ABSTRACT
In general terms, it can be said that Spain has displayed a mosaic of frustrated processes of state and non-state nation-building in contemporary times. The construction of an inclusive and legitimized notion of Spanish nation has never been a fully successful outcome of Spanish nationalism in the stateless nations (Catalonia, the Basque Country and to a lesser extent in Galicia). On the other hand, the non-state nationalisms, especially Catalonia and the Basque Country, have been unable to consolidate a nationbuilding process based on their own state or federal structures. Up until the post-Franco period, the contemporary Spanish state model was based on the French model: the existence of two administrative levels-that of the central power and that of the municipal level with a very low degree of autonomy-articulated from an extremely centralized conception of the state. All historical attempts, some of a very moderate nature, to articulate the state from more ‘regionalized’ premises failed for different reasons: First Republic (1873); the ‘Mancomunitats’ of the Restoration period at the beginning of the twentieth century; the ‘integral’ state of the Second Republic (19311939).
