We are currently living at a time when nation states all over the “West” are being destroyed from within by an entire array of artificially induced mental conditions. However, instead of giving the growing numbers of patients suffering from those conditions the psychiatric treatment they deserve, isolating them from society and giving them substances to ease their sufferings, an opposite strategy has been adopted. Boys and men who think they are women, cats, frogs, birds or whatever; girls and women who think they are Tarzan, hermaphrodites desiring to show their anatomical details, are being taken seriously by medical specialists eager to earn a fast buck by cutting off sex organs and secondary sex attributes, or perform intricate plastic surgery in an effort to imitate the work of nature. Not only these patients are sick, but so are all those collaborating psychiatrists and surgeons, as well as the judges and politicians who allow them to forsake their medical oaths. The growing numbers of anti-white racists who, under the guise of anti-racism, go on a rampage to pillage, destroy, rape and kill their fellow citizens are likewise being goaded by the ruling classes in the “West.” The same goes for all those climate lunatics out there, the people who actually believe that by their actions they can stop heliogenic climate change. They are all stormtroopers in the service of elites who are out to destroy the economy, society and the nation state.

The elites in the European nation states, and in the US and Canada as well, are attacking the nation state from all sides. Having embraced the concept of “multiculturalism,” they have been fomenting mass immigration from especially Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Fundamentally from places whose inhabitants share nothing with the majorities in Europe and North America, apart from the fact they have two legs, two hands and a head with some functioning brain cells. That is about all they have in common. The waves of Third-World fortune seekers has now become a veritable tsunami that is already choking normal society in many towns and villages.

For a much longer period, however, the nation state, especially in Europe, has been under attack from the outside. The Second World War, the conquest by the US and de Soviet Union as well as postwar reconstruction have made serious dents in the national sovereignty of all European states. All of these were, or purported to be, nation states. The UN, OECD, NATO, the EU, the IMF, the World Bank and the International Penal Court at The Hague, all of these organizations entirely or partially financed and directed by the US government with or without the cooperation of Wall Street, have been further eroding what was left of national sovereignty in Europe.

Perhaps those elites believe it is possible to rebuild what they are now destroying, but since it is highly probable that Capitalism itself is dead, it is very much to be doubted if the nation state can be resuscitated. In this respect, it may be useful to take a closer look at what the nation state is and how it came into existence.

This is most clearly visible in the home of the nation state, namely in Europe and the Americas. It should also be borne in mind that the nation state has always been a rather rickety structure, replete with contradictions and non-sequiturs. It may be said that today the only state that still emphatically claims to be a nation state and that does so aggressively and with all means at its disposal, not shying away from any tool or method, is the State of Israel. In this sense it is truly an anachronism, since the leading states in the world today are, almost by definition, multinational, multi-ethnic and multi-religious amalgams: the United States, Russia, China and India. In the second tier we find Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, Turkey and Iran. Sure enough, with varying success, these states have been trying and are continuing to try, to form a kind of docile subjects. The traditional nation state is therefore ipso facto the enemy of these rather kaleidoscopic states. For them it is fine when the locals want to speak their native gibberish or want to dance around some pole in their folkloric costumes, as long as they unconditionally accept the primacy of whatever the imperial capital decrees.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century nation building was of crucial importance in Europe and the Americas. This was to do with the end of the so-called Ancien Regime in connection with the French Revolution of 1789. Whereas most parts of Europe and the Americas (apart from a few republics, in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Venice) had been held together politically by monarchical structures, from that point on other methods of political organization needed to be devised. Thus modern nations came into existence. If these were monarchies, they were usually embedded in written constitutions, which fundamentally changed the status of monarchs.

