Territorial Secession and Federal Loyalty in the 1978 Spanish Constitution

Abstract

The territorially decentralized State constitutes a type of State that reflects the tense balance between two apparently opposed forces. On the one hand, the centrifugal forces favoured by the territorial distribution of the legislative power, which allows democratically elected bodies to regulate certain matters according to their own interests within their own territory; and on the other hand, the centripetal forces resulting from the need to guarantee, within this legal plurality, a unitary efficient working of the State. Among the legal instruments belonging to the decentralized State, federal loyalty may have been the one that has tried to reconcile all the above-mentioned forces in the most efficient way, in an attempt to prevent the emergence of secessionist claims. The recent emergence of secessionist claims in decentralized Spain is most likely related to the fact that neither the law nor the scientific literature have considered the existence of a principle of territorial loyalty. This essay will try to analyse whether such a principle can be inferred from the Spanish Constitution and what legal implications can be derived from it.