Editor’s Essay: The Return of the Nation

Some years back, I used to teach a course on the history of Spain using Mark Williams’s book The Story of Spain. The course’s title included the word Spain, a word that, prima facie, should suggest the idea that I was instructing students on the subjective and emotional particulars that underpin the construction of a nation. Had it been my goal to focus solely on naked historical facts, I would have named the course History of the Iberian Peninsula. Consequently, I selected the story rather than the history of Spain because I’ve always assumed that, more so than a geographical space or a set of affective bonds, a nation is a story. It is a fable crafted to produce an emotional environment within which individuals, particularly those susceptible or sensitive to imaginary constructs, perceive themselves in a relationship of mutual dependence with a hypothesised community. An effective story will make people process the notional data made available to them and assign it an idiosyncratic meaning, one that implicates such data in a manner that is advantageous to communal cohesion and marshalled collective action. In this way, the social, political and economic environment will engage with the individual’s consciousness after passing through the filter provided by the story’s conceptual content. Given that the story has a subjective hierarchy of value, the particular elements of that external cosmos will be assessed and positioned in accordance with their value as catalysts in the process of imagining the nation.