Most of us will see it as an expression of common human pathology when neighbors are persistently at war with each other. One of them may be unwilling to accept that the shade of the lime tree from the neighbor’s ground falls on his own tomato patch while the other cannot stand the children’s screaming that penetrates his ears all day long. There are countless cases of neighbors feuding with each other for the rest of their lives over the most ridiculous trifles. We shake our heads, but everyone understands the motive. My home is my castle! In our own house, on our own property, we want to act like sovereigns – especially when we are no masters of our personal life in other respects.
Seen in this light, the slogans of nationalist parties are merely the direct and intuitively understandable continuation of a general human tendency. We want to be masters in our own house – no slogan appeals so directly to the feelings of most people. Nor should it surprise that immigration plays a special role in this context; everybody wants to decide who they want to invite into their castle or tolerate in its neighborhood. Before we condemn nationalist parties, we should understand why they so easily convince other people. For the AfD, their house and castle is today’s Germany, for the FPÖ it is little Austria (or rather the former Großdeutsche Reich), for the Rassemblement National it is France, for the Fratelli d’Italia and the Lega it is Italy.
However, the resistance against letting others dictate one’s own thoughts and actions is not only directed against the respective neighbors on the other side of one’s borders. It is also expressed in the continuing demarcation of many people in the new German federal states against those in the old Federal Republic. And it flares up in all separatist tendencies, in the completed Brexit as well as in the endeavours of the Catalans to separate themselves from the rest of Spain and of Italy’s far-right parties to get rid of the Mezzogiorno. In a broader sense, the elementary human endeavor to be master in one’s own castle is even transferred to the level of cultural and ethnic particularities. The United States has long ceased to be a melting pot, meanwhile each group insists on its own identity, and some are quite prepared to break up national cohesion as a result.
People insist on sovereignty and freedom at both the individual and the national level. In individuals this need is biologically rooted. At some point, young people must assert their self-determination against their own parents. This process is repeated in national collectives in relation to other collectives where it leads to the glorification of independence. We are dealing with an anthropological constant that we encounter at all times and all over the world.
But at the same time, people have always been curious – especially intellectually alert minds. Where there is a fence or a boundary, we will certainly find people who want to look or venture beyond it. The fact that in some early cultures women ruled instead of men, that a woman was not kissed in greeting but had her breast touched (as during the Renaissance), that some peoples do not worship a personal god while others worship him in a piece of stone, these and thousands other differences always fascinated. The nineteenth century even turned the study of history – i.e. of the diversity of human self-organisation – into a passion.
However, the fascination with what is foreign rarely resulted in individuals exchanging their own identity for a new, foreign one. In the case of states, this has probably never happened on a voluntary basis. The fact that different ways of life and languages always existed simultaneously in Europe never led to Germans becoming French, British becoming Italian etc. (even if they adopted so many things from their neighbors).
If it is true that we are referring to an anthropological constant because individuals as well as states prefer to remain masters in their own house and castle, how can we justify a love of Europe that severely limits such independence? A superordinate confederation of states requires each individual state to transfer to it part of its own sovereignty. Individual states are no longer the sole and supreme masters in their own house. Today, more and more matters are being determined by the European center in Brussels. How can such self-abandonment be justified?
One type of justification is particularly common among Germans and Austrians. Voluntary submission to external political rule is grounded in the fact that one’s own nation has failed in the past. Therefore, the concept of homeland has lost its former emotional attraction. The trauma of German and Austrian history sullied by Adolf Hitler haunts the citizens of both states right up to the present day. Just as a convicted thief or murderer adopts a foreign name to avoid being recognized, many intellectuals and artists renounce their homeland and the bright sides of their national history because they consider it more desirable to find a new, unsullied identity in a larger Europe. Robert Menasse, the great advocate of a United Europe, plays on this widespread mistrust, but even more so he appeals to our innate curiosity for all things foreign and exotic. Hardly any country could be more foreign and exotic than the Albania described in his latest novel. This is what makes „Die Erweiterung” (The Expansion) so worth reading. The same exoticism could of course be found as well among the Māori in New Zealand or the Tutsis in Rwanda, yet no one proposes a political union with those countries.
