In Achieving our Country, Richard Rorty writes “stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity” (13). According to this, it does not really matter whether the emotional stories about Spain's imperial past studied in the previous chapters are objective or not. For objectivity, as Rorty goes on to argue, “is of little relevance when one is trying to decide what sort of person or nation to be” (11). What does matter – and matters decisively – is the moral quality of the national identities constructed by our essayists. We can easily grant that these emotional stories told about the imperial past are not an accurate representation of that part of Spain's history, but this still leaves us with the rather more difficult question of evaluating the moral dimension of such stories. What type of political community is envisioned when the passing of the imperial past is insufficiently mourned (Unamuno), when there is a melancholic identification with it (Ganivet), when there is an indignant reaction to some of its manifestations (Maeztu), or, finally, when the Spanish imperial past is viewed with shame simply to make possible Catalonia's pride in its imperial prospects (Prat de la Riba)?

The answers offered in this conclusion suggest that the difficulties in displacing affection from the empire to a more properly national object burdened the Spanish political imagination for a good part of the twentieth century. This imperial burden can be approached from both a historical and a moral perspective. Historically, the presence of empire in the political imagination can be gauged by examining the emotional investment in imperial myths found in some of the major essays on national identity published between the 1910s and the 1940s, a period when these myths progressively lost their capacity to arouse ambivalent emotions and thus increasingly became the object of an excessive – and by any standard, false – pride (the best example being the Francoist discourses about Hispanidad, the purported Spanish-speaking community on both sides of the Atlantic).

Needless to say, the moral consequences of the national identities forged by imperial pride are nothing short of disastrous.