The Spanish Constitution on its 300th anniversary

Abstract

This article provides some reflection on the Spanish constitution and, more particularly, on the «territorial constitution of the State». It considers how open-ended, ambiguous and indeterminate it is and the enormous complexity of the formulae and techniques employed to distribute powers throughout Spanish territory. This complexity has required the Constitutional Court to become a mainstay of the political architecture of the State. Thirty years down the line, the real challenge facing the Constitution and the State that it governs, is how to avoid the risks of political fragmentation in an organisational model whose potential for devolving powers is left so dangerously open that it appears to have no end and threatens to centrifuge a State that has been so arduously constructed over the last few years. The problem today is that with the reforms of regional charters, the process of transforming our constitutional State may have generated such deep constitutional mutation that Title VIII of the Constitution will be stretched beyond its bursting point. The author’s conclusion is that the fuzziness or relative lack of determination in the 1978 Constitution regarding the territorial structure of the State is not equivalent to the non-existence of limits separating what can be done within its scope and what cannot.