 So in the spirit of today, I actually have a threefold problem. There are three problems with the nation state as we know it It's the nation. It's the state and it's the hyphen between them Just to give you some very quick theory that is well established a state normally taken as a political entity It's a political organization in a given territory. It has sovereignty. It does not share power It has power over what happens in its territory a nation is a given people's understanding as a community We normally say it's just a people, you know Nationalism is a political ideology or a political rhetoric that specifies that these two should be concurrent They should be the same one state one nation one nation one state Their existence is completely normative So under 10% of nation states only have one nation in the most have more than one nation They're normative not empirical. They're also historically new dating from around the time of the French Revolution although it is debated What they do is they represent a Paradigm change before you were politically loyal to your king or your emperor you paid your taxes You fought the wars now the state also wants our cultural loyalty They want to homogenize culture over the whole territory turning peasants into Frenchmen as one of the great works in my field Is called they reify identity and make it into a thing although identity is of course practice What I look at is nations without states because I believe that they have better ways of accommodating difference I Look at Scotland and Catalonia and do it in graphic studies of national identity in these areas And I said that the very idea of the nation state is actually a barrier to us living together as humans In Scotland Catalonia, they don't have falling walls. They have walls with doors in them It's very easy to become Scottish or to become Catalan They have an intercultural ideology where you have a host culture They don't say they don't have a host culture, but this culture evolves with the influx of migrants to become something new That's the whole idea. They also have a belonging that divides from territories So where you live is where you belong where you work where you have your life project is also where you're home So despite many predictions in the last 20 years the nation state is completely well on a live But I say we must kill it. We must move power up. We must move power down. We must become local We must share sovereignty in Supernational organizations and in smaller regions We need to have a territorial conception of belonging where everybody who lives somewhere belongs there and is seen to belong there And we need to have interculturalism where we understand that we're working together towards a new culture And this will make Europe safe for human differences in the future Thank you very much