Patterns of development and nationalism: Basque and Catalan nationalism before the Spanish Civil War

Patterns of development and nationalism: Basque and Catalan nationalism before the Spanish Civil War

JUAN D][EZ MEDRANO University of California, San Diego

Bizkaya, if dependent on Spain, cannot address God, cannot, in practice, be Catholic.

Sabino Arana

From its constituting a nationality, Catalonia derives its right to form a separate state, a Catalan state. From the current political arrangements, from Catalonia's long standing cohabitation with other peoples, derives a certain element of unity, of community, which these peoples ought to preserve and consolidate.

Valenti A lmirall

These quotations from two of the major ideologues of Basque and Catalan nationalism, respectively, reflect two radically different conceptions of what the nation is and two significantly different political programs for the Basque Country and Catalonia: independence and adherence to tradition for the former, federalism/confederalism and a secular and capitalist organization of society for the latter. The Basque and Catalan nationalist movements differed substantially in their character despite the fact that they developed simultaneously in two ethnically distinct Spanish communities, that stood out in terms of their high level of industrial development relative to the rest of Spain, and that had experienced intense immigration from the poorest regions of Spain. Therefore, this contrast between Basque and Catalan nationalism questions the suitability of explanations of peripheral nationalism that stress the role of relative levels of development, of cultural distinc- tiveness, and of the socially disruptive effects of the arrival of large numbers of immigrants. While these explanations may be useful to explain the emergence and dynamics of nationalism, they are ill-suited to explain what constitutes the exclusive focus of this article, that is, differences in the character of nationalist movements.

Theory and Society 23: 541-569, 1994. © 1994 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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To explain these programmatic differences, I analyze how specific patterns of development impinged on the different social groups that formed Basque and Catalan society. More precisely, I focus on how pre-industrial social groups in these societies experienced capitalist development and on the type of ties that the Basque and Catalan capitalist elites established with the Spanish economy and polity.

Relative levels of development and peripheral political nationalism

Contrary to what scholars in the modernization theory tradition, the internal colonialism tradition, and other theoretical traditions 1 would predict, nationalism in Spain has always been stronger in its most developed areas, the Basque Country and Catalonia, than in its less developed areas, such as Galicia. In 1977, Nairn suggested that uneven development is the primary explanation of nationalism and, therefore, that peripheral nationalism is as likely in overdeveloped as in underdeveloped peripheral areas. 2 Nairn sees uneven regional development as an inevitable outcome of capitalist expansion that leads to peripheral nationalism whenever regional inequalities overlap with ethnic differentiation. 3 Like Linz and Dougiass, 4 Nairn posits that having imperial possessions keeps states from seeing a need to build national identities, largely because they are able to extract large revenues from their colonies. 5 According to these authors, while empires last and do not weigh too heavily on the peripheral regions of the core state, peripheral regions tend to accept subordination to the core. However, when the empire begins to unravel, peripheries will rebel against the new financial, political, and military demands made by the core.

Nairn emphasizes the role of uneven development as a mobilizing force: both underdeveloped regions and "over-developed ''6 regions are likely to promote nationalist movements when state membership no longer presents advantages. In underdeveloped regions nationalist movements mobilize the population against the persistence of ethnic economic inequality, while in over-developed regions nationalist movements mobilize the population to push for state reforms that will promote further regional development. 7

The Spanish case fits Nairn's explanation for the development of peripheral nationalism quite well. The development of Basque and Cata- lan nationalism was in part an indirect consequence of Spain's loss of its imperial possessions. The achievement of independence by the

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Latin American colonies throughout the nineteenth century worsened the state of Spain's public finances, already strained by the European wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 8 Faced with this crisis and in order to extract more revenues and to promote economic development in Spain, absolutist and constitutional monarchs enacted centralization measures (political, juridical, rand cultural). These policies impinged most severely upon the two communities that had preserved their particular political and juridical institutions the longest and that were still distinguished from the rest of Spain by language: Catalonia and the Basque Provinces. In both communities, centralization policies were opposed by significant segments of their socio- economic elites, who by the end of the nineteenth century, in the spirit of the time, 9 began to articulate their grievances through nationalist mobilization. In the case of Catalonia, the independence of Cuba in 1898 also had harmful economic consequences that intensified conflict between the Catalan bourgeoisie and the Spanish state.

The impact of the loss of the colonies on the development of Basque and Catalan nationalism, however, should not be over-emphasized, for it cannot account for their programmatic features. Nairn cannot explain, for instance, the separatist and reactionary character of Basque nationalism, which differed dramatically from the pro-capitalist and generally non-separatist character of Catalan nationalism. Only the latter fits his expectations about the character of nationalism in an overdeveloped region.

The Basque anomaly raises serious doubts about the validity of a sociological explanation of types of nationalism based on levels of development. Differences in the character of Basque and Catalan nationalism also reveal the limitations of previous sociological work on the relationship between economic development and nationalism (modernization theory, ethnic competition theory, the reactive ethnicity perspective). 1° Indeed, neither underdevelopment nor relative levels of ethnic competition can explain differences in the character of Basque and Catalan nationalism, since both regions were overdeveloped and characterized by similar levels of ethnic competition.

To account for the different types of nationalism that developed in the Basque Country and Catalonia one needs to stress the role of class interests 11 in mediating the effects of development processes on nationalist political mobilization. This strategy, which by no means implies that ethnic conflict is only class conflict in disguise, 12 has been

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used by many historians or comparative historical sociologists 13 who have studied nationalism. It treats ethnic groups as socially differenti- ated groups in which social actors pursue both ethnic and class interests through political action. TM In doing so, it opens up alternative ways of explaining peripheral nationalism, focused as much on class conflict within ethnic groups as on center-periphery conflict. 15

Unfortunately, work in this historically oriented tradition focuses almost exclusively on the relationship between class interests and nationalism. What is missing in this work but present in the three sociological traditions criticized above is an emphasis on the relationship between development and nationalism. In this article, I link the two approaches by analyzing how development processes shape nationalism by creating constellations of class and ethnic interests that provide a context for center-periphery relations and for class relations within peripheral regions. However, unlike previous work on the relationship between development and nationalism, I stress specific patterns of development instead of levels of development. I demonstrate the rele- vance of two major components of these different patterns of development in accounting for the differences between Basque and Catalan nationalism: The extent to which traditional societies were able to benefit from capitalist development during the transition to the capitalist mode of production and the strength of the ties established by emerging capitalist elites with the state's economy and polity. My two hypotheses are:

1) That traditionalist and separatist political nationalism was more intense in the Basque Country than in Catalonia because the Catalan peasantry and pre-industrial elites were better able to adapt to and benefit from nineteenth-century capitalist industrialization than were the Basque peasantry and pre-industrial elites.

2) That the relative weight of traditionalist and separatist political nationalism was more intense in the Basque Country than in Catalonia because the Basque capitalist elite was not nationalist while the Catalan capitalist elite was. Although the Catalan capitalist elite was not separatist, it became nationalist because, unlike the Basque elite, it was not able to directly influence the Spanish state's decisions - through presence in the government or through the lobbying power of its industrial associations.

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The relative prosperity of Catalan agriculture compared with Basque agriculture and the predominance of a capital goods industry in the Basque Country versus a consumer goods industry in Catalonia were the main structural factors that shaped the political attitudes of the peasantry, pre-industfial elites, and capitalist groups in both regions.

