I am not aware of any country that has such a robust genre of “Country X As a Huge, Unsolvable Problem” as Spain. The “mystery of Spain” has had a scary number of huge volumes dedicated to it. And there is nothing to indicate that the genre is on the wane.
These books are obviously part of a nation-building process, and I have been a huge fan of the genre for years. Now that I’m on sabbatical, I can indulge my bizarre passion for these books.
José Álvarez Junco is a famous historian, and his 2002 book Mater dolorosa is a 700 page volume that tries to answer the question of why the “Spain as a problem” genre is so crazy popular while actually contributing (in a very conscious way) to the genre. The book is lovely, it’s filled with insights, and though I obviously disagree with some of the things the author says, I took many pages of notes and enjoyed the volume thoroughly.
Álvarez Junco argues that Spain’s nation-building efforts in the XIXth century were deficient when compared with those of other Western European countries. There is still a lot of nation-building that needs to be done today and it has to be done fast or the antsy Catalonians are leaving. As Álvarez Junco points out, the XIXth-ventury nationalism was all about bringing territories together and creating bigger countries, while today, nationalism is about creating ever-tinier nations. There seems to be a collective failure of imagination as we are rejecting the very possibility of imagining a community that is not very small.
Author: José Álvarez Junco
Title: Mater Dolorosa. La idea de España en el siglo XIX.
Year: 2002.
My rating: 10 out of 10.
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