ABSTRACT
The intellectual origins of Spanish fascism in the 1920s were conditioned by the territorial issue: how to confront a new version of Spanish identity with the alternative views of substate nationalisms in Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. The bases of Spanish fascism were deeply influenced by “peripheral” thinkers and journalists, some of them with connections in the recent past to anti-Spanish “peripheral nationalism”. Moreover, between 1927 and 1930, protofascist journals such as La Gaceta Literaria and even the first issues of the Fascist journal La Conquista del Estado (1931) attempted to establish a dialogue with Catalan and Galician culture, as well as with Portuguese and Latin-American intellectuals. They attempted to think of Spain as a kind of polyethnic empire. However, the debates about the home-rule statutes of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia led to Spanish fascists increasingly opposing “separatism” as a betrayal of the common homeland. Indeed, the reflections of the main Spanish fascist leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, aimed at developing the notion of empire and “unity of destiny” as an antidote to “primary” ethnic claims. However, theoretical debates on the territorial structure of Spain were usually shadowed by everyday opposition to “separatism” by Falangist militiamen.
