism at international level is seen by some to threaten the dilution of national identity (Alonso de los Ríos, 1994; Bueno 2000). Only recently have the far more important consequences of globalization in general begun to inform the debate about identity in Spain. Immigration since democracy, and in particular in recent years, has resulted in a significant ethnic and cultural transformation, ¹² Yet according to a survey of 2000, only 3 per cent of respondents acknowledged any fear that European integration would erode Spanish identity (Díez Medrano and Gutiérrez 2001).

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a miscegenation similar in intensity, according to José Luis Abellán, to that of premodern Spain (El País 7 October, 2004). Together with the penetration of international consumer culture, this poses a serious challenge to traditional narratives of national identity at both state and regional levels. Responses have ranged from the call for assimilation (implicit because not politically correct) to multiculturalism. Some, like politicians and commentators of the Catalanist left, argue for the integration of immigrants around a secular and civic rather than an ethnic and cultural model, but they still want the vernacular language (the cultural element distinctive of Catalonia as a nation par excellence) to act as the common vehicle of communication among citizens new and old (Colomines i Companys 2000). The postmodernist paradigm throws light on processes undermining traditional identity but it tends to overstate the degree to which they have been successful. Globalization has indeed created new layers of identity as people seek out identities ever closer to them, such as town, village, even neighbourhood. But it has not significantly weakened hegemonic identities. Immigrant communities are under pressure to assimilate into what continues to be the master narrative to avoid ghettoization. The EU remains a union of nation-states and the regions have not acquired any political status within it beyond a consultative role in the Assembly of the Regions; the regions represented in it are far too heterogeneous to act as a lobby for the devolution of decision-making in the EU. In conclusion, we need unavoidably to ask what Spain is, beyond invention and teleology. For this purpose and that of the chapters that follow, it is important to have at least an operational concept of what a nation is. A widely accepted definition is that it is a territorially bound and sovereign community of interaction and attachment enjoying collective political rights or a community within a defined territory where a majority of its citizens claim the right to rule themselves (e.g. Mann 1993; Núñez Seixas 2004; Guibernau 2004a: 7–9). It should be noted that this sort of definition steers clear of language, ethnicity, religion, and history as markers of national identity. Although all four played an essential role in their nationalism at the outset, Spanish and regional nationalists are careful now to reject such an exclusive identity, although their traditions are steeped in these concepts and sentiments. The key element in defining a nation is that significant sections of the community consider the territory as a nation. In these terms, Catalonia and the Basque Country would qualify as stateless nations, while growing numbers of Galician nationalists aspire to win

Is Spain a Nation?

13

over the majority of their co-nationals to this end. And there are other regions, such as Andalusia and the Canaries, where some political elites are moving in this direction. This corroborates the view that national identity is fluid, that nations are provisional and unstable; new nations emerge repeatedly, old nations disappear or change name or category (Álvarez Junco et al. 2005). However, there can be little doubt that under the terms of the definition Spain is also a nation. Even if the historic role of Castile as the hegemonic power within Spain is acknowledged, elites from other regions, including Catalonia and the Basque Country, took part in the construction of Spanish nationhood, and Spanish identity, however imagined, has deep roots in all of Spain, including the Basque Country and Catalonia. If, as some peripheral nationalist narratives argue, Spain was and remains a state, how does that leave regions such as Extremadura or La Rioja? One aggrieved journalist complained that the Basque and Catalan nationalists wish to deprive many Spanish regions of a nation by denying that condition to Spain (Alonso de los Ríos 1994: 16). Another matter is whether we all need to be part of a nation anymore in what some claim to be a postnational era. The official definition of Spain is unambiguous. According to the Constitution, Spain is a nation of nationalities and regions. Article 2 identifies some regions as nationalities without actually naming them. There has been much debate over the meaning of this term. It was not a formulation sought by any of the parties to the negotiations leading to the constitutional settlement. Despite the delegitimization of National-Catholic doctrine after almost forty years of enforcement, the democratic settlement of 1977–8 contained a residue of its assumptions. This was because the Dictatorship was eased out of existence rather than overthrown and the terms of democracy were negotiated on the basis of an uncertain and fragile balance of power between the left, centre, and democratic right. The terms and words used in the Constitution were the subject of tense bargaining, none more so than how the new democratic Spain should be defined in relation to nation and national identity. Thus the right rejected the use of the term ‘nation’ to describe any of the regions as well as the term ‘state’ to define Spain. The designation of nationality (employed in a very different but similarly fragile political context by Lenin in 1914 and in the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill) was therefore the result of inspired compromise (Pérez Royo El País 13 December 2004). Nevertheless, the formula implies that there is only one nation and that the regions with historic claims to autonomy have no political status

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Is Spain a Nation?

as nations, merely that they are cultural nations and therefore do not qualify for statehood (Bastida 1998: 201–16). This is true of current alternative formulations that propose to differentiate ‘nationalities’ from regions by calling them nations or ‘national communities’¹³ within the one nation. They do not obviate the political subordination of these communities to the Spanish nation-state, the existence of which is unquestioned in the Constitution. Yet the Constitution went further. By creating other autonomous communities beyond previous imagination (in Benedict Anderson’s terms), such as the Madrid region or Cantabria, might the Constitution not have effectively diluted the status of the historic nationalities, as Catalanists claim? It is true that constitutional provisions such as Título VIII entitled them faster access to full autonomy by virtue of the plebiscites through which statutes of autonomy were approved during the Second Republic. But the right to autonomy was extended to all the communities defined in the territorial organisation of the state in the new democracy. Subsequent political pacts in 1981 and 1992 established the principle of parity of structure, competencies, and finance, or in other terms equity and solidarity, among all autonomies, with the exception of the Basque Country and Navarra, which enjoy a special tax regime based on historical precedents, and the Canary Islands because of special needs deriving from their geographical location. The tax rights enjoyed by these three regions thus created an asymmetry not only between regions belonging to what is called the ‘common regime’ but also between historic communities. The Basque Country and Navarra, in particular, have been able to use their special relationship with the state to reduce their domestic rates of taxation and increase public services, despite being among the three richest communities in terms of GDP per capita. This has had the effect of further exacerbating social and economic disparities (de la Fuente 2005: 12–13). Partly as a result, Catalan governments have sought to achieve similar levels of economic autonomy on the basis of their historic rank. Indeed, since the promulgation of the Constitution, there has been constant tension between the state and the regional nationalists in power over whether the differential status of the historic communities should be recognized. To complicate matters, autonomies not initially recognized as historic communities, such as Andalusia and Valencia, later have gained that status. ¹³ The 2004 formulation of José Blanco, Secretary of the Spanish Socialist Party or PSOE.

Is Spain a Nation?

15

Is it possible to conceive of a nation-state within which there are stateless nations? This formulation satisfies the minimum definitions outlined above. But is this not a contradiction in terms? And if so, should not any constitutional reform adopt a different formula, such as a ‘nation of peoples’, as Bastida (1998) argues? The questions have two dimensions, juridical and political. In any constitutional reformulation, ambiguity is difficult to avoid, even if the national status of the historic autonomous communities is made more explicit. Without wishing to stray into normative territory, it can be argued that constitutions or laws of the realm never properly reflect shifting identities, and contradictions and ambiguities are surely a result of bargaining based on the political balance of power. This was the origin of the ambiguity of the 1978 Constitution in Spain, as we saw. There is now no risk of democratic breakdown and the traditional right is weaker than it was during the transition to democracy, while regional nationalist parties often act as the fulcrum of majorities in the national parliament. With the new balance of political power in Spain since the elections of March 2004, the Socialist government began a process of reform in an effort to integrate regional demands in a new autonomous model. With the help of the conservative Catalan nationalists of Convergència i Unió (CiU) it succeeded in modifying the more radical claims contained in the revised draft of the Catalan Statute of Autonomy drawn up by the tripartite government in Barcelona led by the then Catalan President Pasqual Maragall and passed by the Catalan parliament. It thus brought to a close a heated political debate that the Partido Popular (PP) had used to mobilize the fear of Spain’s disintegration. Even afterwards, the PP continued to campaign for its abrogation but was no longer able to muster the kind of mass support it had enjoyed earlier. The Zapatero government also began attempts to negotiate a settlement with the Basque government that fell short of the de facto independence sought by Basque nationalists. No political reform, however, is likely to resolve what is increasingly turning into a constitutional impasse. A new form of words and further devolution will not halt the dynamic of comparative grievance that characterizes relations between the autonomies, such as the Catalans’ insistence that their region should enjoy the same competencies as the Basque Country and that the status of both should be maintained in comparison with the other autonomies. Nor will it defuse tensions between the state and the Basque government. The Basque Prime Minister Ibarretxe’s plan for associated nation status for the Basque Country, backed by a majority of four in the regional

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Is Spain a Nation?

parliament in December 2004 with the help of ETA’s banned political wing Herri Batasuna (HB), was rejected by the Spanish Parliament in February 2005.¹⁴ The unconstitutional steps the Basque government threatened to take following this refusal would provoke a political crisis within the Basque Country. We need only remind ourselves that only a third of Basques see themselves as uniquely Basque and that barely half vote for parties seeking self-determination (Euskobarómetro 2006a). Leaving the Basque question aside, any further devolution of competencies on the basis of historic rights—that is, any assertion of the differential status between ‘historic nationalities’ and regions—is likely to be resisted by the regions on the grounds of discrimination or asymmetry. In any case, there is likely to be little room for further devolution, since the state’s finances could not cope with the loss of revenue from the rich regions on which the solidarity principle of the Constitution is based (Unzueta, El País 3 June 2004). Yet the richer regions are insisting that they will not continue indefinitely to pay more to the state than is their due by virtue of their income (e.g. Maragall, La Vanguardia 4 January 2005). In the whole debate about governance in Spain, the political and legal question of the territorial distribution of power has become entangled with the ideological issue of nation and identity. The crucial problem facing Spain is not to do with definition or nomenclature, themes that haunt the discourse of both the Spanish democratic right and some of the regional nationalists,¹⁵ but with the reform of the architecture of governance that can satisfy both the aspirations of the ‘historic nationalities’ and the principle of solidarity across regions that is a central and widely accepted feature of the Constitution. ¹⁴ ETA’s political wing has taken different names since the restoration of democracy. Founded in 1978, Herri Batasuna was a coalition of left-wing radical nationalist parties that advocated full independence for the Basque Country. In 1998, the coalition changed its name to Euskal Herritarrok. In the following years the coalition was renamed Batasuna. In 2003, Batasuna was banned in Spain for ties with ETA. For the sake of clarity, throughout the text we use Herri Batasuna (HB) to refer to the conglomerate of political parties associated with radical Basque nationalism. ¹⁵ Pradera, ‘Nación, autonomía y federalismo’, El País 9 November 2005. The Popular Party’s number two, Angel Acebes, stated that the party was deeply worried that the door might be opened for Catalonia to become a nation and for Spain to cease to be one (El País 19 October 2004).

2 A Tale of Two Nations: Spanish Nationalism before Democracy (1808–1977) In the first years of the new democracy, the nationalist rhetoric of the Francoist dictatorship had led to a sort of rhetorical paralysis, a collective inhibition by which the terms ‘Spain’ and ‘Spanish nation’ were seldom employed by politicians, the media, or academics (Botti 1993: 317–23). Instead, euphemisms such as ‘this country’ were used to denote Spain. In the eyes of some, the concept of the Spanish nation was shameful, too closely identified with the dictatorship to be regarded with any sympathy. How did this crisis of Spanish national identity originate? Was it solely due to the negative impact of Francoism or was it the long-term result of a weak Spanish nation-building process during the nineteenth century? Was the Spanish state’s alleged failure to nationalize the masses responsible for the endurance of regional identities? Was Spanish nationalism, as many saw it at the time, intrinsically authoritarian? Was Spanish nation-building a special case, radically different from the rest of Western Europe? The initial stages of the Spanish nation-building process were part of a broad Western European pattern. Like its European counterparts, the Spanish nation was constructed as an ‘imagined community’ by nationalist ideology. It was an effort to define communal identity in response to the attenuation of traditional allegiances (Anderson 1983: 5–7). The process of building the nation as an imagined community is a modern historical phenomenon that began in the late eighteenth century alongside the American and French Revolutions. It spread across Europe in the early nineteenth century, accompanied by the creation of the liberal state (Mann 1993: 214–53). During this process of political mobilization, a range of political rights and traditions, some of which were invented ad hoc, was attributed to the nation, and the community

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A Tale of Two Nations

that supposedly made up that nation was invested with sovereignty in an effort to consolidate unity among its members.¹ Two opposing concepts of nation emerged in Spain in the first decades of the nineteenth century when the liberal and the traditionalist models of Spain as an imagined political and cultural community were first formulated (Inman Fox 1997: 16). Since then, the confrontation between the two became increasingly hostile and the most extreme manifestation of this conflict of identities was the idea of the ‘two antagonistic Spains’ promoted by Franco during the Civil War and his forty-year-long dictatorship (Radcliff in Cruz and Pérez 1997: 306). There can be little doubt of the existence of a Spanish identity before the ‘age of nationalism’, the era that began with the French Revolution and reached its peak in the late nineteenth century. During the ancien régime, many of the peninsular subjects of the Hispanic Monarchy shared a number of political and religious beliefs that shaped their identity. First, they perceived themselves and the Hispanic Monarchy as intrinsically Catholic, the defenders of the ‘real’ faith against the Protestant northern European neighbours. Second, they saw themselves as rulers of an empire. The fact that native subjects of the kingdoms of Spain were awarded privileges giving them access to public office, guilds, and communal lands, in both the Peninsula and the American Empire, contributed to the emergence of concepts of Spanishness as early as the seventeenth century (Herzog 2003: 54–63). Finally, colonial wars and religious clashes with Protestant, but also Catholic, neighbours helped to shape the figure of the hostile Other and encouraged Spanish subjects to define themselves collectively against it. Hence throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Spaniards developed a deep-rooted xenophobia, directed especially against the French and the English (Alvárez Junco 1996: 90). War, religion, and empire all contributed to the creation of a Spanish ethno-patriotism, a sense of a common identity expressed through demonstrations of affection and pride for the ‘fatherland’. However, ethno-patriotic identity cannot be considered ‘national’ sensu stricto. It was defined in terms of an attachment to a vaguely defined ethnic, or cultural, group, and to a kingdom, a political community built around the monarchy and the Church. It was not therefore attached to the nation. In other words, the legitimacy of the state was not given by the people: the King, and not the ‘nation’, was sovereign during the ancien régime (Álvarez Junco 2001b: 61–2). ¹ For the process of inventing traditions see Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983).


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It was only with the French Revolution that the demand that state and nation should be coterminous, that the ‘political and national unit should be congruent’, became widespread in Europe (Gellner 1983: 1). As we saw in Chapter 1, the modern liberal concept of Spain was created during the Peninsular War of 1808–14. The invasion of Napoleonic troops mobilized an important sector of the population in the struggle against the French and triggered the liberal revolution. In 1810, the National Assembly convened in Cádiz and assumed national sovereignty in defence of a modern canon of Spain as a political community of citizens endowed with equal rights. In March 1812 the National Assembly approved a constitution that established the Spanish nation as sovereign and recognized Spain as a national, constitutional, parliamentarian, and Catholic body (Portillo Valdés 2000: 259–492). To justify abandoning the absolutist regime, Spanish liberalism sought to position itself within ‘popular’ traditions. Liberals defined the national community in terms of a common history and culture rooted in the Middle Ages (Riquer i Permanyer 1994: 251). Thus Aragon’s medieval parliaments and the Castilian Comuneros’ opposition to the rule of the Habsburgs were mobilized as historical landmarks for Spanish liberalism’s claim that it had ‘traditional’ origins. In turn, this contention of a ‘popular’ and ‘democratic’ past was meant to legitimize liberalism and the creation of new participatory institutions within a modern state (Núñez Seixas 1999: 18–19). In other words, from its conception the liberal idea of Spain incorporated an important ‘organicist’ perception of the nation as a community shaped by history and culture, an idea that would eventually underlie the 1978 Constitution. During the reign of Isabel II (1833–68) moderate liberals (moderados) in power developed a nationalist mythology around the canons established in Cádiz. This was part of the ‘invention of traditions’ that took place in all European nation-states throughout the nineteenth century. In Spain, the struggle against the French was called the ‘War of Independence’ and became the focus of national myth making. What was in reality a multilayered civil and international war (French versus British and pro-Napoleonic versus anti-Napoleonic Spaniards) was presented as the people’s fight for the freedom of the patria. The tens of monuments erected to the nation’s ‘martyrs’ and the creation of 2 May as a national holiday are good examples of this effort to weave a new narrative of nation (Álvarez Junco 1994: 74–99). Writers and artists also played a prominent role in the propagation of the nationalist discourse of the moderates. The ‘people’ became the main actor in

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literature and academic books asserting the historical continuity of the Spanish Volkgeist (Jover Zamora 1984: 8–14). The practical goal of these general histories of Spain was to legitimize the construction of the liberal nation-state around contemporary bourgeois social values. At a political level, the moderates argued that a uniform centralized state was the best way to cement the liberal order. At the same time, they maintained a strong identification between Catholicism and Spanish national identity (Inman Fox 1997: 38). A political alternative to this moderate national project was put forward by progressive liberals and republicans. They saw the medieval parliaments (cortes), local charters ( fueros), and religious tolerance as the hallmarks of the Spanish nation’s ‘Golden Age’. Conversely, Habsburg rule, ‘foreign’ absolutism, and religious intolerance had in their view paved the way for Spanish decadence. Instead, freedom, democracy, and, in some versions, republicanism were the redemptive ideals of the liberal-progressive model.² Unlike the moderates, progressive liberals argued for the construction of a decentralized state. They justified this by idealizing the medieval local statutes and municipalities, as the ‘historical guardians’ of the so-called ‘regional freedoms’ (Núñez Seixas 1999: 22–30). By advocating a decentralized state, democrats also claimed to be preserving the ‘traditional’ political structure of the nation. But ideological intentions and political realities proved difficult to marry. When progressive liberals were in power (1868–74) the political system remained highly unstable and the federal project during the First Republic (1873–4) failed to take off. As in France, the bourgeois revolutions led to the emergence of two different types of liberal nationalism: conservative and progressive. Yet in Spain progressive liberals argued for a decentralized state in contrast with centralist Jacobinism, while conservative liberals supported a centralized Spain—unlike their French counterparts, the more ‘regionalist’ Girondins (Núñez Seixas 1999). This division was to be crucial later in the twentieth century. For decades since the second half of the nineteenth century, those supporting the most progressive political options in Spain also favoured municipal autonomy and regional devolution, thus bringing together the ideas of democracy and decentralization. Although the federal republic in Spain was short-lived, its intellectual ² For the republicans’ nationalist postulates see Blas Guerrero (1991) and Jover (1994: 105–67).


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legacy was long lasting. The federal and republican model claimed by the left in the 1970s had its intellectual origins in nineteenth-century progressive liberalism. The liberal concept of Spain was fiercely contested by traditionalist thinking, which also had its early expressions in the ‘War of Independence’, when defenders of the ancien régime defined the Spanish nation as intrinsically Catholic and mobilized the population to fight the ‘atheist invader’. Fernando VII’s supporters, the Serviles, and the Carlists later, considered liberal ideas ‘anti-Spanish’ and against the nation’s ‘traditions’. The Serviles copied the traditionalist discourse developed in France during the Revolution and used the anti-liberal rhetoric as an ideological tool to defend ‘The Altar and the Crown’ (Herrero 1971: 14). In doing so, they laid the foundations of traditionalist thought and many of their ideas were used to build the Catholic model of Spain fifty years later. The Serviles and the Carlists, however, did not appeal to the nation in the modern sense of the term but to traditional legitimacies. The concept of modern nation as a sovereign political community was far too revolutionary for them. The idea of the nation only crept into traditionalist discourse during the second half of the nineteenth century. Traditionalist historians saw Spanish power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a consequence of the struggle against foreign heresy in Europe. The evangelization of the Americas and Catholic unity became the common denominators of the Spanish nation. In the famous words of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo: ‘Spain evangelizer of half of the world. Spain, hammer of heretics, light of Trent, sword of the Pope, birthplace of Saint Ignatius. That is our greatness and our glory: we have no other.’ Traditionalists also held French rationalism and German Krausism responsible for the ‘artificial’ introduction of revolutionary ideas that had supposedly destroyed the unity of Spanish culture (Boyd 1997: 99–103). Contrary to the liberal-progressive model, traditionalists located the Spanish Golden Age in the period of the first Habsburgs and blamed Bourbon reformism for the nation’s decadence. Hence, traditionalists interpreted the history of Spain as a struggle between orthodox patriots and heterodox traitors, between pure followers of ‘national’ Catholic traditions and those contaminated by heretical foreign ideas. This Manichean conception of the nation helped to create the myth of the existence of two Spains, a myth that Franco was later to institutionalize during his forty-year-long dictatorship. Traditionalist

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nationalism was in many respects a latecomer. But once established it reverberated throughout Spain, especially when the liberal system went through successive crises at the turn of the twentieth century. After the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in 1874 and the final defeat of Carlism in the battlefields two years later, Spain returned to a constitutional monarchy under Alfonso XII, with the Liberal and the Conservative parties taking turns to hold office. During the Restoration (1874–1923), liberal conservatives also championed a ‘sacralized’ concept of the Spanish nation not entirely dissimilar to the one defended by the traditionalists. Antonio Cánovas, the architect of the Restoration system and Conservative leader, conceived of nations as biological organisms with their own ‘national character’ shaped through the centuries by tradition and culture (Abad 1990: 160–4). This historicist-romantic conception did not completely rule out the liberal idea of a common will as a key factor in the formation of nations, but it certainly gave more importance to divine intervention. Beyond all geographical, cultural, racial, and linguistic aspects, nations were ‘the work of God’, Cánovas stated in a conference in 1882 at the Ateneo de Madrid (Vilar 1984: 13). At the heart of this discourse lay the idea that the privileges of the Crown, the Church, the financial elites, the industrialists, and the landowners were divinely sanctioned and should be defended in a political order that balanced the socio-political interests of the traditional and the new elites. The idea of the nation was used to justify a political system based on the manipulation of the electoral machine and political clientelism and aiming to integrate different socio-economic elites. The Spanish right has recently tried to present Cánovas as one of the fathers of the liberal nation-state. In 1997, in commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of his death, the Partido Popular orchestrated a propaganda campaign that included public exhibitions, books, seminars, conferences, and TV documentaries on Cánovas. Turning Cánovas into a national icon was fraught with problems in democratic Spain. He had frequently declared his frontal opposition to universal franchise, he was well known for his repressive measures against the working class, and he was the main architect of a corrupt political system. It almost goes without saying that the PP ignored these features of Cánovas’s record. Instead, the campaign presented the conservative leader as a visionary who had brought stability to the country by restoring the monarchy after a series of revolutions and civil wars starting in 1868. The implication for the 1990s was, of course, that the monarchy was the key factor for the stability of Spain. Change might come in


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the 1990s but it would have to be through consensus between the main parties, with no criticism of the Crown being made. Another factor that made Cánovas a ‘hard sell’ in the 1990s was his decidedly centralist views. Unlike the traditionalists, liberal conservatives followed the model laid down by the centralist moderates. They sought to end medieval regional privileges and attempted to unify legislation and state administration. This process of centralization ran parallel to the emergence of a Castilian-centred interpretation of Spanish history, which became dominant at the turn of the new century. According to this view, Castile had been the leading region in the formation of Spain and therefore the ‘psychology’ of the nation had Castilian roots. The centrality of Castile in the nation-building process became a cultural artefact at the service of political nationalism and was articulated in numerous works of art and literature (Inman Fox 1999: 21–36). The invention of Castile as the dominant region in the formation of Spain was a direct response to the birth of Catalan and Basque nationalisms at the end of the nineteenth century. The emergence of alternative national identities indicates that the official canon of Spain promoted by Restoration politicians had failed to integrate a number of social groups in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Some scholars have emphasized the weakness of the Spanish state’s agencies (the educational system, the army, the civil administration, etc.) in order to explain the emergence of Catalan and Basque nationalism in the 1890s. The thesis of the ‘weak nationalization of the masses’ argues that the slow and asymmetric socio-economic modernization of Spain and the failure of liberals when in government to break fully with ancien régime elites resulted in a limited development of the bourgeois state and its agencies. This hampered the state’s efforts from above to homogenize the population around a common national identity, and enabled the subsistence of strong local and regional identities throughout the nineteenth century that would provide a fertile ground for the emergence of regional nationalisms.³ Additionally, ³ The thesis of the weak nationalization of the masses was first sketched by Linz in his 1973 work ‘Early state-building’ (pp. 32–116). Riquer i Permanyer further developed the thesis in his 1994 article ‘La débil nacionalización española del siglo XIX’ (pp. 97–114), and has maintained the same line until today. His more recent contributions to the thesis of the weak nationalization can be found in Identitats Contemporànies: Catalunya i Espanya (2000). The thesis of the weak nationalization has also been supported by, among others, Fusi (1990: 33–44), Beramendi (1998: 187–215), and Álvarez Junco (1996, 2001c, 2002).

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some historians claim that the inability of the Restoration oligarchy to integrate regional elites into the political system was responsible for the failure of the nation-building process and the birth of alternative nationalisms (Riquer i Permanyer 1990: 119–26). This thesis of the ‘weak nationalization of the masses’ tended to prevail in the 1990s. Most historians presented the liberal state as unable to create effective agencies to integrate socially the bulk of the population around the Spanish national ideal. The argument was based on solid grounds. The liberal state was chronically in debt during the nineteenth century. This precluded the formation of powerful state agencies. The national educational system, for example, was not created until 1857 and suffered an endemic shortage of resources. This explains the high level of illiteracy in Spain compared to other Western European states (59 per cent of the population was illiterate in 1900) and the persistence of regional languages throughout the nineteenth century. In addition, the strong involvement of the Catholic Church in the contents of state education hindered the promotion of civic values that saw the nation as the ultimate source of state legitimacy (Boyd 2001: 859–78). The army had as little impact as the educational system as a state agency of nationalization. The Spanish army was not national in the revolutionary sense of the ‘nation in arms’. Instead it deeply divided the privileged and lower classes. An exemption-riddled conscription system, in which the upper and middle classes paid members of the lower classes ‘to substitute’ for them in compulsory enlistment, could not promote the idea of national integration. The so-called redención metálica or ‘monetary redemption’ suggested to the poorer sections of society that service to the fatherland was not an honour but a burden, and it had the effect of undermining any patriotism they might feel and alienating them from the state (Álvarez Junco 1996: 99–100). Moreover, the absence of foreign threat after the Napoleonic wars and the fact that Spain was not involved in any major international war from 1814 to 1898 prevented the military mobilization of the people through which they could be instilled with patriotic feelings. Finally, the centralist administrative system defended first by the moderates and later by the conservatives proved difficult to implement. The division of the country into forty-nine provinces and the unification of local governments in 1833, the creation of the Civil Governors as state representatives in every province in 1844, the formation of the Civil Guard (1844) to ensure the monopoly of violence, and the passing of the Penal Code (1848) and Civil Code (1889) slowly established


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the administrative and legal bases of the state. Nonetheless, centralism took long to overcome the secular fragmentation of Spain’s territory, and the unity of the state remained highly artificial until well into the nineteenth century. The political and economic problems faced by the liberal state led to the progressive but inefficient construction of a modern administration; the province remained the centre of political and social life. In fact, the state was characterized by a profound contrast between legal centralism and real localism throughout the nineteenth century (Fusi 1990: 34). The success of the ‘weak nationalization of the masses’ thesis should not come as a surprise, for it perfectly matched the 1970s paradigm of the ‘failed bourgeois revolution’ and the widespread view that liberal ideas and institutions never took firm root in nineteenth-century Spain. However, by the late 1990s, as the paradigm of the ‘failed bourgeois revolution’ began to be challenged, so was the idea of the weak nationalization of the masses. As we saw in Chapter 1, new studies have argued that the liberal revolutions of the nineteenth century did indeed transform the country and create a state that was not substantially different from that of its European neighbours (Ringrose 1996; Fusi and Palafox 1997; Burdiel 1998: 892–912). While acknowledging the relative weakness of state mechanisms, this ‘revisionist’ historiography claims that the process of nationalization in Spain was partially successful.⁴ It emphasizes not so much the role of state agencies as that of other, more ‘informal’ mechanisms of socialization, such as war, the press, and ideology. For instance, the Carlist Wars are supposed to have had a significant mobilizing effect among the popular classes. For years, thousands of Spaniards were called to arms to fight ⁴ Andrés de Blas Guerrero (1994: 39–52) was one of the first critics of the ‘weak nationalization’ thesis. He argued that the emergence of Catalan and Basque nationalism at the turn of the century was not due to a failure of the Spanish nationalist project but was evidence of the impact Spanish nationalism had made on Catalonia and the Basque Country. In recent years the most vehement criticism of the ‘weak nationalization’ thesis has come from the members of the History Department at the Universitat de València. See the collective article by Saz, Aguado, del Alcazar, Burdiel, Martí, Romero, and Tabanera (‘Normalidad y anormalidad en la historia de la España contemporánea’) criticizing Riquer i Permanyer’s views and the latter’s reponse in ‘Un debate sobre el estado de la nacionalización’, Spagna contemporanea (1998), vol. 14: 139–48. Moreover, the ‘Valencian school’ questioned the general assumption that the permanence of strong regional identities by the turn of the nineteenth century was a sign of the weak nationalization of the masses. Instead, they presented regional identity as compatible with the idea of a unified nation. See Martí and Archilés (1999: 173–90), Archilés and Martí (2001; 2002: 245–78), Archilés (2002), and Segarra i Estarelles (2001: 139–62).

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in the name of the nation (whether liberal or traditionalist) against the ‘enemy within’. True, liberals and traditionalists defended antagonistic views on the political organization of the state, but the existence of the Spanish nation was never in question (Archilés and Martí 2002: 251). Furthermore, several colonial ventures in the second half of the century in Indochina, Morocco, Santo Domingo, and Mexico were partially supported by the lower classes. They also led to a rapprochement between liberals and traditionalists, who both supported imperialist ambitions in the name of national aggrandisement (Cirujano Marín et al. 1985: 206). In the late 1890s, when Cuban rebels resumed their struggle for independence, both the Church and the Carlist pretender made public their support for the ‘Christian traditions of the Spanish army’ (Vilar 1984: 14). The outbreak of the Spanish–American war in 1898 was greeted with popular jingoistic displays in streets and squares, demonstrating that many of the popular classes were imbued with a sense of national identity. What is also striking about the evidence put forward by revisionist historiography is the extent to which Catalan, Galician, and Basque newspapers expressed sentiments of Spanish nationalism in their respective mother tongues. Details of the political debate at the time about the structure of the Spanish nation-state suggest that informal mechanisms of nationalization not directly linked to the state (such as the propagation of liberal and traditionalist ideologies in the press and by the Church) also helped to strengthen the notion of a national community throughout the nineteenth century (Archilés and Martí 2002: 259–60). Central to the revisionist thesis is the idea that the acquisition of a Spanish national identity was compatible with the continuity of strong regional identities. It is argued that regional identities are historical constructs (or inventions) just as much as national identities are. In many occasions throughout the nineteenth century, region-building was seen as part of the process of nation-building. Fostering love for the region ( patria chica) was considered an initial step in the promotion of love for the nation ( patria grande) (Núñez Seixas 2001b: 486). Thus already in the nineteenth century, it is possible to detect the emergence of a ‘dual patriotism’ in areas like Catalonia and Valencia; that is, an identity that combines a strong attachment to the region and the province with loyalty to and identification with the nation-state (Segarra i Estarelles 2001: 139–62; Fradera 2003). The phenomenon of ‘dual patriotism’ became widespread after the restoration of democracy in the 1970s and, as we saw in Chapter 1, today the majority of Spaniards identify themselves to different degrees with both their region and Spain.


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The problems the nineteenth-century Spanish liberal state faced in its efforts to nationalize the masses were not exceptional. In France and Italy the idea of the existence of two antagonistic nations within one state (the two Frances and the two Italys) remained well into the twentieth century (Cacho Viu 1986: 54–62). Indeed, the conflict between localprovincial powers and national representatives was common all over Europe as the liberal state developed (Mann 1993: 5). The monetary redemption of military service lasted until the 1880s in France (Weber 1976: 292–302) and educational systems were unable to impose the official language in many French, Italian, and German regions, where vernacular dialects were widely used until the First World War. Nor were regional political movements seeking home rule or independence unusual in the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, or France at the turn of the twentieth century (Núñez Seixas 2001a: 93–115). In the last analysis, the Spanish model was not that extraordinary. It simply had its own strengths, shortcomings, and peculiarities. This is not to say that state agencies worked efficiently, or that the process of modernization was rapid and symmetrical. State institutions in the main faced multiple problems and socio-economic modernization was geographically uneven. More crucially, the exclusiveness and lack of democratic engagement of the Restoration regime meant that the official nationalism promoted by the state failed to convince popular sections of society and indeed alienated many. The anti-democratic system created by Cánovas impeded the consolidation of a participatory civil society and an inclusive national public sphere (Millán and Romero 2004: 296–300). This led to an increasing gap between popular national identity with its own rituals and cultural manifestations (such as the zarzuela, bullfighting, and satirical journals) and the official nationalism of the Restoration monarchy. These popular and upperclass nationalisms could occasionally mobilize together, as they did in the early months of 1898 in defence of the Spanish Empire. Yet the defeat against the USA intensified the divisions created among Spaniards by modernization and fragmented the discourses of national identity. After the loss of the colonies, Carlists, conservatives, liberals, republicans, radicals, socialists, anarchists and Catalan regionalists all developed opposing projects of ‘national regeneration’ (Balfour 2001). The 1898 Disaster goaded the Restoration elites into intensifying their efforts to nationalize the masses. The dynastic parties attempted to develop a fully national education system that would encompass the entire population. The Ministry of Public Instruction was created in 1900 and

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a number of official pedagogical institutions followed.⁵ In addition, both conservatives and liberals promoted the role of state-controlled education and imposed compulsory universal primary schooling in 1909, fully aware of the need to ‘produce’ a new patriotic youth that would ‘place love for the Fatherland beyond all interest and convenience’ (Silió 1914: 224–5).⁶ To achieve a complete ‘national pedagogy’, a conservative minister of education argued, it was necessary to fight all those ‘humanitarian, pacifist, anti-militarist, and anti-patriotic’ doctrines taught in schools. He claimed these ideas were merely a ‘hypocritical cover’ for the left, who sought to ‘destroy those armed organizations that impeded the triumph of revolution’ (Silió 1914: 181–2).⁷ Nationalization went hand in hand with counterrevolution. During the decades that followed the Disaster, the creation of national symbols was also duly pursued. Conservative governments promoted the Royal March or ‘Marcha Real’ to the rank of national anthem (1908) and the national flag was made compulsory in every public building (1908). Tens of monuments commemorating national heroes and the monarchy were built by a group of artists linked to the Royal Academy of San Fernando, the best examples of which were the sculpture of Eloy Gonzalo García, the ‘hero of Cascorro’ (Madrid, 1902), and the monumental complex dedicated to Alfonso XII in El Retiro park (Madrid, 1902). By official directive, the same artists were active in the provinces, where all sorts of ‘national’ fighters were commemorated, from the Celtiberian resistance against the Romans (Numancia, 1905), through the sixteenth-century imperial commander-in-chief El Gran Capitán (Córdoba, 1909), to the heroine of the ‘War of Independence’ Agustina de Aragón (Zaragoza, 1908).⁸ In 1918, 12 October, the ‘Day of the Race’ (Día de la Raza), was officially declared a national holiday in commemoration of the ‘Discovery of America’ by Columbus. The timing was telling. In 1917, the Restoration monarchy had gone through a dramatic series of crises that threatened the survival of the political system. The promotion of the ‘Day of the Race’ to the rank of official national holiday has to be understood as an attempt to promote political patriotism in the midst of an institutional crisis (Serrano 1999: 318–21). ⁵ Such as the Escuela de Estudios Superiores de Magisterio (1909), the Centro de Estudios Históricos (1910), and the Instituto-Escuela (1918). ⁶ See also de Puelles (1999: 224). ⁷ The author was minister in Antonio Maura’s cabinet. ⁸ Reyero (1999). For the French case see Nora (1984–92). For Germany see Koshar (2000).


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In other words, stirring nationalist feelings among the population was thought to be the internal panacea for an ailing political system. The Spanish government was surely not alone in this endeavour. At the turn of the century, many European states resorted to nationalism as a means of integrating the masses into oligarchic political systems. This process of ‘negative integration’ aimed at undermining the appeal of the left by indoctrinating the lower and middle classes into nationalist values that played on foreign and domestic foes (Preston, 2002: 137–65).⁹ In the Spanish case, the Restoration elites became increasingly eager to invoke internal threats to the nation to justify repression of political opponents. In 1906, the government passed the infamous Law of Jurisdictions curbing freedom of speech after alleging that Catalan nationalists had uttered offences ‘against the fatherland’. Three years later, the soldiers sent to crush the popular uprising in Barcelona were told that they were fighting a ‘separatist uprising’; and in the period 1919–21, Catalan industrialists and Andalusian landowners repeatedly cited ‘national salvation’ as a reason for repressing trade unionists (Álvarez Junco 1997: 58). To justify his military coup of September 1923, General Primo de Rivera invoked nothing less then the imminent ‘tragic end’ of Spain, the very death of the nation at the hands of ‘separatists’ and ‘trade unionists’ (Casassas Ymbert 1983: 81). While political repression in the name of the Spanish nation was widespread, the Restoration oligarchy could not use the empire as a device of national integration after 1898. Unlike Great Britain, France, and Germany, Spain had no colonies to speak of by the beginning of the twentieth century. And when the Restoration oligarchy embarked on a new colonial adventure in 1909, this time in Morocco, widespread popular opposition to the enterprise revealed the growing cleavage between upper and lower classes. At a time when social Darwinism was in vogue and the strength of nations was measured in terms of their colonial power, Spain was perceived as decadent or a ‘dying nation’ in the famous words of Lord Salisbury. This perception of Spanish decadence was widespread, not only abroad but also, and most significantly, at home. Nationalist discourse had portrayed Spaniards as empire builders like the English or the Austrians, yet this ‘missionary or imperial nationalism’ had to be reformulated after the loss of the colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific.¹⁰ An entire generation of intellectuals, ⁹ For the concept of negative integration see Wehler (1985: 100–37). ¹⁰ For the concept of ‘missionary nationalism’ see (Kumar 2003: ix–x).

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the so-called ‘Generation of 1898’, devoted itself to searching for the essence of the nation in the hope of solving the ‘problem of Spain’. Political groups presented various alternatives to ‘regenerate’ the ‘sick’ nation. The immediate effect of the military defeat was a common perception of Spain as a backward nation unable to compete with new international powers. But a more long lasting and profound legacy of this revision of Spanish national identity was the emergence of a generalized feeling of inferiority among Spaniards with regard to their European neighbours. Throughout the twentieth century, the cliché that equated Spain with backwardness and Europe with modernity was to be a persistent component of Spanish national identity. The members of the Generations of 1898 and 1914 both set out to reformulate Spanish liberal nationalism. The regeneracionistas combined romantic German historicism, vitalism, social Darwinism and geographical determinism to develop a concept of the nation as an organic whole (Storm 2000: 392–3, 400). In what can be described as an ethnicist drive, the regeneracionistas highlighted the centrality of Castile in the historical formation of Spain and Castilian as the national language, and emphasized the role of Castile in the formation of the Spanish ‘national psychology’. The philosopher and novelist Miguel de Unamuno used the concept of intrahistoria (the history of people’s daily life) to analyse the ‘real’ character of Spaniards beyond the official narratives. Together with other regenerationists, he fostered the idea that casticismo was an expression of the typically Spanish popular character. In the mid term, Francoism was to use casticismo as an inverted form of cultural imperialism, as a discourse projected inward to reinforce an exclusive construction nof the fatherland (Graham 1995: 238). In the long run, casticismo placed popular culture (especially bullfighting and zarzuela) as a key defining aspect of the national character. Up to this day, what is castizo is equated to what is typically and authentically Spanish. Despite this Castilian-centred concept of Spain, they challenged the Restoration centralist system, which was considered inefficient and guilty of destroying ‘popular national life’. The regeneracionistas advocated the revitalization of the municipalities and local life as the starting point of national reconstruction. On the other hand, they criticized the emerging Catalan and Basque nationalism as artificial, bourgeois, and backward looking. They accused the peripheral middle classes who were turning to regionalist movements as selfish and suicidal, but held the oligarchic system of the Restoration ultimately responsible for the emergence of ‘separatist’ ideas (Maeztu y Whitney 1998: 187–202; Ortega y


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Gasset 1993: 39, 46, 69). In doing so, the regeneracionistas made an important contribution to the nascent dialectic between Spanish and peripheral nationalism that was to dominate the twentieth century. At the same time, they intensified the confrontation between the official Spanish conservative nationalism and the progressive version of Spanish patriotism. In the political arena, the regenerationist movement proposed practical reforms to achieve the ‘Europeanization’ (i.e. modernization) of the country. Joaquín Costa demanded the end of the oligarchic political system and advocated a state-led agrarian reform and government investment in education as the best way of modernizing the country. The movement first crystallized soon after the ‘Disaster’ into the Unión Nacional, which gathered together small farmers and merchants of Castile and Aragon and representatives of the chambers of commerce from all over Spain. However, this petty-bourgeois alliance, with contradictory economic and ideological interests, was unable to form a political party to challenge the establishment, and the movement rapidly faded away in the early 1900s (Balfour 1995: 412–13). The second political attempt at ‘regenerating’ Spain was led by members of the Generation of 1914, such as Ortega y Gasset, Melquiades Álvarez and Manuel Azaña. They promoted a new liberalism steeped in democratic socialism similar to that developed by the Liberal Party in Britain and the Radicals in France. Their aim was to transform the oligarchic liberal regime into a democracy and provide Spaniards with the social reforms of their western neighbours (Cacho Viu 2000: 87–93). The Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) adopted a similar programme, seeing itself as the only ‘national party’; that is, the only party representing the interests of the whole nation. Their call to ‘modernize Spain’ embraced not only social progress but also democratization (Elorza Domínguez 1986). Modernization, democratization, and Europeanization became the key concepts of the left’s programme of national regeneration in the 1910s. Yet once again the Restoration system proved resistant to any kind of transformation from without. Despite the political failure of the regeneracionistas their ideological legacy for contemporary Spanish nationalism was remarkable. Throughout the 1980s, the PSOE played the card of European integration as the tool for modernization and democratic consolidation. Democracy, modernity, and Europe became once again interwoven concepts in the discourse of the Spanish left. Hence, when Spain entered the European Economic Community in 1986, the Socialists claimed that this was

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the culmination of a long project of Europeanization initiated by the Generation of 1898. The democratic right also sees itself as a direct heir of the regeneracionistas. In the second half of the 1990s, the PP incorporated into its discourse many elements of the regenerationist rhetoric, as we shall see in Chapter 5. It advocated regenerating the nation through economic growth and claimed to be the true ‘national’ party, in clear opposition to the ‘corrupt’ PSOE, thus drawing parallels between the ‘real nation’ represented by the people and the ‘artificial Spain’ of the Restoration elites. It is in this context that we have to understand José María Aznar’s attempts to reclaim figures such as Costa, Ortega, Unamuno, and even Azaña. By linking himself to those who had campaigned for modernization and democracy, Aznar was attempting to ‘liberate’ the PP from its Francoist past. In the twenty-five years following the Disaster of 1898, a new authoritarian right emerged seeking to modernize conservatism and mobilize nationalism as a key element of its discourse. The conservativetraditionalist canon of Spain thus continued to develop as a counterrevolutionary ideology designed above all to impede political and social change. Military officers, Carlists, Social Catholics, and the followers of Maura all re-energized this canon by accentuating its Catholic, imperial, corporative, and anti-democratic character and by incorporating new features such as radical militarism and anti-peripheral nationalism. Against the regeneracionistas’ critical vision of Spain, the right appealed to folkloric elements of popular culture, Catholic rituals, and a reformulated version of ‘imperial nationalism’. While progressive nationalism looked to Europe for Spain’s regeneration, conservative nationalism focused on America. Hispanismo, the belief that Spaniards and Spanish Americans are members of the same ‘race’, had been an essential element in the discourse of Spanish politicians since the late nineteenth century.¹¹ Both the right and the left had used the idea of a transatlantic spiritual community as an external projection of the Spanish nation. On the right, Menéndez Pelayo had framed the intellectual bases of Hispanismo during the 1890s by stressing the Catholic, linguistic, and cultural ties between Spain and its former colonies (Pike 1971: 39–41). After the loss of Cuba and Puerto Rico, this conservative Hispanismo gained a new impulse and a wider audience with the writings of Julián Juderías and ¹¹ This concept of race was a cultural one. Race is understood here as being shaped more by common culture, historical experiences, tradition, and language than by blood (Pike 1971: 1–2).


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José María Salaverría, who emphasized the Spanish concept of mission in America. The most popular work of these writers was Juderías’s La Leyenda Negra, a book acclaimed by both press and public. A disciple of Menéndez Pelayo, Juderías denounced foreign powers for inventing the ‘Black Legend’ in order to diminish Spanish influence in the world and complained bitterly about the enthusiastic reception this interpretation of history had received among Spaniards themselves.¹² This drive towards Hispanismo has to be understood first of all as an optimistic nationalist reaction against the pessimism that invaded regenerationist writers after 1898. A good example of this patriotic optimism can be found in the writings of Salaverría, who angrily attacked the negative image of Spain portrayed by the writers and artists of the Generation of 1898 and by those foreigners who had invented the Black Legend (Salaverría 1917: 14–19, 30–41, 38–49). To overcome the ‘masochism’ that he claimed many Spaniards were suffering from, the Basque journalist proposed the creation of ‘a new Spaniard’, who would be proud of the nation’s imperial history. He also advocated a rapprochement with Spanish American countries and supported the military occupation of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco (Salaverría 1917: 21, 123–32, 136–7).¹³ Imperial rhetoric and the promotion of Hispanismo were also a reaction to Catalan and Basque nationalism. Conservative newspapers like ABC, El Debate, and La Vanguardia developed a profoundly antiperipheral nationalist discourse in which the imperial past was contrasted with the ‘mutilated’ Spain that Catalan and Basque nationalists were supposed to favour (Salaverría 1917: 52–7, 62, 65, 81–92; ABC 7 October 1916, 28 August 1923). The more peripheral nationalism grew at the beginning of the twentieth century, the more Spanish nationalism found in Hispanismo the sense of unity of the Spanish ‘race’ (Sepúlveda Muñoz 1994: 317–36). The emphasis on Hispanismo also served to consolidate the belief that Castilian was a superior language to the Catalan, Galician, and Basque languages because it had been the language of Spanish American colonization. The idea that its widespread ¹² Juderías defined the Black Legend as ‘the legend of the inquisitorial, ignorant, and fanatical Spain, a nation unable to stand among the cultured ones, today as in the past, always ready for violent repressions; enemy of progress and innovations; or, in other words, the legend that began to spread in the sixteenth century, with the Reformation, and has not stopped being used against us since, especially in critical moments of our national life’ (Juderías 1997, 1st edn 1914: 24). ¹³ See also his articles in ABC, 20 August 1914; 18 October 1917; 15 August 1922.

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use in America denoted its superiority was later propagated by the Francoist regime and is commonly accepted even today by some right-wing politicians and journalists. The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera inaugurated a new chapter in the development of Spanish nationalism. The heady ideological legacy of the regeneracionistas and the new right was used to shape an authoritarian nationalist discourse that openly challenged the liberal canon (Quiroga Fernández de Soto 2000). Following the counterrevolutionary currents burgeoning in Europe, especially fascism, Primo and his ideologues attempted to build a new corporatist and centralist state. They created an official party, the Unión Patriótica, and formulated an ultra-Catholic canon later known during Francoism as National-Catholicism. Like many other European dictators of the inter-war period, Primo realized that the liberal oligarchic system would not survive in the post-1918 world and thus envisaged creating a new authoritarian state. In Spain as elsewhere, this entailed the construction of a political discourse that would redefine the traditionally dominant liberal narrative of the nation and rally the people around the dictatorship through ‘negative integration’. Primo launched a vast programme of ‘nationalization of the masses’ in which state agencies were put under military control, while the army was given the task of silencing all alternative national identities. Alongside repression, the new regime imposed Spanish nationalist education in schools and military barracks as a means of fostering patriotic feelings, regenerating the ‘Spanish race’ and solving the ‘regionalist question’ (Quiroga Fernández de Soto 2004). But government repression and the primorriverista policies of nationalization had the opposite effect. Indeed, they led to a process of ‘negative nationalization’ by reinforcing Spanish democratic and republican identity and fostering peripheral nationalism in Catalonia and the Basque Country (Quiroga 2007). Basque nationalists devoted themselves to the reunification of the PNV. The different nationalist factions in Catalonia also united in their struggle against the dictatorship, while republican Catalan tendencies found a new mass constituency. More importantly, the authoritarian regime aligned Spanish republicans and socialists with Catalan nationalists in their demands for a democratic republic. By 1930 democracy became identified with republicanism and with home rule for peripheral regions. This alliance set a historical precedent. In the 1970s, the fight against Francoism would bring together, once again, the Spanish left and Catalan nationalism in their demands for a democratic and decentralized state.


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The advent of the Second Republic in 1931 finally created the opportunity to solve the regionalist question through the decentralization of the state. The views of liberal and republican intellectuals, such as Ortega y Gasset and Azaña, dominated the political debate on the subject of the state territorial framework. The Constitution of 1931, drafted by a coalition of bourgeois democrats, liberal intellectuals, and socialists, proposed the creation of an ‘integral’ state, as an alternative to both the centralist and the federal state (Fusi 2000: 249–50). It defined Spanish unity in historical, linguistic, and cultural terms, and declared the Spanish people sovereign following the nineteenth-century liberal tradition. But it also acknowledged the existence of distinct ethnic cultures within Spain and sought to accommodate these within the structure of the Spanish state by offering the possibility of home-rule statutes for regions where alternative nationalist sentiments were strong. During the brief period of the Second Republic the process of political decentralization was uneven. The first Republican-Socialist government was mainly concerned with Catalanist demands and the process of granting home rule was relatively straightforward, despite the total opposition of the right. The Catalan home-rule statute was approved by the Spanish Cortes in September 1932 and the creation of the regional government, the Generalitat, followed suit. The pursuit of political autonomy in the Basque Country proved more problematic. Insufficient social support for the PNV made Basque nationalists turn to the Carlists in order to gain the necessary votes to propose home rule. The Carlists defended the fueros and a theocratic view of politics similar to that of the PNV but refused to support Basque home rule. Hence, from 1934 onwards, Basque nationalists turned to the PSOE, which had a stronghold in the industrial area of Vizcaya. The Basque statute was finally approved in the Spanish Cortes in October 1936. It came too late. On 18 July that year, a military rebellion against the Republic led to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the statute was never fully implemented. In Galicia, the statute of autonomy was voted in June 1936, but the region fell to the rebels soon after the beginning of the conflict and home rule was never implemented. Yet, despite their very different levels of implementation, the fact that Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia had voted in favour of autonomy created a legal precedent that became a tool of historical legitimacy. The Constitution of 1978 would recognize Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia as ‘historic nationalities’ on the grounds that they had had a statute of autonomy granted by the Second Republic.

