Aurelien is a pen name for a substack author - it means Golden or Gilded. The posts are always full of incisive detail. This latest one looks at the whole problematic of nationhood and sovereignity.
'We can argue endlessly over whether the generalisation of the “nation-state” was a good idea. But then, as many such discussions I’ve had in Africa and the Middle East have concluded, we are where we are. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t go back to an imperial system, or even revive any of the competing ideas of the 1950s and 1960s for PanAfricanism and PanArabism. Indeed, events will be slipping more and more out of anyone’s control I would suggest three likely sets of developments for the future.
One is that the frightened and incoherent European response to nationalist conflict will fail, just as much at home as abroad. Attempts to forcibly repress expressions of nationalism in the EU have simply strengthened identification with community and locality in the old-fashioned way. Even France, once the example of how it was possible to create a nation-state by conscious adherence to principles of republicanism and secularism, where anyone who accepted those principles could become French irrespective of identity, is now being pushed progressively in the direction of a society divided into ethnic and religious identity blocs. Other countries are in a worse state, and the abolition of national cultures and the continuing process of the replacement of citizens by consumers will not end well.'
