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Rapping on the Cast(i)le Gates: Nationalism and Culture-Planning in Contemporary Spain[2]

On December 18, 2001 two members of Spain’s ruling conservative party, María San Gil, a city councilor from the Basque Country and national party official, and Josep Piqué, the Catalan-born Minister of Foreign Affairs, presented their much awaited ponencia[3] on “Patriotismo Constitucional” to the press in Madrid. As the pre and post-presentation spin generated by the Partido Popular made quite clear, the proposal, which was ostensibly rooted in Habermas’ notion of Constitutional Patriotism, was designed with the outsized pretension of closing the debate on how best to guarantee comity between the state’s various nationalistically-defined political communities.

That debate had begun (in the formal sense at least) 24 years earlier (August 1977), when a commission of seven newly-elected members of parliament (Miquel Roca, Jordi Solé-Tura, Manuel Fraga, Miguel Herrero de Miñon, Gabriel Cisneros, José Pedro Pérez-Llorca, and Gregorio Peces-Barba) came together in the hope of crafting Spain’s first democratic constitution since the Second Republic (1931-39). The draft that emerged from their meetings in the fall of 1977, which would form the kernel the Constitution which was ratified by popular sovereignty in December of 1978, sought to steer a middle path between Spain’s deeply rooted, and highly antinomic centralizing and decentralizing legacies. Aware of the dangers of tilting too strongly to one side or the other of this contentious issue, which had wreaked havoc on Spanish political and civic life for over a century, they sought refuge in calculated vagueness:

La Constitución se fundamenta en la indisoluble unidad de la nación española, patria común e indivisible de todos los españoles, y reconoce y garantiza el derecho a la autonomía de las nacionalidades y regiones que la integran y la solidaridad entre todas ellas. (“Constitución” s.n.)

Aware of the key role that language and cultural symbols have in mediating juridical abstractions the authors went on to state that:

El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. Todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla. Las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas de acuerdo con sus Estatutos. La riqueza de las distintas modalidades lingüísticas de España es un patrimonio cultural que será objeto de especial respeto y protección.

La bandera de España está formada por tres franjas horizontales, roja, amarilla y roja, siendo la amarilla de doble anchura que cada una de las rojas. Los estatutos podrán reconocer banderas y enseñas propias de las Comunidades Autónomas. Estas se utilizarán junto a la bandera de España en sus edificios públicos y en sus actos oficiales. (“Constitución” s.n.)

These ambiguous passages from the Constitution’s “Preliminary Title” designed to express the new polity’s core presumptions, along with its Title VIII, devoted to questions of its territorial organization, paved the way for the creation and ratification, between December 1979 and April 1981, of statutes of autonomy for Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia. In the first two of these three “Autonomous Communities,” historistically-defined nationalist parties (Convergència i Unió in Catalonia, the Partido Nacionalista Vasco in the Basque Country) quickly acceded to political power committed to maximizing local control over economic and political resources. Since then, neither party has relinquished its control of their respective autonomous parliaments. In contrast, the Galician autonomous government has always been controlled by parties or by coalitions whose missions are state-wide in profile and thus considerably less energetic in terms of their autonomist demands.

In this context, we can speak of the period between 1980 and the present as one in which both Catalan and Basque nationalists sought (with Galicians essentially riding on their coattails) to establish, through political thrust and parry, the full parameters of the vaguely defined prerogatives accorded them in the Constitution of 1978. The transfers of power in each case have been considerable, and include, among many other things, autonomic control over education and health care, and in the particular realm of the Basque country, the right to levy taxes. However, during much of the latter half of this twenty-year period, a time during which the spell of exhilaration and calculated forgetting (el pacto de olvido) which had made the Spanish transition possible began to wear off, the long-term sustainability and desirability of this largely ad hoc and highly opportunistic arrangement has been frequently questioned by important centralists as well as an important number of their nationalist counterparts on the so-called periphery.

The “solution” to this dilemma proposed by Piqué, San Gil and the Aznar government is basically to say that “enough is enough,” that is, that there was no further need for devolution of powers from the center to the periphery. But rather than propose a change in the Constitution aimed at rigorously and straightforwardly codifying the current level of decentralization, they sought instead to establish the essential inviolability of that purposely vague 1978 text, and in so doing, to suddenly reverse their party’s own tradition of open scorn for many of its decentralizing provisions. They sought to justify this abrupt about-face by invoking Habermas’ progressive ideas on reconciling voluntaristic and organicist notions of identity within a single polity.

What they failed to talk about, however, was the intense campaign that the same Partido Popular had waged to re-deploy the historically-charged signs and symbols of Castilian cultural hegemony since coming to office in 1996, and with more intensity still, since achieving an absolute parliamentary majority in May of 2000. Perhaps more importantly, they blithely ignored the fact that Habermas’ idea of constitutional citizenship presumes, indeed, absolutely depends upon, a pitiless examination of the past, especially of the abuses committed in the name of nationalisms constructed on the basis of a shared linguistic, ethnic or racial traits. There is no acknowledgement anywhere in the PP proposals on Spain’s future shape concerning the Castilian center’s fairly constant, albeit always unsuccessful, attempts to cripple and/or eradicate the “other” linguistic cultures of the state during the past. Indeed, there are few lexical resources even available for articulating such a point of view.[4]

I believe that an awareness of this “silence” maintained by the Madrid-centered establishment is one of the keys to furthering overall understanding of the complex and highly problematic interactions between movements of national identity in Spain not only today, but during the entire contemporary era. In the pages that follow, I hope to show that each of the four primary movements of national identity within the Spanish state (Castilian, Basque, Galician and Catalan) have been deeply and fundamentally imbued with the logic of historicist essentialism. In the so-called ‘peripheral’ nations of the state, this fact may have been strategically obscured from time to time, but never widely denied. Within the Castilianist discourse of identity, however, a similarly frank appraisal of this reality has never truly emerged. This ongoing denial, which has been frequently camouflaged by the language of state prerogative and the type of pseudo-progressivism recently invoked by the Aznar government, has served to virtually guarantee that brinksmanship rather than reasoned negotiation be the leitmotiv of Spain’s ongoing search for more cohesive, representative (and hence enduring) social and political institutions.

When we speak of national identity issues, there is a tendency among many observers to fixate primarily on juridical questions such as those that I have briefly touched on above. However, if there is one thing that has become increasingly clear over the last two decades of study into the genesis and evolution of nationality issues,[5] it is that such political constructs, and the debates that attend to them, are located, more often than not, on the trailing edge of social change. The leading edge of that process is what Even-Zohar has termed “culture planning.” For the Israeli theorist, culture planning is “regular activity in the history of collective entities of any size, be they ‘family’, ‘clan’, ‘tribe’, ‘community’, or ‘nation’ “ (“Culture Planning” s.n.) whose principle goal is the creation of a repertoire of options aimed at channeling the human energies of the collective toward a sense of both internal cohesion and differentiation from other such groups.

