Nation: Nationalism, New Nationalism

Etymologically, a ‘nation’ is a popular and political community made up of those of the same ethnic origins, of the same ‘birth’.

The nation ought not to be confused with the nation-state. ‘Nation’ and ‘ethnos’ are the same word, designating a community whose members are of the same origin. To oppose the nation to the Empire is, semantically, to misunderstand it. An Empire, in the positive sense, is a federation, an ensemble of similar, closely-related nations — a ‘federal nation’.

Nationalism ought not to be associated with a defence of the Jacobin and cosmopolitan nation-state. As a concept, nationalism needs to change its meaning: first, it needs to acquire an ethnic association and no longer a strictly abstract political one. It should return to its original etymological sense. Second, henceforth, nationalism ought to be understood in an enlarged European sense — in a visionary, future-oriented way — to include all the Continent’s Indo-European peoples. In this vein, regional patriotism becomes an organic component of an imperial Great-European nationalism — what I call the New Nationalism.

In respect to France, the situation is especially delicate and complex. In no case should French nationalism identify with the tradition of Jacobin nationalism, since the latter is cosmopolitan, anti-ethnic, and, paradoxically, destroys the ‘France’ it claims to love (this is the ‘French paradox’). The same holds for the present institutions of the European Union, whose principal concern seems to be the destruction of Europe’s peoples and nations. Another path is possible, an imperial one, with three dimensions: first, the ethnically based region; second, citizenship based on the historical nation; and third, a global, ethnic, historical nationality embracing the whole Continent.

The relationship between these three levels is too complex to be rationally resolved in a single blow. Only history will solve it. Europe’s problem dictates a top-down solution that transcends existing divisions, a solution that doesn’t destroy attachment to the ethnically-based region, that doesn’t destroy loyalty to the historical concepts of Spain, France, Germany, etc. (to their languages, their cultures), that doesn’t close off a futuristic construction of the Great European Nation. We need to privilege the idea of exclusion and not that of inclusion.