Pablo San Martín's most recent books include Western Sahara. The Refugee Nation (University of Wales Press: Cardiff, 2008), 31. Teinta y Uno / Thirty One. A Bilingual Anthology of Saharawi Resistance Poetry in Spanish (Ediciones Sombrerete & Sandblast: London, 2007), and La Nación (Im)posible. Reflexiones sobre la Ideología Nacionalista Asturiana (Ediciones Trabe: Uviéu, 2006). |
How to cite this article: San Martín, Pablo. "Is Nationalism an Ideology? A critical exploration from the Asturian case". Dissidences. Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism. On line. Internet: 15/12/08 (http://www.dissidences/ 4SanMatinNationalism.html) |
| "The nationalist discourse provides citizens with a series of identitarian markers with which to identify and construct the political frontiers necessary to organise their reality and, therefore, cover over the unbearable uncertainty of being. It is this capacity of the signifier “Asturias” or “Asturian nation” for creating a new world-view about the organisation of society that justifies the inclusion of (Asturian, in this case) nationalism in the family of ideologies. " |
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Nationalism and Ideology in the Social Sciences and the Humanities
The classification of nationalism as an ideology has always been “a matter of some
confusion” in political studies, as political theorist Michael Freeden rightly indicates (“Is
nationalism a distinct ideology?” 748). In fact, adds Finlayson (“Nationalism” 98), “until
recently (nationalism) has been somewhat neglected by political theorists (…) and has more
often been investigated by historians and sociologists”, who tend to treat it as a socio-
political movement more than as a political ideology. Authors such as Ball and Dagger
consider that nationalism “take(s) so many forms and (is) so entwined with so many
different ideologies that (…) is better not to treat (it) as (a) distinct ideology” (Ball and
Dagger 18). This openness of nationalism--it is described by Adams as the “simplest, the
clearest and the least theoretically sophisticated” ideology (Adams 82),--together with the
fact that it “always needs to be in connection with wider social philosophies” (“Nationalism”
112) and its “consisten(ce) with a broad variety of forms of government, both dictatorial and
democratic” (Eatwell 8), generates doubts among many researchers, who end up by
characterising nationalism as a kind of semi- or non-fully-fledged ideology. Nationalism,
suggests Finlayson (“Ideology, Discourse, and Nationalism” 112), “is not an ideology, but
rather ideological; an operation utilized by ideologies”, generating a “matrix of meanings
that can be mobilized by specific ideologies”.
Freeden and Heywood’s positions show, in different ways, such ambivalence. On the one
hand, Freeden admits nationalism to be a thin-centre ideology but denies it the access to the
club of established ideologies such as liberalism or socialism. He considers that nationalism
“fails to meet the criteria of a comprehensive ideology. Its conceptual structure is incapable
of providing on its own a solution to questions of social justice, distribution of resources, and
conflict-management which mainstream ideologies address” (“Is nationalism a distinct
ideology?” 751). On the other hand, Heywood acknowledges categorically that “strictly
speaking, nationalism is not an ideology at all” since it doesn’t comprise a “developed set of
interrelated ideas and values” (Heywood 136). However, he includes one chapter on
nationalism in his well-known textbook on political ideologies. This apparent contradiction is
not rare at all, since despite the widespread reservations about the ideological character of
nationalism, most textbooks over the last two decades have included chapters on the topic
alongside others on socialism, liberalism or conservatism (see Macridis 1989; Adams 1993;
Eatwell and Wright 1993; Garner 1996; Eccleshall et al. 2003).
In the literature on nationalism, some degree of ambivalence is also noticeable. Smith
is reasonably clear when he defines nationalism as an “ideological movement for attaining
and maintaining identity, unity and autonomy of a social group some of whose members
deem it to constitute an actual or potential nation” (Smith 18, emphasis in original). Yet, he
places the emphasis on the term movement rather than on the term ideology, pointing
toward a dynamic that is visible in many studies. Nationalism is very often defined as a
“historical movement” (Smith 29), “political force” (Alter 1) or “collective action” (Hetcher
7) that, based on a relatively fixed ensemble of political ideas about the organisation of
modern society, imagines (Anderson 1983), invents (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983) or creates
(Gellner 1983) a nation. The expressionist (essentialist) approaches of some authors – who
saw it as “the inevitable expression of a pre-existing, objectively-delimited nation” – are
widely rejected in the humanities and the social sciences, in favour of a constructionist view
that considers nationalism as “the agent which, given favourable circumstances, shapes the
nation by means of social mobilization and discourse” (Máiz 252, emphasis in original).
Thus, part of the current debate has moved from the social and ethnic preconditions to the
role played by the discourses, doctrines, ideas, cognitive frames or fantasies informing and
supporting the collective mobilisations, as a quick review of the articles published in any of
the journals devoted to the study of nationalism and ethnicity during the last years reveals.
However, only in a few number of cases such ensembles of political ideas are explicitly
defined and analysed as political ideologies. This reluctance to describe nationalism as an
ideology has to do with the convergence of two underlying dynamics. On the one hand, the
perseverance in most studies of some essentialist traits (that is, the underlying belief that
there is something behind, even if its significance depends on interpretation) and, on the
other, the persistence of pejorative views of ideology, which still evoke “a whole array of
negative notions from false consciousness to fanaticism, mental blockage to mystification”
(Eagleton 1).
Whether nationalism is an ideology or not is thus an obscure question that requires some
clarification. The aim of this paper is to bring some light to this issue, arguing not only in
favour of the inclusion of nationalism in the family of ideologies but also that is necessary to
analyse nationalism as a political ideology. Indeed, as we will see later, this will help us to
grasp nationalism’s ultimate and fundamental aim: to cover over the unbearable emptiness
of society. Drawing on the insights of Freeden’s morphology, Laclau and Mouffe’s post-
Marxism and Žižek’s psychoanalysis, we will explore this question empirically with
reference to a particular case study: Asturian Nationalism [1] in Spain. Firstly, we will
examine the plural array of elements articulated in the nationalist discourse. Secondly, we
will explore the roles played by these elements in the nationalist articulation. Thirdly, we will
look at the force that binds together these elements providing them with coherence and
fixing their meaning in a coherent social, political and cultural discourse. This will help us to
show why an ideological characterization is needed if we want to grasp the force behind
nationalist mobilization and national identity.
The moments of Asturian nationalist discourse
According to Freeden (Ideologies and Political Theory 3), ideologies are systems of political
thought, flexible or rigid, deliberate or not, through which the individuals and the groups
construct a given understanding of the political world that they live in, and then act. This
conception fits within the general tendency to consider ideologies as political belief systems
that shape our social reality and provide us the legitimacy to orientate our political action in
a certain direction (see Heywood 6). But Freeden’s perspective does not focus on such
functional dimension. His morphological research strategy “concentrates rather on
examining the conceptual configurations that accord any specific instance of an ideology a
particular set of identifying meanings”, taking into account that “ideologies are
configurations of political concepts (…) in which particular interpretations of each
constituent concept have been selected out of an indeterminate range of meanings they may
signify” (Is nationalism a distinct ideology? 749).
Political concepts (i.e. liberty, democracy, freedom) do not have an essentially fixed meaning
but, on the contrary, are “essentially contested concepts” (Gallie 171). Thus, the
“impossibility of an ultimate fixity of meaning implies that there have to be partial fixations –
otherwise, the very flow of differences would be impossible. Even in order to differ (...) there
has to be a meaning” (Laclau and Mouffe 112). The basic ideological operation consists then
in turning the unavoidable variety of options into the monolithic certainty that characterizes
every political decision (Is nationalism a distinct ideology? 76). Ideologies are complex
combinations of political concepts, at different levels, whose possible meanings are
decontested or fixed in a particular way, and which aim to generate a particular view about
the organisation of society.
Along this lines, Žižek has argued that an ideological reading consists in showing that a
particular ideology (discourse, performance, practice, etc.) is the result of a combination, of
a montage, of several heterogeneous floating signifiers that acquire their particular meaning
through the intervention of certain master signifiers, nodal points, or points de caption (The
Sublime Object of Ideology 125 and Lacan 268). “Any discourse is constituted as an attempt
to (…) arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre” (Laclau and Mouffe 112) and,
consequently, the main research question is “what creates and sustains the identity of a
given ideological field beyond all possible variations of its possible content?” (The Sublime
Object of Ideology 87).
In the case of Asturian nationalism, according to this logic, an ideological reading has to
focus on the exploration of the several moments inscribed in the nationalist discourse/s
(democracy, liberty, sustainability, socialism, etc.), the localisation of the central element
binding them together (the idea of the nation) and the analysis of the new meanings
resulting from the combination of all these elements in a single and coherent discursive
chain. Therefore, the first step in our analysis should be to check whether the discourse held
by Asturian nationalists is the result of a combination of several heterogeneous ideas. We will
start our brief inquiry by reading a number of texts (pamphlets, manifestos, internal
documents, etc.) produced by some nationalist parties over the last three decades.
In one of its propaganda pamphlets, the Conceyu Nacionalista Astur (CNA), the first
nationalist party in Asturias during the Spanish Transition to democracy in the 1970s,
introduced itself as:
A political union (…) within which there are several tendencies (Marxists, Marxists-Leninists,
Trotskyists, libertarians, …) united in a basic ideology of revolutionary and popular nationalism that
fights for (…) the self-determination of Asturias, in the context of a European confederation of peoples,
with the aim of establishing a self-government that will make possible the participation of the masses
and the creation of a socialist and self-managed society. (Pol Autogobiernu)
Explicitly, the text mentions different tendencies coexisting around a central ideological
element in which all of them converge: nationalism. Nationalism is conjoined with adjectives
such as socialist, revolutionary, libertarian, self-managed, co-federal and European; signifiers
that, in most cases, point toward different leftist traditions, fashionable in that particular
historical context. Two decades later, the political party Izquierda Nacionaliega Asturiana
(INA) acknowledged again the influence of elements from diverse schools of thought,
confessing that it had been “created (...) as a union of different political traditions: socialists,
communists, libertarians, independentists, green, pacifist, feminist…” (INA 1997).
