Theoretical Reflections on Nationalism – Yoshino

“From Ethnie to Nation: Theoretical Reflections on Nationalism” by Kosaku Yoshino (PDF – 7.12 MB):

Theoretical Reflections on Nationalism – Yoshino

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Yoshino, Kosaku. “From Ethnie to Nation: Theoretical Reflections on Nationalism.” In Japan in Comparative Perspective, edited by Hidehiro Sonoda and S.N. Eisenstadt. Kyoto: International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, 1999. Retrieved from: <http://publications.nichibun.ac.jp/region/d/NSH/series/kosh/1999-11-30-2/s001/s012/pdf/article.pdf >.

 

Note: See also Alain de Benoist’s critical analysis of nationalism, its historical origins, and pre-modern forms of state and ethnic relations in his articles “Nationalism: Phenomenology and Critique” and “The Idea of Empire”.

 

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Manifesto of the Spanish Identitarian Solidarist Resistence

Principles of the Spanish Identitarian Circle: Resistencia Identitaria Solidarista

Translated by Daniel Macek

 

1. Europeanism. The Identitarian Solidarist Resistence is before all a European and Europeanist Comradeship. It is born with the principal objective of defending European identity. The Identitarian Solidarist Resistence considers Europe as a nation to construct in a future which is already present. The current configuration of global equilibrium makes it so that only great geopolitical blocs are capable of being protagonists of history, effective centers of power and decision, and in its turn assuring that its inhabitants be political actors and not mere obedient observers of orders and interests alien to their reality and will. Also, economically, we advocate the creation of grand self-centered and self-sufficient spaces capable of breaking the current dynamic tending towards a uniform and sole global market whose power and direction, in very few hands, also translates into the economic-political power and direction of the planet.

But beyond these considerations, we advocate the construction of a one and united Europe on the grounds of common origin and identity.

Staying within the above arguments would not end up having us exit the logic of the dominant thought, justifying European unity by circumstantial and transitory economic or political reasons. The geopolitical and economic necessities, having their importance, do not stop being valid transitory reasons here and now, but without either a larger entity or connection. On the contrary, for us the unity of Europe is based on its own essence, by way of categorical imperative, it must be a unity here and always based on immutable values and not on changing circumstances.

The unity of Europe derives fundamentally from the common identity and heritage of all the peoples and countries which compose it, all those heirs of the Indo-European peoples which, since its initial Northern European core has extended itself across our continent, and later also on others, giving itself the form and nature by which it still differs from the rest of the world. Some punctual exceptions refer also to more archaic nuclei emerging before the common home, but without doubt they also belong to the same ethnocultural reality, or certain allogenic invasions which in reality have left little more than some demonyms and languages whose true nature is still debated.

For all these reasons we define the Identitarian Solidarist Resistance as an identitarian European comradeship, whose objective is the study and dissemination of the ethnic and cultural heriatge of the European people. It advocates, as a consequence of the previous points, the construction of a united political entity of Europe from the Canary Islands to Vladisvostok.

Recovering our most ancient and complete political form, we advocate the constitution of this unity under the form of Imperium, of a superior integration of the diversity, rejecting the form of a macro-Jacobin state, and, being against the current formula of European Union which we neither want nor support, we denounce its bureaucratic and globalist drift as well as its submission to the United States and its almost total absence of political and military will in the world.

2. Religiosity. The reaffirmation of the values and principles common to all Indo-European religions. We denounce foreign values which have been introduced in Europe by religions originally from the desert regions of the Near East. This does not impede us from recognizing that Catholicism and other forms of Euro-Christianity have absorbed in many cases values and principles belonging to our heritage, and have become part of the inner religious feeling of many Europeans. Therefore, together with a purely Indo-European religiosity, in the form of its depth and origin, would be the religious possibilities which we contemplate for the Europe of the future.

We denounce the presence on our soil the religious forms with a will for political expansion and alien to our tradition and history, which have frequently served as an ideological base for the attack on our Great European Fatherland. Islam and Zionism are not religions of Europe and therefore cannot be nor should be grounded in Europe, and have their place far from our borders. In the same way, we oppose all types of current pseudo-religiosity, based simply on “personal well-being” and directed towards all types of misfits, which with the name and under the umbrella of the so-called New Age, tries to make neurotic and neutralize a growing number of Europeans.

3. Immigration. As a consequence of the current phase of capitalist development where interest prevails over all other considerations, and where individuals and peoples, previously dispossessed of their personality and idiosyncrasies, have become interchangeable commodities, we witness the current wave of people foreign to our land and our tradition. From the economic point of view, we advocate the adoption of necessary policies in the countries of origin so that these distressing would not come to be produced and each person has possibilities to develop a dignified life in their place of origin. We are sure that the vast majority of these immigrants would not be here if they would be given opportune conditions in their countries of birth. For that reason we demand the replacement of the current system of exploitation – based on the miserly interests of anonymous multinationals and decadent local elites whose combinations gives place to the chaotic political and economic situations which provoke this painful exodus – by another founded on the values of solidarity and efficacy.

In addition to its economic aspect, immigration concerns us, and very much from the perspective of maintaining the identity of Europe. Accordingly, before the threat which is posed by the exorbitant number and brutal birthrate of these foreigners on European soil, we defend the immediate adoption of measures to stop the arrival of new collectivities of immigrants, as well as the study and possible application of a program of return in the most humanitarian conditions possible.

