Nationalist movements in both the Basque Country and Catalonia are embedded in the context of Spanish rule, but they differ profoundly in their goals, strategies, constituencies, and success in marshaling public support. In a pathbreaking work of historical sociology, Juan Diez Medrano examines these differences for the first time. He provides not only a rich political history of the two cases but also a new explanation for why some nationalist movements adopt separatism or violence.

Diez Medrano compares the formation of cultural identity in Catalonia and the Basque Country in an investigation that starts in the seventeenth century. For each region, he looks at patterns of industrialization, the establishment of nationalist parties before the Civil War, levels of nationalist activity under Franco, and conditions in democratic Spain today.

The author considers conflicts within the populations that Basque and Catalan nationalist movements have claimed to represent, as well as conflicts between the state and nationalist organizations. The "nations" for whom these movements aim to speak, he shows, are in fact deeply divided. He attributes the divergent developments of Basque and Catalan nationalisms to the different relationships between the Madrid government and the leading social group in each region.