The European Right and the Crisis of Nationalism (I)
The European Right and the Crisis of Nationalism (I)
A translation of Adriano Romualdi's essay
An impenetrable fog seems to shroud the Second World War, a cloud of ignorance and uncertainties, a historical curtain that separates us from the men of that era. Separating us from the thoughts and motivations of the men who lived it. Pound called it the Dung War, La Guerra di Merda— so powerful is the stench of that war that it seems to even affect our modern vision. This period has a strange pull on academics, entangling them in a peculiar feedback loop. A couple of weeks ago, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan voiced his shock on twitter upon discovering that 63 percent of Nazi militants identified their main enemy as communism/socialism, and only 18 percent identified Jews as their primary antagonist. How could a professor of political science be so far removed from the motivations of the men who fought that war? One explanation is that reading German primary sources from the era was for a long time practically verboten. Another source of this ignorance is that the Allies’ pre and post-war justifications crystallized into unquestionable truth, wartime propaganda assimilated academic discourse and fostered a scholarly environment akin to the telephone game. You could think of it as an academic human centipede, nearly a century-long, digesting and excreting the same pile of shit.
This fetid cloud of confusion billows out from the Second Great War and also darkens the post-war period. Modern academia has virtually zero interest in analyzing the perspectives and motivations of the next generation of losers, the right-wingers who spiritually succeded the Axis and carried on the struggle in the post-war period. The Lost Causers- dismissed as an insignificant rabble of skinheads with little organization and even fewer brains. But was this the case?
I believe the antidote to our societal amnesia is nothing more than reading the writings of these men. Whether you agree with them or despise them, I believe there is immense value in making this material available, for no other reason than to attain a better grasp on our past.
I have translated into English the first part of a series of essays by the Italian intellectual Adriano Romualdi. (1940-1973). His father was Giuseppe "Pino" Romualdi, an Italian right-wing politician who served both the Republican Fascist Party and the Italian Social Movement, and the rumored son of Benito Mussolini. A summary of Adriano’s life will take the form of another article in the near future. This first article will be free but the next translations will be behind a paywall. And as always I appreciate your support.
(For more essays by Romualdi and Right wing Italian intellectuals, check out
)
_____________________
The European Right and the Crisis of Nationalism (I)
The European Right’s relative inferiority compared to the other modern political forces can be traced back to the Right's inability to propose an alternative that is at the level of the times.
Let us be frank: the accents, slogans, symbols, and motives of the Right are at this point somewhat outdated, frequently pathetic, and occasionally ridiculous.
At the origin of all this is the rapid deterioration of Nationalist themes after 1945, itself due to the disappearance of historical justification among the small European countries when faced with Russia and America.
We live in an age of rapid transformation: a modern fighter jet made in 1960 risks becoming an antiquated wreck in 1970. In the same vein, ideas and interests that still possessed historical logic in 1939- to the age of the nations- risk appearing frighteningly aged in 1969, at the time of the continental empires. The nations of Europe do not have the dimensions for conducting autonomous politics in the face of Russia and America. The idea of the nation as it was developed by romantic culture, as the synthesis of a people’s values in antithesis to the values of the other peoples of Europe, is also insufficient to oppose the internationalistic myths of democracy and communism, which Russian and American imperialism shield themselves with. Only a pan-European nationalist ideology could accomplish this.
The assertion that traditional nationalism is irremediably withered can be demonstrated by simply observing its language. A word like Patria (fatherland), which forty years ago still had the particular vibration of those words which defined the age, has at this point a somewhat pathetic ring to it, a hollow cadence, and a correct political sensitivity would recommend using it less and less. A phrase like <i sacri confini della patria> (the sacred borders of the fatherland) is part of an age in which the various European nationalisms still faced each other on the borders, yet it rings false in a time in which everyone knows damn well that there is only one border in Europe to defend: the one on the iron curtain.
The word <nation> still has a sure stamp, but speaking of <national idea>, and <national alternative> is a descent into the vague, and nobody would be able to give power to these expressions in an age no longer defined by national unity -as it was in 1915- for this is the age of the united Europe, 1970.
The lexicon of the Right (like its wardrobe for that matter: certain sections of the party feel somewhere between the thrift shop and the cemetery) is at this point terribly out of fashion, and so one can not be too surprised if the youth turn their backs on the whole trash heap.
The Right is old and out of ideas. Respond: Fascism presupposes at least the understanding that the Fascism of tomorrow cannot be the Fascism of yesterday, the provincial fascism confined to Italy and Italy alone, for it is clear that such a thing can no longer exist. Everything, to be preserved, must be renewed. In the words of Moeller van den Bruck: “being conservative does not mean depending on what was yesterday, but subsisting on that which is eternal.”
The Right and Nationalism
Nationalism, the <nation> - with all the moral values, martial values, and sentiments of solidarity associated with these terms - has been identified with the Right for almost a century.
