When no one uses the word, the question will still resonate. It has no answer, because in doubt lies the formulation of its own existence today. As if it were a theological question, between faith and disbelief.
What is a nation? There is only a solid answer when someone questions its existence, as Emmanuel Macron has done regarding Algeria in pre-French times. Only the gods are given such a precarious and elusive way of life, susceptible to all doubts, but rooted in hearts by a dogmatic faith and publicly expressed in the fervor of symbols, flags, hymns and monuments.
Political nation? In such a formulation the only objective existence that can have such an evanescent idea is materialized. To cover the free pact between conforming citizens in the acceptance of a common law that constitutes them as a human community. They do not need anything else, neither origin, nor religion, nor shared language, only a territory to live in and rules accepted by all.
Few are, perhaps none, those who resign themselves to such a status, so free. Perhaps even less are those that achieve it, precisely because it is that of freedom. They all want to solidify their collective life in emotions and feelings, especially that of identity, often sublimated as a glorious, exceptional and unique existence, superior even to any other. We are different and better. We have more rights. The humble citizen and republican patriotism is relegated by the instincts of exclusion and supremacism. There is no nation that affirms itself as such without denying another, often the closest and neighboring one.
That idea is little more than two centuries old, but it seems eternal, fixed in the heavens as if it were a god, perhaps because the nations are counted among the last gods. All are inscribed in an eternal existence guided by the stars: Algeria, France, Russia, the United States, Spain, Catalonia… Whoever doubts it insults the nation and its nationals. Born of oppression and denial, they revive every time someone wants to kill them.
They all declare themselves in crisis and live in agony, as if they were on the verge of death. Overcome by life, which overflows the idea of sovereign plenitude, and makes the dream of an eternal and immutable existence inscribed in myth and not in history ridiculous, even the most perfect yearn for the old days and know they are sick of sovereignty. They lose like oil from a damaged engine.
To ask the question, to doubt its existence, requires a certain courage or a certain shamelessness when one has the maximum responsibility for the government of one of them, none other than France, the Great Nation, model of nation and inventor of the idea. Whoever dares knows that the pack awaits him, stirred up by the resentments that fallen idols arouse.
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