4. Ethnicism. The Identitarian Solidarist Resistance, as a European Identitarian movement, is manifested in favor of the defense of the personalities belonging to each one of the “carnal fatherlands” which compose our grand Europe. In a world with the tendency to individualism, to forgetting the past and the reality of peoples for the benefit of the universalisation of the global personality and the single market, the Identitarian Solidarist Resistance considers any positive identitarian reaction based on ethnic realities, as we also do the identitarian reactions which are based on membership to European nation-states.

This does not absolutely mean that we support the idea that each ethnicity goes to become its own and “independent” state. Considering that independence is the capacity to exercise a role in history and in the world according to one’s own will without giving in to interests of an foreign power, we are aware that only a united Europe could be such. Today neither Spain, nor France, nor Germany, nor Italy, nor the United Kingdom are sovereign states, since in all cases their decisions ultimately depend on Washington. Much less could it be that each one of the ethnic groups become micro-states, easy prey of the international dominion.

Inspired by the traditional concepts of European politics – eclipsed with the arrival of Modernity – we demonstrate against any uniformising and centralist idea of the state, and we demand that each one adopts a deferential internal composition with the plurality that it integrates. Definitively, we demonstrate ourselves in favor of the process of European unification to be realized by each one of the existing states, and the maintenance of the personality belonging to each ethnic community.

5. For a society based on the popular community constructed upon the pillars of family-tradition. Modern society is disintegrated. In fact, it can be said that there no longer exists society as such. The word “society” is no more than a euphemism for referring to a heterogeneous set of individuals united only by mere common interest; individuals who compete between themselves to occupy the best places in that so-called “society.” Individualism leads to the separation of material interests, to the separation of the most profound interests, and as a logical consequence, to the division of the people.

For all those reasons, the Identitarian Solidarist Resistance defends the popular community as the base and foundation of the state.

The popular community, contrary to the “society,” is homogeneous and organic. It is homogeneous inasmuch as it is composed of people united not by interest, but rather by bonds forged by millennia of common history, traditions, and heritage, who share the same principles and the same fundamental aspirations, which makes it an indivisible whole. And it is organic because it is not founded on an artificial union, but rather on the bonds of common heritage and tradition, a union of individuals who by their nature tend to share their destiny.

The popular community is not founded as a type of “social contract,” but rather on the same superior bonds which make up a family, which is the basis of community. From the family, it is followed in organic order, the clan or the neighborhood, which groups together several families by affinity, to the clan, the people, or the city, from this to the region, and finally the national-popular community, an organism which encompasses all of the previous ones as concentric rings. But on the basis of all these groups, we find the common heritage as a fundamental nexus of union; a common past, which allows facing a common destiny.

6. The defense of the land trough a responsible economy against consumerism and the “welfare culture.” The Identitarian Solidarist Resistance conceives the economy as an instrument in the service of the national community and not the community as an instrument in the service of the economy, as it happens with today’s society, in which everything revolves around economic parameters.

The current market system is constructed in the form of a circle of production and consumption that must revolve indefinitely and at an increasing velocity, since otherwise the system suffers, possibly even reaching collapse. The production-consumption relationship has been closed in on itself; it no longer depends on the real needs of the community, nor on the capacity of environment to support the level of production that the system requires. One produces and consumes simply to keep the cycle of the system in movement.

The Identitarian Solidarist Resistance denounces the capitalist international and the globalisation of the economy, since under the guise of “development aid,” it transfers its centers of production to countries with cheaper labor, favoring exploitation in these countries, and a rate of artificial standstill in the communities of origin.

Globalisation is also responsible for another, even more disagreeable phenomenon: illegal immigration, which no more than another tactic to cheapen production. The phenomenon of illegal immigration consists in reality of a massive “importation” of cheap labor to industrialized countries, in conditions of genuine slavery. The Identitarian Solidarist Resistance cannot but denounce this repugnant slave trade that is hidden behind illegal immigration, and injury that this practice poses for the dignity and the rights of workers, as much local as foreign ones.

7. As a necessary consequence of all the above, we summarize that we situate ourselves in dialectical opposition to the so-called New World Order and the values and principles which this mandates and wants to impose by force on the whole globe, so that we defend the resistances to the process of planetary uniformisation. The first and most consistent defense against this New World Order is the battle for the maintenance of our identity, personality, and heritage, considering as our own any Identitarian movement emerging on European soil.

 

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Translated from: “Principios de Resistencia Identitaria Solidarista,” Resistencia Identitaria Solidarista, 21 April 2015, <http://resistenciaidentitariasolidarista.blogspot.com/2015/04/noticias-de-ris_21.html >.

 

Nationalism – Benoist

Nationalism: Phenomenology & Critique

By Alain de Benoist

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

There are probably as many theories of nationalism as there are nationalist theories. It is obviously impossible to give an account of them here. We will not take part in the false quarrel over whether nationalism is a pathological exacerbation of patriotism, or if it represents, on the contrary, its conscious and rigorous doctrinal elaboration. Let us note only that, beyond the often extremely complex typologies suggested today,[1] nationalism can be defined in two basic ways.

First, nationalism is the more or less voluntary aspiration, founded on objective facts or not, of a people to be constituted (or restored) as a nation, generally in a context perceived as hostile to its collective identity. Thus it presents itself as a movement of historical construction. In the second definition, nationalism is the political doctrine that affirms that a government must be concerned above all with the national interest, even based upon it exclusively.