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The Republican years witnessed the fragmentation of the Spanish right. Social Catholics of Acción Nacional, Alfonsine Monarchists of Renovación Española, Carlists of the Comunión Tradicionalista and the fascists of Falange were initially unable to form a common front against the democratic Republic. Notwithstanding its factionalism, the right deployed an authoritarian nationalist discourse that presented the Republican secular legislation and social reforms as an assault on the supposed Catholic nature of the patria. At the same time they virulently opposed the statutes of autonomy (Elorza Domínguez 1973: 257–69). The fact that the debate in the Spanish parliament of the proposed Catalan statute was enough to provoke the monarchist general Sanjurjo to stage an abortive military coup in August 1932 indicates how deeply some sectors of the right felt that the Republic was paving the way for ‘the dismembering of Spain’ (Granja et al. 2001: 127). Three years later, Calvo Sotelo, the leader of the Alfonsine Monarchists, famously declared in the Cortes that granting a statute of autonomy to the Basque provinces would be a crime of lése patria. He would rather see ‘a red Spain than a broken Spain’ (Granja et al. 2001:149) The unity of the fatherland became the key feature of a rightist rhetoric that equated regional autonomy with the end of the Spanish nation. Despite their ideological differences, all Spanish right-wing nationalist groups backed the July 1936 military uprising. What united them was a common rejection of democracy and a belief that the Republican government was paving the way for revolution. Once the failed coup turned into a civil war, the different factions of the Spanish right provided the military rebels with men and money. Both sides cast the Civil War in nationalist rhetoric. The Republican government made full use of the mythological repertoire of liberalism. The ‘Spanish people’ were placed at the centre of its propaganda. The left portrayed German and Italian aid to Franco as evidence of a ‘foreign invasion’ and urged the Spanish people to fight the invader, as it had done against the French in the War of Independence. According to this logic, fascism threatened the destruction of the people’s historical freedoms and customs as embodied in the Republic. The defence of the Republic became the fight for the survival of the Spanish nation (Núñez Seixas 2005a). For their part, the rebels labelled themselves the nacionales and described the struggle as nothing less than the defence of the Spanish nation against the Bolshevik foreign invader. The nineteenth-century conservative-traditionalist myth of the eternal fight between the ‘real Spain’ and ‘anti-Spain’ was deployed as an instrument of propaganda.


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Francoists defended the army as the redeemer of the nation and emphasized the struggle against anti-Spain in religious and pathological terms to justify the uprising against the democratic regime and the subsequent repression of Republicans.¹⁴ As in the past, the same rationale was then applied to dehumanize the ‘internal enemy’. Pemán’s famous work, The Poem of the Beast and the Angel (1938), in which supreme Good has to fight a ‘crusade’ against utter Evil, was one of many texts of this kind. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, the destruction of the ‘internal enemy’ was no longer a metaphor: it became the actual physical extermination of political opponents. Franco’s military victory signalled the triumph of a centralist authoritarian Spanish nationalism. This nationalism was primarily based on the nineteenth-century conservative-traditionalist principles, but it also drew upon a range of ideas from military nationalism, the regenerationism of the 1898 Generation, and fascism. The particular conception of the nation fostered by the regime was organicist; that is, Spain was understood as a living organism, a natural entity, whose very life had been threatened by the Second Republic. Francoism promised national revival, the resurgence of the patria based on the Catholic idea of redemption, and a bastardized version of regenerationist organic determinism.¹⁵ A ‘baroque’ rhetoric of Patria, Purity, and Poetry was used ad nauseam to control post-war society, while physical terror was employed as a means of purifying the sins of Spaniards who had supported an ‘anti-Spanish regime’ (Carbayo-Abengózar 2001: 75–8). Indeed, the Francoist state was built with the mixed cement of nationalism, violence, and autarkic economics. As in the cases of Italy and Germany, the aim was to protect existing traditions and adapt them to modern conditions (Richards 1998: 76–80). The Francoist elites saw the war as a means of counteracting the political and cultural effects of economic modernization. The purpose of the regime was thus to industrialize Spain without paying the price of democratization. For this project to be successful, the vast majority of the population had to be ‘renationalized’ in Francoist values. The masses, which, according to Francoist military officers, had been ‘intoxicated’ by left-wing, democratic, and separatist ideas, should be re-educated or annihilated ¹⁴ For the invention of an international communist plot to justify the military coup of July 1936 and its use as a key discursive element throughout the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship see Southworth (2000: 21–186). On the use of the myth of the anti-Spain see Reig Tapia (1988: 211–37). ¹⁵ For the idea of national regeneration in Franco see Richards (1996: 149–57).

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(Losada Malvárez 1990: 132). Hence labour battalions, concentration camps, and mass executions of Republican prisoners were conceived of as a means of indoctrinating and ‘disciplining’ the working class and achieving ‘harmony’ between labour and capital. The same ‘educational’ rationale was applied to combat Catalan, Basque, and Galician nationalists. Because they were part of anti-Spain, ‘separatists’ were imprisoned, sent to labour camps, or simply shot. Physical repression was complemented with educational cultural policies that made the use of Castilian in classrooms compulsory, prohibited the use of regional languages in the public sphere, and closely scrutinized Catalan, Basque, and Galician cultural associations. It goes without saying that Catalan and Basque home rule was revoked (Benet 1995). In fact, the Franco regime made unity a core principle of its definition of the nation. The Ley de Principios del Movimiento Nacional (1957) incorporated the Falangist concept of the patria, defining the Spanish nation with a gobbledygook phrase as being a ‘universal unity of destiny’ (unidad de destino en lo universal). It also gave the army the responsibility of guaranteeing this ‘unity among the men and the lands of Spain’ (Granja 2001: 165–6). The concept of unidad de destino en lo universal referred to an alleged spiritual character forged over centuries as Spain spread across western civilization through imperial conquest in Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. The idea of empire and the nation’s messianic destiny thus resurfaced once again in Spanish conservative nationalist rhetoric to justify internal unity and a common future. As for the architecture of the new state, Francoism readopted the nineteenthcentury centralist liberal model; that is, the hierarchical pyramidal framework of central government, provincial councils (diputaciones), and municipalities. A significant difference from the liberal model was that Franco’s provincial civil governors were also leaders of the official party in the province under their control. The fascist idea of merging party and state became a reality in the Francoist regime. The Franco dictatorship was never as monolithic as the official propaganda portrayed it, however. During the first two decades after the Civil War, it is possible to differentiate at least two nationalist projects within the regime. Falangist nationalism was the same as other European fascist nationalisms, promising a national rebirth based on a continuous revolution at home and the creation of an empire abroad. This palingenetic ultra-nationalism found its cultural roots in the organicist nationalism of the Generation of 1898 and a vulgarized interpretation of Ortega y Gasset, from whom it took the idea that the nation’s energies lie in


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the Spanish people as exemplified by the Castilian peasantry. A second nationalist project was formulated by the former members of Acción Española. It was a more reactionary programme, tending to emphasize the Catholic ‘nature’ of the patria and siding with the Church in its struggle for power with the official party. Falangist nationalism predominated in the first years of the regime, but after the defeat of Hitler, fascist rhetoric and symbolism were played down by Franco as part of his effort to ensure the survival of his dictatorship in the post-Second World War order. Despite a brief reemergence in the late 1940s, the Falangist project of national revolution fell on deaf ears by the late 1950s (Saz 2003). The endorsement of Francoism by the USA in the Spanish–American bilateral treaty and by the Vatican in the Concordat of 1953, together with the failure of the 1956 revolt at the University of Madrid, were the last nails in the coffin of the ultra-nationalist project of Falange. The Spanish fascist party continued to play a key role in state administration and in the youth and women’s movements. It also maintained the monopoly of power in the official trade union. But National-Catholicism became, and would remain until 1975, the hegemonic discourse of the dictatorship. For all the ideological skirmishes between Falangists and Catholics, it should be stressed that both strands of Francoism shared many values. This facilitated the consolidation of an official discourse. Falangists and Catholics found in the ideological universe of National-Catholicism common religious and anti-democratic principles that could be applied to politics, though both shed their anti-capitalism as a result of a constant dialogue with modernity (Botti 1992: 20–1, 118). Above all, Catholics and Falangists promoted the myth of the eternal struggle of Spain versus anti-Spain, the ultimate justification of the Civil War and the only source of legitimacy of the subsequent dictatorship. Thus it should not come as a surprise that Franco insisted until his very last days on perpetuating the idea of a Spain divided into victors and vanquished, Good and Evil, Christianity and Communism, civilization and barbarism, Catholicism and secularism (Preston 1994: 904–5). However, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, leading members of the Francoist intelligentsia, such as the Falangist intellectuals Dionisio Ridruejo, Antonio Tovar and Pedro Laín Entralgo, and the Catholic RuizGiménez, began to move towards political liberalism and to question the exclusive nature of Francoism, which precluded any sort of national reconciliation between victors and vanquished. Moreover, as many intellectuals began to see democracy as the only possible political system for Spain, the

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whole organicist conception of the nation became obsolete. Democracy was about reconciliation, compromise, living together, individual rights, Europeanization, and civil society. The search for the ‘real essences’ of the fatherland in order to solve ‘the problem of Spain’, as the Generation of 1898 had put it, made no sense by the 1960s (Juliá 2004: 462). Nevertheless, Francoism had tried to construct a positive image of Spanishness in distinction to the negative versions of the foreign Other. The tourist slogan of the sixties, ‘Spain is different’, sought not only to attract visitors to a country with ‘exotic’ non-European traditions, but also to stress Spanish Otherness for internal consumption. The implication was that the aim of the clandestine opposition to democratize the country was untrue to the exceptional nature of Spain. However, the slogan and the folkloric stereotypes that went with it had unexpected consequences. ‘Spain is different’ became part of the internal and external criticism of Franco’s Spain. ‘Toros’ and flamenco, the ‘Andalucization’ of Spain, and the idealization of rural life promoted the image of a backward nation. Internally the slogan became the byword for the endemic problems of the country and even today is used to encapsulate the supposedly chronic ills of Spanish society (Kelly 2000: 30–1). Socio-economic transformation throughout the 1960s also made National-Catholicism obsolete. The economic stagnation of the 1950s had threatened the regime with collapse and Franco was forced to abandon the disastrous autarkic policies and adopt economic liberalism in order to survive. From 1957 onwards, Falangist ministers were sacked in a series of cabinet reshuffles and replaced by Opus Dei technocrats, who proceeded to impose a free-market economic model. The idea behind this policy shift was to transform the Spanish economy without any sort of political liberalization. The Opus Dei technocrats thought that giving both the middle and lower classes the opportunity increasingly to acquire consumer goods would make up for the lack of political liberties. According to this logic, political democracy and freedom of speech would become irrelevant in so far as the regime was able to provide the population with material goods. The policy did not quite work as expected. The economic boom of the 1960s and early 1970s (facilitated by the benevolent conditions of the world economy, European tourism, emigrants’ remittances, and lower wages at home) radically transformed Spanish society. Rapid industrialization led to unprecedented migration to the cities and profound social dislocation. Castilian and Andalusian rural dwellers headed en masse for the cities to become the new working class, while social and economic


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inequalities increased throughout Spain. To be sure, by promoting policies of industrialization the regime sacrificed the economic interests of the Castilian smallholders who were compelled to migrate to urban areas. Under Francoism, Castile, official heartland of Spain, became deserted and Castilian peasants, proprietors of the spiritual essence of the nation according to Falangist beliefs, ended up as impoverished industrial workers in the shanty towns of Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, and Valencia. The emergence of a new working class not only led to the birth of a strong labour movement that politically challenged the regime; it also showed the inconsistencies and anachronisms of National-Catholicism in 1960s Spain. Social changes produced by industrialization and migration also led to the erosion of the Catholic Church’s support for the regime. The appalling living conditions of the working class made a serious impact on a new generation of young priests preaching in the urban slums. In the 1960s, worker priests became politically active in neighbourhood protests and community initiatives, joining forces in many instances with the communist labour movement, and a plethora of Catholic lay organizations were born with the specific aim of defending workers’ rights.¹⁶ Moreover, under the auspices of the Second Vatican Council, which called for the basic freedoms of expression and association, the Acción Católica leadership openly criticized Franco’s repressive policies, while many in the Catholic hierarchy began to reconsider their support for the regime. In 1971, the first joint assembly of bishops and priests apologized to the Spanish people for the role played by the Church in the Civil War, called for a revision of the 1953 Concordat between the Vatican and the state, and demanded that all bishops should resign their seats in the Francoist parliament (Lannon 1987: 232). The declaration of the assembly was a huge blow for the Francoist regime. For more than three decades the dictatorship had received the blessing of the Catholic hierarchy, which had helped to consolidate the myth of the Civil War as a crusade for national salvation. In the early 1970s, the Church criticized its own role in the civil struggle and began to distance itself from the regime. For the regime, the ideological crisis prompted by the Church was severe. National-Catholicism could not survive without the support of the Church. Migration and Catholicism also played a key role in the re-emergence of Basque and Catalan nationalism. In 1959, a group of middle-class ¹⁶ For the experience in Barcelona, see Balfour (1989: Chapter 4).

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Catholic university students critical of PNV passivity founded ETA in an effort to intensify nationalist opposition to the dictatorship in the Basque Country. While ETA’s first leaders were drawn from the educated urban middle classes, the new wave of recruits in the 1960s came from the rural interior, pulled towards the cities by industrialization. In the alienating environment of urban Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, these migrants held ‘Spain’ responsible for the destruction of their ‘traditional’ way of life. Amalgamating radical Basque nationalism, Marxism, and Third World liberation, ETA depicted the Basque Country as a Spanish colony. It thus saw violence as a justified means of liberating the ‘fatherland’ from occupation. The use of violence led to increasing state repression, which in turn provoked further ETA violence. The brutality of the regime, with its repeated declarations of martial law in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, mass arrests, and widespread use of torture, not only entrenched the cause of Basque nationalism but also convinced key sections of the population that the Basque Country was in fact under military occupation (Elorza in Graham and Labanyi 1995: 333). As a result, the dictatorship became totally discredited in the region, while Basque nationalism won widespread support by the mid-1970s because of its association with the anti-Francoist struggle. In Catalonia, Christian Democratic currents linked to the Catholic Church and the business community began to articulate a new political nationalism. From the 1960s onwards, the leader of the Catalanist right, Jordi Pujol, fashioned a self-consciously ‘modern’ nationalism in which the defence of Catalan culture and the demand for democracy became entwined. On the left, the Catalan Communist Party (PSUC) also raised the volume of its Catalanist discourse while at the same time recruiting many immigrants to the party. In 1971, both conservative and left-wing Catalanists joined forces with socialist and communist political parties and trade unions in the Assemblea de Catalunya to demand democratic freedoms, political amnesty, and a return to the 1932 Catalan statute of autonomy. As had been the case during Primo de Rivera’s rule, repression of political freedoms and of the Catalan language acted as a catalyst, uniting Spanish socialists, liberals, and Catalan nationalists in their opposition to the dictatorship. What brought them together in the early 1970s was not just a common democratic goal but also support for regional nationalist rights. Both the clandestine PSOE and the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) declared support in their programmes for


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the right of self-determination for Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia, and for a federal democracy. During the last years of Francoism, the idea that democracy would be accompanied by some sort of home rule for the ‘historic nationalities’ became widespread throughout Spain (Muro and Quiroga 2004: 28). By 1975, National-Catholicism had lost all legitimacy. Quite apart from the widespread opposition of clandestine parties and mass organizations, many of those social groups and institutions that had identified with National-Catholicism in the first place, such as the Church, were opposing it by the early 1970s. For the financial elites, Francoism had also become a liability, since the very dictatorial nature of the regime precluded Spain’s membership of the EEC and thus limited the markets that the Spanish economy could access. As with the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the attempt to impose an authoritarian national system on Spain had unintended consequences. Whereas primorriverismo had reinforced democratic and republican Spanish identity, Francoism, owing to its longevity and intransigence, helped to discredit Spanish nationalism itself. The construction and development of Spanish national identity from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of Francoism illustrates the kaleidoscopic nature of nationalism. Spanish nationalism, far from being monolithic, has been adopted by different political ideologies and used as a tool of social control by a variety of regimes. In the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, Spanish nationalism was used to consolidate liberal revolution. Between 1875 and 1930, Spanish nationalism became a counterrevolutionary tool. During the Second Republic, on the contrary, Spanish nationalism turned into an instrument to promote democracy and social reform. Francoism was a backlash against this democratic Spanish nationalism; the dictatorship used an authoritarian Spanish nationalism to halt democracy and socio-political reform while it attempted to carry out an economic modernization of the country. As we have already argued, the process of Spanish nation-building in the nineteenth century had its weaknesses and peculiarities but it was not fundamentally different from that of other Western European states where regional identities remained strong, such as the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. As in Western and Eastern Europe during the first three decades of the twentieth century, stateless nationalist movements emerged in Spain to challenge the authority of the state. In contrast to many of the nationalist movements elsewhere that collaborated with

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the Nazis during the Second World War, thus losing all legitimacy in the post-1945 world, stateless nationalisms in Spain gained political legitimacy precisely because they opposed a Fascist dictatorship. Catalan, Basque, and Galician nationalisms could link their struggle to the fight against a regime that had openly collaborated with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy (Núñez Seixas, 2001a). It was thus the anomalous nature of the Franco regime in post-Second World War Western Europe that bolstered stateless nationalisms in Spain. The crisis of legitimacy of the Spanish nation in the 1970s must be seen in this light. The peculiarities of the Spanish case originate less from the nineteenth century than from the post-1945 world, in which Spain took a different path from the rest of its Western European neighbours, with the exception of Portugal. The anomaly of Francoism became clear to many Spaniards as society underwent profound modernization in the 1960s and 1970s. Ultimately, it was social change that made the Francoist discourse redundant. When in 1977 a parliamentary committee began to draft a new constitution, the Francoist narrative of two antagonistic Spanish nations fighting an eternal war was obsolete. Compromise, concession, and the reconciliation of different concepts of nation were the guidelines of the constitutional debate. As the debate was soon to show, the idea of the Spanish nation had been acutely damaged by Francoism but it was far from dead.

3 Spain Reconstituted, or the Semantic Battle of Nationalisms The debate over nation and identity in Spain is framed by the Constitution of 1978, the touchstone of Spanish democracy. Most public statements are calibrated to resonate with this unique text. It is unique in more senses than one in that none of the previous democratic constitutions of Spain were allowed to intrude, least of all its immediate antecedent, the 1931 Constitution of the Second Republic. A comparison of the two texts would suggest that some of the drafters of the 1978 Constitution had the earlier text close at hand. Indeed, the Socialist deputy involved in the first stage of the drafting acknowledged its influence, alongside that of the constitutions of several other European nations (Peces Barba 1978: 8; Esteban and López Guerra 1980: 41–2). However, any explicit mention of it in the text was unacceptable to the conservative right because the Franco regime was built on the rejection of the democracy for which the Republican Constitution had stood. The new Constitution and the rule of law in the new democracy were thus based on a wilful amnesia (Lacasta-Zabalza 1998: 11–12). Any reference to the democratic legality against which sections of the army rose in 1936 and the repression the Franco regime exercised for almost forty years was barred from the text as part of the supposed price of democracy. In fact the past hardly makes any appearance in the constitutional text, even though it weighed heavily on the minds of all involved in its design, in particular over the question of monarchy, religion and regional nationalisms. In the congressional debate over the Constitution, the Socialist deputy Enrique Tierno Galván proposed a brief formula in the Preamble of the Constitution referring to ‘a long period without a constitutional regime, of negation of public freedoms and lack of recognition [desconocimiento] of the rights of nationalities and regions that make up the unity of Spain’ (Constitución Española: Trabajos parlamentarios (henceforth TP) 1980, 1: 314). The leader of the Alianza

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Popular (AP), Manuel Fraga, rather flippantly dismissed the need to refer to the past. The Preamble should ‘leave History in peace’, he argued, ‘because if History had to be the starting-point of any great decision that affects the future, it is very difficult to know at what moment we have to throw ourselves in, let us say, to swim’. Tierno Galván’s reply was an eloquent plea for historical memory: ‘forgetting the past completely is forgetting those who have suffered the consequences of the past. There is a large sector of the Spanish people who cannot be forgotten; those who have suffered, and the least they deserve is that reference is made to this past, because thanks to their sufferings we are winning today’ (TP 2: 1753–4; Lacasta-Zabalza 1998: 347–8). The 1978 Constitution is thus like a snapshot, taken in the shadow of the Dictatorship, representing what and who Spaniards felt or dared feel they were at that time. We say ‘dared’ in the sense that for almost forty years until the new democracy, no public identity had been allowed except that sanctioned by the Francoist regime. Any departure from the state-imposed model had been tolerated only if it was private or merely the cultural expression of a folkloric regional identity. It is easy to forget the widespread perception of the fragility of democracy at the time. Thus the tentative, multihedged political bargain made between the different forces of the democratic right and left in the transition to democracy was translated, after lengthy and acute argument during some 400 hours and with over 3,000 amendments, into a text that still frames the life of all citizens and organizations in Spain thirty years later. So much has changed since then, in particular collective identities, yet there has been no significant revision of the Constitution. The Spain reinvented in the 1978 Constitution was a feat of semantic engineering and political consensus, facilitating the perception that alternative narratives of Spanish nationalism and regional nationalisms could coexist. Beyond the political consensus, the agreement between the different elites was also made possible by the economic integration that had taken place during the accelerated modernization of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet each party involved in the negotiation of the Constitution sought to assert opposed concepts of nation, identity, and state within the perceived limits of the democratic settlement, all of which were diluted for the sake of democracy. The formulae that were agreed are emblematic of the contradictions of the Constitution and the correlation of political forces in 1978 (Solé Tura 1985: 100–1). It is true that tenets of traditional Spanish nationalism underlie the definitions of nation and identity. As we shall see, the Spanish nation

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appears as an organic entity independently of the consciousness of the people who live within its borders. The monarchy is identified as a defining institution of the state. And although no state religion is conceded, the text postulates ‘the religious beliefs of Spanish society’, which the authorities have to ‘take into account’, and correlates them indirectly, although unmistakeably, with Catholicism. To this extent the Constitution reproduces a traditional identity that hardly reflected the enormous social changes that had been taking place throughout Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet it would be going too far to describe the 1978 Constitution as an expression of constitutional nationalism, as some writers and politicians argue (Bastida 1998). For beneath the rhetoric of constitutional correctness lie very different conceptions of nation and identity based on dissimilar readings of the past. The Constitution is sufficiently broad or ambiguous in its definitions to allow for some of these contradictory meanings to coexist or at least to be read into the text. This was the result largely of the search for consensus between left, centre, and right in the transition at a time when democrats were conscious of the risk of further military intervention. Thus the democratic right was able implicitly to wield this threat in the bargaining process of the Constitution. But it also reflected the uncertainty over the exact political shape Spain might take once democracy was consolidated. Indeed, one of the virtues of the text is that it gives space for a limited remoulding of the architecture of the state without a reform of the Constitution. The available documents of the process leading to the approval of the Constitution by the Congress and the Senate expose these fundamental differences over the nature of Spain. All parties involved in drawing up the text at different levels and stages were driven by a commitment to create a firm basis for democracy. No doubt they were also conscious of its vulnerability, with an unreformed army waiting in the wings. The broad parameters of this democracy had been established, first, by the agreement for the democratic transition translated into the Law of Political Reform and approved overwhelmingly in a referendum in December 1976, and, second, by the socio-economic and political Moncloa Pacts of October 1977 signed by the Suárez government and political parties and trade unions. So the margins for departing from the basic principles of the new democracy were narrow. The PSOE and the PCE and the centre-right had agreed that the new state would be a parliamentary monarchy with an as yet undefined quasi-federal structure. The left’s reluctant acceptance of the monarchy

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overturned deeply held convictions and long-standing programmes but it was seen as a necessary price of democracy in the peculiar circumstances of the transition. Only two lone voices in parliament from the Catalan nationalist left knowingly sought the impossible—to bring back the Republic by requesting amendments to the different draft texts that would substitute monarchy for republic.¹ Nevertheless, the parties involved were determined to ensure that their concept of Spain and the Spanish state was reflected as far as possible in the wording of the text, just as they cajoled and bargained for the representation of their political principles in other areas of definition. This entailed vying with each other over semantic nuances behind which lay competing political concepts. Specific and seemingly innocuous words, or their absence in the text, carried ideological or political implications and therefore needed to be defended, added, or eliminated from the evolving draft. The contest over wording extended to the singular or plural use of terms, such as ‘pueblo’ or ‘pueblos’. The dynamic of the whole process was therefore one of rational choice; that is, of parties and their representatives seeking to maximize their preferences within the framework of consensus. As one of those responsible for drawing up the first draft later stated, ‘Our guiding principle during the bargaining was that there should be no point that was totally unacceptable for any one group’ (Peces-Barba in Threlfall 2000: 64). The procedure for drawing up the Constitution between August 1977 and November 1978 was determined mainly by the results of the first elections of June 1977. The political preferences that shaped the debate on the various committees and in the Congress and the Senate largely reflected the strength of the party representation, rather than the balance of social forces outside parliament (Heywood 1995: 43). Yet according to one of the members of the first draft, the Constitution was more democratic than the correlation of political forces would suggest (Solé Tura in Peces-Barba 1978: 28). Adolfo Suárez’s Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD) made up almost half of the members of both the Congress’s constitutional committee (eventually called the Committee on Constitutional Matters and Public Liberties) and the seven-man committee or ponencia responsible for drawing up the draft project or Anteproyecto of the Constitution. Although the ponencia did not include a Basque nationalist, the Partido Nacionalista Vasco was ¹ The Catalanist republican deputy Heribert Barrera Costa and the senator Lluis María Xirinacs i Damians, TP 1: 233–42; 2: 1888–9; 3: 2960–7).

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meant to be represented by the Catalan nationalist deputy Miquel Roca. However, the PNV rejected Roca as spokesman and soon withdrew from the constitutional committee, leaving its eight deputies to push fruitlessly for their demands at congressional and senate levels. Yet the preponderance of the UCD on the ponencia was offset by its own internal divisions and by the more organized and concerted input of the left and Roca (Solé Tura 1985: 93). Only in the second phase of the negotiations did UCD and the conservative party Alianza Popular begin to coordinate their efforts (Fraga Iribarne 1980: 111). Before looking at the definitions of nation and identity in the Constitution, we should stress the elaborate process the negotiation of the text had to undergo until it was put to the citizens in the referendum of December 1978. Once the first draft was published in the parliamentary bulletin, together with dissenting proposals for amendments made by each of the drafters, it was put to the Congress for further amendments. It was at this level that the most revealing and politically important differences were aired because it was the stage least mediated by compromise. The ponencia then drew up a report for the constitutional committee, which in turn debated the text during May and June 1978, and published its own report filled with amendments proposed by the different party representatives on the committee. This was then discussed at length in July in the Congress, which finally produced the text of the constitutional project agreed in the lower house. The Senate’s own constitutional committee then put this text to the Senators and, after debate in September and October, produced proposals for further amendments. A joint Congress–Senate committee drew up a report in an effort to reconcile the different amendments and this was put finally to both houses and approved in October, although only half of the conservative deputies voted in favour. Two months later it was put to the voters in a referendum and was passed by a majority of almost 88 per cent in a turn-out of around 67 per cent. At each level of consultation, the wording in many of the articles was subject to intense scrutiny, none more so than the definition of the nation and the consequent structure of the state. The constitutional text does not shy from defining Spain. Far from it, Spain is identified not just as a nation but as the source of the Constitution. The first words of the preamble proclaim the ‘Spanish Nation’ as the author of the Constitution and those of the text itself declare ‘Spain is hereby established as a social and democratic State’, or literally ‘Spain constitutes itself into a social and democratic State’. The implication is that Spain and the

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Spanish nation exist as an objective reality independently of its citizens, echoing Ortega y Gasset’s organicist formulation that ‘the Nation … is something prior to any constituent will of its members. It is there before and independently of us, its individuals. It is something into which we are born, it is not something which we establish’ (Pérez Garzón 2000: 239).² That is, a metaphysical construct is given a personality independent of the community with which it is identified. In contrast, the Constitution of the Second Republic had pointedly avoided any reference to nation (though ‘national’ and ‘nationality’ in the singular were used frequently in the text) and used the term Spain in a markedly neutral way. The weighting of the terms ‘nation’ and ‘national’ was subject to bitter debate in the Congress when it considered successive drafts of the 1978 Constitution. The first of these, drawn up by the ponencia, echoed the Republican use of Spain and the people of Spain rather than nation. A leading MP and spokesman of the conservative AP insisted that the wording of the first and second Articles should refer to Spain as a nation: ‘We introduced the concept of nation from the beginning because we consider it strictly necessary and furthermore because it gives true meaning to the phrase, since it is the nation that constitutes itself into the State’ (Licinio de la Fuente TP 1: 147). At the other end of the nationalist spectrum, a radical Basque nationalists deputy called for the replacement of the term Spain with that of the Spanish State on the implicit grounds that Spain was not a nation but a state of nations and regions (Letamendia TP 1: 165–6). The moderate nationalist Basque parliamentary group also attempted to amend ‘unity’ to ‘union’, probably in order to attribute a voluntary and multinational character to the constitutional definition of Spain, as if separate nations had agreed to combine. Since all parties except the radical nationalists in the Basque Country and Catalonia, including the moderate nationalists of those two regions, accepted the notion of Spain as a nation, such demands were consciously rhetorical. However, for the AP and the UCD the reference to nation did not go far enough. Borne along by their traditional Spanish nationalist convictions and probably also by insecurity over the semi-federal structure that was being proposed, they pushed for a greater emphasis in the wording on national unity, the unitary nature of the state, and the role of the armed forces as guardian of this unity. In keeping with its ² Quoted from Ortega y Gasset (1985: 62–3, 77). For the influence of Ortega on the constitutional text, particularly Article 2, see Bastida (1998: 123–48).

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tradition of cooperation with peripheral nationalisms, the left was forced to accept the new wording as the price for distinguishing Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia from other regions in Spain by the use of the term ‘nationalities’. The ‘Galeusca’ formula, in which Galicia, Euskadi, and Catalonia are defined separately from the rest of Spain on nationalist criteria, had been dropped even before the negotiation of the Constitution (Blas Guerrero, El País 2 December 2004). The deal crystallized in the ambiguous wording of Article 2 of the constitution, which is made up of two very different conceptions of the nation. The right-wing AP deputy Silva Muñoz pointed out in a speech in the Congress on 4 July 1978, just before it voted to accept the much amended Anteproyecto (and as a result of which he would eventually abandon his party), that the formula was the ‘clearest manifestation of the simultaneous and contradictory upholding of two irreducible positions: that of those of us who defend, above all else, the national unity of Spain, and that of those who rigidly maintain their criterion of national plurality existing in the heart of what we have understood until now to be Spain’ (TP 2: 1897). The leader of the PNV, Xabier Arzalluz, eloquently defended the pluralist vision of Spain in a speech in the Congress on 18 July. He argued that the true tradition in Spain was coexistence (convivencia) and collaboration between the different peoples of Spain, as opposed to the ‘jacobinist’ concept of the AP President, Manuel Fraga (TP 2: 2389–91). For all the angry rhetoric of the Right, the status of the Spanish nation, as formulated in Article 2 of the 1978 Constitution, is unequivocal. The ambiguity lies in the uncertain meaning of the term nationalities. As the article states, ‘The Constitution is based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation, the common indivisible patria of all Spaniards, and recognizes and guarantees the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions that are integral to it and solidarity among them.’ The wording thus precludes any formal federalism or confederalism, though the relationship between this indissoluble unity and autonomy of its parts is left unclear. Moreover, it would be difficult, if not hazardous, to deduce from this Article that the Constitution recognizes political sub-state nations beneath an overarching Spanish nation. The key word here is ‘nationalities’, one of the most controversial formulations of the constitutional text. Some regions, which are not specified, are awarded the character of nationalities, while others are defined simply as regions. The term nationality is used inconsistently, because at other points in the text it is employed in the orthodox sense of the status of belonging

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to a nation, or more precisely a legal relationship between the individual and the state. The term had been employed in the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill. No doubt the inspiration for its broader use came from the way it was employed in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere to denote ethnic diasporas based in several states or minority ethnic groups within multinational states such as the Habsburg Empire. Indeed, the distinction between nation and nationality had been crucial in the Hungarian kingdom after 1867, in that Hungary was identified as a single nation to which all other ethnic groups or nationalities had to be assimilated. Lenin had used nationalities in 1914 in a very different and even more fragile political context to refer to those ethnic and cultural nations seeking self-determination. Under Stalin the Soviet Union became a multinational state of nations and nationalities, in which the distinction between the two was not significant (Brubaker 1996). Although the historical parallels between these areas and Spain are questionable, the term ‘nationalities’ was a versatile semantic tool that could be used as a bargaining chip between the political parties. Any reference to the existence of other nations within the Spanish nation would have been anathema for the right and the armed forces, while the demotion of the status of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia to regions would have been unacceptable to the regional nationalists and the left. Both the socialists and the communists had taken on board in their pre-democracy programmes the demand for self-determination, and indeed the socialists had recognized the right of self-determination of the ‘nationalities’ that made up the ‘Spanish State’ rather than the Spanish nation (Blas Guerrero 1978). Nevertheless, of all the taxonomies employed in the Constitution, ‘nationalities’ gave rise to the most acrimonious debates in the Congress, the Senate, and the media. In his speeches in the Congress, Manuel Fraga saw little difference between nation and nationality. In his written objection, he made a rare appeal to the 1931 Constitution because it defined Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia as regions. ‘Nationalities’ should be avoided, he argued, ‘in the service of the sacred and indestructible unity of Spain’. In the first stage of Congress scrutiny, the AP deputies produced amendment after amendment rejecting the term. One argued that its meaning was so equivocal that ‘it can open up the possibility of the recognition of different nations within Spanish territory, which would be an attack against the unity of Spain, which is considered in the same article to be fundamental to the Constitution’ (Fraga and Jarabo Payó TP 1: 36, 135). The term met with similar

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objections in the Senate. The writer Camilo José Cela characterized the distinction between nationalities and regions as ‘a storm in a teacup’ but one that might have dangerous consequences. ‘The Spanish nation is Spain’, he insisted. For his part, the philosopher Julián Marías warned about the ambiguity of the terms proposed, which might result in ‘suspicion and mistrust’ (TP 3: 2717, 2951). Aware that the communists’ and regional nationalists’ continued participation in the constitutional negotiations depended on the inclusion of the term in the final text, the right (apparently with the blessing of the military) agreed to include it but only after attempting to denude it of any political implications. If the nation takes the form of a state and the Spanish nation is Spain, ‘nationality’ cannot mean nation. The term, which appears only once in the whole of the Constitution, was thus so hedged by the unequivocal affirmation of Spanish nationalism that it cannot be interpreted as more than a cultural artefact (Bastida 1998: 44–53). In that sense it corresponded to Meinecke’s classic but debatable distinction between political and cultural nations (Meinecke 1970: 10). In fact, Meinecke made a couple of brief appearances in the debate within the constitutional committee when two UCD representatives referred to his model in order to stress that ‘historical-cultural nations’ do not have a ‘sovereign vocation’ and do not seek to establish themselves as states (Arias-Salgado and Herrero de Miñón TP 1: 822–3, 850). However, since Spain was also defined culturally by the democratic right as a natural and organic community along the lines enunciated by Ortega y Gasset, the notion of a nation of nations is even more contradictory. For the left and for regional nationalists the term ‘nationalities’ could still be read as shorthand for a nation without a state; that is, a nation whose members (or at least a majority of them) wish to exercise control over the territory in which they live. Thus the text of Article 2 allowed for different interpretations, reflecting one of the ambiguities seen as essential to the constitutional settlement (Solé Tura 1985: 99–100). But it did nothing to solve the underlying contradiction between the state and what we will henceforth call ‘historic communities’, an inadequate shorthand term used to denote regions that had won or were about to win autonomy during the Second Republic and where a substantial number of people believe they share a common culture and a common past and seek the right to rule themselves. Indeed, the notion that they are stateless nations in a nation of nations or a state of nations has increasingly become common currency in public debate in Spain. The new Catalan Statute of Autonomy declares in its preamble that Catalonia is a nation. The claim

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that this did not contravene the Constitution was backed by the Socialist deputy who drew up the first draft, Peces-Barba, for whom ‘Nationality is not something distinct from nation’ (El País 17 June 2005).³ Another word that gave rise to different interpretations and was used for contradictory political purposes was pueblo or people. Clearly it has varying connotations, from pre-national communities to the popular masses of Third World movements. As used in both the 1931 and the 1978 Constitutions, however, it refers to a political community on which the powers of the state are based. The draft text of the 1978 Constitution also used the term in the plural. Thus Article 2 referred to the unity of Spain, the solidarity among its pueblos or peoples, and the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions that are part of Spain. In this way it recognized the ethnic or cultural plurality of Spain without denying the differences between Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia, and the other regions of Spain. In the debate over the draft, the plural use of the word was employed by some deputies of both right and left for very different purposes. An AP deputy argued that pueblos should be used instead of nationalities, thus levelling plurality to purely regional diversity. On the other hand, the Basque nationalist deputy Letamendia used the word pueblos as an implicit synonym of nations. The implication of his proposal was that Spain should become a confederation of nations; thus he suggested Article 1 should be amended to ‘the powers … of the State emanate from the pueblos that comprise it, in whom sovereignty resides’ (Carro Martínez; Letamendia, TP 1: 122, 165).⁴ However, the final text approved in the referendum only uses the term pueblos in its preamble. Clearly, most deputies and senators would have found it difficult to reconcile the key concept of el pueblo español of Article 1 with the recognition elsewhere in the text of pueblos españoles. ³ For further discussion of the theory and literature of ‘nationalities’ see Bastida (1998: 70–119). ⁴ Similar efforts were made in the Senate by the Basque nationalist Senator Juan María Bandrés Molet and the Catalan nationalist Senator Lluís Maria Xirinacs i Damians, both of whom, in addition, called for the right of self-determination of the ‘nations’ of the Spanish state (TP 3: 2791, 2851). However, pueblo appears much more often than nation in Basque nationalist rhetoric; indeed, nation does not appear once in the Ibarretxe Plan. Manuel Montero argues that the reason lies in the belief central to Basque nationalism that the Basque Country is not the same as the Basque nation; only the unification of the Basque people from Navarra and the French Basque provinces with the people of the Basque Country, and the exclusion of those who do not share nationalist aspirations, can provide the basis of a Basque nation (El País 22 June 2005).

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Closely linked to the issue of nation and nationality are the vexed questions of language and flag. Again, the subtle semantic distinctions proposed in the parliamentary debates reflect the contradictory political agendas of the different nationalisms within the framework of the overall consensus. The ponencia’s draft of Article 3 regarding language passed through all the stages and became the official text of the Constitution with only two amendments: that Castilian should be defined not just as the official language of the state but as a Spanish language and that the other languages spoken in Spain should be identified as Spanish languages rather than languages spoken in Spain. The subtle distinction was partly the result of pressure from the right, anxious to bury the doomed efforts of Basque nationalists to substitute ‘state’ for ‘Spain’ and to define Euskera as one of the state languages rather than as a Spanish language. It was also the result of pressure from the Catalan Group, which fought to defend Catalan as one of the languages of Spain (TP 1: 194–5). Both Basque and Catalan nationalists also objected to the statement in the draft article that it was the duty of all Spaniards not just to know but also to use the Castilian language. The Catalan nationalists went further, insisting that, if this were so, the distinct languages of the autonomous communities should also be obligatory and that their governments should have the right to decide whether they were to be the exclusive language of the region or co-official, as the draft implied (Letamendia and Grupo Minoría Catalana TP 1: 165, 194–5). Again, it was no surprise that the objections of the AP and the UCD overrode the proposals of the regional nationalists. But nor was it surprising that in an effort to achieve consensus it was agreed in the end to make the use of Spanish a right rather than a duty. The issue of flags provoked similar nationalist sensibilities. The Catalans wanted a more explicit reference to the flags and emblems of the autonomous regions in the draft. The Spanish nationalists, through AP deputies Licinio de la Fuente and Laureano López Rodó, one of the most famous of Franco’s ministers, insisted that all regional flags when displayed in public had to be accompanied by the Spanish flag, which should be at least as big as the former and placed in a privileged position. The UCD backed this proposal by also maintaining that the Spanish flag had to have pre-eminence over the regional flags (TP 1: 195, 147, 395, 483). A right-wing Senator wanted the failure to display the Spanish flag to be made a crime (TP 3: 2760). The final text of the Constitution put these niceties aside in the search for consensus, making no reference to size or position. But as we shall see later, flags

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and emblems became frequent issues of contention in the decades that followed the constitutional referendum. In the parliamentary negotiations leading to the final text of the Constitution, the question of the architecture of the new state was also fiercely contested. At the different levels of debate, the same arguments about nation and sovereignty were once again aired even though the constitutional definitions had been agreed, however reluctantly. Rekindling their diametrically opposed rhetoric about nation was perhaps a means for Spanish and regional nationalists to stake out claims for sub-national structures closest to their positions within the increasingly defined boundaries of the constitutional text. But different conceptions of state derived from different conceptions of nation. The socialists recognized that they would have liked to create an authentically federal state (having been committed to federalism since their twenty-seventh Congress) but supported the formulation of the ‘state of autonomies’, implying that the balance of power only permitted a solution midway between federalism and a ‘regionalized centralist State’. At best, it was an ambiguous formula designed to meet as much as possible the demands of the historical regions without upsetting the military or setting off a dynamic of competing demands. The ambiguity may also have reflected the wider process of socio-economic and cultural transformation taking place throughout Europe, through which political institutions were being constantly challenged. Thus the Constitution established a structure of governance that mixed features of a federal state with those of a regional state without being either (Requejo 2001). The expectations of the eventual shape the autonomies would take varied. The communists argued that federalism should be the endpoint of the constitutional process, not its starting-point, and that the Constitution should be sufficiently flexible to allow for this eventuality. In reply, Fraga contended that it should be neither too flexible nor too rigid and should last ‘100 years’. Demonstrating the degree to which many ex-Francoists had come round to accepting a limited devolution, he said AP agreed that ‘autonomy is a necessity, something valid, something irreversible, but which has limits also’. He conceded that the process of devolution was political, not simply administrative, decentralization, implicitly acknowledging that it was based not merely on the principle of subsidiarity but also on historic rights and differences of language and culture (Peces Barba TP 2: 1536–7; Solé Tura TP 2: 1539; Fraga TP 2: 1540, 1548).

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The fundamental issue was now to do with establishing the margins of self-government (a term adopted in the text despite AP) that would be accorded to autonomous regions. AP and some members of the centre right UCD had sought all along to restrict their authority by giving the central state the power to intervene in regional governments, dissolve their assemblies, and veto the laws they promulgated, either if the state considered them to be in breach of the Constitution or for reasons of national security (Ortí Bordás TP 1: 463; Fraga TP 2: 2371). These demands were largely reflected in the final text (Article 151). Furthermore, to restrict the competencies that the autonomies might eventually enjoy, AP tried unsuccessfully to get these listed but not those corresponding to the central state (de La Fuente TP 1: 152). In the final text the competencies of each are outlined, leaving scope for the negotiation of further devolution. However, the organizational principle of the competencies as applied in the Constitution is undeniably one of subsidiarity. At the other end of the nationalist political spectrum, the radical Basque nationalists demanded the right of self-determination. The purely rhetorical parliamentary proposal for virtual independence of one of their spokesmen, Letamendia, was an early version of the Ibarretxe Plan, to which we will return shortly (TP 1: 173). The moderate Basque nationalists, on the other hand, sought a special relationship with the Spanish state, while at the same time claiming maximum authority for the regional governments, though their concern was not for the model in general but for the Basque Country in particular. They argued that devolution was not simply a question of subsidiarity but should be based on historic and cultural factors, economic needs, and social structure. Thus they envisaged an asymmetric model that would give the Basques the highest possible degree of self-government, including control over public order in their region (TP 1: 172, 388). The Basque nationalists’ demands highlight the extraordinary asymmetry of expectations during the design of the new architecture of the state. At the onset of the process of bargaining, few regions besides Catalonia, the Basque Country and (to a much lesser extent) Galicia had expressed interest in autonomy. The original barely articulated plan envisaged a two-tier model, in which these communities would enjoy special forms of autonomy (the so-called Galeusca formula), while other regions would acquire limited devolution only if they wished. Instead, at the insistence of the UCD and with the agreement of most of the PSOE

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leadership, the potential of a uniform state of autonomies (once the autonomies had achieved their statutes) was established in the Constitution (Esteban and López Guerra 1980: 341). Moreover, the central state was equipped with the power to harmonize laws passed by the regional governments, and all regions were required to contribute to a ‘solidarity fund’ that was intended to prevent excessive economic inequalities across the regions. In contrast to the expectations or hopes of regional nationalists, only two juridical asymmetries emerged in the Constitutional settlement. The first concerned the speed of accession to autonomy: a fast-track route for the ‘historic communities’, and two different rates of access for other regions. The second was more polemical. As a result of pressure from the Basque nationalists, the Constitution recognized the ‘historic rights’ of the medieval ‘foral’ system,⁵ but only with regard to the Basque Country and Navarra, thus creating an asymmetry between the Basque Country and the other two ‘historic communities’, Catalonia and Galicia. These rights and their enshrining in the Constitution became a non-negotiable price for their support for the document. But the PNV wanted more than a mere recognition of rights; it demanded the restitution of the powers and institutions of the foral system and a renegotiation of the traditional foral pact with the Crown. Its demands were not simply a means of achieving the greatest possible autonomy but an implicit assertion of a largely confederal vision of historical Spain as a voluntary association of different peoples. As one of its reports stated, ‘the party brought [to the negotiations] a different conception of the state to that of the majority groups and compatible with the affirmation of the original sovereignty of the Basque people’ (Gallego-Diaz and De la Cuadra 1989: 162). The complex and often acrimonious negotiations over the relation between Basque rights and the state of autonomies lasted almost five months and ended in deadlock. AP and a majority of the UCD insisted that the process of devolution and the special competences that might be conceded to the Basque Country had to be negotiated within the Constitution through a statute of autonomy. The Basque nationalists argued that this hardly amounted to the recognition of the special status of the Basque Country. Despite the considerable efforts of the left and ⁵ Under this system the provinces of the Basque Country, Navarra, and Aragon had enjoyed juridical privileges or fueros bestowed on them by the Crown as a reward for their role in the Reconquest until they were progressively abolished from the eighteenth century onwards.

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moderate sections of the UCD to find a formula satisfactory to both the Basque nationalists and the democratic right, the final wording unequivocally treats the Basque Country as another autonomy, albeit one that could enjoy special competences rooted in the fueros, such as the right to collect tax (Gallego-Diaz and De la Cuadra 1989: 145–70). The muddled text of the awkardly named Disposición Adicional is a token of just one of the many attempts that went into the negotiation of the Constitution to find consensual formulae. None of the regions with historical rights are named as beneficiaries of the restoration of the fueros in that clause, yet it was clear that the deal covered the Basque Country and Navarra separately but not, for example, Aragon at all. The ambiguity of the text was not enough to win over the PNV and they recommended that their supporters should abstain in the referendum on 6 December 1978. A valuable opportunity was missed to integrate moderate Basque nationalism into the constitutional model at a time when all parties were conscious of the fragility of the new democracy and were therefore willing, like the PNV, to make concessions in order to consolidate it. Indeed, the consensus forged by debate and negotiations between the Basque nationalist representatives and those of other parties had led to an agreed formula at the constitutional committee stage, which was subsequently overturned by the more intransigent and strongly nationalist sections of the PNV and UCD respectively (Gallego-Diaz and De la Cuadra 1989: 150–6). The text of the Constitution that was finally approved in the referendum established a semi-federal state in which all regions in Spain had the right to establish an autonomous parliament and a government endowed with a potentially wide range of competences. Although each region was given the choice to go down this route by negotiating a statute of autonomy with the state and putting it to a regional referendum, Title VIII allows for an eventual common model, though not necessarily a universal raft of competences across all autonomies. The state would be only semi-federal in the sense that there was no proper federal chamber (the Senate is only partly a chamber of regional representation), the regional authorities would play no formal part in policy-making at state level, and the central state mediated the relations between them. Thus the autonomies are not defined in the text as nations or states but as representatives of the State in their respective territories. The imprint of the old unitary state is still present in the provincial structure of local government, as envisaged in Article 137. Yet because of the number of competencies that could be devolved to them, the autonomies were more

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than simply a new tier of governance in a traditionally centralist state organized into municipalities, local councils, and provinces, as some on the Left argued during the parliamentary debate (TP Solé Tura TP 1: 133–6; Letamendia TP 2: 1534–5). The territorial model envisaged by the Constitution is thus based on an underlying contradiction rather than complementarity between regional and state-wide governance. It is this contradiction that has given rise to a dynamic of competitive federalism and comparative grievance that has taken everyone by surprise. The autonomies have been demanding the devolution of ever more competencies from the central state. At the same time, regions such as Catalonia wish to retain their distinctiveness by enjoying special powers. However, the emergence of regional identities and the acceleration of demands for autonomy were also encouraged by the potential for the assertion of the interests of regional elites and by the lure of the EU’s structural funds. Region-building offered a mechanism for local elites who had emerged under Francoism to recycle themselves as legitimate defenders of regional interests in the new democracy. The rise of this neo-regionalism had been nurtured by provincial government and rationalized by developmentalist strategies elaborated by university departments during the last years of the Franco regime, but it was developed in the new democracy by a whole range of institutions and agencies (Núñez Seixas 2005b). Behind these processes lay the wider dynamic of local nationalism as a response to globalization and the erosion of the legitimacy of traditional nation-states. Regions in Spain with only a tenuous historical claim to nationhood are progressively asserting a national identity of one sort or another. Andalusia, which had been the beneficiary of an exceptional route to autonomy as laid out by Article 151, was defined in Article 1 of its new statute of 2007 as a ‘historic nationality’. Modelling itself on the Catalan Statute, the Andalusian government claimed new ring-fenced competencies and proposed that state investments in the region should be on the basis of population and not GDP. The Andalusian Izquierda Unida (IU) argued that asserting national identity was a way of ensuring the region would be on a par with the ‘historic communities’ (El País 3 May 2006). At the same time, the communities that had been awarded the status of nationalities now drew increasingly on supposed historical precedents for legitimacy. For example, the new Valencian Statute, drawn up by the regional government of the PP with the backing of the regional branch of the PSOE, refers five times to the medieval Kingdom of Valencia as the source of its national identity and distinguishes its

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local variant of Catalan as a different language: the term ‘idioma valencià’ appears seven times in the text (though it was already co-official with Castilian Spanish in the original Statute of 1981). The current process of national or regional redefinition in Spain is a powerful indicator of the fluidity of national identity and nomenclature (Álvarez Junco, El País 28 June 2005).⁶ The initial reaction of the UCD government to the growing demand for autonomy was to seek to impose a single model on all those regions once the fast-track ‘historic communities’ had gained their statutes. With the support of the socialists, they passed the Organic Law of Harmonization of the Autonomous Process (LOAPA) in 1981, whose effects, according to many, would be to erode the ‘historic communities’ by providing café para todos (as opponents described it at the time), imposing from above a common model of competences for all autonomies. Most of the literature seeks to explain the law as a response to the attempted military coup of February 1981 against the supposed disintegration of Spain (Heywood 1995: 144; Conversi 2002: 231) when it was as much to do with the centrifugal tendencies of the autonomous process that seemed to be escaping the control of the main parties (Solé Tura 1985: 124–6). When the law was declared largely unconstitutional by the Constitutional Tribunal, the ‘fiebre autonómica’ or ‘autonomy fever’ resumed and by the mid-1980s all regions had achieved their statutes of autonomy. The PSOE–UCD pacts of the early 1980s and the 1992 agreements between the PSOE and PP increased the potential for all communities, whether ‘historic nationalities’ or not, to achieve similar levels of autonomy along the road map established by the Constitution, and they have not ceased to demand the further devolution of competences. The café para todos dynamic was bitterly opposed by regional nationalists on the grounds that granting equal rights to all regions dilutes their special identity and historical status. As Calhoun argues, all identity claims seek two goals, one of differentiation and one of equivalence (Calhoun 1994: 25). The demand for equality by Catalan, Basque, and ⁶ A similar dynamic had taken place during the Second Republic, when parliamentary deputies (including members of the right-wing CEDA) in several regions, such as Aragon, the two Castillas, Andalusia, and Asturias sought to gain autonomy alongside the ‘historic communities’ through Article 11 and 12 of the 1931 Constitution. The CEDA’s rationale was not far removed from that of the AP in 1978. In an article in ABC on 20 May 1936, its leader Gil Robles had called for ‘A Statute [of autonomy] for all or for none. … It is a problem of equity’ (González Navarro 1993: 35).