What is generally meant by ‘cohesion’ is a state where a widely spread sense of solidarity, or togetherness, exists among a group of people, which consequently does not require acts enforced by sheer physical power. The basic, key concept to such cohesion is readiness, or proneness. Readiness (proneness) is a mental disposition which propels people to act in many ways which otherwise may be contrary to their ‘natural inclinations’. For example, going to war ready to be killed in fighting against some other group would be the ultimate case, amply repeated throughout human history. To create a large network of readiness (proneness) on a fair number of issues is something that, although vital for any society, cannot be taken for granted by that society. (“Culture Repertoire,” 395-96)

A key presumption here is that the aforementioned types of communities are not, and should not be characterized as, “natural” or “spontaneously created” entities. Rather they are the end result of a process of conscious organization marked by both “native invention” and the strategically motivated importation of tropes, texts, ideas, and cultural models from non-native cultural systems. Another is that the literate, or perhaps more accurately today, “semiotically savvy” élites, working in variously explicit degrees of complicity with the collective’s (or would-be collective’s) economic and political power brokers, play a preponderantly important role in these efforts.[6] Such an approach obviously dispenses with the largely romantic—but still widely propagated—construct of the individually powerful cultural producer and focuses instead on the broader issue of how his or her “inspiration” is stimulated and/or mediated by a carefully created and vigorously maintained set of institutional structures.

For Even-Zohar, late medieval Spain is the locus of a key quantitative transformation in the history of such activities. It was there that proponents of culture planning, whose history he considers to be coterminous with the trajectory of organized societies dating back to Sumer and perhaps beyond, first successfully imparted “socio-cultural cohesion to a large population which had long been divided” (“The Role,” 26). In other words, the Castilian monarchy led the world in taking techniques of strategic textual manipulation beyond a limited circle of adepts to a plurality of a much larger and broader scheme of social organization. This proselytizing ambition is perhaps most succinctly adduced in Nebrija’s Prólogo a la Gramática de la lengua castellana (1492). The grammarian makes absolutely clear that he sees standardized Castilian writing as an absolutely indispensable—if not the indispensable—pre-condition for the execution of an extremely wide-ranging Castilian political project. In this way, he added the “nation” to the list of entities that could be fortified by a well-run campaign of culture-planning.

However, it should be pointed out that the concept of the “nation” in Nebrija was not the neatly parsed and heavily glossed construct of today’s political theorists and philosophers. Rather, throughout his short but remarkable treatise on culture-planning, he regularly conflates his concept of the Castilian “nation” with that of the Castilian “empire.” Thus, to be a possessor of Castilian was for him not simply to be different from, but also superior to, the “other,” a category which not only included “los enemigos de nuestra fe” but also “los vizcainos, navarros, franceses, italianos, y todos los otros que tienen algún trato y conversación en España” (Nebrija s.n.) Indeed, he sees the linguistic subjugation of the other Christian peoples of peninsula as the crowning element in a centuries-long campaign for peace:

(Castilian) tuvo su niñez en el tiempo de los juezes y Reies de Castilla y de León, y començó a mostrar sus fuerças en tiempo del mui esclarecido y digno de toda la eternidad el Rei don Alonso el Sabio, por cuio mandado se escrivieron las Siete Partidas, la General Istoria, y fueron trasladados muchos libros de latin y aravigo en nuestra lengua castellana. La cual se estendió después hasta Aragón y Navarra y de allí a Italia, siguiendo la compañía de los infantes que embiamos a imperar en aquellos Reinos. I assí creció hasta la monarchía y paz de que gozamos, primera mente por la bondad y providencia divina; después por la industria, trabajo y diligencia de vuestra real majestad. En la fortuna y buena dicha de la cual, los miembros y pedaços de España, que estavan por muchas partes derramados, se reduxeron y aiuntaron en un cuerpo y unidad de Reino. (Nebrija s.n.)

In keeping with its late-medieval provenance, Nebrija’s vision of the Castilian nation was also heavily inscribed with religious imperatives. However, its messianic tone—evinced perhaps most clearly in the parallels he draws in the prologue between the historic missions of Jews and Castilians—would appear to be extraordinary even by the standards of that age. For him, the great triumph of the Hebrews was that of establishing a written language supple enough to transmit the well-ordered laws of god into a humanly accessible form. He subsequently makes clear later that he sees Castilian, and those that speak it, as his era’s intermediaries between the province of transcendent logic and “muchos pueblos bárbaros y naciones de peregrinas lenguas” (Nebrija s.n.).

That Nebrija, and the Castilian élite for which he spoke, had stumbled upon a winning geopolitical formula was made abundantly clear over the ensuing two centuries. The bundled combination of linguistic fundamentalism, religious fervor and hegemonic ambition, fueled the creation of the largest empire that the world had ever seen. There can be no doubting that the Castilian emphasis on linguistic standardization and explicit cultural hierarchies, greatly facilitated the task of extending and managing the vast and far-flung empire.

So impressive was the success of this Castilianist model of culture-planning that other European polities began imitating its most salient features, especially its obsession with linguistic homogeneity, and from there, bureaucratic cohesion. Perhaps owing to their lack of first-hand contact with the memory and tradition of the Reconquest, however, few of the imitators could match its extremely high level of overtly bellicose religiosity. Further diluting the religious content of the Castilian culture planning model as applied in other European polities was the need for leaders in many of those places to enter into dialogue with the ideas of the Protestant Reformation, which had as one of its prime thrusts the drastic diminution of the role of the Church in public life and governmental affairs. This is not to say that the desire for religious transcendence disappeared for the nationalist culture-planning efforts in those places. Rather, simply that it began to be subsumed by new social and metaphysical constructs.

Emblematic in the first regard was the ever-more centralized and secularized France of Louis XIV (1638-1715), where the Catholic Church, while still important, saw its prerogatives increasingly subjugated to the “reason” of the state. By the time of the French Revolution, some 75 years after the disappearance of the Sun King, things had advanced to the point where many Frenchman no longer viewed an overt connection with the almighty as an indispensable trope for the maintenance of social cohesion. Representative of the second tendency was late 18th-century Prussia. There, Herder, clearly troubled by the potential cultural effects of the universalizing pretensions of the French philosophes and their revolutionary descendants, basically reiterated Nebrija’s belief in the transcendent origin and power of language. However, whereas the Spaniard had viewed the church-state conglomerate of Isabel and her successors as the prime guarantors of this continuing flow of vital civilizing energy, the German placed his trust in the decidedly non-sectarian vehicle known as “nature.” Only by maintaining active and conscious contact with the land, the prime sources of a people’s vital and social rhythms, one could expect to maintain the “timeless” character and cohesiveness of the individual nation.

Few are the people or social organisms with enough tenacity and ego strength to presciently engage in the ongoing revision of a core social concept that they themselves engendered. And so it was with the Castilian-centered Spanish monarchy which remained remarkably blind to these apparent “upgrades” in the program of nationalist pedagogy it had pioneered at the end of the 15th century. True, the ascension of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne in 1715 brought with it brisk dose of French-style juridical centralism. However, it was not accompanied, as it was north of the Pyrenees, by a concomitant rise in the production of secular creeds of universal social organization. The same pattern of administrative reform with only tepid advances in new theories of national identity, was evident during the reign of Carlos III. The growing gap between the two principal strains of nationalism (contractual vs. metaphysical) came to a head in the Spanish case upon the arrival to the Peninsula of Napoleonic troops in 1808. Though the liberal Constitution of Cádiz was certainly a noteworthy component of the famous patriotic backlash of the Spaniards to the French invasion, the strain of thought it represented was, as subsequent events showed, quite far from ever being hegemonic within the early 19th-century Spanish and/or Castilianist discourse of national identity. Indeed, when we contemplate the semantics of the widely employed traditionalist epithet of afrancesado, with its implication that those who embrace liberalism (and reject the social structure of the Old Regime) somehow become apostates of the national community, we can see just how much influence the overtly religious culture-planning model enunciated by Nebrija, and subsequently enacted by the educating clergy and state bureaucrats, continued to have three centuries after its inception.

