State, Constitution, and Parliament: Three Axes of the Spanish Constitutional Debate of 1931

Abstract

This article aims to elucidate the relationship between the ideas of state, constitution, and Parliament in the Spanish constitutional debate of 1931. It argues that Members of Parliament (MPs) made a valuable contribution when understanding the relevance of this interrelation in terms of political philosophy and legal theory. From a methodological perspective, this study pays attention to the arguments of MPs in the course of the constitutional sessions which took place between August and December 1931. In doing so, it portrays the ideological differences of left-wing, centrist and right-wing parties in that constituent assembly. In the first section (“European influences on the Constitution of 1931”) the intellectual links with interwar trends of public law, administrative law and European constitutionalism are highlighted. The second section (“Constitution and Parliament according to Spanish representatives”), shows the meanings given to this nascent constitutional democracy by MPs. Despite their ideological differences they were in favour of strengthening Parliament and the Constitution as a prerequisite for safeguarding democracy. The conclusions resume the argumentative thread, that is to say, that the regime, a democratic republic, was understood by a large majority of MPs as the confluence of three conditions founded on doctrinal and conceptual exchanges from interwar European constitutionalism: the acknowledgement of parliamentary sovereignty, the legal and administrative revamping of institutions, and state intervention in the economy.