Throughout the lengthy process of drafting and approving the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia and negotiating the financing model of the autonomous communities under the ordinary tax regulations for the period 2009-2014 (now subjected to an uncertain review process), Catalan society and the government of the Generalitat must yet again trust the syllogism (promise) which claims that by attaining a greater degree of decision-making authority on public spending (education, health, security, social assistance, etc.) they would get a correlative increase in budgetary resources from the Spanish State in order to properly meet the needs of the citizenry of Catalonia. In other words, if the government of the Spanish State agreed to shift the competences to deal with the public services inherent to the welfare state to the Generalitat de Catalunya, the principle of institutional loyalty and fiscal co-responsibility would ensure that it would also provide Catalonia with the financing needed to ensure a level of care and provision of public goods equivalent to the fiscal effort made by Catalan society.

The challenges of the tax administration, by Joan Iglesias Capellas

The current debate on the consequences for the European Union if there were a declaration of independence within a Member State seems to revolve around the presumably irrefutable fact of a sine die exclusion of the new State, in view of a set of juridical and political considerations. However, these considerations must be analysed in greater detail in order to clarify on a debate which has become excessively polarised, influenced by the zeal to proffer arguments in favour of or against independence.

In order to determine what the legal consequences of a situation of this kind might be, we shall analyse four clearly interrelated issues: the identification of general international legal norms or European Union legal norms which regulate the succession of States within international organisations; the European Union’s current position on succession matters regarding the organisation and especially the case of secession within a Member State; the factors that the European Union might bear in mind when responding to a request for succession with member status for the new State that emerged from the secession from a Member State; and finally, the European Union’s possible responses in the case of secession within a Member State in terms of the succession of it member status within the organisation.

 Legal scenarios for the European Union’s relations…, Alfonso González-Bondia