Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula

Competing and Conflicting Identities

Clare Mar-Molinero, Angel Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nationalism has recently been the focus of considerable interest, but relatively little is known about nation-building and competing identities in Spain and Portugal. In examining the roots of Iberian nationalism, and the conflicts and tensions which have come to the fore in the twentieth century, this timely collection offers a broad interdisciplinary base and socio-historical context through which to understand the region's nationalist challenges. Topics include: - how nationalism is constructed and used as a tool by political groups;- how language is used as a nationalist emblem; and- how cultural representations of nationalism manifest themselves at both a popular level and at the level of elites.This book will provide a welcome addition to Iberian studies and invaluable insights for students and specialists alike.

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The Myths and Realities of Nation-Building in the Iberian Peninsula

Angel Smith and Clare Mar-Molinero

Introduction

The objectives of this chapter are twofold. First, we aim to provide an overview of the development of nationalist movements in Spain and Portugal in order to set the contributions which follow within a broader context. Second, we intend to cover some areas in rather greater depth: in particular the rise of peripheral nationalisms in Spain from the late nineteenth century, and the causes behind the very different nationalist identities and conflicts which developed in Spain and Portugal.

These two countries offer multiple insights into the development of Modern nationalism. Since the Middle Ages they have formed the two major states in the Iberian Peninsula. Spain is by far the largest of these states, with over four times Portugal’s population and over five times its area, though with respect to economic development, social structures and political movements many historical similarities can be discerned. However, in the Modern era the terms of the nationalist debate have been enormously different. Between 1580 and 1640 they were united in a single state, and only after revolt in Portugal did they go their own separate ways. This has determined a certain asymmetry in the state nationalist discourses which developed in the nineteenth century: while reunification with Portugal would occasionally surface in Spanish political debate, fear of Spanish imperialism would be a defining characteristic of Portuguese national identity. More surprisingly at first sight, while from the end of the nineteenth century Spanish nationalism would find itself contested within Spain itself by a number of alternative nationalist discourses, the Portuguese claim to nationhood has, at least within the country itself, remained virtually unchallenged.

In order to understand these contradictions more fully one has to look back to the forging of these states in the Middle Ages and early Modern era. Both Spain and Portugal underwent a process of early state-formation, their territories carved from the advance of the Christian armies southwards at the expense of the Peninsula’s Moorish inhabitants. From 1249 Portuguese territorial boundaries were almost identical to her present-day frontiers, while the Kingdom of Spain was established through the alliance between the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1479, and completed with the incorporation of Navarre into Castile in 1512. In both cases a single territory was defined and a single language came to predominate. In Portugal, by the early sixteenth century, Portuguese had evolved from its language of origin, Galician, into a clearly separate tongue, and was spoken throughout almost the whole of the country (Graça Feijó 1989: 38–9; Chapter 14). In Spain matters were more complex but, as Clare Mar-Molinero (Chapter 4) points out, government and state elites increasingly used a single vernacular language, Castilian,¹ which by the sixteenth century had also become the major vehicle of literary culture.

1. We prefer to use the term Castilian rather than Spanish language as it is, of course, just one (though the most widely spoken) of the languages used in Spain. The term Spanish rather than Castilian is itself a construct of sixteenth-century Spanish ‘proto nationalism’ (the Dictionaries of the Real Academia Española only used the word Spanish rather than Castilian from 1925), and implies either that there should be no other languages spoken in Spain (the right-wing Spanish nationalist perspective), or that areas where other languages are spoken should not form part of Spain (the peripheral nationalist separatist viewpoint).

Nevertheless, there were also important differences between the two states. As we have noted, the Kingdom of Spain was the result of a pact between the Crowns of Castile (itself forged out of the alliance between several different kingdoms) and Aragon (a loose confederation of the territories of Catalonia, Valencia and Aragon), and until the early eighteenth century there was no attempt at meaningful centralisation (Linz 1973: 38–49). Hence the three territories of the Crown of Aragon retained their own Cortes (parliament) and the Basque Country and Navarre their own systems of administration (the fueros). Moreover, the common people continued to speak a multiplicity of languages (see Chapter 4). In contrast, the construction of the Portuguese State was the result of the conquest of the south of the country by a nucleus of population originally based in the north-west of the Peninsula (Graça Feijó 1989: 38), and there would be no foral-type administrative divisions. The results would be of great importance in the age of nationalisms. José Álvarez Junco (Chapter 5) has suggested that an ‘ethno patriotic’ sense of Spanish identity probably existed in Spain by the eighteenth century. However, other authors have argued that in areas such as Catalonia, within the context of institutional autonomy and a separate language, alternative identities could persist and indeed grow (Simon i Tarrés 1993: 8–16; Ettinghausen 1993). These interpretations are not necessarily incompatible, but in the nineteenth century a preexisting sense of specificity could, if conditions were right, be used by the new ideologues of nationalism. In contrast, as we shall see, in the Portuguese case there would be no memory of distinctive administrative and linguistic boundaries on which to hang an alternative nationalist discourse.

