-
The constitution and the politics ofnational identity in
Spain
ENRIC MARTINEZ-HERRERAn AND THOMASJEFFREY MILEYnn
nUniversity Autonoma de Madrid, SpainnnUniversity of Cambridge,
UK
ABSTRACT. The 1978 Spanish Constitution enshrined the
recognition of linguistic,cultural, and some degree of national
pluralism in the country and outlinedprocedural mechanisms for the
creation of regional autonomies, which has given
rise to a de facto asymmetrical federal state. This article
begins by analyzing thecompromise over issues of national identity
embedded in the Constitution and theprocess by which this was
forged. It highlights the articulation among political forces
of contending conceptions of national identity and different
projects for reorganisingthe territorial structure within and/or
against the Spanish state. It also describes thesocial bases of
support for the respective projects. Next, the article examines
recentchallenges to the parameters of the constitutional
compromise. It shows that citizens
support for the basic parameters of the 1978 compromise remains
high and has evenbecome stronger. It emphasises that the
preferences of the general public stand in sharpcontrast with the
preferences of inuential sections of the Basque and Catalan
regional
political establishment, and it concludes that current
challenges to the constitutionalcompromise are driven by political
elites.
KEYWORDS: Basque Country; Catalonia; federalism; nationalism;
Spain
By the end of the Franco era, partially in reaction to the
unitary nationalistconception of Spain associated with the
authoritarian regime, the democraticopposition came to identify
with peripheral nationalist claims in the BasqueCountry and
Catalonia (and to a lesser extent Galicia) for recognition
oflinguistic, cultural, and national differences and even for some
degree of self-determination. Accordingly, the 1978 Constitution
took many of theseaspirations into account. The Constitution
enshrined recognition of linguistic,cultural, and some degree of
national pluralism, and outlined proceduralmechanisms for the
creation of regional autonomies, or self-governingcommunities. The
ofcial recognition of this plurality was further accom-plished with
the passing of regional Statutes of Autonomy. Though
theConstitutional prescriptions were not explicitly federal, they
allowed for theemergence of a de facto asymmetrical federal
state.
This paper begins by analyzing in some detail the nature of the
compromiseover issues of national identity embedded in the 1978
Constitution. It sketches
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the process by which this compromise was forged. It focuses on
the articles inthe Constitution as well as the Basque and Catalan
Statutes of Autonomy inwhich the collective subject of sovereignty
was established, highlighting: fourcontending conceptions of
national identity articulated by different politicalforces; four
corresponding projects for reorganising the political
territorialstructure within and/or against the Spanish state; and
their respective bases ofsocial support.
The paper then traces the evolution of citizens attitudes,
demonstratingcontinuing high and even increasing levels of support
for the basic parametersof the 1978 compromise. Finally, it
examines recent challenges to theparameters of the compromise
driven by political elites, and it highlightshow, in the country as
a whole, and in the Basque Country and Catalonia inparticular, the
preferences of the general public stand in sharp contrast withthe
preferences of inuential sections of the regional political
establishment.
The forging of the constitutional compromise over national
identity during thetransition to democracy
On the eve of his electoral victory in the rst postauthoritarian
legislativeelection in June 1977, Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez
declared his intention toelaborate a Constitution in collaboration
with all the groups represented inthe Cortes (Powell 2001: 222). An
agreement was soon reached between thegovernment and the opposition
in favor of the creation of a seven-membercommittee composed of
parliamentarians one that incorporated threemembers from the
governing UCD, alongside one from the continuist ex-Franquist right
(AP), one from the social-democratic PSOE, one from thecommunists
and one intended to represent nationalists both in Catalonia andthe
Basque Country.
From August to September 1977, these seven would together
elaborate apreliminary draft behind closed doors.1 By November,
part of the draft hadbeen leaked to the press, and by January 1978
the whole thing had beenpublished in a prominent periodical. The
leak set off an intense publicdiscussion about the more
controversial aspects of the preliminary draft.Among the issues
most passionately debated was the drafts treatment of thenational
question in general, as well as, more specically, the
ambiguousguidelines it seemed to sketch for the transformation of
the centralist stateinto something else.
The committee had been composed in an ideological climate in
which themajor political players repeatedly expressed their
commitment to the ideal offorging a constitutional consensus of
sorts.2 The message was consistentlyrepeated that the imposition of
some over others had to be avoided at allcosts. The determination
to transcend the historic rupture between the twoSpains loomed
large in the minds of leaders from virtually all
politicalpersuasions. Such an ideological climate facilitated the
willingness of the
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committee members to strike compromises on the wording of the
preliminarydraft. The tacit assumption was that this draft needed
to serve as a minimalframework for forging consensus.
During the preparation of the preliminary draft, the most
difcultchallenge was the task of forging a fragile consensus on the
articles directlyrelated to the national question.3 These articles
were the ones intended to xthe extent of symbolic recognition for
regional and/or peripheral national-ist aspirations, as well as to
dene the contours and the scope of the juridicaland institutional
space for accommodating such aspirations. What theframers came up
with was a rather ambiguous formula. On the one hand,they decided
to declare the Spanish people as the subject of sovereignty,from
whom all powers of state organs allegedly emanate (Article 1.2).
Inthe same vein, they decided to insist that the Constitution is
founded uponthe unity of Spain. But, on the other hand, they
suggested, the Constitution issimultaneously founded on the
solidarity between the peoples of Spain; andmore importantly, they
also maintained that the Constitution recognises theright to
autonomy of the nationalities and regions of which Spain as
acollective subject is claimed to be composed (Article 2) (emphases
added).
The fundamental ambiguity in this formula lies in the inclusion
of the termrecognise. The term seems to signal a source of rights
and/or authoritythat both precedes the constitutive moment and
cannot in any obvious way beclaimed to emanate from an indivisible
Spanish people as such. Rather, itappears that this authority
emanates from the nationalities and regionsthemselves, who are
thereby already constituted as collective subjects beforethe
constitutive moment, rather than as mere parts of an indivisible
Spanishpeople. By extension, the rights of these
already-constituted collectivesubjects not only precede the
constitutive moment; they also transcend thatmoment. As such, in
this preliminary draft, the framers seem to relegate therole of the
Constitution to that of recognising the already-existing status
ofthe nationalities and regions as collective subjects from whom
certain rightsemanate, rather than the role of constituting those
categories as collectivesubjects and then conferring rights upon
them.
The framers were thus attempting to square a circle of sorts.
For they triedto have the preliminary draft enshrine the
indivisible unity of the Spanishpeople as a collective subject,
from whom the constitutive authority wasalleged to emanate; but at
the same time, they tried to have the text recognisethe existence
of other collective subjects as well. By no means can
thefundamental ambiguity of this formulation be attributed to haste
or neglect.On the contrary, the leaders of virtually all parties
seemed convinced of thecritical importance of getting the wording
of these articles just right (Entrena-Cuesta 1985).4
Even so, the fragile consensus forged on the national question
soon cameunder serious stress. The government was exposed to much
pressure from itsown ranks to remove any mention of the term
nationalities. For a while, itlooked as if the consensus was going
to crumble until after the UCD agreed
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8 Enric Martnez-Herrera and Thomas Jeffrey Miley
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to accept the term in exchange for the communists and the
MinoriaCatalanas acceptance of new off-setting references to Spain
as the commonpatria and to its unity as a nation in the same
article. Thus, the nal draft ofArticle 2 read:
The Constitution is based on the indissoluble unity of the
Spanish nation, the commonand indivisible country of all Spaniards,
and recognises and guarantees the right toself-government of the
nationalities and regions of which it is composed and
solidarityamongst them all.
