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dominant characteristic in the institutional organization of Spanish politics
since its early modern days in 1810. Thus, the process of decentralization
initiated with the Constitution implied a clear historical break, especially after
nearly forty years of strongly centralized dictatorship. In fact, the EA represents
the first enduring noncentralized polity in Spanish history. The union as such,
however, and its main constituent elements, had a long historical tradition and
did not emerge out of distributive concerns at the time of democratization. As
we shall see in detail in
Chapter 7
, the Spanish constitutional design left many
aspects of the process of decentralization open for future political negotiation,
but not the formation of the political union itself, nor the definition of its
system of political representation.
Once the unions formed out of military and geopolitical considerations,
acute trade-offs over the design of their fiscal structures emerge. Conflicts
between trade oriented and domestic oriented states, between urban and rural
areas, between natural resource intensive and manufacturing intensive regions,
between advanced and laggard areas - all conflicts at the center of this topic's
argument - unfolded very early in the history of these political unions. On
the basis of these conflicts Beard (
1933
) produced an economic interpretation
of the Constitution of the United States, recently vindicated and extended by
McGuire (
2003
). Similar tensions are observable since the early days of the
history of the European Union, as illustrated for instance by the conflicts over
agricultural subsidies to producers potentially at risk as a result of the process.
More generally, the history of federations is very rich in conflicts about who gets
what. Any decision about tariffs, price levels, entry restrictions to imports or
exports; any regulation on standards (let alone any decision on taxes) by either a
state or the federal government is bound to generate massive distributive effects.
Out of this large universe of cases, I have decided to focus more precisely on the
design of fiscal structures, that is, taxes and transfers either between individuals
or between territories, in historical periods in which a systematic intervention
of the state in the economy was either demanded for the first time (such as the
Great Depression) or a well known reality (Reunification, Spain). Under these
circumstances, the stakes are higher, and any change in patterns of economic
geography gain political saliency much faster.
Within this latter subset though, additional requirements limit the number
of appropriate cases for the purposes of causal identification. As stated pre-
viously in conditions 2 to 4, the evaluation of the conditional relationship
between economic geography and representation requires a set of cases with
established systems of representation that vary along the continuum ranging
from centrifugal to centripetal representation. The cases under scrutiny in the
following chapters span the range of the centrifugal-centripetal representation
scale, with the EU being the most centrifugal union in the subset, and Germany
and Spain being the most centripetal ones in origin. This variation in consti-
tutional structures and systems of representation is a necessary condition to
assess how different systems react to transformations in economic geography