These dichotomies formed an influential backdrop to the attempt by Portuguese and Spanish governments to forge fully-fledged nation-states during the nineteenth century. At the level of state and government policies there were similarities between the Portuguese and Spanish experiences. However, while in Portugal, by the early twentieth century, few doubted that the country formed a single nation, in Spain the road to the construction of a modern nation-state was to prove littered with obstacles. Indeed, Spain was the only European country to be considered without doubt a nation-state by European nationalist ideologues in the mid-nineteenth century (unlike the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires), which by the early twentieth century was facing a series of internal nationalist challenges.

The Failure of the Spanish Liberal Nation-State Project

The partial failure to forge a nation-state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is thoroughly analysed by José Alvarez Junco, Sebastian Balfour and Francisco Romero Salvado (Chapters 5, 6 and 7). As Alvarez Junco emphasises, in Spain, as throughout the rest of Europe, the nation-state-building process was carried through by liberal politicians who needed to construct new legitimacies following the overthrow of absolutism. Liberal regimes governed in Spain between 1833 and 1923. However, their nationalising policies were a shadow of those pursued by the major Western European powers. In the first place, the poverty of the Spanish State, poor communications, the inadequate education system and a restricted cultural market ensured that the construction of a national identity out of a multiplicity of local references was very incomplete. Furthermore, the dominant liberal tradition proved enormously conservative, and its power-base rested on local oligarchs rather than on sections of public opinion. Consequently, it preferred to try to maintain the traditional legitimation provided by the Catholic Church rather than resorting to the dangerous game of mobilising the masses behind nationalist goals.

The years 1898 to 1923 were to see the final failure of this conservative liberal nation-state project. The defeat of Spain and loss of Cuba in war with the United States was without doubt a crucial turning point. Sebastian Balfour argues that the months following the outbreak of hostilities had, in urban areas, seen a considerable upsurge in patriotic fervour. This indicates that despite the tardiness of the Spanish State some sense of national consciousness had grown up. With defeat, however, came great disillusion. Balfour points out that in its aftermath it would prove far more difficult to enthuse the population with dreams of imperial conquest. At the same time the Restoration regime was discredited and though it was able to limp on until 1923 it remained incapable of structuring a coherent national ideal. On the contrary, as Romero Salvado explains, between 1898 and 1923 governments were still wedded to the old caciquista system of politics, and particularly from 1914 were faced with a growing opposition from both the democratic and revolutionary Left and authoritarian Right, and, as we shall see, from new peripheral nationalist parties. The regime was finally swept away by the military coup launched by General Miguel Primo de Rivera in September 1923.

There were, as Alvarez Junco states, more radical liberal nationalist ideologues, in general linked to the liberal professions. By the late 1860s, exasperated by the Bourbon monarchy’s alliance with the most reactionary strand of liberalism, many of them turned to republicanism. The republicans structured an alternative nationalist cosmology in which the people were portrayed as the true repositories of Spain’s supposedly democratic-nationalist traditions, while the Church and monarchy were seen as the chief blocks to the country’s national regeneration. There were two major strands within the republican movement. In the first place, federal republicanism which, especially in Catalonia, displayed certain particularist features (see below, p.5, and Chapter 10). On the one hand there developed a more centralist, Spanish republican movement. This gave a boost to Spanish nationalism because it provided a democratic alternative to the backward-looking rhetoric of elites (Bias 1991). And taken together with the dissemination of a radical-democratic vision of the Spanish nation by many of the leading writers of the day, this ensured that a liberal nationalist alternative to official nationalism took root in sectors of the urban middle and lower classes. At the same time, however, as Alvarez Junco explains, the existence of competing national discourses also resulted in the fracturing of national identity. The Carlists and conservative liberals could not agree on the same king and radical liberals favoured a republic. Each in turn had their own symbolic apparatus of flags and anthems.

Federalism, Traditionalism and the Romantic Movement: A Challenge to the Spanish Nation?

The very concept of a Spanish nation was for the first time thrown into some doubt in the second half of the nineteenth century. Already in the mid-nineteenth century opposition had been voiced to the centralising tendencies of the liberal state. On the Left, many progressive liberals came to adopt federalism as their creed, and between 1868 and 1873, under the influence of Proudhonian doctrines the first major republican party called itself the Federal Republican Party. Its leading thinker, Francesc Pi i Margall, saw Spain as the nation, but believed that it should be reconstructed on the basis of its ‘old provinces’, which had retained their individuality and should therefore be given a high degree of autonomy.² These federalists were not, then, nationalists avant la lettre, but in recognising the personality of the regions they could help lay the basis for future particularist and nationalist thought (López Cordon 1975; Trías and Elorza 1975). This was very clear in the case of Catalonia where in the 1880s the ex-federalist, Valenti Almirall, developed a programme in favour of Catalan autonomy (Trías Vejerano 1975; Figueres 1990).