Some of the countries of the Old World had already achieved nationhood during the Middle Ages. In medieval France, Paris had been the center of nation building, in which the monarchy occupied a central place. The monks of the monastery of Saint-Denis near Paris took care of the propaganda, and elaborated a national myth around the royal family and the sacred nature of the king. Official historiography thus emphasized the unity of the state, royal authority, religion, and historical consciousness. But apart from France and England, few countries had been able to transform themselves into nations: political structures with a single dominant language, a single religion, and more importantly, one single loyalty. That loyalty was to the monarch, the alleged incarnation of national values. The less force required to enforce this political holy trinity, the stronger the state, or nation. In France and England, challenges to these pillars of national unity had been fought off with success, as for instance, during the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the Atlantic revolution (or democratic revolution, in the words of US historian Robert Palmer) between 1750 and 1850, “nations” proliferated on both sides of the Atlantic—nations, and countries pretending to be nations. Only after 1945 has the world seen a comparable sudden increase in new nations, or purported nations.

All nations face certain common problems, the most important one being the need to secure the loyalty of the citizens. Antonio Gramsci pointed out that what he termed hegemony needed to be constructed, and then maintained with the help of loyal civil servants, bureaucrats, and intellectuals.

The stronger the hegemony, the less brute force required to perpetuate a particular political construction, state, or nation. It may even be said that as soon as a state has succeeded in having its citizens internalize loyalty and display loyal behavior, the state becomes a nation-state, or nation. Nascent states need to assure themselves of a sufficiently broad popular base of support in order to survive.

The literature dealing with nationalism and related subjects such as nation, national identity, nation building, nationality, as well as with patriotism is exceedingly vast. Countless historians, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and assorted non-specialists have devoted their time to the analysis of these topics. The literature can be roughly divided according to the way in which the authors regard the process of national formation. Some see it as a natural and organic process spontaneously taking place at a certain stage of historical development in a particular country or general area. Others subscribe to the notion that a nation is artificial, and as such the product of a conscious nation building effort on the part of a ruling class. One might call the former the idealist, or romantic school, the latter the materialist school. The latter assumes that first there is a state, a political entity, which then creates, or helps to create, a nation. This view is indissolubly linked with nationalism. The other line of reasoning maintains that first, there is national feeling, or nationalism, which then leads to the formation of a separate nation. The nation in turn brings forth the state.

The romantic school traces its origins back to the sixteenth-century French philosopher Jean Bodin, and more notably to the German eighteenth-century romantic thinkers Gottfried von Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Herder taught that a people (Volk) possessed a character all its own, and that this special character had been shaped in primeval times. The purer such a Volk, the better. In Herder’s eyes language was identical with the Volk. His ideas proved quite attractive for subject Central European peoples during the course of the nineteenth century, and in the beginning of the twentieth, in their striving for national independence. Federico Chabod gives a good account of the way in which nationalism became connected with an increased awareness of nature and the individual. This is illustrated with the example of mid-eighteenth-century German-speaking Switzerland. In the nineteenth century French historians Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet felt attracted to Herder’s thesis about the individuality of a people. Recently, one of the more eloquent advocates of this line of thought has argued that the tendency to identify a nation with a language was attractive because of general convenience. In the twentieth century, German emigre scholars have made significant contributions to the study of the problem of nationalism. Frederick Hertz has redefined the debate by introducing more factors than just “natural” national identity. For him, national consciousness was the foremost criterion of nationality, but he regarded religion, economic interests, natural frontiers and historical rights as powerful supporting elements. Hans Kohn gave his treatment of the topic an ideological twist. A romanticist, he divided nationalism into two basic varieties, a western and a non-western type. The western type was allegedly political, rational, pluralist, and freedom loving, whereas the other type was cultural in character, irrational, authoritarian, and collectivist. The former was to be found in the states bordering the Northern Atlantic, the latter in Central Europe, and everywhere else. Needless to say, Kohn’s views clearly echoed World War II ideological struggles between democracy and fascism. Other important romanticists include Luigi Sturzo, who sees the collective personality of a nation as the reflection of the collective popular will, and Carlton Hayes, who thinks along lines similar to those of Kohn. Like Herder, Hayes considered language as the basic determinant of the nation. The fundamentally romantic interpretation of what constitutes a nation, what makes a nation-state, has regained popularity and prominence among academics, most notably Anthony D. Smith.