The comparative focus of this article contributes to the explanation of Basque and Catalan nationalism. ~6 It builds upon Linz's work by isolating those economic factors which intensified the crisis of the Old Regime in the Basque Country compared with Catalonia, by analyzing the major causes of the different attitudes of capitalist elites in both regions toward nationalism, and by supporting these explanations with precise empirical information, something that is lacking in previous work on pre-Civil War Basque and Catalan nationalism. These are important analytical gaps in the literature on Basque and Catalan nationalism. Scholars writing on the Basque Country have provided a plausible interpretation of the development of a traditionalist form of nationalism, but have not explained why the bourgeoisie did not spon- sor more decisively a bourgeois form of nationalism. Conversely; those writing on Catalonia explain why the bourgeoisie became nationalist but do not explain why a traditionalist form of nationalism was all but absent from the Catalan political sceneJ 7

I have relied here on secondary literature, on the writings of the most influential nationalist ideologues and political leaders in both Catalonia and the Basque Country, and on the Spanish Directory of Corpora-. tions and Financial Institutions of 1922. The information contained in this directory (company, sector of the economy, location, assets, and members of the board of directors) has been transferred to a computer database, and to my knowledge this is the first systematic analysis of this valuable source of information. TM It provides a very useful tool to measure two major elements of the explanation offered in this article: the difference in the sizes of Basque and Catalan capitalism and the difference in strength of the econornic ties that Basque and Catalan capitalist elites established with the rest of Spain in the first third of this century.

Basque nationalism: 1876-1936

Basque nationalism developed between the end of the Second Carlist War (1872-1876) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). 19 Nation- alist leaders were members of the lower middle class, who sponsored a

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traditionalist form of nationalism, and members of the local bourgeoisie, who sponsored a liberal form of nationalism. As many authors have noted, the Basque capitalist elite was not nationalist and supported the monarchic Conservative and Liberal parties. 2°

Until 1898, traditionalist and liberal nationalist leaders ran separate political organizations, the Basque Nationalist Party and the Uni6n Vasco-Navarra respectively. They were unsuccessful, however, because the traditionalist and liberal constituencies favored political parties with a Spanish orientation. The lack of political support for Basque nationalism explains why the leaders of its two branches eventually formed a coalition in 1898, despite profound ideological differences. This coalition kept the name of the Basque Nationalist Party (BNP).

Thereafter, although the pro-business sector of the Basque Nationalist Party provided many of the BNP's candidates to General Elections and prevented extremist nationalists from gaining complete control of the Basque Nationalist Party, ideological hegemony and legitimacy belong to traditionalism. This hegemony was exemplified by and reproduced through control over the main party newspapers. Traditionalism was also the ideology of the BNP's electoral base and that of the party mili- tants who, because of the mass character of the BNP's party organization, had great leverage over party decisions. In particular, traditionalists showed their political and ideological superiority by winning a greater number of votes in the one election in which representatives of the traditionalist and liberal branches of the BNP competed electorally against each other, Bilbao's 1922 Municipal Election. 21

I refer to the hegemonic type of Basque nationalism as traditionalist nationalism.22Its indisputable ideologue was the founder and highly charismatic leader of the Basque Nationalist Party, Sabino Arana. Arana was the son of a prominent Carlist supporter as were most of the early leaders of Basque nationalism. His nationalism, which dominated Basque nationalist discourse until the Spanish Civil War, 23 was a defen- sive reaction against what he saw as the harmful influence of liberalism in Basque society. His articles span the duration of his political life, from 1890 to 1903, the year in which he died, and through them one can see clearly delineated a political program essentially informed by religious concerns.

Arana presented his struggle for Basque independence as a struggle for the religious salvation of the Basque race through complete isolation

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from other peoples, especially Spaniards. 24 In his view, language was as much a shield against change as political independence. 25 Similarly, Arana hated Spanish immigrants because they were important agents of change in the traditions and culture of the Basque country, they represented more secular views than the ones prevailing among the Basque population, and they generally supported the Socialist party, instead of adhering to a "religiously founded" system of paternalistic relations between employer and worker.

Finally, Arana's equally vicious attacks on those groups of Basque origin who had facilitated the penetration of liberalism into the Basque Country suggest that his attacks on immigrants were related to their secular values and to the changes they were introducing in the Basque Country, rather than to other factors, such as economic competition. The target of his attacks were the rulers of Vizcaya, the Basque economic and political elites, and the Basque intelligentsia. Not even his capitalist political partners in the BNP were spared his invectives, thus reflecting the gulf separating the two conceptions of nationalism that coexisted in the BNP. a6

The nationalist ideology described above remained hegemonic until the Spanish Civil War and is exemplified in the doctrinal principles agreed upon by the BNP in 1930. 27 Specifically, these prkqciples pro- claimed that Catholicism was the true religion of the Basque Country, that political independence was both a right and the objective to be achieved by the Basque people, that efforts needed to be made to preserve and strengthen the Basque race, and that the old practices and traditional institutions of the Basque provinces should be re-established.

The nationalist coalition formed in 1898 between anti-centralist liberals and traditionalists did not increase the appeal of Basque nationalism to the Basque electorate. Despite a noticeable increase in its level of organization over the years and an exceptional and short-lived electoral success in the 1918 General election, the Basque Nationalist Party did not have much popular appeal until the Spanish Second Republic. Capitalists tended to vote for the Spanish conservative and liberal parties ("dynastic" parties), rural areas were largely controlled by the Carlist party, a traditionalist Spanish party, which advocated a return to the forms of social and political organization that prevailed during the Old R6gime, 28 and the working class, made up mostly of immigrants, supported the Spanish Socialist Party. Thus, the Basque

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Nationalist Party had little support outside the industrial province of Vizcaya and even in Vizcaya it was relatively strong only at the municipal level.

During the Second Republic (1931-1936) the BNP became one of the leading political parties in two of the three Basque provinces, Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa. Basque nationalists benefited from a transfer of votes from traditionalist parties and dynastic parties to the Basque National- ist Party. According to Heiberg, 29 in rural areas this vote came from farmers who, because of growing employment opportunities in industry in neighboring cities, had gained increasing economic independence, which freed them from the political hold of small Carlist land- lords. The rise in support for the BNP in urban areas is less well under- stood, but it has been suggested that segments of the Basque local bourgeoisie used their votes to punish the Basque economic elite for its support of the failed economic policies adopted during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923-1930). 3° The paradoxical consequence of these shifts in electoral behavior was that while most of Spain sided with the leftist Popular Front, in the Basque Country, one of the two leading industrial regions in Spain, the left was a minority compared to conservative forces. 3~

During the Republican years, Basque nationalists, like Catalan nationalists, demanded and worked for a Statute of Autonomy. Various factors contributed, however, to a delay in its approval: the clericalism and xenophobic content of the first draft of the Statute, which made it unpalatable to the Spanish left; popular opposition in the provinces of Navarre and Alava to inclusion in the Basque autonomous community; and opposition by the centralist Spanish Right to the third draft sub- mitted to the Spanish parliament. Eventually, the Spanish Socialists supervised the drafting of a fourth, more democratic, moderate, and somewhat vague Statute, 32 which was approved in October of 1936. By then, however, the Spanish Civil War had already begun.

Catalan nationalism (1876-1936)

The period 1876-1936 witnessed the development of a bourgeois and a progressive type of nationalism in Catalonia, both of which ques- tioned the centralized character of the Spanish state and favored inter- vention in Spanish affairs? 3 The former was represented by the nationalist ideology and programs of the Lliga and was led by businessmen

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and members of the intelligentsia. 34 In contrast with bourgeois nationalism, progressive nationalism, which was represented by the party Esquerra Republicana, was led almost exclusively by members of the intelligentsia. One major difference between Basque and Catalan nationalism is, therefore, that the capitalist elite and the intelligentsia were more nationalist in Catalonia than in the Basque Country.

