We have it a while ago, in the face of secessionism, both in Europe and in other continents we find the face of the other currency: movements that what they are looking for is the union against separation. One of them has sounded again these days. Actually, it is not new, but it always gives speaking in the case of a very particular territory of the United States … and that wants to be part of Spain.
Union is strength. As we said, this other face of the currency travels shared historical and historical narratives, from the longing Autonomous Community number 18 of Spain.
Examples There is more, since Tyrol of the South has revived in the past old belongings Habsburg-Germanic when dreaming of a reintegration in Austria, while in the “Great Albania” ethnic-national ghosts were revived still lit in the Balkans. Iberism, more lyrical than political, evoked the peninsular union between Spain and Portugal, sustained more by nostalgic intellectuals than by movements with real citizen traction.
In parallel, the “great Hungary” continued to beating on the banks of Magaria nationalism, especially among the Hungarians who were out of the borders after the Trianon Treaty, and in Valonia, a small game dreams of returning to France a strip of the old Napoleonic space.
The same end. All these movements, although of little practical viability, reveal that identities not only fragment: sometimes they also seek to reconstitute, as if the map of Europe, far from stabilizing, it was still an unfinished canvas where some peoples aspire to join beyond the borders that they had to live.
Let’s put as an example the case of Puerto Rico.
A historical link. Among the embodies of an empire that dissolved more than a century ago, there are still territories and movements that, by conviction or nostalgia, aspire to restore the political ties that one day united them to the Spanish crown. This is the case of Puerto Rico, an archipelago that for more than 400 years was an integral part of the Spanish empire and that, after the effects of the Spanish-American war in 1898, was ceded to the United States.
Since then, the island has lived in an ambiguous legal status as an associated free state: it is not an independent nation, but neither a sovereign state within the American Federation. In this institutional limbo, the Movement Awards reunification, a group that proposes, in a serious but controversial way, that Puerto Rico returns to Spain and becomes its autonomous community number eighteen. In other words, the initiative seeks to activate historical, sentimental and legal springs to reverse the course taken more than a century ago, challenging both the structure of the Spanish State and the constitutional rigidity of the United States.
Legal obstacles. Obviously it is not so simple. In fact, the legal reality is relentless against the aspirations of the movement. The United States Constitution prohibits any form of territorial secession that is not mediated by Congress, which annuls the possibility of Puerto Rico abandoning its link with Washington without a highly unlikely legal process.
On the other hand, Spain lacks a mechanism in its order that contemplates the incorporation of an alien territory as a new autonomous community. Although activists denounce a blackout Informative that prevents the dissemination of their message within Puerto Rico, they claim to have the support of 16.3% of the population (figure not verified by independent studies).
There is no game. In addition, and very important, being constituted as a cultural association and not as a political party (a limitation imposed by US legislation on entities with proposals incompatible with their federal system) cannot attend elections or develop institutional political activity. All this gives the movement a more symbolic than pragmatic, more provocative than realizable.
Background questions. Be that as it may, and despite the obvious limitations, ahead of reunification opens a peculiar window on the perception of identity in Puerto Rico. In a territory where there is no right to vote for the president of the United States, where American citizenship is granted without full representation and where Spanish remains the maternal tongue of the majority, there are sectors that feel culturally closer to Hispanic Europe than to the Anglo -Saxon universe.
The phenomenon, although minority, revives old debates about decolonization, self -determination and belonging, not only from a legal perspective, but also from an emotional, historical and linguistic.
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