Ten years ago the French (and Catholic, although this is not relevant for our topic) political philosopher Pierre Manent wrote a small book, The Reason of Nations.
In the introduction, he said that Europeans were witnessing some major phenomena, “the erasure, may be the dismantlement of the political form that sheltered the progress of the European man,” which is the nation.
Manent also added “the political form, be it a nation or a city, is not a light cloth; you cannot at will easily decide whether you wear it or not.”
For Manent, the West, facing new challenges, tries to bring a solution to the problem of political order by unifying humanity in one single big village, with a new political order that would be a “democratic empire.”
But in fact, he adds, you have two Western projects, which greatly differ. The American project assumes every people living in the world longs for democracy, free markets and rule of law. The USA is the central power, with a divine mission, helping other people to achieve this aim, either using soft power or muscled methods.
Of course, from time to time some evil/rogue states try to hinder the general harmony and progress, and the USA has to deal with them. (Of course, we, Arabs, know what this means in practice).
However, says Manent, the American scheme does not try to destroy “nations” (those who try to draw new frontiers in the Middle East do it because they think the actual frontiers do not reflect the real nations here).
The democratic empire, in American eyes, would include ancient components like nations, new ones, and people being more or less the same everywhere; no significant antagonising difference between them will emerge. This is the actual version of American idealism, the world it tries to make.
The European project is quite different, and even more promethean. No single state is the central power in this scheme – of course this overlooks and denies Germany’s role.
The centre of this democratic empire is a gigantic central human agency, born near the Rhine, but detached from the peoples and states who gave it birth.
This agency’s realm has a “lust to expand”, a vocation to advocate and impose the new formula in more and more territories, in Eastern Europe, in the Mediterranean, and maybe in Caucasia.
It claims to be a democracy, but in fact it is a “kratos” (a power) without real (well defined, circumscribed) people ("demos"). Why does it claim to be a democracy? Because it respects human rights and rule of law. But there is no deliberation, no consultation of the people (and when one fool decides to consult the people, he is surprised by the result: no, thanks).
This project, like the American, assumes that no difference between peoples, religions, cultures, is significant, but it also denies the “need for a nation” or a national framework.
You have many problems with this project (from here I am mixing Manent’s book with that of Taguieff and Bock). No demos, as already stated. And of course people living in the “democratic empire” are significantly different.
For the Empire project, the explanation is simple: these differences are either not relevant, or the consequence of similar evil processes: the existence and the building of nations, the too-long Westphalia era.
Nations are the mother of all ills. Either they are grounded in “ethnicity”, a community claim to have common ethnic origins, and such claims pave the way to superiority complex or even racism; or they are the fruit of a nation-state building project, which was everywhere ugly, relying on muscle, oppressing minorities, imposing a common language and common curricula, suppressing regional /primordial identities and inventing a new one, the “national”, much more aggressive. In both cases, the nation state formula leads to war, to racism, and to violence.
Of course, much of this is true, but they tend to forget the nation-state is also the “political form” that makes representative democracy, deliberation, collective will, people sovereignty, human individual rights, possible. In effect, democracy needs collective memory, a subtle relation between past, present and future that the nation state provides. The European project needs a break with the past, a self-hating outlook, despising most national cultures and memories, labelled a cause of antagonism and hatred between people.
Of course, this is an oversimplification: it would be more accurate to say a new European “culture” is unfolding, a narcissist one that thinks it is vastly superior to others, as it is the only one that is lucid enough to hate itself and its past. And the European project is, in many ways, an invitation to all dominant cultures of the areas encompassed by the Empire to acknowledge they are ugly, carrying a past full of crimes and to repent… While minorities’ cultures are “victims” that deserve compensation and rehabilitation.
The European project also entails, says Manent, a radical change of the relation, or the equilibrium between, say, “rules” and “people’s will”, or between law and politics. Rules and law, rules of law are quickly gaining ground, at the expense of “state power” and political will. Law and politics no longer go together; we face now a zero-sum game. In itself, this is mixed development, with positive and negative dimensions.
But the fact is that rules and law, these products of Brussels bureaucracy, have much less democratic legitimacy than the elected political leaders. This neatly weakens the claim of being “a democratic empire”.
Moreover, and this is quite nasty, when a political leader takes a decision, he has to account for it. If he simply follows the rules, he no longer has to take responsibility for the results. The “Empire project” has yet to find a solution for this.
To be continued
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