Despite this rhetorical reinforcement to reassure advocates of
the primacy ofthe Spanish nation, the new compromise on the wording
did little to alter thefundamental ambiguity at the core of the
preliminary draft the references toboth nationalities and recognise
remained. In other words, the conceptionof Spain thus embedded in
the text was a somewhat paradoxical one whichSole-Tura (1985: 101)
(the representative for the communists on the Con-stitutional draft
committee) would later label a nation of nations.
While Article 2 thus xed the fundamental ambiguity at the core
of theConstitutions conceptual apparatus, the guidelines for
determining thecontours and scope of the institutions that could be
created for such purposeswere sketched elsewhere in Title VIII. The
preliminary draft of Title VIIIoutlined the procedural mechanisms
for the emergence of something approx-imating a federal system
(Moreno 2001; Solozabal 2004a). It thus bore themark of the
preferences of both the Communist Party and the Socialist Party,in
general, and of their respective representatives on the committee,
Sole-Turaand Peces-Barba, in particular.
Peces-Barba was an enthusiastic proponent of what he called
functionaland organic federalism. In this vein, he advocated the
formulation of a set ofguidelines promising to lead to the
generalisation of autonomy and thus thecreation of a symmetrical,
regionalised state. In the process of arguing for hisown position,
he explicitly contrasted his conception of the
appropriateterritorial organisation for the state with the
alternative conception embodiedin the Second Republic. For the
Second Republic, so-called Estado integralallowed for some
provinces to remain within a regimen comun thus engender-ing
dysfunctional asymmetries (Peces-Barba 1988: 735). The
communistdelegate Sole-Tura basically concurred with his
formulation.
However, both the APs Fraga and Minora Catalanas Roca, for
diame-trically opposed reasons, received this proposal with extreme
reticence. ForFraga, the problem with the federal formulation was
not rooted in a concernabout the structure of its proposed
organisational form per se; rather, it wasrooted in a principled
objection to the structure of justication for this form specically,
in that the term nationalities had once again been employed.
Bycontrast, for Roca, the problem with Peces-Barbas formulation was
preciselythe opposite i.e. that it did not take the term
nationalities seriously enough.As Roca saw it, Peces-Barbas federal
proposal was not rooted in referenceto the term nationality at all,
but in abstract rationalist considerations such
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Constitution and national identity in Spain 9
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as efciency and functionality. For Roca, the proposal failed to
take sufcientaccount of the fact of cultural peculiarity or
difference as the mainjustication for the right to self-government
therefore it could not live upto the structure of justication for
granting autonomy implicit in Article 2(Peces-Barba 1988: 64).
Meanwhile, the three UCD delegates were themselves split.
Whereas two ofthem (Cisneros and Perez-Llorca) disliked the federal
proposal because theysympathised with Fragas objections; the other
(Herrero de Minon) disliked itout of sympathy with Rocas
objections.
The net result was that a majority in favor of Peces-Barbas
federal formulacould not be formed; and yet another ambiguous
compromise would have tobe struck (Peces-Barba 1988). Rather than
coming up with a completelyalternative formula, the committee
members essentially agreed to disagree.They proceeded to water down
Peces-Barbas initial proposal, trying to leaveas much as they could
unstated.
Their failure to forge an unambiguous constitutional consensus
on thiscrucial point meant that they agreed to leave it up to the
processes of normalpolitics to determine whether the state would
evolve according to Fragas,Peces-Barbas, or Rocas competing and
contradictory visions visions whichwe can label decentralised,
symmetrical, rationalist federal and asymme-trical, organic
quasi-federal and/or confederal, respectively.
The nal product of the Draft Committees negotiations was an
utterlyambiguous and hybrid formulation in which the right of
nationalities andregions to self-government would again be
recognised and guaranteed;but in which, at the same time, any
explanation or enumeration of theterritories tting into each
category would be avoided altogether. Instead, twoalternative
procedures were spelled out for exercising the vaguely denedright
to self-government. The rst was a fast-track, intended to apply
tothose territories that had already held referenda on proposals
for autonomyduring the Second Republic namely, the Basque Country,
Catalonia, andGalicia.5 Meanwhile, for the rest of the other as-yet
undened regions, analternative, slow-lane procedure was
devised.6
The nal draft thus did not impose any solution whatsoever on the
issue ofthe future territorial organisation for the Spanish state.
Instead, it left at leastthree options open. Even so, in the
Constitution itself, and against the explicitobjection of Fraga, a
fundamental ambiguity about the nature of thecollective subject and
by extension, about the source, scope and contentof the rights of
alternative collectivities within it had denitely beenembedded.
This in turn meant that the juridical seed for the deconstructionof
the Spanish nation as collective subject, and therefore as source
of rightsand of sovereignty, had been planted.
It was through this ambiguous formulation that the incorporation
of theCatalan nationalists of Converge`ncia into the constitutional
consensus wasthus consolidated. However, the same could not be said
for their Basquenationalist counterparts in the PNV. For the
leaders of this party would
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10 Enric Martnez-Herrera and Thomas Jeffrey Miley
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remain intransigent in their demand for nothing less than the
restoration ofthe traditional foral institutions i.e. rights and
privileges dating to theMiddle Ages and abolished by the liberal
monarchy in 1839 and 1876 andthe subsequent formulation of a pact
with the Spanish Crown. In a last-ditcheffort to get the PNV to
sign up to the Constitutional consensus, a so-calleddisposicion
adicional primera was added to the text, to reassure that
theConstitution protects and respects the historic rights of the
territories withfueros.
With this addition, the recognition of historic rights preceding
andtranscending the constitutive moment, and emanating from a
source otherthan the Spanish people, would be made still more
explicit. Even so, it didnot sufce for the PNV. Nor did this prove
enough for the EE, whichpresented an amendment calling for the
recognition of the right to self-determination. By this point in
the game, virtually all of the parties on thepolitical scene had
agreed to abandon any mention of this subject; and so theamendment
would be voted down on the oor of the Congress by anoverwhelming
majority of deputies.
After the EEs proposed amendment had been voted down, it became
clearthat the Basque nationalists could not be incorporated into
the consensus.On 31 October 1978, when the time came to vote on the
nal text, out of 350seats, the EEs deputy was among the six who
chose to vote against it, and thePNVs seven deputies were among the
fourteen who chose to abstain (Powell2001). The other ve no-votes
came from some of the deputies representingthe AP, who, alongside
another three AP representatives who decided toabstain, broke ranks
with Fraga over his support for the Constitution, largelybecause
they believed the presence of the term nationalities rendered the
textintolerable.
On six December, the new Constitution was put to a referendum
before thecitizenry. The PNV campaigned for abstention, while the
EE campaigned fora no-vote. Meanwhile, every single other party
with representation in theCongreso campaigned in favor of it. As it
turned out, throughout all of Spain,the percentage of votes in
favor of the new Constitution were extremely high(eighty-seven per
cent). In Catalonia, the results were marginally moreimpressive
still a ninety-one per cent yes-vote with a sixty-seven per
centturnout. In the Basque Country, however, only forty-ve per cent
of thepopulation participated, and only sixty-nine per cent of
these registered a yes-vote (see Table 1). Even so, these numbers
still amounted to a democraticmajority.
