Spain as the verdict of destiny

In political and economic terms, the distinction between center and periphery is usually clear: where there is money and power 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 in the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands are often labeled as peripheral from Barcelona, and they have less media presence and less commercial impact, but there are Valencian and island publishing houses that, due to their volume, depth, and catalog's significance, 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 years or so, the void left would be immense. In all genres, but especially in history and essayistic thought. And as many authors from the country (Joan F. Mira, Vicent Flor, Ricard Chulià, Antoni Simon Tarrés, Antoni Martí Monterde...) as world 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 erratic.Give substance to Spanishness

To the just-mentioned authorial payroll, we must now add Ferran Garcia-Oliver (Beniopa, 1957), Professor of Medieval History at the University of Valencia. To write his new book, Una i eterna. Sobre el nacionalisme espanyol, Oliver has shed the armor of a medievalist and donned the overalls of a pugnacious essayist and inquisitive writer who is not afraid to get his hands dirty by manipulating monstrous, resounding, and sophisticated machinery. Specifically, the ideological, symbolic, and discursive machinery that gives substance to Spanishness and has been making it work for many centuries.Handling a vast corpus of facts, citations, characters, and references, Garcia-Oliver's book's thesis is not, as some have tendentiously claimed, that all Spaniards are the same. Garcia-Oliver's thesis is that hegemonic Spanish nationalism – constructor of the official, secular, and transversal Spanish identity, adaptive but above all faithful to itself and to the foundational objectives of homogenizing and expansionist Castilianism – is made with raw materials (imagination, references, 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 and romantic, Catholics and atheists, republicans and monarchists, socialists, communists, and anarchists, have conceived of nothing more than a perpetually united and troncally Castilian Spain.From the anonymous clergymen of the early second millennium to Gustavo Bueno, the leading 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 manufacturing the image and narrative of Spain as a political and cultural entity that self-perceives, explains itself, and proclaims itself from pre-political and post-political parameters, which means that they cannot be politically discussed.With a rich, dense, and robust style, ideal for the exhibition of copious information but also for creative invective, Ferran Garcia-Oliver meticulously explains how the currently still hegemonic idea of Spain and Spanishness has been manufactured, not as any nation and national identity, but as natural products of history and incontestable verdicts of destiny.