The period between the restoration of Bourbon absolutism in 1814 and the outbreak of the Glorious Revolution in 1868 is often portrayed as an ongoing oscillation between extremely liberal and traditionalist concepts of the nation. While this is in some sense true, in can lead to certain misleading assumptions. The first, eagerly and understandably promoted by contemporary progressives, is that there was a rough equivalence between the strength and predominance of liberal and traditionalist élites during this period. It is perhaps more accurately viewed as a long stretch of relative political social and cultural conservatism punctuated by brief but intense periods of progressivist predominance (1820-23, 1835-37, 1854-56). The existence of Carlism meant that the entire Spanish spectrum of cultural, and from there, political options was located much farther to the right than it was in France and other European nations. For example, none of the intermittent progressivist projects mentioned above (and not even the grandfather of them all, the Constitutuion of Cádiz) ever seriously considered an abrogation of the long-standing relationship between church and state. As a result, the bundled discursive relationship between faith (with its strong undercurrent of monistic logic) and national identity developed in the time of Nebrija was never seriously challenged. Another common misconception, perhaps induced by a tendency to use the Second Republic (1931-39) as a prism through which to view the entire history of the Spanish left, is that this so-called liberalism of the mid-19th century was notably more sympathetic than mainline Bourbon absolutism to the non-Castilian cultures of the peninsula. In fact, if anything the administrative reforms of this “versión muy conservadora del liberalismo” (Tusell 45)—the institution of the provincial system, the founding of the Guardia Civil, and the Ley de Moyano among many others—greatly strengthened the bureaucratic hand of those who seeking to impose the notion that Spanish identity was essentially and fundamentally Castilian in nature.

The first notable alteration in Castlianism’s rigidly exclusivistic cultural logic came during the Sexenio Revolucionario (1868-74) when Prim’s leadership coalition offered Dom Fernando, father of the Luis I of Portugal, the possibility of acceding to the Spanish throne, a move that would have led inexorably to the (re)creation of a multilingual kingdom. However, Fernando refused the offer owing, among other things, to his doubts about the Castilian political class’ ability to guarantee the cultural integrity of Portugal under such an arrangement. The monarchy was eventually reconstituted in unitary terms under Amadeo I. However when he resigned in early 1873, the First Republic was established, and with it, the beginning of an even more radical and far-reaching break with the Castilianism’s dominant set of cultural assumptions.

The Federalism that would dominate the short-lived Republic (which until 1870 or so had existed as a splinter tendency of the mid-century “liberalism” outlined above) was, as one would expect, inherently hostile to the designs of centralism. This does not mean, however, that it was necessarily sympathetic to the historistically determined identities of Spain’s non-Castilian cultures. Indeed, if there was one thing that appears to have doomed the First Republic to a short life, it was its general negligence in the realm of culture-planning, that is, its leaders naïve proudhonian belief that a population’s sincere desire to form both local and supra-local polities was enough to guarantee the coherence and survival of the very same entities. This extreme faith in the voluntaristic capacities of the citizenry meant that the “management of memory”—be it the well-codified cultural repertoire of the center or the incipient cultural repertoires of the periphery—was largely ignored. In this context then, we can speak of the First Republic as a time within which the circulation of the time-tested repertoire of monistically-inspired tropes of national identity was not replaced, but rather momentarily suspended.

It was a recognition of this culture-planning failure that inspired Almirall’s particularisme, the first modern iteration of the family of socio-political theory we refer today as Catalanism. Originally attracted to public life by the ideas of Pi i Margall, the prime ideologist of the failed Federal Republic, Almirall understood instinctively that his mentor’s vision was doomed to future failure if it did not take into account the important role of historically-inscribed linguistic and cultural artifacts, (as well as the autochthonous the institutions necessary for reproducing and distributing them) in the creation of enduring political allegiances. In 1879, for example he founded El diari català, the first daily newspaper ever written in the language of the region. Through this and other initiatives, he sought to effect a fusion of the dominant features (minus the marked centralism) of the French nationalistic tradition (universalism, egalitarianism) and Romantically-inflected German historicism with its emphasis the enduring power of language and local custom.

But if the disruption of the Castilianist discourse during the First Republic was for Almirall a useful, if flawed, incitement to a potentially wide-ranging redefinition of the Spanish state, it was an for Cánovas, the prime architect of the political order of the Restoration, a frightening anathema. In his Discurso sobre la nación (1882), for example, resurrects all of the key elements of the hierarchical, imperialistic, and religiously imbued concept of Castilian identity that had enabled both Spain’s meteoric rise and its agonizingly slow fall, going so far at one point to characterize the less widely extended linguistic codes of a nation as the “plantas parásitas” (Cánovas s.n.) in the nation’s otherwise ordered and fundamentally unitary linguistic ecosystem. For all his embrace of principals forged in the past, however, Cánovas, avoided his conservative predecessors’ tendencies toward intellectual insularity and Olympian disdain of modern progress. For example, he was acutely aware of the latest developments in nationality theory such Renan’s “What is a Nation?” And rather than simply ignore that famous talk delivered to great effect in Paris six months before his own, he forcefully refutes it. Through this speech and hundreds of others like it, the fearsome wordsmith greatly updated and expanded Spanish traditionalism’s dialectical toolbox. In so doing, he was implicitly recognizing the increasing importance of urban intellectuals (like himself) and their institutions (like the Ateneo of Madrid where he gave the speech) in the creation and maintenance of any future consensus on the issue of national identity.

Cánovas’s efforts to effect a rhetorical facelift of Castilian traditionalism in the political arena were paralleled by those of Menéndez Pelayo (a fellow Conservative member of parliament) in philology, the new “science” of culture whose genesis and development is intimately linked to the rise of a largely hermetic, hegemonic and temporally infinite concept of German nationalism during the early and mid 19th century. In keeping with the comparative nature of the German model of philology pioneered by thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Franz Bopp, Menéndez Pelayo demonstrated a sincere interest in all of the linguistic traditions of the Peninsula. However, (and here again we see his kinship with his German disciplinary forebears), he was nonetheless possessed of belief in the existence of a clearly hierarchical relationship between them. Similarly, as a devout Catholic, he was strongly imbued with Spanish traditionalism’s long-standing belief in a link between this Castilian-forged unity and the Church. In short, the prodigious labor of Menéndez Pelayo was to become the cornerstone of a whole new and revitalized Castilianist culture-planning project. In terms its core postulates, it differed surprisingly little from the vision enunciated four hundred years before by Nebrija. However, its ostensibly “scientific” and “dialogic” nature appealed greatly to a growing urban intellectual class that wished to expunge its long-standing sense of inferiority versus the cultures of Northern Europe. In this sense, the cultural project of Menénedez Pelayo and that of his political correlate, Cánovas, might be compared with those of the 16th-century Jesuits and the 20th-century members of Opus Dei. In all three movements, the leadership recognized a need to modernize both the theory and practice of Spanish intellectual and civic life. However, none was willing to dispense with any of their fundamental socio-religious convictions to make this happen.