Public opinion and the constitutional compromise
The result of the referendum provides an important piece of
prima facieevidence that the Constitution as a whole initially
enjoyed widespread supportamong the Spanish public. But to what
extent did the positions of the mainpolitical forces on issues
related to the so-called national question in
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particular (and the compromise forged among them as embodied in
theconstitutional text) reect the preferences of different segments
of Spanishsociety, especially in the Basque Country and
Catalonia?
A good way to start to learn about these preferences is by
exploring thediffusion of sentiments of national identity among the
citizenry at the time ofthe drafting of the Constitution. Since the
1970s, the Centro de InvestigacionesSociologicas (CIS) has asked
citizens to place themselves on a scale thatmeasures, in relative
terms, Spanish identity as compared to regionalidentities.7
Specically, the question asks interviewees whether they
identifythemselves as only Basque (or Catalan or Galician), more
Basque (etc.) thanSpanish, equally Basque (etc.) and Spanish, more
Spanish than Basque (etc.),or Spanish only. Let us highlight, in
particular, the low percentages of citizenswho rejected any
identication with Spain in spite of the claims articulated bysome
of the more extreme nationalist organisations. As shown in Table 2,
thelevels of outright rejection of Spanish identity in 1979, the
year following thepassage of the Constitution, stood at a signicant
thirty-six per cent in the
Table 1. Results of the 1978 Constitutional referendum in the
Basque Country,Catalonia and Spain at large (percentages out of
voters and out of totalelectors)
Yes No Blank Invalid Total voters Abstention Total electors
Spain 87.9 7.8 3.5 0.7 17,873,301 32.9 26,632,18059.0 5.3 2.4
0.5 67.1
Basque country 69.1 23.5 5.7 1.6 693,310 55.3 1,552,73730.9 10.5
2.6 0.7 44.7
Cataluna 90.5 4.6 4.2 0.7 2,986,790 32.6 4,428,17361.0 3.1 2.9
0.5 67.4
Source: Congreso de los Diputados (2003). Own elaboration.
Table 2. Relative identications in the Basque Country, Catalonia
and Galicia,19771982
Date
Basque country Catalonia Galicia
Oct-77 May-79 Nov-79 Dec-82 May-79 Dec-82 May-79 Sep-80
Dec-82
Spanish only 12.6 23.5 13.9 8.6 28.7 21.8 16.2 15 14.3S4R 2.6
5.8 4.5 6.1 8.2 4.5 6 5.8E5R 22.1 26.4 24.1 33.1 38.8 42.7 41
48.7
EoR 10.1 12.1 16.5 11 16.6 11.1 15 9.5Region only 41.4 33.9 38.2
42.6 13.7 8.7 23.9 22 10.9DK/NA 5.3 7.8 3.8 3.6 7.4 5.8 1.6 0
10.9
(n) 1,589 928 1,011 950 1,230 1,249 516 1,686 534
Source: CIS (1977, 1980); all other studies by DATA, S.A.
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12 Enric Martnez-Herrera and Thomas Jeffrey Miley
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Basque Country, twenty-four per cent in Galicia, but only
fourteen per cent inCatalonia. In fact, in each of the three
territories with relevant minoritynationalist parties, a majority
of citizens overwhelming in Catalonia registered identication with
Spain, and most of them identied as much as,or more, with Spain
than with their region.
Another question posed to the Spanish public allows us to learn
specicallyabout preferences regarding the territorial organisation
of the State. During thetransition to democracy and in its
immediate aftermath, Linz and his colla-borators at DATA inquired
about citizens preferences among four differenttypes of
organisation. The results they obtained are reproduced in Table 3
(Linzet al. 1981; Linz 1986). The data for all of Spain reveal a
signicant degree of
Table 3. Evolution of attitudes on preferred territorial
organisation for theSpanish state in Spain at large, Basque
Country, Catalonia and Galicia, 19771982
1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1982
Spain
Centralism 43 42 29 33 28 28Autonomism 45 42 49 41 36
47Federalism 6 9 14 11 9 11
Independentism 3 3 5 7 4 4DK/NA 3 5 3 8 22 9(n) 6,340 8,837
5,898 5,499 24,998 5,463
Basque country
Centralism 26 15 14 16 12 13Autonomism 48 46 46 41 32
43Federalism 12 18 21 13 24 18
Independentism 11 16 17 21 21 24DK/NA 2 5 3 10 11 2(n) 434 923
810 323 1,497 313
CataloniaCentralism 33 23 19 22 19 19Autonomism 53 52 44 41 54
54Federalism 8 17 25 16 1 16
Independentism 2 5 11 15 3 7DK/NA 2 2 2 7 14 4(n) 1,147 1,688
928 892 4,130 884
GaliciaCentralism 34 35 34 44 24 28Autonomism 49 41 49 40 26
53
Federalism 10 7 10 7 8 7Independentism 6 3 3 3 6 3DK/NA 1 14 4 6
36 10
(n) 474 926 442 444 1,964 441
Source: Juan J. Linz (1985: 587).
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support for centralism among the general public especially at
the beginning ofthe period. Indeed, in 1977, approximately two out
of every ve Spaniardsendorsed this option. Yet between 1977 and
1978, this proportion dropped fromforty-two per cent to twenty-nine
per cent; and throughout the rest of the period,it hovered around
that level. Undoubtedly, the sudden and rather precipitousdecline
in support for centralism reected the fact that none of the
mainstatewide parties advocated it not even the AP (Linz 1985).
The data for the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia, like
those for allof Spain, reveal autonomy to be the most popular of
the four optionsthroughout the entire period of the transition to
democracy. At the beginning,only one in twenty citizens in
Catalonia endorsed the alternative of indepen-dence; but between
1977 and 1979, support for it tripled, to embrace fteenper cent of
the population. Nevertheless, by 1982, the waxing of
independent-ism had ended, and support for it had waned back to
seven per cent. The trendreected an initial arousal of nationalist
aspirations, followed by the con-solidation of Catalonias status as
an Autonomous Community within Spain,three years after the passage
of the Statute of Autonomy and two years afterthe celebration of
the rst regional elections there. By contrast, in the case ofthe
Basque Country, and in spite of ETAs agitation and extreme
violence, thestarting level around sixteen per cent increased only
up to twenty-odd percent. Thus, autonomism was the most consensual
option among the citizenry,both in Spain at large and in the
regions with a relevant presence of minoritynationalist forces.
Both of these pieces of evidence tend to conrm widespread levels
ofsupport among the Spanish public at large, as well as in the
Basque Countryand Catalonia in particular, for the basic terms of
the constitutionalcompromise, ambiguous though it may have
been.
The terms of discussion of the 1979 Basque and Catalan autonomy
statutes
While the Constitution drafts were still being debated and
negotiated, theBasque and Catalan parliamentarians were already
preparing their respectiveprojects for autonomy statutes. All of
this occurred against a backdrop thatincluded actual and potential
political violence from two extremes die-hardsections of the state
security forces (included in the so-called bunker) and theBasque
nationalist terrorist organisation ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna,
orBasque Country and Freedom). In order to understand the
comparativeintransigence of the Basque nationalists throughout the
constituent process,it is important not to lose sight of the
backdrop of violent political conict especially the dialectic of
terrorist action and state repression that had beensparked by ETA
in the mid-1960s and that had been spiraling ever since. Fromthe
outset of the transition, this dialectic hindered both Suarezs
capacity tonegotiate as well as the PNVs capacity to maneuver. Let
us briey explain.