But let’s turn back to the CNA. Among the objectives mentioned in the pamphlet quoted
above, we find ideas such as the strengthening of municipalities, the achievement of a self-
managed economy and a direct democracy, the “respect of the natural world”, the political
unification of Europe and “the development in Asturias of the Celtic spirit (…) that has been
oppressed for the last two thousand years by the static, rigid, imperialist and militarist
Latinism” (Pol Autogobiernu). In Asturias Dixebrá, CNA’s bulletin, there were fixed
sections devoted to the anti-nuclear campaigns then in vogue and to feminism, as well as
articles on Asturian folklore and history directly inspired in the romantic Asturian
regionalism of the late XIXth century. We can also find articles about national liberation
struggles and colonialism: Asturias was “a country culturally colonised and economically
exploited by the Spanish State, which makes possible for us to affirm that we, the Asturians,
suffer from a double exploitation: the colonial one and class one” (Remanacer 1).
The CNA collapsed at the beginning of the 1980s, after a failed attempt to create a terrorist
group sponsored (and later betrayed) by the Basque terrorist group ETA. New nationalist
parties emerged then, but they continued developing the same radical and revolutionary
nationalist discourse. In the 1990s, however, some discontented sectors manifested the need
to re-articulate the nationalist left with alternative values, “based on leftist and green ideas,
on social justice and direct democracy” (BIA). An alternative left,
able to develop a new model of society constructed around the defence of the idea of social justice and
the progressive values of peace, direct democracy, individual and collective rights and ecology; an
alternative that will base its program on social solidarity, both with the world’s peoples and with the
excluded sectors of our society; an alternative that aspire to remove the social and political obstacles
that disturb a society of equal and free members. (BIA)
Political parties such as Izquierda Nacionaliega Asturiana (INA) and Izquierda Asturiana
(IAS) re-articulated during the 1990s the traditional nationalist discourse, inscribing new
elements in the chain of significance and giving more prominence to some moments that
had been marginal in other nationalist discourses: anti-globalisation, international co-
operation and development, human rights, gender issues, pacifism, ecology.
But not all nationalist discourses are situated within the Marxist and radical traditions. The
Partíu Asturianista (PAS), which in fact has been until now the main nationalist party in
electoral terms, defines its political project as “Asturianist, inter-class and progressive” (PAS
27). For instance, breaking with the anti-systemic readings of other parties, the PAS accepts
the current Spanish political framework as a valid a legitimate context for the development of
its political action. Instead of attempting to overcome the current capitalist and liberal
democratic system, it proposes to “use the democratic means (of the) Spanish Constitution”
in order to “govern from within the democratic institutions” (PAS 115). In addition to such
acceptance of representative and liberal democracy, it also introduces in its discourse neo-
liberal elements such as regional competitiveness, city marketing and other market oriented
economic policies.
In this brief journey throughout the texts of some nationalist collectives, we have easily found
several references to different discursive moments: from socialism to market competition,
from anti-colonialism to green thought, from Celtism to representative democracy. Asturian
nationalist discourse comprehends a plural array of ideas and elements, which are also
inscribed in other discursive articulations and whose origins can be traced back to a plurality
of traditions of though, both prior and contemporary to the emergence of Asturian
nationalism.
The roles of the Asturianist element
So far, our argument runs parallel to Yannis’s Stavrakakis’ analysis of Green ideology.
Through his reading of several manifestos and locus clasici of Green thought, he effectively
shows how several elements such as direct democracy, pacifism, decentralisation, social
justice or post-patriarchal principles, are articulated together with “Green” ideas. Therefore,
both Green thought and nationalism seem to be, from a structural point of view, “ideological
par excellence” (“Green ideology” 269), since both discourses include a plurality of
elements not limited to the nation or the natural world. This means, on the other hand, that
contrary to those who consider Green politics as a project limited to the principles of
ecology, the ecological element is only one among others in Green ideology, although, of
course, it occupies a crucial position. Concern about environmental issues is, as the Green
thinker Porrit states, “by no means the same as being Green” (Porrit, quoted “Green
ideology” 269). As we have shown, being a nationalist in Asturias doesn’t imply only to have
a certain perspective about the contours of the nation, about who is a who is not a “proper”
Asturian, but also to have a particular view about the market economy, social justice or the
European Union.
Freeden’s doubts about the ideological character of nationalism seem unjustified, according
to this schema. For him, a full ideological morphology contains particular interpretations and
configurations of all the important political concepts required for the specific imagination of a
given society. In contrast, a weak ideological morphology has a frail and restricted centre,
linked to a more limited range of concepts, so that it is structurally unable to offer a complex
range of arguments. On that basis, he categorizes nationalism as a thin-centred ideology,
since its “conceptual structure is incapable of providing on its own a solution to questions of
social justice, distribution of resources, and conflict-management which mainstream
ideologies address” (“Is nationalism a distinct ideology?” 751). The problem with this
assertion is that it refers to an ideal concept of the nation rather than the complex
articulation of elements that form every particular nationalist discourse. Just as there are no
universal socialists, liberals or anarchists (without historical context), there are no universal
nationalists but only particular nationalists, whose identities are shaped by a complex
articulation of ideas regarding the limits of the nation as well as the distribution of resources
or social justice and, therefore, providing a full representation of society. As we have seen,
the militants of the CNA had, definitely, something to say about such crucial questions.
Hence, the question that arises in this respect is whether the nationalist element is simply
one more among the several elements of the nationalist chain of signifiers. In other words,
do all the elements comprised in a nationalist discourse count the same? Do they have the
same structural importance? We will try to bring some light to these questions with
reference to the two Asturian regionalist parties that competed in the first elections after
Franco’s death, in 1977, when the differences between regionalism and nationalism started
to crystallize in Asturias.
The first of them, Democracia Socialista Asturiana (DSA), was a political association
articulated around “three basic aims: democracy, socialism and regionalism”, which
promoted as its main objective “the development of socialism, within a democratic
framework, which requires the collective ownership of the means of production, in order to
end with any form of capitalist exploitation” (DSA 1976). Of the three central ideas
delineating its identity, socialism was thus explicitly elevated to the central position. It was,
in other words, the element that defined DSA’s political identity more effectively than any
other. Therefore, regionalism acquired a particular meaning depending on its secondary
position in respect to the socialist moment. DSA’s regionalism was a “popular” regionalism,
in opposition to other forms of conservative or liberal regionalism. Pedro de Silva, founder
and leader of DSA, was very illustrative in this respect:
There is no possible identification (...) between the kind of “regionalism” supported by the
local capitalist groups and a true popular regionalism. The aim of the former is simply to
neutralize the power of national and multinational capitalism in an attempt to be hegemonic
in a certain territory. But at the very same moment when the prevalence of capitalism is
questioned (…), the “superior” (capitalist) interests will always prevail over the hegemonic
disputes. (…) The region / nation, as an economic and historic universe, constitutes (...) the
appropriate framework for analysing class struggle (...), which is different in each particular
social context. (…) Thus, a true popular regionalism is, necessarily, antagonist to the
dominant productive system, which has a national and multinational scale. (…) By
promoting regionalism (…) the capitalist schema will be objectively subverted. (…)
Multinational capitalism requires a multinational culture as its instrument for the creation of
ways of life, habits and customs to absorb the inevitable irrationality of the capitalist system
and, at the same time, to uproot the individuals and communities from their real
environment, to force them to break with their cultural lineage, to alienate them and destroy
their critical skills. (…) The defence of particular ways of life is possibly the only remedy to
preserve the critical consciousness of the peoples. (De Silva 26-7)
“Regionalism” was decontested not as an aim in itself but as one of the necessary strategies
to subvert the capitalist system of exploitation, which was the genuine organising principle
that gave coherence to DSA’s discourse. That made it possible for the DSA to merge with
the Asturian federation of the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) in June 1976. It was an
alliance “based on the socialist principles that link(ed) both collectives” that put explicitly
into the open the secondary role of elements such as regionalism (DSA and PSP 1976).
Let’s move now to the second regionalist party which participated in the 1977 elections:
Unida Rexonalista (UR). In its first public manifesto, its Founding Committee presented its
political project as follows:
The Asturian people face the perspective of an imminent general election, which opens the hope for
better times but, at the very same time, generates uncertainty and doubt. Many people, in fact, ask
themselves what they can do in order to break the current situation of stagnation of the region and to
create a new regime in which the people’s wills will have appropriate sources of expression. (…) To
overcome all the difficulties, to facilitate a true process of change in Asturias, as well as to devolve the
freedom and sovereignty to the people, to allow the Asturians to elaborate a Statute of Autonomy, it is
necessary for everybody to make a big effort. The Asturian people, in order to defend their interests,
require the creation of a common candidature (…), a regionalist option [that] should be born and
delineated in Asturias with no external intromission. (Comisión Gestora 7)
Hence, under the dominant context of ambivalence and uncertainty of that Transitional
period, what the Founding Committee proposed was the creation of an Asturian candidature
able to elaborate a political alternative to solve the crisis Asturias was suffering. The
interpellated subject is clear from the very beginning: the Asturian people. Therefore, the
creation of the electoral candidature is conceived on the basis not of a particular conception
of class struggle, as shown before, but only on the basis of the future of a certain community.
That is to say, in strictly regional terms. In the words one of UR’s leaders, what they were
looking for was an “Asturian and Asturianist wide coalition” (Masip 10-1), since autonomy
was conceived as “the only mean for strength and protect the social, economic, political and
cultural interests of the Asturian people” (UR 1977). That is to say, the discourse of the UR
was articulated around the attempt to solve the rampant crisis and to cover over the
widespread uncertainty haunting the future of the Asturian region.
As has been shown, in the discourse of both UR and DSA a regionalist moment is easily
identifiable. In the case of UR the particular decontestation of regionalism was the central
signifier that bound together several elements (feminism, devolution, democracy, etc.),
attracting the support of various collectives. However, in the case of DSA the socialist
moment was the one fixing in a certain direction the meaning of the regionalist element. The
regionalism of UR was a wide regionalism, an open regionalism in which all the rest of
interests and concerns of the Asturian people might be inscribed, while DSA’s regionalism
was a popular regionalism that only acquired its meaning in relation to a partial fixation of
the idea of class struggle. The different location of the regionalist moment within the
morphological structure of both discourses is what makes it possible to talk, in one case,
about a regionalist discourse and, in the other, more properly about a socialist one. Not all
discourses comprising Asturianist elements in their chains of significance are regionalist or
nationalist discourses, because not all the elements count the same.
