ABSTRACT
Situated on the Iberian peninsula in thesouthwest of Europe, Spain was relativelyisolated from some of the major developments of modern West European historyincluding the Reformation, the early phases of the commercial and industrial revolutions, and the early waves of democratization.1 Although Spain emerged as a great power during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it did not develop all of the features of a modern nation-state at that time. Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Roman Catholic “reconquest” of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslim Moors, instituted the Inquisition that linked Spain firmly to Roman Catholicism, brought the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon closer together than before, and laid the foundations for a great Spanish Empire. However, they did not create a modern nation-state. Their Spain and that of their Hapsburg successors was highly fragmented at home, and many of its governmental resources centered on building and maintaining a far-flung empire abroad. As Spain struggled over the succeeding centuries to become a modern nation-state, it experienced numerous conflicts between its center in Castile and parts of
its periphery, particularly in Catalonia and the Basque Country. The coming of modernization brought new clashes between formerly dominant groups and would-be participants and over economic structures and distribution of wealth. From 1936 to 1939, Spain was torn by a violent civil war that brought death to about 600,000 of its citizens, drove nearly 300,000 of them into exile, and left the country with a long-term authoritarian regime headed by the dictator Francisco Franco from 1939 to 1975. Only since the mid-1970s has Spain established constitutional democracy and joined the mainstream of European politics and economics, entering the European Community (with its Iberian neighbor Portugal) in 1986.