The success of this philologically-fueled revival of the Castilianist repertoire of cultural options was not lost on upon the generation of Catalanists that followed Almirall and began to come of age during the late 1880s and early 1890s. Like the neo-traditionalists of Castile, Prat de la Riba, Cambó, Puig i Cadafalch and Torras i Bages were conservative and Catholic, and consequently naturally given to monistic and hierarchical conceptualizations of national and social identity. Not surprisingly, they tended to view Almirall’s social progressivism and disposition (however theoretical) to multipolar, pan-Iberian solutions to the nationalities problem with suspicion. It was thus not long before they began creating an explicitly historicist apology for the singularity of what they saw as their one and only true nation: Catalonia. The first great public demonstration of this newly politicized organicist vision of the Catalan nation was the famous political manifesto of la Unió Catalanista, Les Bases de Manresa (1892) Arguably more important in the long-run however, were initiatives such as the Cercle Artistic Sant Lluc, an artists collective run under the theoretical tutelage of Torras which sought to give expression to what they viewed as the “essential,” spiritually-inspired elements of Catalan identity,[7] and in this way, counteract modernisme’s “foreign” brand of secular cosmopolitanism. It would be this brand of Catalanism that would be politically ascendant from 1888 onward.

The first formulations of Basque national identity, generated by Sabino Arana during the same decade, grew out of a similar social and religious environment. The major difference in the Basque case was the movement’s much higher degree of distrust toward both universalizing modernity and the Castilian center, the latter of which it saw it (quite mistakenly) as being wholly dominated by the former. This stridency can be traced, in great measure, to the effects of the long-standing Carlist movement in that part of Spain, and more specifically still, the family of Arana. Unlike the conservative Catalan bourgeoisie which had been enticed into a certain complicity with the Castilian center through the granting of relatively new mercantile privileges in the Caribbean, the rightward extreme of the Basque social spectrum had been pursued by Castilianist armies during the same period. Further differentiating the two movements, was the fact the emergent ideological and cultural praxis of La Unió Catalanista had been forged in active, and often quite personal dialogue, with their both Almirall’s group and the “worldly bohemians” of modernisme, interchanges made possible by “bridge” institutions and figures such as El Ateneo, El Centre Català Maragall, Ramón Casas, Joaquim Casas-Carbó, Masso i Torrents y Donènech i Montaner. No such comparable intramural dialogue was present in the incipient Basque movement of national identity.

Like his Castilian and Catalan counterparts, Sabino saw language as the central force in the creation of national solidarity. However, unlike them he had an extremely limited repertoire of autochthonous linguistic artifacts at his disposal. One reason for this was the relatively advanced state of castilianization in the society. Another was that in those areas where the Basque language was spoken, it was far less standardized than either Castilian or Catalan in their particular realms. Finally, and perhaps most decisively, its written manifestations were relatively few, owing to the tradition of granting bards (bertsolaris) rather than scribes the central role in the preservation of the shared cultural patrimony. Though such oral records often have great intrinsic value, they generally fail to generate the same level of socio-semiotic cohesion that written texts can provide.[8] In order to fill this evident lacuna in an otherwise classically historicist apology of the nation, the early Basque nationalists recurred, much like Irish nationalists caught in the same bind at the same time, to the promotion of traditional sports as a banner of communal cohesion. Of far more transcendence in the long run, however, was Sabino’s embrace of an expressly racial understanding of Basque exceptionalism. For Arana, Basques were a noble race whose prime goal must be that of cleansing themselves of the genetic and social contamination suffered during the previous centuries of Castilian subjugation. Needless to say, he does not explain address how such a view is compatible with the centuries-long history of apparently willing Basque collaboration in Castilianist enterprises, nor the fact that his much-cherished Catholic faith was undoubtedly transmitted to his countrymen through the good offices of yesteryear’s version of the maketo.

During the 1880s and 1890s, Galeguismo lagged well behind these two movements of nation identity in political impact. As was the case with their counterparts in the other areas of the peninsula during this time (with the possible exception of the remaining core of Pi i Margall-inspired federalists in Catalonia), the logic of discourse was fundamentally historicist in nature, placing a great deal of emphasis on the importance of building upon the linguistic renaissance set in motion by the poets of the Rexurdimento (Rosalía, Pondal and Curros Enriquez) from in the mid-1860s onward. However, neither of the two great theoretical figures of the movement, Manuel Murguía nor Alfredo Brañas regularly wrote, or demanded that their supporters regularly write, in the autochthonous code of the region. Perhaps for this reason, they like early Basque nationalists, showed an uncommon interest in the example of Ireland. But the British colony was not the only source of “fraternal referents” for their nascent cultural repertoire. Portugal and Catalonia are also primary sources for the tropes, symbols, phrases and discursive strategies used to justify the historic singularity of their people. Particularly striking in terms of its reliance on conservative Catalanism is Brañas’ El Regionalismo (1889) which is often presented as the movement’s first great systematic declaration of principles.

The American defeat of the Spanish in 1898 had the effect of placing proponents of the hegemonic Castilianist discourse of the Restoration, with its hard-wired imperial logic, on the defensive. Quick to seize on this opening were the Catalanists under the direction of the still quite youthful Enric Prat de la Riba. As mentioned earlier, heavy involvement in the Caribbean market during the latter half of the 19th century had served to moderate the autonomous demands many among Catalonia’s conservative bourgeoisie; they were willing to maintain their allegiance to the central government as long as it continued to safeguard their exploitation of this key market. With this benefit now gone, they began to channel their energies increasingly toward the institutionalization of the culture-planning concepts that they, and their more progressive Catalanist rivals from the particularist and modernista camps had been espousing for more than a decade. Notable among numerous other things in this initial explosion of culture-planning activities, was the founding or initiation of La Veu de Catalunya (1899) and the Barcelona Football Club (1899), La Lliga Regionalista (1901), September 11th commemorations (1901), Estudis Universitaris Catalans (1903) and the Palau de la Musica Catalana (1905)

These activities took a quantum leap forward after the November 1905 sacking by Spanish army officers of the building that housed Cu-cut, a satirical Catalan language journal, and La Veu de Catalunya.[9] In addition to the founding of Solidaritat Catalana in March of that year, 1906 saw the publication of Prat de la Riba’s famed catechism of national identity, La nacionalitat Catalana, the organization of the first Congrés Internacional de la Llengua Catalana, the founding of the Museu de Belles Arts and Eugeni d’Ors’s debut as the “glosador” Xènius in the pages of La Veu de Catalunya. This last event was of transcendent importance as d’Ors would utilize his platform in the nationalist paper as well as his keen cosmopolitan sense of taste, to greatly fill out and then order the canon of nationalist signs and symbols. Along the way, he would also renovate Catalan prose stylistics, transforming a heretofore archaic and poetically oriented language into a supple tool for everyday communication. The intense wave of culture-planning continued in 1907 with the creation of the Junta de Museus de Barcelona, La Biblioteca de Catalunya and the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. This last institution created a beachhead for Catalan in the world scholarly and scientific linguistic codes and would later underwrite Pompeu Fabra’s effort to normalize the spelling and grammar of Catalan.

With this extraordinary burst of energy, Catalan nationalism had, in effect, leap-frogged centralist efforts in the realm of nationalist pedagogy. The irritation felt by those who identified with the Castilianist project of national identity can be seen in the peevish articles written by Unamuno[10] on his 1906 trip to Barcelona and Ortega’s diparaging comments on Prat, Cambó and the core legitimacy of the entire Catalanist movement.[11]

The Castilianist counter-attack was not long in materializing. In January 1907 the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios (JAE) was founded by Royal decree. It later gave life to the Residencia de Estudiantes (1910), the Centro de Estudios Históricos (1910) and the Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Físico-Naturales (1910). Core members of these institutions later played important roles in the Liga de Educación Política Española (1914) and its official organ, España (1915).