The nation as an empty signifier
We have already shown that nationalist ideologies comprise a plurality of discursive elements
and ideas; elements that are also inscribed in other discursive articulations and whose
origins can be traced back to a plurality of traditions of thought. Analogously, nationalist and
communitarian ideas are neither restricted to nationalist discourses nor valid enough to
clearly identify them, as the analysis of UR and DSA’s discourses demonstrates. Ideological
discourses comprise a plural and variable number of elements whose significance is not pre-
determinated. Now, the crucial question is what binds them together in a particular
discourse and what invest them with a partially fixed and coherent meaning. In other words,
what creates and sustains an ideology beyond all possible variations in its possible content.
In the cases of UR and DSA we have just seen how the signifiers regionalism and socialism
are privileged and act as reference points. They don’t count the same, but more than the
rest of the elements. They are “the privileged signifiers or reference points (…) that bind
together a particular system of meaning” (Howard and Stavrakakis 8). Laclau and Mouffe
call these signifiers nodal points; master signifiers or points de capiton in a more Lacanian
fashion (Laclau and Mouffe 12). The question is, of course, why and when do certain
elements acquire such a privileged position so that they became able of fixing the meaning
other ideas in a new discursive articulation?
For a new process of discursive articulation to take place the meanings associated to a
number of elements and ideas in other prior articulations have to collapse. If the ideas about
the communities in which we live – and, consequently, about who we/they are – were
ultimately fixed, there would not be any room for new identity conflicts. But history has not
finished. The defining feature of an object of analysis, so many times taken for granted, as
society is its ultimate impossibility, since its contours will never be definitely delineated.
There is always a critical situation when it will not be possible to symbolise the
circumstances according to the mainstream road maps that until then had shaped our world-
views and defined our identities. In other words, there is always a moment when “the
contingency of discursive structures is made visible” (Howarth and Stavrakakis 13). In these
situations, as Stavrakakis points out the centrality of negativity for human experience,
understood as “the horizon of impossibility and unrepresentability that punctuates the life of
linguistic creatures”, is fully visible (“Re-Activating the Democratic Revolution” 56).
But negativity should not be simply considered as a destructive force. On the one hand,
these critical events have obvious destructive consequences: they shatter “already existing
identities and (induce) an identity crisis for the subject” (Howarth and Stavrakakis 13).
However, as Laclau insists, they also have a constructive character, opening spaces for new
discourses (New Reflections 39). The negativity that emerges to the surface at certain
situations is “a creative-destructive force that engenders as well as ruins positive forms”
(Coole 6). Therefore, it is the condition of possibility/impossibility of the constitution of
partial and temporary identities.
The theory of dislocation introduced by Ernesto Laclau (New Reflections 39-45) emerges
here as the crucial tool for the understanding of nationalist ideology and national identity. As
San Martín points out (“A discursive reading…” 102), the concept of ‘dislocation (…)
accounts for the moment of destabilization, failure and subversion of a given discourse, as a
result of the emergence of some events that cannot be integrated in the system of
representation sustaining that particular discourse”. This idea of dislocation “seems to be
designed to account for what, in Lacanian terms, we could describe as ‘encounters with the
Real’” (Glyos and Stavrakakis 116). The Real is what remains impossible to symbolize, what
escapes the field of representation. In other words, the Real would be an event, or a
collection of events, that is/are impossible to integrate in the discourses that give meaning to
our social world. Reality, on the contrary, is the discursively constructed world of
subjects/objects we live in, the world of socially produced meanings that will be dislocated at
a certain historical point by the emergence of the Real. Thus, the Real is what confront us
dramatically not with what we are but with what we are not, that is, what confront us with
what prevents us from being fully ourselves.
Then, to understand society is not to understand what it positively is but “what prevent it
from being fully itself” (New Reflections 44). The moment of prevention, of dislocation of a
certain social imaginary, is simultaneously the moment that generates new attempts to
construct an ultimate world-view with which to suture the dislocated space. Therefore, to
understand nationalist ideology and national identity, rather than to describe affirmatively
their content, is to explore their emergence as new discursive articulations and to study the
moment when a previous national reality faced the Real, generating the desire for a new
reading of the world in communitarian terms.
In some of his writings, Laclau has positivized the negative character of the Real in what he
calls empty signifiers (Glynos and Stavrakakis 117): signifiers that attempt to incarnate the
absence of totality made visible by a certain dislocatory event in a given society. In Laclau’s
words, “although the fullness and universality of society is unachievable, its need does not
disappear: it will always show itself through the presence of its absence” (Emancipations
53). Thus, the ideological operation per excellence, according to this logic, will be precisely
the attempt to decontest and hegemonize the empty signifiers that symbolise the
impossibility of society.
“Order” as such has no content, because it only exists in the various forms in which it is
actually realized, but in a situation of radical disorder ‘order’ is present as that which is
absent; it becomes an empty signifier, as the signifier of that absence. In this sense, various
political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those
which carry out the filling of that lack. To hegemonize something is exactly to carry out this
filling function. (Emancipations 44)
The concept of the nation may clearly act as an empty signifier. It only exits in the several
forms in which / though which it is actually realized. In the context of the Iberian Peninsula
there is no universal or objective nation but various ideological and practical realizations of
the nation with different degrees of success. There are various fillings of the signifiers nation
and community, which might be dislocated at certain critical situations. In other words,
the sedimented plausibility of these ideas is eroded and its contingency resurfaces always at
a certain point. Then, the nation is present through its absence. Through the need of a tool
to map our world and delineate who we and they are. The articulation of the political
discourses that provide us with these tools to read the reality “can only take place around an
empty signifier that functions as a nodal point” (Howarth and Stavrakakis 8).
The study of ideology is therefore “the study of the mechanisms which makes this illusion
[the illusion of an ultimate order, of a definitive and full nation, etc.] possible” (Norval 300).
For this reason, analysing nationalism as a political ideology is necessary if we want to grasp
its ultimate and fundamental aim: to cover over the unbearable emptiness of society. If we
want, in other words, to bring some light to the questions of why and when do nationalist
discourses (and movements) emerge.
The nodal point of Asturian nationalism
San Martín has delineated elsewhere in some detail the contours of the logic of dislocation in
the Spanish context, locating the emergence of Asturian and other peripheral nationalisms
in relation to the radical emptiness opened up by the collapse of the Francoist imaginary at
the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies (“A discursive reading…” and
La Nación (im)posible). In 1964, the Francoist Regime celebrated the “25 years of peace”
opened with its victory in the Spanish Civil War. According to the official propaganda, such a
period of peace, stability and development was one of the main achievements of the Regime.
In fact, as Fusi acknowledges, until the decade of 1960, there were not dangerous
mobilisations in Spain that seriously threatened the social hegemony of the dictatorship
(Fusi 161; see also Vilar). Spanish society was, as De Miguel points out, highly apolitical, not
only because of the political restrictions but also because of the sustained economic growth
and its positive impact in the material conditions of living (De Miguel 208). However, several
factors coincided during the 1960s, generating a growing social discontent and showing that,
despite the official propaganda, “something was going wrong” (De Esteban and López
Guerra 137).
Firstly, the labour conflicts increased dramatically after the introduction of the Law of
Collective Negotiations in 1958, which opened some space for the development of
clandestine trade unions. The “natural consequence (of the new negotiation mechanisms)
were the workers strikes”, especially in industrial regions such as Barcelona, Madrid, the
Basque Country and Asturias (Carr and Fusi 140). The sixties were also years of rising
student mobilisations. All around the Spanish Universities the number of demonstrations,
acts of protest, sit-ins, or mere student meetings to discuss political issues grew rapidly. In
1969, the Regime, unable to control the student movement, declared a State of Emergency
and closed temporarily the University campuses, showing symbolically the increasing
disconnection between the nascent elites and the rigid structure of the Dictatorship. As
Gunther and Montero indicate, the perception of crisis was reinforced by the partial
liberalisation of the mass media that took place in 1966 (Gunther and Montero 13-15). The
aim of the new policies was only to allow for a limited contrast of opinions within the
ideological frontiers of the Dictatorship. However, it ended up by facilitating the progressive
introduction of many opposition demands in the pages of both the old and new publications.
In addition, the regional question resurfaced powerfully during the final Francoist years. The
policies to promote a homogeneous Spanish culture and identity did not manage to
eradicate the old enemies of the nation, mainly incarnated in Francoist imaginary by Catalan
and Basque nationalist movements (see Conversi’s work, for example). Catalanism,
especially in its cultural manifestations, managed successfully to survive the repressive
policies and play a significant role in everyday Catalan life since the 1950s. The situation of
Basque nationalism was radically different. Until the 1960s, the exiled nationalist government
was inoperative and in the Basque Provinces only survived a folklorist and conservative
particularism, not very threatening for the hegemony of the Dictatorship. However, the main
peripheral challenge to the Francoist Regime come from the Basque Country, where a
group of young nationalists, deeply discontent with the passive nationalist strategy, created
the terrorist group ETA in 1959. Nine years later, ETA killed for the first time.
The overlapping of several critical events during the 1960s – worker strikes, student
mobilisations, liberalisation of the mass media, peripheral nationalisms, interfamily rivalry
within Francoist elites, progressive separation between the Church and the State, etc. –
affected crucially the foundations of the Francoist political system. Their significance
surpassed the mere collection of partial crises that might be sorted out within the contours of
the hegemonic order of things. What was under pressure, as De Esteban and López Guerra
pointed out, was “the total organisation of the Spanish political life. And the name of that (…)
is: the (Francoist) State” (De Esteban and López Guerra 13). The Francoist project was
dramatically revealed, though a sequence of critical events, as an unfulfilled fantasy that was
for no longer able to control and/or integrate the new social, cultural and political demands.
