Bringing together the work of top specialists and emerging scholars in the field, this volume is the first book-length study of the rapport between liberalism and the Spanish monarchy over the long nineteenth century in any language. It is at once a general overview and a set of original contributions to knowledge. The essays discuss monarchy’s rapport with the pre-liberal, liberal and post-liberal nation-state, from the eve of the French Revolution, when the monarchy regulated a ‘natural’ order, to the unstable reign of Isabel II, fraught by revolutions that ended in her exile, to the brief republican monarchy of Amadeo I, the much-maligned foreign king, to Alfonso XIII’s expulsion from Spain following the failure of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The essays approach the subject through two main thematic-analytical axes. The first, political axis examines the monarchy’s confrontation with, and adaptation to, liberalism as a political force that aimed to nationalize the Spanish people. The second axis is cultural, and studies the Crown’s support of liberalism’s nationalizing aims through various staging strategies that comprised visits, rituals, ceremonies, iconography, religiosity, and familial and military display. The dual approach invites the reader to question the boundaries between the political and the cultural, especially in regard to the ceremonial, and during critical times that witness the transformation of political power and the building of the nation-state. Designed for Hispanists and students of politics, ritual, liberalism and monarchy, this collection should appeal to academics and researchers as well as anyone interested in modern European history.

Bringing together the work of top specialists and emerging scholars in the field, this volume is the first book-length study of the rapport between liberalism and the Spanish monarchy over the long nineteenth century in any language. It is at once a general overview and a set of original contributions to knowledge. The essays discuss monarchy’s rapport with the pre-liberal, liberal and post-liberal nation-state, from the eve of the French Revolution, when the monarchy regulated a ‘natural’ order, to the unstable reign of Isabel II, fraught by revolutions that ended in her exile, to the brief republican monarchy of Amadeo I, the much-maligned foreign king, to Alfonso XIII’s expulsion from Spain following the failure of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The essays approach the subject through two main thematic-analytical axes. The first, political axis examines the monarchy’s confrontation with, and adaptation to, liberalism as a political force that aimed to nationalize the Spanish people. The second axis is cultural, and studies the Crown’s support of liberalism’s nationalizing aims through various staging strategies that comprised visits, rituals, ceremonies, iconography, religiosity, and familial and military display. The dual approach invites the reader to question the boundaries between the political and the cultural, especially in regard to the ceremonial, and during critical times that witness the transformation of political power and the building of the nation-state. Designed for Hispanists and students of politics, ritual, liberalism and monarchy, this collection should appeal to academics and researchers as well as anyone interested in modern European history.

How much power does a monarch really have? How much autonomy do they enjoy? Who regulates the size of the royal family, their finances, the rules of succession? These are some of the questions considered in this edited collection on the monarchies of Europe. The book is written by experts from Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK. It considers the constitutional and political role of monarchy, its powers and functions, how it is defined and regulated, the laws of succession and royal finances, relations with the media, the popularity of the monarchy and why it endures. No new political theory on this topic has been developed since Bagehot wrote about the monarchy in The English Constitution (1867). The same is true of the other European monarchies. 150 years on, with their formal powers greatly reduced, how has this ancient, hereditary institution managed to survive and what is a modern monarch's role? What theory can be derived about the role of monarchy in advanced democracies, and what lessons can the different European monarchies learn from each other? The public look to the monarchy to represent continuity, stability and tradition, but also want it to be modern, to reflect modern values and be a focus for national identity. The whole institution is shot through with contradictions, myths and misunderstandings. This book should lead to a more realistic debate about our expectations of the monarchy, its role and its future. The contributors are leading experts from all over Europe: Rudy Andeweg, Ian Bradley, Paul Bovend'Eert, Axel Calissendorff, Frank Cranmer, Robert Hazell, Olivia Hepsworth, Luc Heuschling, Helle Krunke, Bob Morris, Roger Mortimore, Lennart Nilsson, Philip Murphy, Quentin Pironnet, Bart van Poelgeest, Frank Prochaska, Charles Powell, Jean Seaton, Eivind Smith.

This book, designed and written on a grand scale, is about the quest over three centuries of Spaniards born in the New World to define their 'American' identity.