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Galician nationalists entails having the same national rights as Spain; hence, for instance, their claim to take part in EU institutions as separate countries or their lobby to have their own national teams competing on the international stage. But it is also a claim of differentiation vis-à-vis the other communities, in so far as Catalan, Basque, and Galician nationalists do not recognize them as equals. Thus the universal model of the constitution has allowed for a catching up process among the autonomies whereby they could seek to achieve the powers of those regions, such as Catalonia and the Basque Country, with the highest degree of competences. However, following the dialectic at the heart of the Constitution between diversity and equality across the regions, Catalonia and the Basque Country have sought to keep their statutes distinctive from the rest, while the Catalan left-nationalist government sought, largely unsuccessfully, to emulate the levels of self-government enjoyed by the Basques. Indeed, the Constitution allows for the possibility of either symmetry or asymmetry across the regions through the negotiation of each individual statute. In principle it establishes a ceiling beyond which the autonomies cannot acquire further competences because they are the prerogative of the state. Nevertheless, the Constitution leaves open the possibility for the state to devolve further powers. In addition to articles enabling constitutional reform, a feature characteristic of all constitutions, Article 150.2, which was approved against the wishes of the AP, empowers the government to issue laws devolving unspecified competences normally reserved to the state. The socialist government of Rodríguez Zapatero came to power in March 2004 committed to using these two constitutional powers to carry through a reform of the architecture of the state consonant with the many political and cultural changes that had taken place over the previous quarter of a century. Minor reforms of the autonomous statutes had been approved in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. But now it was a question not merely of completing the programme of decentralization envisaged in the Constitution but of reflecting the new identities that had emerged since the transition. In fact, socialist spokespersons declared it to be a ‘second transition’; that is, a process of remodelling democracy according to the changing perceptions of the citizens (ignoring the rather less appropriate use of the term by the Aznar government of 1996–2004 to describe its own policies (Juliá, El País 8 May 2005)). During the course of 2005–6, the vast majority of autonomous governments designed plans to reshape their relationship with the state

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through a negotiated reform of their statutes. The process was in a sense a renewal of the pattern of competition and catch-up that had unfolded in the 1980s. In most cases the initiative to deepen the process of devolution had the support of the regional parties of both the PP and the PSOE. The fact that regional leaders of the PP were calling for further decentralization is a token of the extraordinary changes that have taken place in some conservative circles since the Constitution was negotiated. The main opponent on the ponencia of any significant devolution to the autonomies, Fraga, President of Galicia until the regional elections of May 2005, was calling for a whole raft of reforms that would shift further competencies to the regions. The new areas of competence agreed in the same year between the PP’s Valencian government and the regional PSOE opposition included a new regional tax authority that would coordinate with that of the state, representation at EU level, and the decentralization of justice through the creation of a regional supreme court (Aizpeolea, El País 29 May 2005). Whether it pleases the PP rank and file or not, the name of the game in Spain is self-government. For all its willingness to devolve more powers, Zapatero’s government faced two formidable challenges in the Basque Ibarretxe Plan and the renegotiation of the Catalan Statute. The Ibarretxe Plan was drawn up in 2003 by the nationalist coalition of the Basque government led by the PNV and approved in the Basque parliament by a bare majority on 30 December 2004, including the votes of the political wing of ETA, Batasuna (HB), a party banned by the Spanish Supreme Court but allowed to continue in the Basque parliament by the regional government. The Plan was presented as the basis for the reform of the Basque Country’s Gernika Statute of Autonomy, yet on a whole range of issues it went way beyond the boundaries drawn by the Constitution. Without being overtly secessionist the Plan called for the virtual independence of the Basque Country from Spain. It was thus the latest expression of demands voiced repeatedly (though not consistently) by Basque nationalism since it emerged in the late nineteenth century. Its immediate political origin was the policy switch of 1998 when the PNV signed the Lizarra agreement to create a nationalist front with other Basque nationalist parties, including HB, with the avowed intention of bringing about a permanent ceasefire. When ETA returned to its campaign of violence shortly afterwards, the PNV declined to resume its former collaboration with non-nationalist parties in the Basque Country. The Ibarretxe Plan was sold to the Basques as the only viable road map towards peace in the Basque Country. Ibarretxe announced that

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it would contribute decisively to expelling ETA from Basque lives (El País 26 September 2003). The Plan proposed a legal route towards independence that everyone knew was barred by the Constitution. The strategic calculation of the PNV was probably that a rejection of the proposal by the Spanish parliament would generate enough popular support for a decisive win for the party in the regional elections that would follow a year and a half later. From this regenerated popular mandate, it was believed, the Basque government would be able to call an unconstitutional referendum leading to what amounted to a unilateral declaration of independence. The Plan’s proposals (Gobierno Vasco 2003) broke with the Constitution in a whole number of areas. In a report issued six days after its publication, the PP government claimed the Plan violated no fewer than 104 articles of the Constitution. In essence, it sought to create a separate Basque state, Euskadi, which would enjoy a ‘free association’ with Spain. Beyond that it envisaged an eventual federation of Basque lands embracing the French provinces and Navarra as the first stage in the process of ‘reunification’ of the Basque people. Under the Plan, the Spanish state would have little jurisdiction over Euskadi, its authority confined to a small number of competences, of which the most important was defence (to which Euskadi would contribute financially). There would be some overlap in legislation covering penal, mercantile, procedural, and civil law. But the Basque government would reserve to itself the right to promulgate laws and refer all legislative matters to a Basque supreme tribunal of justice. Beyond the competences it enjoys under the Gernika Statute, the Basque government would assume control over all taxation, law and order, prisons, immigration, public works, social security, labour legislation, economic development, and finance. Euskadi would have its own national sports teams, would enjoy direct representation in the EU, and would have the right to be part of the Spanish delegation to the EU Council of Ministers. The overwhelming rejection of the Ibarretxe Plan by the Spanish parliament in February 2005 raised the issue of the constitutional legality of the next stage envisaged in the Plan, the unilateral holding of a referendum in the Basque Country. Opinion polls (El País 11 January 2005; Euskobarómetro May 2005) suggested that more Basques would vote against the Plan than for it, even if the referendum were legal. In the campaign for the regional elections of April 2005, the Basque nationalists made the Plan the central plank of their programme. The fact that they lost a considerable number of votes and, after two months

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of consultations, could only form a new coalition minority government with two other parties and with the occasional parliamentary support of the Communist Party of the Basque Lands (EHAK), a radical nationalist group with ideological links to Batasuna, suggested that the nationalists hardly had the popular mandate within the Basque Country itself necessary to carry through the Plan. In contrast to the Basque proposals, the Catalan demands for the reform of their statute posed less of a challenge to the 1978 Constitution. In addition to the transfer of a new raft of powers and their ring-fencing, the Catalan government of the time (a coalition of Catalan socialists, the left Catalan nationalists Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, ERC, and the small left-green party Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds, ICV) demanded the right to call itself a nation and, in a new ratcheting up of the language issue, the Catalan socialists separately proposed including a clause making it a duty of all those living in Catalonia to learn Catalan, a demand supported by Catalan nationalists. But in a more serious challenge than language or any semantic remodelling, the Catalan government or Generalitat also demanded a reform of the tax model that has arbitrated the financial relationship between the state and the autonomies since 1980. The present model covers all autonomies except the Basque Country and Navarra (as well as the special case of the North African Spanish towns of Ceuta and Melilla) and allows for three different levels of taxation, one exclusive to the state, another shared between the state and the autonomy, and a third devolved entirely to the autonomous government. Factored into this model is the contribution regions make to the inter-territorial solidarity fund designed in principle to prevent any widening of inequalities across the regions. The Generalitat argued that under this model it paid the state more than it got back. To correct this fiscal deficit, it proposed to pass on to the state no more than 50 per cent of the revenue from shared taxes. It also demanded a staggered reimbursement of the fiscal deficit and an upwards harmonization of Catalonia’s tax system with that of the Basque Country over a period of fifteen years. In comparison to the demand that Catalonia be recognized as a nation or that newly devolved powers should be non-negotiable in the future, neither of which fitted the Constitution, the proposed reform of the tax system would have had far profounder implications for Spain’s nation-state model. Introducing a differential tax system across the regions would result in an erosion of the state as a common basis of authority. It would conflict with the basic or ‘organic’ finance

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law, the LOFCA, which controls the financial arrangements between the state and the autonomies. Thus the Spanish government made it clear that any change in the financial model would have to be taken by the autonomous communities as a whole and that a new model would have to apply ‘equitably’ across the regions (El Mundo 28 April 2005; La Vanguardia 9 September 2005). Yet had it been agreed, this further hollowing out of the state would undermine social and national cohesion. The principal mechanism of this cohesion is a common tax and social security system. A third of the state budget goes into pensions and unemployment benefits and, apart from social security, the state administers only 19 per cent of public spending. In contrast, regional administrations have grown disproportionately. Andalusia alone has as many civil servants as the Spanish state itself (El País 2 September 2004, 3 May 2005). The reduction of tax revenue from Catalonia, one of the richest regions in Spain, would have made it difficult for the state to fund the hugely expensive social services for which it has sole responsibility. The Minister of Public Administration, Jordi Sevilla, argued in an interview on 15 May 2005 that if the proposed Catalan financial model were applied across Spain, the central government would simply disappear (El País). The new draft Statute was passed in the Catalan parliament in September 2005, giving rise to a ferocious populist campaign by the Popular Party, which called for a nation-wide referendum to reject it. Before it could reach the next stage in the Congress, however, it was sabotaged by a pincer movement between the Zapatero government and CiU, the conservative nationalist opposition in Catalonia under Artur Mas. Zapatero thus undermined the government coalition in Catalonia led by the socialist Maragall. Both sides reached an agreement that considerably toned down the original draft and the revised version crossed all the democratic hurdles and was finally approved by a large majority in a referendum in Catalonia in June 2006. The whole process had not only generated considerable political tensions at national level but had fed into the competitive dynamic of the autonomous system. The PP president of the Baleares government declared in 2005 that his aim was to achieve the same level of autonomy as the Catalan government was demanding. His counterpart in Valencia included a clause in the region’s new Statute claiming the right to adopt any power subsequently devolved to other autonomies, while projects for new statutes elsewhere, such as Galicia, were seeking similar rights. The fact that the leader of the PP, Mariano Rajoy, recommended the

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new Valencia Statute as a blueprint for the reform of other statutes would suggest a renewed conservative strategy, backed by a majority of the socialists, of seeking to apply a new universal model of devolution, on the lines of the café para todos concept, in order to halt the centrifugal dynamic of the Basque and Catalan nationalists’ demands.⁷ Nevertheless, the increasing transference of powers is widening the gap within the PP between the traditionalists and the modernizers, some of whom are in the periphery, like the Valencian President Camps and the leader of the Catalan branch of the party, Josep Piqué. Similarly, there are strains within the PSOE between regional and centralist traditions, and between one region and another. The socialist federal model of social cohesion and citizen solidarity within a pluralist society (Felipe González, El País 31 March 2005) was contested by the confederal model put forward by the Catalan socialists in alliance with their nationalist partners in government. Moreover, like his conservative counterparts in the Balearic Isles and Valencia, the president of Andalusia, Manuel Chaves, declared that he would not tolerate Catalonia achieving what his community could not, including branding his region a nation. As we have seen, the Andalusian socialists, with the support of the PP, adopted the term ‘historic nationality’ to define the region in the preamble of the new statute of 2007, despite the fact that, according to one opinion poll, only 4 per cent of Andalusians consider Andalusia to be a nation (Tiempo July 2006). Among the most important causes of this competitive federalism is a combination of an assertive neo-regionalism and a new quasinationalism that seems to have gripped many regions. A latent expression of this new-found identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the rush to emulate the fast-track communities in the achievement of autonomy. In the vast majority of the statutes, the regions claimed to have a ‘historical identity’, implying some sort of continuity of collective personality over a long period, and they sought to express this identity through hymns, shields, and flags as they defined them in the texts.⁸ Such assertions, however, are difficult to sustain and their effect is to dilute the claims of Catalonia and the Basque Country, according to Catalan and Basque nationalists, or to push both of these regions to seek further differentiation (García Fernández and Laborda Martín 2002: 35). Some of the autonomies, such as Navarra, ⁷ For further discussion of the Valencia Statute see Chapter 5. ⁸ For the text of all the Statutes, see Aguiar de Luque and Blanco Canales (1988).

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have roots in medieval kingdoms, others are conglomerates of these old kingdoms, such as Castilla-León, and some are creations of nineteenthcentury administrative reform. But none of this signifies a continuity of regional identity. If we take the case of La Rioja, the region was formed out of the single province of Logroño, whose elites had sought in the early nineteenth century to achieve administrative independence from the provinces of Soria and Burgos. Leaving aside undeniable cultural traditions that were often expressed as Riojan, the ‘historic identity’ of the region stems above all from a form of elite provincialism. For the founder of El País, Juan Luis Cebrián, the Constitution has given rise to new nationalisms that merely echo the tiny medieval Taifas and nineteenth-century cantonalisms (Cebrián 1997). Once autonomy was attained, the new institutions of the autonomous governments played a fundamental role in the growth of competitive federalism. Some of the regional statutes define their role primarily as a defence of regional interests, implying the competitive nature of the autonomy framework. Galicia, for example, ‘adopts as its principal task the defence of the identity of Galicia and of its interests and the promotion of solidarity among all who make up the Galician people’. Indeed, as the neo-institutionalist school argues for political institutions in general (March and Olsen 1989), the autonomous institutions do not function simply as transmission belts for norms and roles constructed at national level but are also shaped by regional interests. The institutional momentum generated by the creation of the autonomies led to an accumulation of resources and levers of control and the construction and dissemination of meaning, identity, myths, and symbols, often in competition with other autonomies. These were consolidated through regional administrative cadres, intelligentsias, public agencies, clientele networks, and public–private sector initiatives dealing with the economy, services, education, and cultural life in general. It was the recreation at regional level of a spoils system based on patronage that extended into the national state itself. In regions with distinct vernaculars, policies to entrench the regional (termed national by regional institutions) language in all public spaces, from education to advertising, may have the effect of distancing the periphery from the centre because language contains identity and culture. This process has been intensified in Catalonia above all by the push of the Generalitat to establish a de facto cultural independence (Fernández 1995). The dynamic driving this new quasi-nationalism is competition for funds, powers, and votes. It has tended to articulate a narrative

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of comparative victimization and, in Freud’s memorable words, the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ to mobilize the support of regional voters. The state is seen by many as a milch-cow or as an external oppressor, while other regions are viewed as rivals in the competition for resources and cultural hegemony rather than partners in the governance of Spain. For example, during the spring 2005 campaign for the Galician elections, the outgoing regional President, Manuel Fraga, accused the Zapatero government of withholding millions of euros of investment owed to Galicia in order to bestow the money to friendly regional governments. In her turn the PP President of Madrid claimed that Zapatero did not like Madrid and preferred to benefit the Catalans (Ónega, La Vanguardia 5 May 2005). A further source of regional competition is water. Water in Spain has traditionally been a bone of contention between individuals or villages but is increasingly dividing autonomies as southern and Mediterranean Spain runs out of supplies in the prolonged drought. Control over the water of rivers that run unobligingly through different regions is hotly disputed. Alongside the enduring polemic over plans to divert some of the water of the Ebro river, the PP government of Murcia accused the PSOE government of Castilla-La Mancha in the increasingly dry conditions of the summers of 2005–6 of trying to use its influence in central government to block any further transfer of the waters of the Tajo river to the Murcian river Segura. They were backed by the PP leadership, who sought to turn the issue into a confrontation between Murcian agriculture and the policies of the PSOE government. Rajoy mobilized some of his leaders to join a regional demonstration on 14 July, demanding ‘agua para todos’ in a new variant of the campaign to enforce symmetry among all the autonomies, or rather, to use a trite pun, to water down the status of the ‘historical regions’ (El País 23 June, 27 June, 15 July 2005). Old local antagonisms are now refracted through new regionalisms that display many of the hallmarks of nationalism. The problem of this quasi-nationalism of comparative grievance arises in part from a deficit in the architecture of the state. The wide-ranging redistribution of competences was not accompanied by a corresponding federal redeployment of power. The autonomous governments play no formal role in national policy-making, though they meet regularly with the national government for consultation, at both presidential and ministerial levels. It could be argued that the absence of a proper federal chamber or any official forum for decision-making between the state and the autonomies and between the autonomies themselves gave rise to

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a disassociation between the autonomies and the state. Constitutionally, they are representatives of the state at regional level. Yet, as the Catalan daily La Vanguardia (6 December 2004) argues, most do not feel part of the state because they are excluded from decision-making at national level. The state has often acted without regard to the autonomous governments that have to deal with the consequences of policy decisions made at the centre without consultation. The ad hoc and unilateral manner in which the ‘show case’ projects for the 1992 Seville Expo and the Barcelona Olympics were carried out by the government of Felipe González without reference to any integrated national transport plan cannot have endeared regional governments to the state (Elorza Domínguez 1995: 335). Is it any wonder then that for many the major concern is to wrest as much as possible from the state and, through the state, the EU, in competition with other autonomies? There is a further deficit in public administration and that is the comparative feebleness of local government. It goes without saying that the big city administrations like Madrid and Barcelona wield enormous power and enjoy considerable resources. But thousands of town councils across Spain are relatively underfunded and beset by the increasing strains of modernization, urban development, and social mobility. Recent revelations about urban speculation and corruption involving councillors in different parts of Spain, in particular on or near the Mediterranean coast where property values are still soaring, have unfairly tainted the reputation of local government as a whole, as the political scientist Joan Subirats argues. Yet this sphere of public administration, the link in the chain of governance closest to the citizen, has to deal directly with the consequences of policies made at national and regional levels without the appropriate resources. Regional politicians, such as the Andalusian President Chaves, make much of the importance of devolving competencies from the state in order for citizens to have more control over the institutions of government (El País 27 October 2006). Yet this principle of democratic subsidiarity is at the service of entrenched regional elites, who tend to be more interested in strengthening their own power than in ceding competencies further down the line. Municipal deficit is obscured by regional munificence. Local government remains the Cinderella of public administration in Spain. To conclude, the left-wing Basque nationalist Senator Juan María Bandrés, toying with Ortega’s famous formulation of the two Spains, the ‘official Spain’ represented by the oligarchies and the ‘real Spain’

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embodied by the people, declared in the Senate debate on the Constitution in 1978 that as a result of the text ‘official’ Spain rather than the ‘real’ Spain had become ‘constitutionalized’ (TP 4 October 1978: 4755). By official Spain he might have meant the Spain that was being defined in Madrid according to the balance of power in 1978 as much as traditionalist Spain. Bringing the Constitution more in line with changing identities and citizens’ needs in today’s Spain raises the dilemma of finding a balance between plurality and cohesion. This problem remains ever more intractable, precisely because the institutions created by the 1978 Constitution to acknowledge that plurality have worked against national cohesion.

4 Spain: the View from the Left Since the transition, the left has had an uneasy relationship with the concept of the Spanish nation.¹ The conservatives may have had to revise their traditional views about Spain, but the Spanish left has undergone far profounder changes in its idea of nation and state. Its support for the right of self-determination during the last years of Francoism soon gave way to a range of positions stretching from asymmetric federalism to the defence of the current decentralised constitutional system. There were several reasons for these transformations and fractures. The Spanish left carried different historic legacies into the new democracy. They needed to adapt their game to the exigencies of electoral competition, they had to forge political alliances and come to terms with the new architecture of the state. Yet, for all the diversity, two main features have constantly defined the left’s understanding of Spain: national solidarity and regional devolution. Since democracy was reinstalled, these features have coexisted in a continuous tension in the discourse of the political and intellectual elites of both the PSOE and the PCE. The differences among leftist discourses on Spanish national identity largely depend on which of these two tendencies predominates. As we have seen, Francoism had profoundly discredited the concept of the Spanish nation by the mid-1970s and many in the left had embraced the cause of peripheral nationalism. In 1975, the PCE manifesto defined the right of self-determination of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia as ‘inalienable’. A year later, the PSOE went a step further and declared that ‘all nationalities and regions’ had the right to break free from the Spanish state (Blas Guerrero 1978: 161–3, 169). Although both parties expressed their preference for a federal state structure, they largely conformed to the nostrums of the peripheral nationalists over the territorial question. The reasons for this collusion lie ¹ By the left, we refer to the PSOE and the PCE and subsequently IU, rather than the far left, a very small constituency with only a marginal impact on public opinion.

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in a combination of ideology and tactics. First, like many other European leftists in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the PCE and the PSOE supported, at least rhetorically, revolutionary national liberation struggles in the Third World. The causes of Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam led many on the left to associate anti-colonial wars with the rights of national selfdetermination of small countries. Second, Catalan and Basque nationalism had proved effective in the fight against Francoism and the actions of ETA had generated solidarity with peripheral nationalism across all of Spain. Finally, even if clandestine under Francoism, the PSOE and the PCE competed for popular support with a series of small Marxistleaning parties that were also strong on national liberation rhetoric. By incorporating the peripheral nationalists’ demands, the traditional parties of the left attempted to wean supporters from these new parties that had proliferated in the early 1970s (Blas Guerrero 1978: 76–9). As the transition to democracy proceeded, however, the left’s position changed. Both communists and socialists continued to demand a federal state but quietly ditched the right of self-determination for the historic nations and regions. The ninth Congress of the PCE in 1978 declared its full support for the creation of provisional regional governments but failed to mention self-determination. In 1978, the PSOE agreed on the new constitution with the UCD and three years later both approved the structural development of the state of the autonomous communities, which in effect meant closing the door on secession and allowing a degree of uniformity in the process of devolution. It is important to note that during the transition the debate concentrated not so much on what the Spanish nation was but on the territorial structure the new democratic state should adopt, for all the semantic contest during the constitutional negotiations. This focus on devolution did not in any way mean a denial of the Spanish nation. As the socialist leader Felipe González bluntly put it at the time, ‘it is obvious that the Spanish nation exists. No one with a minimum of political common sense doubts it.’ Yet the then leader of the opposition insisted that the main challenge was to create a decentralized state. Devolution, he claimed, should go as far as the collective consciousness of the region required providing this did not clash with the competences of the centre (González 1978: 44–5). The prevailing assumption in socialist and communist proposals for a new decentralized Spain was that democracy and devolution should go hand in hand. Jordi Solé Tura, one of the ‘fathers’ of the 1978 Constitution and representative of the Catalan left, advocated a federal Spain in which all regions would be awarded a high degree of devolution.

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This process, he argued, would consolidate a new unity among the peoples of Spain, much more solid than the artificial unity imposed by bureaucratic centralism (Solé Tura in Aja 1978: 26–7). Equally, the Socialist deputy Peces Barba claimed that the socialist constitutional proposal for devolution placed unity, solidarity, and autonomy on the same level (Peces Barba 1978: 12–13). The socialist cadres took a similar position. In the 1979 PSOE congress, the vast majority of provincial and regional delegations advocated considerable devolution for all regions while insisting on interregional solidarity as part of the process of democratic consolidation (PSOE 1979: 35, 150–5, 164, 186). Once the devolutionary process began, however, the apparent consensus on the left evaporated. The cosy, neo-romantic idea of the ‘peoples of Spain’ merging harmoniously into a decentralized state came up against the harsh realities of nation- and region-building. In the new political and institutional environment, the hitherto underground tensions between the axioms of national, interregional solidarity and devolution rose to the surface and the idea of the Spanish nation fragmented. From the 1980s on three tendencies on the left can be distinguished. The first is a sort of neo-regionalism, which calls for a symmetrical model of subsidiarity and a high degree of devolution, yet considers Spain as the sole nation. Second, the socialist leaders of the periphery claim that Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia are nations and define Spain as a nation of nations. A third group within the socialist movement stresses the idea of Spain as a nation of citizens and considers that the process of decentralization has to be limited. The creation of the state of autonomous communities did indeed lead to the emergence of a new regionalism, as we saw in Chapter 3. Although popular support for the autonomous communities was unequal throughout Spain, the left unambiguously backed their formation. Once established, regional agencies began an accelerated process of region-building. The official institutions of the autonomous communities fostered a regionalist message as a way of justifying their own existence. Educational, cultural, and economic agencies of the newly formed autonomous communities promoted history textbooks, exhibitions, and cultural programmes in an attempt to strengthen regional identities. In the cases of recently created regions, such as Cantabria and La Rioja, the task was even more difficult because an entire set of histories and new local ‘traditions’ had to be invented ad hoc. The process of creating and inventing tradition was abetted by the strong regionalist component still present in the leftist discourse. As


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different regionalist and nationalist groups were integrated into the PSOE and the PCE in the late 1970s and early 1980s, their leaders insisted that regionalist claims should be respected. This neo-regionalist discourse readopted nineteenth-century republican federalism and finde-siècle regenerationism in the hope of fashioning the Spanish state and nation from the provinces and regions. It was essentially ‘anti-Madrid’; that is, it blamed the central governments for the regions’ problems. But the neo-regionalists were also deeply hostile to Catalan, Basque, and Galician nationalism. It was the fear of becoming second-class regions in the democratic Spain that led leftists and conservatives in Navarre, Valencia, Aragon, New and Old Castile, and Andalusia to claim a similar level of devolution to that of the ‘historic nationalities’. Thus the regionalists stressed their regions’ historical peculiarities in order to claim as many competences as Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia (Núñez Seixas 2005b: 110, 115–16, 127–9). These demands were articulated under the principles of symmetry and interregional equality, but the idea of Spanish national, interregional solidarity was certainly not at the top of their agenda. After all, local elites had understood that the regionalist rhetoric was extremely effective in mobilizing the population and had made use of the newly created autonomous institutions and resources in order to consolidate their power. The defence of regional autonomy became a tool of self-defence. Nevertheless, this neo-regionalism is in fact an alternative Spanish nationalism. Despite their demands for a high degree of decentralization, regionalists acknowledge Spain as the sole nation and the Spanish people as the ultimate sovereign body. As Núñez Seixas has noted, this brand of Spanish nationalism is part of a historical pattern. It resurfaces when Spanish nationalism and the Spanish state are weak and under great pressure from peripheral nationalisms, as in 1917–19, 1931–6, and the 1980s and 1990s (Núñez Seixas 2005b: 109). What is more, this Spanish nationalism is used to undermine the territorial claims of peripheral nationalism. For instance, the strengthening of the Navarrese and Valencian regional identities has clearly acted against the claims of Basque and Catalan nationalists who argue that these territories belong to Euskadi and Greater Catalonia (Països Catalans) respectively. In the last analysis, strengthening regional feelings in Navarre and Valencia is a means of reinforcing Spanish national identity. It is precisely in Catalonia, the Basque Country, and, to a lesser extent, Galicia that the left adopts a different approach to the Spanish nation. Socialists and communists in these regions tend to consider

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them nations. Spain is usually defined as a nation of nations or as a multinational state.² In many senses the discourse of the left in the ‘historic communities’ has shadowed that of the peripheral nationalists. The left’s claim that the special status of the ‘historic communities’ has to be recognized in an asymmetric federal framework is based on an understanding of the ‘exceptional history’ and the national character of a territory similar to that claimed by moderate peripheral nationalists. For example, the socialist ex-President of the Catalan government, Pasqual Maragall, acknowledged the influence of the founding fathers of democratic Catalan nationalism, as opposed to Catalan socialism, in the original draft of the new Catalan statute (Maragall 2002: 181–2). The left has played a prominent role in the proposals to modify the statutes of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. All of them define these regions as nations and claim further devolution. One of the reasons for the left’s support for these demands is that the regional governments in question have been based on parliamentary alliances between the left and peripheral nationalist parties. Socialists and post-communists governed in Catalonia with the support of ERC, the pro-independence Catalanist left-wing party. In Euskadi, the PSOE was in a coalition government with the conservative PNV throughout the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. Since the late 1990s, IU has taken the socialists’ place in the Basque government. In Galicia the socialists were only able to come to power after reaching an agreement with the local nationalists in 2005. Electoral calculations have of course played a role in the left’s tendency to support peripheral nationalists. Since democracy, nationalist parties have regularly obtained a majority of votes in Catalonia and the Basque Country. For both socialists and communists, incorporating nationalist demands into their electoral manifestos has been a way of attracting the moderate nationalist voters of the periphery. As Patxi López, the leader of the PSOE in the Basque region, publicly acknowledged, the socialist proposal for a new statute of autonomy for Euskadi aimed at gaining PNV moderate voters who were disaffected with the pro-independence project of the Basque Nationalist Party (El País 15 August 2004). Beyond the huge bargaining power peripheral nationalist parties have acquired and despite electoral calculations, the left’s proposals for ² For the definition of Spain as a ‘nation of nations’ see, for instance, Pasqual Maragall in ABC 8 November 2005, and Manuela de Madre, one of the leaders of the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC), in El País, 2 November 2005.


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asymmetric federalism have to be understood in ideological terms as well. Many of the assumptions of peripheral nationalism during the last years of Francoism still persist in the Catalan, Basque, and, to a lesser extent, Galician left. The most important of these is the idea that these regions are nations and consequently deserve special treatment within the Spanish state. According to Catalan socialist and post-communist leaders, this does not mean that they should enjoy a privileged status, but through them Spain’s national diversity should be acknowledged. According to this logic, the diverse national identities inside the Spanish state would have different aspirations to self-government and the ‘historic nations’ should be granted the highest possible level of autonomy (Saura, El País 27 December 2005; Maragall 2002: 179, 182). This asymmetric federal model has been fiercely contested by many on the left of the socialist party. The so-called sector guerrista of the PSOE, the group close to the former Deputy Prime Minister Alfonso Guerra, claims that asymmetry goes against the principle of territorial equality among Autonomous Communities (Barrera, ABC 8 November 2005). The symmetry of competences granted to the autonomous communities, the so-called café para todos, is portrayed as the only possible solution for Spain. Furthermore, some socialists explicitly reject the idea of a multinational Spain. According to José Bono, defence minister and former president of Castilla-La Mancha, ‘Spain is not a nation of nations, but a nation of citizens’, and equality among individuals must be prioritized over the autonomy of ‘territories’ (Barrera, ABC 8 November 2005). The Spanish nation is understood here as a body of citizens with equal rights; rather than a mosaic of territories, as constituted at present, it should be the sum of individuals. Unlike in the model proposed by the Catalan, Basque, and Galician socialists, the emphasis is here on national solidarity rather than regional selfgovernment. This is in the main a civic concept of nation based on the principles of solidarity and equality inspired by the French Revolution, which also incorporates the socialist idea of social redistribution of the country’s welfare among citizens. The implications of this emphasis on citizenship, solidarity, and redistribution are important. The left wing of the PSOE pitches its civic conception of nation against the allegedly ethnicist ideas of Catalan, Basque, and Galician nationalists. Since the 1990s, socialist leaders and intellectuals have insisted on the need to ‘create’ democratic citizens. Spaniards should be educated in the values of the Enlightenment and in liberal and socialist values in order to consolidate a democratic Spanish

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national identity under threat from peripheral nationalists (Rodríguez Ibarra, Temas para el Debate 1, 1994: 31). The guerristas also differ from the Catalan, Basque, and Galician socialists on the issue of selfgovernment. The left wing of the PSOE supports self-government and the state of autonomous communities in its current semi-federal form, but it also warns about the perils of an unlimited devolutionary process (Rodríguez Ibarra, El Mundo 8 November 2005). The idea that the autonomous communities act as mini-states, in so far as they have a large number of competences, administer huge resources, and promote alternative national and regional identities, has led some on the left to demand a defence of the state’s competences against the devolutionary claims of regional governments (Francisco Vázquez, Temas para el Debate 1, 1994: 30). The logic behind this demand is twofold. First, the guerristas’ reservations about extending regional powers rest on a classical nineteenthcentury conception of the nation-state in which the state is viewed as the political and institutional representation of the nation. Weakening state institutions by transferring a large number of competences to the autonomous communities weakens the nation itself. Second, the central government is ultimately responsible for redistributing Spain’s wealth among the regions and individuals. Granting the regions further rights over fiscal issues and tax collection weakens the state’s capacity to redistribute money to the poorest autonomous communities, thus undermining the whole principle of interregional solidarity. Seen from this angle, national solidarity and equality among Spaniards can only be guaranteed by the maintenance of a degree of state intervention to counterbalance the ever-increasing demands of the regional governments. The tensions between solidarity and devolution surfaced in the summer of 2003 when the leaders of the PSOE met in Santillana del Mar (Santander) to draft a common proposal for a new state framework. The socialists opted for a federal model to increase self-government. This included the creation of institutional channels for the autonomous communities to participate in both the European Union and state administration. They also proposed that the Senate should become a solely territorial chamber representing the autonomous communities. This move towards federalism aroused some apprehension in the most centralist sectors of the PSOE. For instance, Rodríguez Ibarra, president of Extremadura at the time, accepted the possibility of reforming the statutes but made clear that any transformation should above all seek


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equality and social progress. At the insistence of José Bono, the socialists’ emphasis on self-government was balanced with an explicit reference to the idea of equality among citizens. In the final draft of the so-called Declaration of Santillana, the PSOE stated that ‘the principle of equality among Spaniards [should be] over and above the principle of autonomy’ (El País 31 August 2003). Juggling between interregional solidarity and regional self-government is a common pursuit of the Spanish left. The post-communists and greens of IU face similar problems. The leftist coalition envisages a ‘republican federal asymmetry’ that would give the regions the highest possible degree of self-government, the idea being that more selfgovernment equals more democracy. Additionally, it aims at recognizing the diverse character of ‘the peoples of Spain’ and rejects the current symmetric model (Llamazares 2002: 150–3). But for all the stress on asymmetry and self-government, IU also seeks the ‘highest possible level of solidarity’ among regions (‘Propuesta de Reforma’, El País 22 September 2003). As in the socialist model, the state is seen as responsible for redistributing wealth and guaranteeing solidarity among the autonomous communities (Llamazares 2002: 155). As in the PSOE, tensions emerge inside IU when the principles of solidarity and selfgovernment clash. For example, when the Basque section of IU, Ezker Batua (EB), backed the Ibarretxe Plan in 2003, the leadership of the party was quick to voice criticism. José Mendi, a member of the Federal Presidency of IU, rejected the idea of creating a ‘Spain of associated states’, as proposed by the Basque nationalists’ plan, precisely because this would ‘generate more inequalities’ among citizens (Cambio 16 7 April 2003). The post-communist project for Spain is similar to the socialist Declaration of Santillana in so far as both seek a federal state, the reform of the Senate, and further cooperation between the central and the regional governments (e.g. Llamazares, El País 30 August, 22 September 2003). But since the transition to democracy the post-communists have been fairly consistent on the question of the architecture of the state. IU advocates an asymmetric federal republic in which the ‘peoples of Spain’ enjoy high levels of autonomy in recognition of their specific regional histories and traditions. Thus, when it comes to the structure of the state, IU emphasizes the rights of the ‘peoples of Spain’ over the rights of individuals. However, when the principle of self-government is pushed to its limit and becomes the right of self-determination, IU shows little enthusiasm for promoting secession and appeals to solidarity and equality to maintain a federal unity among Spaniards. Ultimately,

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this call for solidarity rests on the idea of a common, yet plural, Spanish past. In the words of the leader of IU, Gaspar Llamazares (2002: 147), Spaniards have in common a complex, rich, and long-standing historical trajectory. Implicit in this argument is the idea that a shared history is enough to keep them together as citizens of the same state and is the basis on which to build the federal asymmetric state. Whether proposing symmetry or asymmetry, whether stressing devolution or solidarity, all sectors of the left have tried to back their concepts of the Spanish nation-state by appealing to the past. In an attempt to find historical precedents of federal asymmetry, Llamazares (2002: 153) has associated his project with the ideas of the president of the First Republic Francisco Pi y Margall. Pi is a convenient figure for the post-communist model for two reasons. To begin with, he was one of the first of only a few Spanish politicians to theorize on the question of republican federalism in the nineteenth century. Second, he interwove demands for democracy and decentralization. By claiming him as a precursor of its project, the leftist coalition presents the association between self-government and democracy as an old aspiration of Spanish progressive thinking and endows its idea of a federal republic with historical legitimacy. However, as is usually the case when creating historical precedents related to national identity, the post-communist leader denudes his references of any historical context. He simply omits Pi’s admiration for the US federal republic, the fact that the implementation of the federal system in Spain led to the Cantonalist Revolt, and the numerous problems that the First Republic had to face in a semi-permanent state of civil war. Other supporters of the asymmetric system exploit the ideological baggage of Catalan nationalism. Maragall (e.g. 2002: 181) has often stated that what lies behind the PSC conception of the ‘plural Spain’ is the tradition of progressive federal Catalanism. He acknowledges that his model is based on the ideas of two key figures of democratic Catalan nationalism, Valentí Almirall, a federal republican and one of the first theoreticians of Catalan regionalism in the 1880s, and Joan Maragall, poet and key intellectual of the Catalanist left in the 1930s. The value of Almirall and Joan Maragall to the then president of the Generalitat was that they offered a pragmatic solution to the problem of the relationship between Catalonia and Spain in that Catalonia remained part of Spain but had a specific national character at the same time. But Maragall’s idea of a multinational Spain also includes an organicist concept of the Catalan people. In his eyes, the ‘Catalan people’ have expressed their


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will throughout history and this has entailed self-government (Elorza, El País 3 September 2003). In what amounts to a circular argument, the PSC claims that the expression of popular will since time immemorial becomes the basis on which to justify the existence of a Catalan nation. In turn, the existence of the Catalan nation ‘demonstrates’ the historical need for a high degree of self-government (Propuesta 2005, Preamble: 1–3), and this can only be achieved with an asymmetric federation in which the popular will of the Catalan people is duly represented. Maragall (2002: 182–4, 187) recognizes the existence of a common history and identity and the shared interests of the Spanish peoples. However, despite these features in common, his emphasis is on the diversity of the national identities of the peoples of Spain, especially Catalans vis-à-vis Spaniards. Accordingly, it is the particularity of the region’s past that makes it a nation, and hence the claims for an asymmetric system. Socialist supporters of symmetric federalism, on the other hand, recognize the historical peculiarities of the regions, yet stress a common Spanish past. Historical diversity, they claim, does not justify asymmetry, for sovereignty always lay in the Spanish people, since the monarchy (the unifying element of the territories of the state from the times of the Catholic Kings) was replaced by the nation (Peces Barba 2003: 150). Thus, Spanish history is not the sum of the different histories of the Spanish peoples but a process of national integration. For the socialist intellectual Solozábal (1997: 339–41), the Spanish nation is the product of a ‘common historical experience of integrating peoples’. In his attempt to construct the historical legitimacy of the Spanish nation, Solozábal argues that this common past generated not only shared cultural practices but also a ‘structure of coexistence’ expressed in a community of citizens who wish to live together in the future. This approach is a mix of historicism and self-styled ‘voluntaristic nationalism’ (nacionalismo voluntarista) that claims intellectual connections with the ideas of Ortega y Gasset and Ernest Renan. History creates the nation, shapes its current form, and projects it into the future, yet people still join the national project on a voluntary basis. Despite these recent attempts to construct historical legitimacies for the Spanish nation, the truth is that during the first years of democracy the left, and in particular its more regionalist representatives, were disinclined to appeal to a common past as the source of a single nation. Their reluctance has its origins in a negative idea of the country’s past. As we saw in Chapter 2, the paradigm of the Spanish failure

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had been established by the intellectuals of the Generations of 1898 and 1914 and perpetuated by Marxist historiography of the 1960s and 1970s. According to these views, Spanish history was an exception in European terms. The ideas of the Enlightenment had not penetrated into Spain as deeply as in Europe, the bourgeoisie had failed to carry out a radical revolution and break fully with the aristocratic elites, and industrialization had been patchy. The result was that Spain’s path to modernity had been singular, isolated from the rest of Europe, intrinsically authoritarian, underdeveloped, and weakly nationalized. This was far from an academic issue. In the 1970s and 1980s, the vast majority of the leftist leaders shared the idea that the history of Spain was the history of failure.³ When the socialist Prime Minister Felipe González declared in an interview in Paris Match that Spain’s history in the past 150 years had been ‘very tough’—for the country had missed the first and the second industrial revolutions, had suffered economic and social backwardness, and had been internationally isolated—he was merely echoing a widely accepted idea of Spain’s abortive attempts to modernize (González 1990: 289–90). According to González (1989: 44–5), the reason why Spain was underdeveloped compared to its European counterparts lay in a deadly combination of political and economic isolation, both of which, from the nineteenth century onwards, had led to hypernationalism and hyperprotectionism. Explicit in this argument was the idea that Spain’s modernization and democratic consolidation depended on its integration into what was then the European Economic Community (EEC). As in the case of the Generations of 1898 and 1914, the socialists saw the Europeanization of Spain as the only way forward. González himself hailed Ortega y Gasset as a visionary of Spain’s Europeanization. He argued that incorporating Spain into the new European framework was fulfilling a centuries-old tradition in Spanish political thought in which it was seen as an integral part of Europe. It was also in keeping with the demand since the turn of the twentieth century that Spain should return to the European central stage (González 1990: 37). ³ In some instances, the very historians who had promoted the paradigm of the ‘failed bourgeois revolution’ became leftist politicians. This was the case of Jordi Solé Tura, author of Catalanisme i revolució burguesa (1967), one of the key works promoting the Marxist interpretation of backwardness of Spain and the failure of the Spanish middle classes. He later became one of the leaders of the Catalan Communist Party (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, PSUC) and one of the ‘fathers’ of the 1978 Constitution. Solé Tura (e.g. 2003: 274) has maintained this perspective in recent years.


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The socialist interpretation of the Spanish nation was not without historical precedents, but instead of drawing on the past to construct national identity the socialists formulated it as a common project for the future. That is, the nation was a collective project to modernize and Europeanize rather than a historical community with an ancestral past. The vision of the 1898 and 1914 Generations had been to reconstruct the nation through modernization, democratization, and Europeanization. The Socialists claimed that they had fulfilled this vision in the 1980s by consolidating democracy and integrating Spain into the EEC (Muro and Quiroga 2004). In the new environment of the 1990s, the ‘exceptionalist’ or negative interpretations of Spanish history were overturned. After rapid social and economic modernization, the fulfilment of the Europeanist aspirations of the left, and the active participation of Spain in the transformation of the EEC into the European Union, these interpretations seem obsolete. Historians began to portray Spain as a ‘normal’ European country (Ringrose 1996; Juliá 1996; Fusi and Palafox 1997; Burdiel 1998). True, Spain had its peculiarities, like any other European nation, yet it was neither an exception nor a deviation from the common western historical path. Thus the paradigm of the Spanish failure was debunked by a more positive image of the Spanish past. This change in the historiographical tide helped in turn to consolidate a triad of new national myths that had emerged after the transition to democracy. First, the transition and consolidation of democracy threw up a new myth of reconciliation, consensus, and tolerance among Spaniards as opposed to the romantic idea of Spaniards as a passionate and fratricidal people who tended to kill each other in repeated civil wars. Second, Europeanization acted as a counterbalance to the anti-European Hispanidad so beloved by Francoism. Third, the socialist idea of modernization, a compression of democratization and Europeanization, challenged the traditionalist and reactionary views of Spain that had been official for forty years under the Franco dictatorship (Luz Morán 1998: 158). The success of these three new national myths was impressive. Over a few years, Spaniards cast off their inferiority complex towards other Europeans and embraced a positive view of their past and present as a peaceful, European, and modern nation. The success of these three dominant assumptions about Spanish national identity was such that when the conservatives came to power in 1996 they claimed to have a programme of further modernization and Europeanization of Spain. The fact that the conservative Prime

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Minister José María Aznar pegged his ideas to those of the Generation of 1914, as we shall see in Chapter 5, is striking evidence of the shift in public discourse brought about by the socialists. Aznar claimed the legacy, not only of liberals like Ortega y Gasset and Maradiaga, but also of left-wing republicans such as Azaña. The interaction between historiographical revision, politics, and national identity is a complex one. In the case of the Spanish left what began as an intellectual creation of the 1898 and 1914 Generations became part of the nostrums of the predominantly Marxist historiography of the 1960s and 1970s. This historiography had a remarkable impact on leftist political leaders, who, in turn, designed a ‘national project’ of modernization on the basis of their understanding of Spain’s past. Socialist-driven socio-economic and political renovation led in the 1990s to a transformation of Spaniards’ own perception of identity, both at home and abroad. This change had in turn an impact on the way historians analysed the country’s past: the emergence of the ‘paradigm of normality’ was a by-product of social transformations of the previous decades. Beyond the connection between historiographical trends and social transformations, it is important to keep in mind that the socialists’ modernization project was part of a nation-building project. Fostering Europeanization and modernization was a way of creating collective goals for Spaniards and thus maintaining a sense of common identity and solidarity. In addition, the new reading of Spain’s history as European and ‘normal’ had an implicit connotation. Peripheral nationalisms stood out against the new ‘consensual’ and ‘European’ Spain. At the turn of the twenty-first century, many argued that the only thing that made Spain still a peculiar place in Europe was the unusual strength of the peripheral nationalist movements, in particular ETA terrorism (e.g. Barón 2002: 85, 91–2). Tolerant, democratic, and modernized Spain was confronted by the allegedly backward, intolerant, and antidemocratic nationalisms of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. The ‘normalization’ of the Spanish national identity turned peripheral nationalisms into oddballs within Europe. One of the reasons why the PSOE could focus so intensively on the future, on a programme of national modernization, was that no open revision of the recent past had been undertaken during the transition to democracy. The so-called ‘pact of silence’, the tacit agreement among all political forces to avoid a public discussion about the Second Republic, the Civil War, and the Franco dictatorship, benefited the socialists in the middle term. During the transition to democracy the rationale of


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the pact of silence was to preclude any sort of debate that could trigger a military backlash. The threat of a military intervention was real and thus a collective amnesia about the war and the brutal repression of the dictatorship seemed expedient at the time (Aguilar 2002). As we shall see in the next chapter, the right fostered the ‘pact of silence’, because it allowed the conservatives to preserve their concept of Spain while presenting themselves as democrats. Accepting the ‘pact of silence’ seemed to the left the only way to transform dictatorship into democracy without causing a major rift with the Francoist elites. But collective amnesia about the recent past had an added value for the PSOE. Unlike the PCE, which had played the main role in the internal struggle against Francoism, the PSOE had played the part of the bit player who comes on stage at the denouement. The socialists’ bitter internal divisions in exile and their inconsequential opposition against the dictatorship were also overlooked by the vast majority of Spaniards owing to the tacit agreement not to revise the recent past. It was precisely this lack of serious involvement as an opposition force during Francoism that allowed the PSOE to emerge as a ‘new’ party in the eyes of many Spaniards during the years of the transition. The positive electoral results of 1977 and the PSOE’s landslide victory of 1982 were not the result simply of an effective organizational transformation of the party and the presence of energetic new young leaders (Méndez Lago in Balfour 2005: 169–97). They were also the product of popular adherence to a socialist programme of ‘national regeneration’ promising change and modernization without historical retrospect. The ‘pact of silence’ had the unintended consequence of strengthening historical amnesia in a way that benefited the PSOE’s project of national modernization. The socialists were soon aware of the positive effects this collective amnesia had for them. During the 1980s and most of the 1990s the PSOE was keen on keeping the ‘pact of silence’ alive, even when democracy had been consolidated and the reasons that had made the pact possible in the first place had disappeared. While the socialists were in power, a public debate on the burning issues of the Civil War and Francoism was seen as an unnecessary revision of the past that would clash with the newly acquired image of Spain as a modern European country. Crucially, the PSOE also ignored the Second Republic, for it was associated with the Civil War and, thus, with ‘historical mistakes’ not to be repeated. In this manner, the socialist administrations of Felipe González (falsely) presented themselves as the first democratic governments in Spanish history (Aróstegui 2006: 369). In the 1980s,

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however, the work of professional historians began to shed light on the atrocities committed during the Civil War and the scale of post-war Francoist repression. This had an impact on the recuperation of Republican memory at a popular level. In the 1990s, various groups began to emerge from civil society demanding official recognition of those assassinated, tortured, and imprisoned by the Franco dictatorship. The most important of these groups, the Association for the Recuperation of the Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, ARMH), launched a campaign in 1999 to exhume the thousands of bodies of Republicans killed by the Francoists and dumped in common graves. The initial reticence of the conservative government to cooperate with the ARMH led the latter to bring its case to the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. In 2002 the international body insisted on the Spanish government’s support in the search for and exhumation of Republican bodies. By then the question of the historical memory of the Civil War had become a hot topic in Spanish society. Over the past decade, hundreds of novels, films, exhibitions, and TV documentaries on the civil conflict and Francoist post-war repression have been released (Graham 2004: 29–31). Never before in the new democracy has the Civil War commanded such a presence in the media and in Spanish culture in general. What began as historians’ empirical analysis ended up being a major political and cultural issue openly discussed in Spanish society. This public debate has contributed not only to an affirmation of democracy and civil society but, decisively, to a questioning of the country’s past and hence a reinvention of the public idea of the nation. The left-wing parties jumped on the bandwagon of the recovery of Republican memory at the turn of the century. In 2000, the PSOE, IU, and the peripheral nationalist parties promoted a bill in Congress that included giving economic aid to those Republicans who had suffered exile during the dictatorship, reopening common graves and publicly condemning the military coup that led to the Civil War. Despite the PP’s initial reservations, all the political parties in the Spanish parliament voted in favour of the bill on 20 November 2000, twenty-five years after the death of Franco. In May 2002, the reform of the Civil Code allowed over a million people in exile (Republicans and their descendants) to regain or claim Spanish nationality. In October 2002, the Spanish parliament passed a bill proposed by IU to honour the memory of those Republicans sentenced to forced labour by the Franco dictatorship between 1947 and 1970. In the previous month, the PSOE


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had demanded in Congress official cooperation from the judiciary to exhume and identify Republicans buried in common graves (Egido 2003: 145–7). Why this sudden change from amnesia to the vindication of the Republican past? To some extent, the left was responding to a civil society that demanded appropriate public recognition of those who had fought to defend Spanish democracy in the 1930s. Yet the real factor that triggered the PSOE’s and IU’s involvement in the issue of the Republican memory was the conservative party’s electoral victory of March 2000. It was only when the PP gained an absolute majority that the left began to press systematically for a number of parliamentary bills and resolutions in defence of the Republicans. The political agenda behind this move, it can be argued, was to trigger a negative reaction from the conservatives so that they could be accused of Francoist nostalgia. Proposals such as the public condemnation of the 1936 military uprising and the honouring of Republican prisoners have to be understood, first, as an attempt to link the conservative party with the dictatorship and, second, as a drive towards the monopolization of the anti-Francoist struggle by the left. The fact that on both occasions the PP, not without reservations, voted in favour of these proposals is telling of how sensitive the conservative party was to being tainted with the dictatorship.⁴ Despite its late conversion to the task of retrieving ‘Republican memory’, the left has been unable to create a modern myth of the Spanish nation as essentially anti-fascist. Popular resistance to fascism could not be turned into a foundational myth of the modern nation. Contrary to the French and Italian experiences, the Franco dictatorship did not end as a result of military defeat. It survived thirty years after the end of the Second World War. Moreover, the Spanish dictatorship did not collapse but instead voted itself out of existence following negotiations between Francoists and democratic forces. The fact that the left was actively involved in that ‘pacted transition’ to democracy made it impossible to turn the anti-fascist myth into a landmark of national identity. It was reconciliation, consensus, and peaceful understanding among Spaniards, as opposed to common struggle against Francoism, ⁴ This is not to say that the PP supported every single parliamentary initiative of the PSOE and IU. In 2002 the PP rejected an IU proposal to compensate economically those prisoners sentenced to forced labour by the Franco regime. Similarly, the PP opposed a PSOE bill to devote 1 million euros of the 2003 budget to exhume Republican common graves. In 2004, the Ombudsman or Defensor del Pueblo censored the conservative government for hampering efforts to dig up these graves (El País 15 June 2004).

