The following article is taken from the speech given by Daniele Scalea, president of the Machiavelli Foundation, at the event “The Essence of Life”, held in Révfülöp, Hungary, under the auspices of the Scruton Hub.
National identity and democracy
National identity is one of the greatest treasures in Europe’s social capital. Roger Scruton recalled how loyalty to the nation guarantees social cohesion even in the presence of major disagreements. But Scruton was not the first to highlight this precious gift of our Western history.
In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill wrote that it is almost impossible to have “free institutions” (i.e., a liberal democracy) in a country composed of different nationalities, as the mutual sympathy necessary for such institutions to survive would be lacking. On the contrary, there would be mutual distrust and the army would not be loyal to the entire population, perceiving part of it as foreign and hostile.
In the 20th century, Joseph Schumpeter pointed out that a democratic society needs some level of agreement on basic norms and principles, on the “rules of the game,” so that minorities do not feel threatened by the majority and accept its rule.
To understand these theoretical concepts, just imagine the following scenario, which is not so remote or unrealistic. Let us suppose that, in 2050, the Muslim Brotherhood or some similar political group is a serious contender for power in one or more European countries. Could a Jew, a woman, a homosexual, or in general anyone who is not Muslim, accept their government, even if achieved democratically, by means of a vote, with the assurance that their fundamental rights will not be violated? This is unlikely to happen, given that the Muslim Brotherhood has different fundamental rights: the freedom to preach Islam and the application of Sharia law.
The troubled birth of nations
Liberal democracies are historically and structurally linked to nation states. It is in these contexts that they have developed, and it is almost exclusively in similar societies that we have found them able to consolidate and function fully. History shows us that multicultural states tend towards autocracy, with rare exceptions (such as Switzerland, which is composed solely of European and Christian communities and is based on the cantonal model, where each canton is ethnolinguistic and religiously based).
However, the birth of nation states was not painless. It involved defense against invasions, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and religious purges. These bloody events created the relative homogeneity necessary to inspire widespread trust and a sense of identity—preconditions, as we have seen, for democracy.
We should not throw away so lightly this identity that has been won at such a high price. The risk is that, with its disappearance, we will return to what came before: ethnic and religious conflicts.
Who threatens nations and democracy today?
But why is national identity in crisis in Europe today? There is an external and an internal cause. The external one is the most obvious and evident: mass immigration, impossible to integrate in such numbers, and in the presence of an establishment that for decades has considered the goal of assimilation undesirable, has recreated multicultural societies. Societies similar to those of the past, in which there were ethno-religious conflicts, but even more unstable because the communities are not even united by being all European and Christian.
This leads us to the internal cause. Europe would never have agreed to return to fragile and quarrelsome multicultural societies if it had not succumbed, over the last two centuries, to the intellectual seductions of cultural relativism.
In the 19th century, just as the process of nation building was reaching its peak, some elites began to diverge from the rest of society. In the name of progress, they decided to cut all ties with the past, which was no longer seen as a model and a guide, but as a burden and a “foreign country” (L.P. Hartley).
If the past is something negative, then there are no longer any customs, values, and traditions that can automatically be taken for granted. This is the origin of relativism: our culture is just one among many. What is good and what is right is merely subjective. In those years, a fascination with the exotic spread, as seen in the myth of the “noble savage” and even more so in primitivism in art—the imitation of backward African or Polynesian arts, a founding moment of so-called “contemporary” art, with the rejection of all Western aesthetic canons.
However, cultural relativism was not the only thing that broke with the past in those years. Marxism did so too, based on the idea that society is too flawed and must be replaced by a totally new one. These two strands, the rejection of our history and our tradition, have moved over the years, frequently intertwining, as has also happened recently, when neo-Marxism and post-modernism came together to create the absurd and venomous woke ideology.
