Abstract
A recent and excellent history of Europe in the twentieth century describes Spain (along with Britain and France) as a “nation-state.”1 Here the author is still using a widely-held and conventional view that compares these states to the unwieldy Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Czarist empires that existed before 1918, clearly multinational states. In the early twenty-first century, however, it is by no means clear that Spain is a nation-state, and today the question is particularly controversial. In a 2008 speech, former Prime Minister José-Maria Aznar attacked the ruling socialist party as “the unbelieving Left which is combating the idea of the Spanish nation, and has invented false nations without any other objective than to undermine the real one.”2 Aznar was attacking the nationalist or regionalist claims of the autonomous communities of Catalonia, Galicia, the Basque Country, Valencia, and Andalusia, in which live 55 percent of Spain’s 46 million population.3
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Notes
Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization. A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7.
Jaime Vicens Vives, Approaches to the History of Spain, Joan Connelly Ullman, trans. and ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1967), 50–4.
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Quoted in José Alvarez-Junco, The Emergence of Mass Politics in Spain: Populist Demagoguery and Republican Culture, 1890–1910 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2002), 67.
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For an extensive discussion of Cambó and the idea of Catalan “imperialism”, see Enric Ucelay-da Cal, El Imperialismo Catalan. Prat de la Riba, Cambó, D’Ors y la conquista moral de España (Barcelona: Edhasa, 2003).
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Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York, Evanston and London: Harper Colophon Books, 1963), 93.
Daniele Conversi, The Basques, the Catalans and Spain. Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilisation (London: Hurst & Company, 1997), 127.
Daniele Conversi, “The Smooth Transition: Spain’s 1978 Constitution and the Nationalities Question,” National Identities 4 (2002): 3, 224.
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Luisa Calero Vaquera, “The Influence of the ‘Foro Babel’ on Catalan Society.” South Bank European Papers 5 (2000): 4.
Guibernau, Catalan Nationalism, 125; see also Xosé Nuñez Seixas. “Proyectos Federales des los Nacionalismos Subestatales o el Discreto Encanto de la Asmetría,” in Manuel Chust Calero, Federalismo y cuestion federal en España (Castellón de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I, 2004) and “Declaracion de Barcelona,” www.filosofia.org/his/h1998bar.htm (June 1, 2010).
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© 2012 Julius W. Friend
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Friend, J.W. (2012). Catalonia. In: Stateless Nations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008206_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008206_4
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