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This chapter argues that the international projection of democratic Spain has been a largely rational and successful enterprise, for all the deficits in planning and funding. Spain has installed itself as a medium power among European nations, well integrated in the EU and exerting political and cultural influence above all in Latin America and the Mediterranean. Through European integration, globalization, and tourism, and partly through the efforts of Spain's own agencies of cultural transmission, popular stereotypes of the Spanish have been mostly replaced by nuanced perceptions of a vibrant multicultural and multilinguistic community.

This chapter examines the most important obstacles from the early modern age to the formation of a national identity in the nineteenth century. The first thing one notices in the early expressions of identification and pride in relation to Spain is the alternation between glorification of the monarch or dynasty and ethnic patriotism, or praise of the collective identity, upon which the future national identity would be based. A second problem relating to the construction of a pre-national identity in Spain during the early modern period was the fact that the Hispanic monarchy was not a united State but a disparate collection of kingdoms and feudal domains, with subjects who spoke a variety of languages, who were characterised by substantial differences as regards laws and taxes, and who even had to pay tolls when they journeyed between the different territories. Other factors that conditioned and limited the development of a ‘Spanish’ identity under the ancien régime include élitism, or the very restricted access of the populace to the images that were transforming the representation of the collective body.

By reading the same stories in the same language, all partakers of these cultural products go on to share a mental universe, to imagine themselves in the same way, to identify with the same heroes, and to revile the same villains. There is the added benefit that, as the fiction is created, the language is enriched and reinforced as the privileged instrument of cohesion of the imaginary community. European nationalisms associate language, literature, and nation. Literature was the imaginary mirror in which the nation saw itself reflected, where individuals lived as members of that community. The literary canon works like the Bible and it came to the fore in Western societies when the Bible lost its authority as the supreme text. This chapter examines how this national literary canon was formed in Spain.

In Spain, the attempt to build a new political identity was based on a culture already sponsored by the State. The cultural élites set about remaking the political imagery and beliefs of the past in order to adapt them to the new ‘national’ requirements. Everything had to revolve around the nation, the only political subject and mobilising myth which had the power and credibility to rival the absolute monarchs, the bearers of the sovereignty, and the charisma that was now being claimed by the new collective entity. Throughout the nineteenth century, the intellectual and artistic élites devoted themselves to a wide variety of activities, including poetry, novels, history, painting, music and scientific investigation. The peculiarity of this age is that almost everything, including the so-called positive sciences, exhibited national traits. In the cultural reworking inevitably undertaken by each new generation or era, the aim was to nationalise. How this process developed is the subject of this chapter.

History was rewritten in order for the national entity called ‘Spain’ to be identified with Catholicism. This was a task undertaken by a number of authors in the last years of Isabel's reign, a delay of many years in comparison with the national histories produced with a liberal bias. In some cases, their works were really histories of the Spanish Church, recycled and disguised as national histories; in others, as in that of Vicente de la Fuente, a history that could well be classified as national was presented as ecclesiastical. Without exception, they formulated the first version of the National-Catholic myth, which would culminate in the work of Menéndez Pelayo.

The identification between Spain and Catholicism continued for a long time, certainly well into the 1850s. The most striking aspect is that it survived, if not in opposition to, then at least relatively detached from, the national myth which, during the early decades of the Modern Age, was created and controlled by the liberals. This chapter describes the manner by which conservative circles—defined far more by their religiosity than by their identification with the State—gradually evolved towards a nationalist outlook. The first section looks at how closely Catholicism was identified with the Hispanic monarchy at the time of the Counter-Reformation. The second section examines the purges of the non-Catholic minorities in Iberian society in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, something which left a lasting imprint upon the way in which the dominant religiosity was understood. The third section analyses the significance of the celebrated ‘alliance between the Altar and the Throne’ in the final years of the ancient régime, an alliance that was never free of rivalry. Only then can we fully appreciate the complexity of the ties that bound Spanish identity to Catholicism at the beginning of the Modern Age and the subsequent role of religion in the great political upheavals of the nineteenth century.

In 1973 Juan Linz, the pioneering scholar of Spanish nationalism, identified the essential problem of the State in the nineteenth century as one of a ‘crisis of penetration’. According to Linz, the Spanish State was unable to influence society either by means of its educational institutions or else by creating symbols that were acceptable to the majority of its citizens. In the early 1980s, José María Jover put forward a similar theory, which has been advocated even more forcibly thereafter by Borja de Riquer, for whom the growth of regional nationalisms in the twentieth century has been due less to the strength and intolerable centralising pressures of españolismo than to its very weaknesses—in other words, ‘to the ineffectiveness of the state nationalising process’ in the nineteenth century, the outcome of which was ‘a weak Spanish identity’.

This chapter focuses on the war of 1808–1814 and analyses its subsequent mythification as the ‘War of Independence’: that is to say, as a struggle governed by a spirit of national emancipation in the face of an attempt at foreign domination. It also scrutinises the difficulties that lay ahead for the liberal élites which sought to deploy the Spanish identity which had been inherited, reinforced and reformulated during the Napoleonic Wars in the service of their mission to modernise ‘Spain’.

This chapter considers the construction of Spanish identity, both within and outside Spain, in relation to “maurophilia” or the cultural fascination with the Moors in early modern Europe. It explains that “maurophilia” became so persistent that a hidden “Orient within” continuously reveals itself in multiple identifications of Spanish with specifically Moorish dress and cultural fashions. This chapter argues that it was the persistence of Moorishness within Spanish self-identity that enabled Northern Europe to denigrate Spain as the black other of its northern European self.

This chapter studies Martina L. Weisz's Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries (2019). This book aims to analyze “the place granted to Jews and Muslims in the construction of contemporary Spanish national identity, with a special focus on the transition from an exclusive, homogeneous sense of collective self toward a more pluralistic, open and tolerant one, in a European context.” This narrative of progress, however, is challenged by the excellent information provided in the book itself, which shows how these processes have been filled with contradictions and deep ambivalence, both historically and in the present, and how exclusionary nationalism has not been left behind. One of the book's richest contributions is its Jewish/Muslim comparative framework, which, as the author argues, is not usually undertaken. Ultimately, this book contains an abundance of useful information and insights for all those interested in Spain's relationship with its Muslim and Jewish minorities, the political and cultural negotiations of multiculturalism in Spain, and the way these relationships are affected by international events and diplomatic concerns.