Colour in every part of Spain with an organised movement arguing it ought to be its own country, and the Spanish flag ends up holding rather less of the map than you would expect. Galicia, Asturias, León, the Basque Country, Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearics, Andalusia, the Canary Islands out in the Atlantic — each flying its own colours. Spain is one of Europe's oldest continuously existing states, and it has never quite settled how many nations it contains.

The constitution of 1978 tried to answer that with a sentence that is either a masterpiece of diplomacy or a deliberate fudge, depending on who is reading it. Article 2 proclaims "the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation" and, in the same breath, "recognises and guarantees the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions of which it is composed." Nationalities — nacionalidades — in the plural. The drafters were working three years after Franco's death, under the eye of an army that had spent four decades suppressing regional identity. They needed wording that Catalan and Basque negotiators could sign and that generals could tolerate, and they achieved it by declining to define any of the crucial terms.

Three of these movements are conventionally called the historic nationalities: Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia. Each has its own language, each had a statute of autonomy under the Second Republic in the 1930s, and each then spent the Franco years with that language pushed out of schools, broadcasting and often the street. When democracy returned they expected to be first in the queue, and to be treated as categorically different from ordinary provinces.

They were not, and that is arguably the most consequential accident in modern Spanish politics. Manuel Clavero Arévalo, a minister from Seville, argued that Andalusia should reach full self-government by the same fast constitutional route as Catalonia. His slogan — "café para todos," coffee for everyone — gave the arrangement its lasting nickname. Instead of a few special cases inside an otherwise centralised state, Spain built seventeen autonomous communities plus two autonomous cities, nearly all with their own parliaments and presidents. Andalusia voted for the fast track in February 1980 and took it.

The outcome satisfied almost nobody. Regions with no separatist tradition acquired substantial governments. The historic nationalities found their distinctiveness diluted into a system in which everyone was distinctive. And genuinely uneven bargains survived anyway: the Basque Country and Navarre kept the concierto económico, collecting most of their own taxes and remitting a negotiated quota to Madrid. It is an arrangement with nineteenth-century roots that Catalonia has never been granted, and Catalan resentment about it has been a fixture of Spanish politics ever since.

In the Basque Country the argument turned violent. ETA, founded in 1959 under the dictatorship, killed 853 people across roughly five decades before declaring a permanent ceasefire in 2011 and formally dissolving in May 2018. Basque nationalism today is overwhelmingly parliamentary and, paradoxically, less fixated on formal independence than it once was. A devolved government with its own police force, tax authority, health service and Basque-language schools has absorbed much of the original demand.

Catalonia moved in the opposite direction. Its 2006 statute of autonomy, approved by Catalan referendum and by the Spanish parliament, was substantially struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2010 — including the preamble's description of Catalonia as a nation. Support for independence, which had polled well under 20% for years, climbed steeply afterwards. On 1 October 2017 the Catalan government held a referendum the courts had ruled illegal, and national police were filmed dragging voters out of polling stations. The Barcelona parliament declared independence on 27 October. Madrid invoked Article 155, suspended the Catalan government and prosecuted or exiled its leaders. None of the underlying question was resolved, and Catalan parties have held decisive weight in national coalition arithmetic ever since.

The rest of the map is quieter but not imaginary. Galician nationalism runs deep culturally and thinly at the ballot box. Andalusian, Aragonese, Valencian, Balearic, Asturian and Leonese movements all exist, with support ranging from a few per cent down to almost nothing. The Canary Islands — roughly 100 km off the Moroccan coast and some 1,800 km from Madrid — produced an armed independence movement in the 1960s and 1970s that briefly attracted sympathy from parts of the Organisation of African Unity.

What this map really shows is a state that resolved a crisis by leaving its central question open. Spain's own political vocabulary calls the result an estado de las autonomías, a state of autonomies: a phrase describing the machinery while avoiding any claim about what the thing is. That ambiguity is much of why the transition to democracy was peaceful. It is also why the argument is still running half a century later.

Sources: Spanish Constitution of 1978, Articles 2, 143, 151 and 155; Constitutional Court of Spain, Judgment 31/2010 on the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia; Real Instituto Elcano, "Basque terrorist group ETA disbands after 60 years"; Encyclopaedia Britannica, "ETA" and "Spain: Local government"; Wikipedia, "Café para todos" and "Manuel Clavero."

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