Postcolonial Spain: Coloniality, Violence and Independence

By Helena Miguélez-Carballeira

At times explosive, at times restrained, the question of independence has been a fundamental force shaping contemporary Spain. However, the discipline of Spanish (Peninsular) studies has been slow to consider the reality of internal anticolonial and self-determination movements in Spain as part of their purview. To redress this, the present study engages postcolonial theory to shed light on the question of Spain’s ongoing internal national conflict, arguing that modern manifestations of such conflict are linked to internal demands for national sovereignty, independence and self-determination forged against the backdrop of Spain’s post-imperial crisis after 1898.

 

The collection ranges across topics such as late nineteenth-century penitentiary discourses, the biopolitics of Francoist agrarian reform, dispossession and mass tourism in Mallorca, the judiciary aftermath of the Catalan referendum on independence of 2017, and post-ETA memory politics. Collectively, they illuminate the conflict zones of contemporary Spanish culture, where questions related to (contested) internal colonialities and independence are enmeshed with the processes of political emancipation and state repression.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781837721078

Book preview

Introduction

The Spanish Postcolonial Continuum: Contested Internal Colonialities in the Long Spanish Twentieth Century

Helena Miguélez-Carballeira

Like many previous studies, the present volume maps postcolonial theories onto Hispanic peninsular studies in order to diversify how the discipline thinks about the interconnected legacies of colonialism, empire, nationalism, culture, migration and conflict in modern Spain (Altschul, 2012; Faszer-McMahon and Ketz, 2015; Fernández Parrilla, 2018; Harrison and Hoyle, 2000; Murray, 2018; Santaolalla, 2005). Unlike this expansive and significant body of work, however, this book engages postcolonial theory to shed light on the question of Spain’s ongoing internal national conflict, arguing that modern manifestations of such conflict are linked to internal demands for national sovereignty, independence and self-determination forged against the backdrop of Spain’s post-imperial crisis. In particular, the book proposes to articulate the notions of the ‘Spanish postcolonial continuum’ and of ‘contested internal colonialities’ as structuring features of what will here be proposed as the ‘long Spanish twentieth century’. In contrast to existing scholarship based on largely literal definitions of the Spanish twentieth century as beginning in1898, the year of the formal end to the Spanish overseas empire, and its strict centenary in 1998 (Romero-Salvadó, 1999), Postcolonial Spain seeks to theorise the long Spanish twentieth century as an unfinished temporality, joined by a series of as yet unresolved post-imperial entailments manifest in episodes of internal national tension from 1898 until today. Such conflicts include, among others, the immediate aftermath of the Cuban War of Independence and its political and cultural effects on the Spanish domestic setting, Barcelona’s Tragic Week in 1909, the politicisation of progressive peripheral nationalisms during the 1920s and 1930s leading to the Civil War (1936–9) and the ensuing dictatorship (1939–75), the Basque-Spanish violent conflict (1968–2011) and its post-conflict period, the Transition to democracy (1975–82) and the Catalan independence process leading to the self-determination referendum of 1 October 2017, all of which – as this introduction and the ensuing chapters will showcase – invoke or engage with questions related to coloniality and postcoloniality in a variety of ways.

