“Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold.  Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will.  Steam has enabled men to choose what law they will live under.  Money makes place for them.”

—R.W. Emerson

While Pierre Manent’s Democ­racy Without Nations? concerns itself principally with the erosion of national sovereignty in Europe, American readers will find that Manent raises questions about the fragile bond between nationality and self-governance that we would do well to answer.  In Manent’s view, America and Europe are today mirror images.  Each is a version of “democratic empire”; they share a vision of political order that is, strictly speaking, no longer political.  The “sentiment of resemblance,” identified by Alexis de Tocqueville as the quintessential democratic emotion, has become in both Europe and America “a passion for resemblance.”  It is no longer sufficient, it seems, to extend to the “other” the respect that we demand for ourselves; rather, “[w]e are required to see the other as the same as ourselves.”  We have learned to regard only our likenesses as of fundamental value; what is different must be ignored or discarded.  For differences threaten the ideal of democratic human unity, which has become our ultimate aspiration: “a united world in which collective differences will no longer be truly meaningful or significant.”  While the European version of empire seeks to attain this ideal through the seemingly limitless expansion of a stateless European Union, America still clings fervently and (from the European perspective) anachronistically to the model of the nation-state.  In the American version of empire, “One central nation, the model and guardian of democracy, encourages all peoples, whoever and wherever they are, to establish a democratic regime and cultivate democratic mores.”  Unfortunately, even as Europeans and Americans go on blindly “building their Twin Towers of Babel,” the rest of the world—or much of it—more than ever asserts its différence.

Once upon a time, both Europeans and Americans well understood that the sovereignty of the state was the precondition for those equal rights and liberties variously inscribed in the constitutions of every liberal democracy.  If “equality of condition” was the moral end of the modern democratic revolution, the sovereign state served as the indispensable “political means.”  The architects of that revolution, on both sides of the Atlantic, understood that the nation-state’s authority must transcend all lesser or intermediate authorities: churches, political parties, civic or economic associations.

Contra Manent, we might argue that the democratic revolutions of the Enlightenment era, at least outside the French context, were not nearly so concerned with an abstract “equality of condition” as he seems to think.  The “moral end” of the American Founding Fathers, for example, was to preserve a certain “equality” of protections and liberties, as found in the Bill of Rights.  But the term “condition” suggests, to the American ear, something more comprehensive, something bordering on what today is often called “equality of result.”  Nonetheless, Manent is surely correct to argue that our understanding of sovereignty has been, since the end of the Middle Ages, tied irrevocably to the territorial boundaries of particular nations.  That is, the legal abstraction of sovereign authority has always been wedded to concrete, geographical space within which the common life of democratic peoples was constrained and defined.

Today, the European cognoscenti no longer recognize such constraints.  The nation-state is passé.  In stark contrast with the founders of the European Union (when it still operated under the now-defunct cognomen the European Community), the E.U. technocrats who currently preside are actively hostile to the idea of nationality.  In the post-World War II era, Konrad Adenauer and Jean Monnet envisioned a community of sovereign nations engaged in economic and cultural cooperation.  While they hoped to rebuild Europe upon a foundation that might prevent the outbreak of yet another devastating war of nationalist aggression, such men still took for granted the idea that the nation was, as Manent would have it, the “community of belonging par excellence.”  They could not imagine a race of men so utterly deracinated that the “sacred” bonds of nationality would come to seem loathsome encumbrances.  The signers of the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the Schengen Agreement (1995) clearly envisioned, on the other hand, a Europe without borders.  Today, the union is not so much a community of sovereign nations as it is a social and cultural “entity” that seeks to transcend the old, atavistic politics of national identity.  The confraternities of blood and soil have yielded to an “empty . . . humanism that claims to detach itself wholly from all responsibility toward or for a particular people, or from any distinctive view of the human good.”

One of the virtues of Democracy Without Nations? is that, when Manent speaks of the nation as a “community of belonging,” he does so with a full historical awareness of the origins of the secular state and its dependence on a prior understanding of the nation as a sacralized body.  While he does not cite Ernst Kantorowicz’s brilliant study of the political theology of divine-right kingship, Manent clearly understands that the “citizen” of the early-modern secular state was preceded by the “subject” who, by way of an enabling fiction borrowed from the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, was incorporated into the “body politic” of the king.  The secular state, emerging after the wars of religion, achieved legal separation from the Church, predicating its sovereignty on its claim to religious neutrality.  But the secular state’s emergence would not have been thinkable outside the context of the nation understood as a locus of “unreserved devotion.”  Moreover, warns Manent, “the secular state cannot survive the nation.”  Belief in the state’s neutrality requires faith in its transcendence of all rival claims to sovereignty: “Once the nation is abandoned as a sacred community, the lay state itself is laicized and becomes merely one” of many instruments of government.

Thus, at the beginning of a new century, the European Union finds itself in a quandary.  If it maintains its present course of expansion in the name of “pure democracy” (democracy detached from any territorial boundaries), it risks undermining the very foundations of liberal democracy understood as the collective willing of particular peoples or nations.  Moreover, having presided over the withering away of the sovereignty of its constituent nation-states, upon what authority will the European Union enforce its own decrees?  It could, of course, reconstitute itself as a new sovereign, a superstate in the mode of the United States, but that would, in Manent’s view, constitute a betrayal of the stateless vision of global unity Brussels tirelessly promotes.