These two definitions show from the start the ambivalence of nationalism, an ambivalence directly related to its eminently reactive character. Nationalism generally appears in circumstances that are “exceptional,” in Carl Schmitt’s sense of the term. Nationalism aims at reacting against a threat, real or supposed, that would weigh upon the collective identity and prevent it from founding itself as or persisting as a nation. Nationalism, for example, appears just as much in reaction to a foreign occupation as in a situation of colonization, in the framework of an exacerbated regionalism, etc. Its essence, therefore, is related to conflict. It needs an enemy. But this enemy can take the most diverse forms. Hence the plasticity of nationalism which, in history, can just as well be modern or antimodern, intellectual or popular, of the Right or Left. (During the whole nineteenth century, let us recall, nationalism was primarily liberal and republican.)

The definition of nationalism as a political doctrine raises other problems. Once an identity is recovered or the nation emerges, what in nationalism can truly be used as a principle of government? The concept of “national interest” is fuzzy. Maurras writes that a nationalist “subordinates his feelings, his interests, and his systems to the good of the fatherland.” But what faction would not lay claim to this expression? The “good of the fatherland” is a concept for which almost anything can be claimed, the more so as one can have extremely different ideas about it. Given that conflict is of the essence of nationalism, the risk is then great that a nationalist government can exist only while engaging in new arenas of conflict. Any foreigner, for example, will be potentially seen as an enemy. As for the concept of an “inner enemy,” it will lead to civil war, which nationalism seems to prohibit on principle.

The contents of nationalism thus remain rather obscure. One sees nationalist movements appearing in the world, but in general they have few things in common. They are opposed to one another. They claim contradictory values. It all seems as if nationalism were more a form than a substance, a container than a content.

One can understand it better, however, if one relates it to the idea of the nation, from which it cannot be dissociated. Indeed, nationalism initially represents a political instrumentality of the collective identity that gives rise to the nation. However, the nation is only one form of polity among others. And it is a specifically modern form.

Neither the Gallic resistance against Caesar nor that of Arminius against the legions of Varus is relevant to our sense of “nationalism.” The application of the word “nation” to Antiquity or the Old Regime is for the most part an anachronism. In the Middle Ages, the “nation” (from natio, “birth”) had a cultural or ethnic sense, but by no means a political one. At the time of the Hundred Years War, patriotism refers to the “country” (pays), i.e., to both a familiar region and an ensemble of intermediate bodies concretely defining a shared identity. In the political sense, the nation appears only in the eighteenth century, and it is defined in opposition to the king. The “patriots” then were those who thought the nation, not the king, incarnates the unity of the country, i.e., the nation exists independently of the kingdom. The nation joins together those who share the same political and philosophical ideas. It is in this sense that Barrère[2] was able to say to the Convention that “the aristocrats have no fatherland.” The nation is thus initially perceived as the sovereign people, then as the population of a given territory recognizing the authority of the same state and themselves as members of the same political unity, and finally as this political unity itself. One reads, in Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man: “The principle of any sovereignty lies primarily in the nation.”

The Old Regime in France had already largely started the process of centralization. The Revolution continued this process in a new form. It aimed at “producing the nation,” creating a new social bond, generating social behaviors giving rise to the nation as a body politic formed of equal individuals. The state, consequently, became the producer of the social. And this production was built on the ruins of the intermediate bodies. Beginning with the Revolution, the nation became for any individual an immediate presence. It is a collective abstraction to which one belongs directly, without the mediation of intermediate bodies or the state. There is thus, paradoxically, an individualistic root of the nation and nationalism. Louis Dumont has written on this subject:

Historically, the nation in the precise, modern sense of the term, and nationalism—distinguished from simple patriotism—have depended upon individualism as a value. The nation is precisely the type of overall society corresponding to the reign of individualism as a value. Not only does the nation accompany individualism historically, but the interdependence of the two is essential, so that one can say that the nation is a society composed of people who regard themselves as individuals.[3]

The “modernity” of the nation and nationalism remained unseen for a long time, initially because nationalism was at times also a reaction (or an answer) to the social and political dysfunctions born of modernity, then, starting in the late nineteenth century, because the political Right took up the national idea in opposition to the “internationalist” socialist movements.

This individualistic and modern sense of the national idea allows us to understand how nationalism falls within the horizon of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Heidegger, who sees subjectivity as the modern form (Gestalt) of being oneself (Selbstsein), writes in this connection:

Any nationalism is, on the metaphysical plane, an anthropologism and as such a subjectivism. Nationalism is not overcome by pure internationalism, but only enlarged and established as a system. Nationalism is as little brought and raised to humanitas by internationalism as individualism is by ahistorical collectivism. Collectivism is the subjectivity of man on the plane of totality.[4]

At the same time this also clarifies the relationship between nationalism and liberal individualism: the “we” that forms the base of the former is only an enlargement of the “I” characteristic of the latter. In liberalism, it is legitimate for the individual always to seek his own best interest; in nationalism, the national interest precedes all. In both cases, justice and truth merge with what is good for me or for us. In both cases, the ultimate decision lies in subjective interest, that is, in utility.

