Elías Bendodo, the new general coordinator of the Popular Party, has caused quite a stir by declaring, in an interview in El Mundo, that Spain is a multinational state, made up of various nationalities. Santiago Abascal immediately came out to accuse the PP of not having faith in the Spanish nation. Given the commotion caused by Bendodo's words, Alberto Núñez Feijóo disavowed his general coordinator: "It is evident that Spain is not a multinational country," he said. And Bendodo himself rectified his "verbal excess" with a tweet in which he made the official doctrine clear: "Spain is an indissoluble nation of 17 autonomies with their own identities." Ciudadanos has taken the opportunity to promote a constitutional reform that definitively eliminates the term nationalities.
This episode is revealing about the very peculiar way in which we talk about the nature of our State. A way that, among other things, prevents us from thinking of lasting solutions to territorial problems. That the territorial issue is permanently open forces us to consume enormous political energy and has led many to adopt a certain historical fatalism, according to which our country is condemned to suffer periodic territorial crises.
Faced with this historical fatalism, which continues to be paralyzing, it is worth understanding the reasons why this problem is entrenched. In my opinion, the main one is the lack of correspondence between reality and the institutional order. If the rules do not reflect reality, they will function poorly and suffer periodic crises. Of course, if the rules are imposed by threat and coercion, then the problem disappears by force, as has happened in long periods of our history, marked by authoritarianism and repression. But when we are in democratic periods, there is no way to silence the frictions that arise when the institutional system does not adequately reflect social reality.
Both in the Second Republic and in the current democratic period, centralism has receded, but in neither case was it possible to call things by their name and draw the consequences of it. Decentralization developed in both cases with enormous ambiguity.
In the Republic, the blurred concept of the integral State was coined, which, while acknowledging margin for regional autonomy, eliminated at the root any possibility of federal organization or recognition of a Catalan nation that had shared sovereignty with Spain.
In turn, in the Autonomous State of the 1978 Constitution, a wide margin of decentralization is contemplated and article 2 distinguishes between nationalities and regions. The term nationality, however, is not customary to describe a territorially based community. Thus, nationality refers rather to the link between citizens and states (someone may have Spanish nationality, or Argentinean...) or to the feeling of national belonging of people. Despite the artificiality of the term nationality, the deputies of Alianza Popular strongly opposed its use in the Constitution, considering that it was a euphemism used to mask the recognition of nations within Spain, that is, the famous plurinationality that is so repugnant to the right.
The development of the State of autonomies has ended up eliminating the difference between nationality and region, both due to the equalization of powers exercised and due to the definition that numerous autonomous communities have made of themselves in terms of nationality in their statutes of autonomy. In turn, the doctrine of the Constitutional Court has closed any way of plurinational interpretation of our State. In its controversial 2010 ruling on the Statute, the High Court established that “the nation that matters here is solely and exclusively the nation in the legal-constitutional sense. And in that specific sense the Constitution knows no other than the Spanish nation”.
In Spain there has always been a manifest inability to recognize its multinational reality. A minimally dispassionate examination of our history shows that the Spanish nation (the largest and the only one that manifests itself through its own State) has coexisted with at least three nations with their own language, Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country. If this blatant fact has not been admitted at the institutional level, it is because of the fear that plurinational recognition will produce a breakdown of unity, as if unity could only be guaranteed by affirming, against all historical logic, that Spain is a State mononational. This way of reasoning, perfectly reflected in the ruling of the Statute, assumes that national sovereignty is absolute and, therefore, indivisible. No fragment of the State can claim it, it only belongs to the whole.
This interpretation of sovereignty is especially strange given the high level of integration in the European Union: Spain shares sovereignty with other states and with the European institutions, in many cases losing control over policies that are essential for any State (such as monetary policies , commercial and competition). If the Spanish nation shares sovereignty with other European nations and Spain continues to be a sovereign state, why would sharing sovereignty between the various nations that make up Spain lead us irremediably to rupture?
The monistic reading of national sovereignty distorts reality. If our legal-constitutional system can only know the Spanish nation, there is no choice but to conclude that it is an ignorant system, that it does not understand the nature of the country in which it is applied and that, therefore, it cannot solve the problems of territorial integration of the State satisfactorily. Perhaps the territorial conflict would be more manageable if we began by acknowledging what we are, a complex and heterogeneous group of overlapping nations that have coexisted for several centuries within the same State.