Both bourgeois and progressive nationalist leaders and ideologues agreed that Catalonia constituted a distinct moral community, with a common culture (in which language played a pivotal role), a common history, and a common character, all of which distinguished it from the rest of Spain. They differed from Basque traditionalist nationalists in the non-racist nature of their discourse, in their acceptance of modernity, and in that they rarely advocated independence. Although their general justification for nationalist political mobilization was that Catalonia constituted a nation, Catalan nationalist authors and political leaders also pointed out that contemporary conditions in Spain weighed heavily in their decision to mobilize politically. The state's low prestige after the loss of Cuba and the Philippines and its inability to facilitate economic development throughout Spain, its inability to gum'antee order and to promote industrial development in Catalonia, and its threat to Catalan cultural and juridical institutions were the major reasons that nationalist leaders gave to justify their nationalism.

The emergence of Catalan nationalism was preceded by a long process of cultural revival, common to other areas of Europe, that lasted the entire nineteenth century, and was partly inspired by the rapid socio- economic changes that Catalonia experienced during this period. This increasing ethnic awareness, however, did not lead to the formation of nationalist parties until the end of the century.

The main nationalist organization that then developed, and the vehicle for bourgeois nationalism during the period before the Spanish Civil War, was the Lliga Regionalista (renamed Lliga Catalana during the Spanish Second Republic). Its main political goals were to end political corruption and state de-centralization. While the bourgeoisie attached foremost importance to obtaining economic concessions from the government, the intelligentsia was more concerned with juridical and language matters. The Lliga dominated Catalan politics, along with supra-regional republican parties, during the 1901-1923 period and, despite losing its hegemony after Primo de Rivera's Dictatorship, remained a major electoral force during the Second Republic. Fore-

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most among the achievements of the Lliga during this period was the creation of the Mancomunitat Catalana. This institution, founded in 1914, was a supraprovincial organization with the power to coordinate the administration of the four Catalan provinces. Although it fell short of providing political autonomy, it returned a sense of historical unity to Catalonia. Through the Mancomunitat, the Lliga tried to implement an ambitious program of economic, educational, and cultural reforms. Among these reforms were the creation of a strong public-service infra- structure to facilitate economic development, the implementation of policies to extend vocational training among workers, and the development of an ambitious cultural program, which focused on the promo- tion of the Catalan language and culture. 35 Such policies reflected the goals of the main groups that supported the Lliga: capitalists and members of the intelligentsia.

During the 1901-1936 period, the Catalan bourgeoisie represented by the Lliga repeatedly opposed government policies, such as tariff protection for grain imports, which only benefitted agrarian interests from the rest of Spain, and the taxation of industrial profits made during the First World War, which was detrimental to the interests of the Catalan business community. However, partly out of fear of the revolutionary Catalan working class, 36 the leaders of the Lliga never sought independence for Catalonia and even collaborated with the dictatorial government of Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), which the Catalan bourgeoisie saw as the only means to restore order. In fact, the political ambivalence of the leaders of the Lliga who, on the one hand, constant- ly opposed governmental policies and, on the other hand, sought the government's authority whenever it needed to repress the working class, eventually undermined the Lliga's social base and played into the hands of progressive nationalism.

Progressive nationalism did not become hegemonic, however, until the Spanish Second Republic. It is only then that Esquerra Republicana, in coalition with the major anarchist union, the CNT, and with the Uni6 de Rabaissaires, a rural laborers organization, was able to secure enough popular support to replace the Lliga as the major party in Cata- lonia.

The origins of progressive nationalism can be traced to the nineteenth century, to numerous republican organizations with a federalist character that attracted members of the Catalan intelligentsia interested in improving the economic and political conditions of the emerging

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working class. During the period of hegemony of the Lliga Regiona- lista, however, nationalist republicanism remained a minor political force, mostly because of the stigma of "conservatism" which was attached to nationalism during this period by the international labor movement.

Unlike the leaders of the Lliga, nationalist republican leaders actively opposed the government during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. This opposition increased the political capital of progressive nationalism at the same time as it decreased that of bourgeois nationalism. Moreover, it predisposed anarchists and other leftist political groups to collaborate with nationalist republicans when democratic rule was re- stored.

In the decisive municipal elections of April 1931, whose outcome brought about the Second Republic, Esquerra Republicana emerged as the undisputable victor. 37 Their program in those elections clearly reflected their nationalist and reformist goals. They demanded the right to self-determination (their goal being a confederation of Iberian states), political and economic rights for workers, welfare measures for mothers, children, and the elderly, agrarian reform, and the recognition of human rights.

One day after the elections, Maci~, the president of Esquerra, pro- claimed the Catalan Republic, but was soon convinced by Spanish republican leaders to settle for a less ambitious compromise that kept Catalonia a part of Spain. This compromise consisted of the symbolic re-establishment of the Generalitat, a Catalan medieval governing body, while negotiations took place for the approval of a Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia. This Statute was finally obtained in 1932.

A description of the convoluted dynamics that characterized Catalan politics during the years preceding the Spanish Civil War is beyond the scope of this article. Especially after 1935, Spain and Catalonia entered a revolutionary spiral that tells us little about the social hegemony of one ideology or another in Catalonia, or about the reasons for their hegemonic or non-hegemonic character. Suffice it to say that, during those dramatic years, there was a trend toward separatism and revolutionary anti-capitalist solutions as against more moderate alter- natives. During those years, only the Catalan upper classes were firm in their support of autonomy within a united Spain, while large sectors withh~ the intelligentsia and within the non-manual working-class sup-

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ported a progressive form of nationalism aiming at a Spanish confederation, and the lower classes, less concerned about the nationalist issue, demanded a drastic transformation of social relations.

Having outlined the main defining traits of Basque and Catalan nationalism in the pre-Civil War period, I now focus on those factors that explain why nationalism took the form of traditionalist nationalism in the Basque Country while bourgeois and progressive nationalism became dominant in Catalonia.

Rural development and rural stagnation in the context of industrialization

The Catalan road

Catalonia's industrial transformation began in the eighteenth century, earlier than in most Spanish regions. Its economic development was primarily the product of the combination of two factors: agrarian development and the full integration of Catalonia into the Spanish state.

In 1716, in the wake of the War of Succession that brought the Bour- bon royal dynasty to Spain, Catalonia was fully incorporated into Spain by the Decreto de Nueva Planta. 38 This decree abolished Catalan political and legal institutions that had until then preserved Catalan autonomy. Full integration into Spain vastly increased the market for Catalan producers, for Catalonia was able to participate more directly in trade with the rest of Spain and with the colonies of Latin America.

Catalonia had the resources to benefit from the new trading opportunities. The most important of these resources was agrarian wealth. Low population density and the Sentencia de Guadalupe, enacted by Ferdi- nand of Aragon in the sixteenth century to eliminate seigniofial abuses and to grant freedom of movement to the peasantry, had favored the development of a prosperous peasantry in Catalonia.

In the eighteenth century, demographic pressure and new commercial opportunities in Latin America motivated large numbers of peasants to specialize in the production of wine and eau-de-vie for export, under increasing capitalist forms and relations of production. 39 These exports 4° encouraged the development of a dynamic commercial sector, a thriving naval construction industry, and, from the early eighteen hundreds, a modern textile industry.

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The textile industry, whose development was also facilitated by the pre- existence of a proto-industrial urban s e c t o r , 41 w a s the backbone of Catalan industrialization. From the 1830s to the 1850s the Catalan textile industry underwent a technological revolution that brought it to European standards. This progress is indicated by Catalonia's index of industrial production, which trebled between 1840 and 1860. By 1860, the Catalan textile industry had captured about eighty percent of the Spanish market for textile products.

The growth potential of this dynamic sector, 42 however, was limited by the small size of the Spanish market and by high production costs, which curtailed the ability of Catalan industry to compete abroad. Con- sequently, the Catalan capitalist sector came to depend on protectionist legislation enacted by the Spanish government. This economic depend- ence on Spain and working-class unrest during this early period of industrialization, 43 explain why the Catalan capitalist class never sponsored separatist solutions.

