Oldal 70 [70]
NATIONALISM AND NATION-BUILDING IN SPAIN (1875—1939)
arose with an official national anthem: in opposition to the revolutionary
anthem already mentioned the Marcha Real or "Royal March was imposed,
a military march like the Marcia Reale in unified Italy. It had no words,
and so it was difficult for the population to connect with it emotionally. It
was the music of the king and of religion, since it was played during Masses
and other solemn events, and had to be heard standing and in silence, a
good representation of Spanish monarchist conservatism. Egually, popular
nationalism was expressed in mass demonstrations and by other similar
means on the occasion of various colonial crises. Spain did not take part in
any foreign wars with other European powers, which affected its national
construction, since there can be no doubting the influence such wars had in
the consolidation of national identities in Europe and the Americas. However,
the Spanish army did undertake campaigns in the Caribbean, the Pacific and
North Africa, which encouraged a street-level patriotism that was viewed
negatively and even repressed by the authorities.
At the same time a body of national imagery was created and disseminated
around the first nationalistic patriotic commemorations, in the same manner
as one saw in other European countries during the same decades, and
international instruments were made use of to help create national pride and
sentiment, suchas the Universal Exhibition in Barcelona in 1888. Regionalisms,
which were increasingly cultivated in this period, also customarily served to
reinforce Spanish identity at a local level, as was similarly the case in the
contemporary France of the petites patries or the Germany of the Heimat.
Simultaneously, however, other instruments that were at the disposal of the
state for the advancement of ‘nationalization’ and national identification
exhibited serious deficiencies. The army was based upon a class-based system
of recruitment, through which the sons of the upper classes could free
themselves from the obligation of military service by paying a sum of money.
Public education similarly suffered from an accumulation of major failings,
with levels of illiteracy close to 60 per cent in 1900. Only in the last decade
of the previous century had policies begin to be formulated that aimed at
turning schools into incubators of patriots, as in France or Italy.
It was also at the end of the 19" century that a phenomenon arose of crucial
importance for the evolution of the national question in contemporary Spain:
the emergence of alternative nationalist movements in regions such as the
Basque Country and Catalonia. We may ask why these nationalisms appeared,
in which case we need to add to the insufficiencies of Spanish nationalization
other factors, such as the rapid industrialization of these regions, the richest
in the country, their rejection of the intensification of the measures intended
to reinforce Spanish national identification, and the fragility of the Spanish
state as demonstrated by its defeat in colonial war at the hands of the United
States in 1898, which led to the loss of the remaining traces of the Spanish
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