NM's blog

“In an anthropological spirit…I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet. “It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely...

  A liberal approach that ignores class, inequality and uneven capitalist development in the EU and the undemocratic nature of its structure and rule. “ Van Middelaar leaves little doubt of the much lower regard in which he holds the Commission, a useful but humdrum factory of rules, and the Parliament, a windy cavern of words. The Council, by contrast, is the seat of authoritative decisions. The Commission and the Parliament are given to utopian temptations of European federalism, for which he barely hides his scorn… How then does the Council reach its decisions? Behind closed doors, in deliberations of which no minutes are kept, that issue in announcements under the seal of consensus. Van Middelaar supplies a graphic, if tactful, description of the psychological and political mechanisms that generate such consensus. That it is reached far beyond any popular say in the matters so decided, in conclaves where no public gaze is admitted, is not cause for any particular complaint o...