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that were soon successfully turned into symbols of the new democratic Spanish identity. In 2000, the same year the left-wing parties began their campaign to support the recovery of Republican memory, opinion polls showed that 86 per cent of Spaniards felt proud of the way the transition to democracy had been accomplished (Avilés Farré 2002: 89–90). In other words, the idea of a consensual and peaceful transition to democracy took the place of a fully fledged anti-fascist national myth. The retrieval of ‘Republican memory’ poses further problems for the construction of a common national identity because the left is divided over the issue of the monarchy. While post-communists have remained staunch republicans, the socialists have gradually become monarchists. In many ways the PSOE shift towards monarchism can be explained by the affirmative public image of King Juan Carlos. Since the 1980s opinion polls have repeatedly shown that the monarchy is the most respected institution in the country and the vast majority of Spaniards consider that the king played a key and highly positive role in the transition to democracy (Avilés Farré 2002: 90; Muro and Quiroga 2004). But the PSOE’s conversion to monarchism has forced socialists to undergo voluntary amnesia. It is not only that they have ‘forgotten’ that they were republicans up to 1977, but also that this amnesia applies to their claim that historical figures of the party were forerunners of the current democratic system. For instance, López Aguilar, Professor of Constitutional Law, a PSOE MP and Minister of Justice in the Zapatero government of 2004, argued that the socialist leaders of the 1930s, such as Prieto, Besteiro, and Fernando de los Ríos, were the pioneers of the current parliamentary monarchy. Yet their militant republicanism, their successful struggle to create a republican Spain, and the fact that they were members of a republican government are glaringly omitted in his explanation (López Aguilar 2002: 173). On other occasions, the current monarchical regime is justified in terms of the so-called ‘accidentalism’ of some republican figures; that is, their pragmatic acceptance of monarchy. Solé Tura (2003: 278–9), for example, oddly dismisses Pi y Margall’s republicanism with the argument that the main point in the nineteenth-century federalist politician’s agenda was the construction of a democratic Spain, in which the issue of monarchy or republic was of little relevance. Dubious interpretations and intentional amnesia aside, the PSOE conversion to monarchism has profoundly hampered the socialists’ use of historical figures in order to construct historical legitimacy for a democratic national identity. After all, the vast majority of the democrats in Spain


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from the second half of the nineteenth century to the transition in the 1970s were also republicans. Put differently, the acceptance of King Juan Carlos ended up making it more difficult for the socialists to look beyond the transition period in order to create historical myths of democratic national cohesion. Things were not dissimilar in the field of rituals and symbolism. Many of the Francoist national symbols survived the transition to democracy. Unlike in 1931, when monarchist symbols were changed by the Republican government from one day to the next, the new democracy allows many symbols, such as streets and plazas named after Francoist generals and statues of the dictator himself, to remain. The UCD and PSOE governments made no attempts to link the first democratic experience to the second. As a result the patriotic celebrations of the new democracy have shown many more continuities with the Francoist period than with the Second Republic (Aguilar and Humlebaek 2002: 152). The ‘continuist’ approach of the PSOE was epitomized in the celebration of Hispanidad. In the first years of the transition, the King persevered with the Francoist discourse depicting Spain as a civilizing Catholic nation, while the UCD confirmed 12 October as Spain’s national holiday. The socialists initially opposed the decision but changed their mind once in power. In 1987, the PSOE confirmed this day as the national holiday, while IU and ERC demanded that 6 December (commemorating the Constitutional referendum) should instead be the day of Spain’s main patriotic celebration. The PSOE’s second thoughts mean that Spaniards cannot today mark the transition to democracy, their foundational myth as a modern nation, as Spain’s main patriotic celebration (Humlebaek 2004: 209). It was precisely this problem of finding valid precedents for the current democratic system that facilitated the emergence of constitutional patriotism as a reformulation of Spanish left-wing nationalism in the 1990s. The original concept of ‘constitutional patriotism’ (Verfassungspatriotismus) was developed by the German thinker Dolf Sternberger in the late 1970s and popularized by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas in the 1980s. In response to both German nationalism and the increasingly differentiated societies and transnational politics created by globalization, Habermas (1998: 118–226) argued that rational democratic citizenship could replace nationalism as a means of binding citizens together as long as it endowed them with material and cultural pay-offs. The implication is that the only feasible mechanism for consolidating this constitutional patriotism must be the social-democratic state. In this state, the citizens’ loyalty would be not to the nation as the political representation of an

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ethnic group with an alleged common past or shared cultural features, but to a set of rights gathered in a constitutional document. Critics have challenged his generic argument on the grounds that the cosmopolitan political identity that Habermas proposes is too ‘thin’ and is unlikely to provide sufficient underpinning for an inclusive democracy (Calhoun 2000).⁵ The Spanish left first adopted and adapted Sternberg and Habermas’s ideas in the early 1990s. Their timing was not gratuitous. As one of the main architects of Spanish constitutional patriotism acknowledged, the emergence of a patriotism constructed around the 1978 Constitution seemed highly appropriate as a means of reinterpreting concepts and feelings about Spain and its history once democracy had been consolidated and Spain was a fully integrated and active member of the European community (Laborda Martín 2002: 47). In other words, once the national myths of democratization, modernization, and Europeanization were widespread, the socialists embarked on the creation of a long-lasting myth: the 1978 Constitution as the unifying element among Spaniards. Throughout the 1990s, as democratization and Europeanization were consolidated and were thus losing their allure as common national projects, the socialists increasingly appealed to constitutional patriotism.⁶ For constitutional patriots, Spain is a nation politically bounded by a ‘democratic contract’, as established by the 1978 Constitution. Citizens’ loyalty to this ‘Magna Carta’ is what guarantees not only the necessary civic consensus among Spaniards to live together in the same democratic state but also the existence of the Spanish patria, regardless of their ethnic background. Socialists argued that constitutional patriotism was an entirely civic, post-national patriotism, the modern democratic recipe for a time when ethnic national identities were re-emerging all over the world after the end of the Cold War and globalization was generating social dislocation (Lamo de Espinosa, El País 22 November 2001). According to the most optimistic analyses, constitutional patriotism ⁵ A similar argument has been put forward in relation to Spain by Defez (2003). An earlier international polemic between traditional patriotism and cosmopolitan citizenship was sparked off by Richard Rorty’s plea in an article in the New York Times in 1994 for the ‘emotion of national pride’, against which Martha Nussbaum and others argued for a cosmopolitan approach to identity and citizenship (Nussbaum 1996). ⁶ One of the first to adapt Habermas’s ideas to the Spanish case was the socialist senator and history lecturer Laborda Martín. Further theoretical discussion of constitutional patriotism by socialist leaders can be found in Benegas (1997: 38–42), Múgica (1997), Almunia (2000: 122–44), and Rodríguez Zapatero (2002).


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could easily become the vehicle for different conservative and progressive conceptions of the Spanish nation and could even incorporate peripheral nationalists into a common project of a democratic post-national Spain (Laborda 2002). On paper at least, embracing constitutional patriotism appeared to be a convenient strategy for the socialists. As we have seen, the transition to democracy was a historical event the vast majority of Spaniards were proud of, and the Constitution of 1978 also rated high in the national imaginary. By creating such a recent foundational national myth, the socialists also aimed to avoid the problematic task of claiming the historical figures of the PSOE as forerunners of the current democratic system. Shifting the focus to the current Constitution had the advantage of highlighting the consensus of recent times and linking Spanishness to democracy. Despite some rhetorical attempts to integrate peripheral nationalists into the project, constitutional patriots have steadily built their discourse as a weapon against Catalan and Basque nationalists. Explicit in the argument is the idea of the superiority of a twenty-firstcentury, post-national civic patriotism over nineteenth-century ethnic nationalism (e.g. Lamo de Espinosa, El País 22 November 2001; Barón 2002: 96). Furthermore, constitutional patriotism has been used to advance the cause of a federal model that would rule out any asymmetry in the architecture of the state and especially independence for Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia (e.g. López Aguilar 2002: 161–2). However, as the constitutional patriots of the left were soon to discover, the absence of history would dilute the emotional appeal of this new Spanish nationalism. Once again, the problem was the issue of solidarity. In order to implement a social democratic programme based on economic redistribution, socialists argued, the people had to feel an emotional attachment to a common fatherland. Constitutional patriotism might ‘galvanize solidarity in a fatherland of citizens and propose common goals, sacrifices, and shared hopes’. Yet a legal text was far too cold and impersonal a foundation for this national solidarity, especially when the decentralization of the state had led autonomous communities to compete fiercely for resources. Yet to carry out the project successfully, the socialists knew they needed to promote the idea of Spain as a ‘commitment to coexistence, embracing emotion, elements of common identification, a sense of history, and assets of civility’, so the citizens could feel ‘close and warm-hearted towards the state’ (Laborda Martín 2002: 50–2).

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These wishful reflections amount to an inadvertent acknowledgement of the impossibility of building a purely civic national identity. Spain is no exception. All European state nationalisms combine civic features with a certain degree of historicism and with emotional appeals designed to legitimize the existence of a community of citizens living in the same state (Núñez Seixas 2001: 737). It is true that in some cases Spanish socialists openly claim the existence of a common history that fashioned a political and/or cultural community predating the 1978 Constitution. López Aguilar (2002: 59), for instance, argued that Spain is a ‘historical reality’, one of the oldest states in Europe, even if it has lacked ‘cultural, social, and sentimental unity’ until recently. On the other hand, as we saw above, Solozábal explained the emergence of the Spanish nation as the result of a common historical experience that generated shared cultural values. In his view, the 1978 Constitution was a clear example of civic, ‘voluntaristic nationalism’, yet the drafters of the Constitution still had to presuppose the existence of Spain as a previously existing national reality (Solozábal 1997: 341). Whether they claim, explicitly or implicitly, that history forged the patria or whether they emphasize the political or cultural nature of the fatherland, constitutional patriots always present the Spanish nation as a reality antedating the 1978 text. The Constitution is a by-product of the nation and not vice versa. Critics have accused the constitutional patriotism concept of failing to integrate peripheral nationalism into a common project on the grounds that it is about the Spanish fatherland, an anathema for Catalan, Basque, and Galician nationalists (e.g. Aguado 2002: 46). There is some truth in this argument, yet it misses a crucial point about the nature of this new Spanish nationalism. Constitutional patriotism was developed as part of a project to reinvent the Spanish nation. It was the corollary of a process of construction of national myths that had led to the consolidation of the idea of Spain as European, democratic, and modern during the 1990s. Constitutional patriotism turned the 1978 Constitution into the ultimate national myth: a legal document that embodied the democratic rights of all citizens and symbolized the capacity of Spaniards to live together in peace. Yet, at the same time, this idealization of the Constitution set the document in stone and made its eventual reform much more difficult. Thus the political space in which peripheral nationalists could propose ‘acceptable’ demands was limited to the boundaries of the constitutional text, boundaries, it should be stressed, usually defined by the constitutional patriots in terms of symmetric federalism. This new Spanish nationalism also presented itself as the


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paradigm of civic post-national patriotism in a deliberate attempt to portray its opponents as ethnic and backward-looking. Constitutional patriotism primarily aimed not to integrate peripheral nationalists into a common Spanish project but to create a solid alternative to them. In many respects, the ideas of constitutional patriotism have been successful. The 1978 Constitution has become part of the national mythology. In 2000, by the time left-wing constitutional patriotism was gaining momentum, up to 80 per cent of Spaniards deemed the Constitution ‘sacred or essential’ in Spanish politics (Avilés 2002: 96). This might help to explain why the socialist leaders in Catalonia and the Basque Country insisted that the new statutes of autonomy they were proposing would not require any amendment of the 1978 Constitution. Even those on the left who opposed constitutional patriotism on the grounds that it is a new and artificial Spanish nationalism are very careful not to place their devolutionary demands outside the constitutional framework. The IU leader Gaspar Llamazares (2002: 146) dismissed constitutional patriotism as deceptive, as a mere Orwellian use of language by which the meaning of terms was the opposite of what they appeared to indicate. Nevertheless, he considered that the 1978 Constitution provided an adequate legal framework to carry out territorial reforms and the devolutionary process fully. At the other end of the political spectrum, the socialists were victims of their own success. As we shall see in the next chapter, the PP embraced the concept of constitutional patriotism at the turn of the twenty-first century, and then tried to monopolize it. Although in recent years the concept of constitutional patriotism has been invoked less and less by the pro-PSOE intellectuals in the media, the idea that the 1978 Constitution is the last ditch against peripheral nationalists’ demands, and hence should not be amended at any cost, has remained at the core of the discourses of both left and right. The importance the 1978 Constitution has acquired as a weapon against peripheral nationalists can easily be seen in the case of the Ibarretxe Plan and the new Catalan Statute. The PSOE and IU rejected the Ibarretxe Plan outright on the grounds that recognizing the sovereignty of the Basque people was against Article 2 of the Constitution, which establishes that sovereignty rests exclusively with the Spanish people.⁷ The Catalan Statute presented a very different kind of problem. As we ⁷ The Basque branch of IU, Ezker Batua, had, however, voted in favour of the Plan in the Basque Parliament in December 2004.

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saw in Chapter 3, the original draft, drawn up by the left-wing government coalition in Catalonia and approved by the regional parliament, was changed at national level in a deal between the Spanish socialists and the conservative Catalan nationalist party CiU, after a fierce populist campaign orchestrated by the PP. The whole affair demonstrated the degree of internal division within the Spanish left. The PSC and the left-green Catalan party Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds (ICV) had championed the original text, which included the recognition of Catalonia as a nation and altered the existing tax regime in a way that would have undermined the role of the state in the interregional redistribution of funds. Underlying these demands was the assumption that Catalonia had a distinctive history that qualified it as a nation. Yet at the same time this Catalan nation is ‘compatible with a plural and integrated Spanish nation’ (e.g. Llamazares, Época 29 July 2005; Manuela de Madre, El País 10 January 2006). However, many in the PSOE were opposed to the idea that Catalonia could be called a nation and argued that it would be against the Constitution. They also felt that the funding system proposed by the Catalan government denoted a serious lack of solidarity between Catalans and the rest of the Spaniards.⁸ Once again, the tension between devolution and solidarity emerged within the left over the thorny issue of Spanish and Catalan national identities. One of the reasons why constitutional patriotism was received well by most Spaniards was because it was built on Europeanist principles. Following the socialist tradition of the 1970s and 1980s, constitutional patriots presented Spain’s future as inseparably linked to an ever-stronger European Union. Unlike for some sectors of New Labour in the UK and a good number of socialists in France, the alleged loss of national sovereignty that would accompany further European integration is not an issue for the PSOE and hence it gives full support to the European constitutional project. For the Spanish socialists, the EU is a postnational institution in which the traditional nation-states are bound to converge. The political consolidation of the European Union is understood as the only way forward in a globalized world where the European states are unable to compete on their own. This position is directly ⁸ There are many examples of this PSOE critique. See, for instance, José Bono, El Mundo 29 April 2005; José Blanco, El Mundo 3 October 2005; José Luis Rodríguez Ibarra, El Mundo 4 October 2005; Alfonso Guerra, El País 28 April 2005; and José Bono, El País 19 January 2006.


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connected with Habermasian constitutional patriotism, for the EU is presented as a key promoter of a civic citizenship that would eventually create solidarity among Europeans based on common democratic rights and freedoms. Yet the PSOE’s Europeanism should not be taken at its face value. At the heart of the ideological justifications of a Habermasian European post-national project lies the determination to portray Spanish constitutional patriotism as a quintessential civic patriotism, while nationalists who struggle to be nations without state—that is, the peripheral nationalisms in Spain—are outdated ethnic relics in the new globalized world (e.g. Barón 2002: 85, 91–9). Unlike the PSOE, IU did not support the European constitutional project in 2005 on the grounds that the new legislation followed a neo-liberal agenda. But the Europeanist credentials of the Spanish post-communists are unquestionable. IU shares the socialists’ view that globalization is making nation-states obsolete and demands the urgent democratization of international institutions including the EU (Llamazares 2005). Moreover, in the post-9/11 world, the Spanish post-communists have defended the European Union’s ‘civilizing role’, as opposed to the USA’s imperialism. From this perspective, the EU is the only power able to oppose North American unilateralism and should be strengthened along the lines of a federal model. The postcommunist federalist project aims at creating a European civil society able to control EU institutions while building a multilayered European network that would connect local, regional, national, and supranational powers. This European federal project would be mirrored in a federal Spain where the state would respect the national plurality of the Spanish peoples while guaranteeing interregional solidarity. Federalism in Spain is conceived as a ‘vaccine against nationalism’ (Llamazares 2002: 148–9, 153–6). As we have seen, contemporary leftist notions of Spain are fragmented, stretching from asymmetric regionalists who define Spain as a nation of nations with a multinational state to guerristas who wish to strengthen the state and limit the decentralization process. Throughout this chapter we have suggested that in all leftist conceptions of Spain there is a constant tension between national solidarity and regional devolution. Both elements are always present in all discourses about the Spanish nation, but the stronger one of them is, the weaker the other becomes. Notwithstanding continuous chimerical attempts to portray both concepts as compatible, the results are always similar: the more

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emphasis is put on further decentralization, the less stress is laid on solidarity, and vice versa. Disparities in emphasis largely depend on the different uses of history to legitimize national identities and state structures, but they also hinge on the dynamic of the decentralization process. Once the state of autonomous communities was put in place, it set in motion a practice of region-building that led to a neo-regionalist Spanish nationalism. For all its disparities, the concept of national identity on the left has undergone a profound transformation since the transition to democracy. The left has not only rediscovered the idea of the Spanish nation as a valid political concept, it has changed the predominant assumptions about the nature of the Spanish patria. Spain is not associated with backwardness, anti-Europeanism, and authoritarianism anymore. It has become a modern, European, and democratic nation in the public imaginary. This revolution in the features associated with the patria is a by-product of the profound social and political changes Spain has undergone since the 1970s. Yet, despite all assertions of normality within the European family of nations, the modern Spanish fatherland has been built on an idiosyncratic mythology that emerged precisely after the most peculiar episode (in European post-Second World War terms) in the country’s twentieth-century history: the Franco dictatorship. The transition to democracy and the 1978 Constitution were converted into the foundational myths of the contemporary Spanish nation. These new myths, in turn, paved the way for the emergence of a novel left-wing Spanish nationalism in the shape of constitutional patriotism. The latter was depicted as the quintessential post-national civic patriotism à la Habermas, yet, as we have seen, it retained some aspects of a more traditional Spanish nationalism, such as its anti-peripheral nationalist component and the belief that the Spanish nation is a historical reality that predated the 1978 Constitution for centuries. Since the end of Francoism, the left has travelled a considerable distance in its complex relationship with the idea of Spain. The picture that emerges is a fragmented one. Most probably, there is no solution to the issue of solidarity versus devolution, nor is an agreement likely to be found on whether Spain is a nation of nations or a nation of citizens. Unlike thirty years ago, the debate today focuses on the meaning of Spain as a nation, though very few would deny its existence. The fact that the issue resonates so strongly among many on the left and is a matter of intense deliberation underlines the continued strength of the Spanish nation as an idea. Perhaps more crucially, the left has created


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a new national mythology that is shared by the vast majority of the citizens. In many respects this is what nation-building is about: the formation of a collective feeling of belonging to an imagined national community based on a number of historical myths. In this sense, there can be few doubts that in the past thirty years the left has reinvented the Spanish nation in the minds of millions of Spaniards.

5 Spain: the View from the Right Like the left, the Spanish democratic right has had to respond since the transition to increasing challenges to its concepts of nation and identity.¹ It was obliged to shed traditional centralist policies and embrace a progressively federalizing organization of the state as it evolved in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It had to meet the challenge of the increasing radicalization of peripheral nationalisms, from the continued terrorism of ETA to recent demands in the Basque Country and Catalonia for a new relationship with the state. It has had to deal with the rise of regionalism from within its own ranks. And it has been forced to adjust to the effects of EU integration and globalization, both of which undermine traditional conceptions of Spanish identity (Núñez Seixas 2001c: 726–7). On the whole, the responses of the right have been marked by a high degree of programmatic flexibility. Yet its underlying discourse betrays continuities with traditional Spanish nationalism. Indeed, since 2000 this nationalism has surfaced and has polarized political discourse around the issue of nation and identity. By far the most important challenge the right had to deal with was to construct a new democratic political legitimacy in the wake of the dictatorship. In the first year of democracy, the leader of the AP, Manuel Fraga, called for ‘the re-creation of a political culture acceptable to the majority and coinciding with the real tendencies of society and accepted ideas’ (Fraga 1978: 43). Although he did not say it explicitly, this meant demarcating the new conservatism from the dictatorship. Painfully and painstakingly, the conservative leadership positioned the party and its successor PP as a catch-all party of the centre-right (Balfour 2005). However, conservatives proved peculiarly taciturn about the immediate ¹ By the democratic right, we refer to UCD and AP and subsequently PP and their organic intellectuals, as well as institutions such as the Church and the military, some of whose leading members can be identified as such, rather than the far right, a relatively small constituency that has had only a marginal impact on policy-making and public opinion. We also refer to the right in broad terms as conservatives.

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past. Their reticence was perhaps due in part to the fact that many of the high- and middle-ranking members of the AP and UCD had played important roles in the dictatorship or came from leading Francoist families. Their more critical intellectuals claim that the democratic right was gripped by a sense of guilt (Diego Villagrán 1999: 113–14; Vidal-Quadras 2002: 285). Even if this were the case, there were also more pragmatic reasons for drawing a veil over the past. Conservative politicians hoped to recruit a sizeable party membership from among people ambivalent about or nostalgic for the authoritarian regime. More importantly, they also depended on the vote of sections of the electorate deeply influenced by the dictatorship. In 1978, Fraga dismissed the need to look back, even though the problems he identified in the new democracy, such as apathy and political inhibition among citizens, could scarcely be disentangled from the immediate experience of dictatorship (Fraga 1978: 42–3). Almost a quarter of a century later, Aznar, then President of the PP government in its second term of office, coyly justified the conservative reluctance to examine the past when he said in an interview: ‘we need time before we start looking at our history without excessive passions, with the normality with which others do it’ (Prego 2002: 106). Underlying this fleeting rationalization is the acknowledgement that the immediate past is still important and its consequences have not been dealt with in the new democracy. The ‘normality’ of historical retrospect in countries such as Germany was due in great measure to the defeat of fascism. The democratic settlement in Spain left many Francoist assumptions untouched and it consigned the injustices suffered by millions in the Civil War and during the dictatorship to the recycle bin. This failure to confront the past (shared to some extent by the socialists) has deeply undermined the role of conservatism in the debate about nation and identity in the new democracy. It is true that, despite the evident angst about the decline of the Spanish nation as expressed by their organic intellectuals, the political conservative right in Spain has demonstrated a high degree of expediency over the national question, even if for many the driving force of this expediency was the quest for power and the overriding determination to keep it. Thus conservative politicians have, at least rhetorically, taken on board new interpretations of the nature of Spain beyond traditional unitary conceptions. Some have gone as far as to acknowledge the positive contribution multilevel governance and cultural and linguistic diversity can make to the nation, as we shall see.

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However, it can be argued that their concept of Spain is still fashioned by traditional ideology and this in turn is based on historiographical misrepresentation. This is a measure of their failure to get to grips with the heritage of Francoism, indeed it is part of a conscious strategy of denial. For forty years the Dictatorship manufactured and propagated a distorted national history. In the new democracy, the democratic right have failed to repudiate it fully and indeed avoided confronting it. Instead they have attempted to edit it, deleting passages and adding new texts to incorporate a changing balance of power into the narrative. Their sense of identity and political legitimacy derives from this narrative and appears to be little shaken by recent historical research, which tends to reject the axioms of both traditional liberal and right-wing history in Spain. For conservatives the past as traditionally represented is usually incontestable. Thus Pilar del Castillo, Minister of Education in the second Aznar government, stated in an interview in 2000 in ABC (19 June) that the important thing in teaching history in schools was ‘the chronological context, what happened before and after, who, how, where; because the whys can be more controversial’, as if ‘historical facts’, and especially those propagated in traditional Spanish textbooks, were incontrovertible. Moreover, the PP government’s Law of Quality of Education (LOCE) of 2003 not only made the teaching of religion (either Catholicism or the ‘Religious Fact’ (Hecho Religioso)) obligatory but reintroduced a traditional history curriculum permeated by an obsolete interpretation of the past. The Basque professor of political science, Edurne Uriarte, one of the most prolific of Spanish nationalist writers, laments that the notion of Spain was emptied of meaning in the transition because of the ‘voracity’ of peripheral nationalisms and the connivance of the left. Because of its fear of being tainted with the dictatorship, she continues, the democratic right had little option but to leave it to the left to formulate a new nationalism, which the left and its intellectuals notably failed to do. Thus for years afterwards the left made concessions to the historic regions because of ‘complexes’ inherited from the dictatorship (Uriarte, 2002a: 109–32; 2003: 91–2). The result was that ‘the Francoist concept of Spain is not replaced by any other, no new Spanish nation replaces the former because the new Spain is that of its components, that of the autonomies’ (Uriarte 2002a: 122). Yet her argument could be turned on its head. As part of their renovation into centre-right, catch-all parties, the AP and PP had had the opportunity to develop a new inclusive, democratic nationalism


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explicitly distinct from Francoist nationalism. They could have drawn on the historical precedent of the liberal nationalist traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with their strong regionalist roots. They could have exploited the progressive nationalism of the liberal politicians of the Second Republic. But the conservatives only began a timid revision of the past in the mid-1990s, even though they had already abandoned other policies close to the heart of their core right-wing supporters. As we shall see, the old national rhetoric that had nurtured them shaped their perspectives for almost twenty years of the new democracy. Instead of tackling the recent past, they promoted a pact of silence about the Second Republic, the Civil War, and the Dictatorship, with the result that these burning issues hardly ever made an appearance in their public statements. Spain was mostly absent from debate (except among regional nationalists) precisely because Francoist discourse remained untouched. The Spanish nation and national identity became politically incorrect terms because they had not undergone any significant revision since the dictatorship; for years, therefore, the AP and PP were unable to offer an inclusive national project (Lacasta-Zabala 1998: 334–9). In short, the democratic right failed to cleanse its own national stable. Although there are different tendencies within Spanish conservative nationalism, two dominant assumptions underlie most of its narrative about the past, one teleological—that is, a belief in historical purpose or destiny—and the other organicist, the principle that the nation is a living organism, a perennial force of nature irrespective of time and the identities of those who have lived within its supposed borders. A striking expression of this principle was enunciated, as we saw in Chapter 3, by Ortega y Gasset, whose ideas have deeply influenced the democratic right, even though most of these can be identified as liberal. Traditional sections of the Catholic Church, including members of its hierarchy, have played an important role in propagating the teleological myth of an unbroken tradition of Spanishness since the creation of the Roman province of Hispania. Predictably, they place Catholicism at the centre of Spanish identity. In doing so, they are recycling the old myth, whose most influential disseminator was the late nineteenth-century thinker Menéndez Pelayo, that the values of the Enlightenment and liberalism were a foreign corruption that had poisoned Spain’s essence (Rouco Varela 2005). Political conservatives, on the other hand, tend to stress the monarchy and the Reconquest as the source of Spanish identity, though clearly neither has any room for Islamic or Jewish Spain in the canon of national culture.

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Perhaps the most institutionally authoritative expression in the new democracy of this traditional interpretation of nation was the collective report published as a book by the Real Academia de la Historia, which won the National Prize for History in 1998. It could be seen as an attempt to establish a master narrative for the historical culture of the new democracy, simplifying and distorting the past for the purposes of public and educational consumption. Like many other similar accounts, the report largely repeats the nostrums of the Francoist ideology of NationalCatholicism without even mentioning the Dictatorship. Its conclusion posits the existence of Spain ‘from time immemorial’. Spanish identity was an ‘intuition’ in pre-historic times until the Roman Empire gave it conscious political expression by creating the province of Hispania. The founders of independent Spain were the Visigoths, who established monarchy, whiteness, and Christianity as the fundamental signifiers of national identity (Real Academia 1997: 583–7). Thus the invasion of the peninsula by the Muslims in 711 and their presence in Spain over seven centuries, according to another of the contributors to the report, the well known historian Carlos Seco Serrano, represented the ‘loss of Spain’, and the Reconquest was ‘the permanent historical project of Christian, European, Western Spain: the recuperation of the ‘‘lost Spain’’ in order to restore the Visigoth monarchy’ (Real Academia 1997: 319–20). The medieval kingdoms displayed a ‘consciousness of being part of a whole that had to be reconstructed’ until, in the late fifteenth century, the modern state and nation finally emerged after the marriage of Isabel of Castile and Fernando of Aragón. This is the familiar stuff of traditional narratives of the past that fail completely to meet the challenge of the historiography of the past thirty years or so. Where the report departs from National-Catholicism is in its attempt to fit peripheral nationalisms into the narrative. Under Francoism, Basqueness or Catalanness was reduced to manifestations of folkloric diversity within one nation. The report acknowledges the emergence in the nineteenth century of nationalisms on the periphery that challenged the Spanish state but implies that these are compatible with the Spanish nation within the new democracy because they are essentially cultural nations based on different ethnicities and languages, or patrias within the greater Patria. Spain, the report concludes, is therefore a nation of nations (Real Academia 1997: 585–6).² ² Not all the twenty-one contributors share the traditional españolista perspective but it is the dominant view and forms the basis of the report’s conclusion. Significantly,


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By any academic standards, the report abounds in historical myths and cannot be treated as a serious analysis. There is hardly any reference to the considerable literature on nations and nationalism both in Spain and abroad that questions conventional notions of identity and state formation. It is largely an exercise in retrospective nationalism. The traditional definition of what is Spanish is projected backwards into history and an identity and a purpose are attributed to societies that possessed very different values, institutions, social relationships, spatial and temporal concepts, and cognitive frameworks in general. The presence of Hispano-Muslims on the Iberian peninsula for eight centuries and their integration (and that of other ethnic-religious minorities such as the Jews) into its medieval multicultural society are characterized simply as an occupation by an alien race and religion (Manzano Moreno in Pérez Garzón 2000). No acknowledgement is made of the cultural, economic, and political contribution Hispano-Muslims made to the peninsula over the centuries, including the penetration of Aristotelian thought into Europe through the Andalusian Arab philosopher Averroes. In the more extreme expressions of Islamophobia, Islam, along the lines of Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis, is seen as the permanent Other against which Spain has identified itself from 711 to the present day (Vidal 2004), while contemporary radical Islam is portrayed as a conspiracy to restore Islamic Spain or Al Andalus (Arístegui 2005).³ The axiom that the modern nation of Spain was founded in the late fifteenth century, it can be argued, is also an invented tradition.⁴ Conservative politicians, historians, and history teachers need to be the distortions of Francoist historiography are not mentioned and references to the Civil War and the Dictatorship are virtually absent. For a critique of the report see Pérez Garzón (El País 9 December 1998). Further traditionalist interpretations can be found in Otero Novás (1998) and Fernández de la Mora (2003), among others. For counter-interpretations see, for example, Pérez Garzón (2000). ³ Aznar added his voice to the wave of Islamophobia in a speech to the conservative American think-tank, the Hudson Institute, in September 2006, in which he warned of the growing danger to Western civilization of Islamic radicalism and wondered why Muslims had not apologized for having ‘occupied Spain for eight centuries’ (El Mundo 23 September 2006). ⁴ This tradition is shared across the political spectrum, though not of course among peripheral nationalist historians. Thus no less a historian than Juan Pablo Fusi claims that Spain has been a modern nation since the beginning of the sixteenth century (Fusi 2000: 161). However, the conservative historian Carlos Seco Serrano acknowledges that the Spanish state of the sixteenth century was not a unitary state (ABC 7 December 2004).

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reminded that Spain did not exist as a legal entity in 1492. The composite monarchy of Castile-Aragon ruled over a conglomerate of states that retained their institutions as well as their different cultures and languages (Elliott 2006). Nor did Spain achieve the status of nation when the Castilian-Aragonese state was merged into the Habsburg Empire in 1516. Critics of the thesis that Spain emerged as a modern nation in 1492 maintain that it was only through the process of religious and racial persecution, European wars, imperial expansion into the Americas, and state propaganda during the course of the sixteenth century that a distinct notion of Spain and of Spanish identity began to develop among Iberians (though it is not claimed this was a modern notion) (e.g. Rodríguez-Salgado 1998; Kamen 2002). In any case, the concept of the modern state as an impersonal, sovereign, and legally circumscribed political structure with jurisdiction over a given territory (or, in Weberian terms, with the monopoly of the legal use of force) is far removed from early modern political thinking and, indeed, with few exceptions, from that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The state in Western Europe was a patrimonial or, as Susan Reynolds defines it, a regnal state, the domain of the monarchs or emperors, their divinely ordered property, and the people within it were their subjects, whose rights and obligations were tied to property and religion (Reynolds 1984: 250–3; Held 1989: 11). Similarly, the modern concept of nation plays no part in the values of the time. The term itself had various meanings but none was coterminous with the state or even the ‘fatherland’ or ‘homeland’. Least of all was there a sense of national identity. Identities in Western Europe were complex and multilayered. They could even be cosmopolitan but they were also hierarchical, rooted in religion, locality, and monarchy. That is, there was little horizontality of community or sense of citizenship and equality before the law (Greenfeld 1992: 6–21; Kumar 2003: 120). Where there was anything resembling national pride it was a surrogate of the celebration of the monarch or emperor. For their part, monarchs and emperors had so little conception of nation that they had no problem handing over tracts of their land and the people within them to rivals in pursuit of dynastic ambition (Anderson 1998: 70). Some conservative intellectuals are ready to concede that a modern concept of nation began to materialize in Spain only in the early nineteenth century, although they insist that cultural continuities played an important part in the emerging sense of national identity (Jiménez


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Losantos 1995: 520–1; Vidal-Quadras 2002: 285). But this acknowledgement of the relatively recent roots of the nation undermines traditional claims to historical legitimacy. The underlying assumption of a common and unbroken tradition of nationhood is central to conservative understanding of the present. Any differences between the centre and the periphery are less significant that the ‘unifying cultural links’ that have supposedly bound Spain together as a nation since the Roman occupation (Aznar 1995: 48–9). The denial of a common nationhood by peripheral nationalists is seen by conservatives as an affront to a deeply held sense of shared identity, of a Volksgeist spun out of collective memory, tradition, religion, symbolism, art and literature, and so on. The anger and bitterness pervading much of the literature of the right on the national question is the product of this challenge. The hostility between peripheral nationalists and conservatives has intensified over recent years. As we have seen, most conservatives feel that far too much was conceded to the demands of Catalan and Basque nationalists in the process of democratic consolidation. It was difficult enough for conservatives to reconcile their understanding of the national past with semi-federal governance. But there was little expectation in the late 1970s that the demands of peripheral nationalism would become ever more radical except among a violent minority. On the contrary, there was an implicit hope that regional aspirations among moderate nationalists would be satisfied by the concession of a fast-track towards autonomy (Fraga 1980: 135). Even so, the new autonomous system was rationalized at first as part of a functional and symmetrical model of subsidiarity, in which municipal, provincial, and regional governments would administer competences devolved from the state appropriate to each level (Fraga 1978: 174–6). That is, the only special status that would eventually emerge from the process of devolution would be the Basque and Navarrese ‘historical rights’, and this could be justified by age-old precedents. However, in the process of negotiating the Constitution, Fraga, as we have seen, conceded that the autonomous system was more than an administrative arrangement but carried with it political rights. In retrospect, conservatives see devolution as Spain’s ‘Big Bang’, as regions have increasingly expanded their claims to autonomy and nation or nationality status and the centre is perceived as losing its hold (Diego Villagrán 2005: 19). The Big Bang is an appropriate metaphor in one sense at least, in that many conservatives fail to define what existed before.

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It is also paradoxical, in that the right defines the 1978 Constitution as the overriding symbol of Spanish national identity yet it was through the Constitution that the alleged unravelling of the nation-state began. How do conservatives conceive of claims to historic nation status by peripheral nationalists? The adversarial rhetorics of traditional Spanish and peripheral nationalisms are almost mirror-images of each other. The discourse of peripheral nationalisms is examined in Chapter 6. But here we suggest that the majority of the literature and political rhetoric on both sides see the identity of the other as invented or imagined while their own is authentic. Both assert contradictory rather than complementary cultural or ethno-cultural continuities for over a thousand years. Each defends attachment to their nation as patriotism and accuses the other of nationalism. ‘Their’ nationalism has been discriminatory, whereas ‘our’ national project is inclusive. While Spanish nationalism sees the medieval Reconquest and the overseas empire as the processes that forged the Spanish nation by bringing together its different peoples, peripheral nationalism sees them as the imposition of a Castilian empire and language on these peoples. Basque nationalists claim their country was colonized by the Castilians, Catalan nationalists that the modernizing Aragonese-Catalan commercial empire was subjugated to a backward, mercantilist, Castilian monarchy, Spanish nationalists that peripheral nationalisms are variously archaic, tribal, xenophobic, anti-modern, and, in some extreme definitions, totalitarian.⁵ Finally, neither admits that the nationalist narrative begins only with the first appearance of a nationalist political project in the nineteenth century because that would be to deny the ontological basis of their identity (Rivière Gómez in Pérez Garzón 2000: 161). Thus conservatives see the demands of the peripheral nationalists not just as a threat to national unity and a denial of a shared past but as being rooted in exclusive and imagined identities that are incompatible with modernity. Inspired by the debate about identities in post-communist Eastern Europe, one conservative commentator refers to the ‘hibernation effect’ of the Franco Dictatorship, during which peripheral nationalism was shielded from the effects of modernization. In the new multiethnic, multilinguistic, and multidenominational Spain, the imposition through ⁵ The sources from which these perceptions of peripheral nationalisms are drawn emphasize different aspects and vary in their level of criticism. They include VidalQuadras (1993, 1998, 2002), Juaristi (1997a), Jiménez Losantos (1995), Bueno (1999), Diego Villagrán (1999, 2005), Muñoz Alonso (2000), Uriarte (2002a, 2003), Cuenca Toribio (2003), Fernández de la Mora (2003), and Aznar (2004).


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regional government policy of exclusive, primordialist identities is irreconcilable with democracy (Diego Villagrán 1999: 130; Vidal-Quadras 2002: 292). The PP Eurodeputy and one-time President of the party in Catalonia, Aleix Vidal-Quadras, claimed that the regional government under CiU was seeking to make Catalan the basis of national identity because there was no common and cohesive symbol of identity easily available in a ‘land of through-passage [paso] and strong immigration’ (Vidal-Quadras 1993: 158). To base national identity on a language is a ‘nineteenth-century anachronism’ (García de Cortázar in Muñoz Alonso 2000: 20–1). As opposed to the archaic nationalism of the periphery based on linguistic and ethnic exclusivity, conservatives claimed patriotic correctness. Nationalism exists only in the periphery and is, according to some, intrinsically separatist (Jiménez Losantos 1995: 511). Underlying this overtly anti-nationalist discourse is an alternative nationalism. The view from the right implicitly assumes the existence of a Spanish nation, a shared history and language, and a common identity, however diverse in its regional manifestations (Muñoz Alonso 2000: 162–73). As for peripheral nationalists, language is one of the most important signifiers of this identity. Thus Castilian is used by Spanish nationalists as a tool of legitimation, an essential symbol of unity (León Solís 2003). The denial of its universality is a denial of a common past embracing the imperial project. The historical evidence put forward in support of this view by conservative historians, as we have seen, is inadequate, though this does not imply that the argument is entirely without basis. Moreover, conservative political elites are ambiguous about what this nation is. In some of their pronouncements, Spain is a nation by virtue of the Constitution, whose fundamental ethic is democracy, the rule of law, and citizenship. Yet, as we have seen, primordialist, even essentialist, notions slip through the barrier of this constitutional correctness. What is also unclear is the relation between the nation, however defined, and the nationalities. Are these cultural nations, part of a nation of nations and regions? If so, what is the rationale behind the symmetry that conservatives seek in the architecture of the state? Efforts were made to put the national house in order from the early 1990s onwards. Alongside the essentially traditionalist accounts of Spanish history by the Real Academia de la Historia and assorted conservative historians, a strategic shift in thinking about the past took place among the conservative political elite. The AP had failed throughout the decade to dislodge the Socialists from power. As part of its renewed efforts to woo the centre (which included the transformation of the AP into the

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PP in 1989, with Aznar as its president and presidential candidate, as well as a host of policy initiatives) the conservatives sought to construct a new historical legitimacy rooted in autochthonous models of the early twentieth century. While for the left anti-Francoism had been the main badge of identity, the PP looked to establish continuities with Spanish liberalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We saw in Chapter 2 how the PP adopted the nineteenth-century conservative statesman Antonio Cánovas as a forerunner of democratic liberalism. The value of neo-canovismo to the PP was that, for all its democratic deficits, it offered a model of a stable, two-party system capable of resisting the ‘disintegrative demands’ of regional nationalism, as one of the PP’s intellectuals argued (Pérez de Armiñán 1998). We also saw how the PP claimed the regenerationist movement of the early twentieth century as another precursor of the democratic right in its offer to modernize Spain and defend its national cohesion. Aznar peppered his speeches and books with references to figures such as Costa, Ortega y Gasset, and Unamuno in an effort to establish nationalist credentials untainted by Francoism, just as he brought in Popper, Hayek, Fukuyama, and others to demonstrate the neo-liberalism espoused by the party (Aznar 1991, 1995). In this attempt to construct historical continuity with liberal democracy in Spain, Aznar went as far as to identify himself with the President of the Second Republic, Manuel Azaña. The usefulness of association with Azaña was to create a historical precedent of a patriotic national leader attempting to establish liberalism and national cohesion in a supposedly fractious society. The Republican leader’s long-suppressed diaries of 1931–2 were published by the PP’s virtual in-house journal Nueva Revista and Aznar gave a speech at their launch praising Azaña’s greatness and lamenting his tragedy. But Aznar denuded his references of any context, placing Azaña in a historical limbo. He made no mention of the Spanish right and the conservatives, who were largely responsible for bringing down Azaña, except to say that there had been ‘a certain class of errors’ (Aznar 1998: 173).⁶ Thus the PP’s new identikit omitted any connection with or indeed any reference to the conservatives of the 1930s and the Franco Dictatorship. Only the more liberal modernizers among the PP’s organic intellectuals were explicit in their condemnation of Francoism. One maverick conservative went as far as to refer ⁶ One conservative writer goes as far as to criticize the right, as well as the left, for failing to demonstrate the same level of affection for Spain shown by Azaña (Muñoz Alonso 2000: 14–16).


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to the ‘holocaust’ brought on Spain by Franco, ‘the brutal and antipatriotic repression of the winners, who turned the Francoist regime into a theoretical continuation of the Civil War, in permanent struggle against communism, separatism, and, let it not be forgotten, liberalism’ (Jiménez Losantos 1995: 522). By 1995, the PP was emphasizing the cultural plurality of Spain, defined as a nation of different ‘peoples’ (Aznar 1995: 52). This was not unconnected with the possibility that the party might win the general elections of 1996 but would need the support within parliament of the main peripheral nationalist parties. The electoral system in Spain is such that if the vote is close the two catch-all parties of centre-left and centreright have to rely on the parliamentary support of minority parties, in particular regional parties, to form a government. This was true of the PSOE governments of 1993–6 and from 2004 and the PP government of 1996–2000. For one ‘catastrophist’ conservative journalist, this is tantamount to the ‘suicide’ of Spain as a nation, since the electoral system hands the power to determine national policy to peripheral nationalists (Diego Villagrán 2005: 12–18).⁷ Thus the PP went out of its way to woo the Basque and Catalan parties of the centre-right with assurances that the special status of the ‘historic communities’ would be recognized and that the autonomies would enjoy greater representation in the Senate. Aznar declared that he was against any form of federalism because it meant symmetry, implicitly acknowledging the special rights of the ‘historic communities’ (Aznar 1995: 49–56). Like the more centralist wing of the Socialists, many conservatives felt uncomfortable with the concessions to peripheral nationalism made in order for the party to win or stay in power (Vidal-Quadras 2002: 295–6). After all, the right-wing media had been campaigning against Catalanism ever since the CiU had agreed to support the minority government of the PSOE in 1993. The campaign had been launched by a full front page offensive accusing the Catalan government of persecuting the Spanish language ‘like Franco but the other way round’ (ABC 12 September 1993). Once the PP won an absolute parliamentary majority in the 2000 elections, however, they no longer needed to take account of the susceptibilities of CiU, on whom they had relied for parliamentary support. Indeed, in the Catalan elections of 1999 it had been CiU’s ⁷ Hence the PP’s campaign for a reform of the electoral law to reduce the weighting of regional parties.

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turn to need the support of PP deputies in the Catalan parliament to form a government and Aznar, according to one source, had made it a condition of the party’s support that CiU should not pursue the reform of the Catalan Statute (Aizpeolea, La Vanguardia 9 October 2005). Thus, for conservatives, the new government marked the beginning of the recuperation of the concept of Spain as a democratic nation, a concept that had virtually disappeared as a result of the combined efforts of Francoism on one hand, and peripheral nationalism on the other (Uriarte 2003: 18). Under huge pressure from public opinion, the party took the unprecedented step of officially distancing itself from Francoism by supporting a motion condemning the Dictatorship in parliament in 2002, but it did so almost certainly in the hope of closing the debate about the recent past. Alongside a decided shift to the right in socio-economic, educational, and cultural policies, the PP set out to develop a new nationalist discourse and liturgy in order to seize the initiative that had supposedly been conceded to peripheral nationalists. The prime movers behind the new policy were party modernizers drawn largely from a new generation of liberal conservatives, some of whom had been in the opposition against Franco during their youth (such as the exMinister of Transport and parliamentary spokesman of the PP, Eduardo Zaplana, and the ex-Foreign Minister and later leader of the Catalan branch of the PP, Josep Piqué, who had once been a militant in the Catalan Communist Party, PSUC). Uriarte, also a liberal conservative who had been on the left, has likened them to the US neo-conservatives because of their political origin and their injection of neo-liberalism into traditional conservative thinking (Uriarte 2003: 183–4). Far from expressing pessimism about the devolutionary process, the PP took the new approach of celebrating regional autonomy. Spain was a mosaic of peoples of different cultures that coexisted within one nation. Its strength lies in its regions so that, far from fragmenting Spain, the semi-federal system has reinforced the nation. ‘The Spain that is emerging in the twenty-first century is no longer a source of anguish for us.’ Autonomy is ‘the key to the integration and vertebration of Spain’ (Zaplana 2001: 15–20, 76–8). Yet any attempt to deepen the process of devolution beyond the limits established by the Constitution as they understood them, such as the financial proposals in the first draft of the reformed Catalan Statute, was branded as ‘secession’ (El País 6 September 2005). Moreover, empirical data on conflicts between regional governments and the central government under the PP suggest


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that the conservative leadership was concerned to strengthen the state’s powers while restricting the competencies of Autonomous Communities to the principle of subsidiarity (Grau Creus 2005). The PP’s rhetorical shift towards regionalism as the hallmark of nation was a response to two processes. As we saw in Chapter 3, the devolution of resources and decision-making and the dynamic of competitive federalism led to the emergence of powerful political elites at regional level. This has not only changed the balance between centre and periphery within both the PSOE and the PP but also given bargaining power to small regionalist parties on whom regional government often depends for parliamentary majorities. In the 1990s elections, several governments, such as Valencia, Baleares, and Aragon (between 1995 and 1999), fell into conservative hands, with the result that the voice of peripheral conservatism has been growing stronger. The more liberal conservatives welcome the emergence of a new non-nationalist periphery, whose proposals are ‘far from the centralization-nationalism dialectic, demonstrating the federalizing realities of autonomous Spain’. In contrast to peripheral nationalism, these autonomies, according to the new conservative discourse, are entrepreneurial, technological, and modernizing (Diego Villagrán 1999: 137–8). The growth of assertive regional elites has no doubt made PP centralists uncomfortable. The tensions between party centre and periphery began to surface a year after the loss of power at national level in the March 2004 elections. Criticism of the party leadership and calls for the renewal of the PP’s strategy came above all from regional leaders such as Piqué and the president of Baleares, Jaume Matas (La Vanguardia 2, 4, 7 July 2005).⁸ The latter also made a bid for a new financial relationship between central government and the autonomies that went far beyond the PP’s cautious plans for further devolution. Taking up many of the proposals made by the Catalan PP leadership, the Baleares model called for the power to legislate over taxation to be devolved to all regions and suggested that regional governments should also be able to collect 50 per cent of income tax and an unspecified percentage of corporate tax (El País 1 June 2005). This plan was not that distinct from the original proposals for the Catalan Estatut deemed ‘secessionist’ by the party leadership. It certainly implied a further hollowing out of the state, to which the PP is deeply opposed. ⁸ Piqué’s criticism of his party’s strategy was indirectly but unmistakeably expressed in an interview in Avui on 11 February 2007.

