Federalism, Cultural Policies, and Identity Pluralism: Cooperation and Conflict in the Spanish Quasi-Federal System

Abstract

The division of cultural policy between different levels of administration and the coordination between them in federal countries is a relatively neglected area of research, even though the cultural sphere always requires a balanced combination of autonomy and governance. A particularly interesting case of this equilibrium arises in Spain; often described as a quasi-federal system, both regarding its model of state and within the sphere of cultural policy. However, we demonstrate that, despite the broadly decentralized development of cultural administration in Spain—a plurinational and multicultural state—different recent judicial and political processes are distorting the quasi-federalism constructed over the past three decades. We also show that there is a growing tendency to recentralize and to promote a single cultural conception of the country.