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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 39
But in the West unification into nations has had to follow an inexorable series of stages. We ought to be more surprised than we are at the fact that in Europe there has not been possible any Empire of the extent reached by those of the Persians, of Alexander and of Augustus. The creative process of nations in Europe has always followed this rhythm: First movement.- The peculiar Western instinct which causes the State to be felt as the fusion of various peoples in a unity of political and moral existence, starts by acting on the groups most proximate geographically, ethnically, and linguistically. Not that this proximity is the basis of the nation, but because diversity amongst neighbours is easier to overcome. Second movement.- A period of consolidation in which other peoples outside the new State are regarded as strangers and more or less enemies. This is the period when the nationalising process adopts an air of exclusiveness, of shutting itself up inside the State; in a word, what to-day we call nationalism. But the fact is that whilst the others are felt politically to be strangers and opponents, there is economic, intellectual, and moral communion with them. Nationalist wars serve to level out the differences of technical and mental processes. Habitual enemies gradually become historically homogeneous. Little by little there appears on the horizon the consciousness that those enemy peoples belong to the same human circle as our own State. Nevertheless, they are still looked on as foreigners and hostile. Third movement.- The State is in the enjoyment of full consolidation. Then the new enterprise offers itself to unite those peoples who yesterday were enemies. The conviction grows that they are akin to us in morals and interests, and that together we form a national group over against other more distant, stranger groups. Here we have the new national idea arrived at maturity. An example will make clear what I am trying to say. It is the custom to assert that in the time of the Cid[13] Spain (Spania) was already a national idea, and to give more weight to the theory it is added that centuries previously St. Isidore was already speaking of "Mother Spain." To my mind, this is a crass error of historical perspective. In the time of the Cid the Leon-Castile State was in process of formation, and this unity between the two was the national idea of the time, the politically efficacious idea. Spania, on the other hand, was a mainly erudite notion; in any case, one of many fruitful notions sown in the West by the Roman Empire.