Spanish Nationalism Origins: A Historical Overview
In this connection, Professor Domínguez Ortiz says: Before the 18th century, Spain was a geographical expression without political content. The loss of extra-peninsular European domains can be seen as the moment when Spain was created as a defined political entity. Since then, while not abandoning its ostentatious traditional image, there was a King of Spain… smaller than the empire, bigger than Castile. Spain is the most extraordinary 18th-century creation, which remains nebulous, lacking solid and tangible contours.
3. Socio-economic and political circumstances fundamentally linked to the interests of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie and urban dynamics. The establishment of Spanish industrial production occurred in the periphery, especially in Catalonia, favored by strong protectionism to defend its manufacturing and financial interests against an interior Spain, rural and unindustrialized. This led to a long-lasting conflict between the Catalan bourgeoisie and liberalism (Barcelona uprising in 1842 against the “Spanish” and open-door policy, subsequent bombing and repression of Barcelona ordered by the regent, causing his downfall). Consider also that liberalism tended towards centralizing uniformity, hence its desire to enact civil and commercial codes above particular foral laws.
National Spanish Liberalism and Centralism
The liberal political system was born from the Civil War of 1833-1840. To maintain itself, it allowed itself to be controlled by military and political elites representing the most conservative sectors of liberalism. These elites created a political regime and a state model, imitating French uniformity, which took national unity for granted. The new centralized organization of the State tried to ignore existing community realities and dissolve them into a common integration process. Peripheral nationalism has always claimed that the movement was initially regionalist and of the bourgeoisie. It is necessary to clarify what this bourgeoisie was. The large industrial and financial bourgeoisie, active in the political life of the Restoration, although in different regions, was fully linked to the interests of public policy and used its economic power to make or unmake governments. It provided power to Madrid, and Madrid returned the favor by providing special protection for their businesses. Regionalism was originally a peripheral manifestation of the middle and small bourgeoisie.
Catalanism: The social and ideological bases covered diverse fields of intellectual activity that originated in Catalonia, using the vernacular language. This movement brought together the various interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, councils, decentralization, romanticism, and even religious elements. The exclusion of republican federalism forced the two forces to abandon their doctrinal dogmatism and opt for a pre-nationalist regionalism. Republican federalism and historical privileges trumped the Carlist dynastic issue, so that both streams eventually converged in Catalan politics. Almirall championed modern Catalanism, focusing on federalism as a formula designed to bring together and unite the opposing positions of the particularistic bourgeoisie. His approach was not for independence but for autonomy and regeneration, so that the unity of the peoples within the state should not be imposed by force from the center, but should be a consequence of industrial and commercial development. The proposal was for a Catalan and European capitalism led by an urban-industrial bourgeoisie.
The Opposition and the Fall of the Dictatorship
The Catalan Question: The Catalan question was a major one, for three reasons: 1) the persecution of the Catalan language; 2) government intervention in the election of the Board of the Bar Association of Catalonia, forcing the publication of its official guide in Castilian; 3) its intrusion into the ecclesiastical sphere.
The Labor Movement: The labor movement was gaining strength. Since 1928, the PSOE began to believe that, given the lack of a genuine parliamentary system, the only way out was a republic, a position also held by the Communist Party and the anarchists of the CNT.
Intellectuals: Two forces directly contributed to the fall of Primo de Rivera: the intellectuals and the army. The intellectuals, who had not accepted the regime from the beginning, were attacked with Unamuno’s removal as president of the University of Salamanca and his subsequent exile, the closing of the Ateneo de Madrid (because it was said to be leaning towards republicanism), and the University Reform Project, which was given to Jesuit University of Deusto and the Augustinians of El Escorial. The revolts of the university during 1928-1929 and the subsequent repression ended with the closure of the University.
Military Discontent: Within the military, there was discontent with Primo de Rivera’s pro-Moroccan military policies and his unwillingness to protect the careers of peninsular military personnel. The frontal attack on the closed body of artillery broke the harmony of the military and precipitated the fall of the regime. A major conspiracy planned for June 1926, the famous Sanjuana, failed. In the last months of 1929, and in view of the despotic dictatorship’s use of new procedures, protests grew stronger. On January 30, 1930, Alfonso XIII accepted Primo de Rivera’s resignation and instructed the old military man Damaso Berenguer to form a new government.
Spanish Nationalism Origins:
It stems from three levels:
1. The constitutional and historical particularities of non-Castilian political, administrative, and economic societies, including the territories that formed the Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands), the Kingdom of Navarre, and those that had belonged to independent entities or ancient kingdoms with their own civil laws and jurisdictions, such as the Basque Country and Galicia.
2. The renaissance of regional cultures, particularly when non-Castilian Spanish languages gained access to literary expression, as expressed in the Renaixença movement of the final decades of the 19th century, during the Restoration. There is a rediscovery of non-Castilian identities and a new conception of Spain prior to the Uniform Centralist Liberal Capitalist plan (in reality, not a new concept but the situation born from the Spanish conquest and maintained by the Catholic Monarchs and the Habsburgs. What is more difficult to analyze is whether this concept of Spain (15th, 16th, and 17th centuries) was a global entity or a state).