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It could be argued, however, that the PP’s emphasis on the role of regions in the governance of Spain is also part of a (Spanish) nationalist strategy to counter the challenge from Catalan and Basque nationalists. Party modernizers like Zaplana, who emphasize the positive role of the regions, also attempt to downplay the exceptionalism of the historic communities by arguing that other regions had a similar historic relationship with the state. Thus he highlights the cases of Aragon and Valencia, which until 1707 had enjoyed tax-collecting rights as part of the medieval fueros ( furs in Valencian) similar to those of Navarra and the Basque Country (and Catalonia, though he does not mention the latter) (Zaplana 2001: 20–1). As part of their attempt to construct historical legitimacy, PP leaders also identified themselves with the Catalan conservative elite of the beginning of the twentieth century, in particular the leader of the Lliga Regionalista Francesc Cambó, who sought to regenerate Spain by exporting the dynamic Catalan model to the rest of the country. Aznar (2004: 247) argued that ‘at the very root of Catalan nationalism, as asserted by Cambó, one of its founders, lies the aspiration that Catalonia can contribute decisively to leading the process of modernization and progress of Spain’. His statement implies that contemporary Catalan nationalism is a deviation from an authentic model that was once compatible with Spanish patriotism. Quite apart from the fact that the Lliga Regionalista, as its very name suggests, cannot be defined as the expression of Catalan nationalism, his statement ignores the more popular and multifaceted Catalanist movement that united to form Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya in 1931. In other words, the PP was attempting to mobilize the newly assertive regionalism in order to halt what it saw as a drift towards federalism or independence. Thus its leaders held up the proposed reform of the Valencian Statute, drafted by the conservative government of the region and approved in the regional parliament with the support of the socialists, as a model for all others to follow in the search to complete the process of devolution. The main reason for their enthusiasm for the Valencian proposal was that it fully conformed to the Constitution, unlike either the Basque Ibarretxe Plan or the original draft of the Catalan Statute, and explicitly referred to the unity of the Spanish nation. The suggestion of the PP’s President, Mariano Rajoy, that all PP regional governments should either adopt it as their model or demand whatever financial arrangements they wished with the state, was a warning to PP regional governments such as that of the Baleares


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that any other devolutionary proposal that went beyond the Valencian would degenerate into an auction (El País 3 June 2005). The PP’s support for the reform of the Valencian Statute was an indication of how far the party leadership had travelled since democracy, in particular over questions of nation and identity. The original Statute had been agreed by the Spanish parliament in 1981. It asserted the region’s right of self-government and declared the Valencian language co-official with Castilian Spanish. In the new Statute, drafted this time by the Valencian PP and approved by the regional Socialist Party, Valencia is now defined as a historic nationality, a designation once limited to the ‘Galeusca’ regions but increasingly self-assigned by other communities such as Canarias and Aragon. The claim was based on the special rights or furs enjoyed by the region and abolished over 300 years ago. A further clause, named after the Valencian President Camps, asserts that any competences awarded to other autonomies should automatically be granted to the Valencian region (Corts Valencianes 2006). PP modernizers and centralists alike, in tandem with the PSOE, probably saw their support for these proposals as a necessary price to be paid to undermine the radical demands of the peripheral nationalists, in particular the Catalan Estatut.⁹ Both parties sought to use the new Valencian Statute to bring to an end the competitive process of devolution by imposing a constitutional ceiling to ensure symmetry. Instead of the almost ‘unstoppable spiral of demands’ set off by peripheral nationalists, all regions should consolidate the levels of self-government offered by the present system (Muñoz Alonso 2000: 17). In contrast, conservatives of all hues saw the reform of the Catalan Statute as a threat to both state and nation. Piqué, the PP Catalan leader most under pressure from regional demands, only withdrew his support for the draft two months earlier when its demands were ratcheted up as a result of pressure from Catalan nationalists. The Catalan PP, he stated, would only accept it if it were similar to the Valencian Statute (El País 7 September 2005). The former leader of the PP in Catalonia, Vidal-Quadras, was blunter. The new Statute, characterized by ‘anticonstitutionality’, would result in the disappearance of the Spanish state ⁹ This is not to say that the PP carries all its members along. PP representatives of non-Valencian speaking areas of the region have campaigned against the proposed reform of the Statute on the grounds that its greater emphasis on the use of Valencian is discriminatory and is typical of exclusive nationalisms (even though both versions of the Statute offer to protect the linguistic rights of these areas) (Annanoticies.com 2 September 2005).

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from the Catalan community; not only that, it would lead to secession (La Vanguardia 9 September 2005). For the PP leadership, the new Statute, if it were accepted by the Spanish parliament, would signal no less than the breakdown of the Constitution and ‘a change of regime’ (El País 30 September 2005; Rajoy, La Vanguardia 8 October 2005). The reaction of individual members of the military to the draft Statute also revealed considerable unrest among the officer class. The highest ranking general in Spain had already expressed his concern about the future unity of Spain (El País 4 October 2005). It was the controversial speech of the Army Lieutenant General Mena Aguado on the Day of the Armed Forces in January 2006 that showed the extent of disquiet among many officers over the Statute. He warned about the grave consequences of its endorsement, suggesting that if the text went beyond the limits of the Constitution, the armed forces would have to intervene in line with their constitutional role as defenders of the unity of Spain (El Mundo 9 January 2006). Yet the response of the military as an institution was unequivocal. Mena was put under house arrest and stripped of his command. The head of the General Staff, General Sanz Roldán, made it clear that the offending officer had misunderstood the nature of Article 8 of the Constitution; the military were subordinate to government and parliament and could only act as their instrument. Thus at an institutional level at least, it was patent that the armed forces had internalized the protocols of Spanish democracy.¹⁰ Indeed, a poll by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas in February 2006 had confirmed the enormous improvement of the public image of the armed forces since the attempted coup of 1981, in that only 9.9 per cent of those questioned expressed a negative opinion of them. The new counter-nationalist regionalism of the PP evident in the mobilization against the Catalan Statute was also part of a discursive endeavour to occupy the centre ground of Spanish politics. The boldest expression of this rhetorical shift was the document passed at its conference in 2002 entitled ‘The Constitutional Patriotism of the Twenty-first Century’, which laid out a supposedly new vision of nation and identity. It is worth looking closely at this document because it expresses the underlying tension within the PP between traditional españolismo and ¹⁰ Even among those who sympathized with Mena’s statement, there was a clear sense of the inappropriateness of his remarks (Conde Bajén, El Mundo 11 January 2006), while those who openly supported his speech tended to be officers who were retired or in the reserve (e.g. Vidal Delgado on 7 January 2006).


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modernity. Drawn up significantly by a Catalan and a Basque, Piqué and the Basque deputy María San Gil, the paper recognized the need to update the discourse about Spain to take account of its transformation over twenty-five years since the transition to democracy. It rejected any re-edition of Spanish nationalism and argued that the Constitution of 1978, with its stress on liberty, plurality, and civic responsibility, should be the basis of a new concept of Spain. As against the exclusive nationalisms of the periphery, the document posited the inclusive patriotism implicit in the Constitution (Piqué and San Gil 2002). The document was passed by the delegates without dissent (having undergone some 100 amendments in committee stage), though it must have stuck in the gullets of traditionalists. It used the language of the left, and indeed stole the clothes of the socialists, who first introduced the idea in Spain after borrowing it from the German left, as we saw in Chapter 4. Uncharacteristically, the PP found itself invoking this Habermasian formula of a patriotism based on a universal ethic of civic rights free from any primordial attachment to nation. The document called for ‘a civic culture that has to be based on the affirmation and adhesion to values and principles that the Spanish nation gave to itself at the time of the Constitution and made these values the fundamental axis of its political project’. The new idiom was greeted with enthusiasm by some of the modernizers. ‘Constitutional patriotism transforms nations drunk on identity into patrias ennobled by civic sense, helping us to travel along the hygienic path that leads from tribe to polis’, exclaimed Vidal-Quadras (2002: 297). Uriarte (2003: 18) greeted the text as the first formulation of a democratic, political concept of nation, after more than twenty-five years of ‘silence and taboo’. However, the document is ambiguous about nation. Embedded in its text are two different paradigms of Spain. The first draws on postmodern and even postnational concepts. ‘The Spain of today is a country that sees its plurality as a source of richness; that does not base itself as a country on uniformity, but on enriching diversity.’ What enables the coexistence of these diverse identities is attachment to the Constitution and through it to ethical principles and values. In this way, the Constitution represents the ‘overcoming of historical conflicts of the Spaniards. Thanks to it, the ‘‘two Spains’’ became reconciled into one.’ With its eye on peripheral nationalisms, the document discards traditional sources of ethno-cultural identity as the basis of political life. ‘Constitutional patriotism is not based on the dominion or rights of

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history, ethnicity, race, community of beliefs and language, or any other inheritance, whether this is more or less real or imaginary. It promotes constitutional policies for the integration of all in a project positive and desirable for Spain.’ That integration extends to immigrants who wish to be citizens of ‘Constitutional Spain’. A very different model of Spain, however, lurks in the text and occasionally surfaces. This second paradigm contradicts the first. Underlying the document is an implicit restatement of the traditional historicist interpretation of the past. ‘Spain is a political nation forged over the course of a long historical trajectory … a plural nation with a non-ethnic but political, historical, and cultural identity, arising from its contribution to universal History and Culture … and from its historical project rooted in two worlds, the European and the American.’ The document thus also presupposes a common past and a common identity for all those born in Spain. Without an explicit critique of the traditional narrative of the past, it must be assumed that this historical and cultural identity has its roots in white, Castilian speaking, Christian, imperial Spain. The contradiction between the two paradigms highlights once again the reluctance of Spanish conservatives to confront the past in order to construct an inclusive model of nationhood. One of the historical purposes of constitutional patriotism was to achieve a supposedly rational closure of the past. In fact, as it is deployed in the document, it merely prolongs the failure to deal with the past and this failure makes it difficult for conservatives to offer an alternative to peripheral nationalist narratives. While they loyally accepted the concept of constitutional patriotism as enunciated in the PP document, the PP’s in-house intellectuals were unhappy with its dilution of red-blooded nationalism. Patriotism was denuded of any real meaning and turned into a mere synonym of citizenship or civilitas. Some of these intellectuals even implied that its designation of the Constitution as the embodiment of the nation derived from the need to suppress the pre-constitutional past out of a mix of guilt, political self-interest, and a misplaced desire to avoid stirring up old fratricidal antagonisms. The history of Spain was not so exceptional that it could not provide a positive model on which a sense of common identity, and beyond that of patriotism, could be built (González Quirós 2002; Quintanilla 2003). For her part, Uriarte argued that the document was too ‘Habermasian’; that is, its formulation of Spanish nationalism was timid. Patriotism, she argues, is in any case a form of nationalism. In contrast to the ethnic,


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linguistic, and historical sources of identity in the Basque Country, all that constitutionalists offer in the region is ‘the cold and distant Constitution’. What should be asserted instead throughout Spain is a new political nationalism based on a shared history, a common language, and a global project that will generate a cultural and emotional identification with the Spanish nation (Uriarte 2002a: 128–32; 2003: 249). Her argument is not without basis in that constitutions do not by themselves provide a sense of national identity, which by definition is particular rather than universal and contains a strong cultural dimension (Trías Vejarano, El País 15 August 2005). However, the common identity proposed by Uriarte as a means of overcoming national divisions, with its echoes of traditional Spanish nationalism, is hardly likely to be accepted by people with different narratives of the past. It could also be argued that the document’s appeal to constitutional patriotism was an assertion of the Spanish state and the concept of a united Spain as against federal or confederal demands. The adoption of the document did not therefore signal a policy drift towards the centre as much as a strategy to contain the growing claims of peripheral nationalisms. By calling for loyalty to the Constitution the document stressed its incontrovertibility, overlooking the politically and historically conditioned circumstances in which it was negotiated. While the authors recognize the transformation of Spain since the transition to democracy, they argue that to question the state model every twenty-five years would lead only to uncertainty and, as a consequence, would make Spain’s social, political, and economic development difficult (Piqué and San Gil 2002). Thus the PP’s constitutional patriotism is in effect constitutional nationalism in disguise. Patriotism and nationalism are in any case at different ends of the same spectrum of attachment to nation but they can also overlap (Brubaker 2004). Apart from its vague restatement of a traditional historical narrative and despite its obeisance to national diversity, the document’s nationalism lay in its purpose; that is, to deny any reform of the Constitution that would reflect changing identities and unfulfilled demands on the periphery. The diversity within the unity or pluralism-cohesion paradigm running throughout the conservative discourse of nation is especially problematic when it comes to dealing with the challenges of globalization. As we have seen, the strength of local or regional identities is viewed by many Spanish nationalists in terms of a long-standing Spanish problem, whereas it is increasingly part of a new dialectic between local and global common to many countries in Europe. Liberal or neo-liberal

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modernizers among Spanish nationalists accept the cultural diversity and the constantly shifting nature of identity that comes with globalization (Diego Villagrán 1999: 122–3). The biggest challenge posed by globalization, however, is integrating the increasing flow of immigrants into Spanish society without undermining its cohesion. It is of course a challenge common to most European countries, where diffuse fears of the consequences of globalization on identity and the welfare state are projected on to immigrants (Baubök 2001). The Piqué and San Gil document sees the civic contract of constitutional patriotism as a useful tool for the integration of immigrants. The text calls for respect for their different cultures, but in a typically ambiguous statement it also insists that immigrants should fully absorb the Spanish value system. However, it does not explain what these values are beyond those of citizenship. Aznar is more forthright. In the postscript to his eight years as President, he outlined an entirely traditionalist portrait of Spain as an early-modern power ‘with a universal vocation’ that spread its culture across the globe (it is difficult to avoid hearing in this phrase an echo of the Francoist ‘unidad de destino en lo universal’). It therefore had nothing to fear from globalization and immigration, he insisted (Aznar 2004: 253). The logic of his idea is that this traditional culture, that of Christian, imperial, Castilian-speaking Spain, has some continuity with the present. Clearly it would be more amenable to Spanish American than to African immigrants; hence his government’s efforts to encourage immigration (seen as vital to the economy) from across the Atlantic rather than from Africa. Alongside this implicit ethnic agenda, the PP sought to preserve the linguistic universality of Castilian Spanish, not just through Spanish American immigration but by trying to promote the language in schools in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, and Valencia (Muro and Quiroga 2005: 24). In any case, Spanish national identity has been suffused with implicit ethnic features since the nineteenth century. The perception of the Muslim or Moor as the ‘other’, the external enemy against whom Spaniards defined themselves, was a key part of the castizo discourse of popular Spanish nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. The idea of the Muslim as the ‘other’ has not disappeared in the new democracy. On the contrary, anthropological studies demonstrate its continued influence. It is constantly disseminated in schools, among friends, and in family circles and is an integral part of Spanish folklore, proverbs, arts, and architecture (Stallaert 1998: 168). The endurance of the concept of the Moor as the alien that defines what


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Spanishness is not, and therefore links the nation to Christianity, may come as a surprise in a society that has dramatically secularized its habits in the past thirty years.¹¹ Yet the power of this idea arises from its role as the foundational myth of the nation rather than from the number of Spaniards who still practise their Catholic faith. The idea that Spain was built by Christians against Muslims persists in popular consciousness as a myth defining the nation, regardless of the fact that nowadays fewer than 20 per cent of Spaniards are practising Christians. It is precisely in the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla that the ethnically exclusive features of Spanish nationality have gained prominence. In these two cities, where a high percentage of the population is Islamic, the expression of Spanishness as an ethno-cultural stereotype is related to Christianity rather than to a common citizenship, while Muslim identity is portrayed as Moroccan and, therefore, foreign (Núñez Seixas 2001c: 745). The cases of Ceuta and Melilla suggest that national identities in postmodern societies are not infinitely flexible and malleable. Spanish national identity has been reinvented as civic, constitutional, and democratic, but the latent ethnic components of Spanishness come to the fore when it is a matter of integrating nonChristians into the national community. These limitations are especially relevant in the case of Spain, for the number of foreigners resident in the country has risen from half a million in 1996 to almost four million a decade later, amounting to 8.7 per cent of its total population.¹² Even if globalizing forces and the impact of immigration are producing a series of overlapping national identities (e.g. Hispano-Muslims, Latin American Spaniards), the ethnic components of Spanish national identity remain an obstacle to integration. The Constitutional Patriotism document also addressed the fears of many conservatives that integration into Europe might lead to the loss of Spanish identity and the erosion of the sovereignty of the nation-state. These fears seemed to be corroborated by the proEuropean enthusiasm of many Spaniards. Wanting to be like Europeans had been self-destructive because it meant forgetting about being Spanish, according to Uriarte (2003: 35).¹³ Piqué and San Gil invited ¹¹ The process of secularization is discussed in Pérez-Díaz (1993) and Requena (2005: 315–39). ¹² For data on the number of immigrants in the period 1996–2005 see Garrido Medina (2005: 129). For 2006, see Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Avance del Padrón Municipal a 1 de enero de 2006 . ¹³ See also Fernandez de la Mora (2003).

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conservatives to accept that there was no choice but to pool decisionmaking across the EU states over a range of policies precisely because this ensured Spain’s position among nations. They argued that in the European context, the particular and the common, Spanishness and Europeanness, were perfectly compatible, just as diversity and unity were congruent within Spain. The implication of the discussion about the relationship between Spain and Europe is that any weakening of this unity at national level would weaken Spain internationally. One of the most enthusiastic Europeanists among the PP’s modernizers, VidalQuadras, went further. European identity is a means of overcoming archaic nationalisms, understood (as in all his texts) as those of Spain’s periphery. The European project is encouraging the development of a transnational and postnational identity based on universal civic values. This process in no way replaces or competes with national identities based on cohesive cultural, ethical, and historical values such as that of Spain (Vidal-Quadras 2003). Throughout this chapter, we have suggested a contradiction between the modernizing rhetoric employed by conservatives to define nation and identity and the subtext of traditional Spanish nationalism. This inconsistency can also be observed in patriotic liturgy. During Aznar’s premierships of 1996–2004 the pomp and circumstance of nationalist Spain was at its most overt since the transition to democracy, while the leadership was at the same time using the language of civic and inclusive patriotism. As soon as the PP came to power, the conservatives devoted many of their efforts to promoting Spanish nationalism through public symbols, ceremonies, and sport (and, as we have seen, to sponsoring or encouraging the propagation of traditional interpretations of the past) (Núñez Seixas 2005c: 135–8). In 1997, the PP issued a programme to develop ‘a national and defence culture’ in the hope of tackling the apparent lack of interest Spaniards were showing for the patria and for national security (ABC 19 February 1997). Yet the idea of turning the Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos into a centre to organize cooperation between universities, veterans’ associations, and the media met with little success. That very same year, the PP turned 12 October into the Day of the Armed Forces, mobilising 4,500 soldiers to march in the public parade, ten times more than in previous years. However, the attempt to popularize the armed forces by linking them to 12 October had unintended consequences. The militarization of the Day of Hispanidad made popular identification with 12 October even more difficult because of the negative image that many Spaniards had of the


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army (Aguilar and Humlebaek 2002: 154), although that image appears to have improved considerably over the past decade, as we have seen. Contemporary conservative nationalism is a broad church stretching from traditional centralists who wish to strengthen the state to liberal modernizers who welcome the regenerating dynamic of regionalism and globalization. Although the terms have changed, this polarity is similar to that of the intellectual and political elites of the early twentieth century. But many conservative politicians have moved between the two discourses according to the need to win or keep power or in response to the pressure from the regions. Thus while Aznar’s underlying ideology bears all the hallmarks of a traditional españolismo, he has projected a modernizing liberal image when it has been strategically useful to do so. The rhetoric about the dangers of Spain’s disintegration responds more to the PP’s strategy of confrontation with the PSOE government than any serious alarm about the future of the nation, however passionate its concern about national unity. Conservatives are seeking to mobilize residual Spanish nationalism against the efforts of the Zapatero government to reshape the architecture of the state. There are, however, increasing divisions within the PP about the extent of the reform of the regional statutes. In October 2006, the PP leader Mariano Rajoy signalled his support for the inclusion of the term ‘national reality’ in the draft of the new Andalusian statute, thus rejecting the hard-line position of the party’s parliamentary spokesman Eduardo Zaplana, who had already campaigned against the term in the Statute of his native Valencia (El País 12 November 2006). In other words, a growing rift was emerging in the conservative movement as a whole between a hard sector of españolistas who wished to block any further semantic drift from the ‘indivisible unity’ of the nation and more pragmatic conservatives at the centre seeking to build alliances with their own regional leaders and beyond them with potential parliamentary partners in a hung parliament. The PP offensive over the reform of the Catalan Statute was part of a broader campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the Socialist government in the hope of forcing an early election that would see the party’s return to power. The main driving force of this offensive was the conviction that the results of the general elections of 2004 were illegitimate as a consequence of the supposed manipulation by the socialist opposition of the aftermath of the Madrid bombing atrocity. The strategy the PP adopted went far beyond the terms and adversarial discourse of parliamentary opposition (Balfour 2007). Its main tool was

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the populist mobilization of the right in the streets and squares of Spain through the myriad organizations and media controlled by conservative opinion. Among these was the Catholic Church’s popular radio station COPE (Cadena de Ondas Populares de España), founded in 1960 out of the radio networks of parishes and religious orders and amalgamated in 1979 into the powerful company Radio Popular, which is controlled by the Church hierarchy of the Conferencia Episcopal Española. In a mission statement of 1991, the plenary meeting of Church leaders defined its purpose as establishing a ‘missionary presence’ in Spanish life characterized by a ‘civilized dialogue, avoiding unilateral passions and systematic criticism’ (http://www.cope.es/ideario). Yet by any standard, some of the COPE’s programmes, in particular the daily programme compered by the right-wing nationalist Federico Jiménez Losantos, are a highly partisan and provocative medium of radical conservative opinion. Indeed, the radio station has been embroiled in a number of disputes, arising out of its sustained campaign against Catalanism and its alleged fixing of audience ratings, leading to expulsion in 2006 from the broadcasting standards organization in Spain, the Asociación para la Investigación de Medios de Comunicación or AIMC, to which it was readmitted eventually after paying the costs of the AIMC’s court case. Alongside their propagation of a highly traditional view of Spanish identity as essentially Catholic, some members of the Church hierarchy have used the powerful tools of dissemination at their disposal to deepen popular apprehension about a supposed policy drift of the Zapatero government. Thus in a much publicized speech in October 2005, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Madrid expressed his fears for the unity of Spain, the weakening of marriage, family life, and moral values, and the intensification of problems relating to the integration of immigrants (Rouco Varela 2005). In addition to the conservative party and the Church, a range of institutions and movements funded by powerful economic interests, and radio and TV channels, digital and print newspapers and journals have joined in the campaign. Nevertheless this was a largely informal coalition of an assortment of conservative constituencies, from traditionalists to modernizers, who have very different ideas about ethics, morality, and state architecture. The campaign led by the PP against the Zapatero government also carried through into the institutions of the state because many of the top appointments in the judiciary, the military, the security services, and central public administration had been made by the PP on partisan


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grounds, following an old tradition in Spain (a practice traditional in Southern Europe as a whole). That is, public administration had not ceased to be politicized in the new democracy under both socialist and conservative governments, although the partisan use of these appointees was particularly acute in the PP’s endeavour in 2005 and 2006 to question the investigations of the 11 March bombings (e.g. El País 5 October 2006). The three prongs of the campaign were morality, terrorism, and nation. Huge demonstrations were held throughout Spain to protest against the legalization of gay marriage, in which leading members of the Church were prominent. In turn, the peace process in the Basque Country was under constant fire from the conservatives, despite their formal backing for the initiative, on the unproven grounds that concessions to the terrorists were being negotiated secretly. With the backing of the Association of Victims of Terrorism, the PP was able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in protest at the way the government was handling the issue. The violent and unilateral rupture of the peace process by ETA on 30 December 2006 revitalized the PP’s campaign. Mass demonstrations against ETA backed or organized by the party in February and March 2007 turned into protests against the government. The marches were bedecked with national flags and the national anthem was repeatedly sung. This use of constitutional symbols led to confrontation with the socialists who accused the PP of attempting to monopolize them. According to the PSOE spokesperson in the Congress, the PP was seeking to appropriate the national anthem and flag, despite the fact that a decree by the Aznar government in 1997 had confined the use of both to official ceremonies and representation in sports (El Mundo 5 February 2007). In its earlier campaign over the Catalan Statute, on the other hand, the PP’s offensive considerably eroded the lead Zapatero had been enjoying in the opinion polls. The party was thus appealing for once to voters in the centre who were persuaded of the allegedly disintegrative effects on Spain of the further devolution envisaged by the Catalan Statute in both its original text and that negotiated by the government and the conservative nationalist opposition in Catalonia, the CiU. The PP’s campaign to collect signatures in an effort to force the holding of a popular referendum over the Statute throughout Spain met with considerable support, although according to Article 87.3 of the Constitution, such initiatives are not valid when, as in the case of regional statutes, they refer to organic laws of state (El País 25

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January 2006). The polarization over the Catalan Statute threw up yet another right-wing organization in early 2006, the Fundación para la Defensa de la Nación Española, whose members included well known intellectuals, judges, military figures, and PP deputies. At the same time, it gave rise to tensions within the Church between clergy in the Basque Country and Catalonia and the right-wing cardinals and archbishops in the centre. The issue had ceased for a short while to be a major focus of public concern once the revised Statute had finally come into effect after overcoming all the necessary democratic hurdles. However, the PP sought ex post facto to use its majority among the magistrates of the Constitutional Tribunal (most of whom had been appointed during the Aznar administration) to challenge the constitutionality of the Statute, and as a first step managed by one vote to block the appointment of a magistrate who was likely to vote in favour of the Statute, an unprecedented move with little basis in law that they had failed to achieve earlier (Pradera, El País 11 February 2007). However, this polarization had its origins in the rupture by the newly elected Aznar government of 2000 of its alliance with moderate peripheral nationalism, which had given it power in the first place. The Spanish nationalist policies that Aznar carried out during his four subsequent years in power further alienated the support of CiU. As we have seen, national parties in power without an absolute majority usually have to rely on the parliamentary support of regional parties. The Zapatero government inherited the problem of the polarization between centre and periphery bequeathed by the PP, while it had to bank on the support of peripheral nationalist parties to construct a majority parliamentary alliance. The irony is that Zapatero had to rely on the ‘sacralizers’ (sacralizadores) of peripheral nationalism in order to ‘desacralize’ Spanish nationalism (Ramoneda, El País 23 January 2006). Another issue linked to nation that inflamed conservative opinion was the initiatives of left-wing parties, encouraged by grass-roots pressure all over the country, to recognize finally at institutional level the illegality of the military rebellion of 1936 and the Franco Dictatorship, and honour the memory of those who suffered as a result. In response to the declaration of 2006 as the Year of Historical Memory, the first step towards a law of the same name, the PP campaigned for a Year of Concord dedicated to the 1978 Constitution. We have seen how in the early stages of democracy it had suited both the conservatives


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and the socialists to keep silent about the recent past. During the Zapatero government, the left tried to coordinate its efforts to promote the historical memory of the Second Republic, the Civil War, and the Franco Dictatorship, while the PP was still intent on its strategy of denial. Nowhere was this attitude more overt than in the display of symbols. For instance, when the socialist and post-communist members of the Madrid city council demanded that the names of the 360 streets dedicated to Francoist leaders should be changed and that other fascist symbols be removed from the capital, the PP-dominated local council dismissed the motion, arguing that the madrileños were not worried about things that happened seventy years ago (El Mundo 29 September 2006). By making the Constitution the only point of reference in the recent past, conservatives were evading their generational and political roots in the Dictatorship. As a PP spokesman stated, the party ‘has no history besides the Constitution and democracy’ (quoted in Pradera, El País 28 June 2006). Despite their rhetorical commitment not to use history as a political weapon, conservatives since the mid-1990s have been busy pushing a recycled version of the Francoist narrative, whereby the cause of the military rebellion lay in the failure of the Republic to curb the left-wing uprising of 1934. This implicit rationalization of the Nationalist uprising is accompanied by a new relativism in which the Civil War is portrayed as a collective error, fuelled by a resurgence of the fratricidal tendencies of Spaniards; that is, the responsibility for the killings and cruelty is shared equally between right and left. Franco is also given a whitewash and is even credited with paving the way for the new democracy (e.g. Moa 1999, 2001a, b). The huge publicity given by the right-wing media to these accounts legitimizing the military rebellion and the dictatorship that followed helped to sell hundreds and thousands of copies. The support of conservatives for this new pseudo-revisionism is evidence enough of a deep flaw running through contemporary conservatism that has inhibited its assimilation of the norms of democracy and the internalization of its own centrist discourse (Balfour 2007). What the vast majority of conservative nationalists have in common, whether politicians, churchmen, intellectuals, businessmen, or journalists, is a largely unreconstructed view of Spain’s history. What they are defending with such passion and anguish amounts to a sort of internal irredentism, an imagined historic homeland that is being torn asunder

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by invented identities. Confronting the past is a way of understanding the present. Conservative nationalists are diminished by their failure to do so, even on their own terms. As one intellectual, whose book on patriotism was praised by the PP’s in-house journal, states, ‘history … is an especially important means of contributing to the achievement of what we want to be … the past is … a way of telling us what and who we are, who we intend to be’ (González Quirós 2002: 11).

6 Houses of many Nations: Identities in Catalonia and the Basque Country The debate over national identity in Spain is especially polemical in those regions where alternative nationalisms are widely supported. In Catalonia and the Basque Country, politics, culture, and education are dominated by the national question.¹ Regional nationalists have been in power in both communities since the restoration of democracy. For over twenty-five years, they have implemented policies of mass nationalization to foster Catalan and Basque identities. Their efforts have coincided with those of the state, which, despite the ambiguities of its discourse, has been promoting a new Spanish identity linked to democracy, modernization, and decentralization. What is the balance sheet of these campaigns to nationalize the citizens of Catalonia and the Basque Country? National divisions in these two regions are not the outcome of the devolutionary process of the late 1970s. In fact, the fragmentation of identity in Catalonia and the Basque provinces can be traced back to the emergence of Catalan and Basque nationalism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. As we saw in previous chapters, Catalanism was born in the 1880s as a regionalist movement imbued with a plural set of political ideas, from traditionalism to progressive republicanism, and supported by the elites, including broad sections of the bourgeoisie. Catalanism defined Spain as a state and Catalonia as a nation by virtue of its linguistic and historic distinctiveness (Bases de Manresa 1892). Catalan identity was constructed in opposition to Castile, a region considered backward, oppressive, and responsible for hampering the progress of Catalonia. Yet, far from promoting secession, ¹ We leave outside our scope of analysis the case of Galicia. In this region, Galician nationalists have been unable to obtain the same level of social support as their Catalan and Basque counterparts. Galician nationalists have been in opposition for most of the democratic era, only gaining access to regional power as the minor partner of a coalition government with the socialists in 2005.

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Catalanism advocated political autonomy while demanding Spanish protection of Catalan industry from foreign competition at the same time. From the turn of the twentieth century, the movement was controlled by the regional elites who founded the Lliga Regionalista in 1901. This was a conservative alliance led by the industrialist Francesc Cambó, who proposed a programme of modernization for Spain in which industrialized Catalonia would be the model for the rest of Spain to follow (Balfour 1996: 114). Cambó’s programme had little impact elsewhere in Spain but the Lliga became the dominant force in the Catalanist movement and Catalan politics until 1923. Basque nationalism, on the contrary, emerged in Bilbao in the 1890s as a reaction against modernization. The rapid process of industrialization and urbanization led to the creation of a wealthy upper bourgeoisie. It also sucked in an unprecedented flow of labour migrants into the province of Vizcaya. Artisans, small businessmen, and the lower middle classes felt squeezed between big business and the mass of new industrial workers, as industrialization threatened downward mobility. In response some identified with the rhetoric of Sabino Arana, the founder of the PNV. Arana’s world was ultra-Catholic and traditionalist, imbued with a racism whose main target was the immigrants. He idealized the past, painting traditional Basque society as a racially pure, largely rural community. He dreamt up the Basque flag and the Basque anthem and strove to unify the different dialects of the Basque language. He also coined the term Euzkadi to denote an imagined Basque homeland; that is, the provinces of Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, Álava, Navarra, and the three French Basque territories. Unlike Catalanism, Basque nationalism sought independence from Spain from the beginning. Arana turned the fueros, the medieval residue of a fragmented kingdom, into the ‘national laws’ of a would-be nation. He argued that when the Restoration system modified the fueros after the Third Carlist War of 1872–6 (an act he defined as ‘abolition’) the government broke its pact with the Basques and hence they should no longer be linked to Spain. Arana defined the Basque nation in terms of language, religion, political tradition, and above all race. Thus the racially pure, profoundly Catholic Basque community should not mix with foreigners, in keeping with ‘ancient traditions’. In Basque nationalist mythology, the ‘other’ was the Spaniard, who represented all the evils of modern society. Spaniards were a blasphemous bunch, sinful and, even worse, liberal. As for the immigrant workers in Vizcaya, they were the worst because they had embraced socialism (Corcuera Atienza 2001; Elorza 2001).


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The right-wing overtones of the nationalist discourse attracted some tradesmen and bureaucrats and even a section of the upper bourgeoisie controlled by the shipping magnate Ramón de la Sota, who set out to modernize the PNV in the late 1890s. The party created sections for youth, women, and sports, together with a trade union meant exclusively for Basque workers, in order to reach out to society and promote Basqueness. However, the PNV made very slow progress in electoral terms with the exception of Vizcaya, where the party gained the majority of the seats in the provincial government (Diputación) in 1917. Before the Second Republic, at least, the impact of Basque nationalism in the other three provinces was negligible. Moreover, tensions between the purist aranista wing of the PNV and the pragmatic trend controlled by de la Sota ended in the split of the party in 1921. Before the invention of Catalonia and Euskadi as nations, Spanish national identities, where they were felt at all, had remained unchallenged. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, expressions of Spanishness were combined with manifestations of attachment to provinces and regions all around the country. For instance, the identification of Basque Carlists during the Third Carlist War with the Basque region as the land of ancient tradition and devout Catholicism was perfectly compatible with supreme loyalty to the Spanish nation and it was expressed in a strongly Spanish nationalist discourse (Molina 2005: 44, 129–35).² In Catalonia, mid nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals also showed a profound attachment to Barcelona and its cultural and political peculiarities, but they never doubted that Spain was their nation, their ‘greater fatherland’ or patria grande (Fradera, 2003). This is the phenomenon of ‘dual patriotism’, by which national identity developed alongside and was compatible with provincial and regional identities.³ Evidence that this was the case serves to debunk the primordialist and rather teleological idea that attachment to region or province was an early manifestation of national identity in the Basque Country and Catalonia (Sánchez Prieto 1999). The emergence of Catalan and Basque nationalisms changed everything. These movements created national identities that were not only alternative but, especially in the Basque case, antagonistic to ² A different issue, of course, was that the Carlists would define the Spanish nation in opposite terms to those of the liberal canon. ³ Dual patriotism was common to all of Spain. For the Valencian case see, for example, Segarra i Estarelles (2001) and Archilés and Martí (2001).

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the various Spanish national identities. It can be argued that national identity is assimilated via three combined elements, namely myths (developed at a discursive level), rituals (the practical expression of that identity), and symbols (the material representation of the nation). These three elements are part of the national imaginary; that is, the group of ideas, values, stereotypes, representation, and attitudes that moulds the identity of a community at a particular historical conjuncture (Molina 2005: 58). At the turn of the twentieth century Catalan and Basque nationalisms created discourses, rituals, and symbols that shaped a national imaginary in direct competition with Spanish national identities. Unsurprisingly, this led to confrontation between nationalisms. At times the clashes were physical. Violence erupted among españolistas and regional nationalists in Bilbao and especially Barcelona during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, a sort of ‘national fracture’ opened up in Catalonia and the Basque Country at a time when Spanish nationalisms were undergoing a profound transformation in response to the rise of regional nationalism. In Barcelona a specifically antiCatalanist Spanish populism emerged under the leadership of Alejandro Lerroux. In addition, conservative and liberal coalitions were set up in the Catalan capital and in Bilbao to combat regional nationalism at the ballot box. In the province of Vizcaya, the socialist immigrants were beginning to mobilize against the Basque nationalists and a group of well known journalists (Salaverría, Maeztu, Sánchez Mazas) emerged as the self-proclaimed vanguard of neo-conservative Spanish patriotism. As we saw in Chapter 2, the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera had the unintended effect of strengthening regional nationalisms. In 1931, the leftist Catalan nationalist ERC became the hegemonic party in Catalonia even while conservative Catalanism remained an important force. Moreover, the socialists and the Republicans turned towards Catalanism, or at least towards an acceptance of Catalan autonomy and a decentralized Spain. In 1932, Catalonia was granted a statute of autonomy (approved by plebiscite in the four Catalan provinces the previous year) and soon the regional government, the Generalitat, launched policies of the ‘Catalanization’ of society. They included an educational reform to foster education in Catalan, the promotion of Catalan culture, and a specifically Catalanist interpretation of the history of the region. These efforts undoubtedly helped to consolidate the idea of Catalonia as a nation within the Spanish republic (Boyd 1997: 223–5).


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The process of nation-building faced greater obstacles in the Basque Country. The PNV became the largest political party in Euskadi in the 1930s but it had to contend with the major presence of socialist and rightist forces. Thus only PNV supporters adopted Basque national symbols, such as the anthem, the flag, and the designation of Euzkadi, while socialists, Republicans, and Carlists remained loyal to their own (Spanish) national representations. The day of the fatherland, Aberri Eguna, was anathema for non-nationalist Basques and even today is celebrated only by ‘patriotic’ Basques. The picture that emerges during the years of the Second Republic is that of an ‘invertebrate Euskadi’, riven by internal conflicts among Basques (Granja 2006: 308–16). These divisions explain the problems Basque nationalists had in their attempt to obtain a statute of autonomy. In 1932, the PNV failed to secure the support of the Carlists and began to gravitate towards the left. In 1933 the statute was passed in a referendum in the Basque provinces (though not in Navarra), but the Cortes in Madrid rejected it. After the victory of the Popular Front in February 1936, the PNV reached an agreement with its traditional enemy, the PSOE, to pass the text in the Spanish parliament. However, the statute was not approved until October 1936, once the Civil War had broken out and Álava and Guipúzcoa were in the hands of the rebels. The experience of the Second Republic and the Civil War, although different in Catalonia from the Basque Country, formed the basis for the expansion of regional nationalisms during the transition to democracy. As we saw in Chapter 2, Catalan and Basque nationalisms were identified with the anti-Francoist struggle after 1939 and gained domestic and international respectability as pro-democratic forces. To construct their legitimacy regional nationalists equated their movements with anti-fascism and insisted on their staunch loyalty to the cause of the Republic during the Civil War, even though the historical record suggests that things were more complex. This new regional nationalist discourse ignored the fact that Cambó and the cadres of the Lliga Regionalista supported the rebels during the Civil War, while part of the rank and file of the PNV in Álava, Guipúzcoa, and Navarra joined the Francoist forces in July 1936 (Gabriel 2006: 284; Granja 2006: 324–5). The negotiations of the PNV-dominated Basque autonomous government with the Italian fascists, first to surrender Bilbao and, once the city had fallen, to surrender PNV battalions in Santoña, can hardly be described as loyal to the Republic, but these events have been constantly overlooked in the nationalist discourse (Pablo and Mees

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2005: 183–91). Yet the narratives that presented regional nationalisms as co-substantial with democracy dominated popular consciousness in Catalonia and the Basque Country during the transition to democracy and, in many respects, still do today. As with all nationalist narratives, the social effectiveness of a discourse depends not on its historical veracity but on its capacity to assert itself as true. The perpetuation of Catalanist and Basque nationalist identities had been profoundly undermined by the fierce repression of the Francoist regime against all outward displays of identities alternative to the stateimposed National-Catholicism. The regime had sought to erase Catalan and Euskera from all spheres of public life. The Franco dictatorship controlled the public mechanisms of social diffusion in the 1940s and 1950s: the educational system, the mass media, and political association. This gave National-Catholicism the monopoly of public discourse, rituals, and symbols. However, Catalan and Basque nationalist identities had remained alive in the quiet spaces of private life. They found expression in those activities and relationships that the Francoist authorities could not easily scrutinize. The family, groups of friends, the Church, and cultural associations of hiking and dancing provided private channels for maintaining Catalan and Basque nationalist discourse and symbols, as well as their languages, among important sectors of the population. This network facilitated the creation of a nationalist subculture of political opposition and, crucially, the reproduction of Catalan and Basque nationalist consciousness among the younger generations (Johnston 1991; Pérez-Agote 2006: 80–98). The modernization of Spanish society in the 1960s and 1970s had a profound effect on regional nationalisms. We saw in Chapter 2 how the Francoist project to liberalize the economy set in motion an accelerated process of industrialization, which in turn led to fresh waves of internal migration towards Catalonia and the Basque Country. In this new, dynamic Spain the regime’s grip over society was loosened. The effect of this decline in the authority of the state was enhanced by the relaxation of censorship, easing the transmission of regional nationalist discourses and symbolisms, at least into semi-public spheres. Some private schools began teaching in Euskera and the number of books published in Catalan and Basque rose dramatically in the last years of Francoism. Popular music sung in the vernacular languages also became a key means to transmit alternative national identities to the official one, especially in Catalonia. Thus Basque and Catalan nationalisms grew rapidly through cultural channels. These were new nationalisms for a new society.


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In Catalonia Jordi Pujol led a renovated conservative nationalism grounded in Christian democratic principles. His famous phrase ‘fer pais’ (to make the country) encapsulated his nationalist strategy. The Pujolista nation-building project sought the modernization of Catalan economy, the democratization of Spain, and the defence of the Catalan culture at the same time. It soon won the backing of the bourgeoisie, the Church, and the banking elites (Dowling 2005: 109). On the left, the Catalan Communist party (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, PSUC) also added the defence of Catalan culture to its democratic programme, including the right of self-determination. Key in both conservative and leftist strategies was the idea that Castilian-speaking immigrants could and should be integrated into the Catalanist movement, a task at which the PSUC proved remarkably successful during the last years of Francoism, at least among its members and numerous adherents (Balfour 1989). As in the 1930s, leftists and Catalanists of all political tendencies remained united when it came to the demand for devolution. In 1971, Pujol’s movement, Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya, and the PSUC, the PSOE, and the Spanish Communist party PCE joined forces to form the Assemblea de Catalunya, a clandestine organization that aimed to bring democracy and autonomy to the region (Guibernau 2004: 65–9). Basque nationalists, on the other hand, failed to create a united front. ETA gained wide popular support in the early 1970s for its violent struggle against Francoism but was unable to evolve as an organization beyond its purely military strategy. Those militants who sought a more political strategy always ended up breaking away from the core to form a new organization (the most important of which was ETA político-militar, ETA (pm)). The divisions in the nationalist movement deepened during the transition. In 1975, the PNV backed the Plataforma Democrática, the anti-Francoist movement promoted by the PSOE, but the core ETA, renamed ETA military (m), rejected any joint action with Spanish parties. Negotiations in 1977 between the different nationalist organizations to form a ‘national front’ in the forthcoming elections ended in failure. ETA (m) decided to boycott the elections, while the PNV and ETA (pm), in the shape of Euskadiko Ezkerra, ran different electoral lists. The popularity of ETA forced the PNV to update its programme. It abandoned the old confessional and racial definition of Euskadi and took on to its nationalist programme the demand for democracy and the integration of immigrants into Basque society. Moreover, the PNV tried to build an organization that would reach to

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all activities of the community. Just as it did at the beginning of the century, the PNV created sport, youth, and cultural associations, trade unions, and party-based media in order to spread its influence across Basque society (Pablo and Mees 2005: 369–70). The strategy paid off. By 1980 the PNV had become the main party in the Basque Country. The Spanish left also played a key role in the 1970s in promoting regional nationalism. As we argued in Chapter 4, the PSOE and the PCE incorporated many of the dominant assumptions of Catalan and Basque nationalisms. At the beginning of the transition, they went as far as to advocate the right of self-determination for the Spanish regions. This ‘regional nationalist turn’ of the Spanish left reinforced the idea that decentralization was part of the democratic struggle and it paved the way for the adoption of joint programmes seeking democracy, amnesty, and devolution, not only in Catalonia and the Basque Country, but also in other territories with nationalist and regionalist movements such as Galicia and Valencia. The anti-Francoist mobilization was thus crucial in propagating regional nationalist discourses, symbols, and rituals and fostering Catalan and Basque national identities in the new democracy. In the first democratic elections in June 1977, the nationalist parties received 26.9 per cent of the votes in Catalonia and 39.3 per cent in the Basque Country. Three years later, the polls gave 36.6 per cent of the votes to the Catalan nationalists and 65.2 per cent to the Basque nationalists in the regional elections. The formation of the Autonomous Communities transformed and accelerated the process of nation-building in Euskadi and Catalonia. From a clandestine operation in the 1940s and 1950s it became part of the anti-Francoist mobilization in the 1970s and finally turned into an institutionalized reproduction of nationalist consciousness through the official agencies of the new communities. As part of their political agenda, the Catalan and Basque governments used regional institutions at their disposal to transmit alternative national identities to those of Spain. Devolution has also endowed the Catalan and Basque governments with a good deal of symbolic power, including the promotion of the vernacular languages and the national anthems and flags. Thus since the early 1980s, regional television and radio stations, schools, and cultural institutions funded by the autonomous governments have been used to create imagined national communities among Basques and Catalans (Flynn 2001: 711). From the start, the spread of cultural phenomena such as vernacular languages was at the top of the Catalan and Basque governments’ agenda


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to promote regional (or, as they would argue, national) identity. But a form of ‘banal regional nationalism’ has also played an important role in strengthening the identification of citizens with their autonomous communities. Over the years, interaction with the political structures and administration of the region has created bonds or at least ties with the community. Taking part in regional elections, being members of regional societies, paying regional taxes, and receiving regional services all increase a sense of belonging to the community (Martínez-Herrera 2002: 429). This process of nationalization has been remarkably successful in Catalonia. The Pujol government of 1980–2003 popularized the triad Pujol–CiU–Catalonia, which equated any attack on the Catalan president, or his coalition, with an offence against Catalonia itself. CiU also developed a populist dimension when it claimed that Catalans are economically ‘exploited’ by Madrid (shorthand for the Spanish government). This concept of the ‘financial plunder’ of Catalonia was also popularized by ERC, which launched a campaign in the 1990s under the slogan ‘Spain is robbing us’, an idea that resonated strongly with the wider Catalan public (Dowling 2005: 111–12). More importantly, all political parties in the autonomous community, with the exception of PP, share a similar conception of the national character of Catalonia. Despite serious political differences, CiU, PSC, ERC, and ICV consider Catalonia a nation because of language, history, and culture.⁴ This consensus means that Catalanism is the hegemonic discourse in Catalan politics and has been so since the transition to democracy. According to this discourse, the Catalan language is the main expression of Catalonia’s national character and should therefore be promoted at all levels in society. Unsurprisingly, the Pujol government’s polices of linguistic ‘Catalanization’ of the autonomous community found wide support among the Catalan parties. In 1983 and again in 1998, legislation was passed strengthening the use of Catalan in both the public and the private spheres. Catalan was prioritized over Spanish in the educational and judicial systems, public administration, and private businesses. Behind this legislation to expand the use of Catalan language was an attempt to nationalize Castilian-speaking sectors of the population who did not feel particularly Catalan. The programme of assimilation worked. Nowadays, 84.7 per cent of Catalans declare ⁴ This is not to say that all political parties understand the idea of Catalonia as a nation in the same way. The different views on Catalonia, Catalan identity, and Spain of CiU, ERC, ICV, and PSC are summarized in Guibernau (2004: 85–151).

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they can speak the vernacular and 9.6 per cent have changed from a predominant use of Spanish to a dominant use of Catalan in the past ten years (Generalitat 2004; Vila et al. 2005). The growth of Catalan speakers, especially among the sons and daughters of Castilian-speaking immigrants, has been an important factor in the considerable decrease in the number of Catalan citizens who identify solely with Spain. In 1979, almost 34 per cent of the Catalans considered themselves exclusively Spanish. In 1996 this figure had dropped to 11.5 per cent and by 2005 it had sunk to its lowest level of 7.5 per cent (Beramendi and Maíz 2003: 214; Sondeig d’opinió, ICPS 2006: 93). More importantly, the teaching of Catalan to immigrants and their offspring has eased language differentiations and enabled their assimilation into a Catalan identity within a generation (Keating 1996: 131–2). Apart from nationalizing immigrants, these cultural and educational policies have their own internal dynamics. The Generalitat’s institutionalization of Catalan identity provided new employment opportunities for cultural elites. The Generalitat created a form of clientelism controlled by CiU in which ‘organic’ intellectuals were paid with public regional funds to promote an internally homogeneous Catalan national identity (Dowling 2005: 111). This was especially true of the educational system. Education continued to play a key role in defining the national community, and once the teaching system was transferred to the autonomous government in the 1980s the Generalitat decided to Catalanize schools and turned Catalan into the predominant language at primary, secondary, and university levels. The history curriculum was also drastically altered. From the National-Catholic orthodoxy of late Francoism, it moved to the promotion of Catalan national identity. Some of the history textbooks used in Catalan schools nowadays tend to favour providential explanations of history and the Catalan nation.⁵ Moreover, reprints of books on the history of Catalonia written by early twentieth-century nationalists, such as Ferran Soldevilla’s Resum d’história dels països catalans and Rovira i Virgili’s Història de Catalunya, have become very popular and, crucially for the transmission of the patriotic discourse, secondary education teachers have used these romantic nationalist works as textbooks (Rivière 2000: 213–14). The spread of ⁵ This sharply contrasts with the prestigious Catalan historiography that has invigorated academic research in Spain since the 1960s. At university level, debates among Catalan historians like Borja de Riquer, Enric Ucelay da Cal, Jordi Canal, and Pere Gabriel demonstrated a rigorously critical approach and a good deal of reflection on historical methodology and theory in the 1980s and 1990s (Rivière 2000: 214).


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Catalan across the public arena as promoted by the Generalitat can be also measured in quantitative terms. In 1982, 2,175 books were published in Catalan. By 2002, after two decades of funding by regional government, the number of publications in Catalan had risen to 7,300, an increase of 236 per cent. These figures are all the more relevant when we consider that the number of books published in Spanish during the same period rose by 98 per cent (Blanco Valdés 2005: 161). The Generalitat’s mass media are the most influential agencies of nationalization. The Catalan government controls five TV channels, tens of radio stations, and a number of publishing houses and magazines. In a world in which national identity is increasingly transmitted through the mass media, the Catalan government devoted almost 270 million euros of its budget to TV and radio broadcasting in 2006.⁶ It also prioritizes programmes on Catalan history and targets young audiences with a huge investment in cartoons and other children’s programmes.⁷ The impact of Catalan TV can hardly be underestimated. True, regional TV stations have to compete with supra-state and state-level broadcasters. Yet recent research has shown that territories like Scotland and Catalonia have sufficiently distinctive public spheres to challenge the communicative supremacy of the existing states (Kiely et al. 2006: 474). In other words, regional TV can be more effective in transmitting Catalan national identity than state TV in transmitting Spanish identity in Catalonia. Since the early 1990s, external factors also propelled the Catalanization of society. First, the fall of the Berlin Wall led many on the left to abandon their communism and move towards radical nationalism. As with many ex-communists in Eastern Europe, nationalism with its set of dogmas and absolute truths appealed to many in Catalonia after the collapse of the USSR as a source of political identity.⁸ This conversion to the nationalist faith, to what the socialist minister Ernest Lluch called ‘Pujolism-Leninism’, was particularly significant among historians (Jordi Canal, 2006: 7). Second, nationalism has re-emerged with a vengeance in the global era. Contrary to the forecast of some intellectuals, globalization has in fact reinforced national, regional, and local identities. In a world that increasingly defies conceptualization, ⁶ See . ⁷ One of the Generalitat’s channels, K3, is exclusively devoted to children’s programmes. ⁸ For the nationalizing effects of the fall of communism on communist elites in Yugoslavia, the Baltic republics, and Russia see Brubaker (1996).