This book is a radical reinterpretation of the process that led to Mexican independence in 1821—one that emphasizes Mexico's continuity with Spanish political culture. During its final decades under Spanish rule, New Spain was the most populous, richest, and most developed part of the worldwide Spanish Monarchy, and most novohispanos (people of New Spain) believed that their religious, social, economic, and political ties to the Monarchy made union preferable to separation. Neither the American nor the French Revolution convinced the novohispanos to sever ties with the Spanish Monarchy; nor did the Hidalgo Revolt of September 1810 and subsequent insurgencies cause Mexican independence. It was Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 that led to the Hispanic Constitution of 1812. When the government in Spain rejected those new constituted arrangements, Mexico declared independence. The Mexican Constitution of 1824 affirms both the new state's independence and its continuance of Spanish political culture.

Since the Enlightenment, liberalism as a concept has been foundational for European identity and politics, even as it has been increasingly interrogated and contested. This comprehensive study takes a fresh look at the diverse understandings and interpretations of the idea of liberalism in Europe, encompassing not just the familiar movements, doctrines, and political parties that fall under the heading of “liberal” but also the intertwined historical currents of thought behind them. Here we find not an abstract, universalized liberalism, but a complex and overlapping configuration of liberalisms tied to diverse linguistic, temporal, and political contexts.

The Great Christian Jurists series comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied. Spanish legal culture, developed during the Spanish Golden Age, has had a significant influence on the legal norms and institutions that emerged in Europe and in Latin America. This volume examines the lives of twenty key personalities in Spanish legal history, in particular how their Christian faith was a factor in molding the evolution of law. Each chapter discusses a jurist within his or her intellectual and political context. All chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars from Spain and around the world. This diversity of international and methodological perspectives gives the volume its unique character; it will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between religion and law.

The growth of institutional capacity in the developing world has become a central theme in twenty-first-century social science. Many studies have shown that public institutions are an important determinant of long-run rates of economic growth. This book argues that to understand the difficulties and pitfalls of state building in the contemporary world, it is necessary to analyze previous efforts to create institutional capacity in conflictive contexts. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the process of state and nation building in Latin America and Spain from independence to the 1930s. The book examines how Latin American countries and Spain tried to build modern and efficient state institutions for more than a century - without much success. The Spanish and Latin American experience of the nineteenth century was arguably the first regional stage on which the organizational and political dilemmas that still haunt states were faced. This book provides an unprecedented perspective on the development and contemporary outcome of those state and nation-building projects.

This book commemorates the bicentenary of the landmark Spanish Constitution of 1812. Drafted by Spanish and colonial Spanish American liberals (and non-liberals) holed up in Cadiz as Napoleon’s troops occupied the surrounding hills, this war-time Constitution set out radically to redefine ‘the Spanish nation’ for a new age. In the event, it divided Spaniards and threw into sharp relief the question of Spain’s legitimacy in her American colonies. Cadiz 1812 is a defining moment in the modern history of the Spanish-speaking world. Bringing together specialists in the history, politics and culture of Spain and Latin America (the Cadiz text was a cultural and ethnic document as much as a politico-legal one), this volume represents the only large-scale commemoration in the UK of one of the world’s first liberal constitutional tracts. The point of the book, however, as of the conference and accompanying exhibition on which it is based, is not solely to reflect on the significance and repercussions of Cadiz 1812 on both sides of the Hispanic Atlantic at the time. The book also considers later interpretations of Cadiz 1812 and examines, in addition, other constitutions in the Spanish-speaking world beyond 1812. Subjects treated include: Spain’s crisis of absolutism; the Inquisition before the Constitution; liberalism and Catholicism; discourses of the 1812 Constitution; the question of sovereignty; political theatre during the Napoleonic invasion; Goya; the Spanish crisis in the British press; Lord Holland and Blanco White; Pérez Galdós’s Cádiz; futuristic literary representations of Spain’s nineteenth-century crisis; political and philosophical echoes in Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – in Cúcuta, Mexico, Argentina and Cuba; and, finally, politico-philosophical echoes in Spain – in the Liberal Triennium, in the mid-nineteenth century, in the Spanish Second Republic, in 1978, and in 2011 in the midst of the financial (but it is also a constitutional) crisis. The volume includes a specially-conducted interview with Spanish politician Alfonso Guerra, one of the figures behind the Spanish Constitution of 1978.

Michael Freeden explores the concept of liberalism, one of the longest-standing and central political theories and ideologies. Combining a variety of approaches, he distinguishes between liberalism as a political movement, as a system of ideas, and as a series of ethical and philosophical principles.