In summary, between 1800 and the Spanish Civil War, Catalonia advanced rapidly in the industrialization process. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Catalan countryside prospered and farmers invested their profits in commerce and industry. The investment of small agrarian and industrial capital in industry was also facilitated by the relatively small capital requirements of the modern textile industry. 44 The Catalan process of industrialization ensured a relatively fluid transition from a rural to an urban society and the development of a cultural and economic affinity between rural and urban Catalonia. 45

The making of Basque iron-based industry

With almost three percent of the Spanish population in 1800, the Basque Country produced only two percent of the Spanish GDP and was one of the poorest regions in Spain. 46 This poverty reflected the limits of Basque agriculture and the commercial and industrial crises created by the Napoleonic Wars, the loss of the Latin American colonies, and the loss of markets for iron due to more competitive Northern European production.

In the following decades the Basque commercial bourgeoisie followed different strategies to adjust to these new conditions. It made low-risk investments in public debt and real estate, lobbied for the privatization

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of mining, took steps to mechanize iron production, and favored the transfer of customs houses, traditionally located on the border between Castile and the Basque provinces, to the coast.

These transformations were so successful that between 1800 and 1860 the Basque Country's GDP increased faster than that of any other region except for Madrid and Catalonia. 47 Unlike development in Catalonia, however, development in the Basque Country was uneven. In the Basque Country, development in commerce and industry took place despite crises in the agricultural sector and even at the expense of agriculture. While Catalan capitalist development was partly initiated by broad segments of the peasantry, Basque capitalist development harmed the peasantry. Indeed, land speculation and the privatization of municipal land and of mining, both of which had traditionally provided supplementary rents to the peasantry, and rising consumer prices asso- ciated with the transfer of customs houses to the coast, created unrest among the peasantry.

The discovery in 1856 of the Bessemer process for the production of steel by the "direct method" revolutionized the iron industry. The Bessemer process allowed for the production of iron at very low cost and in very large quantities, and required the exclusive use of hematites, with very low phosphoric content, which were more abundant and closer to the surface in the Basque Country than almost anywhere else in Europe.

The dramatic increase in demand for Basque iron ore that followed the discovery of the Bessemer process resulted in a spectacular rise in iron ore exports. Although these exports were almost entirely controlled by foreign interests they generated extensive economic activity in the Basque Country itself. They attracted investors and workers, promoted a formidable capital accumulation which benefitted a number of local capitalists involved in the mining sector, and created incentives for the development of industrial sectors related to iron production. 48 This industry, like Catalan industry, needed protection because lack of a cheap source of coal made Basque industrial products too expensive to compete in foreign markets.

The negative side of this spectacular industrial revolution was that it had highly dislocating effects on Basque society and benefitted only a very small group within the traditional commercial and landowning e l i t e s . 49 This group comprised individuals who had purchased the

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best mines in the years before the export boom, when foreign owner- ship of mines was still forbidden. These mine owners then made their fortunes by charging high rents to and becoming stockholders in the foreign companies that began to exploit these mines in the eighteen seventies. Later on, they invested their capital in industrial and financial activities. Meanwhile, most commercial capitalists, iron manu- facturers, and big landowners were unable to compete against foreign capitalists and against the new Basque capitalist elite.

Patterns of development, social structure, and political mobilization

Catalan capitalist industrial development was endogenous and driven in part by agrarian capitalist growth. Basque industrial capitalist development, on the other hand, took place without agrarian capitalist growth and was greatly distorted by foreign demand and investment, which fostered formidable capital accumulation during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

The different ways in which Catalan and Basque rural areas experienced capitalism explain why the Basque peasantry rejected capitalism while the Catalan peasantry largely adapted to it. Indeed, Carlism and traditionalist nationalism - two different strategies to block the transition to a capitalist society - were stronger in the Basque country than anywhere else in Spain.

For most of the nineteenth century, the Carlist party represented the aspirations of those sectors in Spanish society who opposed socio- economic and political change. During the two Carlist Wars (1833-- 1840, 1872-1876) which pitted Carlists against Liberals, Carlism was particularly strong in both the Basque Country and in Catalonia, but much stronger in the former than in the latter. Indeed, support for Caflism in Catalonia, already much weaker than in the Basque Country in the first Carlist War, decreased considerably throughout the nineteenth century, while it remained very high in the Basque Country until the Spanish Civil War. s°

The loss of two wars deeply divided Carlists - or Traditionalists as they are also known - throughout Spain. Some sectors within the Carlist movement even began to approximate their views to those of the Con- servative Party in power. 51 Consequently some groups within the Basque Carlist community tried to find new ways to achieve their tradi-

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tionalist goals. The ideology of nationalism, then so popular in Europe, offered the possibility of preserving traditional Basque social organization by isolating the Basque Country from the rest of Spain. Arana himself describes the mental process which led many Basque Caflists toward nationalism, when explaining how his brother Luis "converted" (sic) him to nationalism:

...and he made such an effort to demonstrate to me that Carlism was an unnecessary, inconvenient, and harmful way to prevent Spanish influence, to break-up ties with Spain, and even to recover the seigniorial tradition, that my mind, understanding that my brother knew history better than me and that he was incapable of lying to me, started to doubt, and I resolved to study with serenity the history of Biscay and to firmly adhere to the truth. 52

Arana rationalized his shift f rom Carlism to separatist nationalism by saying that the Basq~ae provinces had always been sovereign, and were therefore entitled to independence if membership in Spain threatened the survival of the Basque culture.

The dislocating effects of foreign demand and investment in the Basque Country after the Second Carlist War also explain why a greater proport ion of the urban and rural middle classes supported a traditionalist form of nationalism in the Basque Country than in Catalonia. Members of this traditional middle class, whose wealth still derived from urban and rural property, clung the longest to the Basque idea of the "Fueros" - that is the Basque traditional autonomous political institutions - after they were banned at the end of the Second Carlist War. 53 Indeed, these old institutions, in which rural communities were over-represented, were their only hope to counter the economic power of the new capitalist-elite. Their change from a pro-"Fueros" position to nationalism was a semantic more than an ideological one as the following passage from a speech given in 1906 by the leading "Fuefista" Arturo Campi6n shows:

We proudly called ourselves "Fueristas" in riskier times than today's. How- ever, given that there is a new term which is more graphic, more intense and thoroughly expressive, and that this term does not allow the mild-hearted or those who see themselves as sophisticated (which is the same) to take refuge under it, I declare, without renouncing my past, without subscribing to new ideas, without adopting new attitudes, and, instead, in agreement with my own modest history, that I renounce the old label and from now on will call myself a nationalist (sic). 54

In the end, however, regardless of the relative proport ions of traditional middle-class groups excluded from the benefits of capitalist develop-

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ment in each region, what made these groups more salient in Basque nationalism was that in the Basque Country the classes above them were not nationalist while in Catalonia they were. The next section explains why the Basque upper capitalist classes did not become nationalist while the Catalan did.

