The creation of the tradition of the political community of Spaniards as common destiny over other communities has been argued to trace back to the Cortes of Cádiz. From 1812 on, revisiting the previous history of Spain, Spanish liberalism tended to take for granted the national conscience and the Spanish nation.
A by-product of 19th-century Spanish nationalist thinking is the concept of Reconquista, which holds the power of propelling the weaponized notion of Spain being a nation shaped against Islam. The strong interface of nationalism with colonialism is another feature of 19th-century nation building in Spain, with the defence of slavery and colonialism in Cuba being often able to reconcile tensions between mainland elites of Catalonia and Madrid throughout the period.
During the first half of 20th century (notably during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the dictatorship of Franco), a new brand of Spanish nationalism with a marked military flavour and an authoritarian stance (as well as promoting policies favouring the Spanish language against the other languages in the country) as a means of modernizing the country was developed by Spanish conservatives, fusing regenerationist principles with traditional Spanish nationalism. The authoritarian national ideal resumed during the Francoist dictatorship, in the form of National-Catholicism, which was in turn complemented by the myth of Hispanidad. Identified with Francoism, positive affirmation of Spanish nationalism was delegitimised after the death of the dictator in 1975.
A distinct manifestation of Spanish nationalism in modern Spanish politics is the interchange of attacks with competing regional nationalisms. Initially present after the end of Francoism in a rather diffuse and reactive form, the Spanish nationalist discourse has been often self-branded as "constitutional patriotism" since the 1980s. Often ignored as in the case of other State nationalisms, its alleged "non-existence" has been a commonplace espoused by prominent figures in the public sphere as well as the mass-media in the country.
A central scholarly debate pertaining to the construction of the contemporary Spanish national identity revolves around the assessment of the effective reach of nationalising mechanisms, most specifically vis-à-vis the axiom of 19th-century weak nationalization, supported, for example, by José Álvarez Junco.
Spanish nationalism is a justification of the centralist Spanish state, according to Borja de Riquer. In this sense, it is the historical result of political-ideological-economic interests among Spanish elites, particularly the need to create a unifying national identity in the wake of the collapse of the Spanish imperial project following the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824.Borja de Riquer. 2001, 314. or.
History
Historically, Spanish nationalism specifically emerged with liberalism, during the Peninsular War against occupation by the Napoleonic France.The label nationalist has not succeeded in Spain as an auto-denomination, but the existence of a similar phenomenon to the contemporary European nationalisms has been broadly studied. The fact is related in these article: Joan B. Culla i Clarà Nacionalistas sin espejo, El País, 16 de marzo de 2007. As put by José Álvarez Junco, insofar we speak of nationalism in Spain since 1808, the Spanish nationalist enterprise was a work of liberals, who turned their victory "to a feverish identity of patriotism and the defense of liberty".
The Carlism, which was a defensive movement of the Old Regime, did not regard the adjective "national" with any esteem (national sovereignty, national militia, or national properties) and considered it a term used only by liberals (who were becoming more and more progresistas). Up until the 1860s, the Carlism movement tended to label its followers as "Catholics" rather than as "Spaniards".
Only after the 1859–1860 Hispano-Moroccan War (which was embraced by an until then unseen patriotic fervour across the political spectrum) the hitherto rather uninterested Catholic conservative forces were sold into the possibilities offered by Spanish nationalism; thus, in the last half of the century, a number of Conservative historians (most notably Menéndez Pelayo, whose figure eventually became a lodestar of national catholicism) propelled a new canon of the history of Spain underpinned by their idea of "Catholic unity" as tenet for the Spanish nationality and the monarchy. The menéndezpelayista nationalist construct was well defined in its Catholic matrix (Catholicism would end up becoming the keystone of the reactionary right wing in the 20th century) yet more nuanced in other regards accounting for both a staunch rejection of alternative nationalisms and separatisms and a recognition of the internal plurality of Spain.
Restoration prime minister and historian Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, reproduced some of the best-known paragraphs of the Memorial of the Count-Duke of Olivares in his book Estudios del reinado of Felipe IV, published in 1888, and considered that the Memorial should be read as a manifesto in which the bases of the project of the Spanish nation state devised by the Count-Duke were established.Rivero Rodríguez, 2012a, p. 49.
With the loss of Cuba interpreted as the first crack on the unity of the nation (the Cuban War had been seen by many in the country as a civil war rather than a foreign conflict), Spanish nationalism of the time had to come to terms with the loss of the island at a time when the possession of colonies was seen as a sign of the vitality of the nation.
The so-called "spirit of the 98", created after disaster of 1898, entailed a response coming from the elite intellectual milieus striving for the development of a new Spanish nationalism. While this reaction was not initially identified per se with the right, (several of the representatives of the literary nationalism of the 98 were actually close to socialist or anarchist stances early in their life) many of the most prominent noventayochistas espoused ideas compatible with the conservative thought and several of them eventually evolved towards non-liberal forms of Conservatism, and a group of them would have a substantial intellectual influence in the moulding of the later Fascist ultranationalism. While not yet Fascist nor proto-Fascist, the socalled : Azorín, Pío Baroja and Ramiro de Maeztu, laid the seeds for a potential doctrinal articulation susceptible of being seized by a Fascist movement.
