36

Nationalism and Collectivism

If the apex of traditional civilizations consisted in the principle of universalism, then modern civilization is essentially under the aegis of collectivism. The collective is to the universal what “matter” is to “form.” The first step of what in a traditional sense has always been regarded as “culture” consists in the differentiation of the promiscuous substance of the collective and in the affirmation of personal beings through adherence to superior principles and interests. When the single individual has succeeded in giving a law and a form to his own nature and thus in belonging to himself rather than depending on the merely physical part of his being, then the preliminary condition for a superior order—in which the personality is not abolished but integrated—is already present; such is the order of traditional “participations” in which every individual, function, and caste acquire their right place and reason for being through the acknowledgment of what is superior to them and their organic connection with it. At best, the universal is achieved in the sense of the crowning part of a building, the strong foundations of which consist of both the various differentiated and formed personalities, each one faithful to its own function, and in partial organisms or units endowed with corresponding laws and rights that do not contradict each other but rather coordinate and complement each other through a common spirituality and a common active propensity to a superindividual commitment.

From what has been said previously it is possible to see that in modern society the opposite direction is prevailing, that is, the direction of regress toward the collective rather than progress toward the universal, with the single individual becoming increasingly unable to have a meaning other than as a function of something in which he ceases to have a personality. This becomes increasingly evident as the world of the Fourth Estate approaches. Thus, modern nationalism may be regarded as at best a transition phase.

It is necessary to distinguish between nationality and nationalism. The Middle Ages knew nationalities but not nationalisms. Nationality is a natural factor that encompasses a certain group of common elementary characteristics that are retained both in the hierarchical differentiation and in the hierarchical participation, which they do not oppose. Therefore, during the Middle Ages, castes, social bodies, and orders were articulated within various nationalities, and while the types of the warrior, noble, merchant, and artisan conformed to the characteristics of this or of that nation, these articulations represented at the same time wider, international units. Hence, the possibility for the members of the same caste who came from different nations to understand each other better than the members of different castes within the same nation.

Modern nationalism represents, with regard to this, a movement in the opposite direction. Modern nationalism is not based on a natural unity, but on an artificial and centralizing one. The need for this type of unity was increasingly felt at the same time as the natural and healthy sense of nationality was lost and as individuals approached the state of pure quantity, of being merely the masses, after every authentic tradition and qualitative articulation was destroyed. Nationalism acts upon these masses through myths and suggestions that are likely to galvanize them, awaken elementary instincts in them, flatter them with the perspectives and fancies of supremacy, exclusivism, and power. Regardless of its myths, the substance of modern nationalism is not an ethnos but a demos, and its prototype always remains the plebeian one produced by the French Revolution.

This is why nationalism has a double face. It accentuates and elevates to the state of absolute value a particularistic principle; therefore, the possibilities of mutual understanding and cooperation between nations are reduced to a bare minimum, without even considering the forms of leveling guaranteed by modern civilization. What seems to continue here is the same tendency through which the arising of national states corresponded to the disintegration of the European ecumene. It is well known that in Europe during the nineteenth century, nationalism was synonymous with revolution and acted in the precise sense of a dissolution of the surviving supernational organisms and a weakening of the political principle of “legitimate” sovereignty in the traditional sense of the word. Yet, when considering the relationships between the whole and the single individual as personality, what emerges in nationalism is an opposite aspect, namely, the cumulative and collectivizing element. In the context of modern nationalism what emerges is the previously mentioned inversion; the nation, the homeland, becomes the primary element in terms of being a self-subsisting entity that requires from the individual belonging to it an unconditional dedication, as if it were a moral and not merely a natural and “political” entity. Even culture stops being the support for the formation and elevation of the person and becomes essentially relevant only by virtue of its national character. Thus in the most radical forms of nationalism, the liberal ideal and the ideal of “neutral culture” undergo a crisis and are regarded with suspicion, though from the opposite perspective to the one in which liberalism and the neutral, secular, and apolitical culture appeared as a degeneration or as a crumbling in comparison to previous organic civilizations.