Regional capitalism and the state: The role of capital-goods production versus consumer-goods production

The different political strategies followed by the Basque and Catalan upper classes can be attributed to their relative ability directly to influence state decisions. The previous section points out the formidable effect that foreign demand and investment in iron extracting activities had on Basque industrialization. Because of this, Basque development achieved levels of capital accumulation unheard of in Catalonia. This section focuses on the relative economic power of the Basque and Catalan capitalist elites and its effects on the political power of these two groups. I rely on the 1922 Directory of Corporations and Financial Institutions. Since in 1922 the corporation was already a major institution in both Catalan and Basque society, this directory provides a good approximation of the main differences in economic structure between the two regions. ~5

The information contained in the directory shows that the sizes of Basque and Catalan capitalism were very similar. Accumulated nominal assets throughout Catalan and Basque corporations and financial institutions amounted to approximately the same figure (see Table 1). Moreover, in both communities the number of very large companies (with nominal assets above ten million pesetas) was approximately the same: Forty-nine in the Basque Country and forty-one in Catalonia. Finally', at the Spanish level, the Basque Country and Catalonia, along with Madrid, were Spain's leading capitalist communities. Indeed, among the two hundred largest Spanish corporations, fifty-five were Basque and fifty were Catalan. Exchanging economic power for political power and ennoblement, many owners of the largest corporations were steadily incorporated into the Spanish "power bloc, ''~6 which included the most powerful members of the Spanish landed aristocracy, forming what Moya has called the "Financial Aristocracy. ''57

Beyond these similarities, the Basque and Catalan capitalist structures differed in important ways. For instance, the distribution of corpora-

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Table 1. Distribution by Nominal Assets of Basque and Catalan Corporations (1922)

Ntile Nominal assets Cumulative % of Nominal assets Cumulative % of Basque Country Basque capital Catalonia Catalan capital

they represent they represent

10% 100,000 0.109 10,000 0.027 20% 229,000 0.450 25,000 0.110 30% 350,600 1.088 60,000 0.312 40% 524,500 2.170 100,000 0.720 50% 1,000,000 3.876 250,000 1.540 60% 1,500,000 6.383 500,000 3.435 70% 2,500,000 10.707 800,000 6.064 80% 4,363,194 18.457 1,500,000 10.800 90% 10,000,000 32.651 3,500,000 21.062

Total accumulated assets 2,342,054,947 2,367,928,087

Source: Anuario Financiero y de Sociedades An6nimas [Directory of Corporations and Financial Institutions] (1922).

tions by size was very different in the two communities, for capital was far more concentrated in the Basque Country than in Catalonia (see Table 1).

Moreover, as Table 2 shows, in 1922 the average corporation size in Catalonia was half the size of the average corporation size in the Basque Country. An analysis of variance included in this table demon- strates that only eleven percent of this difference in corporation size can be explained by the different sectorial compositions of the Basque and Catalan corporations. The remaining variance depends on the relative average size of Basque and Catalan corporations within sectors of the economy. This difference strongly supports the assertion that before the Spanish Civil War small-firm capitalism characterized Cata- lan development while large-firm capitalism characterized Basque development.

Finally, what better describes the contrast between Basque and Catalan capitalism, simultaneously revealing the difference in economic power of the two capitalist elites, is the average size of Basque and Catalan financial institutions. As Table 2 shows, in 1922 there were ninety-nine financial institutions in Catalonia compared with twenty-three in the Basque Country but cumulative nominal assets in these financial institutions were twenty-one percent greater in the Basque Country than in Catalonia.

Table 2. Mean corporation assets by region and sector (1922) (in Pesetas)

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Grand mean: 2,932,741.603 Mean Mean after adjusting for composition by sector

N

Basque Country 4,495,307.0 4,337,257.6 521 Catalonia 2,182,422.2 2,258,315.0 1085

Means

Basque Country Catalonia

Agriculture 556,900.1 (8) 715,255.1 (32) Mining 2,975,588.1 (109) 2,148,671.5 (67) Water, gas, electricity 6,807,635.6 (44) 7,361,386.4 (83) Food, beverages, tobacco 1,665,893.9 (33) 1,580,627.2 (114) Textiles 2,277,500.0 (9) 1,833,312.0 (83) Leather, clothes, shoes 383,750.0 (4) 394,I22.3 (47) Paper, press, graphic arts 3,014,685.7 (35) 411,991.3 (46) Chemical 8,259,749.6 (20) 940,275.0 (100) Ceramic, glass, cement 1,896,666.7 (12) 1,161,625.0 (16) Steel 31,750,000.0 (6) 2,000,000.0 (3) Metallurgy 2,136,678.9 (74) 867,122.49(206) Construction 1,229,354.8 (31) 1,132,916.7 (36) Transport, communication 4,924,769.7 (92) 4,831,256.5 (90) Commerce (0) 3,367,777.8 (9) Financial 21,485,000.0 (20) 4,337,500.1 (83) Hotels and similar 1,950,000.0 (3) 1,248,916.7 (6) Diverse services 859,772.7 (11) 437,608.7 (46) Foreign banks (0) 1,589,597,6 (8) Foreign mining 5,843,832.0 (10) 1,260,040.0 (10)

Source: Anuario Financiero y de Sociedades Andnimas [Directory of Corporations and Financial Institutions] (1922). ( ) Number of Corporations. Note: Branches of the Bank of Spain have not been included.

In summ, because one can assume that, in early twentieth-century Spain, levels of capital concentration and economic specialization were indicators of the strength of involvement in the Spanish market, Basque capitalism was clearly far more oriented towards the rest of Spain than was Catalan capitalism. This means that, while in both communities there was a very strong upper bourgeoisie, the relative weight of the local bourgeoisie was much greater in Catalonia than in the Basque Country. It also seems that the economic distance between groups representing capitalism and groups representing traditional society was much greater in the Basque Country than in Catalonia.

560

Further analysis of the data contained in the 1922 Directory of Cor- porations and Financial Institutions, now focused on members of the boards of directors of these companies, supports the hypothesis that, compared with Catalan capitalism, Basque capitalism maintained stronger ties with Spanish capitalism. 58 This analysis shows that out of 7,581 directors throughout Spain, 238 (14 percent of all directors in Basque companies) belonged to the boards of both Basque and non- Basque corporations, compared to 158 who belonged to boards of both Catalan and non-Catalan corporations (8 percent of all directors in Catalan companies, see Table 3).

To gauge somewhat better the extent to which Basque and Catalan capitalists tended to be involved in economic activities outside their region, I have separately ranked directors in Catalan and Basque companies according to the accumulated assets of the Catalan or Basque companies in which they were present, and selected the top one hundred in each of the two communities. 59 Analysis of the joint membership in regional and non-regional corporations of the top 100 directors in Catalonia and the Basque Country shows that forty-three out of a hundred were directors in both Basque and non-Basque corporations, compared to only sixteen out of a htmdred who were members of both Catalan and non-Catalan corporations. Similar findings were obtained by ranking directors according to the number of director- ships that they held and selecting the top one hundred in each region.

Finally, in this review of the linkages between Basque and Catalan capitalism and the rest of Spain, it is worth considering the strength of the

Table 3. Distribution of directors of Spanish corporations and financial institutions according to the location of the corporations in which they serve (1922)

N

Basque 1,474 Basque and other 238 Catalan 1,881 Catalan and other 158 Other in Spain 3,887

Source: Anuario Financiero y de Sociedades An6nimas [Directory of Corporations and Financial Institutions] (1922). Note: The Total Number of Directors is 7,581; the sum presented above does not add up to this number because twenty directors belonged to the board of Catalan, Basque, and Other Spanish Corporations simultaneously and thirty-five belonged to the board of Catalan and Basque Corporations simultaneously.

561

economic ties Basque and Catalan capitalists maintained with the Spanish state apparatus, for this conditioned the political attitudes of Basque and Catalan capitalists toward the Spanish state. The literature on this topic shows that Basque industry depended to a larger degree upon state purchases than did Catalan industry. 6° This is undoubtedly related to the economic sectors that were predominant in each community, capital-goods production in the Basque Country and consumer- goods production in Catalonia. Consumers of Basque products were typically other industries or the state, while private individuals were the main consumers of Catalan products such as textiles (with the excep- tion of army clothing). During the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-1930) commercial relations between the state and Basque industry intensified because of a vast program of public works that was undertaken. According to Harrison, when the dictatorship collapsed in 1930 and the new Finance Minister decided to halt infra- structural reforms, an economic crisis in Vizcaya, more severely hit by this reversal than any other province, followed almost immediately.

