by Let’s start with the basics: for Spain to be viable it is essential, among other things, that patriotism is distributed throughout the national territory, is interclass (of course the workers have a country!) and covers the entire political spectrum. It is not reasonable that parties whose express purpose is to break national unity are legal – in neighboring countries they are not – and neither can this remain at the discretion of democratic alternation, so that, with some governments, for better or worse, it has been guaranteed. its continuity and with others… we’ll see.
Unfortunately, as the reader well knows, the reality in which we find ourselves is quite different from the one described and although not exclusively, an important part of the responsibility lies with a left like the Spanish one that has been disdainful towards national symbols for decades. , indifferent to threats of rupture – ridiculing her adversaries’ concerns in this regard as unfounded – and we have even come to see her strangely fascinated by separatist movements. Well, one of the most serious intellectual efforts that there has been in recent years from that side of the political spectrum to understand the causes of this and overcome such a situation is found in the book of Jorge Polo Blanco Romantics and racists: ideological origins of Spanish ethnonationalisms. Its objective is meritorious and it is worth buying (and even reading!), although it still has some typical shortcomings of our left that we will proceed to analyze.
The thesis on which this work is based is that the artistic and philosophical current of romanticism and its taste for the ancestral, the exotic, the mysterious and incomprehensible to understanding, fostered a type of cultural nationalism, essentialist, drunk on metaphysics, reactionary to the modernity, which replaces history with legend and rambles with logorrhea about the “spirit of the people”, which would end up forming a lethal combination with the (pseudo) biological sciences around racialism, phrenology and social Darwinism, crystallizing all of this in the Nazi doctrine that devastated Europe. The ideologists of the various “ethno-nationalisms” – as they are called – that afflict Spain, particularly the Basque, Galician and Catalan, would have been strongly inspired in their nineteenth-century origins by that fundamentally German current of thought and, despite the fact that after the Second War World Cup had to adapt to new times, they would retain that romantic-racist background and therefore, Jorge Polo maintains, they are openly incompatible with the Jacobin, enlightened, materialist, universalist and equality-based left-wing ideology. This is the general idea of the book, now let’s go in parts.
The first 170 pages are a tour of all those champions of romanticism and German idealism who tried to respond to that lament of Keats: “Doesn’t all charm fade at the simple touch of icy philosophy?”, possessed by an ardent desire to poetize existence and, in the process, national consciences. As Jorge Polo is a philosophy professor, we appreciate his great ease in this field and here we could hardly object to anything. We see parade before our eyes Novalis, Schlegel, Fichte, Hegel, Herder, Schelling and many other authors who were developing an aesthetic and intellectual current punctuated by intimidating concepts—they seem like invocations to Cthulhu—such as kulturgemeinschatf, weltanschauung and volksgeist.
Once this theoretical ground has been established, in the following pages attention shifts to nineteenth-century Spanish authors who, in one way or another, collected that aesthetic-political sensitivity and from it provided content to peripheral nationalisms. The journey now becomes through the theories of Prat de la Riba, Rovira i Virgili, Azkue, Sabino Arana either Castelaoamong others, fantasizing about indomitable Celtic and Aryan races, extremely unique cranial perimeters, regional languages that express “the voice of blood” and telluric ecstasies in which the Galician massif has resisted the Cantabrian mountain range and the Castilian plateau since ancient times ( clearly inferior, where is it going to end).
Separatism 2.0 for the 21st century
Well, this is where our objections to the book begin, which expressly limits itself to “ideological origins” and stops at the preambles of the Second World War. In this way, the realignment and updating of so many political discourses after the defeat of Nazism is conveniently overlooked, when all terminology alluding to race, blood and national essences became outdated or directly became taboo. Instead the separatists embraced the anti-colonial Marxist discourse that became dominant from the 1950s and 1960s; It was no longer about being a superior race, but rather an indigenous tribe oppressed by imperialism.. It is easy for us to bash 19th-century authors and their bombastic rhetoric from contemporary political sensitivity, but it is also a somewhat futile task, because separatism has long been gone: by the end of the 20th century, young Batasunos did not have posters. in their rooms Che Guevaranot by Sabino Arana.
