A salient characteristic of the European nation-state is its multiple cultural identities which share a socio-political space - laws, economy, values, symbols, and traditions - where the activities of the state endow the population with a corporate sense and the intellectual or éélite create an identity by defining and promoting a nationalist language, or discourse, and a culture which provides images and ideas for ordering ways of thinking and believing. The separate cultural identities co-exist in the overarching nation-state, but they seek local power and cultural parity.

In the case of Spain, toward the end of the nineteenth century the country found itself in transition between a proto-industrial economic structure and industrialization, a transition that brought with it a changing social structure defined by the consolidation of a monied middle class, an emerging organized working class, and the instability of the traditional petit bourgeois. bourgeois. On the other hand, the political structure, characterized by an ineffective administration, a corrupt electoral system, an illiteracy of some 75 percent, and an antiquated educational system, was unable to develop in Spain a capitalist democracy of the level of the rest of Europe. At the same time, the country found itself entangled in colonial wars which it lost - the so-called Disaster of 1898 - leaving the national treasury seriously diminished.