As for “materialist” thought, it may be said to have originated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his social contract. In itself, this was a continuation of the age-old idea, first put forward by Aristotle, about the voluntary association of a group of persons and villages into a larger unit, so as to further the common cause. Outstanding among nineteenth-century expressions of this idea is the French historian Ernest Renan, who argued that the nation was intrinsically subjective, and that the members of a nation in fact carried out a “daily referendum,” thus reinforcing the true bonds holding society and the state together.

Among those who insist particularly on the artificial character of the nation, Marxists figure prominently. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels have often implicitly accepted the common nineteenth-century romantic opinion that the world was divided into nations, each with its own particular identity. For instance, Marx, in the Eighteenth Brumaire repeatedly refers to a French nation as opposed to the machinations of the bourgeoisie and Napoleon III. Nowhere is it clear, however, what Marx considered to be that nation. According to Marxist socialism, it is the owners of the means of production in a given area, the bourgeoisie, that strive to form nation states, in order to create an exclusive market for their products. Since nations are therefore essentially economic entities, Marx argued that, eventually, nations and nationalism would come to an end due to the growth of the workers movement and international solidarity. In general, however, Marxists tend to regard the nation as the conscious creation of a national bourgeoisie in order to further its own interests. Marxist theory concerning nation building has been applied most consistently by Margit Mayer and Margaret A. Fay. They argue that economic interests to create an integrated market impelled North American capitalists and the bourgeoisie to give more power, meaning and content to the weak and ineffective federal political framework as a result of the American Revolution.

Non-Marxists as well have devoted their energies to show how a small elite may be instrumental in the process of nation building. Robert Palmer, as it were according to Gramscian thinking, has shown how intellectuals (teachers, preachers and the like) helped spread an incipient revolutionary nationalist idea well before the French Revolution took place. Peter Burke has analyzed a process whereby popular ideas were gradually pushed aside and replaced by an official culture imposed from above. Thus in Western Europe, traditional ideas of localism and regionalism had to disappear because they interfered with the establishment of an effective state bureaucracy that could control the general allegiance of its subjects. Upon this solid base, modern governments could continue to build nation-states, as Eugene Weber has demonstrated. The works by Burke and Weber, to which should be added the important contribution edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, are among a small number of detailed studies on the formation of national states and nation building, demonstrating the fundamentally artificial nature of nations.

It may be argued, therefore, that a nation is consciously created by a group of leading citizens of a certain political entity, a country, so as to provide an emotional content for what might otherwise continue to be an institutional framework devoid of meaning to its members, the inhabitants. Most likely, the leading citizens would belong to an aristocracy or oligarchy, or in the Marxist sense, a bourgeoisie. In fact, much of the work of nation building, that is to say the formulation or production of nationalist ideas, and the production of artifacts supposedly representative of a “national spirit,” would be carried out by intellectuals: university graduates such as lawyers, doctors, judges, engineers and historians, but also artists, poets, writers, students and journalists.

Apart from France and England, most European nation-states were formed between 1800 and 1950. In the collective mind it is taken for granted that national states and national languages and cultures are overlapping. However, this idea is fundamentally erroneous. Of course, all European nation states have their national language. Additionally, in some countries, apart from the national language, there are regional languages with an official status. These countries include France (Breton in Brittany and Catalan in the Roussillon), The Netherlands (Frisian in Friesland), Spain (Catalan in Catalonia, Galician and Basque), Britain (Welsh, Irish and Gaelic), Germany (Danish in Schleswig-Holstein), Italy (French in Aosta, German in Trentino, Greek and Albanian in enclaves in the south), Finland (Swedish in the Southwest), Poland, Austria, Greece, Bulgaria and others. Actually, only Portugal and Iceland are more or less completely monolingual and with little difference between dialects. Like in Spain and Italy, regions in Russia where other languages are spoken often have an autonomous political status.