In his study of the impact of these important cultural institutions, Inman Fox has gone to great pains to stress their “liberal” orientation, that is, their drive to serve as a counterweight against the hermetic traditionalism of the 19th-century Spanish right. In their important analysis of the history of the JAE, Laporta, Miguel et al, take a similar line, highlighting the institution’s close links with Giner and the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. On one level, there can be no denying this set of interlocking institutions did effect an important break with the traditionalist cultural project in terms of its open embrace of scientific method, European culture and in the case of the more politically-minded, democratic processes. Nor can their links to the progressivism of Krausist circles be understated. Finally, it can be assumed that most, if not all, of the brilliant constellation of thinkers involved (i.e. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón y Cajal, Azcárate, Altamira, Ortega, Castro) clearly had an image of themselves as transforming liberals.

Yet if there is one thing that the 20th century history of ideas (and more immediately our own recent academic history of political correctness) has shown with great clarity it is that reformist movements also often contain “black boxes,” areas of inquiry (usually quite close to home psychologically) into which their leading cultural actors cannot, or will not, extend of the critical acuity that marks their theorizing in other realms. For all of their efforts to deconstruct and rectify the long-standing Spanish tradition of obscurantism, xenophobia, social hierarchy and hostility to science, the thinkers of this set newly founded set of cultural institutions did virtually nothing to problematize the “naturalness” of the unitary and Castilian-centered conception of Spanish nationalist life. In fact, they did quite a bit to reify the assumptions inherited from the traditionalist discourse first articulated by Nebrija.

Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in the work of the Revista de Filología Española, the marquee publication of the Centro de Estudios Históricos. The research agenda of this publication shows am uncommon interest in demonstrating the essential ‘timelessness” of the Castilian “character” as evinced in its language and literature, and from there, the center’s anointed role as the prime organizer Iberian life. The key figure at the Revista was Menéndez Pidal, the great chronicler of the Spanish epic and erstwhile disciple of Menéndez Pelayo. Though he would suggest, in contravention to the hierarchical ideals of his mentor, that El Cid, and the Castilian Romancero demonstrated the existence of strongly democratic tendencies within “el pueblo español,” he in no way sought to challenge or to deconstruct “the people’s” proclivity toward religiously-inspired warfare. Indeed, that was seen by him as one of the defining features of lo nacional. In other words, Menéndez Pidal’s vision of the past put a very slight liberal patina on a very old story. Those reading his scholarly articles and/or the famous Clásicos Castellanos series produced for the broader public by his co-researchers and disciples, would receive very few messages disabusing them of the belief that, should the need arise, the center and its “people” were entitled to use institutional coercion against those whom they viewed as denying their set of historically ratified prerogatives.

Despite this of the Castilianist counter-offensive, the Catalanist culture-planning drive continued unabated during the second decade of the 20th century. It was during this period that Eugeni d’Ors solidified the esthetic and moral canons of Noucentisme and Prat de la Riba leveraged the scarce resources of the Mancomunitat, inaugurated after a protracted political battle in 1914, to further multiply the number of institutions dedicated to widening the repertoire of Catalan cultural options. The evident success of the Lliga’s in this realm, as well as Prat’s famous call for the creation of l’Espanya Gran in 1916,[12] emboldened those with similarly structured discourses in the Basque provinces and Galicia. In the first case, this was translated into a re-doubled emphasis, especially within the branch of the movement linked to one of the late Arana’s more trusted collaborators, Engracio Arantzadi, to the creation of autochthonous cultural artifacts. Aranzadi’s efforts culminated with the publication in 1918 of his “breviary” of national identity, La nación vasca. In Galicia, the Catalan example, along with the notions of a re-born Portuguese identity (a cultural commerce largely catalyzed by the writings of the Catalan Iberianist Ignasi Ribera i Rovira)[13] gave birth to that region’s first overtly nationalist (as opposed to regionalist) movement.

Like the dominant discourses of national identity in all of the other areas of the peninsula, the Galician discourse of identity was profoundly marked by both the logic of Herderian nationalism and a frank admittance of religion’s key role in the maintenance of social cohesion. Its foremost theorist and cultural impresario was Vicente Risco who, quite consciously following the examples of Prat de la Riba and Aranzadi, as well as their Portuguese correlate Teixeira de Pascoaes,[14] sought to capture the “essence” of his people in a single “popular” essay: Teoria do nacionalismo galego (May 1920). If there was a salient difference between this text and the models that had preceded it, it was on the level of mimesis. Like Brañas and Murguía before him, Risco was much more heavily indebted than his non-Galician counterparts to the vocabulary and tropes of nationalist activists in other places.

A very short time after the publication of Teoria do nacionalismo galego, Ortega begins publishing in El sol the series of articles that would later come to be known as España invertebrada. As a man who took pride in his ability to be a la “altura de los tiempos,” we can assume that as he sat down to write the series that he was deeply aware of the growing consolidation of the cultural repertoires of national identity on the so-called periphery of the peninsula. Adding to his concern was the ongoing Irish struggle for independence, Wilson’s calls for the right to national self-determination (issued in January 1918), and closer to home, the apparent radicalization of Catalanism following the defeat of Cambó’s bid for a statute of autonomy the year before. As has been noted, Ortega had for a number of years been a harsh critic of historicist nationalisms who was deeply implicated in generating a supposedly new “liberal” justification of the Spanish state. After three years in which he had somewhat drifted away from the public forum to attend to the more intimate concerns showcased in El espectador, Ortega clearly sought to make a resounding statement on Spain’s “nationalities problem.”

True to his widely professed liberal sympathies, he begins by making a convincing case (using the example of the Roman Empire) for the superiority of voluntaristic (as opposed to ethnic, territorial, or linguistic) conceptions of national identity. However, when he expands his analysis to the particular realm of Spanish history, his liberal sang-froid begins unexpectedly to boil, forcing him to emit openly historicist justifications of past Castilian comportment. Just as the “black box” of reflexive Castilianism had led Menéndez Pidal to sustain —in apparent contradiction of the truth[15]— that the Castilians were unique among the peninsular peoples in having had the grandeur of vision necessary for generating epic poems, Ortega sustains that “sólo cabezas castellanas tienen órganos adecuados para percibir el gran problema de la España integral (61) Moreover, this special leadership talent is, he tells his reader, not a function of human factors but rather a “quid divinum” (55). So much for much for the Renanian ideal of a public space and governed by earthly prerogative free from a priori notions of ethnic privilege!

Though Ortega and the vast majority of those involved in the Castilanist culture planning thrust begun in 1907 were deeply opposed to the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, it can be argued that their brand of “sanitized traditionalism” and/or “black box liberalism” provided the regime with a certain degree of intellectual justification. When we exclude the admittedly large and important issue of civil liberties, the two projects saw pretty much eye to eye on the need to pursue technological and economic progress, “clean up” corrupt government and re-establish the unquestioned protagonism of Castile in peninsular affairs. In a sense, Primo accomplished with his loyal divisions and his calculated courting of the monied élite what that army of historians and philologists had wished to do with their pens: consign the so-called “peripheral” movements of national identity to a place of clear marginalization and institutional bankruptcy.

