During the first 20 years of Franco's dictatorship the term “Imperio” circulated as a catchword. It was intended mostly to reconnect Franco’s Spain both rhetorically and ideologically with the “Imperial Spain” that John Elliott (1963) dates between the years 1469 and 1716. After 1716, and especially between 1805 (Battle of Trafalgar) and 1936 (Franco's armed uprising), write Areilza and Castiella, “we lacked our will to ‘Imperio’” (1941: 53). Accordingly, this reclaimed notion of “Imperio” served, on one hand, to disallow the secular postulates of the Enlightenment—which Franco and his most entrenched ideologues considered the root of the schismatic evil defeated in the Civil War—and, on the other, to reassess in that light the subsequent “independence” of Spain's American colonies, in order to re-establish a unifying relationship with them.

How could an impoverished country, devastated by a recent civil war and its aftermath, ostracized both financially and diplomatically from much of the Western world, implement or—at least—give some content to such a transatlantic, imperial notion? A republican intellectual and diplomat in exile, Salvador de Madariaga, offered a peremptory response: “Spain’s relationships with America are purely cultural and literary, and not even a falangista would imagine them otherwise.” The regime's answer was a little more ambitious and disingenuous. Spain's new notion of “Imperio” had little, if anything, to do with traditional endeavors of conquest and expansion, at least in the territorial sense; nor was it directly related to the global capitalist order—with no center and no boundaries (historical or geographical)—that Hardt and Negri identify now with a postmodern version of “Empire.” In fact, when invoking the notion of “Imperio,” the regime's intellectuals often rejected politics and economics explicitly and haughtily in favor of vague metaphysical notions of a common race and a common interpretation of the world to be found (only) within the borders of those countries that had shared the monarchy, the religion, and the language of Spain for over four centuries. Franco's unifying victory in the “Spanish” Civil War would also bring about the reunification of this unduly dissolved community of “Hispanic” countries.