‘From the beginning’: the jurisprudential breakdown of constitutional self-government

Abstract

In 1978, the Spanish Constitution designed a system of self-government by means of negotiated Statutes for the accommodation of the most differentiated territories. It recognized them as nationalities endowed with historical rights and therefore with a title preceding the Constitution itself in time and also, virtually, at law. Even the referenda of initiative for access to autonomy that had been carried out under the previous Constitution, that one of the Second Republic, were constitutionally revalidated. In this way, the Basque Country and Catalonia were constituted in 1979. It was a process that soon began to be distorted. The Constitutional Court, barely established, began in 1981 a meticulous work of sabotage of such a framework of self-government. Here is a case of truly preventive jurisprudence or, as it would turn out, juris-imprudence. That is what this paper is concerned about.