The dislocation of the hegemonic discourses opened an undecidable space, a time of
uncertainty, which generated the desire of a new communitarian fantasy. It was in this
terrain that a new nationalist ideology emerged in Asturias as one of the possible re-
articulations attempting to constitute “a new space of representation” (New Reflections 61).
Yet, why did a certain idea of Asturias become a virtual nodal point under such
circumstances? How can we account for the elements, and particularly the nodal point,
comprised in the new articulation? In other words, what are the limits of the new
discourse/s? Is there any limit at all? As Laclau formulates, “what are those limits that are
other than aprioristic?” (“Identity and Hegemony” 82). His answer is:
the ensemble of sedimented practices constituting the normative framework of a certain society. This
framework can experience deep dislocations requiring drastic recompositions, but it never disappears to
the point of requiring an act of total refoundation” (“Identity and Hegemony” 82).
To explain this logic, Laclau gives the example of Antonio Conselheiro, “a millenarian
preacher (that) had wandered for decades in the Brazilian sertao, at the end of the
nineteenth century, without recruiting too many followers” (“Identity and Hegemony” 83,
emphasis in original). The situation changed radically with the transition from the empire to
republic, which brought about abrupt economic, political and social alterations that
dislocated the traditional way of life in the rural areas.
One day Conselheiro arrived in a village where people were rioting against the tax collectors,
and pronounced the words which become the key equivalence of his prophetic discourse:
“The Republic is the Antichrist”. From that point onwards his discourse provided a surface
of inscription for all forms of rural discontent, and became the starting point of a mass
rebellion which took several years for the government to defeat (“Identity and Hegemony”
83).
On the one hand, the incarnation of God and Evil in the signifiers Empire and Republic was
not predetermined aprioristically. It was a contingent and radical decision, possible because
it was the only discourse available addressing the discontent of the rural villagers at that
particular moment, in that particular historical context. But, on the other hand, it was
possible because it did not clash “with important unshakeable beliefs of the rural masses”
(“Identity and Hegemony” 83). Therefore, as Laclau notes, “the subject who takes the
decision is only partially a subject; he is also a background of sedimented practices
organising a normative framework which operates as a limitation on the horizon of options”
(“Identity and Hegemony” 83, emphasis in original). It is necessary, then, to introduce a
contextualization in the analysis of the emergence of constitutive decisions. We should pay
attention not only to the moment of crisis and its productive effects but also to the normative
framework and the discursive elements available for the new articulations. Let’s turn then
our attention to the mainstream Francoist discourses about the community available at the
time.
Francoist nationalist ideology promoted the “hegemony of a Catholic and traditionalist
version of Spanish nationalism (…), which centred its discourse around the essentialist
affirmation of a Catholic Spain basically identified with Castile” (Núñez 720). The role given
to Castilian/Spanish language was central in the imagination of an ethnically homogenous
Spain. This implied, of course, the conscious repression of the regional languages. However,
the strategy toward these languages was much more complex than that of an extermination
policy, as San Martín has shown in relation to the Asturian language (La nación (im)posible
247-83) In fact, the position of the Francoist elites in Asturias regarding this problematic
issue is crucial to understanding why a new idea of Asturias in national terms was elevated to
the position of virtual nodal point.
Since the late 1940s a group of Francoist scholars from the University of Oviedo (the main
Asturian city) started to develop, from within the very ideological framework of the Regime, a
large corpus of academic materials on the regional particularities of Asturias. The regional
language received a lot of attention and became rapidly a popular subject of study among
the growing numbers of Asturian speaking students from rural areas, although conceived as
an old-fashioned dialect of Spanish without essence in-itself. On the other hand, the literature
written in Asturian that had survived during those years was characterised mainly by its
limits. In a majority of cases, it was extremely poor and tediously reiterative in its topics:
traditional/rural stories, bucolic landscapes, as well as festive and humoristic anecdotes of
“rude and coarse style (…), whose meaning is not the criticism but the trivialisation of the
situations” (Sánchez Vicente 13). Rural environments devoid of passions – (almost extinct)
joyful Arcadias – appeared as the sole geographical locations of these stories. The only
exceptions were, in most cases – particularly in the popular genre of the (performed)
monologs – occasional trips of rural characters to the city, where they faced a succession of
comical situations that, in a last instance, were always aimed to ridicule the villager. In the
plays, the rich and educated characters often employed Spanish language, while Asturian
language was restricted to the poor and illiterate, stressing thus the relations of power
between the two languages and their clear functional division. Thus, the literature in
Asturian was restricted to a clearly defined type of literature, inscribed in the official culture
of the Regime. It was a type of literature peripheral to the true literature made in Asturias –
the one in Castilian – to which some authors looked in search of certain expressive effects
from time to time. In other words, the range of possible meanings of the literature written in
Asturian language was decontested in a certain direction, its meaning partially fixed as
a vulgar and old-fashioned adjacent to the true literature written in Castilian language.
Nonetheless, during those years a total number of over two hundred academic studies on
Asturian language and more than one hundred literary works written in Asturian were
published (Brugos 37-9). Undoubtedly, in Asturias, as in the rest Spain, there was certain---
although very limited---permissiveness toward the regional language, consisting in killing it
without letting it die definitely.
However, when Francoist dictatorship was collapsing or at least in crisis, in the late 1960s
and 1970s, a group of young lecturers and students from the University of Oviedo started to
openly question such policies, that is, to question the meaning attributed until then by the
hegemonic ideology to the vernacular parole. Francoist communitarian fantasy was rapidly
disintegrating at the beginning of the 1970s, as we have briefly shown. The idea of a
homogeneous Catholic Spain, whose unity was symbolised by Castilian language, was not
appealing for any more to growing sectors of the younger generations, since it was
inextricably attached to the whole rigid social system in crisis. However, the central role of
languages in defining nations and communities was not problematized. It was accepted that
languages (as the most symbolic and visible expression of cultures) were the defining
element of nations and communities., What was problematized, on the contrary was the role
of a particular language, Castilian, in delimiting the nation, the community, the frontiers of
inclusion and exclusion.
In the words of Asturian writer Sánchez Vicente, “in 1974, start(ed) a new epoch for the
Asturian literature” (Sánchez Vicente 9). The limitations (in topics, styles, forms, genres,
locations, etc.) disappeared slowly, progressively but decisivley. A new group of writers
began to use Asturian language as a literary vehicle to approach any topic; as a vehicle valid
for any genre or style. Asturian language slipped away from its peripheral and secondary
position and was given “an absolute and non-subordinated” value, which meant “an
absolute rupture with the characteristics of the antique” Francoist strategies (Sánchez
Vicente 13). In the new literature that emerged in the 1970s there are thrillers, erotic poetry,
political essays, journalistic articles, short stories for children, etc. And all these works are
commonly referred as part of the same literary movement: the Surdimientu (renascence,
in Asturian) . Why? Which are the elements linking the practitioners of such different styles,
genres and forms? Where is their common ground located so that we can talk about the
same literary and, more generally, cultural movement? The answer is, of course: Asturian
language. If it makes sense to talk about a novel literary movement is only because all the
authors employ the Asturian language as their artistic vehicle. Therefore, language
stopped being a moment and become a central signifier that – without a particular and
limited meaning – is able to partially fix the meaning of other topics, forms and styles as
“Asturian”.
This shift in the literary role of the regional language clearly symbolises the ideological turn
we are trying to illuminate in this article. The dislocation of Francoist nationalist discourses
opened an unbearable space of uncertainty. The association between Castilian language and
the signifier nation was broken, and thus “the nation” became an empty signifier. That is, an
object of desire whose meaning needs to be partially fixed in a certain direction. Asturian
language, an element available, since it had been kept alive under Francoism through the
administration of a calculated permissiveness (as a subject of study, through a limited and
poor literature, etc), acquired then a new prominence and became something absolute in
itself. In other words, it became a virtual nodal point around which to articulate a new idea of
cultural community in substitution of the old Francoist nation. The imagined Asturian
nation, decontested mainly in linguistic terms, was a signifier able to bind together around it
a plural array of elements, whose meaning was transformed by means of such articulatory
practice.
Final remarks
At this point, the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this article should be
hopefully clear. Nationalism (Asturian, in our case) can be considered an ideology since:
firstly, it consists of a discursive articulation around a nodal communitarian point (an idea of
Asturias); secondly, such nodal point emerges as a virtual fixation of the empty signifier of
the nation, at a particular critical situation when its absence becomes dramatically present;
thirdly, this nodal point binds together a plural array of discursive elements; and fourthly, the
meaning of these elements is partially fixed by means of the articulatory practice (that is,
due to their inscription in the new nationalist chain of significance). Thus, the nationalist
discourse provides citizens with a series of identitarian markers with which to identify and
construct the political frontiers necessary to organise their reality and, therefore, cover over
the unbearable uncertainty of being. It is this capacity of the signifier “Asturias” or
“Asturian nation” for creating a new world-view about the organisation of society that
justifies the inclusion of (Asturian, in this case) nationalism in the family of ideologies.
On the other hand, as we have seen, the strategy of ideological analysis that guided this
paper has proved fruitful in illuminating one of the main questions about nationalism. It
directly focuses on the reasons behind its emergence – namely the attempt to cover over the
precarious character of society – and thus can bring some light to the obscure questions of
why and when nationalist discourses emerge.
Notes
[1] Asturias is one of the current 17 Spanish autonomous communities. It is located in
northwest Spain and has, approximately, one million inhabitants. According to recent
surveys, half of the Asturian citizens speak a vernacular language called Asturian or Bable
(see Llera and San Martín). Asturias is constitutionally defined as a ‘Historical Community’
and has a medium degree of autonomy within the Spanish (asymmetrical) and quasi-federal
system. Although most academics would agree that “regional identity” and “regional
attitudes” are very strong in Asturias, the Asturian nationalist movement is a very weak
peripheral movement in comparison to others such as the Galician, Basque or Catalan. In
electoral terms, for example, it remains marginal within the political system and is divided in
several political parties (Partíu Asturianista, Bloque de la Izquierda Asturiana, Andecha
Astur, Izquierda Asturiana, etc.). However, the Asturian nationalist movement has gained
social relevance during the last two decades, especially in its most “cultural” manifestations
such as folk music and literature. It has also become the most active social movement in the
region, developing relatively successful campaigns, mainly in defence of the Asturian
language, and introducing many of its demands in the Asturian political agenda. On
Asturian nationalism see San Martín (2006) and Bauske (1998). On Asturian language and
regional identity see Llera and San Martín (2003).
