Introduction

The political and administrative map of Spain is now radically different from what it was less than twenty years ago. Instead of a unitary state divided into some fifty provinces (figure 4.p. 47), the role of which was merely to administer the services of the central government, the country now has a semi-federal structure in which the powers of the state are shared with seventeen newly created autonomous communities (figure 7.1 and table 7.1), each endowed with its own president, parliament, executive and high court of justice. In the modern history of Spain, there is no precedent for such a major change in the structure of the state, nor for such a fundamental shift of power from the centre to the periphery.

The long and complex history of the tensions between the centre and the periphery in Spain falls outside the scope of this work and is well documented elsewhere. Suffice it to say here that, partly as a reaction to centuries of stifling centralism, culminating in the dictatorship of General Franco, and partly in response to deepseated cultural differences – particularly manifest in the case of the Basques and the Catalans – the early post-Franco era witnessed considerable popular and official support for some form of decentralisation. This was conceived as an essential ingredient of the return to democracy.