The acceptable face of national pride?

The Romanian flags are flapping strongly in the Ploiesti breeze today and the national anthem and male choral music are blasting from the Cathedral’s loudspeakers as the country celebrates National Day – going back to 1918 when the Romania we know today was first formed out of the ruins of the Hapsburg Empire.

Pride in one’s country is a noticeable feature these days – although many countries (Britain being a prime example) have very little to be proud of. It was Samuel Johnson who said that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” although he was not referring to patriotism in general but rather Prime Minister William Pitt’s abuse of it….. 

 A couple of weeks ago, I discussed Climate Change and the Nation State – the realist case” (2020)  by geopolitical strategist Anatol Lieven whose basic argument I summarised as  -     

-       Climate change has become the world’s number one problem

-       It can be tackled only at a national level

-       At the moment only some voices in the military and in insurance companies recognize the seriousness

-       No real strong pressure is being exerted where it matters

-       Consensus needs to be built

-       That possibility is being undermined by identity politics 

And Wolfgang Streeck has penned an explosive article reminding us that the EU’s commitment to the free flow of labour and capital is a defining feature of neoliberalism and that - 

Strange things are happening in Brussels, and getting stranger by the day. The European Union (EU), a potential superstate beholden to a staggering democratic deficit, is preparing to punish two of its member states and their elected governments, along with the citizens who elected them, for what it considers a democratic deficit.

For its part, the EU is governed by an unelected technocracy, by a constitution devoid of people and consisting of a series of unintelligible international treaties, by rulings handed down by an international court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), as well as by a parliament that is not allowed to legislate and knows no opposition. Moreover, treaties cannot be reviewed in practice and rulings can only be reviewed by the Court itself. 

The current issue is an old one, but it has long been avoided, in the best tradition of the European Union, so as not to wake sleeping dogs. To what extent does “European” law, made by national governments meeting behind closed doors in the European Council and elaborated in the secret chambers of the ECJU, trump national law passed by the democratic member states of the European Union? The answer seems obvious to simple minds unversed in EU affairs: where, and only where, the member states, in accordance with the terms of the Treaties (written with a capital T in Brussels presumably to indicate their sublime nature), have conferred on the EU the right to legislate in a way that is binding on all of them….. 

In his bid for the French Presidency, Michel Barnier has amazed everyone by suggesting that the free flow of labour needs some limits and qualifications

As a sceptic and as a Scot, I have an ambivalent attitude to nationalism – recognising the powerful force it has been in history but still believing that it has its gentler side. The New Statesman ran a good feature recently which did justice to the complexity of the issue.