Ethnicity is the primary basis of social life because it is what philosophers call a “first order” loyalty, that is, civil society, however one conceives of it, or whatever social agenda one might have, is utterly dependent upon this universe of shared meanings that derive from historical experience, objectified in cultural institutions and language.
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2176
Matthew Raphael Johnson
The academic literature on nationalism and ethnicity is an intellectual disaster; the harshest polemics and rants against even the most moderate nationalist position passes the phony “peer-review” process and usually renders nationalism somewhat akin to National Socialism. The concept of the nation is nearly treated as identical to the state and its apparatus, and ethnicity is little more than a residual category of all that is not covered by the ideas of “nation” or “state.”
Making matters worse, the question of “nationalism” in both historical and political journals makes the claim regularly that nationalism is a recent phenomenon based on “myth” and “manipulation.” In other words, it is not an idea taken seriously. At present, it is the greatest threat to the oligarchical elites who presently control much of the globe’s politics.
The academic nonsense regularly published on nationalism is based on a subtle confusion of terminology that is at the basis of my personal interest in this field: the distinction between nation, state and ethnicity. These are far from synonymous, and in many ways they are nearly exclusive of one another. In making these necessary distinctions, the central concepts of ethnic nationalism are made clear.By ethnicity I mean a body of tradition centered on a shared language, a shared universe of meaning. Ethnicity is solely a product of history; the struggle for survival, and nearly all traditional ethnic institutions have been formed for the sake of protection, security and the basic issues of survival. In Russia’s case, it is a mobilization against western aggression.
Appeals to tradition make little sense unless this universe of shared meaning exists, which is largely why the United States cannot be called a “nation,” though specific regions of it can. Language is shaped by historical experience and this complex of experience and language are vital ingredients for tradition to function.
Conservatives have spent the last two hundred years speaking on the idea of “tradition,” which, by itself is a meaningless abstraction, without bothering to discuss its ethnic and linguistic roots. By tradition I mean something similar to the concept of ethnicity, that is, a set of basically unspoken norms and meanings that have developed out of a people’s struggle for survival.
Tradition does not make any sense outside of ethnicity. Ethnicity is the primary basis of social life because it is what philosophers call a “first order” loyalty, that is, civil society, however one conceives of it, or whatever social agenda one might have, is utterly dependent upon this universe of shared meanings that derive from historical experience, objectified in cultural institutions and language. Without it, political discourse must become a top-down affair, with attitudes and arguments administered by an (often anonymous) authority from above.
The state is ethnicity’s radical opposite. What in the ethno-national collective is free-flowing and developing, the state seeks to make rigid; to compartmentalize and administer. The ethnos is based around a shared culture; the state is based upon coercion, violence and bureaucracy. The ethnic group maintains order through the tradition of its own history and development, the state relies on police, armies, psy-ops, secret agents and manipulation. The ethnic group is a diverse organism of traditional institutions and folkways while the state is based upon a culture-less, utilitarian organization of domination, control and exploitation.
The life of the ethnic organism can easily be described as the daily manifestation of the general will, that is, those things that any specific people share in common as a people; those marks that make them a specific people. It is a set of public meanings and unspoken understandings that makes all civil life possible. It is not an appeal to tradition; it is the framework of meaning that permits tradition to be understood at all.
http://www.rusjournal.com/nationalism1.html