New Perspectives on Nationalism in Spain

Dear Colleagues,

Nations and nationalism, as organisational principles of social life, provide individuals with a sense of who they are and where they belong. While nations are not the only form of community to serve human kind in this manner, they remain privileged due to their relationship with the nation-state, the dominant form of political organisation. The Spanish nation, however, has been contested almost since its earliest existence; therefore, the Spanish nation-state is involved in perpetual conflicts between various nationalisms, particularly between different versions of Spanish nationalism and Spanish majority nationalism and various minority nationalisms. At different times in history, conflicts have recurred and turned into organising principles of the political communities in Spain, as communities in conflict or contention but, nevertheless, as communities providing the Spaniards with different senses of belonging.

In recent times, both lines of contention have been activated again, both the left-wing vs. right-wing conflict around the definition of the Spanish nation as well as the majority-nationalist vs. minority nationalist conflict. The conflict between left-wing and right-wing interpretations of the Spanish nation, particularly understood as the former losers and winners, respectively, of the Spanish civil war, has recurred since approximately the year 2000 around the contentious issue of affirming or forgetting the so-called ’historical memory’. The conflict between majority and minority nationalism has recurred most recently around the Catalan separatist conflict, but only a few years back the Basque identities were just as conflictual.

These Spanish conflicts have to be situated in the contemporary European and global context where anxieties about sovereignty are causing the revival of emotional messages and strategies to mobilize the citizenry in favour of particular political communities. Both the state-wide, i.e., Spanish, actors as well as the sub-state nationalist parties have attempted to develop feelings of territorial attachment to the Spanish state and political community or to the sub-state political communities, respectively, and both use emotions and feelings to secure support and assert or claim sovereignty for the political community in question.

In the Spanish context, these questions raise a number of issues to be addressed, including the following:

• The reconfiguration of left- and right-wing nationalist discourses in contemporary Spain;
• The dialectics between majority and minority nationalisms;
• The challenge of the so-called “pacto de silencio” and the exemplarity of the Spanish Transition as a recent trend in public opinion and political discourse;
• The creation of new narratives around historical memory;
• The emergence of a new radical right-wing in Spain, and its similarities and differences with populist radical right-wing parties in Europe;
• The strategies by which the Spanish state, or state-wide actors, try to articulate and reproduce a sense of national belonging within the Spanish political community;
• The reproduction of every-day nationhood within Spain through welfare nationalism, positive self-portrayals of the country, nation-branding, etc;
• The effects of these strategies on citizens’ feelings of national belonging;
• The dynamics that strengthen ideological polarization of national identities;
• Changes in the strength and meaning of Spanish national identity among citizens in contemporary Spain, and this identity’s causes and consequences;
• New links between national identity and political behaviour in Spain;
• Uses and abuses of the Spanish Constitution.

Dr. Carsten Jacob Humlebæk
Dr. Antonia María Ruiz Jiménez
Guest Editors

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• nationalisms in Spain
• national identities in Spain
• political discourses of belonging
• politics of memory
• political uses of history