A Difficult Nation? History and Nationalism in Contemporary Spain

Abstract

The aim of this study is to show how the concept of Spain prevailing today originates from the nationalist ideology of the nineteenth century. The creation of this concept served both to justify the new power relations established during the liberal revolution and to give coherence to its political independence from other states and nations. For historiography, the emergence of the concept of the “Spanish nation” had decisive consequences. From monarchical history ad usum delphinis, there was a change to a teleological interpretation of Spain’s origins which served to justify the formation of the nation-state then under construction vis-à-vis feudal and absolutist powers. Historiography, as part of liberal and romantic thought, was the architect of a temporal, determinist construction, in which the Spanish nation and the nineteenth-century nation-state were inextricably interwoven into an age-old eternal reality. Hence, the historical concept of Spain contained a meta-history that imposed an essentialist new memory, which has subsequently been reproduced at different levels in the history of the country’s autonomous regions or in local history, as variations on the principal narrative. 1