In the quotation above, Heidegger shows just as well that political universalism (“pure internationalism”) does not fundamentally contradict nationalism. Exacerbated ethnocentrism, moreover, is defined quite classically as the private individual enlarged to universal dimensions, and universalism, conversely, as a masked ethnocentrism. The private individual attests only to his truth, but he tends to present it as the truth in itself. Such is the base of the pretense of certain peoples or certain nations to be regarded as “chosen,” i.e., called to fulfill a “universal mission.” France has not escaped this temptation, and even succumbed more often than others. Guizot declared: “France is the heart of civilization.” Lavisse added: “Our fatherland is most human of the fatherlands,” thus giving to understand that there exist degrees of “humanity.” In fact, it is often said that French nationalism cannot be fundamentally intolerant because in France the idea of the nation goes along with that of humanity. But this assertion makes one wonder. Indeed, if the idea of the nation goes with that of humanity, then the idea of humanity also goes with that of the nation. Whoever does not belong to the nation consequently finds himself excluded from humanity.

Any claim of collective identity need not necessarily be formulated in terms of the ideology of nationalism. Such a confusion, given the historical excesses of nationalism, could only call into question the value of the very concept of collective identity. Yet such a concept, regardless of methods and foundations, is essential to any true sociality. In communist societies, it is what made it possible for the people to survive by opposing their own identity to the one the regime tried to impose upon them. In Western society, it is what continues to nourish the symbolic imagination and give meaning to the desire to live together. Nationalism, in what is most tumultuous and questionable in it, is no more the inevitable consequence of the assertion of collective identities than is the nation the only way of politically organizing the citizenry. Indeed, it is the negation of collective identities, such as we encounter throughout the twentieth century in liberalism as well as in Communism, that causes these identities to assume irredentist, convulsive, and destructive forms.

To be more precise, let us say that there are two different ways to pose the affirmation of a collective identity. The first, which could be that of nationalism, restricts the individual to defending his people, while the second, concerned above all with diversity, sees the necessity of defending all peoples against the ideologies that threaten to eradicate them.

Consider the English saying “My country, right or wrong.” This saying is generally misunderstood. It does not state that membership is a mere fact from which one cannot draw an abstraction. It also says that my country can be right or wrong—and not that it is always right.

Yet, in all rigor, a nationalist could not recognize his country is wrong, simply because to judge it wrong, he must have a criterion of justice that goes beyond mere belonging, i.e., ultimately, a clear awareness of the objective truth. A nationalist is spontaneously carried from thinking his country is never wrong to thinking that it is always right. From such a point of view, in the event of conflict, only force can decide. Force then becomes the supreme value. It is identified with truth, which means that history is basically right: the winners are always right, for the sole reason that they won. One paradoxically lapses into social Darwinism, which is only another form of the ideology of progress.

If, on the contrary, I can judge my country wrong, without forgetting it is mine, that is because I know that my membership is not a criterion of objective truth. Then I leave behind the metaphysics of subjectivity, the point where nationalism and liberal individualism converge. The identity of others is no longer in principle a threat to mine. I am ready to defend my identity because this defense is a general principle, whose legitimacy I also recognize for others. In other words, if I defend my “tribe,” it is also because I am ready to defend those of others.

Notes

Alain de Benoist, “Nationalisme : phénoménologie et critique,” in his Critiques—Théoriques (Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme, 2002), 85–88. The translator wishes to thank Alain de Benoist for his permission to translate and publish this essay, Michael O’Meara for checking the translation, and Arjuna for his help with French idioms.

1. Cf. in particular Gil Delannoi et Pierre-André Taguieff, eds., Théories du nationalisme. Nation, nationalité, ethnicité (Paris: Kimé, 1991).

2. Bertrand Barrère de Vieuzac (1755–1841)—TOQ.

3. Louis Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 20–21. English translation: Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

4. Martin Heidegger, Über den Humanismus (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1946), 107. English translation by Frank A. Capuzzi, with J. Glenn Gray and David Farrell Krell: “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, revised and expanded edition (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 244.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “Nationalism: Phenomenology & Critique.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 16 May 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/nationalism-phenomenology-and-critique/ >.

Note: On the problem of nationalism, see also Kosaku Yoshino’s “From Ethnie to Nation: Theoretical Reflections on Nationalism”.

 

Definition of People – Faye

The Definition of a People

By Guillaume Faye

 

People: An ethnic ensemble — biological, historical, cultural — with a territory, its fatherland, in which it is rooted.

‘The people’ — the very term is suspect to the cosmopolitan Left, which sees it as bordering on the politically incorrect — is not any statistical ‘population’; it’s an organic community embracing a transcendent body made up of ancestors, the living, and their heirs. Though marked with a certain spirituality, a people is diachronically rooted in the past and projects itself into the future — it’s submerged in biological and genetic matter, but at the same time it’s a historical, and spiritual, reality.

It’s belonging to a specific people that distinguishes a man and makes him human. Though modern Western egalitarian doctrines reduce peoples to indifferent socioeconomic aggregates, peoples actually constitute the organic bases of the human race; similarly, such doctrines conceive of the ideal man as an individual ‘emancipated’ from his organic attachments — like an undifferentiated cell in a human magma.

It’s necessary to recall, especially for certain Christians, that a people’s attachment is incompatible with Christianity’s present cosmopolitanism. The claim, for example, that ‘I am closer to an African Catholic than I am to a non-Christian European’ is a universalistic claim that relegates a people’s nation to something of secondary significance. This is, indeed, the great drama of European Christianity, marked as it is by Pauline universalism. A Catholic attached to his people and conscious of the biological and cultural dangers threatening them might instead say, ‘I respect all the Christians of the world, but hic et nunc I fight for my people above all, whatever their religion’.

