Spain Is a Collection of Glued Regions. Or Maybe Not So Glued.<br />Even before the Constitution was enshrined, Catalonia got back some of the autonomy it lost in the civil war of the 1930s, as part of a political deal brokered by politicians in Madrid to ensure<br />that Catalans would embrace Spain’s political structure.<br />Elisa said that Later on, nation-building initiatives in Spain have been designed and implemented not only to keep the country together as one nation, but also to consolidate a hierarchical system of government thought to ensure<br />that both Madrid and Castilian language and cultural values would play a prominent and almost exclusive role in shaping the country,<br />Two regions — the Basque Country and Navarra — also have independent fiscal systems, something<br />that Catalonia demanded in 2012 but that Mr. Rajoy’s government refused.<br />"The most disastrous of them was to generalize the map of the regions." In October, Spain’s two main parties — Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party<br />and the Socialists — agreed to form a commission to prepare a constitutional reform.<br />There are historic and cultural reasons for the tensions, but a turning point came in 2010, when Spain’s Constitutional Court rejected part of a statute of autonomy<br />that had been agreed to in 2006 and approved in a Catalan referendum and by lawmakers in the Catalan and Spanish Parliaments.<br />The government in Madrid moved quickly to crush the Catalan secession movement as a violation of the Spanish Constitution<br />and to strip the restive region — at least temporarily — of most of its autonomous powers.