Switzerland has three national languages, namely German, French and Italian. Belgium also has three: Dutch, French and German. Does that mean that the Swiss and the Belgians, depending on their native language, are either German, Dutch, French or Italian? Several major European languages (German, French, Italian, Dutch) each have dozens of dialects. Even English, spoken in Great Britain and Ireland, has between twenty and forty dialects. The speakers of one dialect most often cannot understand those of another dialect. Actually, from a linguistic point of view, it is impossible to define the difference between a dialect and a language, the difference being merely political (“a language is a dialect with an army”). Moreover, it should be borne in mind that nowhere before the end of the 19^th century did a majority or even a plurality of the population speak the national language on a daily basis. It was only thanks to compulsory primary education and universal military service that national languages eventually became truly “national.” In Italy, for example, it was only during the 1960s that, thanks to national television and the automobile, Italian truly became the majority language in the country. Still today, in day-to-day life, most Italians prefer their local dialect over the official national language.

Although in the eyes of many, European nation states are solid constructions, deeply rooted in history, and imbued with a robust national sentiment going back hundreds of years. This is purely a romantic idea without a factual foundation.

Great pains were taken during the 19^th century to instill a kind of nationalism in the population. Interestingly enough, this was done by trying to reconnect with events and persons from a very distant past: Roman antiquity. It was suggested that supposed national characteristics and virtues were traceable to a period supposedly two thousand years earlier. This amounted to asserting that national traits were permanent and immutable.

Two places where Roman antiquity served as an inspiration for early nationalism were Germany and the Netherlands. Germany, divided into several dozens of kingdoms, duchies and counties and loosely held together by the Emperor and the popular language, was elated when in 1425 the manuscript Germania, attributed to Tacitus, was discovered in Hersfeld Abbey, and subsequently printed and published. In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the Dutch more or less shared the German pride of being descendants of the brave Arminius, but then developed an identity of their own. Another place where an early nationalism based on Roman antiquity was developed was Portugal in the 16^th century. Here the hero was Viriato (Viriathus in Latin), a warrior from the Lusitanian people, who in 147 b. C. began a guerrilla against the Roman occupation, which then morphed into an open war that almost resulted in kicking the Romans out of the Iberian peninsula.

During the 19^th century, it became sort of fashionable for European states to look around in the distant past for a hero of some struggle against the Romans and then transform him into an early representative of national virtues and a model for all generations to follow. In 1838, work was begun on a giant statue in honor of Germanic warrior chief Arminius (known as Hermann der Cherusker in German), who in 9 AD defeated a Roman army consisting of three legions (about 30,000 men) in the Teutoburg Forest. Due to financial penury, the giant bronze statue of some 80 feet could only be completed in 1875, when it was unveiled in the presence of German Emperor Wilhelm I. In a sense this latter date was doubly significant, because only four years earlier, the united armies of Germany had defeated France in the Franco-German War. In Belgium Ambiorix was identified as a suitable hero. This was a Gaulish chieftain who in 54 b. C. tried to liberate Gaul from Roman occupation, but was defeated by Julius Caesar. Belgium, which sorely needed a national hero after achieving its political independence in 1830 warmly embraced Ambiorix. In 1866 a monument to him was erected in the provincial city of Tongeren. In 1865, French Emperor Napoleon III commissioned a statue of Vercingetorix, Gaulish leader of the great rebellion against Roman occupation in 52 b. C. and who was finally defeated by Julius Caesar. The Celtic warrior chieftain was presented as the embodiment of all the superior qualities attributed to the French according to the nationalist code. Both Ambiorix and Vercingetorix, whose effigies were, of course entirely invented, are wearing impressive mustaches, which according to scarce available documentation on the period, were the typical attribute of Gaulish men. Around the end of the 19^th century, Viriato also got his bronze statue (in 1903, in Zamora, Spain and one in Viseu, Portugal). Rather fittingly in Britain, ruled by Queen Victoria since 1837, an elaborate bronze monument was unveiled in 1885, representing Queen Boudicca and her daughters. Celtic Queen Boudicca had led a courageous resistance of the early Britons against the Roman invaders.

