Multinational Federalism and Value Pluralism: The Spanish Case

This book addresses the democratic accommodation of national pluralism through federal rules. The key question is: can federalism be a fair and workable way of articulating multinational societies according to revised liberal-democratic patterns? In recent years, scholarly discussion on this issue has undergone a change. Nowadays, the answer to this question is much more complex than the one that traditional political liberalism and federalism used to give us. In the past, these two political approaches usually addressed the question of political pluralism without seriously including national pluralism in the discussion. A theoretical attitude that has often misrepresented and impoverished the moral discussions and the institutional practices of multinational democratic federations. The author presents a model based on Isaiah Berlin's concept of value pluralism and on the analysis of federal democracies. He also puts forward a critical analysis of the current Spanish territorial model and suggests fourpotential future scenarios for this model based on federal patterns.

Ferran Requejo is Professor of Political Science at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.