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that it would contaminate his work as a writer? Every life of the spirit is
also cultivated upon the deliberate neglect of other spiritual possibilities.
He who wishes to try everything, to raise himself up to universal heights,
and chooses nothing so as not to sacrifice anything, condemns himself to
distraction and ultimately to sterility. We must then reevaluate the diffi–
culties, the blinders, the dissimulations, the many tricks with which a
culture protects itself from a consuming indiscretion. Is not Europe's par–
ticular beauty a result of the way it has carved out on such small ground
so many varied ways of life, all of them fragile and unique? Must we pro–
nounce them outmoded and obsolete in the name of the universal? Must
we disdain
a priori
the small legacies and solidarities and ridicule customs
and local habits?
Aside from a few rare exceptions, traditional cultures were closed.
There were no fissures or interstices through which doubt could pene–
trate. The outside always evoked a sense of menace, heresy, or evil. Each
society was convinced that it embodied human excellence and rejected
others as barbaric or animalistic. Such self-sufficiency is no longer possi–
ble. Humanity's sheer variety prevents us from living in the land of our
birth as if it had been revealed the promised land once and for all. We
have lost our national innocence and none of our traditions can claim to
embody the unique and exclusive truth. Identity is always mobile and
impure in a universe that is itself divided between several centers and not
even the greatest power is complete or perfect. There is, to be sure, the
silliness of small countries caught up in the "misery of their territorial dis–
putes," (Istvan Bibo), their petty linguistic quarrels, their chauvinism, and
their megalomania.
It
is also true that the abjectness of a particular ethni–
cal nationalism, like that which rules today in Algeria and Serbia, need no
longer be proven and that separatist viruses which crumble nations into
micro-states are eminently problematic .
It
is possible that the nation-state
is a transient reality and that post-national identities will compose hu–
manity's face in the future.
At the moment, and especially for those of us in the West who oper–
ate in the gap between states that have lost their prerogatives and a
political Europe that has not yet been realized, we still exercise our col–
lective liberty through nations and consider ourselves their citizens. That
is, we feel we share in their power. Nations are both indispensable and
insurmountable because they not only transmit memory, favoring passions
and fervor, but they also form the ideal framework in which a collective
can influence its fate. We are never citizens of the world, but always of a
particular nation that protects our rights and proscribes our obligations.
There is nothing more ridiculous than the idea of a "terrestrial citizen–
ship." (Compared to Martians, Moon-men, or the unlikely inhabitant of
