The territorial organization of Spain. A reflection on the state of the question and keys to constitutional reform.

Abstract

Abstract:
In this work we reflect from a broad historical perspective on the question of the territorial organization of the State in Spain leading to the current situation and offer, in light of this evolution, some keys to the constitutional reform in a federal sense that is deemed necessary in our days. Starting from the evidence that the answer offered by the Spanish historical constitutionalism to the territorial shape of the State has been, in general, to configure Spain as a unitary, centralized state, symbolized by the Monarchy, we analyzed the two large and different attempts that existed prior to the 1978 Constitution to emerge from unitarianism and to establish models of political decentralization. The first experience, with a federal character, developed during the First Republic (1873-1874) was consumed in a few months without even being able to discuss the Draft of the Federal Constitution of 1873, elaborated in the context of an extremely convulsive political and social situation that ended in the anarchy of cantonalism. The second, which during the five-year period of the Second Republic (1931-1936) tested the compatibility of a so-called «integral state» with the autonomy of the regions, was taken very partially into practice and ended with the military uprising led by general Franco and the Civil War (1936-1939).

After Franco’s regime and the democratic Transition, the Constitution of 1978 did not constitutionalize a precise model of political decentralization but prefigured a «decentralized» State, open to different possibilities, giving way to an «autonomic process» from the recognition of the right to the autonomy of nationalities and regions in their Preliminary Title and the establishment of complex rules in Title VIII. The opening of this process evolved towards the so-called «Autonomous State» through political practice and the doctrine of the Constitutional Court, developing gradually with the techniques of federalism and in its field of attraction until setting up a the facto federal State, although with notorious deficiencies and inconsistencies in structure and functioning. The autonomous state came into crisis starting, above all, from the clashes of political nationalism in the Basque Country in the early 2000s and especially in Catalonia from the middle of the last decade to the present, the height of the secessionist challenge.
In the course of this work we try to show that, although in 1873, 1931 and 1978 there was a resounding rejection of centralism and a clear aspiration to establish regional autonomy under different forms, it could not be forged in any of these moments, for different reasons , a net constituent will in this matter that would be able to effectively support a defined model. It is considered that for this and other causes the territorial question is still recurrently open in a channel, pending the appropriate constitutionalization that allows to vertebrate with the necessary stability the Spanish State. Following a general diagnosis of the autonomous model in its evolution in the orbit of federalism, the central elements are considered according to this approach, which are are regarded as necessary for a constitutional reform in a federal key that rationalizes a State that is already federal in the facts and that allows to integrate all the territories with their singularities, devoting a special attention to the Catalan question
within the framework of the present independence challenge.