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STATE BUILDING AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
allow the state to devote the necessary resources to each area. In other words,
a state of its own is what grants power to a community, and particularly to
its elites.
Given the importance of the state, what we intend to explore in this paper
is its role in shaping national identity. Even if we concede the existence of
nations predating statehood (an issue we shall not explore here), what we seek
to examine is whether national identities evolve as a result of state action.
This is not to imply, obviously, that states are the sole agent generating such
identities. We hope only to show how the state can influence their emergence
or consolidation. Our hypothesis, then, is that an effective and efficient state,
capable of providing citizens with goods and services, tends to increase
feelings of identification with the community it serves and administers. In the
case of Spain, the hypothesis can be reformulated in reverse, that is, that the
ineffectiveness and lack of efficiency of a deficient centralized state (resulting
from a problematic nineteenth-century state-building process) fostered a
Spanish national identity which was both weak and laden with peripheral
exceptions. States, to be sure, are not the sole creators of national identity;
what we intend is to examine whether the state — in this case, the Spanish
one — plays a significant role in generating identities.
PERCEPTIONS OF THE STATE IN SPAIN
During the Spanish transition to democracy, peripheral nationalist
movements (in Catalonia and the Basque Country) reclaimed centre-stage
after decades of dictatorship. In their view, Spain was no more than a state
exercising sovereignty over a conglomerate of nations which, in practice,
reflected regional divisions along the borders created by the 1833 partitioning
of the country into provinces. From this perspective, Spain was not itself a
nation, but merely a superimposed political and administrative structure.
Starting in 1977, this position was laid out in the speeches in Cortes of
Basque and Catalan nationalist leaders, implicitly suggesting that Spaniards
as a group lacked national identity, as Spain was no more than a state. It
likewise followed that there was nothing good to be said regarding a state
that oppressed, taxed and occupied these territories (particularly the Basque
Country) while offering nothing in return. References to the Spanish state
were akin to a list of grievances, fueling feelings of victimhood at the hands
of ‘the other”.
* Jose Antonio Rubio Caballero: La vision de España a través del discurso nacionalista durante
la transición, Norba. Revista de Historia, Vol. 19, 2006, 231-258.
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