Regional capitalist elites, the state, and the character of peripheral nationalism

In the period that preceded the Spanish Civil War, the Basque Country and Catalonia established themselves as the leaders of Spanish industrialization. During the process of industrialization the wealthiest Basque and Catalan capitalist families were incorporated into the Spanish power elite. However, the previous section has demonstrated that, beyond rough similarities, the economic structure of the two regions differed quite substantially. Basque capital was more powerful, more concentrated, more oriented toward the rest of Spain, and more closely dependent on the Spanish state. From a socio-structural viewpoint the results of this situation were 1) the existence of a far more numerous local bourgeoisie in Catalonia than in the Basque Country and 2) the development in Spain of stronger economic linkages between Basque and non-Basque capitalism than between Catalan and non-Catalan capitalism. In Catalonia, these two characteristics explain the exclusion of the Catalan bourgeoisie from the power sphere in which they had participated quite vigorously for a short period immediately preceding the Restoration (1868-1874). After the loss of Cuba in 1898, which was a heavy blow to Catalan capitalists, the main Catalan business association, the Foment del Treball Nacional, withdrew its support from the Spanish Conservative party and began to

562

act as a pressure group. In this respect, the Catalan capitalist elite, still playing the Spanish card, supported a political outsider, General Pola- vieja, in his bid for state power. Polavieja, in return for this political support, promised to grant fiscal autonomy to Catalonia, in a similar arrangement to the one Basque capitalists had obtained in 1882 for their region. In 1899, however, the government headed by Polavieja and Silvela failed to deliver on its promise and, instead, approved a budget which increased direct taxation of capital gains. After this disappointment, Catalan capitalists veered resolutely toward what they saw as the only strategy effectively to influence state policy, nationalism. They formed an alliance with groups belonging to the intelligentsia, who for many years had sponsored anti-centralist pro-Catalan- ist political agendas but had lacked sufficient economic resources to achieve their goals.

Political events unfolded very differently for the Basque capitalist elite. Because of their economic power and their close economic ties with the Spanish state, Basque capitalists were always very well represented among the Spanish political elite. A good reflection of the power Basques had over the Spanish state was the enactment of fiscal autonomy for the Basque Country in 1882, after intense lobbying by one of the heroes of Basque industrialization, Victor Chavarri. Unlike Catalan capitalists, Basque capitalists did not need to rely on a form of region- alism to achieve their goals; instead they could rely very effectively on their main business association, the Liga Vizcaina de Productores. 61

Conclusion

The emergence and ideological characteristics of Basque and Catalan nationalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain are a dramatic expression of conflict between modernity and tradition in the ethnically heterogeneous Spanish state. Confirming Nairn's theory of peripheral nationalism, uneven development in Spain during the nineteenth century overlapped with spatially delimited ethnic communities, Catalans and Basques, thus enhancing their ethnic identity and facili- tating the expression of class conflict in nationalist terms. However, the social bases and the ideologies of peripheral nationalism in each region eventually came to reflect the different patterns of development that they experienced and the relative economic power of their capitalist elites. These structural factors shaped the Basque and Catalan nationalist movements through their influence on class conflict and class alli-

563

ances within the Basque Country and Catalonia, as well as conflict and alliances between these classes and the Spanish state.

Of course, differences between Basque and Catalan nationalism cannot be explained in purely structural terms. The developmental factors I have outlined in this article helped to reproduce longer-term cultural and economic processes, which had progressively defined the cultural identity of the upper classes in Catalonia and the Basque Country. De- scribing and explaining this process, however, exceeds the objectives set for this article.

This comparison of Basque and Catalan nationalism shows that "over- development" does not necessarily lead to bourgeois or other pro- industrialization nationalist ideologies. In particular, the Basque case illustrates that, as long as the leading classes of "overdeveloped" regions are able to influence state political and economic decisions, they will refrain from the formulation of nationalist programs. More- over, the Basque case shows that in the analysis of peripheral nationalism, scholars should focus simultaneously on the relationships established between the different social classes in the peripheral community and the central state and on those established between classes within the peripheral community.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Le6n Zamosc, Carlos Waisman, Gershon Shafir, Akos R6na-Tfis, Karl Monsma, Juan Linz, Befit Dencker, and the Theory and Society reviewers for their extremely useful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Neil Smelser, "Mechanisms of Change and Adjustment to Change," in William Faunce and William Form, editors, Comparative Perspectives on Industrial Society (Boston: Little Brown, 1967) 33-54; Ernest Geltner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe of British National Development: 1536-1966 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); Michael Hechter, "Group Formation and the Cultural Division of Labor," American Journal of Sociology, vol. 84 (1978), 293-318; John Comaroff, "Humanity, Ethnicity, Nationality: Conceptual and Comparative Perspectives on

564

the USSR," Theory and Society, vol. 20 (1991), 661-688; Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

2. Other explanations, such as Charles Tilly's in "States and Nationalism in Europe since 1600," Working Paper 128 (New York: Center for Studies of Social Change, New School for Social Research, 1991) 1-12, and Eric J. Hobsbawm's in Nations and Nationalism since 1789. Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) provide alternative but complementary arguments for the development of popular nationalism during the nineteenth century. I emphasize Nairn's argument because his discussion of nationalism facilitates the transition to my own explanation of programmatic differences between Basque and Catalan nationalism.

3. The greater ethnic mobilization potential that exists in these situations of overlap has also been emphasized by Hechter, Internal and Horowitz, Ethnic, among others.

4. Juan J. Linz, "Early State-Building and Late Peripheral Nationalism against the State: The Case of Spain" in S. N. Eisenstadt and S. Rokkan, editors, Building States and Nations, Vol. II, (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage, 1973) 32-116; William A. Douglass, "Introduction," in William A. Douglass, editor, Basques Politics: A Case Study in Ethnic Nationalism, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1985), 1-18.

5. Daniel A. Segal, "Nationalism, Comparatively Speaking," Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1986) 301-321. In his comparison of France with the Austro-Hun- garian Empire, he presents a very different view of the effect of colonial possessions on the development of a national consciousness. According to him, colonial possessions allow for the development of a national consciousness among the bourgeoisie. However, in view of the strength of peripheral nationalism in ex-Empires such as Great Britain, Spain, and the Soviet Union, his argument does not hold, unless qualifications are made by introducing the effect of uneven development into the explanation.

6. Tom Naim, The Break-Up, 72. 7. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic, provides a very similar distinction between the type of

nationalism that emerges in underdeveloped areas and what emerges in overdeveloped areas.

8. Jacques Barbier and Herbert Klein, "Revolutionary Wars and Public Finances: The Madrid Treasury, 1784-1807," Journal of Economic History, vol. 41 (1981), 315-- 339.

9. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983) and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism. Five Roads to Modernity, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) for discussions on the processes of "piracy" or "borrowing" of the ideas of national identity, nationalism, and the nation.

10. Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967); Ernest Gellner, Nations; Michael T. Hannan, "The Dynamics of Ethnic Boundaries in Modem States," in Michael Hannan and J. Meyer, editors, National Development and the World System: Educational, Eco- nomic, and Political Change, 1950-1970 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979); Francois Nielsen, "Ethnic Solidarity in Modern Societies," American Socio- logical Review 50, 133-149; Charles Tilly, "Ethnic Conflict in the Soviet Union," Theory andSociety 20,569-581 (especially 574-575); Michael Hechter, Internal

11. Although the theories listed above acknowledge that social differentiation is nega- tively related to ethnic group formation (Michael Hechter, "Group Formation..."; Michael Hechter, "The Dynamics of Secession," Acta Sociologica 35 (1992), 1-17;

565

Francois Nielsen, "Ethnic Solidarity...") and positively related to ethnic-group mobilization (Hudson Meadwell, "Ethnic Nationatism and Co,Ilective Choice Theory," Comparative Political Studies 22, 139-154), they do not take into account class interests in their explanation of nationalism.