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social actors try to reduce it to their own scale and individuals tend to anchor themselves in their immediate environment, relying on historical memory to enhance a sense of community (Guibernau 2001: 246–68; Mees 2003: 183). Catalan nationalists see the proliferation and increasing power of international, multinational, and transnational institutions as a potential threat to the integrity of the national community. They argue that nations without states are not sufficiently represented in international institutions, and react by seeking to generate a stronger common consciousness among Catalans. Accordingly, in a global society in which supranational institutions seem all too detached from citizens and cannot easily generate identities, the nation, as a community that transcends the life of the individual, fosters the emergence of solidarity among its members (Keating 2000: 39–41; Guibernau 2004: 160–1). The hegemony of the Catalanist discourse at the political level, the Generalitat’s control of education and the mass media, and the institutionalization of the Catalan culture and language have all helped to consolidate a series of myths, symbols, and rituals widely accepted in Catalan society. The largely successful nationalization of Catalan society rests on a historical narrative that emphasizes the national character of Catalonia separately from that of Spain. The alleged Carlist precedents of Catalan nationalism, the portrait of the Spanish civil wars of 1701–14 and 1936–9 as wars against Catalonia, and the national character given to the Reapers’ (or Segadors) War of 1640–52 and the Napoleonic sieges of Gerona in 1808 and 1809 have all been challenged by recent historiography, but they remain the most popular myths informing the lieux de mémoire of many Catalans today (Canal 2006: 8–9). The significance of this shared historical memory goes beyond the construction of the image of ‘the other’ (i.e. Spain) and the generation of a shared national identity. It is also used to back political demands for further self-government. The project of a new statute of Catalonia passed by the Catalan parliament in September 2005 stated that the Catalan people had being fighting for the restoration of Catalonia’s selfgovernment since 1714. The new statute proclaimed itself the depositary of the memory of all those who fought and died for ‘Catalonia’s national rights’ and linked ‘the right of Catalan citizens freely to determine their future as a people’ to the ‘national affirmation historically represented by the Generalitat up to the eighteenth century’ (Parlement de Catalunya 2005: 1–2). The nationalization of the Basque Country since the implementation of the statute of autonomy has also been a success story. The PNV


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has been governing Euskadi with different coalition partners since 1980 and has used regional institutions to promote nation-building from above. As in Catalonia, the Basque government has gone to great lengths to create its own mass media. In the 1980s it set up two television channels (one broadcasting in Euskera and the other in Spanish) and various regional and local radio stations. Recently, it passed legislation to create sixty new local TV channels that will devote at least 15 per cent of their broadcasting time to the promotion of Basque culture (Gara 4 October 2006). The regional government also funds a broad network of public and private associations to promote Basque culture, sports, and language. As part of the process of devolution, the Basques were able to create their own Supreme Court of Justice and the Basque government enjoys an unprecedented range of powers over public order, tax collection, local councils, education, the health system, and labour relations. As in all other autonomous communities in Spain, the consolidation of the regional agencies led to the establishment of a political class and a large number of public regional officers whose jobs depended on expanding, or at least maintaining, the recently created institutions (Blanco Valdés 2005: 74). The Basque government has devoted many of its funds to the promotion of Euskera. The language is considered as the essence of the Basque nation and the key factor of differentiation vis-à-vis Spaniards. Yet despite the rise in the number of Basque speakers in the past twentyfive years, Spanish is by far the most important language in Euskadi, where only 33 per cent of the population has a proficient command of Euskera (Gara 6 October 2006). The key to the success in the process of nationalization is thus not so much the expansion of Euskera but the elaboration and propagation of a nationalist narrative that has reached down to many sectors of Basque society. For a generation now, young people in Euskadi have been educated in schools that tend to emphasize the particularities of the Basques. As the Basque Minister for Educational Innovation put it, the goal was to build a school system that could inculcate a strong Basque identity in the children (El País 13 March 2006). History textbooks in Euskadi are unique in Spain, for they employ racial arguments to explain the origin of the national community. According to some, the Basque ethnie shares physical characteristics with the inhabitants of the territory in the Paleolithic period (e.g. Davant Iratzabal 1980: 18; Ugalde 1981: vol 1, 58–60). Moreover, Basques are portrayed as the original inhabitants of Europe, with their own consciousness of being a different people

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throughout the centuries. This mythology also includes the idea that the Basques were never deeply influenced by the different conquerors of the region. According to this legendary interpretation of the past, Celts, Iberians, Romans, Visigoths, and Muslims did not mix with the autochthonous tribes of the area.⁹ As a self-confirmed prophecy, this supposed ethnic continuity and cultural resistance against the invader would ultimately explain why Euskera, a language whose origin is unknown, has remained alive. Ethnic purity and racial continuity are the key elements informing this nationalist discourse at Basque schools, despite the fact that anthropologists and modern genetics debunked such racial arguments a long time ago (Rivière 2000: 165–9). Irredentism is another common feature in Basque history textbooks. The Basque homeland has been defined as Euskal Herria, and includes Navarra and the French territories of Labourd, Basse Navarre, and Soule as well as the three Basque provinces, according to Sabino Arana’s postulates. The eleventh-century Kingdom of Navarra, which roughly covered the same territory as present day Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, Álava, Navarra, and the three territories beyond the Pyrenees (together with some other lands in Castile and Aragon), is claimed as the political precedent of an independent Euskal Herria before Spanish and French occupiers ‘conquered’ and divided the land (Rivière 2000: 183). This somewhat peculiar interpretation of the past reinforces the reading of Basque history as a history of continuous ‘national’ defeats, from the Romans to the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, including the Carlist Wars. The message transmitted to students is that the Basque people have being fighting to restore their independence and liberties since time immemorial and that the current composition of the Basque Autonomous Community (including Guipúzcoa, Biscay, and Álava) represents a ‘mutilation’ of Euskal Herria. The need for a national ‘reunification’, even if that national unity never truly existed in the past, becomes the implicit subtext of the irredentist teaching of history. Irredentism is not limited to the classrooms. Information on the ‘seven provinces of Euskal Herria’ and weather reports including maps of Navarra, Labourd, Basse Navarre, and Soule are constants of Basque television, radio, newspapers, and websites. These representations of ⁹ This mythological interpretation of the Basques has been incorporated in academic books without much questioning. See, for example, Daniele Conversi (1997: 44), who states that the ‘Romans never succeeded in subduing them [the Basques] or absorbing their culture, nor did the Visigoths, the Muslims, the Franks or the Normans.’


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the ‘seven provinces’ are essential tools in the collective process of imagining the Basque national community as part of a unified territory. A monolithic memory of the Spanish Civil War has played a similar key role in generating Basque national consciousness. Unlike in the rest of Spain, where the memory of the Civil War was either voluntarily repressed or contested, there was no ‘pact of oblivion’ in Euskadi during the transition to democracy. Notwithstanding the fact that PNV leaders such as Xabier Arzalluz openly spoke in favour of amnesty laws and reconciliation between victors and vanquished, the memory of the Civil War and Francoism remained a vivid grievance in the Basque Country in the transition years. Two main factors explain this exceptional situation in Euskadi. First, Basque nationalists presented the Civil War as nothing less than an invasion of the Basque Country and managed to spread the idea that the ‘Basque people’ were the main victims of a war among Spaniards. Moreover, many politicians and historians sustained the myth during the transition years that the Francoist repression in the 1940s had been harsher in the Basque Country than in any other Spanish region as a revenge for Basque nationalist opposition to the rebels (Aguilar 1998: 5–25). Strictly speaking, this was not the case. In fact, other provinces, such as Madrid, Badajoz, and Málaga, suffered a much more brutal repression than Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa.¹⁰ Nevertheless, the Dictatorship declared Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa ‘traitor provinces’ (provincias traidoras) after the Civil War and the idea that Franco had punished the Basques as a people became widely accepted in Euskadi (Blas 1988: 84–5). Further, the violent and disproportionate reaction of Francoist authorities to ETA’s actions turned the Basque Country into the Spanish region with the highest number of political prisoners in the 1960s and the 1970s, which made the ‘forgetting’ of the Dictatorship all the more difficult in Euskadi. During the transition, the Basque nationalists’ discourse and symbols emphasized the past, the Franco dictatorship, rather than the future, ¹⁰ Collecting data on the number of people killed by Francoist repression has been a painstaking process and has not yet been completed for all Spanish provinces. In Vizcaya at least 916 people were killed by Francoists after Bilbao fell to the Carlists. In Guipúzcoa studies show serious discrepancies. The highest estimate is 1,000 people killed and the lowest 500. In Álava figures range from 157 to 351, depending on the research work. These are relatively low figures compared to the aproximately 8,000 people executed in Madrid, 12,000 in Badajoz, and 20,000 in Málaga. Data considering different studies on Francoist repression in all Spanish provinces can be found at . For recent figures province by province see El País 13 August 2006.

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the newly emerging democratic system. Unlike Catalan nationalists, who focused on a ‘new beginning’ and celebrated the restoration of Catalan autonomy and the Generalitat, the Basque nationalists stressed the link between the old and the new Spain (Edles 1998: 129–32). The ambiguous position of the PNV towards the 1978 Constitution and the outright rejection by the political wing of ETA, Herri Batasuna (or HB), of both the Constitution and the Statute of Autonomy spread the idea that the rights of Basques were not truly represented in the new democracy. The notion of continuity between Francoism and the new democracy was heavily reinforced by state terrorism in the 1980s. The GAL, police squads organized by the PSOE government to kidnap and assassinate ETA members and collaborators, not only produced a new generation of ETA recruits but also encouraged many Basques to think that the new democracy had changed very little in Euskadi (Woodworth 2005a: 412–13). As in Catalonia, the network of social associations controlled by nationalist parties in the Basque Country has played a fundamental role in propagating the nationalist narrative. The batzokis, or PNV clubs, and their related trade union, social, and cultural associations, are linked to municipal councils, provincial governments, and the Basque government itself. These networks have created a political clientele stretching into all sectors of society and dependent on public institutions. As for radical nationalism, HB has created a network of bars, sport clubs, a trade union, and social and cultural associations whose aim is to socialize Basques into patriotic values. These agencies of nationalization persistently recount the radical narrative of Spanish occupation and dwell on the nostalgic appeal for a return to an idealized past (Muro 2005: 571–89). This discourse is complemented by a number of rituals honouring dead etarras (ETA members) as warriors fallen for the fatherland. All activities are accompanied by a profuse symbolic representation of Euskal Herria in the shape of flags, anthems, and maps. The dogmatic nature of the discourse, the sacred ceremonies in homage to the martyrs of the nation, the cult of violence, and the ‘holy’ symbolic universe of radical Basque nationalism can be seen as a ‘political religion’ in which the Christian god is replaced by nation as the supreme deity (Sáez de la Fuente 2002). In the past fifteen years, support for this political option has declined, but it still has the backing of between 10 and 15 per cent of the Basques and remains particularly strong in Guipúzcoa. This ‘religion of the fatherland’ is essentially a rural phenomenon, for it is in small towns and villages that the re-creation


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of a monolithic narrative, symbolism, and liturgy remains relatively unchallenged. As recent studies have shown, the smaller the place is, the greater is the support for ETA (Mees 2003: 180). Yet the ability of radical Basque nationalism to socialize a significant sector of the population also demonstrates the importance of non-official agencies in Euskadi. Alternative agencies of nationalization, such as the family, the group of friends, herriko tabernas (radical nationalist bars), and cultural and sport activities, have proved effective enough to create a community of ‘believers’ without the traditional institutional channels. Since the restoration of the regional governments in 1979 in Catalonia and the Basque Country, their new institutions have played a remarkable role in the process of nation-building. Their main achievement was to re-elaborate and popularize a historical narrative and symbolism emphasizing the national character of Euskadi and Catalonia. Despite their political differences, regional nationalists tend to disseminate a broadly similar historical narrative and litany of myths and symbols. The medieval ‘Mediterranean Empire’, the Reapers’ War, 1714, and 1939 are sites of memory to all Catalan nationalists, while the Kingdom of Navarre, the fueros, and Francoist repression are central to the Basque nationalists’ historical memory. This has given peripheral nationalists a huge advantage over Spanish nationalism in the process of nationbuilding in Catalonia and Euskadi, in that their narratives remained uncontested. As we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, the Spanish left and right have diametrically opposed interpretations of the past and were reticent to different degrees about the Civil War and Francoism. In contrast, regional nationalists and many socialists and post-communists in Catalonia and Euskadi have promoted the historical memory of the Civil War.¹¹ The Spanish problem of consolidating a set of national myths extends to the use of symbols. The left only accepted the ¹¹ In 2006 the Basque executive organized tens of events related to the Civil War. Among these there were commemorations of the anniversary of the formation of the first Basque government in 1936, the ‘Basque army’, Basque children in exile, the bombing of Guernica, and different republican figures (Aguirre, Deia 6 October 2006). In Catalonia, ERC also appealed to ‘republican memory’. It demanded the creation of a Committee of the Truth and asked the King to apologize in the name of the Spanish state for the crimes committed against Catalonia during the Civil War, the implication being that Spain, not the Francoists, was responsible for the post-war repression in Catalonia (El Mundo 23 November 2005). In the same line, Ibarretxe demanded of Zapatero an apology to the Basque people for the German Condor Legion’s bombing of Guernica in an attempt to establish a continuity between fascism, Spain, and the socialist Spanish government (La Repubblica 28 April 2006).

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monarchy and new Spanish national flag in the early years of the transition as part of a compromise to transform Francoism into a democratic system. In contrast, the Catalan flag or senyera and the Basque ikurriña came to symbolize anti-Francoism and have been institutionalized and widely accepted in Catalonia and Euskadi. The PP government’s attempt to regain some of the lost ground in the symbolic arena met with fierce opposition from the regional nationalists. When in 1997 the conservatives proposed regulating the use of the Spanish national anthem in public and sports ceremonies, the CiU and the PNV, then supporting the minority government in Madrid, successfully lobbied to reduce the number of events in which the national anthem, ‘Marcha Real’, was made compulsory (ABC 11 October 1997). José María Aznar’s decision to place an enormous Spanish flag in the Plaza de Colón in Madrid and to celebrate a military ritual every month to honour the national emblem led the PNV to install a huge ikurriña in central Bilbao. Catalan nationalists reacted in turn by organizing a ceremony in Montserrat deploying a 750 square metre estelada (pro-independence Catalan flag). The central government has also tried to ensure the presence of the Spanish flag on public buildings in Euskadi. Town councils controlled by Basque nationalists often ignore the legislation making it mandatory to display the Spanish banner alongside the ikurriña, an omission that has led the Spanish government to challenge the Basque government up to nineteen times in the courts of law since 2000. What the so-called ‘war of the flags’ and the polemic over the legislation of the anthem demonstrate so vividly are the continuing problems over the symbolic representation of Spain. For many in Catalonia, Euskadi, and Galicia, but also crucially even in regions with tiny or non-existent nationalist movements such as the Canary Islands, Asturias, and Andalusia, the Spanish flag is still today associated with Francoism (El País 14 May 2006). This reveals a striking dichotomy in the relative degree of Spanish nation-building since democracy. While the reinvention of Spain as a modern, democratic European nation has worked well at a discursive level, it has been far less successful at a symbolic level. The fact that the Spanish national flag and anthem are still identified with the Dictatorship is yet another testimony to the greater persistence of symbols over words. For all the problems Spanish nationalists have encountered in their efforts to renovate official symbolism, sociological surveys show that a majority of Spaniards share a certain degree of emotional identification with the formal symbols of Spanish nationhood, such as the anthem or


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the flag. This is even true of Catalonia and the Basque Country, though attachment to these symbols is considerably lower than elsewhere. But it is the informal symbols untainted by Francoism that Spaniards identify with most. The success of Spanish artists, celebrities, and national sports teams abroad triggers a higher level of emotional identification than official symbolism (Núñez Seixas 2001c: 743). Nationalists of all sorts have realized the importance of this process of ‘informal nationalization’. As in any other European country, the Spanish press extensively covers the games of the national football team, reproducing a routine discourse that invites the reader to differentiate between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between ‘home’ and ‘foreign’. In the case of Spain the association made by left-wing commentators in the 1980s and early 1990s between the national team and Francoism have gradually faded away. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the selección nacional has severed its negative connotations and identification with the team has increased all over the country (León Solís 2003: 79–80). It was precisely the appropriation that the Dictatorship made of the national team (and of Real Madrid) that led many in Catalonia and the Basque Country to support the Barcelona Football Club and Athletic de Bilbao as alternative ‘national’ teams. In recent years, regional nationalists have increasingly claimed the right to have Catalan and Basque teams competing officially at international level. These demands, in turn, have met with the total opposition of Spanish nationalists. For example, in October 2006, when national football teams of Catalonia and the Basque Country played a friendly match in Barcelona, the PP speaker Ángel Acebes described the match as nothing less than ‘an act against Spain’ on the grounds that the only national team that should be allowed is Spain, since Catalonia and the Basque Country are assumed to be an integral part of the Spanish patria.¹² The dispute over national symbols has also taken place at a popular level. The bull of the corridas or the toro bravo has persisted as an iconic representation of Spain. A symbol of blood and war (civil war or war against the foreign invader), the bull became part of the popular national imaginary in the nineteenth century and has become, together with flamenco dancers, one of the most recognizable stereotypical images of Spain (Juaristi 1997). The country has recently witnessed a revival in the use of the bull as a national icon. Since the turn of the twentyfirst century many supporters of Spanish national teams in international ¹² The comments of Acebes were made on the COPE radio station, 9 October 2006. See .

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competitions have carried Spanish flags embroidered with bulls. In these newly created flags the bull replaces the Spanish constitutional coat of arms, providing a more folkloric and popular representation of the nation than the official, institutionalized banner. Although the design of the icon may vary, the most popular model is the so-called Osborne bull. This bull is the logo of a sherry-producing company founded in 1772 by the English immigrant Thomas Osborne Mann that became widespread in the Spanish landscape on roadside advertisements. In the 1990s, traffic authorities forbade roadside advertisements, but the figure had become so iconic that the government was forced to ‘pardon’ the Osborne bull owing to popular demand. The authorities decided to allow huge advertisements to remain, arguing that they had become part of the Spanish landscape, but asked Osborne to remove the brand from the bull, thus completing the transformation of the animal from company logo to national symbol. Catalanists have reacted to the success of the bull as an image by creating their own national symbols. A small anarchist and nationalist organization, the Lliga Anticolonialista (or Anti-colonialist League), attempted, with an only modest outcome, to launch a new image of Catalonia as the Catalan cat or ‘catigat’, symbolizing an independent, itinerant, and anarchical spirit, the antithesis of the overbearing, macho bull (see ). But the Catalan donkey (burro català) has taken over as the new national icon. In 2003, 24-year-old Jaume Sala designed and copyrighted a model of the donkey, the ‘enemy’ of the bull, as the symbol of Catalan identity, banking on the Catalans’ sympathy for the animal (the burro català is not only a traditional figure in Catalan folklore but also an endangered species). It was an inspired piece of nationalist marketing because the image of the donkey spread rapidly via stickers, T-shirts, coffee cups, bowls, and CD covers (see ). Three years after the donkey image was created, Sala claimed that around 300,000 cars had bumper stickers with his iconic design (El Mundo 14 May 2006). For the Lliga Anticolonialista, it was all very unfortunate because the animal represented submissiveness, forced labour, and stupidity, among other negative connotations. Yet the organization had to admit that the new symbol had become very popular and it had done so because it depicted Catalans ‘as we are, which is not a totally negative thing’ (). At least in Catalonia, the debate over national symbols displays a certain lighthearted eccentricity.


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Conflicts over representation, whether at institutional or popular levels, highlight the ongoing dialectic between Spanish and regional nationalists beyond the discursive level and into the realms of symbolism and ritual. The virulence of this dialectic over the past thirty years has coloured not only political debate but also many aspects of the everyday lives of citizens, even though most have not experienced the same apparent angst about nation and identity as the political elites and their media. Nevertheless, it seems that many Spaniards have developed a hypersensibility towards national discourses and representations all around the country. This has handicapped efforts to implement a process of ‘banal’ Spanish nationalization, for regional nationalists in Catalonia and Euskadi closely scrutinize all attempts to use the state’s institutions for this purpose. Unlike in the USA, where flags in classrooms and anthems sung at sport events inculcate a sense of patriotism almost without people noticing (Billig 1995: 37–59), banal nationalism hardly works in Spain because the questions of national identity and the territorial organization of the state remain open and are discussed daily in the media. In other words, banal nationalism operates in societies where national identity is not continuously at stake, but faces serious difficulties in those countries where there is a clash of national identities. This sensibility, it should be noted, is encouraged not just by regional nationalists but by Spanish nationalists. In fact, contemporary Spanish identity has been built against that of regional nationalism. Basque and Catalan nationalisms play the role of the ‘internal enemy’ in the same manner that the Moor plays the ‘external other’. Few other factors have proven more effective in uniting Spaniards than opposition to the terrorism of ETA, which brought millions to the streets in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. From freedom fighters in the years of Francoism, ETA has become the ‘barbaric other’. In the eyes of the Spanish, it represents intolerance, totalitarianism, archaism, and anti-Europeanism, everything democratic Spain believes it left behind after the transition to democracy. Importantly, Catalan and Basque nationalists, even if they formally condemn ETA’s violence, are also often portrayed as anti-democratic, backward looking, and ethnic, reinforcing the perception Spaniards have of their identity as democratic, modern, and civic (Muro and Quiroga 2004). In turn the Spanish media often promote this negative view of regional nationalisms. Television, radio, and the press have all contributed to the

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fostering of an ‘anti-nationalist’ (i.e. anti-Catalan and Basque nationalist) consciousness among some Spaniards (Lacasta-Zabala 1998: 69–79). In the more extreme versions of this media offensive, an entire region has been accused of disloyalty to Spain and threatened with sanctions. In the autumn of 2005, when the reform of the Catalan statute was being heatedly debated in Congress and the media, anonymous grass roots movements launched a campaign on the internet to boycott Catalan products. As a result, sales of Catalan cava, textiles, and food fell in Spain (ABC 18 November and 13 December 2005), although the campaign seems to have failed to persuade Catalans to vote against the new statute. Catalan and Basque nation-building has not been as successful over the past twenty-five years as its promoters would have wished. For all the propagation of national history and culture in schools and media, few Catalans in the early 1990s had a grasp of the main historical symbols of Catalan nationhood. Only 14.8 per cent had even a minimum knowledge of the meaning of the Onze de Setembre (the national day, or Diada, commemorating Catalan defeat in 1714 at the hands of the Bourbon Felipe V during the Spanish War of Succession), while 5.3 per cent knew the figure of Rafael Casanova (who had led the defence of Barcelona during that war), and just 2.9 per cent had heard of the Reapers’ War of the previous century (González Calleja 2006: 159). More recently, the gap between nationalist elites and the bulk of citizens has widened. The controversies surrounding the return to Catalonia of official documents confiscated by Francoists from the Generalitat after the Civil War and the negotiation of the new Catalan Statute between 2004 and 2005 did not lead to any significant popular mobilization (Martínez Fiol 2006: 240–1). National holidays no longer rally public opinion as they did at the beginning of the transition to democracy. The Diada has become just another bank holiday for the majority of the Catalans, while the Aberri Eguna, Day of the Fatherland, is celebrated (separately) by PNV and HB supporters, but ignored by non-nationalist Basques. Policies of nation-building have other unintended consequences. As Breuilly (1993: 276–7) points out, too much ‘cultural engineering’ in the process of creating national identity can be counterproductive. In Catalonia and Euskadi some educational and linguistic policies have proved problematic and have alienated sectors of the Castilian-speaking population. The revival of Spanish identity in both regions since the mid-1980s might reflect resistance to educational and linguistic policies, or simply boredom with the symbolic politics of the Catalan


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and Basque governments (Martínez-Herrera 2002: 443). In Catalonia, where both Catalan and Spanish are official languages, the so-called ‘Bills of linguistic normalization’ of 1983 and 1998 made the vernacular language compulsory across the educational system, as well as in the public administration. This led to complaints by parents and teachers (and the PP) about what they saw as the marginalization of Castilian during the Pujol era. In 1997, a hundred Catalan intellectuals created the Foro de Babel, a civic organization to defend the bilingualism of Catalonia and oppose what they consider to be the imposition of Catalan at all levels of society. The Catalanist policies championed by Maragall’s coalition government provoked the reaction of the left-wing of the PSC, which openly threatened to split away if Catalan nationalism continued to dominate over social issues in the party’s agenda (ABC 28 November 2005). For many non-nationalists, the 2006 statute was the last straw. In the summer of that year, a new movement, Ciutadans de Catalunya, was launched with an explicitly anti-Catalan nationalist agenda. The new party, founded by non-professional politicians and backed by well known Catalan artists such as Albert Boadella, has campaigned for a multinational and bilingual Catalonia and against what it perceives as the danger of nationalism: the Catalanist homogenization of society. As the Ciutadans-Partit de la Ciutadania it surprised many commentators by winning three seats in the November 2006 regional elections with 3.04 per cent of the vote. In the Basque Country the enforcement of Euskera as a compulsory subject in schools and in the administration has also been controversial, yet for different reasons. The Basque government has forced all its employees (including teachers) to learn Euskera. According to the Basque government, the promotion of Euskera has been a success and in the past twenty-five years the number of Basque speakers in the community has grown from 20 to 33 per cent (Gara 5 October 2006). Nevertheless, language has become a barrier to employment opportunities. The euskaldunes (Basque speakers), a linguistic group usually aligned with Basque nationalism, can enjoy the prospect of working for Basque institutions, while those who do not speak Euskera (approximately 70 per cent of the Basque population) have no access to jobs in the public sector. This has created the feeling among many Basques of being secondclass citizens in Euskadi. In the educational system, studying Euskera has become compulsory, but the Basque government has adopted a more pragmatic approach. Students have a choice of four different

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models or pathways, ranging from receiving their education solely in Euskera (Modelo D) to having most of the teaching in Spanish with some lessons in Euskera (Modelo A). The fact that Modelo A is the most popular indicates the importance most Basques attach to Spanish and the limitations in the expansion of Euskera. Additionally, Euskera is a very difficult language to learn. This has hampered the nationalists’ efforts to create a Basque national community through linguistic integration. Teaching Euskera to non-Basque speakers, whether they are Basques, immigrants, or their offspring, has not particularly facilitated their assimilation into Basque nationalist identity, certainly not among the current generation, in contrast to the Catalan case. This is not to say that integration in Catalonia has been a smooth process. Despite the rise in the number of Catalan and Basque speakers, studies indicate that the cultural assimilation of the children of Castilianspeaking immigrants has been far from successful in both Catalonia and Euskadi. Policies promoting the two languages have also failed to end asymmetric bilingualism; that is, Spanish has remained predominant in most of the bilingual areas (Núñez Seixas 2003a: 294). More importantly, these linguistic policies have not been able to turn Catalan and Euskera into the mother tongue of Castilian-speaking Basques and Catalans. In the mid-1990s Spanish was still the main language (lengua habitual) of 78 and 55 per cent of the population in Euskadi and Catalonia respectively (CIS 1996). Ten years later, 44 per cent of Catalans still used Castilian as their daily language (El País 31 December 2005). Beyond the practical problems of instilling language, ideology has obstructed the process of national integration in the two regions. Despite all the rhetoric about assimilation, the ethnic ideological characteristics of Basque and Catalan nationalism remain a sort of wall separating distinct identities among citizens of the two autonomous communities. This is especially true in the case of the PNV, a party that has never openly repudiated the racist postulates of its founder Sabino Arana. The official discourse of conservative Basque nationalists is a model of political correctness that acknowledges the diversity of Basque society. Yet at the level of tradition and sentiment there is a strong narrative of ethnic exclusivity that surfaces into the public political debate from time to time. The former PNV leader Xabier Arzalluz’s frequent reference to the Basque blood type as a sign of distinctiveness between ‘real Basques’ and those ‘from outside’ owes a lot to Arana’s xenophobic legacy. But it was also a strong reminder for those not considered ‘true’ Basques


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that, in the eyes of the jeltzales (supporters of the PNV) there are two classes of citizens, depending on their ‘ethnic purity’ and place of birth. In the blunt words of Arzalluz, those who are not ‘real’ Basques should be treated in Euskadi as ‘Germans in Mallorca’, with some social but very few political rights (Mata 2005: 104). The subtext here is clear: full integration in the Basque national community is impossible for those who do not fulfil certain ethnic and birth criteria. Family origins and places of birth are also important in Catalonia. For example, when the Catalan socialist José Montilla decided to run for the Generalitat some of his colleagues in the PSC opposed the decision on the basis that Catalan society was not ready to vote for a candidate whose parents were not both Catalans. The criticism came from Jordi Sevilla, Minister of Public Administration in the Spanish government and a Catalan himself, who stated that it was ‘too soon for a charnego’ (a derogatory term denoting Catalans of non-Catalan parentage) to become President of the Generalitat. The implication was that his not entirely ‘pure’ family origins would be a liability (El Mundo 31 January 2006). Although this vein of ethnic elitism is not shared by the majority of Catalans, the myth of common origin and cultural homogeneity of nation are obstacles to the integration of immigrants and their offspring. Some Catalan nationalists have described the cultural expressions of Catalans of Andalusian background as a threat to Catalan identity. For instance, members of ERC, when the party was in power in April 2004, dismissed the Barcelona Feria de Abril (or April Fair) as a non-Catalan and pro-foreign celebration because it was a Sevillan import (Blanco Valdés 2005: 130–1). The limits to the process of Catalanization are even more marked when immigrants come from outside Spain. Increasing immigration from Africa and America has sparked fears of a de-Catalanization of society. The ex-leader of ERC and former president of the Catalan parliament Heribert Barrera wrote that his region would disappear under the weight of non-European immigration and went as far as to deny that Haider was racist when he had remarked that there were too many foreigners in Austria (Flynn 2001: 708). The ethnic dimension of nationalist discourse and the attempt to ‘bottle’ the essence of Catalan culture have an impact on who nationalists think should be allowed to vote, and hence on the process of integration. When in August 2006 the PSOE government proposed that all non-European residents in Spain should be granted the right to vote in municipal elections, members of CiU opposed the initiative on cultural and linguistic grounds. The conservative nationalist Antoni

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Duran i Lleida stated that immigrants should learn Catalan and be familiar with Catalan culture before the franchise was extended.¹³ What Duran’s demand betrayed was an underlying tendency among conservative nationalists towards using cultural and ethnic barriers to hinder the process of national assimilation of non-Europeans. Not surprisingly, opinion polls and sociological studies show that CiU, PNV, and PP voters display the highest level among Spaniards of prejudice and ‘segregationist’ tendencies towards African and Muslim immigrants and gypsies (Núñez-Seixas 2003a: 304). Despite its problems and limitations, decentralization has strengthened regional identities in Spain, just as devolution reinforced the identities of Quebeckers in Canada and Scots in the UK (Guibernau 2006: 66–7). The nationalization of the masses from above may have increased the level of identification with Euskadi and Catalonia but, interestingly, it has not weakened the level of identification with Spain of Catalans and Basques. If anything, the regional governments’ nationbuilding, competing with the promotion of Spanish identity by state agencies and media, has encouraged the emergence of dual identities. Nowadays, the majority of Catalans (79 per cent) and Basques (64 per cent) declare a feeling of identification with both their autonomous community and Spain (Sondeig d’opinió, ICPS 2005; Euskobarómetro May 2006a). As we saw in Chapter 1, levels of attachment vary significantly. They range from equal identification with Spain and the Autonomous Community to a stronger identification with Spain than with the region and vice versa. These are cases of what political scientists call ‘nested identities’; that is, ‘lower- and- higher order identities’ such that the latter encompass the former. My identity as resident in city ‘a’ is nested in my identity as resident of region ‘A’—which includes city ‘a’—which is in turn nested in my identity as resident of country ‘Alpha’, and so on (Díez Medrano and Gutiérrez 2001: 757). These multiple identities are possible because both Spanish and Basque and Catalan identities are considered compatible as opposed to antagonistic. Yet, as we have seen, some sections of public opinion in Catalonia and ¹³ The comments of Duran were severely criticized by the leader of ICV, Saura, who described them as ‘verging on xenophobia’ (El País 20 August 2006). However, not all on the Catalan left disagreed with Duran’s ideas. At the time, the socialist Minister of Economy of the Generalitat, Antoni Castells, claimed that non-EU citizens would have to show some knowledge of Catalan language and culture before suffrage was granted to them (El País 22 August 2006). This suggests that the idea of linking nationalization to the right to vote is present across the spectrum of Catalanist politics.


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especially the Basque Country have exclusive identities and identify only with their community or only with Spain. The picture that emerges from surveys on identity is that Catalonia and Euskadi are ‘houses of many nations’. The implication of this multiplicity of collective identities is that there is a gap between the discourse of their political elites and the evolution of national identities. While the construction of Catalan and, especially, Basque identity has been conducted against the ‘other’ (that is, the Spaniard), the majority of Basques and Catalans do not conceive of Spanish and regional identities as mutually exclusive. In other words, the process of nation-building in Catalonia and Euskadi in the past twenty-five years did not lead to the eradication of the various forms of Spanish national identity. In fact, the number of Basques with dual identities has remained unchanged since democracy (around 60 per cent), while the figure for Catalonia has risen from 53 to 79 per cent.¹⁴ Nevertheless, the implementation of nation-building policies has transformed some of these Spanish identities. The growth in dual identity among Catalans is partly due to the fact that Spanish identity in this autonomous community has become more flexible. Most of those Catalans who felt exclusively Spanish at the beginning of the devolution process (29 per cent in 1979) adopted a Catalan identity as the State of Autonomous Communities was consolidated. Thus by 2001 only 15 per cent of Catalans considered themselves ‘Spanish only’ and by 2005 the figure had fallen to 7.5 per cent (Martínez Herrera 2002: 436; Sondeig d’opinió, ICPS 2006). On the other hand, the number of those who identify exclusively with the autonomous community has increased in Euskadi (from 28 per cent in 1979 to 33 per cent in 2006), while remaining stable (around 15 per cent) in Catalonia (Euskobarómetro; Martínez Herrera 2002: 436; Sondeig d’opinió, ICPS 2006). This diversity of identities is reflected in the diversity of political options in Catalonia and the Basque Country.¹⁵ Unlike in most of the other autonomous communities, where the number of relevant parties is usually limited to three or four (if the regionalists are of any importance), ¹⁴ For the data on the Basque Country see Euskobarómetro . For the data on Catalonia see Beramendi and Maíz (2003: 214) and Sondeig d’opinió, ICPS (2006: 83). ¹⁵ One should not, however, draw direct correlations between identity and voting patterns in Catalonia and the Basque Country, for it is often the case that a good percentage of the population vote for the regional nationalist parties in the regional elections and for the PSOE, PP, or IU in the elections for the Spanish parliament.

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eight and five political forces are represented in the Basque and Catalan parliaments respectively. All these parties have different proposals about the political status they wish their communities to attain in the long run. These range from outright independence in the case of ERC, HB, and Aralar, to the maintenance of the current system as defended by the PP in both Catalonia and Euskadi. Between these two opposing views, there is a whole spectrum of programmes for the reform of the architecture of the state, including further autonomy, federalism, co-federalism, and the so-called status of ‘associated state’ drawn up in the Ibarretxe Plan. CiU has traditionally favoured a gradual increase of self-government within the constitutional framework and the specific recognition of Catalonia as a nation within the Spanish state. In the long term, conservative Catalan nationalism aims at establishing a sort of ‘divided sovereignty’ between Catalonia and Spain, a model similar to that of Quebec and Canada, in which Catalonia would have exclusive competencies over most policies affecting the region, including the collection of taxes. The increasing level of self-government and the acknowledgement of Catalonia as a nation were also key demands in the 2005 proposal for a new statute of autonomy promoted by the PSC, CiU, and ICV. The fact that the majority of the Catalan political elites stressed the importance of recognition as a nation without advocating independence is characteristic of post-sovereign nations such as Quebec or Scotland (Keating 2001). In both, nationalist elites, and a good percentage of the population, understand their region as a nation and seek a high level of autonomy.¹⁶ Yet the ultimate goal is neither secession nor the creation of a new fully fledged nation-state ‘à la nineteenth century’. The situation is somewhat different in the Basque Country. Unlike their Catalan counterparts, conservative Basque nationalists abstained in the 1978 referendum of the Spanish constitution but supported the statute of autonomy for Euskadi in 1979. Ever since, the PNV’s objectives have fluctuated between a high level of autonomy and independence. This ambiguous positioning was partially a reflection of the historic infighting between autonomists and secessionists and one of the reasons that led to the split of the latter and the creation of Eusko Alkartasuna (EA) in 1986. Nevertheless, in 1998 the PNV reached an agreement with ¹⁶ However, more Catalans considered Catalonia a region (47 per cent) than a nation (37 per cent) in 2002, before the new statute was proposed (Datos de Opinión, Boletín 31, 2003, CIS). This highlights once again the gap between politicians’ demands and the feelings of the majority of the population.


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EA, HB, and the Basque branch of IU, Ezker Batua (EB), to seek selfdetermination for the seven Basque territories. As we saw in Chapter 3, the Basque Prime Minister (or Lehendakari) Ibarretxe put forward a bid in 2003 to create a federation between the Basque Country and Spain. The so-called Ibarretxe Plan proposed a voluntary association between two ‘free states’ that implied the virtual independence of the Basque Country. The Plan was passed in the Basque parliament with the support of the PNV, EA, EB, and HB in December 2003 but was defeated in the Spanish parliament the following year. The fact that the PNV obtained worse results than expected in the 2005 regional elections meant that the planned referendum on the Ibarretxe Plan was called off sine die. In any case, Basque nationalism has tended to be less accommodating than Catalan nationalism and the proposals devised by its governments are usually more radical than those from Barcelona. Rather than an eventual sharing of sovereignty, the Ibarretxe Plan made very clear that the Basque people were fully sovereign. The new statute proposed for Álava, Vizcaya, and Guipúzcoa was an expression of the ‘right of selfgovernment’ of the Basque people, which freely decided to associate itself with the Spanish state (Preamble, Estatuto Político de la Comunidad de Euskadi 2004).¹⁷ Not a post-sovereign nation then, but a nation that claims its sovereignty lies in some vaguely defined ‘historic rights’ and exercises them to ‘associate itself with the Spanish state in the framework of free solidarity with the other peoples [of the state]’ (Article 1, Estatuto Político de la Comunidad de Euskadi, 2004). How has the new round of devolution, or the second transition, as some have called it, affected Catalans’ and Basques’ search for greater independence? Some scholars argue that the devolution model, while it has strengthened regional identities, has also deterred secession in Catalonia and the Basque Country. According to this view, devolution would ‘tame’ secessionist leaders by tempting them with large doses of political power and prestige in the newly created regional institutions. This would turn goals of independence into never-ending demands for greater recognition and devolution. Second, the reconfiguration of post-Francoist Spanish identity as democratic, secular, modern, and decentralizing would make it possible for many Basques and Catalans to identify with Spain and thereby develop a dual identity and drop their claim for a separate state (Guibernau 2006: 66–7, 70–2). ¹⁷ See .

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There is no doubt that the creation of the autonomous communities led to the emergence of regional political elites who make a living out of negotiating the transfer of competencies from the central state. For these elites, turning their back on the current system and moving towards independence is a risky business with an uncertain outcome. Nevertheless, this was the step taken by ERC in the late 1980s when the party did a U-turn from federalism to secessionism and saw its electoral fortunes rise dramatically. Yet support for independence in Catalonia has fluctuated considerably since the transition. Between 1979 and 1990 it rose from 8 to 20 per cent (García-Ferrando et al. 1994: 182). However, it has steadily declined since then. In 1996, 16 per cent of Catalans favoured independence, and by 2005 the figure had fallen to 12 per cent (ICPS 1997, 2006). The thesis that devolution acts as a deterrent, however, does not seem to work for the Basque Country. Survey data reveal that support for independence has slowly increased in Euskadi since devolution was implemented. In 1977, almost one in four Basques favoured independence for Euskadi; by 2006, this had risen to one in three (Euskobarómetro May 2006).¹⁸ Despite important differences between Euskadi and Catalonia, regional nationalists have created a common front to have their autonomous communities acknowledged as nations within the Spanish state. In July 1998, CiU, the PNV, and the Galician nationalists of the Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG) signed the so-called Declaration of Barcelona, a political statement in which they demanded ‘the legal and political recognition’ of Catalonia, Euskadi, and Galicia as ‘national realities within the [Spanish] state’ (Declaración de Barcelona, 16 July 1998). The declarations that followed in Vitoria and Santiago de Compostela during the following two months formalized permanent cooperation between the three parties. They called for greater promotion of the idea of a multinational Spain and for further and exclusive devolution of competencies for their communities. These texts reactivated the historic dialectic between Spanish and regional nationalisms. In response, the socialist presidents of Castilla-La Mancha, Andalusia, and Extremadura signed the so-called Declaration of Mérida in early October 1998, in which they defended the constitutional framework and objected to the regional nationalists’ attempt to deepen ¹⁸ The same process can be observed in Scotland. In 2006, opinion polls showed that the majority of the Scots (51 per cent) were in favour of independence. This was the highest level of support for secession since devolution was first implemented in 1999 (The Times 2 November 2006).


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the asymmetric nature of Spain’s architecture. Their point was blunt: no ‘natural right, whether pre- or post-1978 Constitution, could be invoked to justify privileges for certain territories or inequality among Spaniards’ (El País 7 October 1998). The reaction of the southern Autonomous Communities’ presidents was a clear case of Spanish leftwing nationalism, a model that welcomes the variety of Spanish peoples and devolution but rejects asymmetry in any shape or form. According to this view, decentralization can go as far as the 1978 Constitution allows but equality in terms of competencies among all Autonomous Communities must be maintained. This dialectic illustrates the difficulties of finding a solution to the national question, indeed, the virtual impossibility of negotiating an agreement over the territorial model. The implementation of the regional nationalists’ asymmetric and multinational idea of Spain seems unlikely. The main problem here is to define what Spain is. As we argued in Chapter 1, this is not a metaphysical issue, but a question of defining the elements that would constitute the different nations of the Spanish state. Regional nationalists draw on ethno-national factors to characterize the components of the multinational state. Thus Euskal Herria (the Basque Country and Navarra), the Països Catalans (Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and Valencia), and Galicia would be three of the nations of that eventual state. But what about the fourth entity? Would Asturians, Andalusians, Extremeños, Aragoneses, Murcianos, and Canary Islanders all fall under the same Castilian nationality? Or would they be considered Spaniards? Paradoxically, the insistence of regional nationalists on describing Spain as a state as opposed to a nation in order to highlight the ‘natural’ character of their nations and the ‘artificial’ character of the state has created a problem for them when it comes to describing the ‘fourth nationality’ that would accompany them in a multinational federation. The terms Spain, Castile, or, even more simplistically, Madrid may work when referring to the antagonistic ‘other’, but regional nationalists are extremely vague in describing the ‘fourth partner’ in the multinational state. As Jordi Pujol once put it with typical evasiveness, the plan was to have a state with Euskal Herria, the Països Catalans, Galicia, and ‘the majority nationality, the one which historically emerged from Asturias, León and Castile, [and] spreads through the rest of the [Iberian] Peninsula with the exception of Portugal’ (Santiago Guevós 1992: 251). Nomenclature apart, Basque and Catalan nationalists would find it difficult to incorporate their ‘irredentist lands’ into a single political unit. Unlike in the UK, where the territorial composition of the different

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nations of the kingdom is not seriously questioned, the irredenta play a key role in the Basque and Catalan nationalist imaginary. But the idea of the Països Catalans cannot materialize beyond rhetoric in so far as the nationalist groups in Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands are unable to put together a formal plan to unify the different Catalan-speaking territories. Moreover, Valencian nationalists define their community as a nation in its own right (Núñez Seixas 2004: 233). Crucially, the vast majority of the Balearic and Valencian population, not to speak of the inhabitants of Catalunya Nord (French Catalonia), oppose any sort of political association with Catalonia. A united Euskal Herria seems even more problematic. The idea of converting Euskadi into a state ‘freely associated with Spain’ encountered strong opposition in Álava, a province with a predominantly Spanish identity. In December 2004, the Alavés provincial government made clear that its province would seek to split from the Basque Country if the Ibarretxe Plan was implemented (El Correo 2 January 2005). The incorporation of Navarra into Euskadi is also highly unlikely. Seventy per cent of the Navarrese MPs voted in 1982 for the creation of their own Autonomous Community and against their assimilation into the Basque Country. Basque nationalism has maintained a strong presence in the western part of Navarra but it accounts for only 20 per cent of the total vote in the region. A recent opinion poll showed that just 12 per cent of the Navarrese are willing to join the Basque Autonomous Community (ABC 7 November 2005). The situation is even worse for Basque nationalists in what they call Iparralde; that is, the three Basque provinces in France. Support for the PNV there oscillates between 1 and 4 per cent of the vote in regional and national elections (Pablo and Mees 2005: 485). Perhaps the biggest problem for the asymmetric federalism proposed by some regional nationalists is the inherent drift towards symmetry of the current model, as we argued in Chapter 3. The implementation of devolution has led to a federalizing dynamic whereby all autonomous communities have acquired the same level of competencies as the ‘historic nationalities’, while regional nationalist governments have attempted to retain the constitutional distinctiveness of their regions (Moreno 2001). This competitive federalism was clearly at work during the debate over whether Catalonia should be called a nation in the 2006 statute. Some scholars have argued that the solution to the never-ending tensions of the territorial model in democratic Spain lies in the creation of institutions in which the seventeen Autonomous Communities can discuss and harmonize their policies, as opposed to the present system


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in which seventeen regional governments negotiate directly with the Spanish government (Aja 1999; Beramendi and Maíz 2003). The transformation of the Senate into a territorial chamber and the holding of summits of presidents of the Autonomous Communities are the most common tools proposed to improve interregional cooperation. It is unlikely that these measures could resolve what is at its core an ideological problem relating to national identity. The participation of Catalan and Basque representatives in these new institutions could ease interregional tensions but this can hardly mean that Catalan and Basque nationalists will accept equal treatment with other Spanish regions, because in their view this would blur the distinctive nature of their nations and downgrade them to mere regions. The fact that the Basque president Ibarretxe initially refused to attend the Zapatero government’s summits of regional presidents, on the grounds that he was willing to negotiate only with the Spanish government, suggests that establishing or remodelling institutions in an effort to establish a stable territorial framework is hardly a solution on its own. As we argue throughout this book, the chronic strains of the 1978 semi-federal system do not derive solely from competitive federalism, from an artificial spoils system run by nationalist and regionalist elites to make a living out of extracting more and more competencies from the state. The tensions are also related to the understanding political elites and citizens have of Catalonia, Euskadi, and Spain as nations. The spiral of demands has become part of the daily fare of nation- and region-building in all autonomous communities, a means of mobilization and identity construction. The status of nation, ‘national reality’, or region is related to the number of competencies won from the state in a dynamic akin to that of a football league with its different divisions. In conclusion, democracy brought decentralization to Spain and this sanctioned the process of building nations alternative to Spain. Since the early 1980s, Catalan and Basque nationalism began to compete with the state using the agencies of their regional governments. In some key aspects, such as the consolidation of a national historical narrative and a set of myths and symbols, regional nationalists have proved far more effective that their Spanish counterparts, strengthening their citizens’ identification with Catalonia and the Basque Country. Yet contrary to their expectations, the process of nation-building did not create exclusive identities. Instead, it fostered the rise of dual identities. Indeed, devolution and nation-building policies did not undermine Spanish identity in Catalonia and the Basque Country.

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Instead, exclusive Spanish identities gave way to more complex levels of identification with the autonomous communities. Many of those Catalans and Basques who did not identify with their region during the transition have gradually come to do so. Thus Spanish identity has been reinvented not just as modern and democratic but also as a dual identity, especially in Catalonia. Dual identity in Catalonia and the Basque Country will not necessarily persist, however. Even if the transformation of the country into a democratic, decentralized state has made the idea of Spain acceptable for most citizens of Catalonia and Euskadi, the continued tensions over the territorial model and the competencies of the ‘historic nationalities’ mean that national identities are constantly being re-elaborated. A new ‘anti-nationalist consciousness’, directed against the allegedly excessive demands on the state made by Catalan and Basque nationalists, now colours some manifestations of contemporary Spanish identity. And it often fails to differentiate between regional nationalists and Catalans and Basques as a whole. A potential scenario for future relations between Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Spain is that the regional institutions become the main intermediaries in communications between citizens and the state, while they appropriate at the same time the production of opportunities and benefits. In this case identification with Spain could decrease and opposition to the current system increase (MartínezHerrera 2002: 445–6). In many respects, the persistence of dual identities depends on the ability of the state to retain some real competences in Catalonia and the Basque Country. In this way the interest of local elites in promoting Spanish national identity would be encouraged (Álvarez Junco 2001a: 278). If the state becomes residual in Catalonia and Euskadi the possibilities of transmitting Spanish national identity would be limited to informal channels, such as family, networks of friends, and sections of the media. In these circumstances, the fluid nature of dual identities might be difficult to reproduce in the long term.

7 Spain’s International Projection The debate about Spain as a nation since democracy has always been framed by the challenge of regional nationalisms. For the defenders of the national unity of Spain, the claim to nationhood by the periphery has sharpened the perception of a perennial national identity based on a common history embracing all the regions of Spain. Defining the nation in relation to the world beyond the frontiers of Spain has been altogether more problematic in the new democracy. Traditional Spanish nationalism defined identity largely in relation to an easily identifiable, though usually imaginary, foreign Other. The external enemy varied according to historical circumstances. In the early nineteenth century the French played an important role as an anti-Spanish stereotype in the process of Spanish self-identification but their representation was complex and often contradictory. Spanish liberals under absolutist rule had looked to France as a model of modernity, but when Napoleon invaded Spain, France became for them also an enemy of the nation. For the Absolutists, on the other hand, nation in itself was a subversive concept emanating from France that challenged monarchy and Church. Thus even Spaniards who demonstrated enthusiasm for the patria were regarded as the internal Other, the ‘Frenchified’ ones or afrancesados (Álvarez Junco 2001b: 343–57). A more perennial foreign Other was ‘the Moor’. It was the cultural stereotype against which Spanish identity could be defined in the invention of the past and the present, from the Arab ‘occupation’ of Christian Spain over seven centuries to the colonial wars in Morocco of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Representations of the Moor became embedded in popular culture over centuries, laden with racist and religious connotations. Yet when the Nationalists brought over Moroccan mercenaries to fight against the Republic, their propaganda inverted the depiction of the Moor to convert him into a soldier of Spain, a defender of religion in the common struggle against Spanish Republicans, atheists, communists, Jews and Masons, all of whom

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Spain’s International Projection

were rolled into the sui generis foreign Other (Balfour 2002: 193–8, 283–6). In the new democracy, the old foreign stereotypes against which Spanish identity could implicitly be defined were no longer politically correct except among conservative mavericks and the far right. In any case, the parameters of identification were changing rapidly throughout Europe and beyond. New collective identities had emerged in the post-war world that stretched beyond and within nations—not just supranational identities associated with Western democracies, Europe, the North Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, but sub-national identities as well. At the same time, the collapse of communism undermined the ideological certainties of the Cold War and diluted identities defined by political ideology. Moreover, the process of globalization fostered multiple identities that challenged or undermined traditional stereotypes, which, while they survived to some extent in popular culture, had largely disappeared from public discourse. In Chapter 1, we examined the complex patterns of spatial identities in Spain at local, regional, and national levels. To these, we need to add data relating to the European identity of Spaniards. A survey in 2002–3 suggested the strength of dual identity on a European level as well, undermining nationalist and sub-nationalist claims to exclusive or hegemonic identification. Across two polls in these years, over 60 per cent of Spanish respondents felt they were both Spanish and European, while only 31.5 per cent considered themselves exclusively Spanish. Identification with Europe was higher in Spain than in most of the fifteen EU countries (the poll was taken before the accession of new members), though it was strongest in Italy, with 71 per cent claiming they were both Italian and European citizens, and weakest in Britain, where 64.5 per cent identified exclusively with the nation and only 29 per cent with Britain and Europe. Spain thus emerged as the third most Eurocentric country in the EU after Italy and Luxembourg (Santacreu and Labert 2004).¹ The Spanish referendum on the EU Constitution in February 2005 also indicated the relative strength of support for Europe. Almost 77 per cent of voters approved the text and only 17.24 per cent rejected it out of a rather low total participation of 42.32 per cent (). One of the reasons for the strength of this identification with Europe is that for most of the twentieth century and in particular under the ¹ For a wider discussion of European identity see Bruter (2005).


