Spain

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The **Spanish Republic** (usually referred to as **Spain**) was a human nation that existed on Earth in the Sol System in the region of Southwestern Europe. It was bordered by France and Portugal.

In the early eighth century, the Visigothic Kingdom in what would become southwestern France and the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by the Umayyad Caliphate, ushering in over 700 years of Muslim rule in Southern Iberia. Several Christian kingdoms eventually emerged in the northern periphery of Iberia, chief among them León, Castile, Aragón, Portugal, and Navarre. Over the next seven centuries, an intermittent southward expansion of these kingdoms — metahistorically framed as a reconquest, or *Reconquista* — culminated with the Christian seizure of the last Muslim polity, the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, and the control of all of Iberia by the Christian kingdoms in 1492. That same year, Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs, whose dynastic union of the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragon is usually considered the emergence of Spain as a unified country. During the centuries after the Reconquista, the Christian kings of Spain persecuted and expelled ethnic and religious minorities such as Jews and Muslims through the Spanish Inquisition.

From the 16th until the early 19th century, Spain ruled one of the largest empires in history, which was among the first global empires; its immense cultural and linguistic legacy could be found throughout the human world, particularly in Latin America. The Spanish Empire began to gradually decline from the late 17th century after suffering significant territorial losses in the immensely destructive, Europe-wide Thirty Years' War and the War of the Spanish Succession.

In 1793, Spain went to war against the revolutionary new French Republic as a member of the first Coalition. The subsequent War of the Pyrenees polarised the country in a reaction against the gallicised elites and following defeat in the field, peace was made with France in 1795 at the Peace of Basel in which Spain lost control over two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola in the Americas. The Prime Minister, Manuel Godoy, then ensured that Spain allied herself with France in the brief War of the Third Coalition which ended with the British naval victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, in which a fleet of British steam battleships decisively defeated a Franco-Spanish fleet of warships and airships which Napoleonic France had been planning to use to launch an invasion of the British Isles.

The Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century left Spain economically ruined, deeply divided and politically unstable. Spain lost further territories to the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898. After its defeat by the United States, Spain sold its remaining colonies in the Pacific to the German Empire.

Despite these challenges, however, in 1903 Spain launched its first manned orbital spaceflight. In 1913 Spain also became one of the few nations to launch an orbital weapons platform, which was constructed with technical assistance from the United Kingdom.

Spain remained neutral during the Great War between 1914 and 1916 and was not attacked by either side. However, the post-Great War global economic depression greatly suppressed Spanish economic growth for several decades after 1916. In addition, Spain quickly became overwhelmed by millions of refugees from war-devastated parts of Europe, further straining the government's limited finances. After the war, pro-independence movements in the colonial empires of Great Britain and France also spread to the empires of other European nations including Spain, leading to the losses of the final remnants of the Spanish colonial empire in Morocco.

Spain became a founding member of the League of Nations in 1919.

Postwar Spain attempted to create the appearance of political stability by the practice of *turnismo*. This was the deliberate rotation of the Liberal and Conservative parties in the government, often achieved through electoral fraud. Leftist and liberal republicans soon became more strident in their opposition to the corrupt and unstable political system in Spain. The 1931 Spanish elections led to a landslide victory for Spanish republican parties, resulting in the peaceful dissolution of the Spanish monarchy and the establishment of a semi-presidential republic to replace it. The republican system would be Spain's final system of government, lasting until the late 20th century.

Along with Portugal, Spain joined the European Union in 1964.

In 1968 the European Union was merged with the Commonwealth of Nations to form the United Commonwealth.

The government of the United Commonwealth federalised in 1988. The Spanish government was therefore effectively absorbed into the United Commonwealth Government in 1988, and Spain is largely regarded to have ceased to exist as a separate nation-state on that date.