innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2006
- Messages
- 15,040
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...
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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