June 21

9:00 AM - 10:45 AM

2.A.06

Pablo Baez Guersi

Abstract: In recent years, negotiations to hold an independence referendum occurred in both Catalonia and Scotland, but only succeeded in the latter region. The Catalan and Scottish governments have claims to sovereignty that compete with those of their national governments. In this paper, I examine how the constitutions of Spain and the United Kingdom, respectively, influenced the referendum negotiations. My paper compares how each government’s claims to sovereignty were accommodated—or not—within the Spanish and British constitutional frameworks. I argue that the flexibility of the British constitution, compared to the Spanish one, is crucial to understanding why an agreement was achieved in Scotland but not in Catalonia. Agreements on holding independence referendums require concessions from both national and regional governments. The national government accepts the risk of losing sovereignty over part of its territory, while the regional government recognizes it lacks the sovereign power to organize the referendum on its own. In the United Kingdom, a flexible constitution allowed for a compromise of this nature. In Spain, on the other hand, the possibility of reaching a compromise was made extremely difficult by the country’s rigid constitution, which entrenched a single restrictive interpretation of sovereignty. Considering current European politics, my study shows how constitutional flexibility could play a pivotal role in achieving compromises between old and new claims to sovereignty.
Keywords: sovereignty, constitution, independence, referendum, Catalonia, Scotland.

Disciplines: Political Science
Law

Substantive Tags: Comparative Political Institutions, Territorial Politics, Western Europe

Research Networks: None of the Above

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