Even when nationalism speaks of “tradition,” it has nothing to do with what used to go by that name in ancient civilizations; it is rather a myth or fictitious continuity based on a minimum common denominator that consists in the mere belonging to a given group. Through the concept of “tradition,” nationalism aims at consolidating a collective dimension by placing behind the individual the mythical, deified, and collectivized unity of all those who preceded him. In this sense, Chesterton was right to call this type of tradition “the democracy of the dead.” Here the dimension of transcendence, or of what is superior to history, is totally lacking.

According to these aspects, it can be said that modern nationalism on the one hand confirms the renunciation of the pursuit of the upwards-oriented direction and the unification through what is supernatural and potentially universal, while on the other hand it distinguishes itself only by virtue of a mere difference of degree from the anonymity proper to the ideal of the Fourth Estate with its “Internationals,” bent, as a matter of principle, on perverting every notion of homeland and of the national state. In reality, wherever the people have become sovereign and the king or the leader is no longer considered as being “from above,” or to be ruling “by God’s grace,” but instead “by the will of the nation” (even where the expression “to rule by God’s grace” has been preserved, it amounts to an empty formula)—it is precisely at this point that the abyss that separates a political organism of a traditional type from communism is virtually overcome—the fracture has occurred, all the values have shifted and been turned upside down; at this point one can only wait for the final stage to be ushered in. Thus, it is more than for mere tactical purposes that the leaders of world subversion in the last form, as it has been embodied in Soviet communism, have as their main goal the excitement, nourishing, and supporting of nationalism even where nationalism, by virtue of being anticommunist, should at least in principle turn against them. They see far away, just like those who employed nationalism for their own purposes during the early revolution (i.e., liberalism) when they said “nation” but really meant “antitradition” or the denial of the principle of true sovereignty. They recognize the collective potential of nationalism, which beyond contingent antitheses will finally dispose of the organisms that it controls.

Hence, the difference in degree between nationalism and the tendencies of a democratic and communitarian character that oppose the forces of particularism and spirit of division inherent in nationalism. In these tendencies the regressive phenomenon that is at the foundation of modern nationalism is also visible; at work in it is the impulse toward a wider agglomerate, leveled on a global scale. As Julian Benda said, the last perspective is that humanity, and not just a fraction of it, will take itself as the object of its cult. There is today a trend toward universal brotherhood; this brotherhood, far from abolishing the nationalist spirit and its particularisms and pride, will eventually become its supreme form, as the nation will be called Man and God will be regarded either as an enemy^[1] or as an “inoperative fiction.” When mankind becomes unified in an immense enterprise and accustomed to organized production, technology, division of labor, and “prosperity,” despising any free activity oriented to transcendence, it will achieve what in similar currents is conceived as the ultimate goal of the true civilizing effort.^[2]

One final consideration concerning modern nationalism: while on the one hand it corresponds to a construction and an artificial entity, on the other hand, through the power of the myths and the confusing ideas that are evoked in order to hold together and galvanize a given human group, this entity remains open to influences that make it act according to the general plan of subversion. Modern nationalisms, with their intransigence, blind egoism and crude will to power, their antagonisms, social unrest and the wars they have generated have truly been the instruments for the completion of a destructive process: the shift from the age of the Third Estate to that of the Fourth Estate; in so doing they have dug their own graves.

Europe had the chance, if not to stop, at least to contain the disaggregative process in a rather wide geopolitical area after the fall of Napoleon who, though he revived the imperial symbol and yearned for a Roman consecration, still remained “the son of the Great Revolution,” the virus of which he helped to spread into the remaining states of traditional and aristocratic Europe as a result of the upheavals brought about by his victorious campaigns. Through the Holy Alliance it would have been possible to create a dam against the fate of the last times. Metternich may rightly be considered the last great European. Nobody was able to see like him with the same far-sighted lucidity and the same overall view the interplay of subversive forces as well as the only way immediately to neutralize them.

