Spain: The State, the Regime Crisis and the National Question

The crisis of October 2017, following the referendum (which was not authorised by the State) on the independence of Catalonia on 1 October and the repression by the State to prevent it, marked the climax of an institutional crisis that has been running since the outbreak of the Catalan independence movement in September 2012. In turn, it was the culminating, although contradictory, moment of a regime crisis that started with the outbreak of the 15M movement, the indignado rebellion, in 2011. In this article I will analyse the historical roots of the 2017 crisis and the political and institutional consequences that the events of October 2017 have had. My objective is to analyse the current regime crisis in the Spanish state from the point of view of the role played by the Catalan national question. I am not going to analyse the overall regime crisis or the independence movement, but specifically how the latter has been related with the former. To do so, I will provide a general overview of the genesis of the so-called Regime of 1978 from the point of view of the national question and of Spain’s failed nation-building process.