Are we dealing with a love of Europe that is like the love that people all over the world feel for their own homes, where they are the sovereign masters? This can hardly be true, because European unification has not really succeeded, even when and where it has been striven for and practiced for decades. I am thinking, for example, of a Franco-German joint venture such as the Arte television channel. From the very beginning, it consisted of two separate parts, one in German and one in French. But even today, the differences between them is obvious to any bilingual observer. To this day, both parts differ markedly in style, content, and presentation. Even in this joint project, France remains French and Germany remains German. The respective editorial teams remain masters in their respective departments. Except for certain mandatory topics, they would hardly broadcast any differently if the European Union did not exist.
So why should we love Europe and show our love by voting for it? This is precisely the question the nationalist parties are asking us. I must confess that I rarely hear convincing answers – at least as far as Europe’s future is concerned.
Only for the past is there an irrefutable answer, and it exists since the founding of a united Europe. But this answer has long been forgotten by the younger generation. Back then Germans and French did no longer want to continue murdering each other, as they had done for almost a millennium. If they wanted to be safe in the future, they had to sacrifice part of their sovereignty and accept a higher authority that would guarantee lasting peace.
Love? No, mutual love or even affection was not involved. How could such an emotion arise between nations that used to be “hereditary enemies”? It was reason that overcame the atavistic emotion of hate. France and Germany entered a marriage of convenience. Mrs. von der Leyen is currently the “Mother Courage” watching over Europe.
This finally brings us to the valid reason why we should not trust the nationalist parties. Emotionally, they are perfectly right. Who will seriously deny that everyone prefers to be the master of their own house? What they lack is the quality that characterises humans over animals. They lack reason – either because they have little of it or – far more frequently – because of populist dishonesty
Europe is not and will never be a love project. It wasn’t when it was founded, and it still isn’t today. No, Europe is much more than that: it is a necessity! You may also put it more pathetically. Europe is our destiny. The individual states of the European continent had no chance of economic, political and – not least – military independence for at least a hundred years. Their position in a world of giants – among superpowers such as the USA, China, Russia and soon India – forces them to pursue a common economic and defense policy. Since 2022, the Kremlin’s reborn Iwan the Terrible has been demonstrating this truth with utmost brutality.
However, since the twentieth century at the latest, not only Europe but all other powers are no longer masters in their own house. All of them live from resources that they import from other nations and from export goods that they sell them. The whole world is so interconnected, its single parts are so unviable, that if these connections were to be severed, the nation state and the control of one’s own home would de facto no longer exist – it merely exists as a cozy illusion in the minds of incorrigible nationalists.
We did not voluntarily give up this control over our own destiny or made ourselves dependent on other nations out of love for them. It is technological progress together with voracious needs and momentous consequences that force us into this dependency. Modern means of transport and communication, modern business, modern natural sciences and, last but not least, the resulting global production of waste (CO2, among many other evils) have created a united humanity that we cannot love – who loves a mere abstract concept? – but which we are exposed to for better or worse because we ourselves have made it possible and brought it about through our actions.
That is why human destiny is no longer just about Europe and the marriage of convenience between its states – for all but the nationalist bullheads, this should be a matter of course. But that is no longer enough. The world’s superpowers – USA, China, Russia, and Europe – are now opposed to each other in the same way as were the hereditary enemies Germany and France up to seven decades ago. If the new enemies are not to destroy themselves together with the rest of humanity – the new Hitler in the Kremlin is constantly threatening to do just that – then the global community must come together under a planetary umbrella. This too will not happen out of mutual love but will be dictated to us by the need to avert the self-destruction of the planet. (This is the subject of my books from the past ten years, but the truth is being willfully ignored by populists on both the right and the left).