Political concepts have histories that explain both their origins and their present-day influence. Spain’s celebration of Hispanic Day is one such concept. Surprisingly, it continues today despite being rooted in Francoist ideology. The holiday wasn’t simply adopted by Franco’s regime. It was actually created as a weapon against republican and progressive ideals.
The loss of Spanish America
Understanding Hispanic Day requires looking at Spain’s loss of its American colonies. When Spain signed the Treaty of Paris, it lost what Rafael María de Labra described in 1912 as “its character as an American nation”. This language may seem strange now. However, Spain saw itself as a nation that had evolved from being an American empire. It never considered itself truly European.
The 1812 Cádiz Constitution made this clear. Its opening line stated: “The Spanish nation is the union of all Spaniards from both hemispheres.” Spain’s existence across two continents was seen as fundamental to its identity. Moreover, it served as a counterbalance to Spain’s complex relationship with Europe. Spanish intellectuals always felt Europe didn’t truly accept them as European.
When Spain lost Cuba and its remaining colonies less than a century after declaring itself a two-hemisphere nation, the shock was immense. Two movements emerged from this crisis. Both would profoundly shape Spanish history. First came compensatory colonialism in Morocco, which directly led to Francoist rule. Second came attempts to rebuild “Spanish America” through the concept of Hispanidad.
From concept to fascist ideology
Miguel de Unamuno coined the term Hispanidad in 1909 amidst confusion over Spain’s lost American provinces. However, from the 1920s onwards, Ramiro de Maeztu transformed it. His “spiritual reconquest” ideology became the foundation of reactionary Spanish nationalism. Maeztu was Basque but came from a wealthy Cuban family that lost everything after independence. This experience shaped his entire worldview.
Maeztu harboured deep anti-Catalan sentiment. He wrote that the only solution to the “Catalan problem” was a war of extermination. He was assassinated when the civil war began in 1936. Nevertheless, he became a major inspiration for Spanish groups emulating Italian fascism. His views stood in stark opposition to alternative progressive perspectives.
The Second Spanish Republic tried establishing a different vision. Luis de Zulueta and the Azaña government proposed multilateral cooperation. They wanted European Spain and the American republics to work as equals. This wasn’t the racial, nationalist Hispanidad that Maeztu championed. Instead, it offered cooperation, peace, democracy and progress. European Spain would be just one nation among many. It wouldn’t dominate the former colonial territories.
Maeztu’s manifesto and Franco’s adoption
In 1934, Maeztu published his doctrinal pamphlet Defensa de la Hispanidad (Amazon.es). The text turned the extreme right’s historical vision into a political programme. “Hispanic peoples will find no rest except in their centre, which is Hispanidad,” he wrote. According to this doctrine, Spain’s mission was defending Catholicism against Protestant Europe. It also meant recovering imperial values, particularly hierarchy and a masculine concept of honour that rejected liberalism, debate and Enlightenment reason.
This doctrine became the main fuel for reactionary movements leading to Francoism. Figures like Ramiro de Ledesma and Ernesto Giménez Caballero developed it further. They added a strong anti-Catalan component. The Falangist movement crystallised these ideas with its notion of “unity of destiny in the universal”. The goal was overcoming the Catalan nationalist challenge by recovering the myth of “Greater Spain” – Spanish America.
Hispanidad became a primary ideological weapon against the Second Republic. The reactionary right considered the Republic secular, liberal and threatening. After Franco won the war, Hispanidad became the regime’s legitimising myth. The dictatorship spent decades transmitting this concept through the education system. Spaniards learned that their history was a succession of glorious, miraculous events. These served Catholicism and were almost divinely ordained. Spain had a universal mission. Regional particularities were not just insignificant but unnatural and ridiculous.
The transition’s failure to break with the past
This history isn’t merely academic. The unabashed embrace of this reactionary Spanish identity that Vox represents today works because nobody ever removed its roots. Those roots remain alive primarily because Spain’s transition to democracy did more than fail to alter Francoism’s ideological foundations. It actually whitewashed and dignified them, just as it whitewashed the dictatorship’s institutions.
Sometimes we seem unaware of the price paid for a transition that left the previous regime’s deep structures intact. Francoism’s survival is no secret. The Spanish monarchy is Franco’s direct, unquestionable legacy. It’s established in the 1947 Ley de Sucesión en la Jefatura del Estado. The Audiencia Nacional is simply the sinister TOP (Tribunal de Orden Público) with changed nameplates. The Guardia Civil maintains its structure as Franco’s privileged instrument of terror and repression. The Valle de los Caídos remains a pharaonic monument to fascism, built with Republican prisoners’ blood and suffering.
Thousands upon thousands of murdered victims remain buried along roadsides and against cemetery walls. Nobody seems concerned with finding and honouring them. Significantly, Spain continues celebrating the anachronistic Hispanic Day that Franco used against the Republic. This explains why in 1981, instead of marking a radical break with Francoist slogans, instead of penalising Francoist ideology to prevent its return, instead of removing reactionary Spanish nationalism’s foundations, the Spanish parliament decided the national holiday would remain that same day. Franco had established it precisely to counter the Republic and feed his dictatorship.
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