Macron's manifesto for Empire

Past history ensures that, perhaps? Where it doesn't you tend to have wars. So whatever is new? Denying reality does not change it. The places where there were "nationalist wars" just happen to be places where was had been continuously fought for centuries (thinking about the balkans...), where that condition for instability was available to be used by those interested in manipulation people against each other.

Communities exist. This is not a moral judgment, it is a fact. Political democracy demand that the members of communities take part in the government of a well-defined polity. From this necessarily arises the political nation. That it arose in the 19th century was a consequence of the rise of democratic politics. This sense of nation was already present in ancient polities, it was just that those all had limited voting rights or were very small, they were the exception. So the phenomenon of "nationalism" is said to be a 19th century thing. Bit the idea and the practices it contains are much older, they go back to the independent cities and towns from the beginnings of history. What changed was a matter of scale.

Who is interested in painting this political nationalism as bad? Those who want to create empires where democracy is reduced to a meaningless ritual, where it no longer works. It is a trap. You cannot divorce demos and democracy. And a demos is nation.

The EU cannot be democratic because there is no european demos. A symptom of which is the absence of organized european political parties. In the inconceivability of candidates from country A hoping to gain many votes from people in country B. Imagine how a popular election for EU president would go... What passes for "political democracy" in the EU is a parliament elected along national lines, where groups are organized as volatile associations of national political groups. And if you are curious whether that is near changing, look at the total failure of Varoufakis' silly pan-european "movement" in the next election.

It is all very nice to play the rebel without a country and claim that nationalism is bad and outmoded. But how do you organize a democracy then? How is power to be exercised if not through some kind of community organization? And how can you have a community organization without agreeing on a definition of what the community (the polity) is and the rules for the way it is organized?
You can discuss what a nation is, even whether it is territorial or not. But you cannot pretend that democracy can happen in the absence if a nation. The nation is the political unit that enables democracy to exist. Anarchists might disagree, but for that specific disagreement they can start a thread about anarchism...
 
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Nationalism isn’t responsible by itself for the peace that has occurred in the past 80 years.
But what do you base your claims on then? That nationalism leads to violence? If at the same time that nationalism has proliferated, violence has also gone down?
Nationalism is responsible for the empire building that took place writ 1700-1940. You can place all that elsewhere too, but nationalist sentiments were a strong part of empire.
That empire building is the opposite of nationalism. These empires robbed other countries of their right to self-determination.
I hope it does too. Thanks for your good wishes! I hope your are very wrong. If you’re right our descendants are going to all die. They might anyways but your walls, your borders, and your national identities will guarantee it.
My descendants will die? That sounds very dramatic. Better build bigger walls then to prevent that

Hm... @Hehehe seems to be advocating an interesting idea. Only nationalism can bring about the socialist ideas that we want. What a novel thought. A sort of... national socialism, if you will? I’ll have to digest this...
That's a cheap strawman and you know it

It's not really arguable at all. The nation is most commonly defined as a common language community, but it is objectively true that the linguistic map of, say, Europe as it exists today is a product of compulsory education in a given language within the boundaries of territory administered by a given state. And even after centuries of this local differences still persist in many cases. As @Owen Glyndwr will tell you, before the modern period you could draw a line of linguistic continuity all the way through Europe. There weren't well-defined national groups before early modern states began to do things to make fighting wars easier.

I don't get what you mean by the phrase "legitimacy of the concept of nation." If you mean, like, its validity in applying to the real world, well, I agree that there is a practical argument for the continuing importance of the national state. But as soon as you get into the realm of legitimating your state, nationalism presents a number of problems, most obviously as succinctly stated by Lord Acton:

By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, it reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary. It cannot admit them to an equality with the ruling nation which constitutes the State, because the State would then cease to be national, which would be a contradiction of the principle of its existence.

This isn't just some theoretical concern, either: we are witnessing that drama play out in Israel. Anyway, the other problem here is that as @Traitorfish has pointed out before, if the nation is in fact ultimately a project of the state, then to say that the state is legitimate because it represents a nation is to say that the state is legitimate because of...itself. Which is also why it's pretty funny that when I said the nation is a state project you repeated back at me "the state is a statist project."

Most European states were dynastic empires until the end of World War I.

