Of Nationalism and Nations

 

As Nationalists, we need to draw a distinction between nationalism as an abstract ideology and nations as quotidien facts. We believe that nations are the core components of human identity, the largest viable entity of government. So we are in favour of nations in principle.

That is a matter of political theory. Which nations actually exist in practice is a matter of political fact – a historically contingent question of the situation in any given place and time. For example, Cornwall isn’t a nation now. It was once, and under certain circumstances could be again. Europe also isn’t a nation now, but it is not impossible that one day it might become one.

What makes nations exist is that their members perceive them as an in-group, differences within which are perceived as of secondary importance compared with differences between any in group member and the out group of “foreigners”.

Note that the perceived identifier of nation membership may be explicitly ethnocultural – the Japanese are a notable example now, and the English were 300 years ago. But it can also be ideological-cultural – as in modern America and ancient Rome. Being an American or a Roman is or was primarily about language, culture and common social values rather than ethnicity per se. However, the past experience of Rome suggests – and I suspect the future history of the USA, and if we go on as we are Britain, will confirm – that ethnicity is a much stronger “glue” than mere culture in terms of making the nation it defines endure..

An interesting case in point here is China. The Han and Roman Empires were formed at around the same time. Indeed the Han Empire, uniting the Chinese people, formed about 200 years earlier than the Roman, in 220 BC. The difference was that in the case of China ethnicity was the bedrock on which the State was built, whereas “Romanitas” was only an ideological-cultural “civic nationalism”, ultimately trying to accommodate Syrians, Arabs, Italians, Celts and eventually Germans in a multi-ethnic “proposition state” like the modern USA.

The result is that, despite trying to strengthen the ideological glue by adopting Christianity as a monolithic State religion/ideology, the Latin-speaking Roman Empire fell 1500 years ago. The ethnic-rooted Han Chinese Empire did not fall and has not fallen. 2200 years after the Han Empire was formed, modern Chinese today still call themselves “Han” and their monoethnic (90% Han  with insignificant minorities around the edges in the case of the current Peoples’ Republic of China) state has endured, springing back repeatedly after several massive foreign invasions and collapses into civil strife.

The increasingly mongrelised Roman Empire in the West did not survive or, despite failed attempts by the likes of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire and now the EU, re-emerge when it was overrun in the 5^th century. One reason was that Romans of Germanic origin, however superficially acculturated, Christianised and Romanised, ultimately identified more with their non-Romanised Germanic ethnic kin than with other Romans. Just as many Muslims in Britain do – for example the Tipton Taliban and the 7/7 bombers.

Interestingly, the Eastern Roman Empire – the two halves were split in the late 3^rd century – outlived the Western half by a thousand years. The reason was that it had at its core not merely a language and an ideology but the monoethnic Greek nation (whose heartland is not just Greece but much of Western Asia Minor, from which they were brutally ethnically cleansed by the Turk). The non-Greek Syrian, Egyptian and North African provinces, proving blood is thicker than even holy water, favoured their fellow Semites in the Arab armies of Islam and were lost as soon as they crossed the Imperial frontiers.

The Greek core of what became the Byzantine Empire put up a truly heroic thousand year fight against the alien Islamic hordes of first Arabs and then Turks. They called themselves “Romaoi”, Romans, and their state Romania, but they were ethnically and linguistically Greek, and that was the core of what they were. Like Tolkien’s Gondor – for which it was probably partly the inspiration – Byzantium got much thanks and little help from the lands of Europe it warded.

Indeed, in 1204 it got stabbed in the back by them, when the Gollum-like Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, perverted the Fourth Crusade into a plundering expedition down the Adriatic, finishing up by sacking the Byzantine capital Constantinople and never so much as treading on the toe of any of the Muslims it was formed to fight. The resilience of the Byzantine Hellenic nation was shown by the fact that it recovered even from this, and regained its capital. But they were fatally weakened, and the orc-horde of the Turk was able to flow around them and subject much of South-Eastern Europe to the most brutal Islamic servitude for centuries. Constantinople, like Minas Tirith, stood alone, a last island in the Muslim sea, until 1453 when the Turkish finally overwhelmed it, and the last Roman Emperor, Michael XI Palaeologus, died sword in hand on the walls of the city.