Where there were no heroes to be dug up from antiquity, heroes from later periods were dusted off to do the job. Thanks to the preparatory work by German poet Friedrich Schiller and Italian opera composer Gioacchino Rossini, the Swiss were regaled with the figure of Willam Tell, the simple peasant who stood up to a foreign tyrant during the Middle Ages. In 1895 an elaborate monument representing him was unveiled in the small provincial town of Altdorf near Lake Lucerne in Central Switzerland.

Italy, which became a unified state only in 1861 after a rather tortuous independence process, could not fall back on a native hero of the resistance against Imperial Rome. It had to content itself therefore with contemporary heroes, the most important of whom was Giuseppe Garibaldi, duly honored with bronze statues, marble plaques and street names.

No nation and no nationalism without heroes, so much is obvious. And where there are none, they have to be dug up or invented,

According to the research by Elise Marienstras, religiously-inspired feelings of superiority were prominent among many of the 17th-century European settlers on the American East coast. Not only the calvinist Pilgrim Fathers in New England and the Dutch settlers in New Netherlands (New York), but also the Lutheran Swedes of New Sweden on the Delaware were convinced of the superiority of their own group. This sense of superiority, especially with regard to Indians, blacks and Roman Catholics, soon became a distinguishing trait of a kind of colonial patriotism and had a decisive influence on the first manifestations of a distinctive American nationalism at the end of the 18^th century. The American War of Independence, the subsequent struggle to secure its place in the wider world, the conflict with Mexico, the presence of a Westward-shifting frontier further helped define American nationalism. There is no lack of specialized studies that document and discuss this phenomenon. Among the most elaborate and thorough was written by Vernon L. Parrington. The organic development of a uniform, universally accepted American nationalism was rudely interrupted by the “War Between the States,” generally known as the “Civil War,” which was not fought primarily over the abolition of slavery, such as it has become a tenet of historical orthodoxy, but over the demarcation of federal and state jurisdictions. The tensions that led to the outbreak of the war can also be observed in the “European Union” today.

During more than a century after the end of the civil war, the American South developed a nationalism all its own, symbolized by the “Stars and Bars” flag and lavish bronze statues to General Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals and politicians. In their shadow, the Ku Klux Klan, the nationalist organization of middle-class and poor whites was allowed to thrive. Since the late 1950s, due to an unabated, ever more intensive offensive by the civil rights movement and its latter-day heirs, culminating in the violent mob action in the wake of the 2020 race riots after the accidental death of George Floyd, many Confederate symbols have been eliminated, dismantled or just destroyed. The Confederate flag was erased from the state flags of Georgia and Mississippi. In other words, Confederate nationalism was forced to make way for a wave of inverted racial hatred and prejudice. This new racism, going hand in hand with a persistent demand for “equal rights” for all kinds of newly invented sexual and racial identities, was declared to be part of American national ideology by the Biden administration. Obviously, the government emphatically wants to make it very clear that it wants blacks and people with all sorts of sexual deviancies and problems to understand it considers them part of the American people, which is, of course absolutely redundant because the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.”

Yet special treatment for certain groups is not new in the US. Something similar was done in 1907 when Columbus Day was declared a federal statutory holiday, especially to make the ever growing numbers of Italians and Italian Americans feel part of the American people. In the years 1900-1914, three million Italians settled in the US, making them one of the most important contingents of immigrants.

The reason why the transgender and woke agendas are now being used as integrative tools (thereby also necessarily operating as a divisive agent among older and more traditionally inclined generations) may be that the Second World War heroic narrative is has become worn-out and stale. The very narrative has descended into a kind of violent vaudeville, to the point that a movie like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Bastards transcends the limits of what is still believable.

