Professor of Constitutional Law at the UBIn 1978 an important effort was made to solve the Catalan and Basque problems, and a flexible and potentially diverse territorial system was envisaged, adjusted to the expressed will of self-government these territories had. The Constitution made differentiated deployments possible, which should allow Catalonia a fairly satisfactory level of self-government, regardless of what other State territories did, some of which had never asked for autonomy. The history of the frustration of this model based on diversity, drowned by a deep uniformist drive to dilute the cases of the Basque Country and Catalonia, is well known. The failure of the 2006 Statute of autonomy reform stands out as one of the culminating moments, and the current coronavirus crisis illustrates the end result: the governance model, centralized or decentralized, depends on the unilateral will of the state, and not on a Constitution that guarantees the position of Catalonia. One only has to compare, for instance, this reality with the reality of federal states such as Germany and the United States.
