Across Europe, political conflicts increasingly appear entrenched and mutually incomprehensible. In Poland, the long-running confrontation between progressive and conservative political camps has strained institutions and public trust. In Spain, tensions surrounding territorial autonomy, constitutional reform, and the Catalan independence movement have likewise revealed the limits of conventional political discourse.

This panel will explore whether storytelling can open new avenues for thinking about institutional reform in such polarized environments. It presents the experience of the Social Contract Incubator, a unique cross-partisan network of Polish intellectuals that sought to imagine new constitutional arrangements through collaborative institutional design.

The Incubator’s work culminated in the book Let’s Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design (Oxford University Press, 2025), which unexpectedly became a non-fiction bestseller in Poland. In an unconventional approach to constitutional debate, Part II of the book contains five fictional stories co-created by policy experts and prominent Polish novelists. These narratives depict “dream regions” within a hypothetical decentralized Poland, using fiction as a tool to explore the consequences of symmetrical decentralization and regional governance.

The Madrid discussion will place this experiment in dialogue with Spain’s own experience of territorial pluralism after 1978. Spain’s evolving debates about federalization, and the political conflicts surrounding Catalonia raise parallel questions about how societies imagine alternative institutional futures.

The panel will therefore ask:

• Can literary imagination illuminate the real political trade-offs embedded in institutional design?
• How might storytelling help citizens and political actors understand the social consequences of subsidiarity, autonomy, and regional power-sharing?
• Could narrative forms help bridge ideological divides by making institutional alternatives more concrete and relatable?

By juxtaposing the Polish and Spanish experiences, the panel explores whether shared storytelling might serve as a modest but powerful tool for expanding institutional imagination in polarized democracies.