Nationalism has long been regarded as one of the keys to the understanding of Latin American politics and history. Numerous authors have devoted their energy to studies of this subject. Unfortunately, however, much of the literature so far produced has been repetitive. Detailed studies of the formation of national states upon the ruins of the Spanish Empire are few and far between.

In Spanish America, the central problem for the creoles who had just shaken off the Spanish imperial yoke was the construction of a credible and politically useable national past. On the one hand they needed to take their distance from the Spanish cultural and political heritage—identifying to a degree with the native Americans, the Indians—while on the other hand they needed to ensure their continued dominance over those very Indians. Thus there was an almost unbridgeable gap between two pillars of creole political thought and action. The creole mind had deep roots. Creole relations with the indigenous peoples were the cornerstone of the colonial political and social establishment. In this respect, Latin American nations were indeed already constructed to a certain degree while still under colonial rule. In Guatemala, for instance, the creoles willfully and very deliberately excluded Indians, mestizos, and Spanish peninsular newcomers from participating in colonial social, economic and ceremonial benefits.

Obviously, for the successor states of especially the Spanish colonial empire, it was just not possible to claim the local indigenous past as a source of inspiration for the nations these were trying to build. This was only done during the 20^th century in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and to a certain extent in Ecuador, that is precisely in those regions where indigenous civilizations had come to fruition before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.

In Argentina, national origins and the process of nation building can be observed quite well. One might even say it is somewhat of a laboratory case of nation building.

Traditionally in Argentina, nationalism sells well, literally. There is a steady and considerable market for profound and less profound analyses of the national character, the fate of the nation, its future, its grand past, its missed chances, its rightful place among the other nations of the world, national heroes like Juan Domingo Perón, heroic actions, and above all, the unique character of the Argentine people and its unique expressions, the gaucho and the tango. But the Argentine nation, whether real or imagined, was the creation of a number of influential citizens. The group of leading citizens, aristocrats, oligarchs, and intellectuals, in nineteenth-century Argentina was reasonably homogeneous, restricted and exclusive. The main branch of this group naturally resided in the capital, Buenos Aires, living off the rents of their extensive cattle domains and profiting from international trade. In the nineteenth century, this group tried to recreate a European state in Argentina, ignoring existing social and economic realities in the country at large that were determined by the heritage of Spanish, Indian and Mestizo culture. These native cultural values were intentionally ignored and relegated to the background of Argentine cultural life. Authors such as Domingo F. Sarmiento and Juan Bautista Alberdi have sought to denounce the native heritage and values and tried to impose non-Spanish European ideas upon their country. Subsequently, these new ideas were woven together in the general concept of an “Argentinian nation,” European in outlook, spirit and tradition. These new ideas were received eagerly by the Argentine upper classes, who were only too willing to construct a nation that would be consistent with their worldview and international business ties.

There is a national preoccupation with nationalism, dating from the golden years of Argentina, between 1880 and 1930, when it was undisputedly the leader among the fellow nations of Latin America. That half-century saw the creation of Argentine national mythology. Works dealing with the colonial past, for instance, clearly reflected contemporary notions of what Argentina was like, and what it should be like.

The myth of an Argentine race, or distinct people, created around 1900 by José Ingenieros, Ricardo Rojas and Roberto Levillier, to name just a few, was in part also a reaction against the massive waves of foreign immigrants that flooded the country in its golden years. Argentinians were told they were by nature cosmopolitan, democratic-minded, tolerant, virtuous, courageous, ready to sacrifice themselves in order to save their fatherland and in addition, racially superior. The cultural and literary historian Ricardo Rojas coined the term argentinidad, “Argentinity” to denote the special set of virtues and qualities that supposedly characterized the Argentinian people. Rojas believed that literature reflected the inner soul and the political and social thought of the nation. Rojas himself was instrumental in laying bare for the Argentine public their own inner stirrings with his influential works on national literature.

