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The Department of Philosophy at the Univ. Of Mumbai, snagged Dr. Peter Koslowski to give a couple of lectures for them, the first one was on “The EU and the end of the association of the Nation and the State”. A very promising topic indeed.

He started out by talking about the origins of the modern European notion of the nation based on Hegel and Schelling’s writings in the 19th century. He was very critical of their view of the nation in terms of a superhuman subject-object framework, and went on to construct his own model of a nation as a special variety of club. These nation-clubs as against nation-states have two fundamental characteristics (1) membership is primarily based on birth and (2) membership can be gained through naturalisation. I completley sympathise with this perspective, and it seems in a sense to be a general enough answer.

Later on though Koslowski fell into a very unique “nationalist trap” - as he called Hegel’s ideas - himself, possibly reflecting the changing idea of nationality far more poignantly in what he said than in what he was trying to say. Towards the end of the lecture he talked about Rumsfield’s “New America vs. Old Europe” thesis and said that in reality the EU at Brussels was the new thing in the world and America was the old thing.

I think a way to answer the question about nationalism per se and other human attitudes in general, is in some sense to be found in the relationship between institutions and attitudes. i.e. “Do institutions frame attitudes or do attitudes frame institutions?”

In my opinion the causation flows more strongly from institutions to attitudes. In this particular case, the formation of a pan-European government at Brussels has created an institution or a rallying point around which people can build their allegiances and identities. In some sense Hegel’s analysis still seems to hold good, in that individual constituents of a nation tend to see themselves in adversarial aggregated terms to non-members of the nation.

Also in general there seems to be little distinction between the nation and the state, in the public imagination. The interests of the Indian Government, for instance, are perceived as the interests of the Indian Nation. Similarly an emerging European State will find that it represents the interests of the emerging European Nation far more vividly in the public imagination, than it does in actuality.

What say?