The economical, social and political globalization led to major changes in the international system, increasing integration between economies, fostering the emergence of new players and making much faster information flows. For few decades, the nation-state, actor par excellence of the international system since the nineteenth century, has been forced to adapt itself. In this context, one of the main consequences of the globalization vertigo was the transformation of sovereignty, which is the concept of the structural state of modernity.

The mutation of sovereignty was recorded at supranational and subnational levels being the former a through the expansion of the regional integration process of which the European Union (EU) is a prime example. Starting with the aim of building a common market in the early days the European Economic Community, the EU eventually became a space of political, social and cultural integration. Although it’s hard to find a suitable definition for this entity, it is easy to see that it lead to a loss of sovereignty in the states belonging to it. That is, the states conceptually adapted to a process they didn´t control at all. In parallel to this process, some national identities that do not have traditional sovereignty and established in the framework of sovereign states materialized some of their political demands through decentralization processes that lead to changes in traditional elements.

This article aims to examine new forms of materialization of national identities that are established within the framework of decentralized democratic states. Thus, we focus on the examples of the autonomous communities of Catalonia and the Basque Country, established in the Spanish State in the framework of the democratic transition process started with the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. The main argument of the text will consider the effect that formulas of political and institutional dynamics also correspond to a dynamic concept of sovereignty.

As for reasoning, we turn to the framework established by the Spanish Constitution of 1978 and the statutes of autonomy Basque and Catalan, as well as a set of separate legislation for each of the two regions. These contributed for the assuming of functions by decentralized organs of power traditionally controlled by the sovereign state.

Leia o artigo:

ROMAO, Felipe Vasconcelos.A transformação dos mecanismos de materialização política das identidades nacionais: o Estado autonômico espanhol e a emergência das autonomias-nação basca e catalã. Rev. bras. polít. int. [online]. 2013, vol.56, n.2, pp. 63-78. Available from: <http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-73292013000200004&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=pt&gt; ISSN 0034-7329. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0034-73292013000200004.