This forceful rollback of the culture-planning initiatives of the socially conservative nationalist parties in Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country only speeded up the radical turn that had begun among them in the wake Cambó’s failure in Madrid. Emblematic in this regard is the trajectory of Francesc Macià. A career officer in the engineering corps of the Spanish army who had first been elected to Parliament in 1907 as a part of Solidaritat Catalana, Macià, like the majority of his fellow solidaris possessed an outlook that was essentially ameliorative in nature; he believed that in time Madrid no choice but to cede to the reality of a culturally distinct Catalonia and a bi-polar conception of the state. After several years in Madrid, however, he became increasingly convinced that this outlook was naïve as it did not take into account the visceral anti-Catalanism of the majority of the Castile-based political and cultural élite. Eventually, he becomes openly separatist in orientation, founding Estat Català in 1922, an event which would lead, in turn, to his wildly unsuccessful attempt to foment and armed insurrection at Prats de Molló in the Pyrenees in 1926. A similar shift took place in 1922 in the Basque country when the so-called grupo aberriano of Gallastegui established hegemony over Aranzadi’s more accidentalist faction of the movement. With the onset of the Primo dictatorship, important operations of these new more strident groups were carried out in exile.[16] Only in Galicia did culture-planning activities of the type that had defined the decade of the teens continue apace. This can probably be explained by the fact that the link between such activities and real political change had always been much more tenuous there than in Catalonia or the Basque Country. Thus the regime allowed initiatives like the Seminario de Estudos Galegos proceed with minimal interference. But even still, the movement suffered schisms. For example, the more militant Irmandade Nazionalista Galega (ING) split off from the Irmandades de Fala in 1922.

For those on the periphery, the centralist intolerance under Primo and Berenguer merely proved what they had always feared, and what a close reading of the contemporary history Iberian discourse of national identity makes crystal clear: Castilianists perennially reserve for themselves the prerogative to use institutionalized violence when they feel that their hegemony is called into question by one or more of their peninsular others. And as the numerous civil conflicts of the 19th century indicate, the generally tendency had been to maintain the pressure on the so-called “periphery” until such time as the “threat” is deemed to be extinguished, or to put it in culturalist terms, until such time as the centralist repertoire of signs and symbols successfully displaces those repertoires generated by groups on the periphery. However, the sudden flight of Alfonso XIII in April 1931, unexpectedly truncated this exercise in “forced forgetting.” But the short length of the dictatorship was not the only problem. Throughout his years in control, Primo had consistently harassed and denigrated the Madrid-based intellectual class. They had responded denying the regime their valued services in the realm of culture planning. Thus the dictator found himself in the awkward role of having nothing much to offer the periphery (in terms of compelling myths of collective identity) in exchange for their forced abandonment of cherished autonomous institutions.

With the declaration of the Republic, situation became cruelly reversed. As we have seen, the latent threat of violence, or at the very least, the right to invoke some supernatural prerogative in relations with peninsular “others,” had always formed part of even the most progressive versions of the Castilianist discourse of identity. Now, thanks to their acrimonious “divorce” from Primo and the power structure he represented, the liberal intellectuals of Madrid who had charged themselves with the duty of creating a new framework for intra-peninsular cohesion, no longer had had that vaunted tool at their disposal. In effect, they were in the difficult position of having to quickly and radically re-invent a centuries-old discursive model along completely non-coercive lines. Their failure to do so effectively is not surprising. Owing to this reality, the center was now at the mercy of the now more cohesive culture-planning models of the periphery. That Catalonia remained part of the Spanish state in the spring of 1931, for example, has much to do with Macià’s sense of calculated restraint than the inherent powers of the center. When the Córtes finally did grant the re-established Generalitat a Statue of Autonomy in 1932 (stripped of the peninsula-wide federalizing provisions with which it had originally been proposed), it was approved over the objections of Castilianist intellectual lions such as Unamuno and Ortega. The narrowness of the “enlightened” Castilianist vision can be seen further in the Azaña government’s harshly negative reaction to the Galeuzca pact of August 1933, in which leaders of all of the major Catalan, Basque and Galician nationalist parties agreed to cooperate in promoting the regular exchange of cultural artifacts between the three nations. Far from seeing this as a new and credible way to perhaps begin reshaping the nation from the periphery, the “liberal” Republican government attacked it stridently in the press.

In many ways, the pact was the high point of attempts to fundamentally reconfigure the parameters of the Spanish repertoire of cultural options. It was also the beginning of the end of the tradition of pseudo-cosmopolitan Castilianism begun by Cánovas and practiced through the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. In November of 1933, coalition formed around Gil Robles’ CEDA movement assumed power. This change, in turn, encouraged the re-emergence of the type and reactionary and frankly anti-modern Castilianism practiced intermittently in the early 1800s, and more assiduously still, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the eyes of military leaders and most of the Catholic right, the mere existence, however tenuous, of composite visions of national identity such as those that were uneasily tolerated by the Republican center-left, proved that the liberal political class had lost whatever bona fides it might have had in its sacred role as guarantors of national cohesion. Though both Basque and Galician statutes of autonomy were proposed (with the Galician one actually gaining a preliminary plebiscitary approval at home) during the pre-war Popular Front government, it was already clear to most that the moment to peacefully implement a radical re-alignment of the relations between Spain’s major culture-nations had already come and gone.

As has been widely demonstrated, the Francoist culture-planning efforts were rooted, from quite early onward, in a frank revival of Spain’s pre-modern repertoire of nationalist signs and symbols. Like the of arrows held tightly in the talon of the Falangist eagle, causes of the Army, Church and the Castilian language were re-bundled and proffered as a cultural package that would enable a new Imperial crusade like the one that had first expelled the infidel from the peninsula, and later made possible the “civilization” of the overseas territories. “Háblame en cristiano” the widely utilized insult/response used by Francoist troops with those using or known to favor the use of one of the non-Castilian languages, reveals quite succinctly the contours of its logic. When we consider the frequent insinuations concerning the “Jewishness” of the Catalans, and the habitual canards about the devious dealings of protestant Great Britain and Masonic cells, Fancoism’s Tridentine and even pre-Tridentine logic becomes more apparent. It was a desire to inculcate the population with this very particular Castilianist view of the peninsular past, that animated the production of the famous wave of historicist films produced by directors such as Juan de Orduña, Rafael Gil and Saenz de Heredia in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

As mentioned earlier, Cambó’s failure to gain a statute of autonomy in 1918-19, combined with rightist oppression of the Primo years, engendered a change of orientation in all of the peripheral discourses identity. There is a tendency, especially when we look at the Catalan case and Barcelona’s famously “red” comportment during the Civil War, to characterize these transformations in terms of a simple migration from the left to the right side of the political spectrum. While it is certainly true that the causes of nationhood, and egalitarianism came together in Catalonia, and to a lesser extent, Galicia, in the period 1931-1937, it would be a grave error to overstate the case. For all of their apparent ideological transformations in the public arena, the discursive architecture of the nationalist discourses of the Maciàs and Castelaos remained heavily indebted to the logic of historicism, with its emphasis on the pre-eminent role of language, place and the work of lettered élites in the creation of social cohesion. This, of course, served as a built-in brake on their long-term ability to adopt truly universal notions social justice. Moreover, with a few notable exceptions, the source of leadership in these now seemingly leftish movements of national identity was what it had always been: the comfortable urban upper-middle class which had a long record of cooperation with clerical authority. While these contradictions were either downplayed or papered over in Catalonia and Galicia during the Republic, the same could not be said of Euzkadi. There the strongly historicist and confessional cast of the PNV, caused it to clash repeatedly with its supposed republican “allies” within the country.

