As we know, contemporary Spain, the Spain we know, achieved democracy after a long string of failures, a historic exceptionality that had distanced it from European middle-class, industrial and enlightened movements. This anomaly was worsened even more as a consequence of the profound, dark inheritance of Francoism.
During the recent past, there was an attempt to impose an exclusive and intolerant idea of Spain that, in addition, identified the Spanish language with the ideology of the authoritarian Franco regime. All this caused the new Spanish democracy to be constructed from a feeble, inhibited, and often shameful national sentiment, and from an apparent (only apparent) renunciation of the nationalist message.
In fact, contemporary Spanish nationalism was identified with Francoism and with its negative characterizations and connotations, the national-Catholicism and its axioms: "Spain, hammer of heretics, light of Trento, sword of Rome, cradle of Saint Ignatius", "Santiago and at them, Spain!" (1), the essentialism, the fundamentalism, the traditionalism, the far-right, the Castilianism, the institutional militarism, the anti-Europeanism, the uniforming centralism, etc. All of these elements were the key reasons for its de-legitimization and denial, at least until the decade of the 1990s, once the Transitional stage was over.
In the 90s, however, these elements coincided with the public projection of the image of a Spain that had been "normalized, approved, reconciled, democratized, de-traditionalized, Europeanized and modernized", that seemed to have moved from the back to the front row in little more than two decades. A democratic Constitution had been approved, as had a parliamentary monarchy and a democratic, social state based on the rule of law, regions had been granted devolved powers, Spain had joined NATO, the European Community and, later, the European Union. The PSOE had come to power. Garci, Trueba and Almodovar had won the Oscar, Samaranch, Solana, and Mayor Zaragoza occupied relevant international positions. The Olympic Games, the Seville Expo, the sporting triumphs, and the classical singers Plácido Domingo, Montserrat Caballé, and Josep Carreras all helped to boost the image of Spain. They spoke of the "Spanish economic miracle", immigrants arrived by the thousands along with European community funds (150,000 million euros), the employment rates and number of jobs grew, there was peace between companies and unions, the Ibex-35 was started, per capita income approached European levels, and the socialist minister Carlos Solchaga declared himself proud that Spain was "the country where one could become rich the fastest".
The socialist victory of Felipe González (1982) managed to bring together for the first time a national project led by a young generation of Spaniards who soon were referred to as young nationalists, as carriers of a project of national transformation based, according to Lamo de Espinosa, on three simple ideas: change (rather than preserve), modernize (instead of traditionalize), and Europeanize (instead of remaining wrapped in Spanish-ness).
It is then when various analysts (Núñez Seixas, Pérez Garzon, Santos Juliá, David Ringrose, Isabel Burdiel) detected an attempt to recover Spanish patriotism, and the renewal of nationalist speech coming from the Spanish right as well as the left. We were witnesses to the end of the myth of Spanish failure. And this end resulted, for the first time, in a complacent and optimistic self-image on the part of Spanish citizenry. The conservative liberal right tried to nurture it and appealed to the historic tradition of pre-war liberal democratic nationalism, and rediscovered the figures of Azaña, Madariaga and Ortega y Gasset. Meanwhile, the left felt itself to be the heir to Spain's Regenerationism and Europeanism, and promoted the recovery of a republican nationalism. There is, then, a thread of continuity that led to the creation of the FAES foundation of José María Aznar in 2002.
It is worth the effort to re-read, from the point of view of the current reality, the confession of sociologist and now president of the Real Instituto Elcano, Emilio Lamo de Espinosa, made in 2001: "1998, twenty years after the Constitution, was the date when the Spanish realized that we had consummated a huge national political project, the project of modernization and Europeanization of Spain. For a generation like mine, that had been raised with a permanent complex due to the historic singularity of Spain, a country that had not had a bourgeois revolution, that had not carried out the industrial revolution, that had not joined modern science, that lacked entrepreneurship, that had not been capable of establishing either a capitalist economy or a democracy ... it is a real relief to see that all this has disappeared, that the Pyrenees are not a border with anything, that we don't have to be ashamed of ourselves and that we are normal".
The Spanish dream consisted of overcoming the secular complex, of allowing the shadow of historic and political failures to fade away and of achieving a "normal" state, comparable to that of Spain's European neighbors. Objectively, then, this national normalization has already been achieved, despite a set of anomalies still persistent in the State, as much in the military and political order as in the judicial, religious, ideological, economic and media spheres, in addition to some new anomalies which have appeared in the past few years as the result of the severe cases of corruption, the institutional erosion of the monarchy and the Constitutional Court, the deep recession and the progressive distancing of the elites (extractive and Madrid-based) from the citizenry. To this set of anomalies we can now add two problems of a different order but concurrent in time: Spain is now a country without a national project, and in Spain there are two nations (or at least one) with its own, distinct national project.
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(1) The author chose to write these mottos and slogans in Spanish in the original article, as they probably resonate much more with the average Catalan reader.
