ABSTRACT
The conclusion arrived at in Chapter 2 was that the countries of the Spanishspeaking world do not fall easily into the category of ‘nation’ as understood in Chapter 1. That is to say that countries such as Spain, Mexico, Peru or Nicaragua, for example, cannot be described as communities with a totally shared sense of unity as the result of possessing a range of common characteristics seen as prerequesites for nationhood. In many of these cases the essential solidarity is too easily exposed as fragile with various social and cultural cleavages preventing it. This is hardly surprising when we remember how many ethnic groups are contained within the political boundaries of these countries. As we have seen, they have been built into states through alliances, wars, economic pressure, demographic trends, policies of centralisation, etc., and the result is plural societies made up of substate-level nations. The level of resistance from these stateless nations and their self-awareness and desire for autonomy is an important issue in evaluating the success of nation-building in Spain and Latin America, and one major factor in the course of language development.
