A nation should be like fulfilling marriage, one is free to leave it but can also choose to stay

French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan’s 1882 lecture, “What is a Nation?”, is an influential text in the study of nationalism, as provocative as it is prescient.

Renan anticipates the Third Reich and the European Union. His central idea is that nations are best defined not by force of circumstance (ethnicity, shared territory or interests), but by the will that sustains desire to live together. A nation, he writes, is “a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make.”

A nation, he contends, ought to be a “daily plebiscite” (referendum) by which he means that it must prove its worth to its people on an ongoing basis. A nation’s worth is proved when people are free to leave, but choose to strive on — for better or worse. In short, a nation is a fulfilling marriage.

As the recipient of considerable opprobrium for espousing similar views, I delight in Renan’s last word on the subject: “At certain moments, the best way to be right in the future is to know how to resign oneself to being out of fashion.” 

MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Today, I propose to analyse with you an idea which, though apparently clear, lends itself to the most dangerous misunderstandings.

The forms of human society are of the greatest variety. They include great agglomerations of men after the fashion of China, Egypt and ancient Babylonia; tribes such as the Hebrews and the Arabs; city-states on the Athenian and Spartan model; communities such as the Israelites and the Parsis, lacking a country and maintained by religious bonds; nations like France, England, and most other modern, autonomous polities; confederations after the fashion of Switzerland and America; the great families that race, or rather language, has established between the different branches of Germans, the different branches of Slavs.

Such are the types of groupings that exist, or rather existed, and that one confuses only at the price of the most serious inconvenience.

At the time of the French Revolution, many believed that the institutions of small independent cities such as Sparta and Rome could be applied to our great nations of 30 or 40 million souls.

ERROR

In our days, a yet greater error is committed: one confounds the idea of race with that of the nation and attributes to ethnographic, or rather linguistic, groups a sovereignty analogous to that of actually existing peoples.

Nations are something rather new in history. Antiquity did not know them: Egypt, China, and ancient Chaldea were in no sense nations.

There were no Egyptian citizens, no more than there were Chinese ones. Classical antiquity had its republics and its municipal kingdoms, its confederations of local republics, its empires; it hardly had a nation in the sense that we understand it. Prior to their absorption into the Roman Empire, Gaul, Spain, and Italy were assemblages of peoples, often comprising leagues between themselves but without central institutions or dynasties.

If one is to follow certain political theorists, a nation is above all else a dynasty representing an ancient conquest. According to the theorists of whom I speak, the grouping of provinces brought about by a dynasty through wars, marriages, and treaties ends with the dynasty that has brought it about.

However, is such a law absolute? It is not. Switzerland and the United States, both formed as conglomerations of successive additions, have no dynastic foundation.

DYNASTIES

One must thus admit that a nation can exist in the absence of the dynastic principle even that nations that have been formed by dynasties can separate themselves from these without for all that ceasing to exist. The old principle that only takes princes into account should no longer be observed: apart from the right of dynasties, is the right of nations. But on what criterion should we base this national right? By what sign shall we know it? From what tangible fact can we derive it?

By race, many say with assurance.  According to this theory, the Germanic family, for example, has the right to reclaim its scattered members, even if these member do not ask to rejoin it. That is a great error, one which, should it become dominant, will result in the destruction of European civilisation. Race is not everything as it is amongst rodents and felines and no one has the right to go about the world examining men’s heads and then grabbing them by the throat saying;  “You are of our blood; you belong to us!”

HUMILIATION

What we have said of race must also be said of language. The United States and England, like Spanish America and Spain, speak the same language but do not constitute a single nation.

By contrast, Switzerland, so well-made because it was created by the consent of its different parts, contains three or four languages. The desire of Switzerland to be united despite its linguistic variety is a much more important fact than similarity often achieved by humiliation.