In October 1977, after a period of long and difcult negotiations
betweenthe government and the Basque nationalists, Suarez declared
a general
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14 Enric Martnez-Herrera and Thomas Jeffrey Miley
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amnesty, in an effort to overcome the dialectic of violence and
repression(Domnguez-Iribarren 1999; Powell 2001). But the gamble
did not pay off for not only did ETA refuse to give up the armed
struggle but, seeking todestabilise the situation, it dramatically
stepped up the violent attacks (Jaimeand Reinares 1999;
Martnez-Herrera 2008). The backdrop of escalatingviolence put the
Suarez governments plans for democratic reform in avulnerable
position, especially given the fact that for close to forty
yearsFranquist propaganda had associated democracy with the failure
to maintainpublic order (Jackson 1965). Conservative opinion
predictably interpretedSuarezs amnesty as a capitulation and as a
catalyst for a descent into furtherlawlessness. This in turn made
it near impossible for Suarez to carry out thenecessary democratic
reforms in the security agencies (Domnguez-Iribarren1999).
Moreover, the consequent continuation of authoritarian methods
inthe police forces served to erode the governments democratic
credentials(Carr and Fusi 1979). The result was a very real
potential of militaryopposition to the democratic transition under
way a threat that wouldaffect the entire process (Linz and Stepan
1996: 99).
Meanwhile, the dialectic of violence and repression hindered the
PNVscapacity to maneuver, too by facilitating the radicalisation
and polarisationof the Basque population, and therefore fostering
the emergence of arelatively strong anti-systemic alternative
linked to ETA (Herri Batasuna,HB), with which the PNV were forced
to compete for hegemony of thenationalist cause (Dez-Medrano 1995).
Such competition from the radicalnationalist ank made it more
difcult for the PNV to cooperate with thecenter lest it risk losing
its nationalist credibility. By contrast, the morecooperative
Catalan nationalists in Converge`ncia experienced no
comparablecompetition from their radical nationalist ank.
After the approval of the Constitution in December, Suarez
called a newgeneral election, in which the voters validated his
mandate. Almost immedi-ately, negotiations began between the
government and representatives fromthe three historic regions, on
the content of their respective Statutes ofAutonomy. The Basque
Statute was the rst to be passed. In the summer of1979, a mixed
committee of representatives of the assembly of
Basqueparliamentarians and the Comision Constitucional began
debating the Basqueparliamentarians proposal, amidst an
unprecedented wave of intensied ETAviolence.
The two sides of this committee clashed over several precepts of
theproposed Statute. At the core of their disagreements was the
claim, in itsrst article, that national sovereignty resides in the
Basque people, fromwhom the powers of the Basque Country emanate,
without making anyreference to Spain (Powell 2001: 248). In the
end, the government imposed adrastic revision, so as to exclude the
reference to Basque sovereignty and toinclude the explicit
reference to Spain.8 A similar kind of revision was imposedupon the
proposals Disposicion Provisional. The version presented to
themixed commission included a thinly veiled reference to the right
to
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Constitution and national identity in Spain 15
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self-determination namely, the claim that acceptance of the
Statute by nomeans implies the renunciation of the Basque People to
the rights whichcorrespond to it in virtue of its History and its
will to self-government (Powell2001: 248). By contrast, the nal
version was watered down so as to only makean oblique reference to
such rights.
By the end of July, in what turned out to be essentially
bilateral negotia-tions between Suarez and the PNV leader Carlos
Garaikoetxea, the PNVaccepted such revisions. Next, the Basque
Statute was passed in the SpanishCongress with the support of all
the parties represented there, save for the AP.Despite the
revisions imposed, the PNV considered that the new
Statuterepresented a noticeable improvement over the Statute of
1936. The institu-tional powers granted to the region even included
the creation of a regionalpolice corps, and the so-called concierto
economico (economic agreement) wasre-established the terms of which
guaranteed the Basque Country the bestscal deal by far in all of
Spain. The PNV therefore called for a yes-vote in thereferendum
ratication to be held in October 1979. The newly created,
radicalnationalist HB (associated with ETA), predictably, would
call for abstentioninstead. As shown in Table 4, whether for
explicitly political reasons or not,the turnout was only fty-nine
per cent; even so, fully ninety per cent of theserecorded their
support. The Basque autonomous region had thus been reborn but the
conict in Euskadi remained far from being resolved.
Meanwhile, in Catalonia, as early as September 1978, an assembly
ofparliamentarians, led by the PSC-PSOE and the PSUC (the main
parties onthe left), had begun to work on a draft for the Catalan
Statute. Among theserepresentatives, a climate of relative
consensus was sustained throughout theprocess (Landn, Monreal and
Salas 1982; Milian i Massana 1988). Soon aftertheir draft had been
completed, negotiations with the Constitutional Commis-sion began.
In large part because of their multilateral nature, these
negotia-tions proved much more difcult than the ones over the
Basque Statute. Theimportant presence of socialists and communists,
in addition to Converge`ncia,in the assembly made it more difcult
for Suarezs government to stonewallthe aspirations included in the
draft. In addition, the direct participation oftwo framers of the
Constitution (Roca and Sole-Tura) in the elaboration of
Table 4. Results of the 1979 referenda of the statutes of
autonomy for theBasque Country and Catalonia (percentages out of
voters and out of totalelectors)
Yes No Blank Invalid Total voters Abstention Total electors
Basque country 90.3 5.2 3.4 1.2 921,436 41.1 1,565,54153.1 3.0
2.0 0.7 58.9
Catalonia 88.1 7.8 3.6 0.5 2,639,951 40.3 4,421,965
52.6 4.6 2.1 0.3 59.7
Source: Congreso de los Diputados (2003). Own elaboration.
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16 Enric Martnez-Herrera and Thomas Jeffrey Miley
-
that draft lent it an a priori air of constitutional legitimacy
that the Basquedraft never enjoyed. Even so, the government still
managed to stand rm,forcing a few critical revisions.
Most signicantly, Suarezs government insisted upon two
modications tothe drafts rst article. The rst concerned the
original reference to the act ofconstituting the Catalan territory
as an Autonomous Community as anexpression of its national reality;
the second concerned the related issue of theoriginal reference to
powers emanating from the people, understood as theCatalan
collective subject. The government objected that such
wordingeffectively granted the Statute an independent constitutive
status, derivedfrom the rights of the Catalan people, rather than a
status ultimatelyderivative of the Constitutional order. In the
end, both references werewatered down. To begin with, the nal
version of the rst article of theCatalan Statute still mentioned
Catalonias status as a nationality, butwithout claiming that the
act of constituting it as an Autonomous Communitywas an expression
of such a reality. Likewise, the nal version stillmentioned that
powers emanate from the people, but only after insistingthat they
emanate from the Constitution and from the present Statute
aswell.
The government also insisted upon other important modications.