The applicability of postcolonial theory to the study of contemporary Spain is proposed in this volume for its historical, political and critical potential. Postcolonial studies is viewed here as the critical field that encompasses the study of conflict zones where questions related to independence and national self-determination are deeply enmeshed with processes of cultural production and political emancipation. That contemporary Spain qualifies as one such context is incontrovertible, seeing as the Spanish political and public sphere has remained overdetermined by internal nationalisms and self-determination movements for the whole of the twentieth century and to this day. Some of these are active in domestic settings as varied as the Canary Islands, Andalucia, Galicia, the Basque Country, Castile, Asturias, Aragon and the Catalan Countries (including the Catalan-speaking territories of Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands). While varied in their level of political articulation, these movements are brought together by an internal anticolonial worldview of post-Francoist Spain that denies the ‘legitimitat històrica d’Espanya com a estat-nació, atès que tal legitimitat es sustenta sobre la negació d’altres pobles’ (‘historical legitimacy of Spain as a nation state, given that such legitimacy is based on the denial of other national communities’) (Ojeda and Barquer, 2022). This fact notwithstanding, Spain is rarely incorporated into choral postcolonial approaches to Europe’s postimperial nations, a field that has remained reluctant to addressing the specificities of self-determination movements within European territory as part of its purview. The volume Postcolonial Transitions in Europe: Contexts, Practices and Politics (Ponzonesi and Colpani, 2016) does not include any Spain-related contribution, for example, and only one of its chapters deals with ‘a colonial conflict within Europe’, namely the Anglo-Irish conflict, ‘at a time when this aspect of European history seems to have been entirely pushed aside by the presumably larger concerns of a Europe that has to face the challenges of global politics’ (Fekadu-Uthoff, 2016: 83). While postcolonial approaches to the study of contemporary France, Italy and Germany have been forthcoming in the past decades, the focus of this body of work has been the pressing questions of migratory regimes, racism and European states’ occlusive, deferring and exoticising memory politics regarding their colonial pasts (Cooke, 2005; Forsdick and Murray, 2003; Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 2012). Attention to internal national conflicts under the aegis of European postcolonial critique continues to be rare. In the case of the paradigmatic Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (Forsdick and Murphy, 2003), for example, only one chapter deals with the question of internal colonialism within France (Williams, 2003), while analysis of the cultural production associated with Breton separatism has stayed in the fringes of the field of Francophone postcolonial studies (Blin-Rolland, 2019). The break-through volume Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 2012) does refer to Italy’s internal colonialism as ‘the expression of subalternity from within the nation state’ (2012: 4). However, it does not extend its scope to the study of internal pro-independence movements in Italy, for which the notions of internal subalternity and dependence have been fundamental, as more recent analysis of the theoretical foundations of Sardinian separatism have argued (Ghisu and Mongili, 2021). For the Spanish context, no proposal for the study of the Spanish postcolonial condition exists that incorporates the question of the country’s internal pro-independence movements, with the exception of Joseba Gabilondo’s sustained critique of Spain’s post-imperial condition and his call for new ways of thinking about Spain that help consider ‘el horizonte de violencia, persecución, conflicto, judicialización, criminalización, terror y marginación que caracteriza el Estado español de hoy en día’ (‘the horizon of violence, persecution, conflict, litigation, criminalisation, terror and marginalisation that characterises the Spanish state today’) (Gabilondo, 2019: 94–5). While it is not possible for this single volume to exhaust all the critical possibilities that could help establish such a critique of contemporary Spain, it is here proposed that engaging discourses of post-empire with internal national conflict, independence, self-determination and coloniality opens a promising avenue in this direction.