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Franco Dictatorship it signified modernity and democracy for Spaniards who aspired to both. It has even been suggested that the appeal of Europe was that it also appeared to offer the resolution of a ‘fragmented and problematic nationhood’ (Graham and Sánchez 1995: 411). Yet this appeal is likely to have been strong only in the periphery among those, like moderate Catalan nationalists, who saw Europe as a means of achieving de facto independence within a pluralist Spain. How then has democratic Spain reinvented itself abroad? That is, what concepts of Spain and Spanish identity have been projected internationally? Representations of nation and national identity in Spain, as elsewhere, are transmitted abroad by a wide range of agencies, from private business to public institutions, from creative artists to language teachers. Undoubtedly, the penetration abroad of Spanish capital, technology, and economic goods also plays an important role in renewing foreign perceptions of Spain. Spain of course had been invaded by multinational capital from the 1960s and as the process of globalization intensified in the 1980s and 1990s its communications and culture industry was increasingly absorbed into the global networks. However, we will focus above all on those images diffused by agencies whose functions are to project the culture of Spain and thus its identity to the outside world, whether from within the country or abroad. Under the Franco Dictatorship the official transmission of Spanish culture abroad was controlled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the official Institute of Hispanic Culture, but the funds they had available were relatively limited. With the advent of democracy, a multiplicity of new institutions and channels of communication was created, among which there was considerable overlap between not only state institutions but also public and private agencies. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs runs a network of cultural centres attached to its embassies and consulates across the globe, as well as organizations based in Spain. Alongside it, the Ministry of Culture is responsible for numerous agencies involved abroad in activities concerned with cinema, audiovisual arts, art, music, theatre, state museums, and so on. For their part the Ministry of Education and Science and that of Labour and Social Affairs are both represented abroad and administer different cultural programmes for international consumption. In addition, autonomous governments, city councils, universities, sporting federations, and even military institutions take part in projects abroad. The most important of these state organizations for cultural projection is the Cervantes Institute, set up in 1991, after

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a bitter struggle for control between different ministries, to administer the teaching of Spanish and Spanish culture internationally; equivalent to the British Council or the Alliance Française, the Institute has never ceased since then to expand its operations (Íñiguez 2006). To these agencies must be added the three state-run media, the external channel of Televisión Española (TVE), the Rádio Exterior de España (REE, the world radio station of Rádio Nacional de España), and the national press agency EFE. Alongside government departments and organizations, these media play an important part in funding and promoting Spanish literature, art, cinema, and sports abroad. For at least a decade, the Spanish cinema in particular enjoyed considerable subsidies from the state until they were reduced by the PP government in 1996, and while TVE and other public organizations continued to support film-making, financing also came from private television companies. Of the state media, the REE can claim to have the greatest impact abroad, especially in Spanish America. Since it was set up in 1977, it has achieved an audience of some eighty million listeners, putting it in third place in world rankings behind the BBC and Vatican Radio (Calvo 2006). Critics have pointed out the relative lack of infrastructure, the problems of coordination, and funding deficits among these different public agencies (Ansorena 2006; Calvo 2006). They argue that democratic governments have not taken advantage of the opportunities for Spain’s cultural projection abroad. There are some 400 million Spanish speakers across the globe (including large numbers in the USA), making it one of the three most important languages in the world, while the sale of Spanish cultural products abroad represented some 4.5 per cent of Spain’s GDP by 1997. The most important market is Latin America, where books published in Spain account for 45 per cent of all book sales. An initiative called the Proyecto Marca España (the Spain Brand Project) was launched in 2001 by a number of public institutions to coordinate efforts to construct an image of Spain in tune with its new economic, social, and cultural realities (Noya 2003). Yet for all the initiatives, Spanish governments have still failed, so some commentators argue, to capitalize on this enormous potential to strengthen Spain’s international influence (Martínez Lillo 2003). Moreover, there has been no clear cultural policy shaping the activities of the extraordinary range of different public agencies representing Spain abroad, and if such a policy can be discerned its purpose is often to distort the complex realities of contemporary Spain in the interests of an ideological agenda (Íñiguez 2006).


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Nevertheless, no one can deny that the cultural impact of the new Spanish democracy in Europe and beyond has been extraordinary. It has transformed popular concepts of Spain abroad.² Like any other long-established country, Spain has undergone frequent revisions in its representations elsewhere. In the nineteenth century, two distinct narratives of identity, driven by different ideological agendas, were projected outside Spain by both foreign and Spanish observers. Popular resistance against Bonapartist rule gave rise to a narrative linking the old myth of the conquistadores with the new vision of a heroic and warlike people that drove out the French invader, creating a model for political forces opposing despotism or would-be nations fighting against occupying powers (Núñez Florencio 2003: 190). This epic narrative gave way later in the century among both foreign and Spanish writers to a contradictory picture of a backward, uncultured, and fanatical nation, attractive, nevertheless, for its supposed exoticism and the wildness of its natural environment, offering a contrast to the crowded asphyxiation of industrial Europe. The growing appeal of Don Quixote, for example, derived partly from what was seen as its metaphorical representation of a backward but charmingly eccentric Spain. The Civil War, in its turn, echoed old stereotypes of popular international imagination according to ideological affiliation: a heroic people fighting reaction and obscurantism associated with the Black Legend on the one hand, or a necessary war to bring order to a bloodthirsty, anarchical Spain on the other. In its early period, the Franco Dictatorship transmitted an atavistic culture extolling racial purity, the Catholicism of the CounterReformation, and the myths of Spain’s Golden Age, in particular through the semi-official film studios of Cifesa (Compañía Industrial Film Española). By the late 1940s, Hollywood imports, duly sanitized by dubbing and censorship, began to flood the Spanish cinema market (Evans 1995a) and the regime increasingly became identified with popular culture through the promotion of folklore and sport, reinforcing the stereotypes of foreign representations of Spanish identity. Indeed, the official slogan of the tourist industry, ‘Spain is different’, played on the attractions of backwardness, unwittingly demonstrating an internalization on the part of the regime of Spain’s supposed failure to ² A recent survey of world opinion regarding individual countries rates Spain overall as twelfth among twenty-five countries, yet the data were based on a relative under representation of Latin America and over representation of Asia and therefore the explanatory value is questionable (Noya 2005).

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modernize (Núñez Florencio 2003: 198). Against the culture of evasion promoted by the state, a new and highly politicized counter-culture emerged in the mid-1950s using allegory and irony as tools of contestation in a repressive environment. Appealing to the new professional middle classes created by accelerated modernization, its protagonists also increasingly gained an international audience in Europe and Latin America. Their cultural products projected an entirely new image of Spain as a modern, pluralistic, and culturally innovative nation. In fact, the political transition to democracy was preceded and deeply influenced by the cultural transition advanced by Spain’s intellectuals and creative artists during the latter part of the Dictatorship (Díaz 1983). With democracy, new and complex images of Spain emerged on the international scene. On the one hand, the political process of transition became a model for democratizations elsewhere, however specific its variables were to Spain. This political ‘normalization’, combined with the related effects of its rapid modernization and integration into Europe, catapulted Spain into the ranks of the modern nations of Western Europe. In all sorts of cultural activities Spaniards have become top world players, in particular in sports such as tennis, basketball, football, athletics, formula 1 racing, and so on. On the other hand, the revitalization of cultural activity in Spain gave rise to a bewildering range of intellectual and artistic expression, from postmodernist deconstructions of Francoist values to continuities of pre-democratic mass culture. Among the most important phenomena in the projection of the new democratic Spain was the assertion of linguistic and cultural plurality in place of the monoculture of the Dictatorship. Devolution gave the regions, and in particular Catalonia and the Basque Country, the opportunity to project their languages, cultures, and identities to the rest of Spain and abroad. What images of Spain and Spanish identity were transmitted? The speed of change, the almost synchronous processes of modernization and democratization, extraordinarily compressed in time in contrast to the core Europe, gave rise to a conjunction of archaic, modern, and postmodern in the portrayal of identity (Graham and Sánchez 1995). The lifting of Francoist censorship unleashed a hedonistic celebration of sexuality and nakedness in the Spanish cinema. Other films continued the tradition of the neo-realist school of the 1960s to grapple with social and political problems. Much of the literature and the cinema (especially Almodóvar, the most internationally successful of film directors in the new democracy) used parody and pastiche in tune with the postmodernist canon to subvert the traditional values of pre-democratic Spain


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and represent the ambiguities of democratic Spain. Thus machismo and transexuality appeared alongside or within each other, as the clichés of traditional folklore were inverted to express new gender and national identities. Yet as the Spanish cinema became absorbed by the global film industry from the mid-1980s onwards, it increasingly turned to American models and became less interested in the exploration of Spanish identities (Jordan 2000: 76). As for the representation of the past, it was often portrayed in the art, literature, and film of the 1980s and 1990s as ambiguous, unresolved, a reflection of the self-imposed amnesia of the democratic settlement, a failure in the present to confront the Civil War and the Dictatorship. In the two decades that followed the death of Franco modern Spanish identities were thus presented variously as fluid, ambiguous, multilayered, repressed, and even clandestine (Kinder 1993). There are no such equivocations in state-sponsored representations of contemporary Spain. They are celebrations of its modernity and maturity as a nation, and its economic and cultural dynamism. Accordingly, the consensual nature of the transition had finally buried the myth of the conflictive or even fratricidal inclinations of the Spanish. Spain’s growing role in international organizations such as the EU and NATO was a demonstration that it had joined the core of modern, progressive Europe. The apotheosis of this official cultural, economic, and political projection of the new Spain was staged in 1992. Over the course of that year, four different events were held across Spain: the Olympic Games in Barcelona, the Universal Expo in Seville, the celebration of Madrid as Cultural Capital of Europe, and the fifth centenary of the discovery of America. The events coincided with the tenth anniversary of the election of the socialists, though celebrations were derailed somewhat by a looming economic crisis. Nevertheless, they were jubilant in their claim of having completed what they termed the final cycle of Spain’s modernization. The celebrations of 1992 made a big impact in Spain and beyond. The organizers of the Barcelona Olympics claimed that almost 3,500 million people watched the opening ceremony on TV, three million tickets were sold, twenty-eight heads of state visited Barcelona during the course of the Games, and 4,880 journalists covered the events, representing 1,700 media organizations from across the globe. Spain achieved its highest level of success in the history of the Olympics, winning thirteen gold medals with an overall tally of twenty-two medals. For its part, the Seville Expo, dedicated to the era of discoveries and therefore linked

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to the commemoration of the discovery of America, was visited by almost forty-two million people, including thirty-six members of royal families, forty-three heads of state and twenty-six prime ministers (El País Anuario 1993: 110–14, 299). The celebration of Madrid as cultural capital of Europe was organized by the city council, the autonomous government of the Madrid region, and the Ministry of Culture. It included numerous concerts, films, art exhibitions, dance performances, plays, and literary and scientific congresses, many of which sought to stress the city’s connections with Europe. Finally, the fifth centenary of the discovery of America enjoyed huge financial support from the Spanish state and numerous events and symposia were held in Spain and Spanish America over the course of 1992. For official spokespersons, the events of 1992 were a triumphant confirmation of democratic Spain’s new status. The then Mayor of Barcelona, Pasqual Maragall, claimed that the different celebrations were the expression of Spain’s new ‘positioning’ in the world (El País Anuario 1992: 164). For Spanish Olympic officials, Spain had finally come of age. ‘At a stroke, the black legend that had always hung over Spanish sport under the banner of improvisation and the solitary hero emerging out of the desert, is now destroyed.’ The Games, another official declared, were a demonstration of a ‘more open, tolerant, consensual and happier society’. The Seville World Expo, according to one of its organizers, ‘gives a clear signal that Spain has overcome the cliché that marked it out as a country of improvisation and individualism’ (El País Anuario 1993: 300, 110). Of course, the formal discourse surrounding the celebrations of 1992, refracted through different ideological lenses, was part of the obligatory rhetoric of officialdom. But almost all the statements framed the symbolic significance of the celebrations in terms of the myth of Spain’s exceptionalism within Europe. The ‘normality’ of the new Spain lay in its conformity to the norms of Western European modernity. But what these norms were and what deviated from them were not clear, nor was the meaning of the concept of modernity. The writer Vázquez Montalbán saw the Seville Expo and Olympic Games as dramatizations of a dubious construct of Spain’s ‘modernity’: ‘it was hoped that 1992 would be a demonstration of the definitive modernization of Spain, a confused abstraction that followed the project of democratization’ (El País Anuario 1993: 108). It could be claimed with some justice that Spanish democracy had been consolidated by the time of 1992 and that Spain’s socio-economic


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structures had been modernized. But ‘modernity’ is paradoxically an issue to do with the past as well. In Spain, the past has not been resolved culturally or ideologically, least of all the immediate past of the Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship. The continuities with the discourse of traditional Spanish nationalism were made evident in the heated debate over the fifth centenary of the discovery of America. The then Mayor of Madrid, the conservative Álvarez del Manzano, declared just before hosting the city’s events that ‘Madrid … is preparing to highlight … the prestige of Spain in the year of the commemoration of the fifth centenary of the incorporation of America into the world of universal culture’(El País Anuario 1992: 168, 172). That view of the cultural debt owed Spain by Latin America underwrote the nationalist policies of the Aznar governments of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, as we shall see. But the conventional account of the discovery and conquest had been repeatedly challenged by historians and it was contested once again during the celebrations of 1992. Even Pope John Paul II declared that the only thing worth celebrating was the evangelization of Latin America (El País 6 January 1992). The contradictory currents running through the 1492 commemoration were nowhere more apparent than in the play of the Catalan group Els Joglars called ‘Yo tengo un tío en América’. The committee responsible for the celebrations had selected the group to perform this show in Latin America. The play, mixing pantomime and politics, denounced the destruction caused by the Spanish invaders of 1492. In Spain the commemoration gave rise to much polemic alongside the traditional celebration. There was even a violent demonstration in Seville, where the main activities were being held, in protest at the distorted historical representations of the discovery. Vargas Llosa, one of the participants in a symposium on the fifth centenary, was puzzled by the polemic. ‘Intellectually’, he wrote disapprovingly, ‘this country has given the impression of being burdened by a recondite guilty conscience’ (El País 3 and 14 April 1992). Another potential contradiction of the 1992 celebrations was the instrumentalization of the Olympic Games by the Spanish state and the Catalan government for different purposes. The Catalan President Jordi Pujol saw them as an opportunity to promote Catalonia abroad, so that the ceremonies were surrounded with symbols of Catalanism. For the government, on the other hand, the Games represented an affirmation of the modernity of Spain. The uneasy relationship between the two discourses was temporarily resolved in the opening ceremony when the

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King and Queen entered the stadium to the strains of the Catalan national hymn, ‘Els Segadors’. Thus the conflicting cultural discourses were turned into a celebration of the plurality of identities in Spain (Morgan 2000), while the authority of the Spanish monarchy and state was duly affirmed. A similar ambivalence or contradiction in cultural projection lies in the relationship between mainstream Spanish culture in Castilian and the minority languages and cultures of the periphery. In constitutional terms these are all part of the rich plurality of the culture of Spain, and in each multilingual region the regional language is co-official with Castilian. In practice, however, conservative governments have tended to regard the representation of the periphery as the responsibility of its autonomous governments. The PP does not always include the languages of the periphery in its concept of Spain’s core identity, as we saw in Chapter 5, and so the role abroad of the Cervantes Institute and the other state institutions was almost uniquely to propagate the language of Cervantes, Garcilaso, Lope de Vega, Cela, and so on, authors deeply associated with that identity. This was particularly true of the second Aznar government, when the directors of institutes either shared the views of their government because they had been appointed by it or had to exercise caution in pursuing a multicultural programme. Of course, any language-teaching initiative was limited by the market, in which the demand is overwhelmingly for Castilian Spanish. But for some time the cultural representation of the periphery was extremely limited in the programme of the Cervantes Institute. For their part, the socialist governments of Felipe González had paid lip service to the idea of an inclusive cultural projection, although they probably exercised greater tolerance towards the propagation of the culture of the periphery. It was only under the Zapatero government that the first significant steps were taken towards a cultural policy integrating the periphery, rather than a multicultural laissez-faire policy. Despite the socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs’ reference to the role of the Cervantes Institute as situating ‘our language’ (in the singular) ‘in the pre-eminent place it deserves’ (El País 29 April 2006), the Institute has undertaken a range of initiatives in an attempt to create a broad cultural church embracing the different languages and cultures of Spain. Under its new administration, led by the Galician César Antonio Molina, it joined with the University of Alcalá in 2005 to create the Casa de las Lenguas to promote the linguistic plurality of Spain (Cervantes May/June 2005: 9). And between 2004 and 2005 it signed agreements


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with the cultural and linguistic institutes of Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, and the Balearics to cooperate in the promotion of regional languages and cultures as part of its activities abroad. Of course, these initiatives are not simply the product of a new governmental policy, as the Zapatero administration would have it, but the result also of the relatively recent emergence of cultural institutions in the periphery prepared to invest money in joint activities with the Cervantes Institute to promote their languages and culture. How have these different and sometimes contradictory identities impinged on Spain’s international relations in the new democracy? More particularly, to what extent has Spanish nationalism driven foreign policy? The link between national identity and international relations is more difficult to conceptualize than the relationship between Spanish and peripheral nationalisms in Spain. Foreign policy literature in general has tended to adopt a rational choice perspective; that is, governments act on the basis of national interest defined in geostrategic and economic terms. Defending the national interest on the international stage is not in itself an expression of nationalism. It only becomes nationalist to the extent that it is propelled by an ideological agenda. Foreign policy is of course not autonomous from concepts of national identity and interpretations of the past. How the national interest is determined in international relations can be shaped by nationalism as much as it can be by rational policy considerations (Prizel 1998). Foreign policy, for example, can provide governments and political elites with a means of national mobilization and political cohesion beyond the immediate concerns of the national interest abroad as defined by rational choice. It can also help to shape the values and identity of the state itself. According to the President of the European Parliament, the Spanish socialist Josep Borrell, ‘Foreign policy, more than any other [policy], affects the identity of states, their vision of the world, their interests, and the values they embody and project’ (Borrell 2003: 14). Foreign policy can also be the expression of the nationalism of teleological purpose or mission abroad. Thus nationalism has deeply influenced the foreign policy of the United States since Manifest Destiny; both Wilsonian universalism and the more recent neo-conservative agenda abroad are imbued with the idea that American values, conceived as universal values, should be exported across the globe (Prizel 1998). An example of the retrospective rationalization of nationalist policies abroad is the British establishment’s efforts over several decades in the post-Second World War period to gloss over British racism overseas

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and exploitation of its colonies, as well as its violent repression of anticolonial nationalisms or religious movements in the British Empire, all at the service of a narrative of a benevolent colonialism (Judd 1997). This supposedly benign past forms part of a liturgy of official projections of identity on to the international stage. It is a kind of residual and banal imperialism, expressed through language, symbols, monuments, music, and all the rituals of the Commonwealth and monarchy. Few nations in Western Europe are free of the residue of their colonial past. Nor are they free of enduring expressions on the international stage of a unipolar identity centred on the dominant political elites of the past. Spain is no exception. Spanish foreign policy since democracy has centred on a number of main axes: European integration, relations with the United States, Latin America, and Arab countries, especially Morocco, policy relating to the Mediterranean and national security in an increasingly volatile global context, and finally the awkward issue of Gibraltar. Some critical voices suggest that the foreign policy of democratic governments in Spain has been contradictory or largely reactive, with no clear definition of medium- or long-term objectives or assignation of appropriate resources (Marín 2003; Palacio and Rodrigo 2003). Yet this criticism could be extended to many other states and in important areas of foreign policy Spanish democratic governments have demonstrated reasonably clear objectives, in particular with regard to Spain’s relationship with Europe. Evidently, integration into Europe and the post-Francoist reconfiguration of relations with the USA were the priorities of foreign policy formation in the first few years of democracy. The UCD governments of 1977–81, consumed above all with their domestic agenda of democratic consolidation, took the first steps towards European integration. But it was the socialist government of Felipe González that finally oversaw Spanish incorporation into the then EEC, driven by a pragmatic foreign policy increasingly devoid of the ideological agenda with which the PSOE had surfaced in the new democracy (Morán 1990; Viñas 2004). A shift from a moderately neutralist foreign policy to a more Atlanticist position was consummated early on in the first socialist government with the replacement of Fernando Morán by Francisco Fernández Ordoñez as minister of foreign affairs and the 1986 referendum on continued membership of NATO, which González had made a test of his premiership (Barbé 1999). In this sense, the policies of both the UCD and the socialist governments in the first years of democracy largely fit within the rational choice or realist framework of explanation.


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One policy area, however, where all governments of Spain since democracy have been driven by a nationalist agenda is Gibraltar, that ‘Lilliputian colony at the southern tip of Iberia’, as The Economist (11 August 2002) characterized what was once a cherished symbol of British power. But Spanish administrations would reject the idea that their policies were in any way nationalist. In the eyes of both socialists and conservatives, the Gibraltar phenomenon is a gross anomaly. It is indeed the last remaining colony in Europe and one of sixteen territories across the globe defined by the UN as pending decolonization (Gold 2005: 1–2). Since it was ceded to Britain in 1713 in the Treaty of Utrecht, Spain has never renounced the aspiration of recovering sovereignty over the Rock and in more recent times has repeatedly claimed that the UK occupation of half the isthmus joining the rock to the mainland is illegitimate. The repossession of Gibraltar is a cause that has united political elites since the nineteenth century. For Francoists, the British occupation of Gibraltar was ‘a permanent offence, a continuous grievance, a stain that wounds the honour of the fatherland’ (Areilza and Castiella 1941: 104). In the new democracy, the far right continued to couch its demand for the return of the Rock in the language of a casus belli (Piñar López 1980: 31–62). The irreducible outcome towards which all democratic parties have been striving is the end of British sovereignty over Gibraltar and its eventual reincorporation, in one guise or another, into Spain, whether as a new semi-federal region or as a region with a special dispensation. The strategy of all Spanish governments in different measures has been to combine negotiations with Britain with a policy of pressure on Gibraltarians and an international appeal for the restitution of Gibraltar on legal grounds, mainly through the UN (Ballesteros 1998: 193). Gibraltar is a multilayered problem for both British and Spanish governments, but above all for Spain. As Felipe González put it in 1991, ‘For the British, Gibraltar is a visit to the dentist once a year when we meet to talk about it. For us, it is a stone in the shoe all day long.’³ Yet the strategies that were adopted for its reintegration were always conditioned by wider foreign policy considerations. Even under Franco, politicians had adopted a pragmatic approach in the search for the repossession of Gibraltar, while simultaneously imposing sanctions, such as the border closure of 1969. Earlier plans to barter one of Spain’s possessions in northern Africa, Ceuta, gave way to a policy of offering ³ Financial Times 9 May 1991, quoted in Gold (2005: 133).

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Britain co-sovereignty over Gibraltar or at least its co-administration, with the eventual aim of restoring full sovereignty to Spain. Franco himself had been more inclined to wait for Britain to cede its colony to Spain as part of the wider process of post-war decolonization (Sepúlveda Muñoz 1996: 88–91). Spanish policy towards Gibraltar in the new democracy was hedged by the number of related issues. The claim to Gibraltar raised the question of the legal status of Spain’s possessions on and off the coast of Morocco, in particular the two enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. The Spanish governments, with some justification, insisted that the two issues were fundamentally different. Yet one of the most important principles on which its claim to Gibraltar rested, a principle enshrined in UN policy on decolonization, was that of territorial integrity. Morocco has made sure this parallel features in its demand for the integration of the two enclaves into the Moroccan state (Gold 2000). Another problem is that any sweeteners that might be offered by the Spanish government in an effort to persuade Gibraltarians to abandon British rule could threaten to raise the competency threshold in Spain itself and set off a new spiral of demands for greater autonomy (Ortega, El País 20 May 2002). For the same reason, recognition by Spain that the people of Gibraltar have the right of self-determination would be used by peripheral nationalists in Spain as a precedent for their own demands. Even the idea of co-sovereignty was seized on in 2002 by the then leader of CiU Jordi Pujol, to push for the re-establishment of what he claimed had been co-sovereignty in Catalonia between the Castilian and Aragonese-Catalan regnal states until 1714 (El País 21 May 2002). Policy towards Gibraltar did not differ significantly between the socialist governments and the first administration of Aznar. However, the second term of the Aznar government was marked by a more aggressive language over the Gibraltar issue, in particular over the unilateral referendum organized by the Gibraltar government in November 2002 in response to UK–Spanish bilateral negotiations over sovereignty. Aznar threatened to continue the restrictions on Gibraltar if its inhabitants turned down any future agreement leading to full Spanish sovereignty (ABC 1 May 2002). In the event, over 98 per cent of those polled in the referendum voted to maintain the status quo. With the onset of the war in Iraq, however, Spanish nationalist discourse was toned down in order to accommodate the new British ally in ‘the war on terror’. The Zapatero government of 2004, while it maintained the Spanish demand for the eventual reintegration of Gibraltar into Spain, adopted


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a more conciliatory policy by accepting that talks should involve Gibraltarian representatives in their own right, a position that previous Spanish administrations had not felt able to accept. Zapatero’s Foreign Minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, declared Spain would seek a virtuous circle of cooperation with Gibraltar rather than the zero-sum games he claimed had been played until then (El País 3 August 2004). A tripartite agreement was signed on 18 September 2006, the Córdoba Agreement on the Forum of Dialogue, bringing to an end the state of exception of Gibraltar in its relations with Spain and setting in place mechanisms to lift existing obstacles to cross-border cooperation (Valle Gálvez 2006). But as long as Gibraltarians cling to the inalienability of their right of self-determination and the British government continues to insist on their right to choose, the status of the Rock will remain an intractable problem because the Spanish political elites want Gibraltar back. The demand is less rational than nationalist because Gibraltar is no longer of any great consequence militarily or strategically. Nor does the issue mobilize popular sentiments any longer among the majority of Spanish people. It is only embraced wholeheartedly by the far right, for whom it remains an irredentist cause. The stronger nationalist dimension of the PP government’s policies towards Gibraltar characterized a range of other policy areas as well, in particular those that were adopted after the terrorist attacks in New York of 11 September 2001. The radical change in US global policy in the wake of these events towards a unipolar ‘war on terror’ transformed the variable geometry of international relations post-1989. European powers were presented with a number of options: from a unipolar global policy through alignment with the USA over international security measures to a multipolar, cosmopolitan orientation (Palacio and Rodrigo 2003: 161–3; Cardoso 2005). Although the PP government sought to maintain the multipolar policies that had emerged after the collapse of communism from 1989 onwards, in particular in its relations with Ibero-America, it chose the first option as its dominant model. The reorientation in Spanish policy was consummated in the Azores summit of 2003 between Bush, Blair, and Aznar. The PP government’s new alignment represented a paradigm shift in Spanish foreign policy in the new democracy. Since the transition, governments had sought consensus and tended to enjoy greater or lesser support from at least the opposition party in its foreign policy formation (Pino 2003; Sahagún 2004). Aznar’s shift towards unconditional support for the Bush government’s new global policy

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post-9/11 was in defiance of both the opposition as a whole and public opinion in Spain. It also transformed the terms of Spain’s relations with Europe, Latin America, and the Arab world, effectively undermining the multipolar approach that Aznar had made much of in his investiture speeches inaugurating the PP governments of 1996 and 2000 (Aznar 1996, 2000).⁴ Finally, it had the potential to weaken Spain’s role across a range of foreign policy and international security issues, such as immigration, economic and cultural cooperation, and the defence of human rights (Palacio and Rodrigo 2003). How did the PP justify such a radical reorientation of Spanish foreign policy? As we argued in Chapter 5, the Aznar government’s absolute majority in the 2000 elections allowed it to develop new more assertive policies in a whole range of areas, among them a new nationalist discourse and liturgy. Moreover, Aznar could rely on a relatively quiescent public administration. Institutional constraints on policy-making tend to be weaker in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe because of the continued practice of political patronage. Thus neither the PSOE nor the PP governments during their periods of consolidated power were under any significant pressure to bargain over policy with the networks of state agencies. Although they made efforts to professionalize the civil service, they both dispensed patronage according to tradition. The turnover of top-ranking personnel in public administration is notoriously high when parties win power (Pérez-Díaz 1987; El País 6 April 1997). Furthermore, in order to streamline his new foreign policy shortly after the 2000 electoral victory, Aznar set up a new government body, the Consejo de Política Exterior, in which, as chair, he could exercise a more presidentialist role in the formulation of policy. This meant the partial sidelining of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Grasa Hernández 2001). It is true that the foreign policy project that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Josep Piqué, unveiled in parliament on 26 September 2000, the ‘Plan Estratégico de Acción Exterior’, did not mark a radical break with the foreign policy alignments of the socialist government in the first half of the 1990s. Piqué acknowledged the multipolar nature of the international context since 1989 in which the United States exercised unique power and in which there were multiple areas of ⁴ Similarly, his successor as leader of the PP, Mariano Rajoy, claimed just before the March 2004 elections that the party was committed to multilateralism but at the same time argued that alignment with the USA had to be an indispensable feature of the EU’s foreign policy (Rajoy 2004).


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instability. The six objectives he outlined—to support EU integration and enlargement, strengthen the Iberoamerican community, consolidate Spain’s international presence, support the UN’s peace efforts, promote Spanish business abroad, as well as its language and cultures—could be contained within the framework of the traditional foreign policy of Spanish democracy (Diario de Sesiones del Congreso de los Diputados (DSCD), Comisiones (Asuntos Exteriores), no. 55, 26 September 2000: 1211–25). Yet the ambitiousness of the outcomes that Piqué sought betrayed an underlying voluntarism driven by a nationalist agenda. As the socialist shadow foreign affairs spokesman, Manuel Marín, pointed out in the parliamentary debate over the plan, the minister had defined neither the strategies nor the means with which the government hoped to further Spain’s influence in international relations (DSCD: 1223–5). The 2000 government, committed to balancing the state budget, envisaged no significant injection of new resources into foreign relations. Indeed, Piqué himself acknowledged the contradiction between his foreign policy objectives and the self-imposed budgetary rigour of the government, without offering a solution (DSCD: 1212), The 2001 budget allocated only a 6.8 per cent rise in the operations of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, as compared to a 5.8 per cent rise in the overall budget. The small difference in the two was similar to that allocated by the Socialist government in 1991. Yet the number of personnel in Spain’s international relations operation was roughly the same as that of the early 1980s and in any case way below that of other countries claiming to have a global policy (Sánchez Mateos 2000). Aznar’s realignment with the Bush doctrine at the Azores summit went against the policy agenda outlined by his minister less than two years earlier yet it was also impelled by the same voluntarist ambition for Spain to punch above its weight in the world. The overt justification of this shift flowed from the impact of 9/11, the belief that the most important problem facing Western democracies was now global terrorism. In this Manichean interpretation of a complex and variegated problem, ETA became the Spanish version of a wider phenomenon. Thus Aznar and some, if not all, of his ministers bought into the Bush government’s view that the different manifestations of international terrorism formed an ‘arc of extremism’, a seamless conspiracy against Western democratic values. They could only be defeated by targeting their supposed source, rogue states or the Axis of Evil, and replacing them with democratic governments. In an interview with the American investigative journalist

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Bob Woodward, Bush spoke approvingly of Aznar, alongside his other new allies in the ‘war on terror’: ‘Tony Blair, José María Aznar, John Howard, all share that same zeal for freedom’ (Woodward 2004: 89). In a justification of his support for the Iraq War (which took the form of the despatch of troops after the initial Anglo-American offensive), Aznar stated: ‘we are defending Western democracies, and especially Spanish democracy … Spaniards have to understand that their liberty depends on the extent of Spain’s influence in the world’ (Aznar 2004: 173, 179). What was not made clear was how Iraq was threatening Spanish democracy and Spaniards’ liberty. Aznar’s flight of rhetoric echoed the ‘castles in Spain’ thinking of the American neo-conservatives. Although he was replaced by Ana Palacio in 2002 and demoted to the post of Minister for Science and Technology, Piqué sought to justify the new alignment on the grounds that the intensified globalization of security following 9/11 and the emergence of new world players such as China meant that Spain was likely to remain on a dual periphery—within Europe and in an already peripheral Europe—if it did not readjust its foreign policy priorities (Sahagún 2005: 267). The problem with his argument is that it underestimated the EU as a world actor but more importantly it vastly overestimated the role Spain could play as a minor partner in the new transatlantic axis (Marín 2003). Some of PP’s organic intellectuals later justified Aznar’s realignment with the Bush doctrine on the grounds that as a result Spain had begun to influence global decision-making, but offered no evidence besides the fact that US senators now lunched periodically with the Spanish Ambassador or with delegations from Spain (Bardají and Portero 2004: 2). Beneath the questionable rationalization by both Aznar and Piqué of Spain’s new alignment with the Bush administration may have lain the calculation that it provided the opportunity to strengthen Spain’s leverage in international relations by splitting the EU consensus led by France and Germany and creating a new European axis aligned with the USA made up of Britain, Spain, Poland, and a number of other excommunist countries that were either members of or candidates for the EU. As a result, Spain could emerge from its relative subordination to France and Germany and assert itself as a world player.⁵ Though Aznar ⁵ This strategy is made explicit in Bardají and Portero (2004: 1), both of whom are associated with the foundation set up by Aznar, the FAES. They refer to Spain’s ‘subordinate role, always following the line laid down … by the two great [powers]’ of France and Germany.


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denied any downgrading of Europe, he was effectively encouraging the emergence of a new pro-American bloc within Europe, justifying it by the exigencies of Spanish security and by Spain’s historic transatlantic identity. His investiture speeches of 1996 and 2000 could be said to argue a balance between Spain’s European and transatlantic vocations, a departure from the more Europeanist vision of democratic governments since 1977 (Aznar 1996, 2000). The likely price of this unilateral realignment was high. At the EU level, Spain risked losing support from both Germany and France. Both were vital for Spain across a range of policies, such as the future of structural funds and international cooperation in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Furthermore, if the PP government’s goal was the defeat of terrorism at home as well as abroad, it could hardly alienate the French government, since its support in security operations against ETA was almost certainly more important than any hypothetical improvement in security information from the CIA about Basque terrorism. The new alignment also entailed a considerable loss of influence in the Arab countries with which Spain had enjoyed a close relationship during and since the Franco Dictatorship. This was especially true of the Maghreb, and in particular Morocco, where tensions were high following the clash over the islet of Perejil, off the coast of Morocco, an incident we shall examine shortly. Spanish–Moroccan relations were particularly sensitive because both countries needed to negotiate jointly the two urgent problems of fishing rights and immigration. The new foreign policy configuration was also in defiance of public opinion in Latin America, over which Aznar was seeking to strengthen Spanish economic, cultural, and political influence in the hope of bolstering Spain’s authority in international relations (Ayllón Pino 2005). Opinion polls suggest that the strongly positive image that Latin Americans have of Spain (the most positive among all countries) fell during the Aznar administration, only to be boosted once again when the new PSOE government took power in 2004. According to figures published by the Real Instituto Elcano, the positive image of Spain among Latin Americans had fallen to 59 per cent in 2003, while those who had a negative image had risen to 16 per cent. After the election of a Socialist government, on the other hand, the positive response rose to 68 per cent and the negative response fell to 10 per cent (RIE 2005). Spain’s ambition to turn the Iberoamerican community into a multilateral player in international relations under Spanish leadership, above all through the conferences of heads of state and government

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in Latin America and Iberia (and through the Latin American link, to build a stronger presence in the Pacific), was subordinated to building a closer relationship with the USA (Cardoso 2005), clearly a much more seductive partner in the transatlantic designs of the PP government. However, the most important price of this realignment was the loss of consensus over foreign policy among political parties in Spain and the polarization of Spanish public opinion, which was overwhelmingly against a closer alignment with the USA, in particular after the Azores summit, a belief that would grow even stronger at the start of the war in Iraq. According to public opinion surveys, by the spring of 2003 some 70 per cent of Spaniards believed US world leadership to be undesirable, by far the highest percentage across a range of European countries. By October of the same year, 57 per cent believed that US unilateralism represented a very important threat for Spanish interests, twice as many as the European median. On the contrary, Spaniards overwhelmingly supported an apolar or multipolar foreign policy as opposed to a policy closely aligned with the USA (Lamo de Espinosa and Noya 2004). Could this decision to reorient Spanish foreign policy be contained within a rational choice explanatory framework, representing a calculated move to reassert Spanish influence abroad, despite the likely domestic and international costs? The balance of evidence suggests that the policy was driven not simply by a cost–benefit calculation of its repercussions for the national interest, as Piqué would have it, but also by ideology. One dimension of this ideology has already been mentioned briefly, the neo-conservative belief shared with Bush and Blair on the necessity of liberal or neo-imperial interventionism to strike at the heart of ‘global terrorism’. But another ideological impulse undermining rational policy formation was nationalism. We have only to examine statements by Aznar himself and slogans coined by PP in the aftermath of the Azores summit to appreciate the extent to which the party’s foreign policy was influenced by a traditional concept of the nation’s past. All governments, of course, seek to strengthen their hand internationally, but Aznar’s conceptual framework appeared to derive its inspiration from traditional Spanish nationalism. Thus Spain, once great, now sought to renew its historical vocation for world leadership. Phrases such as ‘bringing Spain out of the corner of history’, making Spain ‘a great among greats’, ‘a global actor’, ‘a decisive country in the conflicts of the world’ littered the speeches and propaganda of PP in 2003 (Marín 2003: 110–15).


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Further evidence that Aznar’s shift in foreign policy derived from a nationalist interpretation of the past can be found in his own account of his eight years in power, published in 2004. Apart from penning an extraordinary eulogy of Bush (extraordinary by any standard), Aznar is almost explicit about the normative, even primordialist dimension of his foreign policy when he insists that although there were pragmatic reasons for good relations with the USA, Spain had a historical vocation to link America with Europe. He thus makes a direct link between foreign policy and national identity as shaped by a particular interpretation of the past. ‘[T]he Atlantic projection of Spanish politics and culture … forms part of our identity, of our nature … the American continent—all of the American continent—has to be incorporated into the Atlantic world. That task has been one of the great contributions of Spain to Europe and to the West, and must continue to form part of its projection’ (Aznar 2004: 195). In the post-2001 foreign policy of the Aznar government, the ‘transatlantic link’ had two dimensions. The first was Spain’s new alignment with the Bush administration and the government’s self-appointed role as promoter of the Bush doctrine on international terrorism within Europe alongside British, Italian, and Polish administrations. The second was Spain’s adoption of a hegemonic role in Latin America in which it could exert a supposedly historic leadership towards the same global policy (Arenal 2005: 64–8). Relations with Latin America had been high on the list of priorities of all governments in Spain since democracy. Socialist efforts to push for the institutionalization of an Iberoamerican community had culminated in the first summit of Spanish, Latin American, and Portuguese heads of state in Guadalajara in 1991. The initiative had lost some steam by the mid-1990s owing to the difficulty of reconciling Spain’s integration into the EU with its relations with Latin America, as well as the varying degree of interest shown by Latin American countries (Arenal 1995). The first Aznar administration sought to renew the Iberoamerican project by exercising a new hegemonic, multilateral policy towards Latin American governments. With its shift towards alignment with the Bush administration, on the other hand, Aznar moved towards a more unilateral, interventionist policy in Latin America to promote what he viewed as a priority in global politics, the war on terror. The result was to weaken the Iberoamerican community, and this undermined Aznar’s ambition to use Spain’s historic links with Latin America to

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increase its international leverage. Latin American criticism of this policy is implicit, yet unambiguous, in the ex-President of Brazil’s report of 2005, drawn up at the behest of the Iberoamerican summit of two years earlier (Cardoso 2005: 52). The ambition of the Aznar government to exercise leadership over Latin America derives, like many other of its policies, from an implicit nationalist reading of the past. In this narrative, Spanish America owes its identity largely to Spain, which forged its dominant religion, language, and culture; that is, Spain brought civilization to the continent. Uncomfortable details about the destruction of American civilizations by European disease and the Spanish sword helped by its indigenous allies are omitted from the narrative. Since then, according to the nationalist texts, Spain has contributed to Latin America’s development by bringing modernity and, after the independence of most of the region, by sending its immigrants to populate the new cities in the vast continent. Spain therefore has a historic right of diplomatic authority over Latin America as a whole. This amounts to a form of banal imperialism, shorn of formal or outward symbols of dominance but impregnated with paternalism. There are some echoes here of the early twentieth-century right-wing book Ramiro de Maeztu’s Defensa de la Hispanidad. It goes without saying that the narrative is not shared by most Latin Americans (e.g. Fuentes 1992). The evocation of transatlantic ties contains strong echoes of Francoism. Indeed, Angel Viñas identifies several continuities between Francoist and PP foreign policies, in particular in its dependent relationship with the United States (Viñas 2004). The far right (Fuerza Nueva, Frente Nacional, and Falange Española) asserts an even more radical position over Spain’s ‘vocation’, or, as the Francoist rhetoric would have it, Spain’s destiny. Its true identity lies with the old empire, with a ‘spiritual communion’ with Spanish America. Although it is quiet about closer links with the USA, the Spanish far right is adamant in its opposition to the further integration of Spain into social democratic Europe (Núñez Seixas 2004). The grandstanding ambition underlying the new foreign policy of the PP hardly squared with Spain’s resources and potential authority at international level (Sahagún 2005: 269). Furthermore, as Marín asserted, the ‘big bang’ of the PP’s policy switch was not accompanied by any new allocation of resources to the instruments of foreign policy in Spain or abroad, and the PP government became simply the ‘messenger’ and the conservative media the ‘supporters’ of American global policy under


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Bush (Marín 2003: 116). In short, there was a disproportion between the long-term aspirations informing the new realignment and the likely benefits that might be derived from its implementation. Like Blair, Aznar appeared to gain no payback from his uncompromising support for Bush’s policy on Iraq. On the contrary, this support may well have been one of the rationalizations of the jihadists responsible for the murderous bombings in Madrid on 11 March 2004, and it formed part of the complex process whereby the PP government lost the elections three days later (although it is inevitably difficult to determine the extent to which the PP government’s policy towards the war in Iraq, as opposed to its handling of the aftermath of the atrocity, influenced the result of the elections). After the Madrid atrocity, PP spokesmen, backed by El Mundo and the Episcopal COPE radio station, continued to insinuate a link between the jihadists and ETA, even though no solid evidence had emerged that would suggest any connection between the two. The PP’s campaign over a supposed cover-up was unlikely to chime with most of the electorate so it could only be interpreted as part of the conservatives’ effort to obscure the connection between their support for Bush’s policy over Iraq and terrorist action, as well as to justify their insistence in the immediate aftermath of the bombing that ETA had been the probable perpetrator of the atrocity, despite evidence that emerged on the same day that an Islamist cell was responsible (El País and El Mundo September and October 2006 passim). The ideological dimension of Aznar’s pro-American foreign policy is reflected in his statements about the relationship between the USA and Europe. Without close alignment to the USA, Europe is doomed. ‘The only possible Europe is the Atlantic Europe … it is the real Europe. … Any European idea that seeks to debilitate or break the Atlantic alliance is, among other things, a suicide’ (Aznar 2004: 195). It is true that the USA was key to post-war reconstruction of Europe and that without NATO peace-keeping in the post-communist Eastern Europe would have been problematic because of the relative ineffectiveness of the EU’s Security and Defence Policy and the Western European Union. Especially after 2001, however, stressing Europe’s Atlantic link amounted to an implicit backing of the US doctrine of international intervention under the neo-conservative administration, rather than support for the postmodern normative goals of European foreign policy as a whole. As opposed to the liberal or neo-imperial interventionism of the Bush administration, the EU was pushing for a more multilateral and diplomatic approach to crisis management (EU 2003; Kagan 2003).

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Beyond this ‘Atlantic identity’, restated perhaps as a rationalization of support for the US administration, Aznar stressed the Christian roots of Europe. Together with his Polish counterpart, he argued that there should be a reference to the Christian origins of Europe in the European Constitution. The price of ignoring Christian values, he went on, is ‘political hedonism’ and the decline of society (Aznar 2004: 191). This simplistic reading of the European heritage tends to be part of the baggage of Catholic conservative political ideology. In the Spanish case it also has a strong nationalist facet because by emphasizing the supposed Christian heritage of modern Europe Aznar is drawing attention to the historical importance of Spain in the European concert of nations. In a somewhat distorted reading of the past, he claims that the ‘values on which the [European] continent are based are, in large measure, the result of the Spanish contribution’ (Aznar 1998: 175). Spanish conservative literature stresses the historic role of Spain as defender of the faith in Europe, first as the evictor of the Muslim invaders from its southern shores (Real Academia 1997: 319–20), and then as guardian of Catholic orthodoxy during the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Spanish conservatism thus sees itself as the main gatekeeper of religious and moral values within an increasingly secular Europe. It is also a custodian of the supposedly rational, authentic Europe of nation-states against the irrational romantic Europe of peoples, which predictably embraces not just Central and Eastern European nationalisms but Basque and Catalan nationalisms. According to this ahistorical perspective typical of conservative thinking, the nation-state is the rational locus of human relations, within which different identities and cultures can coexist (Orella 2001). Moreover, Aznar’s model of the structure of the EU is based on this traditional nationalist ideology. It is in a sense a mirror-image of his position on the architecture of the Spanish state. As we have argued, the PP has taken on board a multilateral concept of governance but seeks to retain the exclusive powers of the state in as many policy areas as possible. This is particularly true of foreign relations. Unlike the post-2004 PSOE government, the PP administration excluded regional governments from any negotiations or representation at EU level except at the purely consultative Committee of the Regions (Sahagún 2005: 270–5). During international debates leading to the drafting of the EU Constitution, Aznar argued against any federal tendency or any form of subsidiarity that might enshrine or compartmentalize rights and competencies at different levels of governance in Europe. He claimed


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that these tendencies have the potential first to undermine national identity by fomenting regional nationalism and second to disaggregate common interests. ‘As a Spaniard’, he said in the speech to the French Institute of International Relations in 2000, ‘I believe that, rather than a geometric division of competencies, we must deepen the notion of a shared exercise of competencies’ (Aznar 2000). Aznar’s emphasis on the sharing of competencies, by no standards a sharing between equals, reveals his preference for a more centralist model because it would allow greater control of regional governance by the state. His favoured model of subsidiarity is thus similar at national and European levels. The EU is the Europe of nation-states that have pooled sovereignty in a limited range of policy areas in the interests of greater competition and dynamism. Any devolution to national as well as sub-national levels should not undermine this principle and to this effect the EU and the state in turn should ensure their control over any devolved competences. Aznar’s notion of subsidiarity is thus concerned less with bringing government as close as possible to the citizen and more with ensuring the continued power of the nation-state to define policy at national and international levels in a continued hierarchy of competence (Aznar 2000). This runs very much against the principle agreed in 2001 by the EU Commission of multilevel governance as a ‘networking arrangement’. Although Aznar’s arguments are expressed with the exquisite delicacy of political correctness, they derive from an enduring, much-revised nationalism based on a primordial concept of nation. This residual nationalism surfaced and was on display during the ‘war’ over the islet of Perejil or Leila, as it is called in Morocco. On 11 July 2002, Moroccan gendarmes, followed later by soldiers, occupied this tiny island inhabited by goats a few hundred yards off the Moroccan coast. Spain and Morocco both claimed ownership of the island, yet could not rely on any historical precedents or treaties to justify ownership. Perejil/Leila could be considered to have been part of the Spanish Protectorate by omission. When Morocco achieved independence in 1956, the demarcation of Spanish possessions in North Africa did not include the island. Logically, therefore, it should have been considered Moroccan terrain (El País 17 July 2002). Moreover, the 1986 draft of the municipal statute for nearby Spanish Ceuta had included the island as part of its territory but this was dropped with the agreement of PP when the statute was formalized in 1994 in order not to upset Morocco. In any case, official Spanish maps since 1956 implied that the island was part of Moroccan territory (El País 18 July

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and 8 August 2002). Thus the Spanish military response that followed Moroccan occupation of the island had a fragile basis in international law, while the Moroccan action could hardly be described as diplomatic. What, then, of the reasons for the Moroccan action? The Moroccan government rather implausibly claimed that the occupation was part of its campaign against drug trafficking and illegal immigration. Moroccan observers, while repeating these claims, argue that from 2000 onwards the Aznar administration had undermined the stability of HispanoMoroccan relations by its aggressive policy towards Morocco on a range of issues (Sehimi 2003; Naciri 2004). The motives were almost certainly more complex. Relations between both governments had become fraught in the preceding year and a half. A diplomatic stand-off had already taken place between the two countries in 2001 over the Spanish government’s immigration policies. But a number of other issues had exacerbated the pending crisis, such as the failure of the EU–Moroccan negotiations over fishing rights and Spain’s support for a UN resolution calling for a referendum over the status of Western Sahara. A more indirect motive was the recent agreement between Britain and Spain for co-sovereignty over Gibraltar, a deal that impinged on the Moroccan claim to Ceuta and Melilla (Hernando de Larramendi 2003; Montabes et al. 2004). In other words, the Moroccan action could be interpreted as a hazardous way of bringing a number of grievances against the Aznar government to a head in the hope of gaining concessions. The Aznar government’s response to the occupation of the island was to send elite Spanish troops backed by the air force and the navy to repossess what was claimed to be Spanish territory. The operation, nicknamed ‘Romero-Sierra’, cost almost a million euros (El Mundo 22 January 2003). Though his initiative was later backed by all parties except IU, and the Basque PNV, Aznar’s parliamentary mandate did not extend to the use of force, merely the restoration of legality. While he subsequently gave his support for the action, Zapatero expressed his preference for a diplomatic solution (El País 17 July 2002, 27 February 2003). According to opinion polls, however, the military operation was backed by over three-quarters of Spaniards and it gave rise to displays of jingoism that had been largely absent from Spanish politics since democracy.⁶ The PP President of Castilla y León called on ⁶ An electronic poll in El País (21 July) showed 78 per cent of Spaniards to be in favour of Spanish intervention, while ABC (27 July), echoing the findings of the CIS, put the number at 75 per cent and El Mundo (21 July) at 91 per cent.


