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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 31
This has been clear for a long time past, which makes more strange the obstinate persistence in considering blood and language as the foundations of nationality. In such a notion I see as much ingratitude as inconsistency. For the Frenchman owes his actual France and the Spaniard his actual Spain to a principle X, the impulse of which was directed precisely to superseding the narrow community based on blood and language. So that, in such a view, France and Spain would consist to-day of the very opposite to what made them possible. A similar misconception arises when an attempt is made to base the idea of a nation on a territorial shape, finding the principle of unity which blood and language do not furnish, in the geographical mysticism of "natural frontiers." We are faced with the same optical illusion. The hazard of actual circumstances shows us so-called nations installed in wide lands on the continent or adjacent islands. It is thought to make of those actual boundaries something permanent and spiritual. They are, we are told, natural frontiers, and by their "naturalness" is implied some sort of magic predetermination of history by terrestrial form. But this myth immediately disappears when submitted to the same reasoning which invalidated community of blood and language as originators of the nation. Here again, if we go back a few centuries, we find France and Spain dissociated in lesser nations, with their inevitable "natural frontiers." The mountain frontier may be less imposing than the Pyrenees or the Alps, the barrier of water less considerable than the Rhine, the English Channel, or the Straits of Gibraltar. But this only proves that the "naturalness" of the frontiers is merely relative. It depends on the economic and warlike resources of the period. The historic reality of this famous "natural frontier" lies simply in its being an obstacle to the expansion of people A over people B. Because it is an obstacle- to existence in common or to warlike operations- for A it is a defence for B. The idea of "natural frontiers" presupposes, then, as something even more natural than the frontier, the possibility of expansion and unlimited fusion between peoples. It is only a material obstacle that checks this. The frontiers of yesterday and the day before do not appear to us to-day as the foundations of the French or Spanish nation, but the reverse; obstacles which the national idea met with in its process of unification. And notwithstanding this, we are trying to give a definite, fundamental character to the frontiers of to-day, in spite of the fact that new methods of transport and warfare have nullified their effectiveness as obstacles.