Of course, extensive work has been carried out on the many domestic legacies, facets and cultural archives of Spanish colonialism for its duration and after its collapse, and this book is also deeply indebted to it. The influential work of Susan Martin-Márquez (2008), Benita Sampedro-Vizcaya (2008), Lisa Surwillo (2014), Akiko Tsuchiya (2019) and Xavier Andreu Miralles (2023), among numerous others, has attended to the enduring post-imperial entailments observable in nineteenth-century, twentieth-century and present-day Spain. Other lines of work, such the one pursued in Brice Chamouleau’s edited collection De colonialidad: perspectivas sobre sujetos y género en la historia contemporánea española (‘On Coloniality: Perspectives on Subjects and Gender in Spanish Contemporary History’) (2017), have focused on the intersections between coloniality and gender subjectivities in contemporary Spain, while decolonial historians such as Javier García Fernández have approached the historical formation of Spanish fascist ideologies as indivisible from colonial ideologies and practices (García Fernández, 2021). This critical corpus is fundamental for any understanding of the continuing leverage that acritical imaginaries of Spanish colonialism have on the country’s society, culture and politics – a fact that has become exacerbated with the creation of the Spanish far-right party VOX in 2013 and its entry into Spanish parliamentary politics, both at central and regional level, since 2019. Drawing on the theories of Spanish national identity by philosopher Gustavo Bueno (1924–2016) and his critique of Spain’s geopolitical subordination to the European Union, the fascination with imperial ideologies exhibited by Spanish far-right politics taps into the pre-existing motif of ‘una España que, antes de ser nación, y por encima de serlo, fue imperio, y en dejando de serlo pasó a ver amenazada su mera existencia’ (‘a Spain that was an empire before it became a nation, and which – after ceasing to be an empire – saw its mere existence under threat’) (Batalla Cueto, 2021: 115). As shown by the profusion of apologetic (even celebratory) publications on the Spanish empire flooding the Spanish non-fiction publishing market since the Catalan referendum on independence of 2017, the view that rekindling Spanish imperial pride is one fundamental strategy against the dispersing force of internal separatisms functions as an implicit structuring principle of the Spanish conservative establishment. Surprisingly candid examples of this association between Spain’s post-imperial energy and the containment of internal separatisms (if need be, by force) abound in the neo-imperialist writing boom catalysed by María Elvira Roca Barea’s best-selling Imperiofobia y leyenda negra: Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y el Imperio español (‘Empire-phobia and the Black Legend: Rome, Russia, the United States and the Spanish Empire’) (2016). Roca Barea’s own sequel text, Fracasología: España y sus élites: de los afrancesados a nuestros días (‘Failure-ology: Spain and its Elites: from the Francophiles to our Present Times’) (2019), includes a defence of empire’s universalist imperative as a bulwark against the ‘feudalising’ tendencies of various kinds of particularisms emerging in Spain and Latin America, including ‘guerrillas comunistas, cárteles de droga, nacionalismos regionalistas, indigenismos revolucionarios’ (‘communist guerrillas, drug cartels, regionalist nationalisms, revolutionary indigenisms’) (Roca Barea, 2019: 161). A more outright formulation of this perspective is found in Marcelo Gullo Omodeo’s book Madre Patria (‘Motherland’) whose subtitle reads ‘Desmontando la leyenda negra desde Bartolomé de las Casas hasta el separatismo catalán’ (‘Dismantling the black legend from Bartolomé de las Casas to Catalan separatism’) (Gullo Omodeo, 2021).

Despite its circulation in best-selling publications such as those above and its clear presence in the Spanish public sphere, the present volume treats the discursive explicitation of a continuum between Spanish overseas colonialism and the country’s internal national conflict as contested ideological terrain. As Susan Martin-Márquez has already stated, ‘metaphors of colonization would be strategically employed by a number of nationalist separatist movements in Spain throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ (Martin-Márquez, 2008: 46). However, those political traditions seeking to transpose global anti-imperialist and anticolonial ideologies into the Spanish domestic setting have been the object of sustained censorship, rewriting, manipulation, persecution and violent suppression since the formal demise of the Spanish overseas empire in 1898 to this day. The term ‘contested internal colonialities’ is therefore here proposed as a designation for those enclaves within the contemporary Spanish administrative territory where anticolonial discourses have given rise to particular political cultures of nation-building and national emancipation, where self-determination and independence from the present-day Spanish state may feature as options. Contestation of these ideologies has occurred both on the discursive and material planes. As we shall see in this introduction, the admission that the loss of the last Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Pacific could bring about further dismemberment of the Spanish peninsular territory was by no means an uncommon trope of the immediate post-1898 period, yet its mere formulation elicited a diversity of strong effects. As a consequence, the emancipatory counterpart of this trope in the Spanish postcolonial mentality (namely, that peripheral nationalities in Spain could qualify as internal colonies and thus aspire to the principle of self-determination) has been one of the most contentious, divisive and resilient ideas of the Spanish modern and contemporary period. Seen under this light, the long Spanish twentieth century can be envisaged as a discrete (albeit, unfinished) temporality, structured around the appearance in the immediate post-1898 sphere of a discursive continuum – hereafter termed the ‘Spanish postcolonial continuum’ – symbolically joining consummated separatist processes overseas and envisioned future ones domestically and generating an often-violent dialectic throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with the Catalan referendum of self-determination in 2017 marking its most recent, unresolved climax. It is in this sense that the present volume theorises the specificity of Spain’s postcolonial condition as one determined by a modern empire-to-nation transition that has been continuously challenged by internal anticolonial nationalisms, which need either to resist or be entirely deactivated. In the following section, I will develop some of the implications that this outline has for a historiographical rereading of Spain’s immediate postcolonial period after 1898 and sketch some of its political and cultural echoes across the long Spanish twentieth century. In the introduction’s last section, the critical and political implications of this approach for peninsular Hispanic studies will be considered and mapped onto the book’s chapters.

