Incunabula of Europe. Part II: Nicola Catalano, between Tangier and Luxembourg (1950-1953)

Abstract

Nicola Catalano’s career epitomizes the hinge between the Moroccan Italian administration of the Tangier International Zone and the early European institutions, illustrating how legal expertise shaped, and was shaped by, semi-colonial governance and postwar European integration. Born in 1910, Catalano’s trajectory – from Sapienza graduate to State Attorney and legal advisor to Italian government bodies – coalesced in Tangier, where his role as Legal Advisor to the International Administration emerged amid a push for functional autonomy within a framework dominated by Franco-British competition and American influence. His selection in 1950, amid a national contest involving multiple candidates, reflected Italy’s strategic aim to reassert influence within Tangier’s multinational administration, despite the presence of Spanish and other European jurists. Catalano’s contributions, including his early intervention on the powers of the Mixed Tribunal and the primacy of international treaties over local laws, anticipated a constitutional logic that transcended traditional sovereignty: he argued that while the Tribunal’s authority was limited to interpretive and applicative functions, it could not unilaterally annul national laws and must defer to the “Constitution convention” governing Tangier. He underscored the hierarchical, yet contested, status of legal sources – treaties, Dahirs (constitutional-like laws), codes, and ordinary laws – within a system where international law could override internal statutes, but where no single body possessed absolute constitutional supremacy in the absence of explicit treaty provisions. Upon his relocation to Luxembourg in 1953 to contribute to the European Coal and Steel Community, Catalano’s thinking crystallized into a rhetoric of economic liberalization and political integration as indispensable conditions for a robust European unity. His writings from Tangier – advocating open economic ex-change, the democratization of commerce, and a federative approach balancing national interests with continental cooperation –anticipated a Europe rooted in Africa’s transcontinental transformers: Tangier’s cosmopolitan constitutionalism as a microcosm of Europe’s future order.