ABSTRACT
The Liberal prime minister Praxedes Sagasta explained the defeat of 1898 by the fact that ‘Spain was a poor country’. Britain’s prime minister, Lord Salisbury, called Spain ‘moribund’. In some ways, the ‘boomerang effect’ of imperialism on the homeland, which the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt identified as a factor in driving European totalitarianism, would be evident in Spain as army politics developed revanchism after 1898. The loss of empire aggravated Spain’s intellectual crisis, forging such ‘silver age’ pessimists as Joaquin Costa and Miguel de Unamuno, who would soon become known as the ‘Generation of 1898’. Spain’s nineteenth century thus witnessed a complex process of war, pendulum swings in politics, and nation building. Pendulum swings would prove to be much more extreme in Spain, even for a country which would remain neutral in both world wars. Joaquin Costa in 1900–1902 published works on ‘Europeanising’ Spain and abolishing ‘oligarchy and caciquism’.