It is a process of identification that has an origin, and it is an origin that must be retraced.
Right and Left are terms that are a part of the vocabulary of post-revolutionary Europe. And with Democracy and the great industrial transformations of the 19th century, two fronts were established, one of subversion, and one of conservation.
Conservation does not only signify the mere conserving of institutions or privileges, but also of the values connected to a true type of society. Subversion does not only signify the destruction of a particular society, but the assault against those values - blood, religion, hierarchy - that a true society safeguards.
The revolution began in Europe in 1789 - and it still has not yet finished - it is not merely the demolition of this or that social order, but the utter negation of all of the values upon which every European Order once based themselves.
This was already explicit in the Enlightenment, the intellectual manifesto of this subversion. Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alambert did nothing but vomit the same cliches that the press regurgitates to us today. The slogans that religion is a lie propagated by the rich, that military tradition is a murderous cult, and that social difference, races, and individualism are all injustices, a product of mere individual chance at birth. The Enlightenment - and all that which it spawned, what we call liberalism or democracy, socialism or communism - is anti-history. It is the contempt for the very forces of blood and spirit, those sublime energies that saturate the past and animate the sails of world history.
Every affirmation attracts a negation, or every negation an affirmation.
The Enlightenment has negated tradition, the past, and the blood.
Romanticism idealized tradition, rediscovered history, retraced the most distant and mysterious streets of the Abstammung, of the blood. It felt the dangers that the industrialization of the planet represented for man, the sapping of all local and regional life forces. They bumped up against the principles of <throne and altar>, but dug deep, and in the end discovered a new legitimacy in the community of blood and culture, within the nation. Reinserting the bourgious forces, which the revolution had put to the free state, in the groove of a new authority and a new solidarity. It accomplished a revolution, but in order to conserve. It liberalized society, but while emptying liberalism of its poison, creating responsibility towards the state, towards the nation.
The forces of conservation were at first closed in a rigid defense, the teleology of the threatened order: this was legitimism. And its symbol was Metternich.
Then they hatched an idea that was more elastic in the face of the new reality, and inserted the bourgeois forces in the channel of a new legitimacy: this was nationalism. Its symbols were Cavour and Bismarck.
Also in Italy, the liberalism of the Risorgimento transformed into a kind of nationalism, not with the scream “Long live universal suffrage!” but with the cry of “Rome or Death!” did Garibaldi’s band march on. And the little garibaldino Crispi was already - a generation late - a political reactionary.
Everywhere in Europe, the nation had become the place of collecting values: the tradition against the infernal leveling, the national discipline against the universal rambling, and military honor against the international.
In brief: the nation in the 19th century became the formula with which the educated classes of the western countries indicated the responsibility they felt towards the spiritual values inherited from the past. The values that materialism, industrialism, and the indifference of the masses threatened to destroy.
Nationalism, understood in this way, stretched to the maximum the spirit of struggle, of affirmation, of the sacrifice of noble Europe. It kept alive a certain spiritual energy, without which - in a climate already opaque with parliamentarianism - it would surely perish. It kept alive a sense of momentum, martial, colonial, pioneering, without which the people of Europe would have withered away. Just compare today’s democracies to the national democracies and monarchies of the world before 1914 to understand what we have come to lack with the national idea: independence, pride, and courage. Italy itself owed its rise from 1848 to 1918 not to its liberalism but to its nationalism.
The values of nationalism were based on an assumption, that the world revolved around the nation. It was based on a historical myth that all of history was in function to the nation, and every populace neighboured a barbarian, in the original sense of the word: one who speaks another language and therefore is in some way bad. The national prospects excluded the existence of a united Europe, united by race and by culture. In Italy, they talked of Rome, of Classicism, but they did not speak of the fact that the Greeks and Latins came from the North; in France they spoke of the Chanson de Roland, but they did not speak of the fact that Charlemagne and his knights spoke German. In Germany they exalted the Reich, but passed over the fact that the idea of the Reich was transmitted to Charlemagne from Rome, and that the church of d’Auisgrana copied that of San Vitale in Ravenna.
The national perspective shattered history into hostile blocks, capable of producing great energies within but containing the germ of the future European Civil Wars. And the national values were linked to the belief that the nation was eternal and timeless, exactly like the values of the polis and those of the town were tied to the belief in the timelessness of the polis and town: the reorganization of history at the basis of a greater unity would have fatally put them in crisis.
The rise of Russia and America as continental powers embracing boundless territories and rich in all manner of raw materials is contemporaneous with the rise of Russia and America as myths, ideological leaders, and as ways of life, who were destined to eclipse the nations and to empty the old Fatherlands of their contents and ideals.