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The classification of nationalism as an ideology has always been “a matter of some
confusion” in political studies, as political theorist Michael Freeden rightly indicates (“Is
nationalism a distinct ideology?” 748). In fact, adds Finlayson (“Nationalism” 98), “until
recently (nationalism) has been somewhat neglected by political theorists (…) and has more
often been investigated by historians and sociologists”, who tend to treat it as a socio-
political movement more than as a political ideology. Authors such as Ball and Dagger
consider that nationalism “take(s) so many forms and (is) so entwined with so many
different ideologies that (…) is better not to treat (it) as (a) distinct ideology” (Ball and
Dagger 18). This openness of nationalism--it is described by Adams as the “simplest, the
clearest and the least theoretically sophisticated” ideology (Adams 82),--together with the
fact that it “always needs to be in connection with wider social philosophies” (“Nationalism”
112) and its “consisten(ce) with a broad variety of forms of government, both dictatorial and
democratic” (Eatwell 8), generates doubts among many researchers, who end up by
characterising nationalism as a kind of semi- or non-fully-fledged ideology. Nationalism,
suggests Finlayson (“Ideology, Discourse, and Nationalism” 112), “is not an ideology, but
rather ideological; an operation utilized by ideologies”, generating a “matrix of meanings
that can be mobilized by specific ideologies”.
Freeden and Heywood’s positions show, in different ways, such ambivalence. On the one
hand, Freeden admits nationalism to be a thin-centre ideology but denies it the access to the
club of established ideologies such as liberalism or socialism. He considers that nationalism
“fails to meet the criteria of a comprehensive ideology. Its conceptual structure is incapable
of providing on its own a solution to questions of social justice, distribution of resources, and
conflict-management which mainstream ideologies address” (“Is nationalism a distinct
ideology?” 751). On the other hand, Heywood acknowledges categorically that “strictly
speaking, nationalism is not an ideology at all” since it doesn’t comprise a “developed set of
interrelated ideas and values” (Heywood 136). However, he includes one chapter on
nationalism in his well-known textbook on political ideologies. This apparent contradiction is
not rare at all, since despite the widespread reservations about the ideological character of
nationalism, most textbooks over the last two decades have included chapters on the topic
alongside others on socialism, liberalism or conservatism (see Macridis 1989; Adams 1993;
Eatwell and Wright 1993; Garner 1996; Eccleshall et al. 2003).
In the literature on nationalism, some degree of ambivalence is also noticeable. Smith
is reasonably clear when he defines nationalism as an “ideological movement for attaining
and maintaining identity, unity and autonomy of a social group some of whose members
deem it to constitute an actual or potential nation” (Smith 18, emphasis in original). Yet, he
places the emphasis on the term movement rather than on the term ideology, pointing
toward a dynamic that is visible in many studies. Nationalism is very often defined as a
“historical movement” (Smith 29), “political force” (Alter 1) or “collective action” (Hetcher
7) that, based on a relatively fixed ensemble of political ideas about the organisation of
modern society, imagines (Anderson 1983), invents (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983) or creates
(Gellner 1983) a nation. The expressionist (essentialist) approaches of some authors – who
saw it as “the inevitable expression of a pre-existing, objectively-delimited nation” – are
widely rejected in the humanities and the social sciences, in favour of a constructionist view
that considers nationalism as “the agent which, given favourable circumstances, shapes the
nation by means of social mobilization and discourse” (Máiz 252, emphasis in original).
Thus, part of the current debate has moved from the social and ethnic preconditions to the
role played by the discourses, doctrines, ideas, cognitive frames or fantasies informing and
supporting the collective mobilisations, as a quick review of the articles published in any of
the journals devoted to the study of nationalism and ethnicity during the last years reveals.
However, only in a few number of cases such ensembles of political ideas are explicitly
defined and analysed as political ideologies. This reluctance to describe nationalism as an
ideology has to do with the convergence of two underlying dynamics. On the one hand, the
perseverance in most studies of some essentialist traits (that is, the underlying belief that
there is something behind, even if its significance depends on interpretation) and, on the
other, the persistence of pejorative views of ideology, which still evoke “a whole array of
negative notions from false consciousness to fanaticism, mental blockage to mystification”
(Eagleton 1).
Whether nationalism is an ideology or not is thus an obscure question that requires some
clarification. The aim of this paper is to bring some light to this issue, arguing not only in
favour of the inclusion of nationalism in the family of ideologies but also that is necessary to
analyse nationalism as a political ideology. Indeed, as we will see later, this will help us to
grasp nationalism’s ultimate and fundamental aim: to cover over the unbearable emptiness
of society. Drawing on the insights of Freeden’s morphology, Laclau and Mouffe’s post-
Marxism and Žižek’s psychoanalysis, we will explore this question empirically with
reference to a particular case study: Asturian Nationalism [1] in Spain. Firstly, we will
examine the plural array of elements articulated in the nationalist discourse. Secondly, we
will explore the roles played by these elements in the nationalist articulation. Thirdly, we will
look at the force that binds together these elements providing them with coherence and
fixing their meaning in a coherent social, political and cultural discourse. This will help us to
show why an ideological characterization is needed if we want to grasp the force behind
nationalist mobilization and national identity.
The moments of Asturian nationalist discourse
According to Freeden (Ideologies and Political Theory 3), ideologies are systems of political
thought, flexible or rigid, deliberate or not, through which the individuals and the groups
construct a given understanding of the political world that they live in, and then act. This
conception fits within the general tendency to consider ideologies as political belief systems
that shape our social reality and provide us the legitimacy to orientate our political action in
a certain direction (see Heywood 6). But Freeden’s perspective does not focus on such
functional dimension. His morphological research strategy “concentrates rather on
examining the conceptual configurations that accord any specific instance of an ideology a
particular set of identifying meanings”, taking into account that “ideologies are
configurations of political concepts (…) in which particular interpretations of each
constituent concept have been selected out of an indeterminate range of meanings they may
signify” (Is nationalism a distinct ideology? 749).
Political concepts (i.e. liberty, democracy, freedom) do not have an essentially fixed meaning
but, on the contrary, are “essentially contested concepts” (Gallie 171). Thus, the
“impossibility of an ultimate fixity of meaning implies that there have to be partial fixations –
otherwise, the very flow of differences would be impossible. Even in order to differ (...) there
has to be a meaning” (Laclau and Mouffe 112). The basic ideological operation consists then
in turning the unavoidable variety of options into the monolithic certainty that characterizes
every political decision (Is nationalism a distinct ideology? 76). Ideologies are complex
combinations of political concepts, at different levels, whose possible meanings are
decontested or fixed in a particular way, and which aim to generate a particular view about
the organisation of society.
Along this lines, Žižek has argued that an ideological reading consists in showing that a
particular ideology (discourse, performance, practice, etc.) is the result of a combination, of
a montage, of several heterogeneous floating signifiers that acquire their particular meaning
through the intervention of certain master signifiers, nodal points, or points de caption (The
Sublime Object of Ideology 125 and Lacan 268). “Any discourse is constituted as an attempt
to (…) arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre” (Laclau and Mouffe 112) and,
consequently, the main research question is “what creates and sustains the identity of a
given ideological field beyond all possible variations of its possible content?” (The Sublime
Object of Ideology 87).
In the case of Asturian nationalism, according to this logic, an ideological reading has to
focus on the exploration of the several moments inscribed in the nationalist discourse/s
(democracy, liberty, sustainability, socialism, etc.), the localisation of the central element
binding them together (the idea of the nation) and the analysis of the new meanings
resulting from the combination of all these elements in a single and coherent discursive
chain. Therefore, the first step in our analysis should be to check whether the discourse held
by Asturian nationalists is the result of a combination of several heterogeneous ideas. We will
start our brief inquiry by reading a number of texts (pamphlets, manifestos, internal
documents, etc.) produced by some nationalist parties over the last three decades.
In one of its propaganda pamphlets, the Conceyu Nacionalista Astur (CNA), the first
nationalist party in Asturias during the Spanish Transition to democracy in the 1970s,
introduced itself as:
A political union (…) within which there are several tendencies (Marxists, Marxists-Leninists,
Trotskyists, libertarians, …) united in a basic ideology of revolutionary and popular nationalism that
fights for (…) the self-determination of Asturias, in the context of a European confederation of peoples,
with the aim of establishing a self-government that will make possible the participation of the masses
and the creation of a socialist and self-managed society. (Pol Autogobiernu)
Explicitly, the text mentions different tendencies coexisting around a central ideological
element in which all of them converge: nationalism. Nationalism is conjoined with adjectives
such as socialist, revolutionary, libertarian, self-managed, co-federal and European; signifiers
that, in most cases, point toward different leftist traditions, fashionable in that particular
historical context. Two decades later, the political party Izquierda Nacionaliega Asturiana
(INA) acknowledged again the influence of elements from diverse schools of thought,
confessing that it had been “created (...) as a union of different political traditions: socialists,
communists, libertarians, independentists, green, pacifist, feminist…” (INA 1997).
But let’s turn back to the CNA. Among the objectives mentioned in the pamphlet quoted
above, we find ideas such as the strengthening of municipalities, the achievement of a self-
managed economy and a direct democracy, the “respect of the natural world”, the political
unification of Europe and “the development in Asturias of the Celtic spirit (…) that has been
oppressed for the last two thousand years by the static, rigid, imperialist and militarist
Latinism” (Pol Autogobiernu). In Asturias Dixebrá, CNA’s bulletin, there were fixed
sections devoted to the anti-nuclear campaigns then in vogue and to feminism, as well as
articles on Asturian folklore and history directly inspired in the romantic Asturian
regionalism of the late XIXth century. We can also find articles about national liberation
struggles and colonialism: Asturias was “a country culturally colonised and economically
exploited by the Spanish State, which makes possible for us to affirm that we, the Asturians,
suffer from a double exploitation: the colonial one and class one” (Remanacer 1).