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the support of all autonomies for the military action on the ground that it was in defence of the interests of Spain (ABC 18 July). The dispute reawakened traditional hostility towards the Moroccan Other that had been so entrenched in Spanish culture since the ‘Reconquest’, expressed in nursery rhymes and cautionary aphorisms (Sahagún 2002). An EFE photo of legionnaires beneath the Spanish flag at the top of the island evoked Joe Rosenthal’s famous picture of the marines pushing up an American flag on Iwo Jima in the Second World War and it was given much prominence in the Spanish media. The successful retaking of the island was followed by military parades and decorations, as if it had been a full-scale war. Eighteen months later, a march past of the Special Operations unit responsible for the action took place in the presence of Aznar, two of his ministers, a number of presidents of autonomous and provincial governments and civil and military authorities, after which 63 of the 600 soldiers of the unit were decorated with the prestigious Cross of Military or Naval Merit, in addition to 9 other soldiers named in a ministerial decree (El Mundo 26 February 2004). For some diehard Spanish nationalists, the failure of the political opposition to give its full support to the military action smacked of anti-Spanishness (anti-españolismo). One influential journalist accused the left, and in particular Felipe González, of being the internal enemy (Alonso de los Ríos, ABC 21 July 2002). Surprisingly however, not all the right-wing media expressed support for the action. A year later, the maverick El Mundo (11 July 2003) evoked the ‘surrealist spectacle of two armadas taking up positions over a gob of a mountain spat on the sea’, while the only real victims of the dispute, it argued, were the family that had tended goats on the island and the Moroccan fishermen who had collected shellfish on its shores. Even the deeply conservative ABC questioned Spanish ownership of Perejil (17 July 2002). The EU failed to come to the support of one of its members, partly because the affair was regarded as a colonial matter and partly because France was keen not to upset its former colony (Monar 2002). And in an interview in GQ two years later, the then American Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had been called on to broker a deal to end the hostilities, referred to the object in dispute as ‘a stupid little island’ (El Mundo 6 May 2004). The triumph of Spanish nationalism in the Perejil/Leila ‘war’ was indeed a meagre one. One controversial policy area of international relations in which it could be argued that both the conservative and the socialist governments

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have largely followed liberal precepts is immigration. The number of legal (non-EU) immigrants into Spain trebled under Aznar’s two periods of office until it was over one and a half million. Between 2004 and 2006, the number increased to some two million under the PSOE government. Figures for the number of illegal immigrants, on the other hand, have been hotly disputed. Both the PP and the PSOE governments carried out mass amnesties allowing the legalization of hundreds of thousands of unregistered immigrants. The PP claimed that under the post-2004 PSOE administration the number of illegal immigrants rose sharply to reach some 1.6 million by mid-2006. However, using municipal registers, probably the most accurate source of information, the National Institute of Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE) calculated in July 2006 that the figure was in fact just over one million (El País 26 July 2006; Fernández Cordón, El País 23 August 2006). Nevertheless, the rise in the foreign population in Spain is unprecedented in Europe. Whereas in the 1980s Spain had among the lowest percentage of foreigners of its total population in the ranks of Western Europe countries, by 1 January 2006 there were 3.88 million foreigners resident in Spain, over 8.5 per cent of its total population, fewer than in Germany but many more than in the UK and more than in France (INE 2006).⁷ Like other countries in Western Europe, Spain needs more workers to fill gaps in the labour market and it needs younger people to compensate for the ageing population and to pay for future pensions. From a net exporter of labour, Spain had become a net importer in the new democracy from the mid-1980s onwards. The benefits that immigrants brought to the economy are manifest in figures published by the Caixa Catalunya, which claimed that the average annual growth of GDP in Spain of 2.60 per cent between 1995 and 2005 was thanks entirely to the contribution of immigrants, since without them GDP would have fallen to −0.64 (La Vanguardia 29 August 2006). But the supply of immigrants soon outstripped the demand, pressurizing the government increasingly to step up restrictions in line with measures taken elsewhere in Europe. The main source of immigration has been Latin America, historically the favourite destination of Spanish emigrants in the past. Rising numbers of Latin Americans arrived as the USA stepped up its visa and border controls, leading to what one commentator has described as the ‘Latinamericanization’ of Spain (Gratius 2005). The Latin American population in Spain on 1 January 2006, according to ⁷ Calculations for earlier periods come from Delgado Godoy (2002).


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INE, numbered 1.39 million, almost half of whom came from Ecuador and Colombia, while the African population numbered 686,319, well over half of whom were Moroccan (INE 2006). The increasing pressure of both legal and illegal immigration into the EU and the numerous attendant problems of security controls, social cohesion, and human rights gave rise to repeated initiatives at EU level from the Single Act onwards. More recently the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, the Schengen Agreement, and the Tampere summit of 1999 attempted to balance increasingly tough controls with directives to ensure ‘liberty, security, and justice’. Yet the EU appeared to be more concerned about security than the integration of immigrants (ZapataBarrero 2001), and Spain rapidly became the southern gate of Fortress Europe. Until 2000, Spanish legislation over immigration centred on the 1985 Organic Law of Rights and Liberties of Foreigners in Spain (Ley Orgánica de Derechos y Libertades de los Extranjeros en España), otherwise known as the Ley de Extranjería. This was qualified in 1994 by the Socialist government’s introduction of quotas that allocated labour niches to immigrants. According to one study, the selection and categorization of immigrants to fill these niches was shaped increasingly by stereotypes and latent racism (Agrela 2002). As a minority government, the first PP administration had sought the consensus of other parties, as in many other policy areas, in order to bring the law up to date and incorporate the new EU directives. A revised law was agreed in parliament almost unanimously in 1999. However, during the electoral campaign of 2000 and after, the PP and the conservative media couched the issue in a way that appeared to exploit fears among some sections of the public about illegal immigration. This propaganda encouraged popular blurring of the distinction between legal and illegal immigration and promoted the association of illegal immigration with crime (Agrela 2002). In his investiture speech of 2000, Aznar argued for the beneficial effects of immigration while stressing the need to step up measures to deter illegal immigration. He proposed creating a new organization within the government to carry out his new policy, the Delegación de Gobierno para la Inmigración, and passed yet another law to control immigration, and in all of this he claimed to seek the consensus of other parties for what he defined as a política de estado (see ). The PP government’s 2000 law on immigration, passed after it had won an absolute majority, put into place highly restrictive measures for policing the borders and dealing with illegal immigrants, as well as significant cuts in legal immigrants’

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rights. As with much of its foreign policy, the PP thus began its new legislature by polarizing party debate, despite Aznar’s claim that he was seeking consensus (Campuzano 2001). It would be wrong, however, to assume that there exists a large constituency of fear about the effects on immigration on Spain in the new century. According to a number of surveys in the late 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, including those of Eurobarómetro and the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, public opinion in Spain had been largely in favour of immigration and happy to coexist with people from different races, religions, and nationalities. Indeed, among the fifteen EU countries in 2000, Spain had rated as the most tolerant towards immigrants. Only 10.6 per cent accepted the statement that immigration threatened their culture and identity, compared with 31 per cent in Britain and over 25 per cent in Italy, France, and Germany (González Enríquez 2004: 3–4). A large majority in 2005 favoured legal immigrants having the right to vote in municipal elections and over half believed they should be able to vote in the general elections. Furthermore, a high percentage (86 per cent) said that it would not matter to them much or not at all if their children shared classes with those of immigrants (El País 28 October, 30 and 31 December 2005). What these figures fail to show, however, is the rise of racism and discrimination among a growing minority in a country whose experience of mass immigration is relatively recent. The sources of this racism and xenophobia, such as urban dislocation, unemployment, and political demagoguery, are no different in Spain from in the rest of Europe. Another question is which immigrants Spanish people tend to feel more confident about or comfortable with and here the surveys tend to show less sympathy towards Africans and in particular Moroccans and more towards Europeans and Latin Americans (González Enríquez 2004: 5). This tendency is likely to have been exacerbated by the jihadist atrocities in Madrid in 2004 and the publicity given to the intensification during the summer of 2006 of desperate attempts by Moroccan and sub-Saharan Africans to enter Europe illegally through the Canary Islands and the Spanish enclaves in the North African coast. A poll conducted in May 2006, clearly designed to link the whole issue of immigration with this wave of would-be immigrants from Africa, found that almost 70 per cent of respondents felt that the number of immigrants resident in Spain was excessive (Sondeo Sigma Dos, El Mundo 29 May 2006). A survey of September 2006 showed that 37.7 per cent of respondents regarded immigration as the most


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urgent problem in Spain (CIS barómetro). These new figures suggested a shift in perceptions about immigration among a wider number of people but they do not undermine significantly the findings of earlier polls showing a relatively high degree of receptiveness among Spaniards towards immigrants in general. In fact, a study revealed that Spain was the country with the lowest number of violent attacks against immigrants in the EU. Only 2 per cent of the immigrants living in Spain had been victims of xenophobic crimes in 2006, a fairly low percentage compared to the 10 per cent average of the EU and 20 per cent in Belgium (El Mundo 6 February 2007). The PP was and still is meticulous in its avoidance of statements that might be seized on as an example of ethnic discrimination in immigration policies. Yet in government it adopted a lateral policy over immigration. Increasing the immigrant population was necessary for the Spanish economy, the PP government argued, but its application of immigration policies demonstrated an ethnic and cultural defensiveness. Thus it favoured Latin American over African or Eastern European immigration. Under Aznar, the children and grandchildren of Spanish immigrants to Latin America were given the right to claim Spanish nationality. And in an initiative nicknamed ‘Operación Ecuador’, a number of agreements were signed with the government of Ecuador in 2001 to give special facilities to illegal Ecuadorean immigrants in Spain to reapply for visas and work permits.⁸ Against the argument that this was an ethnic filter (López García, El País 16 February 2005), conservatives would maintain that favouring Latin American immigration made for greater social cohesion and responded therefore to social rather than ethnic concerns. Thus the balance sheet of the PP governments’ policies on immigration suggests that they were guided more by economic liberalism than by issues of national identity, however much they exploited social fears about immigration for electoral purposes (indeed, some of the PP’s most prominent members, like its parliamentary spokesman on foreign affairs, have played on traditional anti-Muslim feeling (Arístegui 2005)). Economic liberalism, however, does not mean that immigration policy in Spain has been in any way progressive. Like the socialist governments before them, the PP administrations willingly joined other countries of the core Europe in the construction of a security cordon around Europe ⁸ For further details see Ecuadoran governmental documents: .

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to control the flow of immigration when it did not suit their interests, the main criterion for which was the supply of cheap labour to fill jobs no longer attractive to Spaniards. The socialist party has been equally explicit about the benefits of immigration within the parameters agreed at EU and international levels. But it has displayed different priorities in government. More concerned than the PP with extending the rights of immigrants, it is also seeking to strengthen reciprocal agreements with African governments in order to facilitate the repatriation of illegal immigrants and boost sustainable development in their countries of origin, in keeping with EU global policies (Moratinos 2006). It also sought in 2005 to regularize the situation of many illegal immigrants by extending an amnesty to almost a quarter of a million of them, a measure criticized by the interior ministers of G5. The government pointed out the economic advantages this regularization would bring, in particular a boost of some 1.5 billion euros to social security payments (BBC News 25 May 2006). The PSOE government was caught off guard by the crisis of the summer of 2006. The publicity given to the desperate plight of thousands of would-be immigrants as they landed from ramshackle boats on the beaches of the Canary Islands (and as the bodies of those among them who had drowned washed on to the beaches), forced the government to change its political discourse. The PP and the conservative media painted a picture of incompetence and laxity leading to a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ (El Mundo 29 August 2006). Under pressure from within parliament and worried about the effect on public opinion, the Zapatero government sought the help of other EU countries and promised to expel unregistered immigrants. And it began negotiations with other parties for a State Pact on Immigration that would further tighten controls over illegal immigration, in particular from Africa. The policies adopted by the Zapatero government over immigration and international relations, it could be argued, represent a renewal of consensus-driven policy-making, since the first years of the democracy defined as the políticas de Estado. That certainly was the declared aspiration of the socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs, Miguel Ángel Moratinos. In an article published shortly after the PSOE won the elections of March 2004 replete with indirect criticism of the PP’s ‘rupture of our traditional model of foreign policy’, he argued for reconfiguring foreign policy along traditional democratic lines in tune with resources, on the one hand, and public opinion, on the other. The withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq was one of the first measures announced


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by the Zapatero government. The new policy meant establishing a more multilateral approach to global politics, which in turn meant a ‘more balanced’ relationship with the USA, and a greater emphasis on relations of equality rather than paternalism with Latin American countries (Moratinos 2004). Unlike for the PP, there is no residue here of an old ideological or nationalist agenda. Socialist policies are also of course influenced by concepts of national identity shaped by a particular reading of the past, as we argued in Chapter 4. But they are informed by an aspiration towards further modernization and greater integration in Europe, an ambition that combines both an evolving social democratic ideology and a particular model of the national interest. Less driven than PP by a nationalist concern to defend and promote an imagined historical community, the socialists have been more inclined towards expediency and rational choice in their foreign policy. In this sense they have made greater use of soft power or public diplomacy, while the PP government in its second administration was prone to muscular diplomacy and the occasional exercise of hard power.⁹ Thus, for example, Zapatero insisted in a speech to the UN that terrorism could only be dealt with successfully if security measures were combined with drainingthe-swamp policies that addressed the political and economic injustices around which terrorists found social support (El Mundo 22 September 2004). He also launched the rather wishful initiative of an international ‘Alliance of Civilizations’, which seeks to promote more understanding among different cultures and religions through the development of greater institutional links, educational reform, and new technology (El País 16 February 2006). Although it was clearly designed to counter Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations the statement was welcomed, at least diplomatically, by Condoleezza Rice. But it was also condemned as a ‘stupidity’ by Aznar, who had bought into the American neo-conservative view of the growing menace of Islam (El Mundo 23 September 2006). In one area, the national policies of the PP and PSOE have been reversed. While the PP is a strong although not always consistent partisan of neo-liberalism, the Zapatero government has defended economic protectionism on the grounds of national interest. Its position is part of a common pattern that cuts across neo-liberal policies and pressure. Economic nationalism in the first part of the twentieth century ⁹ For more on the uses of public diplomacy in Spain see Noya (2006).

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took various forms, such as autarky or state intervention in the economy undertaken as a means of meeting the challenge of rival economic powers. In the new globalized world, it manifests itself in the efforts of liberal states to distort the terms of trade in their national favour or to protect national capital, jobs, and strategic interests from foreign take-overs. An example of this latter endeavour is the ex-French Prime Minister de Villepin’s so-called ‘economic patriotism’. In the best traditions of Gaullism, he led the state to intervene in the economy in an effort to ensure the French ownership of big companies based in France at a time of increasing capital mobility in the liberal global market. Thus he attempted unsuccessfully to block Mittal’s bid for Arcelor, the big French employer; similarly he brokered a merger of the state-controlled Gaz de France with the French private water and power company Suez, with the purpose of blocking a bid by the Italian ENEL to purchase Suez (Economist 1 July 2006). For its part, the Zapatero government conducted a rearguard effort in 2006 to protect the private Spanish energy company Endesa from a take-over bid by the German company E.ON by politically backing a counter-offer from another Spanish company, Gas Natural. The reasons it gave to justify this preference were not spurious. There has been much controversy in Europe over the control of national power supplies, pitting free-market principles backed by the EU Commission against national economic interests, whose main defender has been France. In the row over Endesa, Zapatero joined the controversy by stating that ‘markets are important, but, for the Executive, citizens [are] more’; that is, he accepted the rules of the international game, but these had to be balanced against ‘a reasonable national interest’. This was defined by Borrell as the need to protect a strategic national good (El Mundo 22 February and 9 April 2006). In turn, the neo-liberal camp in Europe led by Berlusconi and backed by Britain and the Netherlands (with the external support of a number of US banks) accused the Spanish government of economic nationalism (Financial Times 22 April 2006). How did the socialist party position itself within the new economic liberal orthodoxy? Like socialists in power elsewhere it took the route of contemporary social democracy, accepting liberalization and privatization while seeking to mitigate their effects on society through social policy and the management of economic growth. At the end of 2005, the PSOE government abandoned the state’s ‘golden share’ over previously nationalized industries such as Endesa. On the other hand, it approved a decree in February 2006 strengthening the power of the


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National Energy Commission to veto or condition take-over bids in the energy sector. That is, it continued to reserve for the state an important role in regulating the market. In an inversion of rhetoric, this vestige of state interventionism was criticized by the leader of the PP Mariano Rajoy as a ‘Falangist tic’, in reference to the Spanish Fascist party’s predilection for economic autarky in the 1930s (El Mundo 30 March 2006). However, the Socialist policy was impelled by the need not simply to protect citizens (read customers), as Zapatero argued, but also to strengthen the ability of Spanish companies to meet the competition of foreign and multinational corporations. Thus government ministers have talked about promoting domestic mergers in order to create ‘national champions’ better able to compete on the global stage (BBC News 3 February 2006). Like many of their counterparts on the left and right in Europe, and indeed like the PP government under Aznar, Socialist governments have sought to promote Spanish business in the rapidly globalizing world market. Along a spectrum of economic policy choices this form of intervention is closer to the ‘economic patriotism’ of de Villepin than it is to the defence of the national interest as Zapatero defined it; that is, the interests of citizens. While the foreign policy and cultural representations of Spain have demonstrated at times a residue of traditional Spanish nationalism, the international projection of democratic Spain has been a largely rational and successful enterprise, for all the deficits in planning and funding. Spain has installed itself as a medium power among European nations, well integrated in the EU and exerting political and cultural influence above all in Latin America and the Mediterranean. Through European integration, globalization, and tourism, and partly through the efforts of Spain’s own agencies of cultural transmission, popular stereotypes of the Spanish have been mostly replaced by nuanced perceptions of a vibrant multicultural and multilinguistic community.

8 Spain Reinvented If there is a problem of nation and identity in Spain it has been exacerbated by political elites and their associated institutions and organic intellectuals. Paradoxically, those who have most vociferously questioned whether Spain still exists as a nation are the conservatives of the Popular Party and their supporters in the media. Judging by the opinion polls over the past ten years, the vast majority of people who live in Spain are less troubled by such issues. The concern among many of the political parties to define or set in stone the national character of country or region goes against the more complex identities of the people that inhabit them, identities that are not static and can shift according to the context. This flux is characteristic of a wider process of cultural change in Europe and beyond. What is at issue is not whether Spain exists or not or whether it is falling apart. Instead it is the traditional ways of seeing Spain from both the centre and the periphery that are being challenged. Or, as the socialist President of Andalusia, Manuel Chaves, argued, ‘Spain is not breaking up, what is breaking up is a particular way of conceiving Spain’ (El País 3 May 2006). Spain of course is perceived as a nation among the vast majority of its citizens, including most people in the periphery. If by nation we understand a self-conscious community with an underlying common civic culture, compatible with a diversity of cultural expressions, and with a political project shared by a majority of its citizens based on democratic, multicultural, and self-governing principles, then it is difficult to deny its existence. Yet the contemporary Spanish nation has been largely reinvented in the new democracy, though it has roots in older traditions, cultures, and memories. Equally, Spanish national identity is the product not just of late modernization but also of the new democracy. The concept of a nation of nations, on the other hand, is questionable, in that nation implies undivided sovereignty. The widespread use of the term is a measure of the strength of political and cultural narratives of historical diversity. But the problem is not so much one of definition

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as one of recognition. The polysemy of names self-attributed by elites to their regions, such as nation, nationality, and national reality, is a search for acknowledgement of a historical status that would bring with it constitutional privileges. Such terminology does not get round the fact that the Constitution is unambiguous on the most crucial issue, that there is a Spanish nation-state and all regions, however defined, are subordinate to that nation-state (Álvarez Junco 2005). Moreover, opinion polls largely confirm a consciousness among the vast majority of citizens of being Spanish to different degrees. That is, neither the rise of neo-regionalisms with a quasi-nationalist discourse nor the continued strength of regional nationalisms has attenuated the duality of identities (Núñez Seixas 2005d: 75). Still, a minority in the periphery do not identify with Spain, despite a common recent past, because of the strength of nationalist narratives. These nationalist discourses, whether of the periphery or of the exclusive Spanish variety, share basic primordialist definitions of nation and region. And their narratives of the past do not stand up particularly well to the scrutiny of historical analysis. The separate identities or the unicultural common identity, which they claim are based on primordial roots and relationships, are in fact nineteenth-century rationalizations and only partly correspond to contemporary society. Language or ethnicity has rarely been and is hardly ever now the basis of national difference. Spanish nationalism itself failed to construct a new democratic narrative that might provide a common political project and a sense of a shared culture because Spanish nationalists of the left and right have been too scared of or too complicit with Francoism or simply too wrapped up in their narrative of modernization and Europeanization to confront the past. The control of regional governments by Catalan and Basque nationalists since the transition to democracy has led, in most of the cases, not to the creation of exclusive identities, but to a sort of dual patriotism or allegiance that combines different measures of emotional attachment to both Spain and the region. Similar shortcomings can be detected in the efforts of Spanish nationalists to impose a predominant Spanish identity through state agencies. The phenomenon of dual patriotism is widespread across the country and not exclusive to those regions with alternative nationalist movements. Both cases show the limitations in a global world of the traditional processes of the nationalization of the masses from above via state (or regional) institutions, such as the educational system and government-controlled media. Informal agencies, such as the family, the group of friends, alternative media, popular

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culture, and sport activities, also have a crucial role to play when it comes to the creation of national identity. The recent reinvention of the toro bravo as a national symbol is telling not just of the problems official Spanish nationalism faced to detach itself from Francoism at a symbolic level, but also of the importance of popular culture as a nation-building factor. Nevertheless, emotional attachment to the Spanish nation is still highly influenced by the weight of state institutions in the regions. The interest of local elites in fostering Spanish identity is related to the actual power the state retains in the autonomous communities and the incentives will diminish if the former becomes residual. Dual identities are not necessarily a permanent feature. The democratic system has provided a framework in which both Spanish and regional identities can be promoted alike, yet the creation of regional sentiments seems to have been more effective at the level of the autonomous communities. Surveys show that the youngest generation, that of those born after the death of Franco, has the least sense of belonging to Spain and the highest level of identification with the region (González Blasco 2006). Efforts were made in the transition to democracy to recognize ethnocultural and linguistic diversity within Spain. The need formally to acknowledge this diversity had been made acute by its repression under the Franco dictatorship. Although there are different degrees of diversity within Spain, the three regions of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia stand out as distinctive from the rest on cultural grounds. Yet political demands across these three regions for a reconfiguration of their relationship with the Spanish state vary enormously, from independence to greater levels of autonomy. Other regions have languages distinct from Castilian, as well as historical precedents for autonomy, such as medieval fueros. The result is a range of difference, from regions with a recently created historical memory and Spanish as the only local language at one end to those with ethno-cultural and linguistic identities that had achieved autonomy during the Second Republic and the Civil War at the other. The solution negotiated in the Constitution only distinguished Catalonia, Euskadi, and Galicia from the rest in the short term and it created an asymmetry between these same historic communities by giving the Basque Country and Navarra a special tax deal for political reasons. The café para todos or symmetrical logic of the new system of autonomy, extended to all but these two regions, sparked off a catch-up process of competition for further devolution and autonomous rights that in

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turn led to the radicalization of demands in Catalonia and the Basque Country. The new autonomous institutions and the social, cultural, and business networks they fostered created a self-generating (or pathdependent) competitive dynamic that hindered the development of the cooperative semi-federalism that was supposed to characterize relations among the autonomies and between them and the state. The weak representation of the autonomies at state level means that the institutional mechanisms linking the state and the autonomies do not exactly encourage co-responsibility. The Senate represents above all the provinces (and amongst these it over-represents the less populated provinces largely of central Spain) whilst the Senators designed by the communities are in a minority. Thus the regions have no strong institutional stake in governance at state level (unlike the Länder via the Bundesrat in Germany). On the contrary, they seek to satisfy their clients and voters by extracting the greatest possible rights and resources from central government. The result has been a progressive hollowing-out of the state that if taken further might undermine social and national cohesion. How then can the uncomfortable, restless ménage à trois in Spain— that is, the State, the ‘historic autonomies’, and the rest of the regions, some of which are aspiring to the status of historic—be rehoused? It would be facile to talk about problems and solutions. Indeed, rather than a problem, plurality in Spain could be seen as an advantage; it is the source of innovation, cultural vitality, internal competition (The Economist 24 June 2004). Yet it is a political problem in that this plurality has not been resolved at an institutional level. It has no simple solution in that it is a complex, multilayered problem, embracing state structures, competencies, identities, and cultures. There are no quick fixes or perhaps no fixes at all. The variety of proposed solutions to the supposed crisis is as great as in the period after Spain’s loss of the last fragments of its old empire in 1898. These ‘remedies’ stretch across a wide spectrum, from separation or divorce (with or without alimony) to even greater decentralization (or the regionalization of the system based on the principle of subsidiarity). Solutions, of course, have to be politically, even if remotely, feasible rather than ideal to be taken seriously in political discourse. In other words, they need to consider achievable scenarios. Two such scenarios fall on either side of the fundamental divide between rationalizing the existing model largely within the parameters of the Constitution and reconfiguring it through a reform of the Constitution. One model, which can be termed the de la Fuente

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model after its main proponent, the economist Ángel de la Fuente, argues the need to achieve a balance between equality and autonomy. Accordingly, the state remains as national gatekeeper of a minimum standard of universal benefits and thus retains control over the basic design of the present tax system, as well as social security and the regional solidarity fund. But within this framework and on the basis of the existing constitution, regional governments can be given greater freedom to determine the basket of goods and services in their regions by raising or lowering taxes. De la Fuente also calls for a trade-off between equity and efficiency that would make public investment in poorer regions more proficient and allow richer regions to enjoy the benefits of investment in infrastructure. To tackle the comparative grievance fostered by the special foral regimes of the Basque Country and Navarra, the de la Fuente model proposes a new method of calculating their contribution to the central kitty, thereby eroding the differential between the tax paid by them and that paid by the rest of the country. Finally, it advocates fiscal co-responsibility, achievable through greater coordination between the state and autonomous tax agencies (de la Fuente 2005). According to supporters of such a reform, this would mean locating representatives of the exchequer within the administration of the autonomous communities (Segarra and Fajes, El País 20 May 2005). The second scenario, which we shall call the Requejo model after the Catalan political science professor who has published several key works on the subject, proposes a plurinational asymmetrical form of federalism. Its proponents accept that symmetrical federation is unrealizable in Spain. Indeed, federalism as such is pie in the sky because of the inherent asymmetry of identities and expectations (quite apart from the determined opposition of conservatives to any such solution). Even in Germany today, where there is no such diversity of aspirations and cultures, the symmetry of West Germany has given way to the asymmetry of the new united Germany, in which the poorer Länder are unable to match the richer. According to this federalizing model, any new architecture of the state must reflect the plurinational nature of Spain, but within that recognition the interests of national minorities need to be protected, which the 1978 Constitution has manifestly failed to do. Hence the relationship between Catalonia, Euskadi, and Galicia and the state needs to be reconfigured as a confederal system different from the regional model of other regions (even those now claiming to be nations or nationalities), extending the recognition the Constitution

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gave to their special status by describing them as nationalities and awarding them a fast track towards autonomy. This new relationship could take the form of new fiscal and economic arrangements, the further devolution of competencies and the expression of national difference at institutional and symbolic levels, such as the highly emotive issue of separate representation in sport (Requejo 1999, 2001, 2005).¹ The two models highlight the difficulty of balancing the aspirations of the centre and the disparate regions. The first would not satisfy the goals of the nationalist political elites of the periphery, least of all the Basques, while the second would be shot down by the conservative Spanish nationalists (and indeed by many in the PSOE), for whom the Constitution and the present architecture of the state are untouchable. The proposed reforms of the Zapatero government are a timid step in the direction of transforming the state framework but they are unlikely to resolve the impasse. The President made clear that the bottom line for any further devolution was the retention by the state of a range of exclusive competences, which amount to 52 per cent of public expenditure at present. Beyond that he dangled a whole string of tempting morsels of self-government before the regions: a more decentralized justice system, more regional control over airports and immigration, and greater participation in the representation of Spain in the EU. At the same time, Zapatero relaunched a process of consultation over the reform of the Senate. The upper chamber is a hybrid institution whose roots lie in the old Senate of the pre-1931 monarchy and the Council of the Francoist Movement that replaced it in 1939. It does not entirely fulfil the role envisaged for it in Article 69 of the Constitution as a chamber of territorial representation (Pradera, El País 18 November 2005). Aznar’s minority government of 1996–2000 had set up a committee to discuss reform of the Senate, under pressure no doubt from his regional nationalist parliamentary partners, only to disband it two years later. Zapatero’s electoral programme of 2004 promised a very limited reform of the Constitution, one of whose features would be a greater representation of the regions in the Senate. To achieve this under Article 67, Zapatero would need to win a three-fifths majority in both chambers or two-thirds in the Congress, a difficult undertaking given the opposition of the conservatives to any reform of the Senate. ¹ Requejo (2001) appears to favour this model, though he lists three other scenarios without taking sides.

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The Zapatero government also introduced an important innovation in its first year in office in 2004 by instituting a regular conference of the presidents of the autonomies. This represented an attempt to begin integrating the regional governments into national decision-making; that is, to establish an informal practice of co-responsibility. This annual conference is similar to the meetings of the Länder governments with the federal government outside the Bundesrat or Switzerland’s conference of federal governments. It is a higher instance at a political level of the Sectoral Conferences that had been established many years previously to discuss planning across the regions in specific areas of activity, as well as the Consejo de Política Fiscal y Financiera, which since 1980 has attempted to coordinate the financial activities of the regional governments with the state (Aja 2005; Consejo de Estado 2006). The introduction of a co-decision-making institution on the lines of the federal system might encourage the transformation of competitive into cooperative semi-federalism. Yet the role of this conference is purely consultative and although it might have considerable political bearing on the government (as, for example, in its decision in April 2006 to transfer 4,500 million euros of central funds to the regions to compensate for the deficit in health funding) it has no institutional status. Neither the regional statutes renegotiated between 2005 and 2007 during the so-called ‘second transition’² nor the creation of new organs of consultation at state level are likely to reconcile the nationalist aspirations of the different political elites and their clients or bring to an end the dynamic of competitive semi-federalism. A greater degree of federalization, rather than federalism, might begin to address the issue of regional competition and comparative grievance by encouraging the pooling of responsibility, but such a process is blocked by the balance of political power. More importantly, what stand in the way of any substantial reform of the architecture of the state (including municipal government, the most neglected sphere of governance yet potentially the closest to the citizen) are institutional and cultural inertias, encoded identities and mentalities, both Spanish and regional. As for the question of nation and identity, the different claims to nationhood embrace different interpretations of the past, in particular the recent fractured past. Confronting history is crucial because it is a means of leaving behind old narratives that reinforce a sense of separateness or a sense of undifferentiated unity. The plurality of identity and diversity ² For details see Chapter 3.

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of culture in contemporary Spain need to be located in history, not embedded in imagined narratives of the past. Least of all can they rest on amnesia. Without engaging with the past, we cannot make sense of these identities and cultures, and without that understanding, the relationships between them cannot easily be negotiated. This is a task that can be tackled at many different levels, starting with historians. As Borja de Riquer argues, ‘Really little has been done by historians themselves to promote a new concept of democratic citizenship that starts from a critical knowledge of the past and sees the existence of diverse identities as something normal and compatible’ (El Pais 1 December 2005). Nevertheless, like elsewhere, in Spain nation and identity are constantly evolving and undergoing reconfigurations in a rapidly globalizing, multicultural world. A new generation of Hispano-Muslims and Hispano-Americans, among others, is forging new perceptions of Spain. Interdependence is increasingly replacing independence in a global process that is sweeping aside cultural, ethnic, political, and economic frontiers (Foix, La Vanguardia 3 October 2005). The spread of new multinational and multiethnic identities is gradually undermining old perennialist narratives, weakening nation and national identity and strengthening the potential of cosmopolitanism. Yet this is only one scenario because these identities and cultures also represent a challenge to majority cultural norms and might encourage a backlash, as is evident in France and the UK, where there are signs of popular confusion between the duties of citizenship and loyalty to the symbols of nationalism (The Economist 21 October 2006). The reinvention of different national identities in Spain since the return of democracy illustrates their malleable nature. The widespread acceptance of triple identities, which encompass identification with the region, Spain, and Europe, shows that plurality is a reality. Yet that flexibility is limited. Neither Spanish nor regional nationalisms have been able, or willing, to dissociate themselves completely from their ethnic components. Language, religion, or the myth of a common origin and history persist as defining elements of the nation. And this persistence of ethnicity elements is a serious burden for integrating immigrants into the national community, no matter how much this discourse is sweetened with the postmodern language of multiculturalism in the global village. An entirely optimistic scenario for the future of Spain would be one of a postmodern, postnational state in which identities based

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Spain Reinvented

on language, ethnicity, culture, and history are less important than citizenship. This would be in tune with the process taking place at least in Western Europe, a sort of second cycle of ‘secularization’, this time from nationhood to citizenship rather than from religion to laicism. This is largely because Europeanization and globalization are undermining national sovereignties, while geographical mobility and immigration are creating new layers of identity. Thus ‘shared citizenships’ may replace ‘shared sovereignties’ as the locus of the relationship between states and regions (Jorba 2004). Constitutional patriotism is more than a pious hope or pure wishful thinking on the part of proponents of this ‘secularization’. What cannot be denied is that Spain will continue to reinvent itself.

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Index Acebes, Ángel 16 n., 145, 145 n. Alfonsine Monarchists 36 Alfonso XII, King of Spain 22, 28 Almodóvar, Pedro 166 Alianza Popular 45–6, 49 Almirall, Valentí 80 Álvarez González-Posada, Melquíades 31 Álvarez del Manzano, José María 169 Anarchists 27 Andalusia 13, 14, 60, 61 n., 66, 67, 75, 144, 156, 196 Aragon 19, 31, 58 n., 59, 61 n., 71, 75, 104, 111, 112, 113, 140, 174 Aralar 154 Arana Goiri, Sabino 9, 128, 150 Arias-Salgado y Montalvo, Rafael 53 army 23, 24, 26, 34, 37, 38, 45, 47, 53, 56, 85–7, 98 n., 114, 120–1, 122, 124–5, 163, 186–7 Asturias 61 n. Athletic de Bilbao 145 Arzalluz Antia, Xabier 51, 141, 150, 151 Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory (ARMH) 86 Association of Victims of Terrorism 123 autonomous communities 3, 14, 15, 55, 66, 73, 74, 77–9, 91, 96, 134–5, 139, 150, 153, 156–60, 198, 200 statutes 21, 35–6, 58, 61–3, 66–8, 78, 121, 123, 202 Azaña, Manuel 31, 32, 35, 84, 108, 108 n. Aznar López, José María 2, 32, 62, 83–4, 99, 100, 103 n., 108–110, 112, 118, 122–4, 144 and foreign policy 169, 170, 174–87, 178 n., 179–185, 193, 195 Baleares 66, 67, 111, 112, 157, 158, 171 Bandrés Molet, Juan María 54 n., 70

Basque Country 112, 118, 124, 127, 130, 132, 141, 143, 153, 157, 166, 171, 198–9 and identity 117, 129, 147, 153 n., 160 and language 55, 128, 132, 139, 140, 149, 150 and peace process 63, 123 and statute of autonomy see Gernika Statute Basque government 15, 16, 63–4, 76, 139, 143 n., 144, 149 Basque nationalism 131–2, 141, 142, 145, 149, 152–3, 168 and the Ibarretxe Plan 54 n., 57, 63–4, 79, 93, 112, 154, 155, 158 Barcelona Football Club 145 Berlusconi, Silvio 194 Barrera i Costa, Heribert 48 n., 151 Belgium 191 Black Legend 33, 165, 168 Blair, Tony 175, 178, 180, 183 Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG) 156 Boadella, Albert 149 Borrell Fontelles, Josep 171, 194 Bourbons 21, 22, 148 Britain 5, 27, 29, 31, 43, 94, 152, 157, 162, 173–4, 178, 186, 188, 190, 194, 203 burro català 146 Bush, George Walker 175, 177–8, 180–1, 183 Cadena de Ondas Populares de España (COPE) 122, 145, 183 Cádiz cortes 8, 19 Calvo Sotelo, José 36 Cambó i Batlle, Francesc 112, 128, 131 Canada 5, 152, 154 Canary Islands 13, 14, 113, 144, 157, 190, 192 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio 22, 23, 27, 108 Cantabria 5, 14, 74

234 Carlists 21–2, 26–7, 32, 35, 36–7, 103 n., 129, 131, 138, 140, 141n. Casanova, Rafael 148 Castells i Oliveres, Antoni 152 n. casticismo 30, 209 Castile 13, 23, 30, 31, 41, 75, 102, 127, 140, 157 Castilian language see Spanish language Castilla-La Mancha 4, 69, 77, 156 Castilla-León 68 Castillo Vera, Pilar del 100 Catalan language 42, 55, 61, 107, 130, 132, 135–7, 149, 150, 152 Catalan nationalism 112, 138, 149, 150, 154, 155 origins of 60, 127–8, 138, 140 during the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera 130, 145 during the Second Republic and Civil War 130, 143 n. under Francoism 143 n. Catalan regionalism 80 Catalanization 130, 135, 137, 143, 151 Catalonia 131, 135, 137, 139, 142, 148, 150, 156–9, 166, 169, 171 and identity 107, 134, 135 n., 152–3, 155, 159–60 and immigration 107, 132, 150–1 and independence 154, 156, 174, 198 and statute of autonomy 35, 111, 113, 148 Catalan government 35, 65, 66, 68, 76, 80, 94, 109, 130, 136–8, 148, 169, Catholic Church 18, 22, 24, 26, 39, 41, 42, 43, 98n., 101, 122–4, 132, 133 Catholicism 13, 18, 29, 31, 32, 36, 37, 89, 184 Cebrián, Juan Luis 68 Cela, Camilo José 53, 170 Celts 140 Ceuta 65, 119, 173, 174, 185, 186 Chaves González, Manuel 67, 70, 196 Cantabria 5, 14, 74 Cervantes Institute 163, 170, 171 cinema 163, 164, 165–7 Ciutadans-Partit de la Ciutadania 149 Colombia 189

Index Comuneros 19 Constitution of 1812 8 Constitution of 1931 35, 45, 52, 61 Constitution of 1978 vi, 15, 19, 35, 65, 71, 82, 90–3, 96, 106, 124, 142, 157, 200 drafting of 45–7, 50–1, 54 constitutional patriotism 89–96, 114–19, 204 Convergència i Unió 15, 66, 94, 107, 109–10, 123–4, 135–6, 144, 151–2, 154, 156, 174 Costa Martínez, Joaquín 31, 32, 108 Declaration of Barcelona 156 Declaration of Santillana 79 Disaster of 1898 27, 28, 31, 32 Duran i Lleida, Antoni 152 education 68, 101, 127, 130, 136, 138, 139, 150, 163 during Restoration 24, 27, 28, 31 under the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera 34 Ecuador 189, 191 Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) 65, 76, 89, 112, 130, 135, 143, 151, 154, 156 españolismo see Spanish nationalism Estatut see Catalonia Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) 16 n., 63, 64, 84, 98, 123, 133, 142, 143, 147, 179, 183 origins 42, 63, 133 and peace process 123 images of 147, 177 ETA político-militar (ETA-pm) 133 Euskadiko Ezkerra (EE) 133 Euskera see Basque Country and language Eusko Alkartasuna 154 European Economic Community (EEC) 43, 82, 83, 172 European Union (EU) 12, 162, 167, 189, 195 Spanish integration 11, 12, 98, 181 and the autonomies 62, 63, 64, 70, 201 and PSOE 94, 95, 192, 194 and PP 120, 177–9, 183–5, 187 Extremadura 4, 5, 13, 72, 156 Ezker Batua (EB) 79, 155

Index Falange 36, 38, 39, 182 federalism 51, 60, 67, 68, 72, 80, 109, 111–12, 154, 158–9, 200 confederalism 51, 164 semi-federalism 199, 202 and the Left 56, 75–8, 81, 92–3, 95 Fernando, king of Aragon 102 Felipe V, king of Spain 148 flags 55, 67, 123, 134, 142, 144, 146, 147 flamenco 40, 145 Foro de Babel 149 Fraga Iribarne, Manuel 46, 51, 52, 56, 63, 69, 98, 99, 105 France 20, 21, 27, 29, 31, 94, 161, 188, 190, 194, 198, 203 and Basque Country 158, 179 and PP 178, 178 n., 179, 187 Franco, Francisco 18, 36, 39, 40, 125, 167, 173–4, 198 dictatorship of 11, 38, 44, 60, 84, 86–87, 96, 106, 108, 110, 124–5, 132, 162–3, 179 Francoism 21, 37 n., 38, 45, 83, 165 and repression 86, 87 n., 109, 141 Frente Nacional 182 Fuente, Ángel de la 199–200 Fuente, Licinio de la 50, 55 fueros 20, 35, 38, 58n., 59, 112, 128, 143, 198 Fuerza Nueva 182 GAL 142 Galicia 75, 76, 91, 118, 157, 161, 198 Galician nationalism 2, 84, 127 n., 134, 144, 156 Generalitat see Catalan government Generation of 1898 3, 30, 32–3, 37, 38, 40, 82–3 Generation of 1914 2, 31, 83, 84 Gernika Statute 63–4, 154, 200 Germany 27, 28, 29, 37, 43, 44, 99, 178–9, 188, 190, 199, 200 Gibraltar 172–5, 186 globalization vi, 3, 6, 11–12, 60, 89–90, 95, 96, 98, 117–18, 121, 163, 178, 195, 204 González Márquez, Felipe 70, 73, 82, 85, 170, 172–3, 187 Great Britain see Britain guerristas 77–8, 95

235 Habermas, Jürgen 89–90, 95, 96, 106, 115–16 Habsburgs 19, 21 Herri Batasuna 16, 16 n., 63, 65, 142, 148, 154, 155 Hispanismo 32–3 historic communities 14, 53, 58, 60–1, 76, 109, 112, 198 see also Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia historical memory 14, 46, 86, 124–5, 138, 143, 198 Howard, John 178 Hungary 5, 52 hymns and anthems 67, 134, 142, 147, 179 Ibarretxe, Juan José 63, 143 n., 155, 159 see also Basque nationalism Iberians 104, 140 identity v, 2, 6, 11–13, 16, 18, 61, 68, 90, 92, 94, 96, 202–4 Francoist 1–2, 46 regional 4, 46, 60, 67–8, 81, 127–60 see also Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalism Spanish 3–5, 7, 9–10, 13, 17–18, 23, 26–7, 30, 34, 43, 46, 60, 72, 75, 78, 80, 83, 88, 98–122, 196–8 and international projection 93, 161–84 dual and nested identities 4, 152–3, 159–60, 198 immigration 3, 4, 5, 11, 64, 107, 108–9, 151, 188, 189, 190–1, 204 during PP government 176, 179, 186, 189, 191–2 during PSOE government 192, 201 industrialization see modernization Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds (ICV) 65, 94, 135, 152, 154 Iraq 174, 178, 180, 183, 192 Isabel I, queen of Castile 102 Isabel II, queen of Spain 19 Italy 27, 37, 43, 44, 162, 190 Izquierda Unida (IU) 60, 71 n., 76, 79, 86, 87, 89, 93, 95, 153, 155, 186 see also Ezker Batua and Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds

236 Jews 101, 103, 161 Jiménez Losantos, Federico 122 Joglars, Els 169 John Paul II, Pope 169 Juderías, Julián 32, 33, 33 n. Juan Carlos I, king of Spain 88, 89, 143 n., 159–60 Laín Entralgo, Pedro 39 Latin America 164, 165 n., 166, 169, 172, 176, 179, 180–2, 188, 191, 195 Lerroux, Alejandro 130 Letamendia Belzunce, Francisco 54, 57 liberals 8, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27, 28, 42, 84, 161 Lizarra agreement 63 Llamazares Trigo, Gaspar 80, 93 Lliga Anticolonialista 146 Lliga Regionalista 112, 128, 131 Lluch Martín, Ernest 137 López Aguilar, Juan Fernando 88 López Álvarez, Patxi 76 López Rodó, Laureano 55 Madariaga, Salvador de 84 Madrid region 5, 14, 168 Major, John 6 Maragall i Mira, Pasqual 15, 66, 76, 80, 168 Maragall i Gorina, Joan 80 Marías, Julián 53 Marín González, Manuel 177, 182 Mas i Gavarró, Artur 66 mass media 120, 152, 160, 164, 167, 197 in the Basque Country 134, 139 in Catalonia 137, 138, 148 conservative 109, 122, 125, 132, 147–8, 182, 187, 189, 192, 196 Matas Palou, Jaume 111 Maura y Montaner, Antonio 32 Mena Aguado, Lieutenant General 114 Meinecke, Friedrich 53 Melilla 65, 119, 174, 186 Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino 21, 32, 33, 101 Mendi Fornies, José 79 Mill, John Stuart 42 Moderados 17, 19 Modernists 6–7 modernization 16, 127, 133, 166, 168, 196, 197

Index in 19th and early 20th centuries 17–19, 23, 27, 31–2, 37, 128 under Franco 43, 44, 46, 132 and PSOE 70, 82–5, 90 and PP 106, 112 Molina, César Antonio 170 monuments 19, 28, 172 Moratinos Cuyaubé, Miguel Ángel 175, 192 Morocco 26, 29, 33, 161, 172, 174, 179, 185–6 see also Perejil Murcia 69, 157 Muslims 102, 103, 118, 119, 140 n., 152, 184, 191 myth 6, 7, 167, 168 historical 8, 10, 19, 103, 165 traditionalist 21, 36, 101, 165 republican 36 Francoist 39, 41 since 1978 68, 83, 87–93, 96, 97, 130, 143, 203 in Catalonia and the Basque Country 120, 138, 140, 140 n., 141, 143, 151, 159 nation, concept of 6–8, 12 see also nationalism, Basque, Catalan, Galician and Spanish nationalism National-Catholicism 10, 34, 39–41, 43, 102, 132 nationalism 101, 137, 147 civic 10, 101 concept and theories of 1, 2, 6–8, 117, 171 economic 193–4 ethnic 91, 116–17 regional 9–11, 31, 32, 33, 34, 72, 73, 75, 77, 92, 105, 106, 107–11, 124, 130, 134–5, 147, 185 see also Basque, Catalan, Galician and Spanish nationalism nationalities 13–14, 16, 35, 43, 45, 51–4, 60, 61, 72, 75, 107, 158, 160, 190, 200, 201 nationalization 7, 197 negative nationalization 34 of the Basque Country 127, 138–9, 142–3, 152 of Catalonia 127, 135, 137–8, 152, 152 n.,

Index of Spain 9–10, 23–6, 28, 34, 147 see also weak nationalization thesis Navarra 14, 54, 58–9, 64, 65, 67, 112, 128, 131, 140, 157, 158, 198, 201, Netherlands 5, 194 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 167, 172, 183 Opus Dei technocrats 50 Ortega y Gasset, José 31, 32, 35, 38, 50n., 81, 82, 84, 101, 108 Osborne bull 156 Palacio, Ana 178 Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) 134, 76, 128–9, 133–4, 138–9, 142, 144, 148, 150–1, 154–5, 158, 186 in the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera 34 in the Second Republic 35, 131 during Francoism 42, 133 and 1978 Constitution 49, 51, 58, 59, 142 see also Arana, Basque nationalism, Ibarretxe, Ibarretxe Plan, Partido Comunista de España (PCE) 42, 47, 52, 53, 56, 72, 73, 75, 76, 85, 133, 134 Partido Popular (PP) 15, 22, 69, 86, 87, 94, 98, 101, 109, 144, 164 foreign policy 175–6, 178–80, 182–3, 184, 188–9 ideology and discourse 32, 93, 101, 107–8, 109, 110–11, 114–8, 120, 131–2, 125 and immigration 187–92, 193, 195 and regional autonomy 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 110–11, 112–13, 113 n., 149, 154, 170, 184 see also Alianza Popular, Aznar, constitutional patriotism Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) 61, 74, 84–5, 86–9, 91, 94, 111, 123, 142, 201 pre-1977 31, 35 42 47 73 133 and foreign policy 95, 172, 192 and ideology and discourse 75–6, 134, 193–4 and immigration 151, 178, 192

237 and regional autonomy 57–8, 60, 63, 67, 69, 72, 75–9, 93–4, 109, 113, 184 Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC) 42, 82, 110, 133 patriotism 9, 18, 24, 28, 31, 90, 93, 106, 112, 116, 120, 130, 194–5 concept of 7–8, 90 n., dual patriotism 26, 129, 129 n., 197 see also constitutional patriotism Peninsular War 8, 19, 21, 28, 36 Perejil, Islet of 179, 185, 187 peripheral nationalism see regional nationalism Pi y Margall, Francisco 80, 88 Piqué Camps, Josep 67, 110, 111, 113, 115, 118–9, 176–8, 180 Poland 178 Portugal 44, 157 Powell, Colin 187 Primo de Rivera, General Miguel 29 dictatorship of 11, 34, 43, 130 Pujol i Soley , Jordi 42, 133, 135, 149, 157, 169, 174 Quebec 154 Rajoy Brey, Mariano 66, 69, 112, 121, 176 n., 195 Real Madrid C. F. 145 regeneracionistas 30–2, 34 religion v, 6, 12, 18, 45, 47, 100, 103–5, 128, 142, 161, 182, 203, 204 see also Catholicism regionalism 60, 67, 74, 75, 80, 98, 111, 112, 114, 121 Renan, Ernest 7, 81 Requejo, Ferran 200, 201 n. Republicans 20, 20 n., 27, 34, 37, 84, 86–7, 88–9, 130, 131, 161 Restoration 18, 19, 22–4, 27–32, 128 Rice, Condoleezza 193 Ridruejo, Dionisio 39 Rioja, La 13, 68, 74 Riquer i Permanyer, Borja de 23 n., 25 n., 136 n., 203 Roca i Junyent, Miquel 49 Rodríguez Ibarra, Juan Carlos 78, 94 n., Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis 69, 90 n., 123–4, 143 n., 156, 186, 193–5, 201

238 Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis (cont.) government of 15, 62–3, 66, 69, 88, 121–5, 159, 170, 171, 174–5, 186, 192–4, 201–2 Romans 28, 140 Rouco Varela, Cardinal-Archbishop of Madrid 101, 122 Russian Federation 5 Salaverría e Ipenza, José María 33, 130 Salisbury, Lord 29 San Gil, María 115, 117–119 Sánchez Mazas, Rafael 130 Scotland 6, 137, 154, 156 n. Sevilla, Jordi 66, 151 Silva Muñoz, Federico 51 Social Catholics 32, 36 Solé Tura, Jordi 48, 49, 56, 60, 73–4, 82 n., 88 Sota, Ramón de la 129 Soviet Union 52 Spanish-American War 10, 26 Spanish Civil War (1936–9) 10, 18, 36, 37 n., 38, 39, 41, 84–6, 99, 101, 103 n., 109, 125, 131, 140–1, 143, 148, 165, 167, 169, 198 Spanish Empire 10, 18, 27, 29, 38, 106, 182, 199 Spanish language 30, 33, 38, 55, 61, 106–7, 109, 113, 116, 118, 133, 135–6, 148–50, 170, 198 Spanish nationalism 1, 5, 7, 11, 17, 25 n., 20, 43, 124, 130, 143, 197–8 conservative 19, 33, 46, 96, 98, 106, 115–21, 161, 169, 180 conservative-traditionalist 21–3 and foreign policy 171, 180, 187, 195 and Francoism 37, 43 left-wing 91–6, 157 liberal 19–21 liberal-progressive 20–1, 31 as neo-regionalism 75, 96 and primorriverismo 34 since 1978 46, 53, 91–3 traditionalist 21–22 see also constitutional patriotism Sternberger, Dolf 89 Suárez González, Adolfo 47–8

Index Subirats, Joan 70 Switzerland 202 Thatcher, Margaret 6 terrorism Basque nationalist 84, 98, 123, 147, 179 see also Euskadi Ta Askatasuna Islamic 177, 180–1, 193 state 142 see also GAL Tierno Galván, Enrique 45–6 televisión 22, 86, 122, 134, 137, 139, 140, 147, 164, 167, 180 see also mass media Tovar, Antonio 39 traditionalists see Carlists transition to democracy 46–8, 73, 79, 83–5, 87–9, 91, 96, 131–4, 141, 144, 148, 166–7, 198 Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de 30, 32, 108 Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD) 48–50, 53, 55, 57–9, 61, 73, 89, 98 n., 99, 172 United Kingdom (UK) see Britain United Nations (UN) 86, 173, 186, 193 United States of America (USA) 27, 39, 95, 147, 164, 172, 175, 176 n., 178, 180–3, 188, 193 Uriarte, Edurne 100, 106 n., 110, 115–17, 119 Valencia 41, 134, 157–8 identity 26, 75, 113, 129 n. kingdom 112–13 language 61, 118 autonomous community 14, 75, 111, 158 statute 60–1, 63, 66–7, 112–13, 121 Vargas Llosa, Mario 169 Vatican 39, 41, 164 Vázquez, Francisco 78 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel 168 Vidal, César 103 Vidal Quadras, Aleix 99, 105, 106 n., 107, 109, 113, 115, 120

Index Villepin, Dominique de 194–5 Viñas, Ángel 182 Visigoths 2, 102, 140 Wales 6 War of Independence see Peninsular War weak nationalization thesis 9, 23–5, 43 Western Sahara 186

239 Woodward, Bob 178 Xirinacs i Damians, Lluís Maria 48 n., 54 n. Zapatero see Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis Zaplana Hernández Soro, Eduardo 110, 112, 121

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