12. Indeed, I subscribe to the view that individuals' political behavior is partly motivated by a desire to protect ethnic-group interests. On this issue, Donald Horowitz, Ethnic; Donald Horowitz, "How to Begin Thinking Comparatively About Soviet Ethnic Problems," in Alexander Motyl, editor, Thinking Theoretically About Soviet Nationalities. History and Comparison in the Study of the USSR (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1992), 9-23.

13. One can include in this tradition the following recent publications: Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1985); Kathryn Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers (Berkeley: Universi- ty of California Press, 1983); Segal, "Nationalism;" Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations; John Comaroff, "Humanity;" Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism.

14. Hechter's recent work, under the influence of rational-choice theory, has the virtue of taking the individual as the starting point and of viewing nationalist political mobilization as a social movement that needs to be studied using the theoretical tools developed by the social movements literature. See Michael Hechter, Prin- ciples of Group Solidarity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Michael Hechter, "Nationalism as Group Solidarity," Ethnic and Racial Studies 10, 415-- 426; Michael Hechter, "The Dynamics." Although his focus thus far has been on the external rewards and penalties that determine an individual's participation in ethnic collective action, a strategy focused on individuals and on their utility schedules could also be used to develop hypotheses about other types of nationalist behavior, such as voting behavior and the decision to create a nationalist organization, that are less sensitive to selective rewards and penalties imposed by nationalist organizations.

15. Marianne Heiberg, "Urban Politics and Rural Culture: Basque Nationalism," in Stein Rokkan and Derek W. Urwin, editors, The Politics of Territorial Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1982) 355-387. She points out that Basque nationalism is particularly interesting because of the important role intra-ethnic group conflict played in its development, 358.

16. Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne darts L "Espagne Moderne: Recherche sur les fondements des Structures Nationales. (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N, 1962); Juan J. Linz, "Early State;" Stauley Payne, El Nacionalismo Vasco (Barcelona: Dopesa, 1974); Javier Cor- cuera, Orlgenes, Ideologia, y Organizaci6n del Nacionalismo Vasco (1876-1904) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1979); Antonio Elorza, Ideologias del Nacionalismo Vasco (San Sebastian: Haranburu, 1978); Juan Pablo Fusi, Pluralismo y Nacionalidad (Madrid: Alianza, 1984); Faustino Migurlez and Carlota So16, Classes Socials i Poder Politic en Catalunya (Barcelona: PPU, 1987), among others.

17. These explanatory gaps are also present in Eric J. Hobsbawm's own analysis of Basque and Catalan nationalism; see Nations, 119-120.

18. The Anuario Financiero y de Sociedades An6nimas was published annually from 1914 to at least the late 1950s by a private publishing company, based in the Basque industrial city of Bilbao. For many years, the two persons responsible for its publication were lbafiez and Marco-Gardoqui. The year of 1922 was the first year for which extensive information was provided for both financial and non-financial corporations, which explains why I did not choose an earlier date. The stated goal of this publication was to inform businessmen. Although the information for this

5 6 6

publication was voluntarily provided by the companies themselves, the authors of this publication provide comparative figures to demonstrate the completeness of its coverage. Copies of this directory can be found in many Spanish libraries. The library of the Banco de Espafia, in particular, owns the entire collection. Manuel Gonz~ilez Portilla ( La Formaci6n de la Sociedad Capitalista en el Pais Vasco, 1876-- 1913 [San Sebasti~-a: Haranburu, 1981]) and other researchers often use the information contained in this directory, but so far nobody had transferred its information to a computer database. Gonz~ilez Portilla suggested the idea of using it for my research, and I would like to thank Santiago de la Hoz, Mafia Teresa Delgado, and Sarolta Petro for their assistance in creating this dataset.

19. Stanley Payne, El Nacionalismo; Juan J. Solozabal, El Primer Nacionalismo Vasco (Madrid: Tucar, 1975); Antonio Elorza, ldeolog[as; Javier Corcuera, Or[genes; Jose Luis De La Granja, El Nacionalismo Vasco durante la H Repg~blica (Madrid: CIS, 1986).

20. Javier Corcuera, Or[genes; Javier Cuesta, El Carlismo Vasco: 1876-1900 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1985); Stanley Payne, El Nacionalismo; Antonio Elorza, Ideologias. In my own empirical research, by contrasting the names of leading members of the major political parties in the Basque Country with the names of members of the Board of Directors in Spanish corporations and financial institutions, I have been able to confirm that indeed the Basque capitalist elite was not nationalist.

21. The BNP had previously split along the Traditionalist/Liberal cleavage; while the Traditionalist sector retained the name of the party, the more Liberal branch competed under the name Comunidad Nacionalista Vasca (Basque Nationalist Com- munity).

22. There is little agreement on how to classify forms of nationalism (Ernest Gellner, Nations; Ernst Haas, "What is Nationalism and Why should we Study It" Inter- national Organization 40,707-744; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism). In this article, I have chosen the terms traditionailst, bourgeois, and progressive, because they fit better into my characterization of the two nationalist movements throughout the twentieth-century, which I elaborate in a forthcoming book comparing the two movements. However, using Haas's definitions, one can say that Basque nationalism is a mixture of the traditional and restorative types of synchretist nationalist ideology. Catalan nationalism, on the other hand, presents elements of two types of nationalism; the bourgeois form of nationalism is a mixture of the liberal Whig and the syncretist synthetic types defined by Haas, while the progressive form of nationalism falls into what Haas calls the Liberal Jabobin nationalist ideology.

23. Engracio de Arantzadi, who succeeded Arana as one of the main ideologues of the BNP, provides a telling illustration of this ideological continuity in his book Ereintza, Siembra de Naeionalismo Vasco, 1894-1914, which was published in 1935 (San Sebasti~: Aunamendi, 1980).

24. Sabino de Arana, Obras Escogidas (San Sebastian: Haranburu, 1965 [1897]); 73-75.

25. Ibid, 207. 26. Javier Corcuera, Or[genes, 158. 27. Antonio Elorza, Ideologias; Jose Luis De la Granja, ElNacionalismo. 28. Jose Extramiana, Historia de las Guerras Carlistas (San Sebasti~in: Haranburu,

1980); John F. Coverdale, The Basque Phase of Spain's First Carlist War (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984); Vicente Garmendia, La Ideolog[a Car- lista (1968-1876) (Zarauz: Diputaci6n Foral de Guipfizcoa, 1984).

29. Marianne Heiberg, "Inside the Moral Community: Politics in a Basque Village" in William Douglas, editor, Basque Polities, 295.

567

30. Juan Pablo Fusi, Pluralismo; Jose Luis De la Granja, El Nacionalismo. 31. Ibid, 566. 32. Juan Pablo Fusi, Pluralismo. 33. Isidre Molas, Lliga Catalana II Vols (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1971); Santiago

Alberti, El Republicanisme Catal6 i la Restauraci6 Montrquica (Barcelona: Alberti, 1972); Xavier Cuadrat, Socialismo y Anarquismo en Cataluha (1899-1911) (Madrid: Ediciones de la Revista del Trabajo, 1976); Borja De Riquer and Miquel Izard, Coneixer la Historia de Catatunya, Vol. 4 (Barcelona: Vicens Vives, 1983); Gabriel Sirvent, "Algunes Notes sobre la Implantaci6 Sindical de Socialistes i Anarquistes a Catalunya, abans dels Anys de la Primera Guerra Mundial," ha Manuel Gonz~ilez Portilla, Jordi Malnquer de Motes, and Borja de Riquer Permanyer, editors, Industrializaci6n y Nacionalismo, (Bellaterra: Universitat Aut6noma de Barcelona, 1985), 555-568; S. Tavera Garc/a "Notes sobre L'Anar- co-Sindicalisme Base i Catal~, 1917-1920," in Manuel Gonz~lez Portilla et al., Industrializacitn y Nacionalismo, 569-578; Joan Culla i Clara, El Republicanisme Lerrouxista a Catalunya (1901-1923) (Barcelona: Curial, 1986); Manuel Lladonosa i Vall-Llebrera, Catalanisme i Moviment Obrer: El CADCI entre 1903 i 1923 (Mont- serrat: Publications de l'Abadia de Montserrat, 1988); M. Dolors Ivern i Salva, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (1931-1936) (Montserrat: Publicacions de l'Abadfa de Montserrat, 1989). My own empirical research, in which I contrast the names of nationalist and non-nationalist leaders with the names of members in the Board of Directors of Spanish corporations and f~ancial institutions confirms these studies' findings.