The CNA collapsed at the beginning of the 1980s, after a failed attempt to create a terrorist
group sponsored (and later betrayed) by the Basque terrorist group ETA. New nationalist
parties emerged then, but they continued developing the same radical and revolutionary
nationalist discourse. In the 1990s, however, some discontented sectors manifested the need
to re-articulate the nationalist left with alternative values, “based on leftist and green ideas,
on social justice and direct democracy” (BIA). An alternative left,
able to develop a new model of society constructed around the defence of the idea of social justice and
the progressive values of peace, direct democracy, individual and collective rights and ecology; an
alternative that will base its program on social solidarity, both with the world’s peoples and with the
excluded sectors of our society; an alternative that aspire to remove the social and political obstacles
that disturb a society of equal and free members. (BIA)
Political parties such as Izquierda Nacionaliega Asturiana (INA) and Izquierda Asturiana
(IAS) re-articulated during the 1990s the traditional nationalist discourse, inscribing new
elements in the chain of significance and giving more prominence to some moments that
had been marginal in other nationalist discourses: anti-globalisation, international co-
operation and development, human rights, gender issues, pacifism, ecology.
But not all nationalist discourses are situated within the Marxist and radical traditions. The
Partíu Asturianista (PAS), which in fact has been until now the main nationalist party in
electoral terms, defines its political project as “Asturianist, inter-class and progressive” (PAS
27). For instance, breaking with the anti-systemic readings of other parties, the PAS accepts
the current Spanish political framework as a valid a legitimate context for the development of
its political action. Instead of attempting to overcome the current capitalist and liberal
democratic system, it proposes to “use the democratic means (of the) Spanish Constitution”
in order to “govern from within the democratic institutions” (PAS 115). In addition to such
acceptance of representative and liberal democracy, it also introduces in its discourse neo-
liberal elements such as regional competitiveness, city marketing and other market oriented
economic policies.
In this brief journey throughout the texts of some nationalist collectives, we have easily found
several references to different discursive moments: from socialism to market competition,
from anti-colonialism to green thought, from Celtism to representative democracy. Asturian
nationalist discourse comprehends a plural array of ideas and elements, which are also
inscribed in other discursive articulations and whose origins can be traced back to a plurality
of traditions of though, both prior and contemporary to the emergence of Asturian
nationalism.
The roles of the Asturianist element
So far, our argument runs parallel to Yannis’s Stavrakakis’ analysis of Green ideology.
Through his reading of several manifestos and locus clasici of Green thought, he effectively
shows how several elements such as direct democracy, pacifism, decentralisation, social
justice or post-patriarchal principles, are articulated together with “Green” ideas. Therefore,
both Green thought and nationalism seem to be, from a structural point of view, “ideological
par excellence” (“Green ideology” 269), since both discourses include a plurality of
elements not limited to the nation or the natural world. This means, on the other hand, that
contrary to those who consider Green politics as a project limited to the principles of
ecology, the ecological element is only one among others in Green ideology, although, of
course, it occupies a crucial position. Concern about environmental issues is, as the Green
thinker Porrit states, “by no means the same as being Green” (Porrit, quoted “Green
ideology” 269). As we have shown, being a nationalist in Asturias doesn’t imply only to have
a certain perspective about the contours of the nation, about who is a who is not a “proper”
Asturian, but also to have a particular view about the market economy, social justice or the
European Union.
Freeden’s doubts about the ideological character of nationalism seem unjustified, according
to this schema. For him, a full ideological morphology contains particular interpretations and
configurations of all the important political concepts required for the specific imagination of a
given society. In contrast, a weak ideological morphology has a frail and restricted centre,
linked to a more limited range of concepts, so that it is structurally unable to offer a complex
range of arguments. On that basis, he categorizes nationalism as a thin-centred ideology,
since its “conceptual structure is incapable of providing on its own a solution to questions of
social justice, distribution of resources, and conflict-management which mainstream
ideologies address” (“Is nationalism a distinct ideology?” 751). The problem with this
assertion is that it refers to an ideal concept of the nation rather than the complex
articulation of elements that form every particular nationalist discourse. Just as there are no
universal socialists, liberals or anarchists (without historical context), there are no universal
nationalists but only particular nationalists, whose identities are shaped by a complex
articulation of ideas regarding the limits of the nation as well as the distribution of resources
or social justice and, therefore, providing a full representation of society. As we have seen,
the militants of the CNA had, definitely, something to say about such crucial questions.
Hence, the question that arises in this respect is whether the nationalist element is simply
one more among the several elements of the nationalist chain of signifiers. In other words,
do all the elements comprised in a nationalist discourse count the same? Do they have the
same structural importance? We will try to bring some light to these questions with
reference to the two Asturian regionalist parties that competed in the first elections after
Franco’s death, in 1977, when the differences between regionalism and nationalism started
to crystallize in Asturias.
The first of them, Democracia Socialista Asturiana (DSA), was a political association
articulated around “three basic aims: democracy, socialism and regionalism”, which
promoted as its main objective “the development of socialism, within a democratic
framework, which requires the collective ownership of the means of production, in order to
end with any form of capitalist exploitation” (DSA 1976). Of the three central ideas
delineating its identity, socialism was thus explicitly elevated to the central position. It was,
in other words, the element that defined DSA’s political identity more effectively than any
other. Therefore, regionalism acquired a particular meaning depending on its secondary
position in respect to the socialist moment. DSA’s regionalism was a “popular” regionalism,
in opposition to other forms of conservative or liberal regionalism. Pedro de Silva, founder
and leader of DSA, was very illustrative in this respect:
There is no possible identification (...) between the kind of “regionalism” supported by the
local capitalist groups and a true popular regionalism. The aim of the former is simply to
neutralize the power of national and multinational capitalism in an attempt to be hegemonic
in a certain territory. But at the very same moment when the prevalence of capitalism is
questioned (…), the “superior” (capitalist) interests will always prevail over the hegemonic
disputes. (…) The region / nation, as an economic and historic universe, constitutes (...) the
appropriate framework for analysing class struggle (...), which is different in each particular
social context. (…) Thus, a true popular regionalism is, necessarily, antagonist to the
dominant productive system, which has a national and multinational scale. (…) By
promoting regionalism (…) the capitalist schema will be objectively subverted. (…)
Multinational capitalism requires a multinational culture as its instrument for the creation of
ways of life, habits and customs to absorb the inevitable irrationality of the capitalist system
and, at the same time, to uproot the individuals and communities from their real
environment, to force them to break with their cultural lineage, to alienate them and destroy
their critical skills. (…) The defence of particular ways of life is possibly the only remedy to
preserve the critical consciousness of the peoples. (De Silva 26-7)
“Regionalism” was decontested not as an aim in itself but as one of the necessary strategies
to subvert the capitalist system of exploitation, which was the genuine organising principle
that gave coherence to DSA’s discourse. That made it possible for the DSA to merge with
the Asturian federation of the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) in June 1976. It was an
alliance “based on the socialist principles that link(ed) both collectives” that put explicitly
into the open the secondary role of elements such as regionalism (DSA and PSP 1976).
Let’s move now to the second regionalist party which participated in the 1977 elections:
Unida Rexonalista (UR). In its first public manifesto, its Founding Committee presented its
political project as follows:
The Asturian people face the perspective of an imminent general election, which opens the hope for
better times but, at the very same time, generates uncertainty and doubt. Many people, in fact, ask
themselves what they can do in order to break the current situation of stagnation of the region and to
create a new regime in which the people’s wills will have appropriate sources of expression. (…) To
overcome all the difficulties, to facilitate a true process of change in Asturias, as well as to devolve the
freedom and sovereignty to the people, to allow the Asturians to elaborate a Statute of Autonomy, it is
necessary for everybody to make a big effort. The Asturian people, in order to defend their interests,
require the creation of a common candidature (…), a regionalist option [that] should be born and
delineated in Asturias with no external intromission. (Comisión Gestora 7)
Hence, under the dominant context of ambivalence and uncertainty of that Transitional
period, what the Founding Committee proposed was the creation of an Asturian candidature
able to elaborate a political alternative to solve the crisis Asturias was suffering. The
interpellated subject is clear from the very beginning: the Asturian people. Therefore, the
creation of the electoral candidature is conceived on the basis not of a particular conception
of class struggle, as shown before, but only on the basis of the future of a certain community.
That is to say, in strictly regional terms. In the words one of UR’s leaders, what they were
looking for was an “Asturian and Asturianist wide coalition” (Masip 10-1), since autonomy
was conceived as “the only mean for strength and protect the social, economic, political and
cultural interests of the Asturian people” (UR 1977). That is to say, the discourse of the UR
was articulated around the attempt to solve the rampant crisis and to cover over the
widespread uncertainty haunting the future of the Asturian region.
As has been shown, in the discourse of both UR and DSA a regionalist moment is easily
identifiable. In the case of UR the particular decontestation of regionalism was the central
signifier that bound together several elements (feminism, devolution, democracy, etc.),
attracting the support of various collectives. However, in the case of DSA the socialist
moment was the one fixing in a certain direction the meaning of the regionalist element. The
regionalism of UR was a wide regionalism, an open regionalism in which all the rest of
interests and concerns of the Asturian people might be inscribed, while DSA’s regionalism
was a popular regionalism that only acquired its meaning in relation to a partial fixation of
the idea of class struggle. The different location of the regionalist moment within the
morphological structure of both discourses is what makes it possible to talk, in one case,
about a regionalist discourse and, in the other, more properly about a socialist one. Not all
discourses comprising Asturianist elements in their chains of significance are regionalist or
nationalist discourses, because not all the elements count the same.
