OCR Output

STATE BUILDING AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

these are well enclosed inside an iron circle which only allows them to move in
the direction desired by the oligarchs of Castilian politics. The fundamental or
organizing principle is supposedly general for the entire nation, but in actual fact
it is no more than an expression of a part of it which has imposed itself on the
rest, and answers always to its political and judicial state. Whether established by
a so-called Conservative oligarchy or by a so-called Liberal one, the organizing

principle is always authoritarianism”.

Ultimately, underneath cultural differences and identity-based arguments
lay a lack of satisfaction with the state and its day-to-day functioning. This
was something that could hardly be solved overnight by merely replacing
a regime with a different one, as the two regime changes that took place
in the twenties and thirties would prove. On 13 September 1923, General
Primo de Rivera established a six-year-long dictatorship (1923-1930), which
portrayed itself as an opportunity to regenerate the country and put an end to
patronage and corruption but failed to create a truly ‘new’ — or for that matter
effective — state?””. On 14 April 1931, a Republic that would remain in place
until the end of the Civil War in 1939 was established; its goal, among others,
was to definitively modernize the nation. Yet its reforms did not manage to
transform the state, which basically remained the same in terms of efficiency,
regardless of any autonomy granted to certain regions (Catalonia, in fact)
within the framework of the Republic’s integral state. Both the dictatorship
and the Republic failed to eliminate corruption and irregularities from the
state’s administrative apparatus”.

CONCLUSION

The main conclusion to be drawn from the above is that there appears to
be a relationship between degrees of national identification and levels of
satisfaction with the functioning of the state. This was particularly apparent
in the Spain of the Restoration and in the period of crisis it experienced
after 1898. Irregularities, interferences between the aims of politics and the
administration, the absence of well designed public policies and a peculiar

26 Valenti Almirall: El catalanismo, Barcelona, Libreria Espafiola, 1902, 152.

” Alejandro Quiroga Fernandez de Soto: Haciendo españoles. La nacionalizaciôn de las masas
en la Dictadura de Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), Madrid, CEPC, 2008.

Joaquin del Moral: Inmoralidad politica (“enchufismo” y acumulación de cargos), Madrid,
Imprenta de Galo Säez, 1931. Regarding proposals for the reform of the state among
Socialists, Luis Araquistain pointed out the need to radically reorganize the state; see: David
Guerra Sesma: El PSOE, entre el jacobinismo y el federalismo durante la Restauracién y la
Segunda Republica, Historia del Presente, Vol. 29, 2017, 19-20.

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