The political developments in Catalunya concerning its contested referendum and the (suspended) unilateral declaration of independence have reopened the debate on secessionism in Europe. The proposed panel aims at analysing the challenges that such movements pose both for the respective constitutional orders and the European edifice in general. López Bofill‘s paper argues that the prohibitions...
All the world‘s a stage (of popular sovereignty): Catalan referendum between the script, performance, and calculus
In their selective iconoclasm, those who have moved beyond a sovereign people have also neglected the unwritten scripts of constitutional change that accompany the vocabulary of popular sovereignty. Those are the scripts that Catalan sovereigntists, to their disappointment, tried to perform in an attempt to impress relevant spectators—the external actors for whom they believed had...
Hubris, Constitutionalism and the ‘indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation’
The paper analyses the struggles of the Catalan Government to organise a referendum on secession and the Constitutional framework invoked by the Spanish central authorities to prohibit it. On then one hand, it shows that the repression of secessionist referendums within the Spanish Constitutional framework triggers several problematic questions concerning the role of constitutional supremacy...
Secession in the EU Constitutional Order
The aim of this paper is to trace the position of the EU constitutional order of States with regard to the right of secession of sub-state entities. The thesis of the paper is that although the EU legal order does not recognise a universal and unilateral right of secession to them, its position is more...