Identità nazionale, monarchia, impero. Costruire la spagna nell'età del liberalismo (1782-1868)
- Autores: Emanuele De Luca
- Directores de la Tesis: Guido Abbattista (dir. tes.), María Cruz Romeo Mateo (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat de València ( España ) en 2018
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Alfonso Botti (presid.), Jean-Philippe Luis (secret.), Ferran Archilés i Cardona (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Historia Contemporánea por la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid; la Universidad Complutense de Madrid; la Universidad de Cantabria; la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela; la Universidad de Zaragoza; la Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea y la Universitat de València (Estudi General)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
- Resumen
Most of historiography on contemporary Spain interprets terms such as nation and empire, national construction and imperialism, as if they were contradictory or self-disclaiming. After the American revolutionary processes of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the imperial Spanish dimension would have been replaced by the purely national one, where the different liberal families, through a revolutionary process, firstly introduced a constitutional monarchical system and then clashed for the political articulation and internal cultural heritage of the nation. According to this reading, only during the Restauración borbónica, and then with the crisis of 1898, an "imperial conscience" would re-emerge as a component of a "mature" nationalism and capable of characterizing the colonial adventures in Africa of the twentieth century.
However, as proposed by Josep Fradera, from the end of the eighteenth century - with the crisis atlántica and the process of Iberian-American independences - until the end of the "Isabeline era", Spain, from a metropolitan center of a great global empire, passed to be an "imperial nation". This research is focused on the political and cultural aspects of this passage: probing the permanence of the empire in the form of "imperial conscience" - a terminology taken from Anglo-Saxon and post-colonial historiography, especially from Alda Blanco's studies - in the era of liberalism and understand how this process engages in the construction of a national-patriotic imagery and rhetoric. Which role did the imperial dimension play in the different contexts that composed the complex and varied Spanish geography, for the definition of the nationalist constellation in the nineteenth century? The loss of most of the Ibero-American colonies until 1824 led to a double process in the Atlantic context: a different inclusion / exclusion of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines within the political, economic and administrative boundaries of the (imperial) nation; and the reconstruction of cultural and symbolic relationships with the former colonies through symbolic constructions such as panhispanism and hispanoamericanism. At the same time the imperial conscience was nourished by the search for new territories to be discovered, governed and colonized, especially in Africa.
How to interpret this progressive "reorientation" towards Guinea and, in particular, Morocco, which will be so important in 20th century foreign policy? Spain was not any imperial nation or monarchy. In fact, it occupied a specific role within the European political and cultural order: leyenda negra and mito romántico conveyed and coagulated long-term representations and stereotypes - on the history, the ethnic character, the personalities that succeeded on the throne of Spain, colonialism, customs perceived as folkloric - which together established an "European image" of Spain, to paraphrase Edward Said. Furthermore, this image was based on a "semi-orientalization" of the Iberian country: a hybrid country, both picturesque and decadent, as much European as exotic and close to the Muslim Arabic tradition.
These different matrices of representations were non-marginal components in the construction of a national-patriotic narrative and genealogy. This, since the end of the eighteenth century, remained linked to the rhetorical dimension of the empire and then to an (often vain) research of a renewed international role of the nation during the nineteenth century. Analyzing narrative sources - such as periodicals or novels rather than historiography, orientalistic studies and travel diaries - and through the identification of emblematic events such as the Guerra de Africa (1859-1860), it's shown that the loss most of the colonies did not mean abandoning the imperial propensity of Spain. It was, if anything, a transformation because of the different political and cultural conditions opened by the Era of liberalism.
