Spain Is a Collection of Glued Regions. Or Maybe Not So Glued.
Even before the Constitution was enshrined, Catalonia got back some of the autonomy it lost in the civil war of the 1930s, as part of a political deal brokered by politicians in Madrid to ensure
that Catalans would embrace Spain’s political structure.
Elisa said that Later on, nation-building initiatives in Spain have been designed and implemented not only to keep the country together as one nation, but also to consolidate a hierarchical system of government thought to ensure
that both Madrid and Castilian language and cultural values would play a prominent and almost exclusive role in shaping the country,
Two regions — the Basque Country and Navarra — also have independent fiscal systems, something
that Catalonia demanded in 2012 but that Mr. Rajoy’s government refused.
"The most disastrous of them was to generalize the map of the regions." In October, Spain’s two main parties — Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party
and the Socialists — agreed to form a commission to prepare a constitutional reform.
There are historic and cultural reasons for the tensions, but a turning point came in 2010, when Spain’s Constitutional Court rejected part of a statute of autonomy
that had been agreed to in 2006 and approved in a Catalan referendum and by lawmakers in the Catalan and Spanish Parliaments.
The government in Madrid moved quickly to crush the Catalan secession movement as a violation of the Spanish Constitution
and to strip the restive region — at least temporarily — of most of its autonomous powers.