The Year 1898: The Empire’s Shadow

In 1898 Spain definitively lost its last colonial possessions in America and Asia. If the defeats of 1824 meant it was now a second-rank Empire in retreat, the defeat of 1898 and the Treaty of Paris with the United States that same year was even worse, placing Spain behind even the other Iberian imperialist, Portugal.

First was Spain's growing interest in Africa, which had existed since the Middle Ages. In the eighteenth century Spain's commitments deepened after changes in Ottoman policy brought about more peaceful commercial and diplomatic relations in the eastern Mediterranean. As a result, the import of Russian grains from the Black Sea ports of Odessa and Rostock took on great importance for the peninsular periphery, which grew accustomed to receiving imports. Morocco's role changed as the result of repeated subsistence crises in Spain, where domestic markets were still not well integrated. As a result, in the 1790s the state considered the possibility of establishing some sort of protectorate in Morocco. That line of thinking continued through 1859-1860, when the first war against the Alaouite kingdom took place, and into the twentieth century, when Spain established protectorates there in 1912 after reaching an agreement with France. After years of warfare, an administrative structure for these territorial claims was established in 1927 which lasted until 1956, when the entire country was decolonized.

The establishment of areas of interest in northern Morocco (the Rif) and the south (which would become known as the Spanish Sahara) took place at the same time as Spain penetrated the Gulf of Guinea, a remnant of Spain's late entry into slave trafficking.

The turn to Africa and the ideology of Hispanism in America in the early twen­tieth century did not only continue older territorial ambitions; it also represented a coherent ideology of continuity. Spain was to continue among the club of nations and “imperial societies,” to use Christophe Charle's term. There is no better example than its desperate effort to hold on to its three colonial enclaves in 1898, including a major military mobilization involving 500,000 soldiers and volunteers at a time when Spain had 18 million inhabitants. The mobilization showed something that previously could be seen only imperfectly: the mature relations between empire and nation. If Cuba's demand for home rule brushed up against the rigid identifi­cation of the modern nation and the unitary institutional framework consolidated within the liberal state, then the Filipino demand for reforms revealed the very narrow limits in the state's flexibility. Once military and political efforts to keep the colonies failed in the face of Antillean and Filipino nationalism and US expansion, the debate concerning the state answer to the regional demands of home rule also failed to give birth to any kind of liberal consensus. These two failures gave birth to Basque and Catalonian nationalism. Basques and Catalonians wanted not just a Europeanized version of Cuba and Canada self-government for their regions, but they also wanted the state to retain its imperial ambitions, however modest, and thus maintain membership among the world's leading nations.^[2317] Spanish nation­alism in the twentieth century once again became confused with imperial ideals, rhetorical and effective, weak and aggressive.

social demands by unions and the real or imaginary challenges posed by regional nationalism.³⁹ In that sense, the tradition that emerged from the wreckage of the late empire was reborn in the odd ideals of the victors of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939.

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