Since the eighteenth century the development of European nationalisms has been directly linked to war. Military conflicts create socio-psychological borders among ethnic and national groups, and delineate sharp contrasts between ‘us’ and ‘them’ by stereotyping the other. Therefore, war provides at least two mutually reinforcing effects for nationalism. First, the wartime social environment and the cult of the nation in arms create internal cohesion, minimise dissent and reinforce a deeper sentiment of community based on strong emotional ties such as blood and sacrifice, common suffering and shared destiny. Second, military action conclusively formulates a stereotyped image of the other, which is just as necessary for consolidating the national identity as the previous task of nation-building carried out by institutions, intellectual elites or social movements. Patriotic wars have strongly contributed to the consolidation of the variegated nation-building processes that were under way in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.

The Spanish civil war was no exception to this European trend. It is paradoxical that this civil conflict was perceived as a patriotic war by most of the political elites on either side. Both sides excluded the other from being considered as true Spaniards and this exclusion persisted to some extent throughout the following forty years. The process of conveniently ‘forgetting’ the Spanish civil war during the transition to democracy, after Franco's death, in order to avoid reviving the armed conflict and reawakening the ‘ghost’ of the permanently irreconcilable two Spains was the result of a political consensus among Francoist reformers and democrats.