Hijacked Heimats: national appropriations of local and regional identities in Germany and Spain, 1930-1945

This article analyses instances in which ultra-nationalism and local and regional identity politics proved compatible, and even mutually constitutive. Focusing on Germany and Spain under Hitler and Franco, the authors suggest that both regimes imagined the nation as a space composed of distinctive regional parts. They uncover a particular ideological affinity between fascist or quasi-fascist views of the state and the notion of regional diversity, which was invoked to combat the perceived dangers of state-building in the Napoleonic mode: liberalism, progressivism and bureaucratisation. While political separatism was repressed, regionalism was often cultivated to introduce an element of populism, grass-roots activism, social rootedness and ideological dynamism into the political process that seemed desirable to both regimes. In the German case, it also served as a pragmatic and hence manageable alternative to volkish ideologues, whose spiritualist and egalitarian inclinations brought them increasingly into conflict with the party line.