The Jesuit spirit might resolve the contradiction in reference to the Old Testament’s Hebraic tradition: ‘Babel — the mélange of disparate peoples — is a punishment from God, Who wants His peoples to be separate and diverse — humanity is one in Heaven, but multiple on Earth’. *

Arab Islam has no difficulty reconciling the notion of people (the ‘Arab nation’) with that of its universalism. The Jews, on their side, have similarly reconciled a ferocious defence of their ethnicity — their singularity — with their religion, however theoretically monotheistic and universalist it may be. At no moment have Judaism and Islam, unlike the Christian Churches today, engaged in doubting, guiltstroking diatribes against ‘xenophobia’ and ethnocentrism. They are not masochistic . . .

* * *

Like every anthropological notion, ‘people’ lacks mathematical rigour. A people doesn’t define itself as a homogeneous biocultural totality, but as a relationship. It’s the product of an organic alchemy that brings various ‘sub-peoples’ together. The Bretons, Catalans, Scots, etc., can be seen thus as the sub-peoples of a larger people — the Europeans.

* * *

We ought to highlight the ambiguity that touches the notion of the people. The universalist ideology of the French Revolution confused the idea of the people with that of an ‘ensemble of inhabitants who jurisdictionally possess nationality’, whatever their origin. Given the facts of mass immigration and naturalisation, the notion of the French people has been greatly diluted (as have the British or German peoples, for the same reason). This is why (without broaching the unresolvable issue of what constitutes a ‘regional people’ or a ‘national people’), it’s advisable to dialectically transcend semantic problems — and affirm the historic legitimacy of a single, European people, historically bound, whose different national families resemble one another in having, for thousands of years, the same ethnocultural and historical origins. Despite national, linguistic, or tribal differences, haven’t African Blacks, even in Europe, been called on by Nelson Mandela or the Senegalese Mamadou Diop to ‘think like one people’? From Nasser to al-Qadhafi, by way of Arafat, haven’t Arabs been urged to see themselves as an Arab people? Why don’t Europeans have the same right to see themselves as a people?

As for ‘regional peoples’, it’s necessary to oppose Left-wing regionalists, self-professed anti-Jacobins and anti-globalists, who unhesitatingly accept the concept of French or American jus soli — who confuse citizens and residents, and who recognise as Bretons, Alsatians, Corsicans, etc., anyone (even of non-European origin) who lives in these regions and chooses to accept such an identity.

* * *

In belonging to a people, its members are emotionally inclined to define themselves as such, which implies political affiliation. For this reason, we say that a people exists at that point where biological, territorial, cultural, and political imperatives come together. But in no case does mere cultural or linguistic attachment suffice in making a people, if they have no common biological roots. Alien immigrants from people X who are installed on the territory of people Y — even if they adopt cultural elements of their host people — are not a part of Y. As De Gaulle thought, there might be minor exceptions for small numbers of compatible (White) minorities, capable of being assimilated, but this could never be the case for, say, French West Indians.

Similarly, in defining the notion of a people, territorial or geopolitical considerations must also be taken into account. A people is not a diaspora: the Jews felt obliged to reconquer Palestine as their ‘promised land’ because, as Theodor Herzl argued, ‘without a promised land, the Jews are just a religious diaspora, a culture, a union, but not a people’.

There’s a good deal of talk today, on the Left and the Right, about people being ‘deterritorialised’. In reality, there’s nothing of the kind. Every healthy people, even if they possess an important diaspora (Chinese, Arabs, Indians, etc.), maintains close relations with its fatherland.

* * *

Modernist gurus have long claimed that the future belongs not to peoples, but to humanity conceived as a single people. Again, there’ll be nothing of the kind. Despite globalisation and in reaction to it, the Twenty-first century will more than ever be a century of distinct peoples…

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Note (for the New European Conservative):

* This is not necessarily the only way for a Christian to reconcile the concept of distinction between peoples with the Christian religion, since throughout history Christianity has been interpreted in numerous different ways. Many Christian conservatives and nationalists in the past have in fact argued that humanity is divided into distinct and separate peoples, and in some manner continues to be so in Heaven (similarly to many Pagans who believed that peoples continue to exist in the Afterlife [excluding those Pagans who believed exclusively in reincarnation]).

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From: Faye, Guillaume. Why We Fight: Manifesto for the European Resistance. London: Arktos Media, 2011, pp. 211-213.

 

Decline And Splendor Of Nationalism – Sunic

The Decline And Splendor Of Nationalism

by Tomislav Sunic

No political phenomenon can be so creative and so destructive as nationalism. Nationalism can be a metaphor for the supreme truth but also an allegory for the nostalgia of death. No exotic country, no gold, no woman can trigger such an outpouring of passion as the sacred homeland, and contrary to all Freudians more people have died defending their homelands than the honor of their women. If we assume that political power is the supreme aphrodisiac, then nationalism must be its ultimate thrill.

