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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. + 79 +