Language is one part of a national identity sure. How then is it a "gotcha!" to point out that states might teach that language to their citizens? French state could not do that if there were no French language to begin with. The fact that there are different accents to every language does not refute this in any way. The idea that all these boundaries aren't "perfectly defined" or perfectly discrete or whatever does not matter. Nothing in this world is perfectly defined. Maybe the French nation has people living in it who speak something that is closer to Spanish than French. It does not delegitimize the existence of France as a nation. Also, pointing out that states have advanced nationalism is in no way contradictory to the idea of nationalism.

You’ll find that even outside of language there are many many other ways to delineate nations. People from some geographical area. People who look the same. Religions. “Ethnicity”, which is itself equally nebulous. The best part is, once you consider that each of these is essentially equally legitimate (read: not at all, minus force), then you have numerous maps that all overlap and contradict one another, making the comfortable idea of neat, tidy nation-states that will eliminate conflict once they’re implemented laughably impossible.
Eliminate conflict? I don't think anyone here is arguing that nationstates cannot engage in war. This seems like the Nirvana fallacy. Unfortunately, war has been a part of the human condition since the beginning.

Oh and by the way for all the flaws in its execution this is why the US will always represent a superior form of polity to one based on the nation. One is based on physiological (in the uglier racialist theories of nationhood, anyway) or geographical happenstance, the other is a moral community that anyone can become part of. All the "fighting over laws" we do is in fact the mark of a free association of people trying to form a "more perfect union"; the supposed political unanimity springing from nationhood is generally the consequence of an authoritarian government. And of course even in the US we see "the national interest" being invoked to allow one part of the nation to ride roughshod over another, because like any abstraction the nation papers over all kinds of contradictions, the most obvious being gender and class.
What I predict is that as the US begins to invoke "national interest" more and more to run roughshod over others, you will see more and more separatist movements. If that happens, you will then need to reorganize the polity or straight-up oppress those separatist movements.
 
The places where there were "nationalist wars" just happen to be places where was had been continuously fought for centuries (thinking about the balkans...), where that condition for instability was available to be used by those interested in manipulation people against each other.

It is certainly true that there had been ethnic instability in the Balkans for a long time. What is also true is that the concept of the national state raised the stakes of inter-ethnic politics by raising existential-level questions about who would constitute the polity. Those kinds of questions simply don't arise in the same form in a dynastic empire or other form of state where the organizing principle is not nationality or ethnicity.

Communities exist. This is not a moral judgment, it is a fact.

Sure, it's a fact that communities exist. What isn't clear is whether the nation constitutes an organic community analogous to the polis from ancient times. I think there is a very strong argument that it in fact does not, and that nations are in fact state projects, which again suggests that to claim the state's legitimacy derives from the nation is to claim the state's legitimacy derives from the state itself.

Who is interested in painting this political nationalism as bad? Those who want to create empires where democracy is reduced to a meaningless ritual, where it no longer works. It is a trap. You cannot divorce demos and democracy. And a demos is nation.

Well, I am as anti-EU as you are (maybe not quite, lol) but I am telling you that nationalism is bad. Ascribing me these motives isn't really fair or accurate, no more than if I claimed you're just into nationalism so you can ethnically cleanse all the minorities in Portugal.

Language is one part of a national identity sure. How then is it a "gotcha!" to point out that states might teach that language to their citizens?

I already explained why it's a "gotcha". If you don't bother to read the post why quote and respond to it?

What I predict is that as the US begins to invoke "national interest" more and more to run roughshod over others, you will see more and more separatist movements. If that happens, you will then need to reorganize the polity or straight-up oppress those separatist movements.

And what I predict is that when this prediction turns out to be wrong, it won't change your views on anything.

That empire building is the opposite of nationalism. These empires robbed other countries of their right to self-determination.

Out of curiosity, what position do you take on Catalan independence? Why do so many people appear to disagree that they are part of the "Spanish nation"?
 
I already explained why it's a "gotcha". If you don't bother to read the post why quote and respond to it?
Now we're simply starting to go in circles. Even if the nation were entirely created by the state (it isn't) it still would not delegitimize the concept. We also do not live in the world of forms, the nation does not need to have some kind of 100% perfect delineation (nothing has), it simply needs to be a useful unit of political organization (which it is).
And what I predict is that when this prediction turns out to be wrong, it won't change your views on anything.
If it turns out that I'm wrong, I'll just come out and admit it. If, after 50 years, US remains a liberal democracy with the exact same borders as it has now, I will admit I was wrong.
Out of curiosity, what position do you take on Catalan independence? Why do so many people appear to disagree that they are part of the "Spanish nation"?
The thing about Catalan independence is an excellent example. Spain is running roughshod over their interests for the "greater good". The people of Catalonia do not seem to have enough love for their fellow man to support them financially, which is why they're seeking independence. This, in turn, means that Spain either has to oppress them or let them go. Personally, I support their right to independence if the majority of Catalans are really for it. Also, for whatever it is worth, I would support independence movements that seek to gain independence from Finland. Ålanders or Samis probably don't have any serious aspirations for independence, but if they did, I would certainly want to negotiate a peaceful separation. In fact, getting rid of Åland might be a net positive, but that's neither here or there.
 
Now we're simply starting to go in circles.

We're "simply starting to go in circles" because you've literally repeated the same thing three times without addressing what I said three (of my) posts ago.
 
- Agent of chaos : "If there isn't a nation that co-exists in the USA, does it mean Barak Obama is a Kenyan ?"

Who is interested in painting this political nationalism as bad? Those who want to create empires where democracy is reduced to a meaningless ritual, where it no longer works. It is a trap. You cannot divorce demos and democracy. And a demos is nation.
Much agreed.

You still fail, as all have done, to address the fundamental problem here: where does one nation end and the other begin? And how to ensure that the boundaries of the state match those of the nation?
I'm sorry, I don't understand the issue.
A nation is an abstract, a representation that extends and changes through time and space. It ends in a foggy area of multinationality, of people integrating a society, a process that might occupy up to several generations and is not necessarily linear. It might happen that the parents feel better integrated as nationals than their children, for whom the old land holds much affection. There isn't so much an essence to a nation as there is an imaginary. And that imaginary needs not be fixed or hostile. Although the State is the usual incarnation of the nation, the nation can exist outside its boundaries.
The nation can also end in a time and space where it isn't recognized anymore as a relevant fraction of our identity.
Identity is always fractional. A national identity doesn't supersede other forms of identity (e.g. class) ; they all add up in a kaleidoscopic manner. Which parts of the identity are prevalent vary from individual to individual.
To clear it up : if anything, I'm all for granting voting rights to non-nationals. I think it's an important part of the integration process.
 
A nation is an abstract, a representation that extends and changes through time and space.

The claim that people are making here is the exact opposite: that a nation exists, not as an abstraction, but as a real community which is the only possible basis for democratic politics. That is a far stronger claim that what you're saying here.
 
I do not read them like you do. Maybe it's just a matter of crunching definitions before reaching an agreement.

edit : most forms of identity are representations. It doesn't prevent them from finding solid ground down this earth.
 
I do not read them like you do. Maybe it's just a matter of crunching definitions before reaching an agreement.
You even quoted the part where he states it most clearly and said you agreed:

Who is interested in painting this political nationalism as bad? Those who want to create empires where democracy is reduced to a meaningless ritual, where it no longer works. It is a trap. You cannot divorce demos and democracy. And a demos is nation.

edit : most forms of identity are representations. It doesn't prevent them from finding solid ground down this earth.

Of course identity is an abstraction. All identities are abstractions. IMO the point of the political left is to make people see that they are nothing but abstractions, to create the conditions for solidarity against the tiny ruling elite.



 
Okay, we can do this. Yes, I think that quote from innonimatu is central. But I would bold the opening question instead.
I made the same argument last page :
"It is, actually, exactly what Macron is doing : relegating nationalism to the far-right corner and agitating the spectre of anti-republicanism.
How nationalism was instrumentalized in the past can serve as a lesson. It doesn't describe how it is bound to be used.
So : the far-right made a hold-up on the nation and the idea is now considered so dirty it cannot be touched. I think that's all too convenient.
For what greater good, may I ask, did we abandon the nation ?"

The lurking shadow in both of those questions is that of the big capital, de-territorialized corporate governance that cares neither for the people nor democracy.
I'm fine with class solidarity but the Communist International kinda died in 1914. Some will say nationalisms triggered the war ; some will say nationalisms were instrumentalized for the benefits of the great capital. I think the capital triggered the war and nationalisms were mere instruments.
I'm also fine with multiplying layers of solidarity. And local government, because government should keep the interests of the governed in mind. A nation-based government feels local nowadays.
Somehow, I might say that cosmopolitanism is a privileged stance that few can afford (I could). I find it a respectable wish in its ideal but I fail to see how it finds suitable ground to develop horizontal solidarities. Somehow, I feel it leaves an open range to the great capital, which I do not trust to serve my interests, nor the interests of my fellow humans. Cosmopolitanism is like Kantian morals : beautiful or informative in form, rather useless or even counter-productive in application.