19th century
First Moroccan War After continued incidents, in October 1859 the First Moroccan War began, with a patriotic enthusiasm to imitate the French colonial advances in Algeria, and the dazzle by the opportunities. Articles and books about it were published everywhere, telling about Spain's mission in Africa, and creating a story that contrasted Morocco and Spain, identifying them with despotism and freedom, or integrism and tolerance, respectively, and they listed Spanish exploits throughout history.
Numerous speeches were also made, such as that of Francisco Javier Simonet at the Ateneo de Madrid, in 1859, legitimizing the right to assist Spain in its civilizing mission, given that in his opinion, North Africa was populated by two great races, Tamites (Arabs) and Semites (Berbers), both in a state of ignorance and barbarism.
By itself or through the patriotism of the media, the war acted as a nationalist agent among the population. Nevertheless, journalists like Ruperto de Aguirre go further, and talk about race and degeneration applied to the North African population, as does Emilio Castelar in the Crónica de la guerra de África, where he elaborates a patriotic text that uses the concept of the Iberian race, and describes it as having a civilizing mission, in the same way that the Slavic race had to "civilize" Turkey, and also mentions the Indo-European race, "opposed from centuries ago to the Semitic race".
20th century
In the view of Ismael Saz, within regenerationism, a diverse brand of nationalism, the two main antiliberal nationalist political cultures in the 20th century in Spain would come to be forged: the reactionary nationalist one (national catholicism) and the fascist one, both enjoying hegemony during the Francoist dictatorship.
Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset defined Spain as an "enthusing project for a life in common" (proyecto sugestivo de vida en común). Meanwhile, the Fascist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera preferred the definition of a "unity of destiny in the universal" and defended a return to the traditional and spiritual values of Imperial Spain. The idea of empire makes it universalist rather than localist, this is what makes it singular among other forms of nationalisms, but closer to others (Italian fascism).
Relationship between Spanish nationalism and Argentine nationalism Many of the people involved in the establishment of the word Hispanidad have a relationship with Argentina, to live there, such as the Spanish writer José María Salaverría, resident in Argentina between 1910 and 1913, the Spanish priest Zacarías de Vizcarra,Ramón Solans, Francisco Javier (2014). «La Virgen del Pilar dice...»: usos políticos y nacionales de un culto mariano en la España contemporánea. Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza. resident in Buenos Aires, or Ramiro de Maeztu, ambassador to Argentina between 1928 and 1930.Núñez Seixas, Xosé M. (2013). «Notas sobre Los españoles en Rosario (1934): Una vindicación republicana de la inmigración española en la Argentina». Revista de Indias (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) 73 (259): 857-874. ISSN 0034-8341
In fact, throughout the first third of the 20th century there is a fluid relationship between Spanish nationalism and Argentine nationalism,Lida, Miranda. De Manuel Gálvez a Jacques Maritain. Hispanofilia y francofilia en el catolicismo argentino de la primera mitad del siglo XX. Itinerantes: Revista de Historia y Religión, 2017, 7: 61-81.Lojo, María Rosa. La Argentina y su criptoidentidad gallega. Olivar, 2016, 17.25: 2-2. which would include the creation of material of great impact on both sides of the Atlantic, such as now the book El Solar de la raza, by the argentine Manuel Gálvez, from 1913. An impact that would extend to the Spanish Civil War,Jitrik, Noé. Lectura de Vasconcelos. Nuevo Texto Crítico, 1988, 1.2: 261-286. for example in the instructions of the Fiscalía del Ejercito de Ocupación, of January 1939, preparing the occupation of Barcelona, which unified the criteria of the military prosecutors in the Memoria de la Fiscalía de Ejercito de Ocupación, with instructions such as:" The national site must be disinfected. And here is the work - glorious and glorious - entrusted by chance to military justice... This immense pyre in which so much dross is being eliminated... The Inquisition must be resurrected,... of very Spanish originality. .. [There is] a need for a new legal building on the site of the race... stripped of all feelings of personal piety... The enemies are factions guilty of the crime of Military Rebellion, factions of rebels against the Fatherland "Perhaps the fact that, during the 1919 pogrom in Argentina, during the Argentinian Tragic Week,Antisemitism: a historical encyclopedia of prejudice and persecution, Volym 1 AvRichard S. Levy - it was called to attack Jews and Catalans indiscriminately can be placed within the relations with Spanish nationalism . The reasons are not clear, especially considering that, in the case of Buenos Aires, the Catalan colony, established mainly in the neighborhood of Montserrat, came from the very foundation of the city. It could be pointed to the fact that Spanish nationalism already at that time qualified the Catalans as of Semitic ethnicity.
Relations Spanish National Catholicism - German National Socialism