They’re hiding ballot boxes in Barcelona, and all around, hundreds of them secreted in trusty houses. They’re waiting for the cops to come. The referendum — on whether Catalonia should become an independent state — is due to be held on October 1. It was announced months ago, called by the Catalonia Regional government. Last week, the Spanish courts declared it to be an illegal act. The national police are being sent in to make sure it doesn’t happen. The Catalonian police have been put under the command of the national police. The regional government, and regional activists, are pressing on.

Now, it’s getting serious. Local officials have been arrested. A million ballots have been printed and distributed. Catalonia is a place with a radical and militant history, and most likely, there will be violence.

Five thousand kilometres east, there’s another referendum happening. The autonomous province of Kurdistan is holding an independence vote — including in areas whose control is currently in dispute, around Mosul and Kirkuk, which has a mixed Arab-Kurdish population, and is claimed by the Iraqi government proper. Should Kurdistan declare itself an independent state, there may well be a clash between Iraqi and Kurdish forces — and a clamour among Kurdish populations in other states, to join the new entity.

[Rundle: Kurdish HDP party victorious in a resplendent Turkey]

Meanwhile, a world away (in more ways than one), in the US, threats to eviscerate North Korea have been interrupted by a war between President Donald Trump and NFL football players, which began with Trump criticising those few who had refused to stand during the national anthem prior to the game — resulting in a mass “take the knee” protest by NFL players of colour, and various solidarity poses by others in their team.

The last of these three events may have been the least of these conflagrations, but in some ways it’s the most striking. As the “take the knee” protest spread, and came to be taken on by ever-larger proportions of teams, managements were faced with some fraught decisions. “Fire the sons-of-bitches!” as Trump had urged, or keep the teams together. Since the money involved is staggering, and since team solidarity is a real factor in success or failure, team managers, owners, and white players supported their teammates’ stance. Some didn’t even come out of the changing rooms until the anthem was over.

That is extraordinary. Last year, the “take the knee” protest — about black deaths at the hands of cops — was started by a single player, Colin Kaepernick, and spread to a select number of others, who endured calumny. This year, the flag, the anthem, and the hand-on-heart — the full national mysticism — were spurned on mass. The pressing question is not what this represents, but what sort of assumptions, what sort of shift, makes it possible.

What’s common to all three events is that inherited legitimacy — of an ancient nation-state, of a regional US power, of a nation rendered in occult terms — appears to be cracking everywhere, and in every aspect. Legitimacy is, by its very nature, power maintained with the absence of force, and by the reproduced consent of the governed. All of these events have been imagined, postulated, proposed before. Now they have simply happened. What can have changed to make this possible?

The answer must be that, contradictory and counter-intuitive though it may be, it is the composed nation-state that has lost some vital command of loyalty. Spain may be very much older than Iraq, but it is no less a composed entity, put together by conquest from the Castilian centre. Iraq is now a Shiite republic, oriented to Iran. Whatever claims there might have been for its original formula — three provinces stitched together by the British — have long since been destroyed. The Scots independence referendum may have been unsuccessful, but it showed what was possible — the dismantling of a composite nation-state that had ruled the world. When this was followed by the successful Brexit referendum, it became clear that all bets were off.

[Brexit, in context: an essay on reversed polarities]

In the US, something else has occurred. Hitherto, it’s been the left assailing the legitimacy of the United States, and the notion that it is, beyond all self-interest, a union. But the chaotic, gonzo process by which Donald Trump waged his presidential campaign did more to trash the notion of country before party than the whole of the 1960s. Trump offered his supporters the idea that liberals were the real traitors, and that alliance with other forces — “we love WikiLeaks!”, “Hey Russia! Find the rest of Hillary’s emails!” — was a legit move. The failure of large sections of the right-wing press to condemn him consecrated the move. Once you politicise the mystical unity of the nation, everything is up for grabs. And that would appear to be why what would once have been marginal protests — seen as incomprehensible — quickly became first plausible, then central.

These events would not be occurring, these new possibilities would not have arisen, simply because of individual events, such as Brexit, or Trump’s election. Their possibility arises above all from the material change in social life and organisation, in the very knitting-together of society. The nation-state was made possible by the printing press, the cannon, the rise of science and the organisational rationality that accompanied it. Its final piece was the railway system and the telegraph, which connected provinces to the capital with near simultaneity.

Now that all these material forms have been superseded, the composite nation-state’s form no longer appears to be essential. Thus its failures become not a necessity to be borne, but purely oppressive. The Scots were social-democratic, anti-war and empire, and anti-austerity. It took the second half of New Labour, and the Cameron government — the seemingly unending reign of a regime with which they did not agree. Spain is centralised to a degree that has excluded Catalonia from shared power and cultural recognition as an equal partner. But it has also had two elections in a row delivering no decisive result, creating governments unable to pursue a decisive strategy, and with no indication that a third go would deliver a different result. Oppression that was merely frustrating has suddenly become intolerable. New ways for groups, cities, regions to put themselves together are suddenly not merely possible, but the optimum solution.

Such explorations of new possibilities will obviously meet a push-back. It’s clear that the Spanish government will go to great lengths to crack down on the Catalonian referendum — fearful that it will be followed by a Basque version, and possibly others. The US has supported the Kurds, especially against Turkish opposition, and military attacks; though betraying the Kurds is as American a tradition as the anthem before the football, their client state of Iraq is far less unified than the Kurds, and its army has no motivation to take Kurdish territory. Meanwhile, in US football, it’s a stand-off. This is football we’re talking about — it is woven into the fabric of US life. If the teams are united, then much of middle America will have to deal with a confusing message.

It is the least of these, it is the greatest of these. Something is under way.