Spain’s veto seems unlikely. José Manuel García-Margallo, Spain’s foreign minister, declined to state that Spain would veto Scottish accession when invited to do so. Instead, the Spanish Government has taken the line that the cases of Catalonia and Scotland are fundamentally different because the UK’s constitutional setting permits referendums on secession while the current Spanish constitution enshrines the indivisibility of the Spanish state and establishes that national sovereignty belongs to all Spaniards.
The Spanish government is trying to make a virtue out of necessity. They would find it politically difficult to oppose an independent Scotland’s membership. As Stephen Tierney and Katie Boyle observe, ‘if the UK Government is prepared to recognise an independent Scotland and work towards its membership of the EU with the cooperation of EU institutions and the overwhelming majority of the other Member States, then it is simply unforeseeable that this would be vetoed by an individual Member State’.
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