The nation as an empty signifier
We have already shown that nationalist ideologies comprise a plurality of discursive elements
and ideas; elements that are also inscribed in other discursive articulations and whose
origins can be traced back to a plurality of traditions of thought. Analogously, nationalist and
communitarian ideas are neither restricted to nationalist discourses nor valid enough to
clearly identify them, as the analysis of UR and DSA’s discourses demonstrates. Ideological
discourses comprise a plural and variable number of elements whose significance is not pre-
determinated. Now, the crucial question is what binds them together in a particular
discourse and what invest them with a partially fixed and coherent meaning. In other words,
what creates and sustains an ideology beyond all possible variations in its possible content.
In the cases of UR and DSA we have just seen how the signifiers regionalism and socialism
are privileged and act as reference points. They don’t count the same, but more than the
rest of the elements. They are “the privileged signifiers or reference points (…) that bind
together a particular system of meaning” (Howard and Stavrakakis 8). Laclau and Mouffe
call these signifiers nodal points; master signifiers or points de capiton in a more Lacanian
fashion (Laclau and Mouffe 12). The question is, of course, why and when do certain
elements acquire such a privileged position so that they became able of fixing the meaning
other ideas in a new discursive articulation?
For a new process of discursive articulation to take place the meanings associated to a
number of elements and ideas in other prior articulations have to collapse. If the ideas about
the communities in which we live – and, consequently, about who we/they are – were
ultimately fixed, there would not be any room for new identity conflicts. But history has not
finished. The defining feature of an object of analysis, so many times taken for granted, as
society is its ultimate impossibility, since its contours will never be definitely delineated.
There is always a critical situation when it will not be possible to symbolise the
circumstances according to the mainstream road maps that until then had shaped our world-
views and defined our identities. In other words, there is always a moment when “the
contingency of discursive structures is made visible” (Howarth and Stavrakakis 13). In these
situations, as Stavrakakis points out the centrality of negativity for human experience,
understood as “the horizon of impossibility and unrepresentability that punctuates the life of
linguistic creatures”, is fully visible (“Re-Activating the Democratic Revolution” 56).
But negativity should not be simply considered as a destructive force. On the one hand,
these critical events have obvious destructive consequences: they shatter “already existing
identities and (induce) an identity crisis for the subject” (Howarth and Stavrakakis 13).
However, as Laclau insists, they also have a constructive character, opening spaces for new
discourses (New Reflections 39). The negativity that emerges to the surface at certain
situations is “a creative-destructive force that engenders as well as ruins positive forms”
(Coole 6). Therefore, it is the condition of possibility/impossibility of the constitution of
partial and temporary identities.
The theory of dislocation introduced by Ernesto Laclau (New Reflections 39-45) emerges
here as the crucial tool for the understanding of nationalist ideology and national identity. As
San Martín points out (“A discursive reading…” 102), the concept of ‘dislocation (…)
accounts for the moment of destabilization, failure and subversion of a given discourse, as a
result of the emergence of some events that cannot be integrated in the system of
representation sustaining that particular discourse”. This idea of dislocation “seems to be
designed to account for what, in Lacanian terms, we could describe as ‘encounters with the
Real’” (Glyos and Stavrakakis 116). The Real is what remains impossible to symbolize, what
escapes the field of representation. In other words, the Real would be an event, or a
collection of events, that is/are impossible to integrate in the discourses that give meaning to
our social world. Reality, on the contrary, is the discursively constructed world of
subjects/objects we live in, the world of socially produced meanings that will be dislocated at
a certain historical point by the emergence of the Real. Thus, the Real is what confront us
dramatically not with what we are but with what we are not, that is, what confront us with
what prevents us from being fully ourselves.
Then, to understand society is not to understand what it positively is but “what prevent it
from being fully itself” (New Reflections 44). The moment of prevention, of dislocation of a
certain social imaginary, is simultaneously the moment that generates new attempts to
construct an ultimate world-view with which to suture the dislocated space. Therefore, to
understand nationalist ideology and national identity, rather than to describe affirmatively
their content, is to explore their emergence as new discursive articulations and to study the
moment when a previous national reality faced the Real, generating the desire for a new
reading of the world in communitarian terms.
In some of his writings, Laclau has positivized the negative character of the Real in what he
calls empty signifiers (Glynos and Stavrakakis 117): signifiers that attempt to incarnate the
absence of totality made visible by a certain dislocatory event in a given society. In Laclau’s
words, “although the fullness and universality of society is unachievable, its need does not
disappear: it will always show itself through the presence of its absence” (Emancipations
53). Thus, the ideological operation per excellence, according to this logic, will be precisely
the attempt to decontest and hegemonize the empty signifiers that symbolise the
impossibility of society.
“Order” as such has no content, because it only exists in the various forms in which it is
actually realized, but in a situation of radical disorder ‘order’ is present as that which is
absent; it becomes an empty signifier, as the signifier of that absence. In this sense, various
political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those
which carry out the filling of that lack. To hegemonize something is exactly to carry out this
filling function. (Emancipations 44)
The concept of the nation may clearly act as an empty signifier. It only exits in the several
forms in which / though which it is actually realized. In the context of the Iberian Peninsula
there is no universal or objective nation but various ideological and practical realizations of
the nation with different degrees of success. There are various fillings of the signifiers nation
and community, which might be dislocated at certain critical situations. In other words,
the sedimented plausibility of these ideas is eroded and its contingency resurfaces always at
a certain point. Then, the nation is present through its absence. Through the need of a tool
to map our world and delineate who we and they are. The articulation of the political
discourses that provide us with these tools to read the reality “can only take place around an
empty signifier that functions as a nodal point” (Howarth and Stavrakakis 8).
The study of ideology is therefore “the study of the mechanisms which makes this illusion
[the illusion of an ultimate order, of a definitive and full nation, etc.] possible” (Norval 300).
For this reason, analysing nationalism as a political ideology is necessary if we want to grasp
its ultimate and fundamental aim: to cover over the unbearable emptiness of society. If we
want, in other words, to bring some light to the questions of why and when do nationalist
discourses (and movements) emerge.
The nodal point of Asturian nationalism
San Martín has delineated elsewhere in some detail the contours of the logic of dislocation in
the Spanish context, locating the emergence of Asturian and other peripheral nationalisms
in relation to the radical emptiness opened up by the collapse of the Francoist imaginary at
the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies (“A discursive reading…” and
La Nación (im)posible). In 1964, the Francoist Regime celebrated the “25 years of peace”
opened with its victory in the Spanish Civil War. According to the official propaganda, such a
period of peace, stability and development was one of the main achievements of the Regime.
In fact, as Fusi acknowledges, until the decade of 1960, there were not dangerous
mobilisations in Spain that seriously threatened the social hegemony of the dictatorship
(Fusi 161; see also Vilar). Spanish society was, as De Miguel points out, highly apolitical, not
only because of the political restrictions but also because of the sustained economic growth
and its positive impact in the material conditions of living (De Miguel 208). However, several
factors coincided during the 1960s, generating a growing social discontent and showing that,
despite the official propaganda, “something was going wrong” (De Esteban and López
Guerra 137).
Firstly, the labour conflicts increased dramatically after the introduction of the Law of
Collective Negotiations in 1958, which opened some space for the development of
clandestine trade unions. The “natural consequence (of the new negotiation mechanisms)
were the workers strikes”, especially in industrial regions such as Barcelona, Madrid, the
Basque Country and Asturias (Carr and Fusi 140). The sixties were also years of rising
student mobilisations. All around the Spanish Universities the number of demonstrations,
acts of protest, sit-ins, or mere student meetings to discuss political issues grew rapidly. In
1969, the Regime, unable to control the student movement, declared a State of Emergency
and closed temporarily the University campuses, showing symbolically the increasing
disconnection between the nascent elites and the rigid structure of the Dictatorship. As
Gunther and Montero indicate, the perception of crisis was reinforced by the partial
liberalisation of the mass media that took place in 1966 (Gunther and Montero 13-15). The
aim of the new policies was only to allow for a limited contrast of opinions within the
ideological frontiers of the Dictatorship. However, it ended up by facilitating the progressive
introduction of many opposition demands in the pages of both the old and new publications.
In addition, the regional question resurfaced powerfully during the final Francoist years. The
policies to promote a homogeneous Spanish culture and identity did not manage to
eradicate the old enemies of the nation, mainly incarnated in Francoist imaginary by Catalan
and Basque nationalist movements (see Conversi’s work, for example). Catalanism,
especially in its cultural manifestations, managed successfully to survive the repressive
policies and play a significant role in everyday Catalan life since the 1950s. The situation of
Basque nationalism was radically different. Until the 1960s, the exiled nationalist government
was inoperative and in the Basque Provinces only survived a folklorist and conservative
particularism, not very threatening for the hegemony of the Dictatorship. However, the main
peripheral challenge to the Francoist Regime come from the Basque Country, where a
group of young nationalists, deeply discontent with the passive nationalist strategy, created
the terrorist group ETA in 1959. Nine years later, ETA killed for the first time.
The overlapping of several critical events during the 1960s – worker strikes, student
mobilisations, liberalisation of the mass media, peripheral nationalisms, interfamily rivalry
within Francoist elites, progressive separation between the Church and the State, etc. –
affected crucially the foundations of the Francoist political system. Their significance
surpassed the mere collection of partial crises that might be sorted out within the contours of
the hegemonic order of things. What was under pressure, as De Esteban and López Guerra
pointed out, was “the total organisation of the Spanish political life. And the name of that (…)
is: the (Francoist) State” (De Esteban and López Guerra 13). The Francoist project was
dramatically revealed, though a sequence of critical events, as an unfulfilled fantasy that was
for no longer able to control and/or integrate the new social, cultural and political demands.
The dislocation of the hegemonic discourses opened an undecidable space, a time of
uncertainty, which generated the desire of a new communitarian fantasy. It was in this
terrain that a new nationalist ideology emerged in Asturias as one of the possible re-
articulations attempting to constitute “a new space of representation” (New Reflections 61).
