The Council of Europe and the Catalan Secessionist Process: The Authoritarian Drift of the Radical Democratic Principle

Abstract

This study shines a light on the problem of Catalan secessionist leaders’ abuse of the term “democracy”, an issue rarely discussed in the academic debate. The Catalan secessionist case has mainly been studied as a problem concerning the principle of territorial integrity and how it relates to the existence (or otherwise) of a right of self-determination for a substate entity. However, it is also a problem of democracy. For the entire secessionist process was based on a democratic principle outside and against the Spanish Constitution: one that defends the supremacy and inviolability of the (regional, in this case) parliamentary majority over the rule of law and respect for minority rights. It thus pitted a radical or identity-based democracy against the democracy protected and promoted by the Council of Europe (in which the rule of law, human rights and democracy are inseparable principles forming a single whole). The Venice Commission, the European Court of Human Rights and a divided Parliamentary Assembly have all witnessed this defence of authoritarianism through the radical democratic principle advocated by the leaders of the Catalan process. In response, the first two have defended constitutional democracy, the common heritage on which European public order is based. In 2021, the PACE took a short-lived position (it has adopted no further resolutions in this sense), buoyed by a weak majority, in favour of the Catalan radical democratic principle. Two years later, however, it, too, would defend constitutional democracy as the “genuine democracy” to which the 1949 Treaty of London refers, albeit again by a slim majority. The study concludes that there is no place for the radical democratic principle in Council of Europe law.