Perhapsmost signicant was the reduction of the Generalitats
jurisdiction overeducation and scal powers. In comparison with the
Catalan Statute of1932, the nal product entailed a somewhat higher
level of self-government onissues such as education and the media,
but a somewhat lower level in areassuch as the justice system,
public order, and local administration (Balcells1991). Well aware
of the latent threat of military intervention, the
Catalannationalists came away decidedly content with what they had
grabbed.Consequently, the totality of groups with political
representation in Cataloniacampaigned for the new Statutes approval
in the subsequent referendum. Theresult was an overwhelming
eighty-eight per cent support for it though witha rather small
turnout (sixty per cent) (Table 4).
Thirty years later: citizens, elites and recent challenges to
the constitutionalcompromise
We have seen evidence of high levels of support around the time
of thetransition to democracy among the Spanish public as a whole
as well as in theBasque Country and Catalonia for the basic
contours of the compromiseforged in the constitutional text. We
will now turn to examine what hashappened to such support, before
concluding by describing how, since the late1990s, an escalation of
the aspirations of Basque and Catalan nationalism hasoccurred, at
least within the regional political parties representing
thosemovements, which has led to renewed demands for substantial
constitutionalreforms openly challenging the constitutional
compromise.
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Constitution and national identity in Spain 17
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Thirty years later: citizens national identities
Let us start by examining the evolution, if any, of citizens
national identitiesin Spain and in the regions with powerful
mobilized nationalist movements.Have national identications shifted
substantially, thus setting the stage fornew demands for
constitutional reform concerning the conceptions of thenation in
Spain and its nationalities? We can track the indicator
thatdescribes citizens relative identications with Spain vis-a`-vis
their regionsas introduced in the previous section. Considering rst
national identicationin Spain at large, Figure 1 shows that, in
1980, more than thirty per cent ofSpaniards identied themselves as
primarily Spanish, thirty-eight per cent asequally Spanish and of
their region, and twenty-four per cent identify mainlywith their
region.9 In 1989, after the nationwide establishment of regional
self-government institutions, primarily Spanish identication falls
to twenty-veper cent, those with equal identication rise to above
fty per cent and thoseidentifying primarily with a region decline
to eighteen per cent. Such levelsremain relatively stable
throughout the following decade, albeit moreSpanish identication
continues to decline, and by 2005 it is a full elevenpercentage
points below the 1980 level.
Rather than a loss of identication with Spain, what this means,
however,is a boost of the relative weight of regional identication
a legitimisation ofboth the autonomous communities and the
decentralised state of autonomiesas a whole. In fact, while this
move from primarily Spanish to dualidentication occurred, there was
also a dramatic drop of preferences for acentralised state among
the same citizenry a correlation that also occurs at
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97
98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06date
iden
tifica
tion
E>RE=RE
-
the individual level. Specically, support for centralism
decreased from forty-three per cent in 1976 to nine per cent in
2005. This evidence conforms, andprovides richer evidence, to lend
credence to the claim that the state ofautonomies became
consolidated and that autonomous communities gainedtheir popular
support as political communities within one decade (Garca-Ferrando,
Lopez-Aranguren and Beltran 1994; Martnez-Herrera 2002).
Figure 2 describes, in turn, the trends of exclusive regional
identication inthe Basque Country and Catalonia. In spite of claims
by some of the moreextreme nationalist organisations, between 1982
and 2005, the refusal of anySpanish identity in the Basque Country
dramatically fell from a level of aboutforty-three per cent of the
population to around twenty-ve per cent. Thistrend lends credence
to the hypothesis that political decentralisation andpower-sharing
foster integration of the nationalist minorities. Yet the
resultsfor Catalonia are less straightforward, as the levels of
rejection in 1979, afterfalling in the mid-1980s, returned to their
original level in the 1990s(Martnez-Herrera 2002).
Another theoretical dimension of attitudes towards political
communitieshas to do with the views or conceptions that citizens
have about their politicalcommunities. These include the
conceptions of either their state or theirregion as a nation or
otherwise. Survey research in the Basque Country andCatalonia has
inquired into this since 1990, when an appropriate question wasrst
devised (Garca-Ferrando, Lopez-Aranguren and Beltran 1994).
Itswording by the CIS reads: Which term do you prefer to use to
refer to theBasque Country/Catalonia?, the closed answers supplied
being a nation and
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97
98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08
Year
%
Source: Martnez-Herrera (forthcoming). Figure 2. Percentages of
rejection of Spanish identication in the Basque Country
andCatalonia, 19772007.
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Constitution and national identity in Spain 19
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a region, and offering also the option to spontaneously declare
alternativeviews. Figure 3 describes their development. Throughout
the period 19902005, the proportion of Basques regarding their
autonomous community as anation has remained quite stable at around
an approximate average ofthirty-six per cent. In turn, an even more
stable tendency to the nationalconception for Catalonia is
noticeable, most of the time around thirty-veper cent.10
But what about the state-wide political community? Before the
death ofFranco, Linz (1973: 99) famously wrote:
Spain, today, is a state for all Spaniards; a nation-state for a
large share of thepopulation; and only a state, not a nation, for
important minorities.
The question now is how Basques and Catalans see Spain. The CIS
hasinquired into these views since the mid-1990s. Table 5 describes
the answers tothe question What does Spain mean for you? between
1996 and 2005. Theresponse option that expresses the Spanish
nationalist view of the politicalcommunity in its most
straightforward manner a nation I feel a member of only attains
about ten per cent in both regions. However, in Spain,
thealternative my country expresses a similar meaning in a softer
manner, thusavoiding the die-hard Spanish nationalist stance
associated by many with theimagery and discourse of the previous
regime, and suggesting instead aninclination to a civic patriotism
of sorts. Altogether, the options demonstrat-ing more affection for
Spain i.e. my nation, my country and something
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
Year
Sources: For 1990, Garca-Ferrando et al. (1994); for all other
years, seeMartnez-Herrera (forthcoming).
%
Basque CountryCatalonia
Figure 3. Conceptions of the region as a nation in the Basque
Country and Catalonia,19902005.
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20 Enric Martnez-Herrera and Thomas Jeffrey Miley
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special made by history, uniting us are selected by about half
of Catalansand hardly a third of Basques. In turn, the somewhat
ambiguous, in affectiveterms, my state is chosen by between a
quarter and a fth of the Basques andaround sixteen per cent of the
Catalans.
Moreover, Spain was portrayed in 1996 as a state made of
severalnationalities and regions by another quarter of Basques and
almost a thirdof Catalans. The gure changes remarkably in the
Basque Country in 1998and 2005, as the pollsters substituted the
expression a state of nationalitieswith a state of autonomies and
suppressed the option an alien state.Interestingly enough, the
categorical rejection of Spain allowed in 1996 wasgiven by only
three per cent of Catalans, but by twelve per cent of Basques. Itis
also worth pointing out that the gures for rejection of Spain in
the BasqueCountry are fairly similar to the voting gures for the
radical nationalists ofthe coalition HB (later named Euskal
Herritarrok or Batasuna) by the mid-1990s, but in Catalonia these
are far smaller than the vote-shares of EsquerraRepublicana
(ERC).11
We can safely conclude that, by the mid-2000s, in comparison
with the late1970s, the proportion of citizens refusing to identify
themselves with Spainhas dramatically dropped in the Basque Country
and, after a temporarydecrease, has remained the same in Catalonia.
In turn, citizens views of theSpanish and the regional communities
are by no means homogeneous. Yetthey are quite stable and there are
always more people who regard Spain as atheir nation or country
than who confer on their region the category ofnation.