Exclusive interest in language as a criterion of nationhood has, like that of race, its dangers and inconveniences. When one exaggerates its importance, one limits and closes oneself up in a particular culture understood as national. One leaves the open air that one breathes in the midst of humanity in order to lock oneself away in little freemasonries of one’s compatriots. Nothing could be worse for the mind nor more regrettable for civilisation.

NATIONALITY

Religion no longer offers a sufficient basis for the establishment of a modern nationality.  Community of interest is assuredly a powerful link between men. Do interests suffice to make a nation? I do not think so. Communities of interest determine commercial treaties. However, sentiment features in the making of nations.  A nation is a body and soul at the same time. A Customs Union, by contrast, is never a fatherland.

Geography and what are called natural frontiers certainly play a considerable part in the division of nations. Geography is one of the essential factors in history.

Rivers have distributed the races; mountains have stopped them.  But can one say, as certain parties believe, that the limits of a nation are inscribed on the map and that a given nation has the right to judge what is necessary in rounding its corners or in striving to reach this mountain or that river? I know of no more arbitrary or disastrous doctrine. With it, one justifies every kind of violence. 

Geography makes a nation no more than race does.

Geography provides the substratum, the field of battle and of work but man provides the soul. Man is everything in the formation of this sacred thing that one calls a people.

SPIRITUAL

Nothing material suffices. A nation is a spiritual principle resulting from the profound complexities of history it is a spiritual family, not a group determined by the lay of the land.

We now see what does not suffice to create such a spiritual principle: race, language, interests, religious affinity, geography, military necessities. What more could there be? Given what has already been said, I will not need to hold your attention much longer.

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which, properly speaking, are really one and the same constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present.

One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received. Having suffered, rejoiced, and hoped together is worth more than common taxes or frontiers that conform to strategic ideas and is independent of racial or linguistic considerations. “Suffered together.” I said, for shared suffering unites more than does joy. In fact, periods of mourning are worth more to national memory than triumphs because they impose duties and require a common effort.

SOLIDARITY

A nation is therefore a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make. It presupposes a past but is reiterated in the present by a tangible fact: consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation’s existence is a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life. A nation has no more right than a king to say to a province: “You belong to me, I am taking you.”

For us, a province is its inhabitants and, if anyone in this affair has the right to be consulted, it is the inhabitant. A nation never has a true interest in annexing or holding territory that does not wish to be annexed or held. The vow of nations is the sole legitimate criterion and that to which it is necessary to constantly return.

We have chased away metaphysical and theological abstractions from politics. What now remains? Man remains, his desires, his needs. The secession and, in the long run, collapse of nations are the consequence of a system which placed these old organisms at the mercy of often poorly enlightened wills.

It is clear that, in such a matter, no principle should be pushed too far. Truths of this order are only applicable when taken together and in a very general way. Human will changes but then what doesn’t beneath heaven?

ETERNAL

Nations are not eternal. They have a beginning and they will have an end. A European confederation will probably replace them. But, if so, such is not the law of the century in which we live. At the present moment, the existence of nations is a good and even necessary thing. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, a liberty that would be lost if the world had only one law and one master.

Man is a slave neither of his race, his language, his religion, the course of his rivers, nor the direction of his mountain ranges.

A great aggregation of men, in sane mind and warm heart, created a moral conscience that calls itself a nation. As long as this moral conscience proves its strength by sacrifices that require the subordination of the individual to the communal good, it is legitimate and has the right to exist. If doubts are raised along the frontiers, consult the disputed populations.

DISDAIN

“Consult the populations, you say! What naiveteì! These sickly French ideas that pretend to replace diplomacy and war with an infantile simplicity!”  Let’s listen, Messieurs, and leave the reign of the transcendents. Let’s know how to submit to such strong disdain. Perhaps, after many fruitless experiments, they will later return to our modest empirical solutions. 

At certain moments, the best way to be right in the future is to know how to resign oneself to being out of fashion.

 David Ndii, an Economist is currently serving on the Nasa Technical and Strategy Committee, where he leads the NASA policy team. [email protected] @DavidNdii