Barcelona, Catalonia and the Crown of Aragón in the Bourbon Spanish Empire

After an outline of present-day ‘glocalization problems’ of the European Community this article analyses the problem of whether the centralizing policy of the Spanish Bourbon government after the War of Spanish Succession provides historical evidence on the origins of contemporary Catalan nationalism, as often argued, or not. Referring briefly to the medieval and early modern imperial traditions of both the Aragonese kingdoms, especially of Catalonia and its predominant city of Barcelona, and the Castilian kingdoms, the article argues that during the 18th century the Crown made strong efforts to integrate Catalans into the imperial government and trade and spent large quantities of fiscal income in the modernization of Catalonia as a central base of its Mediterranean policy. Therefore, the historical origins of present-day nationalism have to be explained in the context of more recent historical phenomena in the context of the so-called ‘uncompleted Spanish national project’.