Extracting racist and misogynistic quotes from him in order to discredit the PNV of our days is a task that entertains many, but its scope is epidermal as long as said party is today as irritatingly progressive as almost the entire remaining political arc. Let us remember that they are supporters of the VioGen laws, they supported the Trans law, the “Only yes is yes” law and they dedicate huge amounts of money (from the very lucrative Economic Agreement) to the issue of climate change, to finance feminist and LGTBI associations, as well as as well as to provide substantial aid – with the consequent appeal effect – to a large number of immigrants, often of Muslim origin, preferred by the Basque and Catalan authorities over those of Hispanic roots (who would continue to be Spanish in a certain way). Calling the separatists insistently racist and xenophobic could have the undesirable effect of making them perceived by many voters as a bastion against the multiculturalist policy of open borders. There were many Catalans who supported the 2017 coup in the hope that an independent Catalan State would have a more restrictive immigration policy…
Of course, there is an essential element in peripheral nationalisms that has remained unchanged over time: his anti-Spanishism and his Europeanism (two sides of the same coin). So what in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th was expressed in accordance with the biological fashions of the time—they were sublime big-headed Europeans as they were of Celtic, Aryan or Nordic race compared to the “African” Spaniards with small skulls—is now expressed. expressed in the sense that they are more sophisticated European because they are more progressive, civilized and modern, compared to the reactionary, old-fashioned, Francoist, caspous, inquisitorial Catholic Spaniards, etc. It is here where I would like to introduce an observation that I consider important: Jorge Polo shows how strange he is for the marriage between the left and the peripheral nationalists… Could it not be because they both share the same Europeanism/blacklegendism and that is why they recognize each other as relatives? How many times have we seen people on the left be ashamed of bullfights, Holy Week processions or other similar cultural manifestations that apparently would distance us from that Europe that fascinates them so much, Lutheran, vegan and cycling, the one that euthanasia to your elderly when they start coughing?
Response from Spanish nationalism
Reading this book I have had the suspicion that the author has not completely gotten rid of some of those previous biases, even though he is on the right track. An example of this is found in his tenacious insistence—erroneous, in my opinion—on distinguishing between nation/ethnic nationalism (the bad one) versus nation/civic-political nationalism (this would be the good one). Polo tells us that modern political nations have brought with them a leveling, centralizing effect, which inevitably puts an end to certain institutions, dialects or particularities in favor of a common citizenship, in such a way that “in the construction of modern political nations it is “ethnicity turned out to be a completely insignificant factor”… But isn’t the United States a canonical example of a “modern political nation”? Because it was a deeply ethnic State from its very foundation, citizenship was not extendable to the indigenous or black population, and those immigrants of European origin were integrated to the extent that they assimilated the Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity in such a way that the population Italian, Polish or Irish took generations to complete this process. Developing political/philosophical categories that leave out half of the reality they purport to describe leaves much to be desired as an efficient taxonomic classification…
Even so, let’s accept octopus as a pet and assume, as he points out on another page, that the canonical modern political nations are only the European ones (he specifically cites England, France, Italy, Germany and Spain) that emerged, he tells us, from the forgetting the various ethnic strains that coexisted in their territory to give rise to something superior… But aren’t national museums, typical of the 18th and 19th centuries in all those countries, the institutionalization of a collective identity, a narrative of the nation, a TRUE Volksgeist even low in calories? Weren’t German and Italian reunification a process guided by the ethno-cultural? He also mentions the Reconquista as an event in which various “ethnic nations” merged to create a “political nation.” According to the RAE, ethnicity is “a human community defined by characteristics such as language, religion, ancestry or shared cultural traits.” Wouldn’t the Spain of 1492 also be an ethnic nation since it was built with well-defined limits that excluded the Muslim and the Jewish? And what can we say about France, a country stuck in aggressively ethnic and exclusive categories, as they could see in Algeria from 1830 until the terrible war of independence that cost them more than half a million deaths in the mid-20th century. But perhaps the latter is difficult to see for a part of the Spanish left with a long French and Masonic tradition (pardon the redundancy). There will be no need to elaborate on the clear racial consciousness that guided the United Kingdom in its empire, I imagine.
We will agree, in view of the above, that such distinctions between ethnic/political nations are diffuse and that Michael Billig In denying them he is more correct than Polo would like to admit. Furthermore, applied to the Spanish case they end up doing more harm than good. Considering Spanish nationalism as civic/political compared to the ethnic of peripheral nationalisms means, when you look at it, internalizing its game: Spain would be the BOE, the state power, the constitutional drafting and the ministries, the coldly rational-administrative, versus the identity-based. , cultural, sentimental that we can disdain with enlightened superiority but that turns out to be able to win over the majority will in Galicia, the Basque Country and Catalonia. People are social, tribal animals, the emotional-irrational is part of our being and If we want Spain to have continuity, we must fight separatism also in the symbolic, cultural and emotional field.. That is why it is a matter of State that regional sports teams are not allowed, that Spanish is the only official language as well as a vehicular language in education throughout the country (perhaps those romantic authors were not so wrong when linking language and nation), that cultural affinity be a fundamental criterion in immigration policy, that patriotism be a civic value to be taught in schools, that the people appropriate their national symbols and that they are not just flags hanging in public buildings and, in short, it is necessary, vindicate the history and heroes of the Spanish past, as well as their exploits, in a popular culture that we cannot leave in the hands of Hollywood.
Does all this perhaps sound too close to that dangerous romanticism?
