“The Spanish-Catalan Governments commission cannot enter into the definition of the general state framework or affect the competences of the rest of the Autonomous Communities”
Teresa Freixes, professor of Constitutional Law of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, founder and president of the Concordia Civic platform and full academician of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), has published the article “Bilateralismo versus constitucionalismo” (Bilateralism versus constitutionalism), where she warns about what she considers an interpretation of the Spanish Constitution concerned, partial and alien to the bodies envisaged to exercise it within the framework of the current bilateral negotiation maintained by the Governments of the Spanish State and the Generalitat of Catalonia. To the extreme, the academician points out, that its conclusions may affect, directly or indirectly, the rest of the Autonomous Communities and all the Catalan and Spanish citizens, in a state of defencelessness.
“The State-Generalitat bilateral commission that is put back into operation is not a new cooperation instrument, its functions are similar to those of the other bilateral commissions that exist in the Autonomous Communities, does not limit the State’s capacity for definition and coordination of territorial policies, as defined by the Constitutional Court”, considers Freixes.
Dra. Teresa Freixes
The professor gives the example of the United States and, above all, of Germany or Austria, which function within the diversity that the complex federal structure entails because its instruments of political and technical cooperation maintain a regular functioning and serve to unblock the natural divergences that the composite States can present.
“Spain has a problem that comes from afar and that gets worse after the break of the constitutional pact that was produced with the prolegomena of the Catalan Statute of 2006 -she says-. When these crises result in confrontations like the current one, they can turn into structural crises that confront to the citizens to position themselves mentally in a dangerous way if there is no rational programmatic axis that adequately overcomes the intellectual chaos that all this entails, especially taking into account the two main axes in which everyone wants to exercise their unilateral hegemony: communication and the education”.