The different histories of Rome and China, and of the two Roman Empires, West and East, graphically demonstrate that civic nationalism is not enough when the barbarians come. Only racial nationalism, a bond of blood as well as of speech and belief, can anchor nations deep enough to withstand the storms and tides of history.

Which nations actually come to birth depends on that history. But from a bond of shared blood, of genetic shared identity, can be forged in battle against a common enemy an enduring nation from disparate if kindred precursor states and tribes. Thus the English were forged from the little kingdoms of the Angle, Saxon and Jutish tribes in a desperate quarter-millennium of battle for England against the Vikings, the Danes and Norsemen, who indeed, as close ethnic kindred, were themselves absorbed into the new English nation.

Thus also were Castilians, Aragonese, Catalans and Galicians forged into a Spanish nationhood in the Reconquista, the eight century long battle to win back their land, acre by acre, battle by battle, generation by generation, from the Arab conquerors. But a historical accident left one Iberian people separate. The Portuguese too took part in the epic reconquest of Iberia from Islam, but they stayed under their own kings, and their language drifted ever more apart from Spanish. By the 17^th Century, they were sufficiently separate to rise up after eighty years of Spanish rule and be a nation again.

Some Nationalists, such as the Breton Yann Fouere, saw the future of the European Race in such separatism, in a “Europe of a Hundred Flags”, of small nations such as Wales and Brittany and Cornwall. These peoples were indeed nations once, but they are not so now – their peoples mostly do not see themselves as more Cornish or Welsh than British, more Breton than French (indeed the Le Pens, pere et fille, are Bretons who are quintessentially French!). But these peoples might become nations again, and Britain and France break up into their component peoples – although the English and those who would remain French would still greatly outnumber the rest of the British and French successor nations.

Other Nationalists, such as Sir Oswald Mosley, took the opposite view, and called for “Europe a Nation”. Europe isn’t a nation now, as a statement of simple fact. And it will certainly not be bound into one by the webs spun by Brussels bureaucrats, the more so as their multi-cultural vision is the antithesis of what nations are forged from. The centres of their web, the European Parliaments and offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, by no coincidence at all, have not a trace of European identity, culture or heritage about them, soulless glass and cement boxes worthy of a multinational corporation. No European nation will ever come from there, or unite Arab, Pakistani, Turk, Roma, African and other Immigrant and indigenous European into any living or enduring entity.

But the immigrants the EU welcomes into its identityless void may yet play their part in forging Europe into a nation. As a part of the presence against which the existing nations of Europe are driven to unite. In the coming decades, as the burgeoning hordes of the Third World, which European medicine and technology has bred far beyond the capacity of their lands to feed, swarm west in desperation and land hunger, vast barbarian hordes will pour across our borders, no doubt merging with their ethnic kindred already here. In the desperate struggle that follows to hold on to our European homeland a European nationhood may indeed be forged from the bonds of shared blood in the blood of shared battles. It may be so.

And if it happens – if Europe, or in a different future, Cornwall then becomes a nation then as nationalists we shall recognise and applaud the fact.

All we say is that the largest stable human political unit is a nation. Political units that are not nations.  Artificial entities united only by speech or ideas do not and will not endure. As the Western Roman Empire and the USSR did not, and the USA and the EU will not. Though in the former case a genuine white American nation will emerge if they succeed in resisting the Third World hispanics who seek their land. And in the latter case, the existing white European nations will need to stand together if they are to keep their and our homeland from the impending mass migration out of Afro-Asia.  How, and how well, and how closely they stand together will determine what nation or nations are left standing on our soil when, and if, the migration tide is at last halted.

Nations, forged from shared bonds of blood and homeland, are an abiding reality of the human condition. Which nations are thus forged, if they share enough kinship to gel as nations, is the happenstance of history.

Nationalism as an ideology is greater than any nation in any place in any time. It is an eternal human verity….