2. Pi stated, ‘almost all of them were nations in their day. They still retain their specific physiognomy and some are distinguished from the rest by the particularity and unity of their language, customs and laws’ (Pi i Margall 1877, 1936 edn: 274).

At the same time, the republicans also championed the possible future unification of the Iberian peoples in a single confederation. This was supported most enthusiastically by the federalists, and was justified in ethnic and historical terms with the claim that the Iberian Peninsula had constituted a single Iberian race before the Roman invasion (Círujano Marin, Elorriaga Planes and Pérez Garzón 1985: 87–8). This ideal was, indeed, as Alan Freeland points out in Chapter 3, also to be found in the writings of Portuguese republicans, for whom a loose Iberian confederation could provide protection against possible Spanish aggression and allow Portugal to play a more central role in European history. Within the dominant moderate liberal tradition, however, these ideas found little echo. Though the loss of Portugal in the 1640s was oft-lamented, it was realised that with England acting as the guarantor of her sovereignty any attempt at intervention would be doomed to failure. Indeed, the rather passive European foreign policy which Spain was forced to pursue throughout the nineteenth century was increasingly justified in racial terms. As social Darwinism came into vogue from the mid-century, it was argued in Britain and Germany that the northern European Aryan races were superior. Concomitantly, Spanish liberals became increasingly aware of Spanish relative backwardness, and pessimistic as to the role the country could play in European affairs. Hence the leading Spanish statesman of the second half of the century, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, explained his policy of withdrawal (recogimiento) with reference to the supposed ‘decadence of the Latin races’ (Jover Zamora 1981: 317).

On the Right, traditionalist and conservative thinkers also criticised liberal centralism, contrasting it with reference to the supposed liberties of ‘the peoples’ of Spain in the Middle Ages (Mañé y Flaquer 1886), and therefore supported the claim for the restitution of medieval privileges such as the fueros, and the decentralisation of the state administration.³ The traditionalist, particularist current, which drew on the writings of Le Play and Taine, was especially pronounced in the Basque Country and Catalonia, but was also to be found in Galicia, Valencia and Aragon (Solé Tura 1974: 55–94: Cirujano Marín, et al. 1985: 127; Riquer 1987: 78–84). In the Basque Country, where the fueros were not abolished until 1876, they were strongly defended by the traditionalist—Catholic Carlists and later by middling landowners (the jauntxos), whose local power they had protected. Javier Corcuera argues that both these movements tended to foster a ‘pre-nationalist’ consciousness in sectors of the population because they created an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality, in which the ‘them’ could be identified with Castilian liberalism (Corcuera Atienza 1979: 51–8, 180–4).

3. The traditionalist historian, Victor Gebhardt, argued in favour of ‘the right which Catalonia, Navarre, the Basque provinces and the other regions of Spain which feel at ease with the remnants of their national existence have to live their own lives’ (Círujano Marin et al. 1985: 129). In quite similar terms the conservative representative of Catalan industrial interests, Juan Mañé y Flaquer, stated in 1855: ‘Spain is a federation of peoples (pueblos), of nationalities, of distinct races, with different traditions, different customs and different languages’ (Riquer 1987: 78–9).

Traditionalists also drew on European Romanticism, which exalted Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages and emphasised the cultivation of one’s own particular language and legends, with the result that in both Catalonia and Galicia from the 1850s cultural revival movements grew up — the Renaixença and Rexordimento — which mythologised and glorified these regions’ past (Chapters 4 and 14). Similarly in the Basque Country so-called fuerista writers, took up myths which had been built up from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and spun tales of the independent spirit of the Basque peoples, who had descended from Tubal, nephew of Noa, and who, by bravely fighting off the Romans, had retained their original language (Jauristi 1986). Their organicist vision of their own territory, which postulated the forging of a particular race with its own character through a combination of spirit, customs and language, certainly helped lay the basis for future ethno-cultural nationalisms. Significantly, however, Portuguese Romantic writers never pursued themes which could, in the future, be taken up by anti-state nationalists. On the contrary, a major theme in Portuguese Romantic literature was Luís de Camões, the sixteenth-century poet who, in the nineteenth century, became the symbol of national identity (Chapter 3).

It can, therefore, be seen that in Spain jy the second half of the nineteenth century the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 The Myths and Realities of Nation-Building in the Iberian Peninsula
• Part I: Centrist State-Building: The Imposition of a ‘National’ Hegemony
• Part II: The Nationalist and Regionalist Counter-Consciousness: Competing and Conflicting Identities
• Part III: Supra-National Structures and the European Union
• Index