Nazione e nazionalismo in Catalogna, 1808-1936

Abstract

Nation and Nationalism in Catalonia, 1808-1936

The gestation of the Catalan nation as socio-political reality has been a long term process that did not reach its peak till the first third of the XXth Century. Notwithstanding that some realities which affected such gestation come from much earlier, ethnicity especially that goes back to the Middle Ages and some events of its history as the aborted revolt in the XVIIth Century or the loss of self-government at the beginning of the XVIIIth. In the XIXth Century small elitist groups began the ideological implantation of ethnicity and local history thus creating provincial patriotism, literary renaissance and regionalism without denying at the moment that Catalonia is part of the Spanish nation. The negative answers of the Spanish central governments to the devolution requests and the humiliating Spanish defeat in 1898 mark the turning point whence Catalan nationalism and a strong process of nationalization alternative to the Spanish took its birth. The result is the existence of a Catalan nation which coexist with the Spanish one within a society also broken by social tensions. The “Catalan problem” remains, without a stable solution, as the first point in the political agenda of the three political systems occurring in succession until the Civil War: the parliamentary monarchy, Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship and the Second Republic.