Nationalism and the idea of Europe: How nationalists betray the nation state

‘Nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers’, says Benedict Anderson, whose work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, has become itself a minor contemporary classic.’ Hegel is not, however, an implausible candidate for philosopher of nationalism. Through him we can trace the source idea. True, Hegel’s presentation of the rationally organised state as the carrier of political liberty would seem to be several degrees too cool for the affections of a national philosopher. It is not, however, the state, but the ‘spirit’ upon which the state confers legal identity, that provides the philosophical underpinning to nationalism. History is, Hegel says, uninterested in individuals. Instead ‘what it has to record is the activity of the spirit of peoples’. Hegel (as well as Herder before him) borrowed this idea from Mo?tesquieu, to whom he even gave fulsome credit.2 This genealogy is, of course, outrageous. How can the seminal ideal of nationalism be traced to Montesquieu, that urbane sceptic and liberal advocate of moderation? It was the peculiar fate of this philosopher of international commercial exchange and of a constitutional separation of powers that his thought about esprit, the ethos or spirit of a people, should have ended up the vehicle of the nationalist understanding of the nation. Montesquieu said: