Back in 1993, the suggestion from Gianfranco Miglio, the ‘theorist’ of Italy’s Northern League, that ‘civilized’ Europe should deploy the atavistic nationalism of ‘barbarian’ Europe (the East) as a ‘frontier guard to block the Muslim invasion’ would have seemed preposterous. Today, the demagogues ruling Hungary and Poland claim to be the sentinels of a Christian Europe in a parody of their actual role in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As it happens, no European country stokes ideological xenophobia today more than the one to which Rousseau advised ‘an exclusive love of country’ and the necessity of national strength and character: Poland.
In another ironic twist of history, the idolatry of the nationalistic state, the ‘coldest of all cold monsters’, as Nietzsche called it, has intensified in Enlightened France. While conducting its own ‘war on terror’, the French government seems to be trying to invent Rousseau’s Sparta: using such political and cultural technologies as national history, national flag, national education, and the imaginary unity of national language, to project the image of a homogenized national community.
Nationalism has again become a seductive but treacherous antidote to an experience of disorder and meaninglessness: the unexpectedly rowdy anticlimax, in a densely populated world, of the Western European eighteenth-century dream of a universally secular, materialist and peaceful civilization.
Louis Vuitton in Borneo
The triumphs of capitalist imperialism in the nineteenth century had fulfilled on a grand scale Voltaire’s dream of a worldwide materialist civilization knit together by rational self-interest. This pioneering intellectual and commercial entrepreneur proved to be, in Nietzsche’s assessment, the ‘representative of the victorious, ruling classes and their valuations’.
A typical later example was the inhabitant of London, who in 1914, as John Maynard Keynes wrote, could ‘order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth … he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world’. This blessed citizen of an empire, who was best positioned to make money in globalized markets, ‘regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement’. To him, ‘the projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries’ seemed to have no influence on social and economic life. The extensive conflagrations of the early twentieth century, during which racial and national identity was repeatedly valued more than economic rationality, shattered this illusion. As Keynes wrote, with devastating understatement, ‘The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.’
In the late twentieth century, however, the old dream of economic internationalism was revived on a much grander scale after Communism, the illegitimate child of Enlightenment rationalism, suffered a shattering loss of state power and legitimacy in Russia and Eastern Europe. The financialization of capitalism seemed to realize Voltaire’s dream of the stock exchange as the embodiment of humanity, which, however religiously or ethnically diverse, spoke the unifying language of money. The establishment of the European Union (EU) seemed to vindicate Nicolas de Condorcet, who had insisted that Europe formed a single society. And the universalist religion of human rights seemed to be replacing the old language of justice and equality within sovereign nation states.
The ‘magic of the market’, in the exuberant phrase of the Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf, seemed to be bringing about the homogenization of all human societies. As Louis Vuitton opened in Borneo, and the Chinese turned into the biggest consumers of French wines, it seemed only a matter of time before the love of luxury was followed by the rule of law, the enhanced use of critical reason, and the expansion of individual freedom.
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Today, however, this vision of universal uplift seems another example of intellectuals and technocrats confusing their private interest with public interest, their own socio-economic mobility as members of a lucky and arbitrarily chosen elite with general welfare. Nowhere does the evidence of moral misery accumulate faster than in the so-called public sphere. The setting for opinion and argument originally created in France’s eighteenth-century salons by face to face relations, individual reason and urbane civility, is now defined, in its digital incarnation, by racists, misogynists and lynch mobs, often anonymous.
In the absence of reasoned debate, conspiracy theories and downright lies abound, and even gain broad credence: it was while peddling one of them, ‘Obama is a foreign-born Muslim’, that Donald Trump rose to political prominence. Lynch mobs, assassins and mass shooters thrive in a climate where many people can think only in terms of the categories of friends and foes, sectarian loyalty or treason. The world of mutual tolerance envisaged by cosmopolitan elites from the Enlightenment onwards exists within a few metropolises and university campuses; and even these rarefied spaces are shrinking. The world at large – from the United States to India – manifests a fierce politics of identity built on historical injuries and fear of internal and external enemies.
In its mildest forms in Catalonia, Scotland and Hong Kong, nationalism is again the means to establish and reinforce collective identity, to designate what ‘we’ are like and how we differ from ‘them’, if not to dictate the stern political consequences – exclusion, expulsion, discipline – for those categorized as ‘them’. The extraordinary outbreak of anti-immigrant racism in England after the referendum on Brexit in June 2016 seemed to confirm Rousseau’s assertion that ‘every patriot hates foreigners; they are only men, and nothing to him.’
Yet again, the Genevan seems to have been more perceptive than his metropolitan detractors in casting doubt on the universalist and cosmopolitan ideals of commercial society, and in understanding the emotional appeal of rejecting them. Rousseau, darkly aware that wounded honour and the desire for glory and recognition drive human beings more than economic motives, did not live to witness the nationalistic backlash to cosmopolitan civilization. But his own critique, and its resonant echoes in Germany, are key to understanding why mythological, religious and tribal narratives are being scripted in the age of neoliberal individualism, and indeed why the inquiry into early modern thought and the interrogation of the present require a common framework.
The First Angry Young Nationalists