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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. 28 + 87 +
