We inhabit the epoch of global conflicts, where nationalism reveals itself for what it truly is: a blunted weapon against the complexity of the present. European culture has traversed millennia of transformations, yet today we find ourselves imprisoned in categories that belong to the past. Nation-States, these artificial constructions born between the 15th and 19th centuries, are not natural givens but economic architectures that sacrificed cultural richness on the altar of forced unification.
Consider linguistic history: Tuscan imposed itself upon other languages of the peninsula not through intrinsic superiority, but through economic and institutional power relations. Roman dialect, Neapolitan, Genoese, Venetian – complete and sophisticated languages – were demoted to dialects. Giovanni Gentile attempted a different path: making the dominant language coexist with the dominated ones, stimulating translations that enriched the common patrimony. An experiment that sounds prophetic today.
The Deception of Divide and Rule
Contemporary nationalism serves interests that transcend national borders. International investor complexes, disciplined by major transnational credit institutions, use “divide and rule” as their instrument of dominion. Paradoxically, nationalism becomes the perfect recipe for transnational control.
Capitalist reality has already drawn the map of the future: a Euro-American bloc, a Chinese-Russian one, and the rest of the world distributing itself according to these geoeconomic geometries. All founded on the laws of labor-force exploitation, all oriented toward profit accumulation for transnational investor chains.
Imperial Legacy as Model
European culture roots itself in a different tradition: the imperial one. We speak not of imperialism in the modern sense, but of the principle of Universality that permits dialogue and coexistence among diverse cultural forms united by a common ordering principle.
The Roman Empire and the Habsburg Empire, with all their contradictions, showed how to make culturally, socially, economically diverse realities coexist in an organic totality. This is the true challenge: coordinating specificities, diversities, peculiarities in relation to the social needs of geoeconomic areas characterized by locally developed knowledge enriched by external contributions.
The Anthology of Cultural Revolution
European culture emerges from the convergence of traditions that traverse centuries like an underground river of wisdom. From Platonic speculations that opened the way to contemplation of the One, to Thomism that wedded reason and faith in grandiose synthesis. Dante who constructed the Divine Comedy as architecture of the soul, Meister Eckhart who plumbed the mystical abyss where God generates himself in man.
The Italian Renaissance exploded with Pico della Mirandola proclaiming human dignity called to become architect of its own destiny. Marsilio Ficino translated Plato while Giordano Bruno imagined infinite worlds populated by diverse intelligences, paying with his life for his revolutionary vision.
The Italian hermetic tradition – from Agrippa to Campanella – attempted to reconcile natural magic and Christianity in a synthesis that anticipated modern science.
The integral traditionalism of Julius Evola, despite its distance from Christianity, restored philosophical dignity to the search for the Absolute against rampant materialism. René Guénon demolished the false spiritualities of his time to rediscover the primordial Tradition that unites all authentic paths toward the Sacred.
This is not cultural archaeology but the European people still living in the tension between the heritage of the Fathers and the audacity of the future, between fidelity to the depositum fidei and the inexhaustible creativity of spirit that always renews itself without ever betraying its own roots.
False Western Patriotism
Today we witness the attempt to substitute Europe with a “Western patriotism” that perpetuates American and Zionist value dominion. This is the warmongering nationalism dominant since 1945, natural continuation of the imperialistic nationalism developed between the end of the 19th century and World War I.
Following the theses of Fallaci and Samuel Huntington, this approach would oppose the West to the rest of the world. A strategic and cultural error that betrays the very essence of European culture: openness to the other, capacity for synthesis, humanistic universalism.
Europe as Power: The Third Bloc
We propose a Europe as Power that serves as engine and bridge toward the Arab and African world for a path of liberation from dominant imperialism. Not false patriotism on behalf of third parties, but a European federation capable of positioning itself as a third bloc facing other realities in formation.
This federal Europe will not emerge spontaneously. It requires a cultural and political subject that moves based on radical criticism of the current situation. A criticism that denounces how existing European integration is largely the fruit of American imperialism, and how sovereignism represents its abstract negation that drags part of public opinion.
The Tragedy of the Present
Tragic is that there does not yet exist a European public opinion concretely alternative to the reality of imperialism. Tragic is that the alternative culture in formation cannot yet orient European masses, nor provide consciousness of an economic, social, historical-institutional identity in which specifically European geoeconomic interests take body.
But opportunity hides within tragedy. The European people have always known how to transform crises into rebirths, falls into resurrections. From the Black Death that opened the path to the Renaissance, from religious wars that generated tolerance, from the rubble of the 20th century that produced the European idea.
Toward the Empire of Culture
The Europe of the future will be neither the sum of nationalisms nor the appendage of other empires. It will be the empire of European culture: a space where diversities coordinate without canceling themselves, where the universal declines itself in the particular, where tradition nourishes innovation.
An empire that recognizes in the Parthenon and Sagrada Familia, in Dante and Joyce, in Bach and the Beatles, in Gothic cathedrals and contemporary architecture, the manifestations of genius that traverses centuries and borders.
The European people already exists: it speaks different languages but shares similar dreams, lives in separate nations but breathes the same cultural air, carries different passports but bears in its heart the same creative restlessness.
The Europe that comes will be this: not a market but a civilization, not an administration but a soul, not a compromise but a vision. The empire of culture that the world awaits, that the world deserves, that the world will have.