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Attention to liberal nationalism has obscured the Catholic origins of European nation-building processes. However, Catholic intellectuals forged a fully fledged and influential nationalist discourse of their own from traditional and conservative doctrine. More specifically, Latin European countries led the theoretical development of Catholic nationalism from a transnational construct. They were the kernel of Catholicism and their theological, philosophical, historical, and political theories had a great impact on the general formation of Western nationalism. In this essay, I study how Catholic intellectuals from Spain, France and Italy sought the right zone of compatibility between transnational Catholicism and nationalism, focusing on Spanish Catholic thinker Jaume Balmes (1810-48). Through his example, I claim that an affirmative intellectual engagement with the idea of the nation was at the core of liberal and conservative Catholic thought in the transnational Latin European sphere.
Modern nationalism and the entire nation-state project have been traditionally considered, by modern historians, purely liberal in their origins. Although the topic of this essay is theory rather than nationalist practice, I build on the new tendencies in the literature on nationalism that now stresses the premodern and frequently religious origins of nationalism. 1Anthony Marx has demonstrated that the nation-building processes of the modern era cannot be isolated from the premodern idea of nation.2Following a similar tendency, Linda Colley writing on the British case, David Bell on the French, Ricardo García-Cárcel on the the Spanish, and Anne-Marie Thiesse on Europe as a whole have reached parallel conclusions.3Their contributions to the debate on the origins of modern nationalism have been an important revision to much of the literature on this topic. And Colley, Bell and García-Cárcel emphasize the religious features within nationalist narratives. Their rediscovery of the intertwining of religion and nationalism erodes the centrality of what Ernest Gellner called "classical liberal Western nationalism" and the prevailing consensus that screened out religious nationalism. 4For in fact, countries that are supposed to have had classic nation-building processes according to Gellner's own model were Catholic nations: Italy, Spain and France. In these countries, nationalism and the nation idea had old, premodern origins. They reflected the influence of religion, notably Catholicism. These three nations formed the core of the...