Argentinian historical convention has it that there have been at least two, or even three, different Argentines, the first, from 1810 till about 1880, the second from 1880 till 1930, and the last, from about 1940 till the present. The underlying notion is that in each of these periods, the Argentinian nation has had a different character. Thus, instead of historical continuity, national history is rather marked by abrupt breaks. For most contemporary authors, the real Argentina has only existed since the arrival of millions of immigrants and their slow integration and absorption into the preexisting Argentinian people. True nation building and the formation of a national community thus would be a recent phenomenon.

However, efforts at nation building were by no means limited to more recent periods, in fact dating form the very beginning of Argentina’s existence as an independent country. Methods, ideas and goals of the early nation builders were remarkably similar to later efforts. From the very beginning, the Argentinian revolution for independence presented itself to the population of Buenos Aires by means of propaganda. The Revolutionary Junta that took power in 1810 assured that things had changed for the better, and that it was doing everything in its power to guarantee the wellbeing of the population. But government propaganda claimed their loyalty in return. Concurrently, the revolutionary governments sought to change the physical and temporal world of the citizens. The city streets were given new names, while a revolutionary calendar replaced the old one dominated by religious holidays and an occasional monarchical celebration. The importance of revolutionary festivals as a yardstick of political loyalty was lost on few people. Dissenters, adversaries and certain foreigners were reluctant to show up on national holidays. Many of these, unhappy with their status and fearing for their possessions or positions, eventually sought salvation by means of naturalization.

At this point in time, it may be said that the energy, time and attention for detail that have gone into founding and building nations are matched today only by the determination and single minded destructive dedication of those committed to kill those very nations.

In view of the attack on the existing nation state that is underway these days, many in Europe and the US take a dim view of the chances for survival of their societies. It is obvious these will not survive in their present form, that is just plainly impossible. Moreover, why would states survive the general collapse that is currently taking place?

Some observers, such as French philosopher Francis Cousin have concluded that Capitalism is dead and under no circumstances can be resuscitated. He may be right and in that case the death of the nation state will be inevitable. If national states collapse, this will be the equivalent of a change in the political system, which inevitably goes hand in hand with violence. That is some kind of historical law.

After the collapse of the national state, something must take its place. In many cases, a new configuration will likely not follow the borders of the former nation states. Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has predicted that, at least in Europe, a period of international anarchy and confusion with great numbers of small fiefdoms engaged in permanent war against one another, such as during the Middle Ages is going to follow upon the collapse of nation states. Such small political units may actually look very much like the Amish settlements in the US, or the Mennonite colonies that were founded in South America around 1900: largely autarkic communities held together by bond of kinship, religion, customs and language. Actually, as regards their character and modus operandi, such communities are quite similar to the indigenous tribal communities that Europeans first encountered when they set foot in the Americas, some of which still survive today. Yet given the precarious existence of such communities in a hostile environment, it will be necessary always to be ready to fight for survival.

During the 2008 financial crisis that severely hit Greece, many young urban professionals left the city and settled in the ancestral rural homes that their grandparents had left half a century ago when they moved to the city in search of work. Today, with economic penury spreading across Europe, this flight from the big city has become popular in other EU countries, especially in the Mediterranean. The Italian government is actively promoting the resettlement of abandoned villages, selling houses for one Euro, on condition they be restored and modernized by the owner.

In view of current developments, it is quite likely that van Creveld’s prediction will come true and that interesting times lie ahead of us.

If, however, somehow or other, nation states would manage a restart, they could use the experiences in Argentina and to a lesser extent the US as an example of how to integrate successfully large numbers of foreigners.

As is so often the case, history may serve as a source of inspiration for the solution of problems we are faced with today.

Notes

See Hans Vogel, How Europe Became American (London: Arktos, 2021).

Thierry Baudet, De aanval op de natiestaat (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2016).