The Spanish Postcolonial Continuum

The Spanish post-imperial crisis after 1898 has been extensively studied for how it engaged the period’s conceptions of empire and nation in the domestic setting. Although, as Christopher Schmidt-Nowara has shown in The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (2006), discourses about the Spanish empire, along with nation-building purposes, have been utilised since at least the 1820s, the events of 1898, which from the metropolitan perspective singularly combined the historical experiences of terminal colonial loss and an internationally resounding military defeat, are still seen as the discrete historical catalyst for the modern Spanish post-imperial condition. Causing a traumatic disruption in the realm of self-representation, Spain’s inability to retain its last colonies in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Pacific precipitated a crisis in the country’s processes of nationalisation, which had up until then drawn heavily on the imaginaries of imperial grandeur and the idea of Spanish international leverage. With the vision of the country’s imperial power now shattered, domestic discourses on Spanish national cohesion entered a process of profound reconfiguration that had to make sense of the events of modern anticolonial secessionism entering the Spanish arena via the Cuban War of Independence (1895–8) and the Philippine Revolution (1896–8), as well as other earlier European and transcontinental independence processes such as the Crete revolt against Ottoman rule (1866–9), the Finnish rise against Russification at the turn of the century and the Irish process towards Home Rule (1870–1922) (Balcells, 2013; Costa, 2013). A large part of what Nicholas Round called the ‘mental world of 1898’, therefore, involved a multifaceted and often conflicted engagement with independence, both as a consummate historical experience affecting territories that had been considered a part of the Spanish administration until their final excision, and as an imagined possibility suggestive of a further dismemberment of Spanish territorial unity – a unity that was conceptualised fluidly at the time both as an imperial and a national historical reality (Round, 2000: 91). The disintegrating effect of independence processes and the consequent imperial demise therefore put a significant dent in the nationalising potential of what Antonio Feros has called ‘the Spanish master narrative on the conquest and colonization’ (Feros, 2005: 111). Underlying this late nineteenth-century articulation of empire and nation was the association between imperial military prowess and domestic national governability, a central feature of the Spanish post-1898 moment that has remained a hallmark of Spanish political imagination in its long twentieth century.

The ‘Spanish postcolonial continuum’ – the imperial logic of Spanish post-1898 nationalisation that associated overseas independence processes with the exacerbation of domestic concerns about national cohesion and unity – has been treated in the historiography of the period either as an obvious commonplace or as an elusive implicature. The vast historiographical literature on the domestic repercussions of 1898 agrees that the politicisation of peripheral regionalisms at the turn of the century, particularly their Catalan, Basque and Canarian inflections, were a direct consequence of Spanish imperial collapse (Balfour, 1997: 136–7; Dowling, 2013: 16–17). In parallel, it is largely acknowledged that modern anticolonial terminology, including the principle of self-determination, entered discussions about the domestic territorial debate in Spain mainly via the Cuban and Philippine independence processes (Ucelay da Cal, 2003: 69). However, as Enric Ucelay da Cal remarked regarding the critical parameters of this historiographical field: ‘suele hacerse una censura tajante entre los problemas políticos coloniales y los peninsulares’ (‘the link between colonial and peninsular political problems is usually the object of strong censure’) (Ucelay da Cal, 2003: 76). I agree that studies of the metropolitan repercussions of overseas colonial secession display a particular kind of reticence when it comes to exploring the polysemy of meanings – as well as cultural and political uses – that the Spanish postcolonial continuum had in the post-1898 period. This is not insignificant, as the discursive presence of this continuum can be detected in a wide array of documents of the period, from highly canonical texts of Spanish regenerationist thought such as José Ortega y Gasset’s España invertebrada (‘Invertebrate Spain’) (Ortega y Gasset, 2007: 64–5), to early twentieth-century Catalanist media and political tracts such as Francisco Cambó’s Por la concordia (‘In Favour of Harmony’), where he declares in cautionary tone that ‘El esfuerzo que España hizo para conservar sus últimas colonias lo haría centuplicado para conservar Cataluña, si por acaso tratase ésta de hacer efectiva su separación’ (‘The effort that Spain made to keep its last colonies would increase hundred-fold if Catalonia were to make its separation effective’) (Cambó, 1927: 117).