Nonetheless, since the French publication of this book in 2006 (under the title La raison des nations: réflexions sur la démocratie en Europe) there are manifest signs of a move in that direction.  The Treaty of Lisbon, signed in December 2007 by 26 of the 27 E.U. member states, appears to provide a constitution whose powers would effectively establish a new, supranational European State and, as Anthony Coughlan recently noted in the Brussels Journal, make “national parliaments subordinate to the new Union.”  As of early March, however, only a few of the member states have ratified the treaty.  In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy is attempting to railroad ratification by way of a parliamentary vote that would preclude a dangerous national referendum.  In England, Prime Minister Gordon Brown is pursuing much the same strategy, while in Ireland, a referendum is to be held later this year.  If Irish voters reject the treaty (as Sinn Fein is urging), that could derail the entire ratification process.  Still, the European Union’s overreaching raises troubling questions about the fate of representative democracy in Europe.  What Manent calls “genuinely vital political representation” presupposes, as we have seen, a coherent, deeply rooted sense of national identity, a conviction on the part of the people that they are, in fact, “representable.”  Yet the people of Europe are now increasingly subdued by an all-encompassing and dictatorial bureaucratic apparatus that insidiously dissolves all traditional social bonds and replaces them with “statistical and administrative” groupings bereft of any meaning for the collectivity.

While Manent is acutely conscious of the threat to liberal democracy posed by this seemingly inexorable drift toward a nationless European “unity,” he is surprisingly sanguine about the possibility that the desire for nationality will reassert itself in the not-so-distant future.  He seems to believe that Europe must sooner or later come to recognize, not only that its constituent nationalities are real (and not simply arbitrary lines on a map), but that the idea of Europe itself is a “something” rather than a “nothing,” a substantive cultural, religious, and political something that is unique and irreplaceable.  With respect to a possible resurgence of national feeling, Manent points to the example of Israel.  In the aftermath of the holocaust, the European democracies were enthusiastic supporters of the Zionist dream of a Jewish state, especially since the state envisioned by the political Zionists promised to be a purely secular one, severed (for the most part) from the ethnic and religious particularities of Jewish history.  But in a short time, ethnic and religious difference began to reassert itself with a vengeance.  After the Six Day War in 1967, European approval of the Israeli project began to wane.  In acting against European advice, Israel had, in effect, declared independence from Europe.  But even as Israel joyfully asserted national pride, Europe had begun the process of anguished handwringing over its historical crimes against the Jews and all the “others” who had fallen victim to European nationalism.  In 1947, the establishment of the state of Israel (at least in the socialist vision) seemed to herald the “advent of a unified humanity”; today, it “displays the limits of [that] universalism.”  The message that Israel speaks to Europe is that history cannot be erased, that ethnic and religious particularities will reassert themselves.

However, the example of Israel may be exceptional.  After all, Israel has been besieged by her enemies since her inception.  Under such conditions, even the most starry-eyed of internationalists is likely to become a breast-beating patriot.  Such conditions do not exist in Europe, unless the massive number of Islamic immigrants is recognized as a threat of similar magnitude.  Some prominent figures—including the late Oriana Fallaci and others not normally identified with the right—have voiced their recognition of the threat.  But nowhere in Democracy Without Nations? does Manent express any concern about the impact that, say, four million Muslims in France (roughly ten percent of the population) may have on the French sense of national unity.  Indeed, Manent speaks as if ethnicity need not be a fundamental trait of genuine nationhood, and he points to the United States as an example of this.  Yet the American experience shows that, as our predominantly European ethnicity has diminished, so has our sense of collective unity.  In the case of Islamic immigration in Europe, the threat is one not only of ethnic conflict but of religious conflict.  One would think, then, that if a resurgence of national pride were going to blossom anew in the European states, it would have shown some signs of doing so already.  For the most part, however, the post-Christian peoples of Europe remain quiescent, more inclined to demonstrate against threatened pension plans than to protest their leaders’ craven betrayal of their sovereignty.  As the Islamic population in Europe grows, it is increasingly likely that Islamic activists seeking autonomous enclaves where sharia would prevail over the laws of the state will have to be appeased.

Whatever the weaknesses of Democracy Without Nations?, they are minor compared with its splendid grasp of the importance of territory, of the necessary bond between geographical space and political “forms and parameters.”  When those bonds are dissolved, the realm of the “political” ceases to exist.  Today, we inhabit a digital world in which instantaneous communication with virtually every nook and cranny of the globe is possible.  One seemingly need not be bound to a nation or a particular volk, or even a family, to find one’s “identity” amid a bewildering universe of possible identities.  It is necessary merely to choose, as though one were purchasing a suit of clothes or selecting an entrée off a menu.  Nor is one in any way bound by yesterday’s choice.  At first, such freedom is intoxicating—a world without borders, whether personal or national!—but soon the intoxication palls.  Infinite variety begins to taste infinitely banal.  The miraculous networks of communication result in no enduring community.  Communication alone, Manent memorably states, “is like an amorous encounter reduced to the ‘kiss’ of two telephone numbers on a computer screen.”  Man is, rather, a political animal, and must find his true fulfillment in a political community, a community defined and constrained by historical boundaries, an arena of struggle, of “putting things in common.”  For it is only within such a community, this side of the Heavenly City, that the individual may find justice. 

 

[Democracy Without Nations? The Fate of Self Government in Europe, by Pierre Manent (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books) 109 pp., $20.00]