So, the nation. What's so bad about it ? Can we make sure we distinguish right-wing nationalism from the nation ? Surely, there can be an enlightened nationalism that respects democracy, human dignity and the interests of the meek, that is generously inclusive. I don't believe there is any necessity to what form a "nationalism" should take, no essence. It can be a layer for identity and a ground for government. I don't believe either all forms of nationalism would aim to negate other forms of identity and/or be expansionist. We've reached a form of friendship between nations, over here in Europe, even tolerating them damn spoilers.

To an extent, the fact that nationalisms are only instruments for the far-right and the big capital to manipulate is even more a reason why leftists should take over the question and present alternative forms of nationalism. Saturate the field.
As an anecdote : most of the nationalist independence movements, in the 1950-60's, were also socialist movements and fighting against the cosmopolitan imperialism of the big capital.
Nowadays, countries that have been privatized to foreign multi-national entreprises could certainly benefit from a revival of such movements (à la Nasser, if you will).
 
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Can you explain why this quote is wrong:
By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, it reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary. It cannot admit them to an equality with the ruling nation which constitutes the State, because the State would then cease to be national, which would be a contradiction of the principle of its existence.

 
Can you explain why this quote is wrong:
By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, it reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary. It cannot admit them to an equality with the ruling nation which constitutes the State, because the State would then cease to be national, which would be a contradiction of the principle of its existence.
Is this the part that you falsely claim I haven't addressed? Like I said, the nation doesn't have to exist in the world of forms. The state can have people living in it that may or may not be a part of the nation. The nation can grant them equality. The nation does not need to be 100% pure. Arguably, as the state becomes more ethnically fractured, it becomes more unviable. The nation does not need to have some kind of 100% perfect delineation or purity (nothing has), it simply needs to be a useful unit of political organization (which it is).
 
Past history ensures that, perhaps? Where it doesn't you tend to have wars. So whatever is new? Denying reality does not change it. The places where there were "nationalist wars" just happen to be places where was had been continuously fought for centuries (thinking about the balkans...), where that condition for instability was available to be used by those interested in manipulation people against each other.

Ah... so then nations are a modern development? Or else surely these Balkan wars of the past could also have been a product of nationalism. If the nation is ancient and immortal then I should surely argue that they were.

Communities exist. This is not a moral judgment, it is a fact. Political democracy demand that the members of communities take part in the government of a well-defined polity. From this necessarily arises the political nation. That it arose in the 19th century was a consequence of the rise of democratic politics. This sense of nation was already present in ancient polities, it was just that those all had limited voting rights or were very small, they were the exception. So the phenomenon of "nationalism" is said to be a 19th century thing. Bit the idea and the practices it contains are much older, they go back to the independent cities and towns from the beginnings of history. What changed was a matter of scale.

It is a terribly Eurocentric thing to point to rhetoric in the Greek city states and normalize their philosophy as universal to human nature. Sure, Athens and Sparta engaged in nationalist rhetoric. But how is that comparable to human societies in, say, pre-Columbian North America? Sub-Saharan Africa before colonialism? Even much of China for most of its history, save when it was divided. The Mandate of Heaven transcended nations, and is much more verifiably ancient and immortal than nations. Perhaps this is the human condition? A divine cycle of corruption and revolution towards the perfect society?

Who is interested in painting this political nationalism as bad? Those who want to create empires where democracy is reduced to a meaningless ritual, where it no longer works. It is a trap. You cannot divorce demos and democracy. And a demos is nation.

Democracy is rule by the people, not the nation. Fundamentally the two may be similar, but the problem, shall I restate it, is that they have never been perfectly congruent. Never before has a national identity been asserted flawlessly, establishing perfect state borders over a population of individuals sharing a nation. Every time it has required correction, to the borders, the nation, or the people. Ideally the borders would change first, followed by the nation, and finally the people, but sadly it seems national correction tends to begin with people.

The EU cannot be democratic because there is no european demos. A symptom of which is the absence of organized european political parties. In the inconceivability of candidates from country A hoping to gain many votes from people in country B. Imagine how a popular election for EU president would go... What passes for "political democracy" in the EU is a parliament elected along national lines, where groups are organized as volatile associations of national political groups. And if you are curious whether that is near changing, look at the total failure of Varoufakis' silly pan-european "movement" in the next election.

If this is the lens from which you criticize the EU then you have sorely misjudged its problems. By this logic the EU would be a flawless polity if only a European nation could be synthesized. But I think we all know that’s not true. Even if it were possible, a pan-European nation state would suffer all the same problems as the loose confederation of many nation-states that exists now. Still imperialistic, still highly unequal between different regions, still authoritarian, still murderous and violent. I don’t think you believe that the infusion of inclusive nationalism into the EU would prevent them from killing Africans, surely? If anything it would simply make them more effective.

The problem is not that we don’t have enough nations. The problem is that the entire national model is just another distracting abstraction that detracts from real analysis of things, complicates them needlessly beyond what they are. Now that’s not to say that the abstraction doesn’t exist in reality. It definitely does, but more so through concerted efforts to apply it to reality, quite the same with race, gender, family.

It is all very nice to play the rebel without a country and claim that nationalism is bad and outmoded. But how do you organize a democracy then? How is power to be exercised if not through some kind of community organization? And how can you have a community organization without agreeing on a definition of what the community (the polity) is and the rules for the way it is organized?
You can discuss what a nation is, even whether it is territorial or not. But you cannot pretend that democracy can happen in the absence if a nation. The nation is the political unit that enables democracy to exist. Anarchists might disagree, but for that specific disagreement they can start a thread about anarchism...

Are you serious? The entire premise has become “nationalism is good, therefore the EU is bad.” And now you don’t want the foremost criticism of nationalism to be an accepted topic of conversation?
 
Sure, it's a fact that communities exist. What isn't clear is whether the nation constitutes an organic community analogous to the polis from ancient times. I think there is a very strong argument that it in fact does not, and that nations are in fact state projects, which again suggests that to claim the state's legitimacy derives from the nation is to claim the state's legitimacy derives from the state itself.

The one big problem I see with nations as we have them today is that many are too big to allow democratic government to actually work.

The argument that nations are by its nature exclusive is a valid one. Tribe, town, city, online forum :D, country, all have rules about how to join, requirements from as well as rights for members. And the politics of each one is (among other things) a continuous argument about those rules, rights and requirements. They're dynamic, all of them.
But can you have any community without this? If you do not have this minimum of complexity I argue that you do not have a community, you have an accidental group of people. And you do not have a government, you have the "do as I say or I'll hit you with this big stick" thing.

I made a thread on whether libertarianism had "poisoned" certain ideas with associations that were not necessary, I guess another could be made about certain groups poisoning the concept of nation. Nation begot nationalism and became a dirty word, and I might have avoided the issue by writing "patriotism" instead, but I dislike games with language and would rather argue facts. Many attributes are ascribed to the idea of nation, so to make it clear my idea of nation is when I state that it is a requirement for democracy. It is a political community whose members agree/consent on a common system of government. It is neither ethnic nor racial, not linguistic or "cultural". It tends to be culturally specific because history, but it is not necessarily so. And also because history it cannot be created overnight, or in a mere few years, of from people with à priori opposite goals.

Ah... so then nations are a modern development? Or else surely these Balkan wars of the past could also have been a product of nationalism. If the nation is ancient and immortal then I should surely argue that they were.

Can you consider the possibility that nations are not a modern development and that instability was a sympthom of nations not existing there at the slate rulers were attempting to create polities? Nations with all the modern trappings, yes they are a 19th century thing. But nations as political communities whose members are conscious of being part of that one, those are much more ancient. Personal I even found the arguments about governments of feudal type and the many different loyalties common in the middle ages exaggerated. Then as now there were layers to political, but people had a fair idea about who was on top.

It is a terribly Eurocentric thing to point to rhetoric in the Greek city states and normalize their philosophy as universal to human nature. Sure, Athens and Sparta engaged in nationalist rhetoric. But how is that comparable to human societies in, say, pre-Columbian North America? Sub-Saharan Africa before colonialism? Even much of China for most of its history, save when it was divided. The Mandate of Heaven transcended nations, and is much more verifiably ancient and immortal than nations. Perhaps this is the human condition? A divine cycle of corruption and revolution towards the perfect society?

Where did I mention Greek city-states? I think that if you care to search you'll find city states elsewhere that had elected rulers. Unless you believe that kings actually descent from gods and were among the first men...

I'm not going to argue about pre-Columbian America as the history of its urbanized areas can never be well knows just from the archaeological record. We do know that the Aztec Empire was a recent creation and a break with a tradition of city-states ruled by separate rulers. We do not and never will know exactly how each of those rulers came to power over the centuries that these cities lasted. In fact we only know the name of a handful of them. We also know that the Inca empire was also a relatively recent creation. These empires fell quickly precisely because they lacked internal political cohesion. Whereas the reduction of the old Mayan cities in Yucatan, which had remained outside Aztec control, took centuries.
I'd be happy to argue about China and whether its current existence as one state is more accident of history that a product of past imperial propaganda. But the history forum would be a better place for that.

Democracy is rule by the people, not the nation. Fundamentally the two may be similar, but the problem, shall I restate it, is that they have never been perfectly congruent. Never before has a national identity been asserted flawlessly, establishing perfect state borders over a population of individuals sharing a nation. Every time it has required correction, to the borders, the nation, or the people. Ideally the borders would change first, followed by the nation, and finally the people, but sadly it seems national correction tends to begin with people.

Never before and never now. No one here is pretending that a nation is some immutable construct. People move and change groups all the time. What I am arguing is that a political group must have some border, a distinction between those who are part of it and those who are not. I'm not arguing that this border is static in time. That this border is also geographical is an unavoidable convenience. That once established it is hard to change is an objective fact.

If this is the lens from which you criticize the EU then you have sorely misjudged its problems. By this logic the EU would be a flawless polity if only a European nation could be synthesized. But I think we all know that’s not true. Even if it were possible, a pan-European nation state would suffer all the same problems as the loose confederation of many nation-states that exists now. Still imperialistic, still highly unequal between different regions, still authoritarian, still murderous and violent. I don’t think you believe that the infusion of inclusive nationalism into the EU would prevent them from killing Africans, surely? If anything it would simply make them more effective.

I was not in that particular criticism arguing whether it would be a good or bad thing. The belief that an European nation" can and should be synthesized is one held by politicians in Brussels and in some other capitals, not one that I share.

The problem is not that we don’t have enough nations. The problem is that the entire national model is just another distracting abstraction that detracts from real analysis of things, complicates them needlessly beyond what they are. Now that’s not to say that the abstraction doesn’t exist in reality. It definitely does, but more so through concerted efforts to apply it to reality, quite the same with race, gender, family.

Missed this quite I meant to reply to also. The national model is necessary. A nation is a polity with internal cohesion. You cannot have democratic politics outside of it. You cannot just cry "internationalism" as it that were a magic word capable of changing reality. There have been silly ideas of internationalism, and intelligent, practical ideas of it. It would be worth another thread by itself.

Are you serious? The entire premise has become “nationalism is good, therefore the EU is bad.” And now you don’t want the foremost criticism of nationalism to be an accepted topic of conversation?

No the premise I presented is "nations (or if you want a short definition, political communities) are necessary for democratic politics". The EU is not a nation, therefore it cannot have a democratic system of government.
 
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But this is a drastically different definition of what constitutes a nation than we have been operating under for the rest of this thread. If a nation is any “political community” then the US is one nation, Canada is one nation, the USSR was one nation. The British empire was one nation.

The specific understanding of the nation is that it is an identitarian construct that includes a population based on some shared cultural or social feature, and excludes others on that same basis. If you wish to define nation in some arbitrary other way, then we can separately argue if whatever your other arbitrary definition is is a necessity for democracy, but if you accept the common definition of nation then we have established a refutation.
 
We can perhaps say that a sovereign country is a requirement for a democracy. It is just that if you make a sovereign country without the sense of community that is usually considered an attribute of a "nation", you have a really dysfunctional one. It becomes a distinction that makes little sense, which countries are not a nation? Israel comes to mind, and it does not have a democracy: it has about half the population with political rights and the other half disenfranchised and demanding a nation of its own. Nationalism there is a solution: allow a self-organized nation to have its own country and each resulting country can have its democracy. As it is, it is one country without democracy.

The same would have been true of the british empire, or the other colonial empires. When they moved towards democracy, they had to break apart into smaller units.
 
An independent community with a sense of communal solidarity has nothing to do with nationalism.

I think if you accept that large polities ought to be broken into smaller, community-oriented ones you’ll find that whatever sub-polity you’ve created has many of the same problems. So it ought to be broken down into sub-polities too.

See the Austrian Empire, Yugoslavia, modern Bosnia. When does the nation become too small? A nation for ethnically Bosnian, religiously Muslim, northwesterners who speak a Serb-Turkish Bosnian creole? Perfect democracy! Until the ones living on this side of the river start to accumulate more wealth than the ones on that side of the river.

Eventually you arrive at the conclusion that each individual ought to constitute their own nation, with absolute sovereignty and equality with their fellow individuals. Anything less lends itself to tyranny. Because the individual is the only thing that is real, materially, when examining this hierarchy. Any other possible distinction you find is fundamentally arbitrary in some way. Geographically, linguistically, philosophically, religiously, god forbid ethnically. The nation is not a materially real thing, it does not exist beyond arbitrary assertion. That assertion requires unjust violence. There is no perfect nation because social identity requires social construction, and people socially construct themselves differently even within what seem to be perfectly sliced apart “nations”.

What’s left is pure ideology. Zionism, Pan-Germanism, so on. All justifying hierarchy.

Now I will say as an aside that nationalism, like all moral beliefs/philosophical frameworks/ideological constructs, has its pragmatic uses. But it is far from ideal and should remain far from our ideals.
 
Israel comes to mind, and it does not have a democracy: it has about half the population with political rights and the other half disenfranchised

I mean this describes the history of almost all "democracies" which is to point out that if your premise is that the nation is the only construct in which an ideal democracy exists I would point out that never in history has that taken place yet. Even post advent of the nation state.

Furthermore if we cannot get to the point that all of Europe is a community, all of North America is a community and so on and then take that to the next level and realize all of humanity is a community then this is all for naught anyways.

Or maybe just point out here the reason the EU sucks for you isn;t because it is not a nation in the sense you romanticize, its because it is not well ran in its response to its people's interests as a whole. That and the whole free world is coming to grips with the idea that we can;t always get what each of us want.
 
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I don't think it's a coincidence that small and fairly homogeneous countries like the Nordic countries often top the list of happiest countries or least corrupt countries. In fact, I believe that many of these Midd-Eastern countries have dictators precisely because they prevent Middle-Eastern nations from devolving into ethnic conflict (which often seems to be exactly what happens whenever Western intervention removes one of these dictators). There also seems to be something of a difference in mentality. Russia is big and diverse. The feeling I get from Russians is that they really do not have the same kind of civic engagement as we do. Russians just kind of take it as a given their government doesn't care about them, and they don't care about the government. They don't seem to have much faith in greater good. I know a few data points are not compelling proof, but I think it's an interesting theory nonetheless.

See the Austrian Empire, Yugoslavia, modern Bosnia. When does the nation become too small? A nation for ethnically Bosnian, religiously Muslim, northwesterners who speak a Serb-Turkish Bosnian creole? Perfect democracy! Until the ones living on this side of the river start to accumulate more wealth than the ones on that side of the river.

Eventually you arrive at the conclusion that each individual ought to constitute their own nation, with absolute sovereignty and equality with their fellow individuals. Anything less lends itself to tyranny. Because the individual is the only thing that is real, materially, when examining this hierarchy. Any other possible distinction you find is fundamentally arbitrary in some way. Geographically, linguistically, philosophically, religiously, god forbid ethnically. The nation is not a materially real thing, it does not exist beyond arbitrary assertion. That assertion requires unjust violence. There is no perfect nation because social identity requires social construction, and people socially construct themselves differently even within what seem to be perfectly sliced apart “nations”.
I think you'll find that this process of eternal fracturing does not happen in reality, perhaps precisely because of nationalism. It's true that there are some independence movements going around in Europe, there always are. But Europe also has many countries which I would call nation states, and which are very stable. Your theory ignores the forces that bring people together (which includes but is not limited to national identity).
 
No the premise I presented is "nations (or if you want a short definition, political communities) are necessary for democratic politics". The EU is not a nation, therefore it cannot have a democratic system of government.
It is not one yet. But if you define nations as "political communities whose members are conscious of being part of that one", it may well become one in our lifetime... presuming some on this forum become centenarians.
Also, sure, it could not have a democratic system of government by its own until such time. Fortunately, it consists of Member States.
I mostly agree with the rest of your post.
 
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