To talk about nationalism in Anglo-Saxon countries usually evokes the specter of tribalism, violence, heavy politics, and something that runs counter to the idea of progress. For an American liberal, nationalism is traditionally associated with irrational impulses, with something incalculable that has a nasty habit of messing up a mercantile mind-set. A merchant does not like borders and national emblems; his badge of honor is his goods, and his friends are those who make the best offer on the global market. It is no coincidence that during World War II the Merchant preferred the alliance with the Commissar, despite the fact that the Commissar’s violence often eclipsed that of the Nationalist. Daniel Bell once wrote that American liberals find it difficult to grasp ethnic infatuation because the American way of thinking is “spatially and temporally suspended.” Indeed, to an insular maritime mind, it must appear absolutely idiotic to observe two people quarreling over a small creek or a stretch of land when little economic yield lies in the balance. A politician in America, unlike his rooted European counterpart, is essentially a realtor, and his attitude towards politics amounts to a real estate transaction. It is hard to deny that a person on the move, reared on Jack Kerouac or Dos Passos, is frightened by the ethnic exclusiveness that is today rocking the part of Europe from the Balkans to the Baltics. The mystique of the territorial imperative, with its unpredictable ethnic cauldron, must be a paramount insult to the ideology of the melting pot. Contrary to widespread beliefs, nationalism is not an ideology, because it lacks programmatic dimension and defies categorization. At best, nationalism can be described as a type of earthbound behavior with residues of paganism. Whereas liberalism operates in the rational singular, nationalism always prefers the irrational plural. For the liberal, the individual is the epicenter of politics; for the nationalist, the individual is only a particle in historical community. To visualize different brands of nationalism one could observe a European family camping on the rocky beaches of the French Riviera and contrast it to an American family on the sandy beaches of Santa Barbara. The former meticulously stakes out its turf, keeps its children in fold; the latter nomadically fans out the moment it comes to the beach, with each family member in search of privacy. Incidentally, the word “privacy” does not even exist in continental European languages.

Following World War II, for a European to declare himself a nationalist was tantamount to espousing neofascism. On the ossuary of Auschwitz, few indeed were willing to rave publicly about the romantic ideas of 19th century poets and princes, whose idyllic escapades gave birth, a century later, to an unidyllic slaughterhouse. At Yalta, the idea of a Europe frolicking with the liturgy of blood and soil was considered too dangerous, and both superpowers held high this reminder in the form of their respective strategy of “double containment.” After their excursion into the largest civil war in history, Europeans decided not to talk about nationalism or self-determination any longer. Many European intellectuals, and particularly German pundits, preferred instead to recommit their suppressed nationalist energy to far-flung Palestinians, Sandinistas, Cubans, or Congolese instead of to their own ethnic soil. Third World nationalism became for the European mandarins both the esoteric catharsis and the exotic superego; and to theorize about the plight of Xhosa in South Africa, or Ibo in Nigeria, or to stage treks to Cashmere or Katmandu became an elegant way of wallowing in new political romanticism. This vicarious type of meta-nationalism continued to play a role of psychological repository for the dormant and domesticated Europeans who needed time to heal wounds and wait for yet another renaissance.

Has this renaissance already occurred? The liberal parenthesis that lasted for 45 years, and which received its major boost after the recent collapse of its communist alter ego, may indeed be coming to an end. From Iberia to Irkutsk, from Kazakhstan to Croatia, hundreds of different peoples are once again clamoring for their place under the sun. To assume that they are raising their ethnic voices for economic reasons alone is misleading, and liberals are committing a serious mistake when they try to explain away nationalism by virtue of structuralist-functionalist paradigms, or when they shrug it off as a vestige of a traditional ascriptive society. Contrary to popular assumptions, the collapse of communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is a direct spin-off of ethnic frustrations that have for decades laid dormant, but have refused to die away. The paradox apparent at the end of the 20th century is this: while everybody is talking about integration, multiculturalism, ecumenism, and cosmic fraternity, fractures, fissures, and cleavages are appearing everywhere. Paradoxes abound as little Luxembourg preaches sermons to a much larger Slovenia on the utility of staying in the Yugoslav fold; or when Bush, after failing to rescue the Balts, comes to the aid of artificial satrapy in the name of the “self-determination” of its handful of petrocrats; or when Soviet apparatchiks fake concern for the plight of Palestinians only to further crack down against their Bashkirs and Meshkets.

Nationalism is entering today the third phase of its history, and similar to a heady Hydra and howling Hecuba it is again displaying its unpredictable character. Must it be creative in violence only? Ethnic wars are already raging in Northern Ireland, in the land of Basques, in Corsica, let alone in Yugoslavia, where two opposing nationalisms are tearing Versailles Europe apart and showering the treaty successors with embarrassing and revisionist questions.

There are different nationalisms in different countries and they all have a different meaning. Nationalism can appear on the right; it does, however, appear on the left. It can be reactionary and progressive, but in all cases it cannot exist unless it has its dialectical Other. German nationalism of the 19th century could not have flourished had Germany not been confronted by the aggressive French Jacobinism; modern English nationalism could not have taken off had it not been haunted by assertive Prussia. Each nationalism must have its ‘Feindbild,’ its image of the evil, because nationalism is by definition the locus of political polarity in which the distinction between the foe and friend, between hostis and amicus, is brought to its deadly paroxysm. Consequently, it is no small wonder that intra-ethnic, let alone inter-ethnic, wars (like the one raging today between Croats and Serbs) are also the most savage ones, with each side vilifying, demonizing, and praying for the total destruction of the other.

In addition, side by side with its positive founding myths, each nationalism must resort to its negative mythology, which in times of pending national disasters sustains its people in the fight with the enemy. In order to energize younger generations Polish nationalists will resurrect their dead from the Katyn, the Germans their buried from Silesia and Sudetenland; Croats will create their iconography on their postwar mass graveyards, Serbs their hagiography out of their war-camp victims. Body counts, aided by modern statistics and abetted by high-tech earth excavators, will be completed by mundane metaphors that usually tend to inflate one’s own victimology and deflate that of the enemy. German nationalists call Poles “Polacks,” and French chauvinists call Germans “boches.” Who can deny that racial and ethnic slurs are among the most common and picturesque of weapons used by nationalists world wide?