Actually, the Israeli nation state is also supported just by fiction: Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009)

Joachim Ehlers, “Elemente mittelalterlicher Nationsbildung in Frankreich (10.-13. Jahrhundert),” Historische Zeitschrift 231 (1980), 565-87.

Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and other Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1957), 118-25 and 186.

For instance, Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

Robert R. Ergang, Herder and the Foundation of German Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931).

Federico Chabod, L’idea di nazione (Bari: Laterza, 1961).

Heinrich Koppelmann, Nation, Sprache und Nationalismus (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1956).

Frederick Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1944), and Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1944).

Luigi Sturzo, Nationalism and Internationalism (New York: Roy, 1946), and Carlton J. H. Hayes, Nationalism: a Religion, (New York: Macmillan, 1960).

Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?”, an address given at the Sorbonne in 1882. In Oeuvres Complètes vol. 1 (Paris: Calmann-Levi, 1947).

Jacob Talmon has provided an in-depth analysis of Marxism and nationalism: The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).

Margit Mayer and Margaret A. Fay, “Formation of theAmerican Nation-State,” Kapitalistate 6 (Fall, 1977), 39-90. The article is a reworking of Mayer’s Dissertation “Zur Genese des Nationalstaats in Amerika” (Frankfurt am Main, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, 1977).

Robert R. Palmer, “The National Idea in France Before the Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940), 95-111.

Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper, 1978); see also Eugene Weber , Peasants into Frenchmen, The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Elise Marienstras, Les mythes fondateurs de la nation américaine: Essai sur le discours idéologique aux Etats-Unis a l’époque de l’indépendance 1763-1800 (Paris: Maspero, 1976).

Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought. An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926).

David Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: the History of the Ku Klux Klan (Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1968).

Good introductions are Arthur P. Whitaker, Nationalism in Latin America (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962); Samuel L. Bailey, ed., Nationalism in Latin America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971); Gerhard Masur, Nationalism in Latin America (New York: Macmillan, 1966).

Gonzalo Vial Correa, “La formación de las nacionalidades hispanoamericanas como causa de la independencia,” Boletín de la Academia Chilena de la Historia 33 (second semester 1966) 110-44; an older article studies revolutionary vocabulary, see Jorge Basadre, “Historia de la idea de patria en la emancipación del Perú,” Mercurio Peruano, 39 (1954), 53-75.

Leopoldo Zea, The Latin American Mind (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970). The papers read at a conference held in 1983 at the University of Hamburg, in Germany, in commemoration of the bicentenary of the birth of Simón Bolivar, have been published recently. Many familiar themes are discussed, and taken together, they provide a valuable contribution to the topic of Latin American nationalism and nation building. See Inge Buisson, Gunther Kahle, Hans-Joachim König and Horst Pietschmann, eds., Problemas de la formación del estado y de la nación en Hispanoamérica (Bonn: Inter Nationes, 1984). See also Severo Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo (Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, 1973).

Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

Carl J. Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism: Argentina and Chile, 1890-1914 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970).

Adolfo Garretón, La municipalidad colonial, desde su fundación hasta el gobierno de J. Láriz (Buenos Aires: J. Menéndez, 1933) Juan Agustín Garela, La ciudad indiana: Buenos Aires desde 1600 hasta mediados del siglo XVIII (Buenos Aires: Estrada, n.d.); Roberto Levillier, Les origines argentines: la formation d’un grand peuple (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1912); José Ingenieros, La formación de una raza argentina, in volume 4 of his Obras Completas (Buenos Aires: Mar Océano, 1961).

Earl T. Glauert, “Ricardo Rojas and the Emergence of Argentine Cultural Nationalism,” Hispanic American Historical Review 43:1 (1963), 1-13.

Hans Vogel, “Fiestas patrias y nuevas lealtades en Buenos Aires,” Todo es Historia 287 (1991), 42-50.

Hans Vogel, “New Citizens for a New Nation: Naturalization in Early Independent Argentina,” Hispanic American Historical Review 71:1 (1991), 107-131.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTMpxFRyFbg

Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).