THE BALANCE OF EVILS:

Twilight of the Nation-State: European transnationalism is a utopian dream, Pierre Manent warns: a review of Democracy Without Nations? The Fate of Self-Government in Europe, by Pierre Manent, translated by Paul Seaton (Bruce S. Thornton, 18 January 2008, City Journal)

The European Union’s grand project rests on the belief that nationalism is passé, indeed pernicious. Fascism’s mystic nationalism proved, on this view, that the nation-state impedes the spread of human rights, tolerance, and the rational adjudication of disputes—all essential to global peace. The nation-state should therefore give way to organizations like the E.U.: a transnational, secular institution that can bring about peace and prosperity by practicing what French intellectual Chantal Delsol calls “techno-politics”—a rational approach superior to the atavistic passions and superstitions that fired nationalism. But as the political philosopher Pierre Manent argues in a provocative new book, the European project, at least in its current form, represents a serious threat to democratic freedom. “If our nation suddenly disappeared and its bonds were dispersed,” Manent observes, “each of us immediately would become a stranger, a monster, to himself.”

A professor at the Centre des Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron, Manent has written extensively on democracy, nationalism, and liberalism. Democracy Without Nations comprises an earlier essay of the same name; a long monograph, La raison des nations, that appeared in France in 2006; and a lecture, “What Is a Nation?” Together with translator Paul Seaton’s overview of Manent’s writings, they make an excellent introduction to the work of an important thinker, whose ideas help us understand the temptations of the E.U.’s utopian dream—and its dangers.

What troubles Manent is “the erosion—perhaps the dismantling—of the political form that for so many centuries has sheltered the endeavors of European man. I refer to the nation.” He begins by examining the present European scene, dominated by a “passion for resemblance,” which he describes as a demand that we see others as ourselves and ignore cultural differences, national ones above all. Europeans also increasingly regard their nations’ pasts as “made up of collective crimes and unjustifiable restraints.” With the past demonized and current differences ignored, legitimacy comes to reside only in a kind of “human generality.”

Yet modern democracy first arose through nation-states, Manent reminds us. These political forms united particular peoples into “communion,” binding past, present, and future. Now, though, “this unifying principle of our lives has lost its connective force,” the national communion dissolving into “predemocratic” associations lacking the democratic nation’s power to assimilate disparate groups and values. Asks Manent: “What human association, old or new, will be able to bring consent and communion together in a viable way?”

Abandoning democratic nationhood puts at risk the individual rights, equality, and freedom that the nation-state made possible in the first place.

It is, of course, the point of transnationalism to do away with those pesky liberties so that elites can impose their will. And, while nationalism is, indeed, pernicious, it is also an inevitable pathology of secular Darwinism, so will be the opposing pathology which prevents the transnational project from coming to fruition.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 19, 2008 6:01 AM