Nationalism is not a generic concept, and liberal ideologues are often wrong when they reduce European nationalism to one conceptual category. What needs to be underlined is that there are exclusive and inclusive nationalisms, just as there are exclusive and inclusive racisms. Central Europeans, generally, make a very fine distinction between inclusive Jacobin state-determined (‘staatsgebunden’) unitary nationalism vis-a-vis the soil-culture-blood determined (‘volksgebunden’) nationalism of Central and Eastern Europe. Jacobin nationalism is by nature centralistic; it aims at global democracy, and it has found today its valiant, albeit unwitting, standard-bearer in George Bush’s ecumenical one-worldism. Ironically, a drive towards unitary French nationalism existed before the Jacobins were even born, and it was the product of a peculiar geopolitical location that subsequently gave birth to the modern French state. Richelieu, or Louis XIV, were as much Jacobins in this sense as their secular successors Saint-Just, Gambetta, or De Gaulle. In France, today, whichever side one looks — left, right, center — the answer is always Jacobinism. In a similar vein, in England, the Tudors and Cromwell acted as unitary nationalists in their liquidations and genocides — ad majorem Dei gloriam — of the Cornish and Irish and a host of other ethnic groups. Churchill and other 20th-century English leaders successfully saved Great Britain in 1940 by appealing to unitary nationalism, although their words would have found little appeal today among Scots and Irish.

Contrary to widespread beliefs, the word “nationalism,” (‘Nazionalismus’) was rarely used in National Socialist Germany. German nationalists in the 1920’s and 30’s popularized, instead, such derivatives as ‘Volkstum,’ ‘Volksheit,’ or ‘Voelkisch,’ words that are etymologically affiliated with the word ‘Deutsch’ and which were, during the Nazi rule, synonymously used with the word ‘rassisch’ (“racial”). The word ‘Volk’ came into German usage with J.G. Fichte in the early 19th century, when Germany belatedly began to consolidate its state consciousness. The word ‘Volk’ must not be lightly equated with the Latin or English ‘populus’ (“people”). As an irony of history, even the meaning of the word “people” in the English language is further blurred by its polymorphous significance. People can mean an organic whole, similar to ‘Volk,’ although it has increasingly come to be associated with an aggregate of atomized individuals. Ironically, the German idea of the Volk and the Slavic idea of ‘narodi’ have much in common; and indeed, each group can perfectly well understand, often with deadly consequences, each other’s national aspirations. It is no small wonder that in the German and Slavic political vocabulary the concept of federalism and democracy will acquire a radically different meaning than in linguistically homogeneous England, France, or America.

By ostensibly putting aside its racist past, yet by pushing its universalist message to the extreme, the West paradoxically shows that it is no less racist today than it was yesterday.

French and English nationalisms lack a solid territorial dimension, and their founding myths lie elsewhere. Over the course of their history, due to their colonial holdings, these countries have acted both as European and non-European nations — which explains, particularly in the light of massive non-European immigration — why their elites find it difficult to argue for their strong ethnic identity. Continental European nationalism, and specifically the German idea of ‘Volksheit,’ is by contrast the product of a set of geographic circumstances unparalleled in France or England. In France and England, the people were created out of the existence of the state. In Germany and Continental Europe, nationalism has manifested itself primarily as a cultural phenomenon of frequently stateless peoples. In Germany, Poland, Romania, etc., poets and writers created the national consciousness of their peoples; in France, princes created state consciousness. Popular figures in Central Europe — like Herder or Father Jahn in Germany, Sandor Petofy in Hungary, Ljudevit Gaj in Croatia, Vuk Karadzic in Serbia, or Taras Shevchenko in the Ukraine — played a crucial role in laying the foundation of the modern state for their respective peoples. Quite different was the story of nationalism in France where ‘legists’ created the unitary French state by suppressing regionalism in the French Hexagon. Similarly, in England, the role of nation-state builders fell to merchants and to maritime companies, which, aided by buccaneers, brought wealth for the English crown. Interestingly, during the Battle of Britain, Churchill even toyed with the idea of transferring Downing Street and the Westminster Palace to the heartland of America — a gesture which in Central Europe would have amounted to national suicide.

Like America, France first became a state, and in turn set the stage for the molding of the French people of different tribes; by contrast, Germans have always been a stateless yet compact people. The history of France is essentially the history of genocide, in which French rulers from the Capetians to the Bourbons, all the way down to modern Jacobins, meticulously carried out destruction of Occitans, Vendeans, Bretons, Franche-Comte, etc. Suppression of regionalism and nativism has been one of the major hallmarks of French acculturation, with the latest attempt being to frenchify Arabs from the Maghrib countries. Today, France is paying the price for its egalitarian and universalist dreams. On the one hand, it is trying to impose universal values and laws on the masses of Third World immigrants; on the other, it must daily proclaim the principle of self-determination for its multiracial social layers. If one puts things in historical perspective, everything presages that France has become a prime candidate for sparking off racial warfare all over Europe.