Having described the main characteristics of national identity
of theBasque and Catalan publics three decades after the adoption
of the constitu-tional compromise, and observing the consolidation
of citizens attachment toits basic tenets, let us just sketch the
substantially different views that an
Table 5. Understandings of Spain as a nation or otherwise in the
BasqueCountry and Catalonia, 19962005
Basque country Catalonia
1996 1998 2005 1996 1998 2005 1996
My country 20.5 15.7 18.9 38.7 38.5 34.1 51.8A nation I feel a
member of 9.8 6.4 5.2 12.0 9.9 11.2 23.5Something special made by
history,uniting us
3.3 4.8
The state I am a citizen of 24.7 17.3 17.0 11.9 15.7 18.3
10.2State of nation alities/autonomies 24.0 35.6 35.1 33.6 28.1
30.5 11.0An alien state 12.4 13.0 2.8 5.3 1.4
DK/NA 8.6 21.7 10.8 0.9 3.1 0.5 2.0(n) 429 613 576 747 1003 920
498
Source: Martnez-Herrera (forthcoming).
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Constitution and national identity in Spain 21
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inuential section of the political class holds on this matter.
In the nalsection, parties current positions will be described as
they have beenexpressed and advocated in the political process. Yet
current research hasrendered information available about the
individual attitudes of one inuen-tial segment of the political
class the political class of Catalonia.
Research into the political attitudes of the political class and
publicservants of Catalonia reveals that nationalist standpoints
are strongly over-represented as compared with attitudes in the
adult population at large. TheCatalan language is the rst language
(or mother tongue) of less than fortyper cent of the population in
Catalonia, and less than forty per cent were bornin Catalonia and
have both parents born there as well. However,
nativeCatalan-speakers and those with parents born in the region
are both stronglyover-represented among the political class and
public servants of Catalonia.With a few exceptions, this is
especially evident among leadership positions(see Matas 1995; Miley
2005, 2006). Similarly, although no studies on theirattitudes are
available, the preeminence of autochthonous Basques in theBasque
public administration is patent as well (Mansvelt-Beck 2005;
Tejerina2001).
A study on Catalonia (Miley 2005, 2006) has revealed that, in
1999, sixty-eight per cent of the CiU Members of the Catalan
Parliament (MCPs)declared that they feel only Catalan while none of
them felt as Spanish asCatalan, as shown in Table 6. By contrast,
in the whole population, thebreakdown was fourteen per cent who
identied only with Catalonia and
Table 6. Self-identication and understandings of Catalonia as a
nation or aregion in Catalonia: elites (1999) versus masses
(19981999)
General public
Constituencies MCPs
CiU PSU CiU PSC
Spanish Only 9 3 13 0 0S4C 6 4 9 0 0S5C 45 41 55 0 60SoC 23 33
15 32 35Catalan only 14 18 5 68 5DK/NA 3 1 3 0 0(n) 3,589 1,194 819
19 20
Region 47 37 60 0 0Other 7 5 7 0 30Nation 37 51 26 100 70
DK/NA 9 8 7 0 0(n) 1,003 293 178 19 20
Sources: For the general public and party constituencies
understandings of Cataloniaand relative identications, CIS (1998
and 1999, respectively); for Members of CatalanParliament (MCPs),
Miley (2005, 2007).
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22 Enric Martnez-Herrera and Thomas Jeffrey Miley
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forty-ve per cent registering balanced dual identity. Even the
voters for CiUwere more moderate than their representatives, as
only eighteen per cent ofthem felt Catalan only. Concerning their
perceptions of Catalonia as anation or as a region, all CiU
parliamentarians as well as an overwhelmingseventy per cent of the
PSC parliamentarians chose the term nation, while, in1998, a
majority of the citizens of the region (forty-seven per cent)
preferred touse region. The stance of the parliamentarians was more
nationalist thanthat of their voters, too, as only fty-one per cent
of the CiU constituency andtwenty-six per cent of the PSC
constituency chose that option. This gapbetween elites and masses
is explained by origin and language only partially,however it has
also roots in the ideology that is acquired throughout
thefunctional socialisation of the regional political elites (Miley
2007).
Thirty years later: ongoing pressures for constitutional
reform
Having thus illuminated the persistent and even increasing
social bases ofsupport for the basic parameters of the
constitutional compromise that wasforged during the transition to
democracy, let us examine and discuss tworecent challenges to the
constitutional compromise adopted in 1978 challenges that have been
proposed by political elites in the Basque Countryand Catalonia,
respectively. The rst of these challenges has, for the timebeing at
least, been effectively stonewalled by the unied opposition of
todaystwo main statewide parties, Jose Luis Rodrguez-Zapateros
governing PSOEand Mariano Rajoys conservative Partido Popular (PP).
The second, how-ever, has managed to split these two main statewide
parties, and has therebyprecipitated a crisis of constitutional
legitimacy of unprecedented proportionsin the posttransition
period. We will examine the nature of each of thesechallenges in
turn.
The roots of the rst challenge, coming from the Basque Country,
can betraced back to the mid-1990s, when a series of shocking
revelations implica-tioning the socialist government, over the
course of the previous decade, in astate-sponsored dirty war
against ETA exacerbated the already extremepolarisation of Basque
society. Then, in 1997, after the kidnapping andassassination of a
young PP city councillor, a wave of open indignation andcitizen
protest broke out in the region in the aftermath of which the
PNVdecided to negotiate secretly with ETA. In those negotiations,
the PNVessentially agreed to openly break with the constitutional
order in exchangefor ETAs promise to put down its arms. In short
order, this process led, rst,to the end of all collaboration
between the socialists in the Basque Country(PSE-PSOE) and the PNV;
next, to the declaration of an indenite cease-reon the part of ETA;
and, nally, to the signing of the so-called Pacto deLizarra, which
included the institutional collaboration between PNV, EA andthe
political branch of ETA (at the time, named Euskal Herritarrok) and
thesupport of the latter for the investiture of Ibarretxe as
President of the region.By the autumn of 1998, the PNVs
sovereigntist turn was complete. Even
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Constitution and national identity in Spain 23
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after ETA decided to pick up its arms once more, there would be
no turningback.
In October 2003, the lehendekari was presented, and the Basque
legislaturepassed the Plan Ibarretxe. The plan that was passed
declared that theBasque people have the right to determine their
own future . . . in accordancewith the right to
self-determination.12 The incompatibility between thisformulation
and the carefully worded compromise contained in Article 2 ofthe
Constitution is so obvious that it requires little comment. The
EE-proposed amendment that had been explicitly voted down in the
course ofthe constituent debates has thus been resurrected with a
vengeance.13
The Plan Ibarretxe does not call for outright independence for
the BasqueCountry; instead, it proposes a new con-federal status of
Free Associationwith the Spanish State, one characterised not only
by the right to unilateralrecourse to the referendum as the
appropriate mechanism for exercising thealleged right to
self-determination, but also by institutionalised mechanismsof
bilateral consultation and negotiation between the Basque and
Spanishexecutives.14
Finally, the plan includes even in its scheme for its own
implementation adenitive shift in the ultimate locus of sovereignty
from the Spanish to theBasque collectivity. More specically, the
plan explicitly breaks with theconstitutionally enshrined
procedures for Statute reform, by insisting thatafter approval by
an absolute majority in the Basque Parliament, should anagreement
not be reached in the Spanish Congress within a period of
sixmonths, the lehendakari has the right to ratify it unilaterally
instead viareferendum in the Basque Country.15
In February 2005, the two main statewide parties stood together
andjointly voted down a Basque nationalist initiative to have the
Plan Ibarretxedebated on the oor of Congress. In so doing, they
effectively fended off thechallenge to the existing constitutional
order, at least in the short run. Evenso, subsequently, the threat
of a unilateral referendum called by the lehenda-kari would long
loom large. By late 2007, the threat escalated after
Ibarretxepromised to convoke such a referendum by 25 October 2008.
