Despite the best efforts of elites such as Peter Sutherland to break up the homogeneity of European countries and destroy national sovereignty, people continue to embrace their national identity and celebrate their people’s accomplishments. Humans, when you get right down to it, are naturally tribal beings. It’s hard to find a better example of the truth of this than at the Olympics. Brad MacDonald’s recent article in TheTrumpet.com highlights the abundance of nationalism and the absence of of a fabricated European Union identity at the London games:
Even if you’ve only caught 10 minutes of the Olympics, you’ve surely noticed the omnipresence of the flag. London is covered in flags of every size and color, from the national flags of Guam and the Solomon Islands, to Old Glory, to the Union Jack. National flags are painted on the faces of tourists, emblazoned on jerseys, shirts and backpacks, fluttering in stadiums, on cars, and on the backs of beaming medalists. Every European country is represented, from mighty Germany all the way down to Macedonia and Albania. Every European flag, that is, except for the national emblem of the entity that is supposed to unite them all: the European Union.
…More than any other event, the Olympic Games is a celebration of pure, untarnished, unchecked, NATIONALISM.
And this is why the EU doesn’t work.
The EU is struggling for the same reason European athletes never proudly fly the EU flag: because the citizens of Europe’s nation-states are unwilling to surrender sovereignty to the EU!
Click here for the full article
Tags: european union, london games, national identity, nationalism, olympics
This entry was posted on August 10, 2012 at 9:47 am and is filed under News & Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Probably not true nationalism. Here is a great quote by Doug Casey from an article I read on Lew Rockwell’s site. He does make the distinction between the modern nation-state and a true nation of people.
http://lewrockwell.com/casey/casey129.html
“Okay then, let’s look at the Olympics themselves. Back in 776 BC, when they first got started in Greece, individuals competed, representing their different city-states. But in those days, every citizen knew almost everyone else; the people living in those cities – which were very small by modern standards – were related by extensive family ties, shared cultural and linguistic bonds, shared philosophical contexts, and more. So an individual from Athens could be considered reasonably representative of his fellow Athenians, as would a Spartan.
But today, Some kid-athlete from Detroit or San Diego or New York almost certainly has little in common with me – certainly less than my friends scattered around the world. He or she doesn’t represent me, or America, for that matter. Anyway, there no longer is an America, only the US. And almost none of these other nation-states today are truly “a people.” They’re cobbled together hodgepodges of various mutually antagonistic racial, ethnic, linguistic, and other classifications of people, resulting from war and conquest. Most people in most countries today don’t have anything significant in common, except the name of the government on their ID papers.”
“None of those sporting events that are supposedly between countries make any sense to me. I mean, where there used to be a Soviet Union fielding sports teams, now there’re 15 countries fielding them. There used to be a Czechoslovakia; now there’re two countries to cheer for – in the former Yugoslavia there are five. And in Germany, there used to be two of each team to cheer for, and now there’s one. It’s a completely meaningless way of grouping people, and counting the achievements of people this way means even less. It makes no sense for people to have any loyalty to these arbitrary lines drawn on maps.
I suppose some might feel some bond of kinship for the people of a region they inhabit who share a culture, language, history, and so forth. Or, for that matter, if a corporation you work for decides to field a team, it might make sense to root for your group… and groups of people might come together for other reasons that bind them and sponsor sports teams. I could see it making sense in many ways – but the idea of nation-states co-opting this process and turning it into a vehicle for political propaganda is just awful.”
‘Almost none of these other nation-states today are truly “a people.” They’re cobbled together hodgepodges of various mutually antagonistic racial, ethnic, linguistic, and other classifications of people, resulting from war and conquest.’
Exactly right. Great find, Anti-Federalist.
The Olympics show good pride in ones accomplishment and people.
It is a great example of how “different can be good”.
Beats a war any day.