Noah Feldman, Columnist

On Paper, Spain Is Ready for Showdown With Catalonia

The constitution allows the government to act when a region goes rogue. The question is whether the fallout can be contained.

October 24, 2017 at 10:30 AM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Catalonia is ready, too.
Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg

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Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is playing with fire. Over the weekend, he announced he would invoke a never-used provision of the Spanish constitution to remove the elected leaders of Catalonia from office because of their support for Catalan independence.

The provision, with antecedents going back to the Holy Roman Empire, is designed to avoid fundamental conflict between federal states and a central government. Had the U.S. Constitution included a similar rule, it might have helped avert the Civil War. But historically, invoking the right to put down a rogue state also poses a grave danger to federalism and even democracy itself, as it did when Germany last took a similar step, in 1932.