Source: Facebook

NATIONALISM

by Daniel Gurpide

1. I think that ‘nationalism’ has to be clarified and put into historical perspective so as to become a really empowering technology.

(CD: ok)

2. My priors so that you understand where I come from: I have relatives in Spain, France, Norway and the UK; I studied in Madrid, Paris, Cambridge, and Dresden; I lived in Tanzania, Bolivia, New York, Switzerland, and Germany. I consider myself a ‘good European’.

(CD: ok)

3. Nationalism only has meaning for me if understood as a doctrine capable of expressing in political terms the philosophy and vital needs of European man in 2017 (I am thinking not in geographical, but in anthropological terms—the white man—and including both the peoples of the continental homeland as well as ‘Europe overseas.’ Their plight is common and, even if they are unaware of it, they are experiencing a similar fate—they all suffer from the same disease).

(CD: agreed)

4. European nations are condemned either to exit from history and be melted down into a shapeless and faceless global mass, or to turn into the substance of a future nation and people.

(CD: agreed)

5. It is convenient to distinguish between two different ways of posing the ‘national question.’ One, developed in France, sees a nation essentially as a construction operated by a state, and bound ab initio to a restricted horizon, a closure: historically, the closure and separation from Empire. This attitude cannot but immediately give rise to the problem of fixing national borders: in this case first for the natio francorum without; then, for the political and cultural identities within those borders, on which ‘reduction’ is operated. This policy of self-exclusion without (from the Imperium), and homologation and repression of internal identities and differences within, was pursued by French absolutism—and to its ultimate consequences with the French Revolution. Subsequently it was emulated by all the democratic revolutions in Europe, to the point when all nationalisms based on ‘the masses’ and exclusion of ‘the other’ arrived, necessarily, at contemporary one world universalism.

(CD: agreed)

Contrary to appearances, the one world ideology—which today impregnates the dominant culture and the political praxis of international institutions—is only superficially in contradiction to the presuppositions of the form of nationalism described above. Withdrawal into oneself implies, intrinsically, recognition, sooner or later, of equality among nations. The dream of political universalism is but the reproposal, on a global scale, of the very process that led to the formation of the nation-state.

(CD: agreed)

6. Where the memory of the Roman imperial model persisted, and where the project of a Holy Roman Empire as restoration of the classical order remained politically active through the Middle Ages the process of ‘national’ unification did not take place (except partially and on a small scale) until the Romantic Age: during the nineteenth century. It assumed a deeply diverse aspect.

(CD: agreed)

In this case, it is not the state that builds a nation and stimulates a national consciousness, but rather a national consciousness which, in its maturity, seeks to express itself politically through one state. Belonging, for example, to the German or the Italian nation was not, initially, a fact on which to build national consciousness, but rather an idea (in its political sense): a spiritual attachment to a project that needed to be defined and was linked to an old imperial vision of a hierarchically organised cosmos.

(CD: agreed)

7. Today, the situation of European nationalism is analogous. Europe – Magna Europa – does not enjoy a real existence. Europe is only the destiny of those who recognise themselves as part of it. Furthermore, it is precisely to this ‘ghost,’ to this choice of culture, values, civilisation (i.e., the regeneration of history)—to this myth—that the faith of the good European is addressed. Ultimately, it is also contrasted with the jumble of states and petty-states inhabiting our continent, together with their squalid supranational bureaucracies.

(CD: agreed)

8. There is another reason why European nationalism should associate itself with the second model described above: the very same idea of Europe amounts to a transfigured re-emergence of the imperial vision. The unification of Europe on the model of the Jacobin nation-state—and in direct opposition to regionalist tendencies (even perhaps forcing linguistic, cultural, and administrative homogenisation)—is unthinkable. There is a further reason: the non-existence of the matter of Europe’s borders. Europe is not a territory, but rather a destiny offered to all who can trace an ethnic and spiritual relationship to it.

(CD: agreed)

This consideration helps clarify how un-European, in this sense, are institutions like the Council of Europe, an institution of which Turkey is a member today—and perhaps Israel tomorrow.

(CD: agreed)

9. With the Industrial Revolution, humankind entered into a phase of planetisation. None may avoid such planetary perspective or dream of impossible isolation. Planetary order is unavoidable. It is fated to come about, sooner or later.

Tomorrow’s Great Politics cannot be conceived or pursued without a ‘world order’.

(CD: Um. Either I dont understand what you’re getting at, or I don’t agree. i’m not sure which. What I see is vacillation between opening and closing, expanding and contracting, civilizations in response to circumstances, and some having the free capital to adapt and some not.)

10. Institutionally, we should study carefully three models: Switzerland, the USA Constitution (Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Adams) and Ancient Rome. My contribution today regarding Rome:

(CD: agreed 100% that those are the three ‘scales’. Swiss > American > Roman.

11. The planetisation that is taking place demands a ‘cosmic order.’ Will such order be ‘imperial’ or ‘egalitarian’? In that the future is open, this must remain unknown: we can merely commit ourselves to one or to the other.

(CD: Ok so this is where we are not seeing the same thing and that’s why I asked the question.)

The egalitarian solution implies the reduction of humankind ad unum, the emergence of the ‘universal type’ and of global standardisation. The imperial solution is hierarchical. If freedom in egalitarian dialectics is one absolute opposed to another (the denial of freedom), in imperial dialectics, freedom is merely a relative proposition directly linked to the notion of social responsibility. Within the Imperium, only the right of the best is absolute, measured according to the virtue manifested by humankind at a particular moment. However, Imperium is also, from a planetary perspective, the only means of preserving differences, thanks to the principle of unicuique suum, which implicitly recognises the fundamental inequality of values and identities.

Imperium may be seen as the alternative to globalisation: strength and cohesion in diversity as a model of planetary organisation.

(CD: I see speciation as an opportunity.)