Abstract
The local authorities have been engaged for over two decades in politics of cross-border cultural cooperation in the name of a Catalan identity sometimes made use of at all levels of power in a context of parallel development. On a department territory left out on the scale of the country and the region, their national and rural vision is opposed to an urban and European vision of the authorities of the great neighbouring region, shared by the urban mayor of Perpignan. The European logic of a territory cross-region and cross-border dynamics tends to alter their representations.