Van Prinsterer on National Life

On 06/08/11, In Doctrine of Nations, by W.M. Godfrey

Kinists are often taken to task on the basis of our claim that there is a national life (and by extension a racial life), and not merely a tribal life. While it is true that the tribal social organization, being built immediately and directly out of near and intermediate relations is the primary component, commerce and interchange between tribes, based on shared characteristics, commonalities of law, unities of custom, among other traits, aggregate to bring into being a larger, more expansive existence. In the passage below from Gillaume Groen van Prinsterer, taken from his important treatise Lectures on Unbelief and Revolution, we find an eloquent expression of this conception:

Where several states form a close union as a result of origin,location and intercourse, unity of development cannot be absent. e.g. in Greece. What differences between cities and tribes, what antagonism between Dorians and Ionians! What contrast between Athens and Sparta! Yet there was a Greek nationality; and it would be possible to show that those diverse tribes, landscapes and localities all contributed — not just by imitating each other but also through their own proper development — to the progress, stagnation and decline of the national life.

And would there not likewise, after the fall of the Roman Empire, have been unity and coherence among the European states, a European nationality? There was unity of origin (through the melting or dwelling together of the barbarians with the inhabitants of the Roman domains); unity of development and vicissitudes (resistance to the continual migrations of nomadic peoples; feudalism; crusades; rise of the towns; recovery of royal power); unity of learning and culture (chivalry; the influence of Antiquity; the universal use of Latin); unity of religion (with respect to it, common participation in every change).

Especially the last three centuries. Thus Heeren is right in calling his work a History of Europe’s Political System and Political Association (preface, v; p. 18). (general criterion) Visible everywhere is the intermeshing or crossing of interests; shared turbulance and strife; the parallel development of learning, of culture; the diffusion of the same principles and ideas; even the blurring of the separate nationalities, so that Sterne compares them to worn-off coins. On what, then, would the hypothesis rest that the revolutionary current was proper well-nigh exclusively to France?

History confirms this reasoning.

Kinism is not an ideology, it is a life force arising out of the memory and investigation of the neglected traditions of our fathers, those pre-modern traditions that more closely resembled the mutual understandings of the ancient Western church. As such, there is a diversity of views on what degree of consanguinity and cultural resemblance constitutes an equal yoking of partners, and the conditions for stable, peaceable national existence. What is clear is that there has occurred in the geopolitical entity referred to as the United States a specifically national disintegration that violates any reasonable understanding of these conditions, and the result has not been the development of a post-national life, but strife, enmity, and mutual suspicion arising out of the violation of natural barriers, accumulated over ages. While it is also clear that national life is something that is in the eye of the beholder, that is precisely the point, and why Kinism insists on the principles of self-determination and voluntary association, incorporated into the U.S. Constitution, dedicated to the posterity of the people, and not the involuntary social engineering of governments and economic elites.

Comments:

These are very important observations for kinists and I’m going to post this around as much as I can.

It does raise some questions for me.

I suppose the biggest question is:  despite what has been historically normative (for the sake of argument, we can accept that Prinsterer’s view of nationalism is historically accurate)...what is the divinely authoritative view?

Now, I realize that’s a big question and outside the scope of this particular article, but I do wonder how consistent Prinster’s view is with a Scriptural understanding of nationalism, and to what extent his position can be exegeted from the text.

I had a second question while reading the introductory paragraph:  how are race-life and national-life different?  If they’re equated, then why the need for two terms?

Perhaps they’re not equated?  A “Nation” may be the aggregate set of characteristics and economic exchange among various racially-similar tribal groups (or “States” as Prinster says) in a particular geographical region, but then conceptual muddles arise, namely:  how is the concept of “nationhood” related to the tribes at all?  “Nation” becomes an abstraction and that leaves the door open to propositional-nationhood (or so it seems to me.)

I truly believe a look at the writings of the Romantic Nationalists may help address the diversity of views among kinists on these matters, especially if approached from a presuppositional framework.

Posted by Shotgun  on 12/16  at  07:36 PM

Hi Shotgun, as for the divinely ordained view of the nations, we have historically referred to this as the biblical doctrine of nations. We have the example of scripture to guide our understanding, and it is replete with examples where nations are understood as groups of related people. So this view is established by precedent. Even Israel’s intercourse with its neighbors is regulated by the nearness of their relation to Israel. In nearly all translations of the Bible, the term “nation” (or the Latin equivalent) is used to translate either a Hebrew term (if the Masoretic) or a Greek term (if the LXX) meaning extended tribe, lineage race or a cognate, that is, the descendants of a common ancestor. From this clue alone we see that the saints of the Christian church who translated the Bible, considered a nation to be composed of descendants of a common scion. This is clear testimony as to what the Western church thought. I can find no evidence that there was any other conception than this prevalent in the church. In fact, this idea of the constitution of a nation appears to be independent of its formal polity, by which I mean how a people is governed. The terms most often rendered ‘nation’ in translations of the Septuagint are phyo and phuo, which are related forms. There is more to say here, but it probably deserves a topic in the forum.

I think that confusion concerning the distinction between race and nation are more linguistic, due to the problem of continuum. But I think the view many prominent Kinists hold is that a both a race and a nation are self-identifications, of two different scales of inclusion, and not concepts that can be rigidly distinguished. Etymologically, race and nation have often been cognates, which is why we could have constructions such as “the English race.” I think we must admit of some ambiguity here, that is really only solved by the principle of self-determination. But nation is also a collectivity that we distinguish from tribe. These terms are various gradations of relation. The term that includes the complex of characteristics beyond the biological, is ethnic group,or ethnicity. These are, more often than not, related tribes, descending from some common ancestry, that share a religious cultus, and various other constitutive traits. Kinists typically argue that the criterion for unity is dual: it is both biological and social (including the spiritual-religious), and rests on the ground of self-determination. To the extent that a “nation” is a synthetic entity that imposes a false unity on heterogeneous or warring tribes, it is simply empire by another name. The early socialistic empires of the fertile crescent were of this sort. That is, they were cobbled together out of various tribes that may or may not have the requisite commonality and comity to live peacefully and productively together without eruptions of violence.

I’m not familiar with what you have called the Romantic Nationalism except in the sense that it is antipodal to a kind of rational statism, so I will reserve comment until I know more about it as a category. Perhaps Jules Michelet would be considered a Romantic Nationalist? I suppose the reason is that I do not think of anything except organic nationalism to be nationalism. For me, the term proposition nation, as Lincoln formulated it, is an oxymoron. But if we are distinguishing types of nationalism, I would say that Romantic and Cultural are interconnected and mutually dependent. For instance, there are many cultural elements that have been absorbed by the Japanese from the U.S., but we could not consider a hypothetical entity compounded of Japan and the U.S. to be a “nation” in any sense continuous or consistent with the etymological lineage of that term.

Posted by W.M. Godfrey  on 02/01  at  10:39 PM

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