34. See works in note 33. 35. De Riquer and Izard, Coneixer, 170. 36. Juan J. Linz, "Early." 37. One important factor that has also been mentioned to explain the sudden appeal of

Esquerra Republicana among the Catalan working class was the shift to the right by the supra-regional Republican party, which until then had attracted most of the popular vote.

38. I use the word "fully" because there is growing evidence that integration was pro- ceeding quite fast in the years preceding the War of Succession, both at the economic and cultural levels; see Carlos Martinez Shaw, Cataluna en la Carrera de Indias (Barcelona: Critica, 1981); David Laitin, "Language and the Construction of States: The Case of Catalonia in Spain," Wilder House Working Papers 10 (1991), 1-33.

39. Pere Pascual, Agricultura i Industrialitzaci6 a la Catalunya del Segle XIX, (Barce- lona: Crftica, 1990); Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne.

40. Research on the type of merchandises that were exported has been hampered by the lack of official statistics on the composition by product of exports to foreign countries. Although authors agree that Catalans also exported textile products to Latin America, the dominant view is that these industrial products represented a tiny percentage of total exports and that only a very small proportion of the industrial goods that were produced in Catalonia were exported. See J. K. J. Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization. Cotton in Barcelona, 1728-1832 (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1992), Albert Carreras, "Catalufia, Primera Regitn Indus- trial de Espafia," ha Jordi Nadal and Albert Carreras, editors, Pautas Regionales de la Industrializacitn Espafiota (siglos XIX y XX), (Barcelona: Ariel, 1990), 3-22; Pere Pascual, Agricultura.

41. J. K. J. Thomson, A Distinctive, 12-13.

568

42. Jordi Nadal, El Fracaso de la Industrializaci6n en Espaha, (Barcelona: Ariel, 1975). 43. Juan J. Linz, "Early," 57-59. 44. Pedro Tedde, "Banca Privada y Crecimiento Econrmico en Espafia, 1874-1913,"

in Papeles de Economia Espa~ola 20 (1984), 169-184. 45. Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne; Jaume Vicens Vives, Industrials i Politics al Segle XIX

(Barcelona: Vicens Vives, 1958); Jordi Maluquer de Motes, "La Historia Eco- nrmica de Catalufia," in Papeles de Economia Espahola 20 (1984), 268-280; Albert Carreras, "Fuentes y Datos para el An~lisis Regional de la Industrializacirn Espafiola," in Jordi Nadal and Albert Carreras, editors, Pautas Regionales, 3-22; Pere Pascual, Agricultura.

46. Albert Carreras, "Fuentes." 47. Albert Carreras, "Fuentes." 48. Ibid; Antonio Escudero, "Capital Minero y Forrnacirn de Capital en Vizcaya

(1876-1913)," in Jordi Nadal and Albert Carreras, Pautas Regionales, 106-123; Emiliano Fern~indez de Pinedo, La industrializacirn en el Norte de Espaga, (Barce- lona: Critica, 1988).

49. Manuel Gonz~ilez Portilla, La Formacirn; Emiliano Fernandez de Pinedo, La Industrializacirn; Albert Carreras, "Fuentes."

50. The clergy, small landowners, and peasants were the main social actors supporting Carlism in the two communities. A detailed comparative study of the causes for the war, for its greater intensity in the Basque Country and in Catalonia, and for the reasons why it was strongest in the Basque Country, has not yet been conducted and is beyond the scope of this article (Juan Diez Medrano, Divided Nations, forthcoming). However, a comparative analysis based on the literature that has been published on the Carlist Wars suggests that the relative level of development of agriculture in the two regions ultimately explains the different intensity of popular support to Carlism in the two regions, by determining the intensity of rural- urban conflict (Pere Pascual, Industrializaci6; Josep M. Mundet i Gifrr, La Primera Guerra Carlina a Catalunya [Barcelona: Publicacions de l'Abad/a de Montserrat, 1990]; Miquel Izard, "El Rechazo a la Modernizaci6n Capitalista, Catalufia y Euskadi, Similitudes y Diferencias," in Manuel Gonz~ilez Portilla et al., Industria- lizacirn, 375-387; John F. Coverdale, The Basque Phase of Spain's First Carlist War, [New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984]; Vicente Garmendia, La Ideo- logia; Jose Extramiana, Historia; Stanley Payne, El Nacionalismo; Emiliano Fer- n~indez de Pinedo, Crecimiento; Pablo Fern~adez Albadalejo, La Crisis delAntiguo Rdgirnen en Guip~zcoa [Madrid: Akal, 1975]; Jaume Torres Elias, Liberalismo y Rebeldia Campesina, [Barcelona: Ariel, 1973]).

51. Javier Cuesta, El Carlismo. 52. Cited in Javier Corcuera, Origenes. 53. As is well known now, the preservation or suppression of the Fueros was not the

origin of the war, nor one of its major themes (Javier Corcuera, Origenes). The Spanish central government, however, used its military victory to eliminate them, as part of its centralizing efforts. For several years after the revocation of the Fueros, the restoration of these traditional rights and institutions was in the political agenda of all major political groups in the Basque Country, including industrial capitalists. However, in 1882, an economic agreement - the "Conciertos Econrmicos" - was signed between Basque authorities and the central government which gave Basque authorities fiscal autonomy. This measure was greeted with enthusiasm by the wealthiest Basque capitalists, who then decided to abandon the pro-Fueros cause.

569

54. J. Corcuera, Origenes, 129. 55. Actually, the corporation was more extended in the Basque Country than in Cata-

lonia, where small family firms were relatively more common. 56. Manuel Tufi6n de Lara, Estudios sobre el Siglo XIXEspahol, (Madrid: Siglo XXI,

1972). 57. Carlos Moya, ElPoderEcon6mico en Espa~a, (Madrid: Tucar, 1975). 58. The fact that major capital owners still tended to be members of the Boards of their

companies in this historical period (they also participated in political contests), justifies the use of this Directory. In the absence of information on the place of off- gin of all directors, this analysis has used information on the province where corporations were located, to compare the number of directors belonging both to the Board of Basque and of non-Basque (outside of the Basque Country) corporations with the number of Directors that belonged both to the Board of Catalan and of non-Catalan corporations.

59. Because of their intense involvement in Basque or Catalan economic activities one can define these top 100 directors as Basque or Catalan, regardless of place of birth. Moreover, linking the names included in these lists with biographical infor- marion available on these persons and personal knowledge of typical Catalan and Basque names suggests that these people were indeed Basque or Catalan by ethnicity as well as by intensity of economic involvement in the region.

60. Joseph Harrison, "La Industria Pesada;" Manuel Gonz~ilez Portilla, La Formaci6n; Manu Montero, Mineros.

61. Ignacio Arana P6rez, La Ligna Vizcaina de Productores y la Pol[tica Econ6mica de la Restauracidn. 1894-1914, (Bilbao, Caja de Ahorros Vizcaina, 1988).

Documents

Patterns of development and nationalism: Basque and Catalan nationalism before the Spanish Civil War