Yet, why did a certain idea of Asturias become a virtual nodal point under such
circumstances? How can we account for the elements, and particularly the nodal point,
comprised in the new articulation? In other words, what are the limits of the new
discourse/s? Is there any limit at all? As Laclau formulates, “what are those limits that are
other than aprioristic?” (“Identity and Hegemony” 82). His answer is:
the ensemble of sedimented practices constituting the normative framework of a certain society. This
framework can experience deep dislocations requiring drastic recompositions, but it never disappears to
the point of requiring an act of total refoundation” (“Identity and Hegemony” 82).
To explain this logic, Laclau gives the example of Antonio Conselheiro, “a millenarian
preacher (that) had wandered for decades in the Brazilian sertao, at the end of the
nineteenth century, without recruiting too many followers” (“Identity and Hegemony” 83,
emphasis in original). The situation changed radically with the transition from the empire to
republic, which brought about abrupt economic, political and social alterations that
dislocated the traditional way of life in the rural areas.
One day Conselheiro arrived in a village where people were rioting against the tax collectors,
and pronounced the words which become the key equivalence of his prophetic discourse:
“The Republic is the Antichrist”. From that point onwards his discourse provided a surface
of inscription for all forms of rural discontent, and became the starting point of a mass
rebellion which took several years for the government to defeat (“Identity and Hegemony”
83).
On the one hand, the incarnation of God and Evil in the signifiers Empire and Republic was
not predetermined aprioristically. It was a contingent and radical decision, possible because
it was the only discourse available addressing the discontent of the rural villagers at that
particular moment, in that particular historical context. But, on the other hand, it was
possible because it did not clash “with important unshakeable beliefs of the rural masses”
(“Identity and Hegemony” 83). Therefore, as Laclau notes, “the subject who takes the
decision is only partially a subject; he is also a background of sedimented practices
organising a normative framework which operates as a limitation on the horizon of options”
(“Identity and Hegemony” 83, emphasis in original). It is necessary, then, to introduce a
contextualization in the analysis of the emergence of constitutive decisions. We should pay
attention not only to the moment of crisis and its productive effects but also to the normative
framework and the discursive elements available for the new articulations. Let’s turn then
our attention to the mainstream Francoist discourses about the community available at the
time.
Francoist nationalist ideology promoted the “hegemony of a Catholic and traditionalist
version of Spanish nationalism (…), which centred its discourse around the essentialist
affirmation of a Catholic Spain basically identified with Castile” (Núñez 720). The role given
to Castilian/Spanish language was central in the imagination of an ethnically homogenous
Spain. This implied, of course, the conscious repression of the regional languages. However,
the strategy toward these languages was much more complex than that of an extermination
policy, as San Martín has shown in relation to the Asturian language (La nación (im)posible
247-83) In fact, the position of the Francoist elites in Asturias regarding this problematic
issue is crucial to understanding why a new idea of Asturias in national terms was elevated to
the position of virtual nodal point.
Since the late 1940s a group of Francoist scholars from the University of Oviedo (the main
Asturian city) started to develop, from within the very ideological framework of the Regime, a
large corpus of academic materials on the regional particularities of Asturias. The regional
language received a lot of attention and became rapidly a popular subject of study among
the growing numbers of Asturian speaking students from rural areas, although conceived as
an old-fashioned dialect of Spanish without essence in-itself. On the other hand, the literature
written in Asturian that had survived during those years was characterised mainly by its
limits. In a majority of cases, it was extremely poor and tediously reiterative in its topics:
traditional/rural stories, bucolic landscapes, as well as festive and humoristic anecdotes of
“rude and coarse style (…), whose meaning is not the criticism but the trivialisation of the
situations” (Sánchez Vicente 13). Rural environments devoid of passions – (almost extinct)
joyful Arcadias – appeared as the sole geographical locations of these stories. The only
exceptions were, in most cases – particularly in the popular genre of the (performed)
monologs – occasional trips of rural characters to the city, where they faced a succession of
comical situations that, in a last instance, were always aimed to ridicule the villager. In the
plays, the rich and educated characters often employed Spanish language, while Asturian
language was restricted to the poor and illiterate, stressing thus the relations of power
between the two languages and their clear functional division. Thus, the literature in
Asturian was restricted to a clearly defined type of literature, inscribed in the official culture
of the Regime. It was a type of literature peripheral to the true literature made in Asturias –
the one in Castilian – to which some authors looked in search of certain expressive effects
from time to time. In other words, the range of possible meanings of the literature written in
Asturian language was decontested in a certain direction, its meaning partially fixed as
a vulgar and old-fashioned adjacent to the true literature written in Castilian language.
Nonetheless, during those years a total number of over two hundred academic studies on
Asturian language and more than one hundred literary works written in Asturian were
published (Brugos 37-9). Undoubtedly, in Asturias, as in the rest Spain, there was certain---
although very limited---permissiveness toward the regional language, consisting in killing it
without letting it die definitely.
However, when Francoist dictatorship was collapsing or at least in crisis, in the late 1960s
and 1970s, a group of young lecturers and students from the University of Oviedo started to
openly question such policies, that is, to question the meaning attributed until then by the
hegemonic ideology to the vernacular parole. Francoist communitarian fantasy was rapidly
disintegrating at the beginning of the 1970s, as we have briefly shown. The idea of a
homogeneous Catholic Spain, whose unity was symbolised by Castilian language, was not
appealing for any more to growing sectors of the younger generations, since it was
inextricably attached to the whole rigid social system in crisis. However, the central role of
languages in defining nations and communities was not problematized. It was accepted that
languages (as the most symbolic and visible expression of cultures) were the defining
element of nations and communities., What was problematized, on the contrary was the role
of a particular language, Castilian, in delimiting the nation, the community, the frontiers of
inclusion and exclusion.
In the words of Asturian writer Sánchez Vicente, “in 1974, start(ed) a new epoch for the
Asturian literature” (Sánchez Vicente 9). The limitations (in topics, styles, forms, genres,
locations, etc.) disappeared slowly, progressively but decisivley. A new group of writers
began to use Asturian language as a literary vehicle to approach any topic; as a vehicle valid
for any genre or style. Asturian language slipped away from its peripheral and secondary
position and was given “an absolute and non-subordinated” value, which meant “an
absolute rupture with the characteristics of the antique” Francoist strategies (Sánchez
Vicente 13). In the new literature that emerged in the 1970s there are thrillers, erotic poetry,
political essays, journalistic articles, short stories for children, etc. And all these works are
commonly referred as part of the same literary movement: the Surdimientu (renascence,
in Asturian) . Why? Which are the elements linking the practitioners of such different styles,
genres and forms? Where is their common ground located so that we can talk about the
same literary and, more generally, cultural movement? The answer is, of course: Asturian
language. If it makes sense to talk about a novel literary movement is only because all the
authors employ the Asturian language as their artistic vehicle. Therefore, language
stopped being a moment and become a central signifier that – without a particular and
limited meaning – is able to partially fix the meaning of other topics, forms and styles as
“Asturian”.
This shift in the literary role of the regional language clearly symbolises the ideological turn
we are trying to illuminate in this article. The dislocation of Francoist nationalist discourses
opened an unbearable space of uncertainty. The association between Castilian language and
the signifier nation was broken, and thus “the nation” became an empty signifier. That is, an
object of desire whose meaning needs to be partially fixed in a certain direction. Asturian
language, an element available, since it had been kept alive under Francoism through the
administration of a calculated permissiveness (as a subject of study, through a limited and
poor literature, etc), acquired then a new prominence and became something absolute in
itself. In other words, it became a virtual nodal point around which to articulate a new idea of
cultural community in substitution of the old Francoist nation. The imagined Asturian
nation, decontested mainly in linguistic terms, was a signifier able to bind together around it
a plural array of elements, whose meaning was transformed by means of such articulatory
practice.
Final remarks
At this point, the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this article should be
hopefully clear. Nationalism (Asturian, in our case) can be considered an ideology since:
firstly, it consists of a discursive articulation around a nodal communitarian point (an idea of
Asturias); secondly, such nodal point emerges as a virtual fixation of the empty signifier of
the nation, at a particular critical situation when its absence becomes dramatically present;
thirdly, this nodal point binds together a plural array of discursive elements; and fourthly, the
meaning of these elements is partially fixed by means of the articulatory practice (that is,
due to their inscription in the new nationalist chain of significance). Thus, the nationalist
discourse provides citizens with a series of identitarian markers with which to identify and
construct the political frontiers necessary to organise their reality and, therefore, cover over
the unbearable uncertainty of being. It is this capacity of the signifier “Asturias” or
“Asturian nation” for creating a new world-view about the organisation of society that
justifies the inclusion of (Asturian, in this case) nationalism in the family of ideologies.
On the other hand, as we have seen, the strategy of ideological analysis that guided this
paper has proved fruitful in illuminating one of the main questions about nationalism. It
directly focuses on the reasons behind its emergence – namely the attempt to cover over the
precarious character of society – and thus can bring some light to the obscure questions of
why and when nationalist discourses emerge.
Notes
[1] Asturias is one of the current 17 Spanish autonomous communities. It is located in
northwest Spain and has, approximately, one million inhabitants. According to recent
surveys, half of the Asturian citizens speak a vernacular language called Asturian or Bable
(see Llera and San Martín). Asturias is constitutionally defined as a ‘Historical Community’
and has a medium degree of autonomy within the Spanish (asymmetrical) and quasi-federal
system. Although most academics would agree that “regional identity” and “regional
attitudes” are very strong in Asturias, the Asturian nationalist movement is a very weak
peripheral movement in comparison to others such as the Galician, Basque or Catalan. In
electoral terms, for example, it remains marginal within the political system and is divided in
several political parties (Partíu Asturianista, Bloque de la Izquierda Asturiana, Andecha
Astur, Izquierda Asturiana, etc.). However, the Asturian nationalist movement has gained
social relevance during the last two decades, especially in its most “cultural” manifestations
such as folk music and literature. It has also become the most active social movement in the
region, developing relatively successful campaigns, mainly in defence of the Asturian
language, and introducing many of its demands in the Asturian political agenda. On
Asturian nationalism see San Martín (2006) and Bauske (1998). On Asturian language and
regional identity see Llera and San Martín (2003).
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| Is Nationalism an Ideology? A Critical Exploration from the Asturian Case |