This article takes as a starting point the notion that the Spanish post-imperial imagination after 1898 included the period’s preoccupation with the rise of Spain’s peripheral separatisms and the idea of Spanish national disintegration as the last phase of the country’s imperial decline. The article traces the manifestation of this internal imperial imagination in Ortega y Gasset’s España invertebrada (1922) and its reverberations in the writings on Catalan-Castilian relations by Ernesto Giménez Caballero and Jaume Vicens Vives, which interact explicitly with Ortega’s text. Further, the article analyses the competitive power play present in the Spanish and Catalan twentieth-century national
imagination, where symbolic evocations of empire function as manifestations of a coveted masculine power that are used to convey different political solutions to Spain’s internal national conflict.