To this end, theBasque legislature went so far as to pass a law
xing the terms and the date forthe said plebiscite. However, once
again Spains socialist government and themain conservative
opposition stood united on this issue, both lodging anappeal to the
Constitutional Court against what they deemed to be anobviously
unconstitutional law. As it turned out, the Court concurred;
andjust over two months before the foreseen date, the plebiscite
was in fact ruledunconstitutional.
In the meantime, the clear break on the part of the heretofore
moderateand semi-loyal nationalists in the PNV with the
constitutional orderhad already done much damage. It contributed to
poisoning the politicalatmosphere throughout the entire country.
However, ironically enough, itultimately also contributed to the
Basque nationalists defeat in the May2009 regional elections at the
hands of an unprecedented alternative
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24 Enric Martnez-Herrera and Thomas Jeffrey Miley
-
constitutionalist block led by the socialists, who in coalition
with theconservative Partido Popular proved capable of forging
sufcient support toput an end to 29 years of PNV rule in the
region. Even so, Ibarretxes Planserved to destabilise the current
federal system, in no small part by helpingprovoke a spiraling of
identity-based, territorial aspirations among theCatalan political
establishment.
Such aspirations in Catalonia were channeled into a proposal for
Statutereform that was, somewhat paradoxically, initially
spearheaded by PasqualMaragall, the erstwhile leader of the
socialist party in Catalonia. The proposalwas eventually passed on
30 September 2005 with the support of some eighty-ve per cent of
the members of the Catalan Parliament (with the exception ofthe
representatives of the PP). Albeit the Catalan proposal, in
comparisonwith its Basque counterpart, was less agrant in outing
the basic parametersof the constitutional compromise, it did shift
the ultimate locus of sovereigntyfrom the overall Spanish nation to
the particular Catalan one. This shift ismost explicit in the
proposed reforms preamble, which declares the vocationand right of
the citizens of Catalonia to freely determine their future as
apeople. Furthermore, in contradiction of the term nationality,
which, as thereader will recall, was both pillar and product of the
hard-fought compromiseof the Constitution, Article 1.1 of the
proposed Statute reform insisted insteadthat Catalonia is a
nation.
In addition to these two explicit challenges to the
Constitutional compro-mise, the proposed reform introduced at least
two other, somewhat moreimplicit, transformations. The rst of these
has to do with the source of publicpower. Article 1.2 of the
Constitution stipulates: National sovereignty residesin the Spanish
people, from whom the powers of the State emanate. Article2.4, of
the Statute, however, contends that The powers of the
Generalitatemanate from the people of Catalonia and are exercised
according to thisEstatut and the Constitution. The inclusion of
this clause constitutes animplicit challenge, insofar as the powers
of the Catalan regional governmentthus stem directly from the
Catalan demos, rather than indirectly from theConstitution itself,
the authority of which emanates from the Spanish demosas a
whole.
Finally, the proposed reform sought to exploit the fundamental
ambiguityin the term recognise employed in the Constitution in
order to render explicitthat the source of Catalonias collective
right to self-government bothprecedes and transcends the
Constitutional moment. In that vein, Article 5of the proposed
reform referred to historical rights, specically proclaimingthat
the self-government of Catalonia is also based on the historical
rights ofthe Catalan people, on its secular institutions, and on
the Catalan legaltradition, which this Estatut incorporates and
modernises . . . .
From the outset, Maragalls determination to push through a
reformprovoked intense and steadily increasing political debate and
tension through-out all of Spain. The Statute proposal was
initially an attempt on the part ofMaragall to capture and channel
a certain escalation of territorial aspirations
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Constitution and national identity in Spain 25
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on the part of nationalists in Catalonia, at a time when the
moderatenationalist minority coalition then governing the region,
Converge`ncia iUnio (CiU), had its hands tied by the support
provided for them by the PP.Coming on the heels of the threat of a
unilateral move to convoke areferendum on the part of the Basque
nationalists, as contained in the so-called Plan Ibarretxe,
Maragalls proposal met with the approval ofZapatero, both because
it constituted a more moderate alternative to thePlan Ibarretxe and
as a means of forging a popular front of sorts withperipheral
nationalist political forces, one promising sufcient
electoralweight to force the PP back into the opposition.
As a result, when Zapatero came to power in March 2004, he
arrived withmore than one important campaign promise to fulll. For
he had prominentlypledged to lend his support to Maragalls pet
project of Statute reform. In theface of strident opposition from
the PP, and despite some serious difcultiesimposing his program
within his own party, Zapatero managed to make goodon this promise
as well throughout the tumultuous reform process. In thetense
moments that preceded deliberations on the oor of the
CatalanParliament, Zapatero personally intervened to secure support
for it by theconservative Catalan nationalist opposition. Before
his direct intervention,CiU had credibly threatened to sink
Maragalls project by holding out for amore maximalist
alternative.
When the time came for deliberations on the oor of the Congreso
inMadrid, Zapatero successfully marginalised powerful dissidents
within hisown ranks, thereby securing the approval with relatively
few alterations.Among the amendments introduced to the text,
however, were the two mostexplicit challenges to the constitutional
compromise discussed above. Speci-cally, the mention of the right
of the citizens of Catalonia to freely determinetheir future as a
people was suppressed altogether. In its place, the muchmore
moderate claim that Catalonia wishes to develop its political
person-ality within the framework of a State which recognises and
respects thediversity of identities of the peoples of Spain was
inserted. Likewise, theproclamation of Catalonias status as a
nation was withdrawn as well. It wasreplaced in Article 1 with
explicit reference to the hard-fought constitutionalcompromise term
of nationality, albeit supplemented in the Preamble by anadditional
allusion, which reads as follows:
In reection of the feelings and wishes of the citizens of
Catalonia, the Parliament ofCatalonia has dened Catalonia as a
nation by an ample majority. The SpanishConstitution, in its second
article, recognises the national reality of Catalonia as
anationality.16
Both of these modications were instrumental in causing an
about-face by thesecessionist ERC, which subsequently withdrew its
support for the Statute.However, despite these alterations which
excluded the two most explicitchallenges to the constitutional
compromise, the other two implicit challenges both the assertion
that the powers of the Generalitat emanate directly from
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26 Enric Martnez-Herrera and Thomas Jeffrey Miley
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the Catalan people and the claim that Catalonias self-government
isgrounded in historical rights managed to emerge from the
Congresounscathed.
In the run-up to the referendum in Catalonia, Zapatero was very
active inthe attempt to mobilise an apathetic public in favor of a
clear majority vote toratify the new Statute. In fact, a clear
majority (73.2%) was attained withextremely low participation
(48.9% only). The Prime Minister has thusproved to be willing to
gamble much of his political capital on the prospectsfor a
successful outcome of the reform process. So much so that, along
withhis commitment to a negotiated settlement with ETA in the hopes
of puttingan end to the violence, the issue came to dominate the
countrys politicaldebate.