Metternich saw all the most essential points: that revolutions are not spontaneous outbursts or mass phenomena, but rather artificial phenomena that are provoked by forces that have the same function in the healthy body of people and states that bacteria have in the generation of diseases in the human body; that nationalism, as it emerged in his own day and age, was only the mask of revolution; that revolution was essentially an international event and that the individual revolutionary phenomena are only localized and partial manifestations of the same subversive current of global proportions. Metternich also saw very clearly the concatenation of the various degrees of revolution; liberalism and constitutionalism unavoidably pave the way for democracy, which in turn paves the way for socialism, which in turn paves the way for radicalism and finally for communism—the entire liberal revolution of the Third Estate only being instrumental in preparing the way for the revolution of the Fourth Estate, which is destined to inexorably remove the representatives of the former and their world as soon as they have completed their assignment as the avant-garde in charge of opening a breach. This is why Metternich saw folly in coming to terms with subversion: if you give it a hand it will soon take the arm and the rest of the body as well. Having understood the revolutionary phenomenon in its unity and essence, Metternich indicated the only possible antidote: a similar supernational front of all the traditional states and the establishment of a defensive and offensive league of all the monarchs of divine right. This is what his Holy Alliance was meant to be.

Unfortunately, the material and spiritual requirements for the full implementation of this grandiose idea were lacking. Around Metternich there were not enough capable men and leaders. The unity of a defensive front on the political and social plane was a clear and evident concept; what was not so clear was the idea that was capable of being a positive reference point and a chrism for this alliance so that it could really be holy. To begin with, in the context of religion there was no unity, since the league was not limited only to Catholic monarchs, but it also included Protestant and Orthodox ones as well; thus, this alliance did not even have the direct and immediate sanction of the Catholic Church, the head of which never joined it. What was really needed was a revival of the spirit of the Middle Ages, better yet, of the Crusades; what was really needed was not just the mere repressive action and the commitment to military intervention wherever a revolutionary flame began to flicker within the territories covered by the alliance, but rather something like a new Templarism, an order, a block of men united by a common idea and relentless in action who could give in every country a living witness to the return of a superior human type. Men such as these were needed rather than the courtiers, ministers of police, prudent Church leaders, and diplomats only concerned with finding a “balanced solution.” At the same time, an attack should have been launched on the ideal plane for a view of the world and of life. But who were the representatives of the pure traditional spirit who in that period would have been capable of extirpating the hotbeds of the rationalistic, illuministic, and scientistic mentality that were the true ferment of the revolution? Where were those who would have disavowed that culture that, beginning in the 1700s, the royal courts and the aristocracies found it fashionable to be part of, or those who would have been able to cover with ridicule rather than with chains all those who romantically portrayed themselves as the apostles and martyrs of the “great and noble ideas of the revolution” and the “freedom of the people”? Lacking a true soul and having jumped at the center of Europe’s attention at the time when the Holy Roman Empire had ceased to exist even nominally—owing to the voluntary renunciation of the Hapsburgs—Vienna was famous mainly as the “city of waltzes.” The Holy Alliance, after ensuring a parenthesis of relative peace and order in Europe, was eventually dissolved and revolutionary nationalisms, which disintegrated the previous political and dynastic units, no longer found any tough resistance to halt their onslaught.

With World War I, the Russian Revolution, and World War II the decisive events of the last age are ushered in. In 1914 the central empires still represented within the Western world a remainder of the feudal and aristocratic Europe, despite the undeniable aspects of militaristic hegemonism and some questionable collusions with capitalism, especially in Wilhelm’s Germany. The coalition against the central empires was expressly a coalition of the Third Estate against the residual forces of the Second; it was a coalition of nationalisms and the great democracies more or less inspired by the “immortal principles” of the French Revolution, which some people wanted to replicate on an international scale and which fact did not prevent the humanitarian and patriotic ideology from playing into the hands of a greedy and supremacist high finance. As few other times before, World War I displays the traits of a conflict not between states and nations, but rather between ideologies of different castes. The immediate and willfully pursued results of this war were the destruction of the German monarchy and Catholic Austria; the indirect results were the collapse of the Czars’ empire, the communist revolution, and the establishment in Europe of a sociopolitical situation that was so chaotic and contradictory as to contain all the premises of a new conflagration.

