Spain as destiny's verdict

In political and economic terms, the distinction between center and periphery is usually clear: where the money and power are is the center, where there is less money (because it is plundered from you or you don't generate it) and subordinate power is the periphery. In cultural terms, however, the distinction is much less evident. We can say that the cultural center is where the works, discourses, and ideas that expand the most and have the most influence are generated, but this often depends more on political and socioeconomic factors than on cultural quality. Publishing houses from the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands are often branded as peripheral from Barcelona, and have less media presence and less commercial impact, but there are Valencian and islander publishing houses that, due to the volume, depth, and transcendence of their catalog, are more central than many from Barcelona. The Afers publishing house, for example.If we were to erase from the Catalan literary scene all the books that Afers, conceived and directed from Catarroja by Vicent Olmos has published over the last thirty-odd years, the void that would remain would be immense. In all genres, but especially in history and essayistic thought. And from authors from the country (Joan F. Mira, Vicent Flor, Ricard Chulià, Antoni Simon Tarrés, Antoni Martí Monterde... ) as well as from global references in cultural history and political thought (Benedict Anderson, Michael Billig, Joep Leerssen, Craig Calhoun). If the leaders and ideologues of what we still call Catalanism had read and assimilated Afers' titles on nationalism and national and identity issues, the ideological framework and the arguments they use to defend the cause they claim to defend would not be so weak or so erratic.Giving substance to Spanishness

To the barely mentioned authorial roster, we must now add Ferran Garcia-Oliver (Beniopa, 1957), professor of Medieval History at the University of Valencia. To write his new book, One and Eternal. On Spanish Nationalism, Oliver has shed his medievalist armor and donned the guise of a pugnacious essayist and an inquisitive writer unafraid to get his hands dirty handling monstrous, resounding, and sophisticated machinery. Specifically, the ideological, symbolic, and discursive machinery that has shaped Spanishness and made it function for many centuries.Drawing on a vast wealth of facts, quotes, characters, and references, Garcia-Oliver's thesis is not, as some have tendentiously claimed, that all Spaniards are the same. Garcia-Oliver's thesis is that hegemonic Spanish nationalism – the builder of the official, secular, and transversal Spanish identity, adaptive but above all faithful to itself and to the foundational objectives of uniformizing and expansionist Castilianism – is made from raw materials (imaginary, referents, driving ideas, narrative) that permeate the vast majority of Spaniards. Those of today and those of the past and, when their turn comes, those of the future. Because Spain is theologically one, immutable, and eternal, as thousands of historians, philosophers, novelists, playwrights, journalists, poets, judges, civil servants, and politicians have written in one way or another. Garcia-Oliver acknowledges exceptions and nuances, but his book demonstrates that liberals and conservatives, enlightened thinkers and romantics, Catholics and atheists, republicans and monarchists, socialists, communists, and anarchists, have conceived of nothing more than a perpetually united Spain, troncalmente Castilian.From the anonymous clerics of the early second millennium to Gustavo Bueno, the favored philosopher of Aznarism, passing through figures as disparate (but so similar in their conception of Spanishness) as Cardinal Cisneros, the Count-Duke of Olivares, the poet Quevedo, the writers Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset, and the republican historian Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, all have contributed to forging the image and narrative of Spain as a political and cultural entity that perceives itself, explains itself, and proclaims itself from pre-political and post-political parameters, which means they cannot be politically discussed.With a rich, dense, and robust style, ideal for presenting copious information but also for creative invective, Ferran Garcia-Oliver meticulously explains how the still-hegemonic idea of Spain and Spanishness has been fabricated not as any ordinary nation and national identity, but as natural products of history and incontestable verdicts of destiny.