Spanish irredentism

Spanish irredentism is a concept of Spain according to its present-day boundaries, incorporating territories claimed to be Spanish lands, such as Gibraltar and in some cases Portugal and other territories.

There has been strong Spanish objection to the separation of Gibraltar from Spain since British acquisition in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) in the aftermath of the Spanish War of Succession.[1]

A Spain holding all of the Iberian Peninsula became a topic in Spanish nationalism beginning in the 19th century, with proponents idealizing historical Roman Hispania when all of the Iberian Peninsula was united under the same rule.[2] The concept of Spain as a cultural and political unit had been developed centuries earlier with the publishing of Father Mariana's History of Spain (1598) in which Mariana supported a Hispanic identity.[2]

During the Spanish Civil War, the Carlists and the Falange prior to the two parties' unification in 1937 both promoted the incorporation of Portugal into Spain. The Carlists stated that a Carlist Spain would retake Gibraltar and Portugal.[3] The Falange, both prior to and after its merger with the Carlists, supported the unification of Gibraltar and Portugal into Spain, during its early years of existence the Falange produced maps of Spain that included Portugal as a province of Spain.[4] After the Spanish Civil War and the victory of the Nationalist faction led by Francisco Franco, radical members of the Falange called for the incorporation of Portugal and the French Pyrenees into Spain.[5] Franco in a communiqué with Germany on 26 May 1942 declared that Portugal should be annexed into Spain.[6]

As of 2016, only Gibraltar remains a subject of dispute among some Spaniards, rarely seen as a priority, with all other claims long forgotten in both political and popular discourse.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Tibor Frank, Frank Hadler. Disputed territories and shared pasts: overlapping national histories in modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. P. 339.
  2. 1 2 Kohl, Philip L.; Fawcett, Clare (1995). Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 41–42. ISBN 0-521-48065-5.
  3. ↑ M. K. Flynn. Ideology, mobilization, and the nation: the rise of Irish, Basque, and Carlist national movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Pp. 178.
  4. ↑ Wayne H. Bowen. Spain during World War II. Columbia, Missouri, USA: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Pp. 26.
  5. ↑ Stanley G. Payne. Fascism in Spain, 1923-1977. Madison, Wisconsin, USA: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. P. 331.
  6. ↑ Paul Preston. Franco: a biography. BasicBooks, a division of HarperCollins, 1994. Pp. 857.
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