Upon the Statutes approval in the Congreso in Madrid, the
parliamentarygroup of the PP immediately led an appeal to the
Constitutional Court, asdid the Defensor del Pueblo and ve
Autonomous Communities, in accor-dance with the comparatively
restrictive stipulations for Constitutional appealprovided by the
1978 Constitution. As a result, the Constitutional Tribunalitself
has come under much re, and its highly awaited decision is expected
tobe handed down in the near future. Regardless of how the Court
decides, theintensity of the conict between the countrys two
principal political partiesover the issue of Statute Reform has
signied a fundamental break with thebasic features of consensus and
compromise that had previously characterisedthe politics of
national identity and the territorial conguration of the
Spanishstate, so much so that such consensus and compromise had
been consub-stantial with the constitutional order itself.
Notes
1 The reections of several of the seven founding fathers of the
1978 Constitution are of
enormous value for understanding the process through which the
Constitution was drafted. The
Catalan delegate for the communist party, Sole-Tura, has been
particularly prolic on the subject
(e.g. Sole-Tura 1978, 1985). So too has one of the UCDs
delegates, Herrero de Minon (1993,
1998). The socialist delegate, Peces-Barba, has presented his
own version, too (1988). Finally, of
interest in the same vein is an edited volume containing essays
from all seven of the founding
fathers, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Constitution
(Cisneros and Herrero 1998).
2 For an overview of the debates that arose during the
elaboration of the Constitution, see
Garrido Fallas (1985) edited volume. For other early
contributions, see Hernandez Gil (1982),
Attard (1983), and Bonime-Blanc (1984).
3 For a noteworthy contribution from the eld of political
theory, see Onate (1998). For a
useful discussion of the juridical implications of the wording
agreed upon, see Solozabal (2004b:
Ch. 1).
4 Along with this collective sense of urgency would come a
heightened level of scrutiny. Almost
immediately after its publication, the ambiguous formulation of
the preliminary draft would begin
to suffer a veritable avalanche of attacks from opposite anks.
On the one side, the reputed
publicist and long-time opponent of the Franco regime, Julian
Maras, would kick things off with
a series of articles in which he challenged the sagacity of any
mention of the term nationalities.
He would insist that the distinction made in the text between
nationalities and regions
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Constitution and national identity in Spain 27
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amounted to a form of clear discrimination that threatened to
engender suspicion and distrust in
many areas of Spanish society (Entrena-Cuesta 1985: 43). In so
doing, Maras was articulating
just a few of the fears shared by broad segments of the Spanish
center and right. In fact, from the
very outset of the drafting process, Fraga had vehemently
opposed the inclusion of the term
nationality on the grounds that such inclusion could only lead
to confusion. Over the course
of the rst half of 1978, when the proposed amendments to the
text were being debated, it became
increasingly clear that for almost everyone in the AP, as well
as for large portions of the governing
UCD, the term could only be interpreted as a synonym for nation.
This in turn implied for them
a fundamental incompatibility between mentioning the term in the
Constitutional text and
maintaining a commitment to the unity of the Spanish nation. In
other words, it implied for them
a capitulation to the separatist threat. Simultaneously, on the
peripheral nationalist ank, a
very different kind of capitulation was denounced namely, that
of the Minora Catalana.
Neither of the main Basque nationalist parties PNV or Euskadiko
Ezquerra (EE) proved
willing to go along with what they interpreted as Rocas
excessively pliant stance. Consequently,
during the period of proposed amendments to the preliminary
draft, representatives from each of
these formations would repeatedly criticise the reference to
Spain as a nation. As they saw it,
Spain is not a nation, but a State formed by a collection of
nations (Entrena-Cuesta 1985: 43).
5 The Basque Country and Catalonia had already been granted a
pre autonomous status by the
government though it had been made clear that the legal status
of these regions would ultimately
be derived by the Constitutional text.
6 Whats more, the nal draft of Title VIII would remain silent on
several important points. To
begin with, exercise of the right to self-government would not
be obliged. Nor would the
territorial conguration of these different regions be
established. Nor would the scope and content
of the right to self-government be xed. Nor even would any
distinction in the kind or level of
rights recognised and guaranteed for nationalities as opposed to
regions be drawn (Powell
2001).
7 The resulting gures are nicely complemented by private surveys
directed by DATA. For
treatment of the data, see Martnez-Herrera (2002).
8 In accordance with such criteria, the nal draft of the article
would read: The Basque People
or Euskal-Herria, as an expression of their nationality and in
order to accede to self-government,
constitute an Autonomous Community within the Spanish State
under the name of Euskadi or
the Basque Country, in accordance with the Constitution and with
this Statute, which lays down
its basic institutional rules.
9 In this portion of the analysis, the categories Spanish only
and more Spanish than of the
region, on the one hand, and of the region only and more of the
region than Spanish, on the
other, are collapsed into primarily Spanish and a primarily
regional identications, respec-
tively. This is because, in its rst nation-wide survey (1980),
the CIS did not offered the complete
array of answering options.
10 The somewhat higher level in 1990 may well be attributed to a
smaller sample size, the lack of
the other answer option, and the implementation by a pollster
other than the CIS.
11 Herri Batasuna changed its name to Euskal Herritarrok in
1998, and to Batasuna tout court
in 2001 for judiciary reasons.
12 More precisely, the plans preamble declares: The Basque
people have the right to decide their
own future, as was passed by an absolute majority of the Basque
Parliament on the 15th of
February, 1990, in conformity with the right of
self-determination of peoples, internationally
recognised, among others, in the International Pact of Economic,
Social, and Cultural Rights.
The Plan Ibarretxe can be accessed at
http://www.nuevoestatutodeeuskadi.net
13 The incompatibility between the Plan Ibarretxes invocation of
the right to self-determination
and the basic parameters of the constitutional compromise
extends further still. For the Plan
makes clear that the collective subject of self-determination,
the Basque people, being referred to
is not limited to the three provinces that compose the Basque
Autonomous Community; rather, it
is intended to include Navarra, as well as the three provinces
of the French Basque Country
(Iparralde). See, in particular, Articles 1, 2.1, 6 and 7 of the
Plan.
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28 Enric Martnez-Herrera and Thomas Jeffrey Miley
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14 The proposed new status of Free Association is announced in
the Plans preamble, in which
said association is declared compatible with the possibilities
for development within an Estado
compuesto, plurinacional y asimetrico. This new con-federal
relation would include the granting of
specically Basque Citizenship (Plans Article 4). The basic
institutional guidelines for governing
future foreseen bilateral relations are sketched in the Plans
Title I, Article 13 of which establishes
the referendum as the mechanism through which the Basque people
can freely renegotiate their
relation with the Spanish state; and Article 15 of which
provides the blueprint for the composition
of a bilateral commission between the Basque and Spanish
executives. On the other hand, Title
VIII of the Constitution explicitly reserves (in Article
149.1.32) the right to authorise referenda for
the central government alone.
15 The proposed procedure for implementation of the new Statute
is spelled out in Article 17 of
the Plan.
16 Evidently, the Spanish legislature was wise enough to
distinguish between the ample majority
registered by the representatives of the Catalan Parliament, and
the beliefs of the Catalan public
itself since, as the reader may recall from Figure 2 above, the
term nation has never been
embraced by even a simple majority, much less an ample majority,
of the Catalan citizenry.
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