Introduction

Abstract

Few questions in Spain attract the same level of controversy as nationalism and national identity. As José Alvarez Junco recognized in the prologue to his major work on Spanish nationalism and nation-building in the nineteenth century:

The subject is, let us not beat about the bush, a poisoned chalice. To a degree consciously, as an intellectual challenge and a sense of civic duty but also without meaning to and with a certain degree of apprehension, I have entered a hornet’s nest.¹