La petita pàtria catalana nello scontro tra unilateralismi

The paper analyses the political conflict between Catalonia and Spain by means of a theoretical approach that considers the relationship between secession and democracy (developed in the first part, moving from, in particular, the Canadian experience). The structure adopted allows to identify, in the case considered, different forms of unilateralism: on the one hand, the actions of the Catalan autonomous community; on the other hand, the behaviour of the Spanish State. The result is that the territorial crisis is managed in a way that is far from the values of an advanced democratic system: as a matter of fact, the attempts of resolution have been exclusively at the jurisdictional level. The final part, moving from contributions on nationalism, focuses on the concept of small homelands, marking misunderstandings that its application to the Catalan question risks generating.