Spain has suffered in the last two decades a very high separation tension. In this lecture, professor Roberto Galán-Vioque explains what happened in Catalonia in 2017, where an attempted referendum was held, the approval in 2005 by the Parliament of the Basque Country of an unconstitutional bill to call unilaterally for a referendum, and in 2006 the Second Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia by the Spanish Parliament as an attempt to prevent these separatist movements that was annulled by the Constitutional Court.

He argues that the separatist tensions in Spain have been aggravated by the existence of an insufficient, discriminatory and inadequate system of financing of the regions, by the partisan use of the idea of the unity of Spain both by the independence parties and by the so-called constitutionalist parties, and by a quite intransigent position of the Constitutional Court that has rejected the possibility of a self-determination referendum, going further what the Constitution itself establishes. It is an extremely complex situation that requires recovering the spirit of the political transition in order to undertake a necessary constitutional reform.