World War II was this new conflagration. In this war the ideological line-ups were not as precise as in the previous war. States like Germany and Italy that had appropriated the authoritarian and antidemocratic idea and had sided against leftwing forces, by their initially upholding in this war the right of “nations in need of living space” as they struggled against world plutocracy, almost appeared to espouse Marxism on the international plane by giving to the war they waged the meaning of an insurrection of the Fourth Estate against the great democracies in which the power of the Third Estate had been consolidated. But overall, and especially after the United States entered into the conflict, what appeared to be a prevalent ideology was one that had already shaped World War I, namely, the crusade of the democratic nations bent on “liberating” the people still enslaved to what were looked upon as “backward political systems.”^[3] The latter was destined rapidly to become a mere facade with regard to new political alignments. In their alliance with the Soviet Union, which was willed in order to bring down the powers of the Axis, and in their persevering in a mindless radicalism, the democratic powers repeated the error of those who think they can employ with impunity and for their own purposes the forces of subversion, and who, by following a fatal logic, ignore the fact that when the forces representing two different degrees of subversion meet or clash, those corresponding to the higher degree will eventually prevail. In reality it can clearly be seen how, from the Soviet side, the “democratic crusade” had been conceived only as a preparatory stage in the global plans of communism. The end of the war marked the end of the hybrid alliance and the real outcome of World War II was the elimination of Europe as a main protagonist in world politics, the sweeping away of any intermediate form, and the opposition of America and Russia as supernational exponents of the forces of the Third and Fourth Estates, respectively.

It really does not matter what the outcome of an eventual conflict between these two powers will be. The determinisms of some kind of immanent justice are at work; in any event, the process will reach the end. A third world war in its social repercussions will eventually determine the triumph of the Fourth Estate, either in a violent way, or as an “evolution,” or in both forms.

There is more. On the plane of the political powers pursuing world domination, Russia and America appear today in an antagonistic relationship. And yet if one examines in their essence the dominant themes in both civilizations, and if their ideals are closely scrutinized as well as the effective transformations that, following a central tendency, all the values and the interests of life have undergone in both of them, then it is possible to notice a convergence and a congeniality. Russia and America appear as two different expressions of the same thing, as two ways leading to the formation of that human type that is the ultimate conclusion of the processes that preside over the development of the modern world. It may be worthwhile to focus briefly on these convergences. Not only as political convergences but also as “civilizations,” Russia and America are like two ends of the same pair of pincers, that are closing in from the East and the West around the nucleus of ancient Europe, which is too depleted in its energies and in its men to put up an effective resistance. The external conflicts, new crises, and new destructions will only be the means to definitely open the way for the varieties of the world of the Fourth Estate.

Footnotes

1. Proudhon had already declared that the true remedy does not consist in identifying mankind with God, but in proving that God, if he exists, is mankind’s sworn enemy.

2. J. Benda, The Treason of the Clerics.

3. With regard to the dubious ideological alignments during World War II. one should notice in the two powers of the Axis, Italy and Germany, the negative element proper to “totalitarianism” and the new forms of dictatorial “Bonapartism.” With regard to the other power of the Tripartite Pact (Japan), it would have been interesting to see the results of an unpreced entedexperiment, that is, of an external “Europeanization” coupled with an internal retention of the traditional spirit of an empire of divine right. Concerning the appraisal of both positive and negative elements of Fascism, see my Il fascismo: saggio di una analisi critica dal punto di vista della Destra (Rome, 1964).