Catalan and Basque Nationalism

Abstract

The union of the Hispanic crowns in 1478-9 created a joint Spanish state but not a unified nation. Under the Habsburg imperial system of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the historic constitutional pluralism of the five Hispanic kingdoms, together with the legal and administrative rights of the Basque country and the Balearics, were maintained with little change. Spain as a single united polity did not emerge until after the victory of the new Spanish Bourbon dynasty in the Succession War of the early eighteenth century. By I716 the new regime had abolished the separate constitutional systems of Arag6n, Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearics, leaving only that of the small 'kingdom' of Hispanic Navarre (in fact by that time only a semi-autonomous province), and the foral rights (fueros) of the Basque country. The most recalcitrant region had been Catalonia. During the late Middle Ages Catalonia was the axis of the constitutional federation of the Crown of Aragon and developed one of the most advanced if not the most advanced constitutional system in fourteenth-century Europe. Catalan commerce, finance, shipping, and manufactures at that point compared favourably with those of Venice and Genoa, surpassing anything to be found in northern Europe. Fifteenth-century Catalonia, however, fell into severe decline, losing population and economic impetus. Its towns were prey to sharp political class conflict, and the countryside was the scene of violent social struggle to throw off the residues of serfdom. This culminated in the Catalan civil war of the I46os in which, at one point, the principality was about to become a protectorate of the crown of France.