It is important to bear all this in mind when we look at the evolution of the major Iberian discourses of national identity over the last half-century. According to a vision that is still widely circulated today, the clash of national culture-planning projects during this period went something like this. From 1939 to the early 1950s, Franco utilized the cinematic, journalistic and literary resources at his disposal (not to mention those having to do with the employ of state violence) to expunge and/or simply overwhelm with religiously-imbued Castilianisms any remaining signs of Catalan, Basque and Galician identity. As he did so, the non-Castilian leaders and artistic producers kept the flame of their national cultures alive in exile. As good Republicans, these exiled patriots felt a strong affinity toward egalitarian politics and a generalized aversion toward confessionally-informed social thought. As the 1950s wore on, it became clear to the Franco regime that some entente with instrumental modernity was necessary. The first step in this process was the entry into the government of the so-called “technocrats” of Opus Dei. It was followed, in the early sixties, with country’s decision to make tourism one of the prime engines of its economic development. As a result of these changes, Spaniards born after 1940 began to fall increasingly into step with the dominant social democratic views of the European counterparts. As the regime’s ideological vehemence declined in the mid sixties, numerous exiles returned home. In dialogues with them, and with their new trans-pyrenaean interlocutors, the post war generation began re-connecting with their country’s “lost” history of progressive politics and cultural diversity. It was out of this ferment that recovery of the Catalan, Basque and Galician cultural systems arose during the 60s, 1970s and 1980s.

While such a vision holds some truth, it pays short shrift to the important role played by home-based, religiously-informed nationalist organizations in this renaissance. This was especially the case in Catalonia the place which, in one form or another, has always served as vanguard of nationalist mobilization of the Iberian periphery. While figures like Tarradellas ambled through a solitary and often humiliatingly inconsequential exiles, Jordi Pujol and other Catholics nationalists like him were busy reconstructing the bases of the Catalan identity through their participation and leadership in groups such as the brotherhood of La Mare de Déu de Montserrat, Crist Catalunya, and the Grup Torras i Bages. In these organizations, the example of Prat de la Riba was valued much more highly valued than that of Companys or even Macià and Marxist forms of analysis were generally shunned. In Galicia, the process of nationalist regeneration followed a similar route with the catholically-inflected Galaxia Group, led by Ramón Piñeiro, García Sabell and Carballo Calero, gradually reviving the goals and works of the largely conservative Xeneración Nós of Risco. In the Basque Country, the model of analysis outlined above conforms somewhat better to reality. There, the PNV of the post-war was hobbled, just as it had been at the turn-of-the-century, by an inability to generate and place into wide circulation among the intellectual class (never mind the general public) a compelling repertoire of unquestionably “native” cultural materials. This culture-planning failure, was one of the prime reasons why a younger generation of impatient activists felt the need to break from the PNV and found ETA in 1959, filling this “cultural gap,” as it were, with armed violence heavily informed by Marxism and anti-colonial theory. However, when we look a little closer, we can see that for all its apparent interest in non-confessional and ostensibly left-leaning ideologies, ETA and its present political arm HB have discourses that are heavily indebted to highly mystical notions of communal identity. In many ways, the constructs of abertzale sacrifice and martyrdom are as close as one gets in the so-called western world to the militant religious fervor found in some branches of Islam.

The seemingly natural symbiosis between historistic and religiously imbued politics and nationalism has been made readily manifest in the years since the ratification of the 1978 Constitution. In the months previous to the inaugural autonomous elections in Catalonia (March 1980), it was widely believed that one of the major leftist groups PSC-PSOE or the PSUC would gain a leading plurality of the votes. To the surprise of many, it was Pujol’s coalition (CiU) with its strong, and largely complex-free, relationship to the culture-planning repertoire engendered by Prat de la Riba, d’Ors, Cambó and others at the outset of the 20th century that carried the day. The Catalanist left is still waiting for its first autonomist victory. A similar process can be seen in the Basque Country. In the 1980 autonomous elections there, the PNV, linked like Pujol’s coalition to confessional social thought and early 20th-century culture-planning repertoires, quickly reasserted its hegemony (unbroken right up until today) within both the nationalist camp and the country as a whole. The story was has been pretty much the same in Galicia except for the fact the long dominant right-wing party is a “sucursal” of the state-wide PP. But even this is very much in keeping with the early twentieth history of Galeguismo, within which claims for self-rule were always much less strident than in Catalonia or the Basque Country owing to a) the relative weakness of the urban bourgeoisie and b) the continuing grip of a Madrid-oriented caciquista regime over public life in many rural areas.

Owing to both its own experience as a persecuted party under Franco as well as its acute awareness of the need to engender a workable civic consensus after years of one—party rule, the PSOE adopted largely “hands-off” policy toward both Castilianist culture planning and the movements of national identity in Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country during its long stay in office. In its reluctance to use centralist power for blatantly centralist ends it can be compared to the Republican government of the period 1932-34. It was, however, also like that government in terms of its general refusal to work pro-actively towards the development of more fully articulated and truly multi-polar model of intra-state cultural relations.

During its first term in office, a time when its working majority depended on support from Pujol’s CiU, the Aznar government more or less continued with the line established by the Socialists. But even while maintaining this ostensibly non-committal posture in the realm of day-to-day tactics, it was deeply engaged in a culture-planning effort aimed at re-igniting the dormant flames of Castilianism. One key element of this campaign was the rehabilitation of the historical legacy of Cánovas del Castillo and the politics of the Restoration. This was accomplished through a barrage of government-backed commemorations, studies and reissues of his work. In this way, the PP prepared the ground not only for a re-legitimation his peculiar brand of governance by an elitist minority, but the return of his pseudo-dialogic approach to the problem of dealing with progressivism and Castile’s peninsular others.

Another was the creation of the La Fundación San Millán de la Cogolla, dedicated to “investigar, documentar y difundir los orígenes de la Lengua Castellana y la utilización de las nuevas tecnologías para la difusión y actualización del castellano en el mundo.” (“Origen y constitución” s.n.) San Millan located in Old Castile is, of course, the site of the Monasteries of Suso and Yuso which, according to the late-19th and 20th century philological school, was the “cuna de la lengua española” owing to its link with Glosas emilianenses and later on, the poetry of Berceo. The monasteries possess the added symbolic advantages of having been definitively put out of business by the desamortización of Mendizábal in 1835. Thus, in creating the foundation in 1998, the Aznar government was not only creating an institutional bulwark for Castilianism, destined in time to become the “atalaya de nuestra cultura” (“Origen y constitución” s.n.), but also righting what in traditionalist eyes one of lay progressivism’s most egregious assaults on the church’s rightful place in Spanish society. In the ensuing years it has become a launching ground for all types of centralist culture-planning initiatives. When in July of 2000, the government finally released its long awaited white paper on the teaching of humanities, with its call for a “vertebration” of the national educational system, it did so at the newly renovated monasteries. It has also played host to events such as the Encuentro de Embajadores Iberoamericanos, Reunión de las Academias de la Lengua Española, an Exposición Pictórica en Homenaje a la Lengua Española y a San Millán de la Cogolla, Presentación oficial de la nueva edición de la Ortografía de la Lengua Española. At this last event, the then Minister of Culture Mariano Rajoy said:

España no es una potencia económica ni industrial, pero sí una colosal potencia cultural gracias al castellano, que hablan en el mundo unos 400 millones de personas… España es inexplicable sin su proyección hacia América y a esa cultura común hispánica debemos hoy nuestro lugar en el mundo. (Presentación oficial”s.n. )

Could the drive to re-bundle the fundamental building blocks of the centuries-old tradition of Castilanism (language, faith, tradition, and a “universal” imperial mission) be any clearer?

