National state foreign policy and regional external action: An uneasy relationship

The sovereign nation-state has traditionally been conceived as the main actor in the international system, with the ability to pursue independent foreign policy considered an integral part of state sovereignty. While international relations have always been more than the sum of interstate relations, in recent years the rescaling of social, political, economic and cultural systems has produced a plethora of actors and networks both public and private, and at different territorial scales that question central states’ monopoly in international relations and, potentially, the very nature of sovereignty. This chapter deals with the external action of sub-state regions, which has grown exponentially in the last decades, and asks under what conditions is this external action perceived as a challenge to nation-state foreign policy and, by extension, to the sovereignty of the nation-state. We centre our analysis on the development of sub-state entity (SSE) external action in Spain since the re-establishment of democracy in 1978, and specifically that of Catalonia. The analysis of this case is understood as a plausibility test for checking the factors and the conditions under which paradiplomacy turns to protodiplomacy