Twenty years ago I participated in the collective work What moves us? Six values up for debate (Mina), coordinated by the late Josep Maria Terricabras. I was assigned the section on democratic values. In one conversation, an essay by Kenichi Ohmae, published a decade earlier, in 1995, came up, analyzing the decline of the nation state. Terricabras told me: "It's very interesting, but it doesn't contribute anything to us [Catalans]. I think he was right. end of the nation state It generated considerable debate, which I don't know if it's still relevant today. It raised an important question: the durability and relevance, or not, of the nation state in a globalized world. The nation state has often been perceived as an immutable entity, forgetting that its historically very recent formation. Although it was a pillar for overcoming feudalism and promoting Enlightenment ideals, the idea could be problematic. Blindly adhering to the concept led to Jacobin ideas or worse. However, according to Ohmae, the question wasn't exactly whether the nation state is good or bad in itself, but whether it still remains a functional and reasonable structure.

A few years after the dictator's death, and after much begging, the Catalan nation under Spanish domination got some very famous tailors from the court to make it some very celebrated constitutional dresses. They were called autonomies. And for almost thirty years, those who said they had seen them and published chronicles praised their beauty. Until one day the people discovered the deception and began to shout in the streets: "The nation is naked!" When the tailors saw their cunning had been discovered, they had those who went before the people locked up in prison. But it was no longer possible to hide the fact that the nation had been naked all those years.