Looking at Germany and its East European glacis, a sharp eye immediately discovers a fluid area of levitating borders, “seasonal states,” yet strong culturally and historically minded peoples. Central and Eastern European have a long ethnic and historical memory, but their borders fall short of clean-cut ethnographic lines. Germany, for instance, offers a view of an open and poorly defined stage yet at the same time it is a closed community. By contrast, Jacobin France, functionalist-minded England, and America are geographically closed states, but open societies. Nationalism in these countries has always been inclusive and has invariably displayed globalist and imperialistic pretensions, notably by spreading its unitary message to disparate peoples worldwide.

Geographic location has also affected the ethnopsychology of European peoples. An average German is essentially a peasant; his psychologic cast and conduct are corporal and telluric. A German displays great courtesy but lacks politeness, and like most peasants he usually exhibits heavy-handed (“schwerfaellig”), and frequently an awkward approach to social relations. By contrast, a Frenchman, irrespective of his ideological stripe and social background, is always a petty bourgeois; he is full of manners and stylishness but also full of pretensions. Unlike a German nationalist, a Frenchman displays a surfeit of manners but lacks courtesy. Even the most ignorant foreign tourist who goes to Germany and France will notice something foggy and unpredictable about Germans, while at the same time he will be gratified by the German sense of professional correctness and absolute honesty. By contrast, the body language and mannerisms of the French, as appealing as they may be, frequently leave one perplexed and disappointed.

In the course of their ethnogeneses, languages gave final veneer to their respective peoples. The German language is an organic language that branches off into eternity; it is also the richest European language. The French language, similar to a great extent to English, is an opaque language spun more by context than by flexion. As idiomatic languages, French and English are ideal for maritime and seaport activities. Over the course of history the French sabir and ‘pidgin’ English proved to be astounding homogenizing agents as well as handy acculturative vectors for the English and French drives toward universalism. Subsequently, English and French became universal languages, in contrast to German, which never spread out beyond the East European marshlands.

The German idea of the ‘Reich’ was for centuries perfectly adapted to the open plains of Europe, which housed diverse and closely knit communities. Neither the Habsburgs nor the Brandenburgs ever attempted to assimilate or annihilate the non-Germanic peoples within their jurisdiction as the French and English did within theirs. The Danube monarchy, despite its shortcomings, was a stable society, proven by its five hundred years of existence. During the First and Second Reich, principalities, towns, and villages within the bounds of the Austrian and Prussian lands had a large amount of self-government that frequently made them vulnerable to French, Swedish, and English imperial ambitions.

German ‘Volksheit’ is an aristocratic as well as a democratic notion, since traditionally the relations between domestic aristocracy and the German people have been organic. Unlike France or England, Germany never experimented with foreign slavery. In Germany, ethnic differences between the local aristocracy and the German people are minimal; by contrast, in France, Spain, and England the aristocracy has usually recruited from the Northern European leadership class and not the masses at large. Incidentally, even now, despite the exactions of the French Revolution, one can see more racial differences between a French aristocrat and an average Frenchman than between a German aristocrat and a German peasant. In Germany the relationship between the elites and the commoners has always been rooted in the holistic environment, and as a result Germany has remained a society barely in need of an elaborate social contract; it has based social relationships on horizontal hierarchy and corporate structure, buttressed in addition by the idea of “equality among the equals.” By contrast, French and English society can be defined as vertically hierarchical and highly stratified; consequently, it should not be surprising that French and English racisms were among the most virulent in the world. It is also worth recalling that the first eugenic and racial laws in this century were not passed in Germany, but in liberal America and England.

Political scientists will one day ponder why the most glaring egalitarian impulses appear in France and America, two countries which, until recently, practiced the most glaring forms of racism. Are we witnessing today a peculiar form of remorse or national-masochism, or simply an egalitarian form of inclusive racism? Inclusive nationalism and racism, that manifest themselves in universalism and globalism, attempt to delete the difference between the foreigner and the native, although in reality the foreigner is always forced to accept the legal superstructure of his now “repented” white masters. By ostensibly putting aside its racist past, yet by pushing its universalist message to the extreme, the West paradoxically shows that it is no less racist today than it was yesterday. An elitist like Vilfredo Pareto wrote that liberal systems in decline seem to worry more about the pedigree of their dogs than the pedigree of their offspring. And a leftist, Serge Latouche, has recently written how liberal racists, while brandishing their ethnic national masochism, force liberal values and liberal legal provisions upon their “decorative coloreds.”

Peoples and ethnic groups are like boughs and petals; they grow and decay, but seldom resurrect. France and England may evoke their glorious past, but this past will invariably have to be adjusted to their new ethnically fractured reality. Lithuania was, several centuries ago, a gigantic continental empire; today it is a speck on the map. The obscure Moscow in the 15th century became the center of the future Russian steamroller because other principalities, such as Suzdal or Novgorod, fantasized more about aesthetics than power politics. Great calamities, such as wars and famines, may be harbingers of a nation’s collapse, but license and demographic suicide can also determine the outcome of human drama. Post-ideological Europe will soon discover that it cannot forever depend on the whims of technocratic elites who are in search of the chimera of the “common European market.” As always, the meaning of carnal soil and precious blood will spring forth from those who best know how to impose their destiny on those who have already decided to relinquish theirs. Or to paraphrase Carl Schmitt, when a people abandons politics, this does not mean the end of politics; it simply means the end of a weaker people.

 

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Sunic, Tomislav. “The Decline And Splendor Of Nationalism.” Chronicles of American Culture (January 1992). < http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/tomsunic/sunic1.html >.

Note: This essay was also republished in Tomislav Sunic’s Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity – Collected Essays (Shamley Green, UK: The Paligenesis Project, 2010).