In El bucle melancólico the Basque writer and former member of ETA, Jon Juaristi suggests that the self-pitying hermeticism of the contemporary Basque discourse of identity has virtually guaranteed the failure substantial and constructive dialogue between its adherents its and those of the peninsula’s other nationalist projects. Similarly in Catalonia, intellectuals such as Alejo Vidal-Quadras from the centralist right and Josep Ramoneda from the Catalanist left have long railed against what they see as conservative Catalanism’s inherent inability to engender a meaningful ecumenical dialogue leading to a the construction of a truly plural Spain. In Galicia, figures such as Alfredo Conde and Marcial Gondar Portasany have criticized Galeguismo’s tendency to greatly overplay its hand on the issue of linguistic uniformity. Implied in all of these criticism’s is a belief that the discursive structure of historicist nationalisms—which as we have seen have been the dominant strain of nationalist thought the Iberian periphery during the contemporary era—carry within them a need for exclusivity, and from there, a tendency toward institutional coercion, that is fundamentally antithetical to the construction of a functioning multi-national polity. These criticisms, especially those of Juaristi and his countryman Mikel Azurmendi, have been enthusiastically received and re-circulated by the current conservative government in Madrid. Yet, while they celebrate these “deconstructions” of the peripheral culture-planning projects, they do nothing to encourage a similar analysis of Castilianism’s ample tradition of historicistically-justified exclusivity.

In the wake of the Piqué and San Gil’s ponencia, Aznar himself has stressed that the time has come for Spaniards to live “sin prejuicios, ataduras ni cuentas pendientes con la historia” (Huesca s.n.). These are certainly strange words from a man whose administration has shown such a keen interest in Cánovas, Academiás de la Lengua, the Monasteries at San Millán de la Cogolla and the “vertebrated” teaching of history in public schools. What he really means, of course, is that non-Castilian Spaniards should dispense with their “unhealthy” obsession with the past and cede to the “natural fact” of Castilian historical supremacy. In so doing, he is tapping into a deep well of Castilian exceptionalism which has been institutionalized to the point of being imperceptible to many who uphold its main aims. But while it may be imperceptible to him and his core group of support, the reality of Castilianism’s hegemonic logic will never disappear for most on the periphery. He is of course free to engage in the politics of the trágala. But before employing the sword that is concealed behind the colorful muleta of his Patriotismo Constitucional, perhaps he should reflect a bit more on the scant level of lasting success achieved by his ideological forebears. If Cánovas and Primo, whose regimes had far more repressive machinery at their disposal, could not eradicate the “unnatural” reality of the so-called peripheral movements of national identity, why should he expect to be able do so now? Would it not be easier for everyone involved if the Neo-Castilianists of today would simply admit, and base any and all any negotiations over the future of Spain’s civil society, on the unassailable fact that today’s Spain contains not just three, but four major, historistically-defined movements of national identity.

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[2] Originally published in Mabel Moraña ed. Ideologies of Hispanism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004) 107-137.

[3] In this context, ponencias are reports commissioned by the leadership of the party for the purpose of framing discussion at its annual convention. Thay might be compared to the so-called “planks” within political platform of a party in the U.S. The annual convention of the PP took place in Madrid from the 26th to the 28th of January 2002.

[4] The critical discourse attendant to nationality issues in Spain has, in its Spanish-language iteration, long included the use of terms such as catalanismo, galleguismo bizcaitarrismo and even vasquismo (although “el nacionalismo vasco” is now much more common than these last two terms employed by Ortega and Unamuno respectively). However, the term castellanismo has never really achieved the status of a common linguistic currency. I believe this omission is quite telling. In an attempt to spur a leveling of the semantic playing field, I will use the term Castilianism throughout the remainder of the paper.

[5] Until the mid-eighties, there was still a relatively high level of critical unconsciousness among most scholars whose work centered on nationalist discourses. One either tended to accept and thus “work within” the prima facie claims of essentialists concerning the spontaneity and “timelessness” of nationalist belief systems or to simply dismiss such discourses as pesky and illogical vestiges of a soon-to-be-extinguished system of social meaning. It was a situation that, in many ways, mirrored the tendency in literary studies to either accept the canonicity (another metaphor for “timelessness”) of certain works on the basis of previous critical pronouncements or to reject the whole system of relative literary value as nothing more than a feeble and fundamentally self-interested bourgeois imposition. Thanks to Bourdieu and others like him who have concentrated on the broader dynamics of the economy of symbolic goods, and the far from disinterested role that intellectuals and intellectual institutions play within it, many literary scholars have distanced themselves from such facile posturing and have begun to examine the full range of processes through which “taste” is generated. Benedict Anderson is, of course, the most frequently cited exponent of such “critical reflexivity” in the realm of nationality studies. However, scholars from the Tel-Aviv and Leuven Schools schools, trained in literary and translation studies, have taken the Cornell historian’s fecund intuitions to a much higher level of specificity and rigor. The reason would appear to be clear. While historians and political scientists often possess ample tools for macro-theorizing, they often lack the level of linguistic competence, global cultural experience and attention to textual nuance that is common among scholars of literature. When we consider the importance of intersystemic “cultural commerce” and the need to push intra-cultural “hot buttons” on the successful creation and maintenance of such schemes of identity, we can see that these abilities are of absolutely crucial interpretive importance.

[6] Applying these postulates present circumstances in the U.S. (albeit in admittedly crude and reductionist fashion) it might be argued, for example, that the outpouring of patriotic fervor following the events of September 11th, far from being a spontaneously occurrence or a the result of a profound appreciation for the qualities of President Bush or Secretary Rumsfeld, was the logical result of a culture planning entente forged in the 1980s and 1990s between the small and increasingly interrelated concentrated group of major audiovisual producers and an ever more unilateralist and militarized political establishment. Aware that the so-called Vietnam Syndrome was a direct result of the fact that many Americans “too intimate” with the gruesome carnage of war and the moral grayness of neo-colonialist adventurism, the national security establishment (greatly strengthened by new funding for conservative Washington think-tanks) desperately hoped for a new repertoire of morally unambiguous story lines that minimized or caricaturized armed conflict’s human toll and portrayed political deliberation as an unnecessary drag on “decisive” and “heroic” action. Hollywood, increasing aware that introspection and moral angst of The Deer Hunter vintage simply did not sell as well as manichaeanism, readily obliged in providing such “uplifting” and cartoonishly simplistic images and plots. The massive implantation of this newly established repertoire of tropes and symbols (with its systematic degradation of the non-US “others”) has been fundamental to generating the apparently overwhelming “proneness” for the type of foreign policy the US is pursuing post September 11. In short, if we were really serious about explaining our current way of acting the world we would be far less interested in the insider gossip concerning the ascendancy within the Bush Adminstration of Condoleeza Rice or Colin Powell and far more interested in how people like Jerry Bruckheimer, Menachem Golans, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Arnold Schwartzenegger and Chuck Norris substantially re-engineered many Americans’ perception of the core terms of engagement between “us” and the world outside our borders.

[7] See Castellanos, 25-35.

[8] See Even Zohar “Repertoire,” 389-392.

[9] Despite fervent Catalan cries for justice, the central government not only exonerated the rioters, but passed a statute, La Ley de Jurisdicciones (23 March 1906) that insured that army officials would be exempt from prosecution should they engage in similar activities in the future.

[10] See Unamuno, “Solidaridad” and Dendle.

[11] See Ortega, “Pididendo” and “Diputado”.

[12] However, in making his famous call for a multipolar form of Iberian unity, the leader of the Lliga was, in fact, co-opting ideas that had long been popular among Catalanists such as Ribera-Rovira, Casas-Carbó and Joan Maragall who tended to identify not so much with noucentisme and its implied orthodoxies, but rather with the Republican and/or modernista branches of the movement.

[13] See Harrington, “Risco”.

[14] See Harrington, “Risco”.

[15] See Fox, 105.

[16] For more on this phenomenon, see Harrington “Agents”.