Nationalism and Fascism
The first world war was the revolution of nationalism. In the enthusiasm that arose in the youth, in the dissolution, in the front of it, of the socialist international; in the costume of the life in uniform, that spread and remained, almost like the idea of a perpetual national guard, it expressed all of the force reached by the nationalist ideology. This revolution of nationalism is evident in Italy, where the intervention of a minorities revolution, the same which, in the wake of the values represented by the war, conquered and revolutionized the state. In Germany, the Nationalist revolution continued regardless of the defeat- thanks to the defeat- that exasperated the national sentiment: “We have lost the war but gained the nation” wrote Schauwecker in 1933.
Fascism was, between the two wars, the attempt at institutionalizing nationalism. It was, at the same time, the understanding of the dangers represented by the national mentality of the two internationals: that of communism and that of Americanism. Since the world war, while having exasperated nationalism, had generated two forces capable of eclipsing it: Wilsonianism, the pretense of the Americans to sit as referees in Europe, and Bolshevism, the candidacy of the Russians as the leaders of the continent. Already in the first post-war period, it took the form of two tendencies that could have fatally emptied the old fatherlands: the communist propaganda with its messianic expectations towards Russia, and on the other hand, the cinema, the jazz, the flavor, and the costumes of the Americans, instilling, drop by drop, the myth of an American world and American superiority.
Fascism was the instinctual reaction of the European people to the prospect of being ground into anonymous dust by the Moscow International, Hollywood, and Wall Street. It was a European reaction and a European phenomenon, that fully triumphed in those countries- like Italy and Germany- that had suffered from the gangrene rot of communism and the deceptions of Wilsonianism, but also present to some degree in all of Europe, from France to Scandinavia, from Romania to Spain. Unsurprisingly, these movements, which arose from an identical demand, sympathized with each other. It is no surprise that around Italy and Germany, it took the form of a <Nationalist International> however difficult the formula was. Difficult for the mentality of the nationalists, due to the limited historical perspective, and the mutual jealousy and envy.
At any rate, this alignment of fascistic movements, however difficult and tiring, represented the only chance offered to the nationalists to overcome the contradictions in a new European order. The dilemma facing the Nationalist movements was: either perpetuate itself in a small dimension, ideologically and territorially, and then inevitably overwhelmed or emptied by the communist international and the forces of “Democracy” (Francoism is a typical example of these nationalists who were emptied) - or, instead, arise and break the ancient limits, and create in this way a truly European Bloc. The nationalists needed to give life to an international that possessed the ideological, martial, and economic force to block the path of the other internationals.
In the age of Russia and America’s development into formidable holders of raw materials, no autonomy or independence could be possible in Europe if the iron of Lorraine and Noway, the petroleum of Ploesti and Baku, the steal industry of Belgium, of Ruhr, of Bohemia, of Silesia, of Donbas, could not be found in the same common hands. This was the fundamental intuition of Hitler when he wrote in Mein Kampf that the war was fought only to return to Germany the borders of 1914. Every new age requires new boundaries. He also wrote: “Germany will be a world power or will not exist at all.”
But Hitler thought of great space in an epoch in which Nationalism could only reason by province. Hitler severed with a sword the Gordian Knot of Europe's eternal divisions and contradictions. Hitler stirred the race with a myth that transcended nations and opened the ranks of the Waffen SS not only to the Belgians, to the Hollanders, to the Scandinavians, but also to the Baltics, the French, to the Slavs. Hitler played the card of Europe, of the Neuordnung Europas aus Rasse und Raum.
We think that he intended to adapt Germany and Europe to a new dimension of world politics. From one side, the destruction of the Bolsheviks, and German hegemony over those countries (Baltic States, Ukraine, the Caucuses) reluctant to the Russian yoke. From the other side, the return into the Reich of the territories of (Belgium, Holland, Alsace Lorrain) that had been a part of Germany until the 17th century; to the North, the reinsertion of the Germanics among the Scandinavian peoples; in the end, the recovery of the hegemonic mission of Austria in the Danube Basin. The Mediterranian Lebensraum would have been filled by Italy, which would have ousted the English; the Spanish, retaken Gibraltar, and have defended access to the west. The French would have substantially conserved their African Empire. It would have been a continental revolution inspired by geopolitics, what was defined by Ratzel, Kiellen, Haushofer: the awareness that politics was being reorganized across continental spaces.
Aiming at the creation of a European political Bloc, capable of defending itself from external pressure. “A Monroe Doctrine of Europe,” as one American historian defined it.
This Bloc could only have been created by Germany, it is a fact: 80 million Germans, in other words, double the other European populations, the central position, between North and South, East and West, that already with the Sacred Roman Imperium that had formed the nucleus of ecumenical Europe, with a formidable technical and industrial capability, in the end, the military superiority and organization acquired in the Prussian age; making Germany the nation predestined to reorganize Europe.
One could like this reality or dislike it, but by denying it, you would refuse to recognize the only path that would not lead to the fatal eclipse of national Europe.
With the fall of Germany, so too would the other nations of Europe fall, and the world of the Fatherlands, the world of nationalisms, would be crushed by the Internationals of the dollar and of communism.