Without a doubt, then, one of the meanings conjured by the postcolonial continuum between Cuba and Catalonia in the early twentieth century was to conflate anxieties about the loss of the last overseas colonies with the possibility of independence processes taking root domestically. Yet, a traceable tendency in the literature of the period has been to downplay the appearance of this figure of the Spanish post-imperial imagination by emphasising, as Sebastian Balfour does in his account of early Catalanism, that uses of the term ‘separatism’ in domestic contexts were not representative of political ideologies that were merely seeking ‘autonomy not independence’, and that the expression of analogies between Cuban and Catalan autonomy tinged only the more ‘extreme nationalist positions’ (Balfour, 1997: 132, 136). A similar disavowal appears in Álvarez Junco’s commentary of Alejandro Lerroux’s parliamentary discourses at the turn of the century. Drawing on the anatomical imagination that was characteristic of the period to refer to the national body politic, Lerroux exhorted his fellow parliamentarians to attend carefully to the ‘ulcer’ that episodes of civic and cultural unruliness in early twentieth-century Barcelona were provoking, ‘porque si no el catalanismo ha de dar tales disgustos a España que aquellos otros que trajeron consigo la pérdida de nuestro imperio quedarán empequeñecidos’ (‘because otherwise Catalanism will cause such afflictions to Spain that those brought about by the loss of our empire will seem small in comparison’) (Lerroux, 1901, in Álvarez Junco, 2005: 304). Acknowledging, as is received wisdom in the historiography of the period, that the ‘humiliation of 1898’ had stirred a new culture of national self-doubt, Álvarez Junco dismisses Lerroux’s evocation of a Cuban-Catalan continuum as scarcely relevant owing to the lack of historical concomitances between the two contexts (Álvarez Junco, 2005: 304). However, the evident historical incommensurability between the process of Cuban independence and the early years of Catalanism should not stand in the way of exploring the network of meanings that the evocation of this link had for the Spanish post-imperial imagination, as well as its continuous presence in Spanish twentieth and twenty-first-century politics, particularly in relation to questions of national governance in the face of persistent pro-independence activism. To illustrate some of these meanings, I will elaborate on one use of the Spanish postcolonial continuum linking overseas and domestic separatisms following Javier Krauel’s cultural emotions approach to the post-1898 moment, as well as his call to examine how ‘a powerful imperial past is integrated within the affective life of nationalism’ in Spain (Krauel, 2013: 9).

Post-1898 Fear and Spanish National Governance

A key cultural emotion mobilised by post-1898 discourses of nationalisation in Spain was the fear of further imperial dismemberment unfolding internally; that is, the fear that a repeat of 1898 could happen on domestic soil. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Sara Ahmed includes fear among a core of emotions powerful enough to institute ‘affective economies’ (Ahmed, 2004: 44). Seeing fear’s relation to its object as foundational of a particular spatio-temporal frame, extending sideways through the ‘sticky’, metonymic relation between fear’s signs and into the future, through the anticipation of its object, Ahmed is able to highlight the function that fear plays in sustaining the modes of collective community that are integral to modern power economies, including the family, the nation and the international civic (seen as civilised) society (2004: 78). The dialectics of fear therefore engage not only the subject of fear and the ‘others’ it necessarily institutes as its threat, but they also determine a given community’s ability to persist or disintegrate. In early twentieth-century Spain, the fear of a potential transmission between the events of independence materialising overseas and a possible domestic iteration animated many of the period’s discussions about the problem of Spanish weak nationalisation. Put differently, the fear that disintegration abroad could lead to disintegration back at home provided a powerful affective structure for Spanish regenerationist thought and action, traceable in both the period’s writing and policies.

Take Luis Morote’s book La moral de la derrota (‘The Moral of Defeat’) (1900), for example, a text that participates in the corpus of regenerationist essays written in the immediate wake of the Spanish-American War, alongside others such as Los desastres y la regeneración de España (‘The Disasters and the Regeneration of Spain’) (1899) by José Rodríguez Martínez or La tragedia de América: cómo empieza y cómo acaba: liquidaciones coloniales (‘The Tragedy of America: How it Starts and How it Ends: Colonial Severances’) (1899) by Antonio Pérez Rioja. La moral de la derrota was written by the Valencia-born liberal jurist and journalist Luis Morote i Greus (1864–1913) immediately after returning from his eventful coverage of the Cuban war of independence for the Madrid daily newspaper El Liberal (‘The Liberal’). The events surrounding the correspondent’s presence on the island would certainly become one of the journalistic sensations of the period leading to the passing of the Carta Autonómica de Cuba (‘Autonomy Charter of Cuba’) in November 1897, with El Liberal playing a central role in the promotion of the pro-autonomic agenda that the government of Mateo Sagasta (1825–1903) tried to deploy as a way of averting the secessionist processes underway in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Published two years after the Treaty of Paris 1898, by which Spain was forced by military defeat to relinquish Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States, Luis Morote’s La moral de la derrota noticeably capitalises on the image of the valiant and loyal patriot that had put his life at risk in Cuba to serve the nation’s interests, thus achieving the highest glory: ‘la de padecer por España, la de arriesgar por su causa la vida, la de jurar su amor ante la revolución en armas’ (‘that of suffering for Spain, that of risking one’s life for its cause, that of swearing one’s love for it before an armed revolution’) (Morote, 1900: v). It is from this stance as a first-hand observer that Morote sets forth his essay’s twofold programme: to rehabilitate the public image of the Spanish military after its capitulation in Santiago de Cuba and to extract a series of political lessons from that experience, as encapsulated in the book’s central message that a new conduct – a morality – can be derived from defeat. From the outset, Morote’s diagnosis relies on the fusion of imperial and national discourses for its explanation of how a certain weakness of vision led the country to its recent resounding failures: ‘Si ha habido quiebra’, he says, ‘no es solo la de la energía militar, sino la quiebra y ruina de un concepto total y orgánico de nuestros destinos en el mundo y también de nuestras fuerzas’ (‘If there has been a fracture, it is not only of military energy, but the fracture and ruin of an organic and total concept of our worldly destinies and of our strengths too’) (Morote, 1900: vii). It is to a recalibration of its worldly destinies, therefore, that Spain should now turn, to forge a renewed sense of purpose. To Morote’s mind, this project should focus, first and foremost, on tackling the disintegratory forces that the country had begun to experience on domestic soil, where a further iteration of the recently lived episode of colonial loss may be looming. Blaming the ‘infortunio de la pérdida de las colonias’ (‘ill-fortune of the loss of the colonies’) on a series of ‘causas permanentes’ (‘permanent causes’), perceptible in the areas of Spanish civil, military, economic, religious, educational and psychological organisation, Morote writes:

Pero si no poseemos colonias, tenemos, sí, un cuerpo nacional en la Península, aprisionado por el despotismo de los reyes primero, por la centralización jacobina después. Y como al perderse América, por un efecto natural, aunque triste, de los hechos, se han relajado los vínculos que tienen agregadas las partes de la nación, es fuerza que nos apliquemos á desentrañar las causas de ese mal y sus remedios, si no queremos (Dios no lo haga) que mañana en Cataluña sigan el ejemplo de separación que les ha dado Cuba, ó al otro día en los riscos de las provincias Vascongadas reproduzcan los partidarios del Rey Neto la ya cuarta guerra civil. (1900: 106)

But whilst we do not have colonies, we do have a national body in the Peninsula that is under the grip of the monarchy’s despotism, on the one hand, and of Jacobin centralisation, on the other. And since, naturally but sadly, the loss of America has had a relaxing effect on the bonds that bring together the different parts of the nation, it is imperative that we attend diligently to understanding the causes of this evil, as well as its solutions, lest, God forbid, tomorrow in Catalonia they follow the example of separation that Cuba has given them, or that the day after tomorrow, in the crags of the Basque provinces, the supporters of King Neto reproduce a fourth civil war already.

The mere possibility that Cuban independence could spark a further dismemberment of the national body within peninsular territory is potent enough a reason to abandon the ways of Spanish heroic militarism as a method for national regeneration and consider alternative methods to increase national cohesion. Here, the figure of a possible post-1898 independence process occurring within Spain is not being floated for its immediate historical plausibility, but for its historically specific capacity to mobilise an emotional response, through which new political meanings could be created. In other