HISTORY, NATIONAL IDENTITY AND POLITICAL CIVIC CHARACTER IN COMPLEX SOCIETIES: The case of Spanish and Latin American societies

National identity and political civic character constitute, on an ideographic level, two sides of the same coin. In other words, they are expressions of how citizens feel they belong and participate in the Nation. The Nation is a basically political concept whose explanation is also somewhat complex. For many, it is a reification of a type of society; that is, it constitutes a merely ideological plane superimposed on the "real society", so that its origin is a consequence of the changes that were introduced with the advent of the modern State.

From the epistemological point of view, national identity suffers from the same difficulties of definition as the Nation. Like it, it suffers in all aspects that make up the same vicissitudes as the Nation-State. Each social science approaches these concepts differently, but all of them indicate that it is extremely complex to take into account all the variables that make up these two entities. Some of the research is proposed ideographically and others try to introduce nomethetic approaches. In any case, we can think that the definitions necessarily represent what has been called conceptual "constructs".

In this book we have constituted a sample of diverse approaches and problems on the national identity and the civic political character, trying to expose how these entities are perceived in the light of current conditions and from different points of view. In them, it is specified that both the Nation-State and the national identity are historical products and that, therefore, they are changing and, in the best of cases, they have a beginning and an end, as shown by the advent of the processes of globalization. The format that each author has determined has been respected, aware that each social science has its own way of analyzing, evaluating and reporting their research topics. We hope that this will provoke a greater interest in the readers to know how to observe, in these tasks, the Ibero-American experience.