{"id":3098,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:54","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3098"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:54","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:54","slug":"32-nation-and-empire-real-and-political-unities-vol-25-the-human-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/25-the-human-cycle\/32-nation-and-empire-real-and-political-unities-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-32_Nation and Empire- Real and Political Unities.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tChapter V
\n\t<\/font>
\n\t<\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tNation and Empire: Real
\nand Political Unities <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tT<\/font>HE PROBLEM<\/b> of the unification of mankind resolves itself into two distinct difficulties. There is the doubt
\nwhether the collective egoisms already created in the natural evolution of humanity can at this time be sufficiently
\nmodified or abolished and whether even an external unity in some effective form can be securely established. And there is
\nthe doubt whether, even if any such external unity can be established, it will not be at the price of crushing both the free
\nlife of the individual and the free play of the various collective units already created in which there is a real and active life and
\nsubstituting a State organisation which will mechanise human existence. Apart from these two uncertainties there is a third
\ndoubt whether a really living unity can be achieved by a mere economic, political and administrative unification and whether
\nit ought not to be preceded by at least the strong beginnings of a moral and spiritual oneness. It is the first question that must
\nbe taken first in the logical order. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAt the present stage of human progress the nation is the
\nliving collective unit of humanity. Empires exist, but they are as yet only political and not real units; they have no life from
\nwithin and owe their continuance to a force imposed on their constituent elements or else to a political convenience felt or
\nacquiesced in by the constituents and favoured by the world outside. Austria was long the standing example of such an
\nempire; it was a political convenience favoured by the world outside, acquiesced in until recently by its constituent elements
\nand maintained by the force of the central Germanic element incarnated in the Hapsburg dynasty,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 of late with the active aid
\nof its Magyar partner. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 304<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font>\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIf the political convenience of an empire of
\nthis kind ceases, if the constituent elements no longer acquiesce and are drawn more powerfully by a centrifugal force, if at the
\nsame time the world outside no longer favours the combination, then force alone remains as the one agent of an artificial unity.
\nThere arose indeed a new political convenience which the existence of Austria served even after it suffered from this tendency
\nof dissolution, but that was the convenience of the Germanic idea which made it an inconvenience to the rest of Europe and
\ndeprived it of the acquiescence of important constituent elements which were drawn towards other combinations outside the Austrian formula. From that moment the existence of the Austrian Empire was in jeopardy and depended, not on any inner necessity, but first on the power of the Austro-Magyar partnership to crush down the Slav nations within it and, secondly, on the
\ncontinued power and dominance of Germany and the Germanic idea in Europe, that is to say, on force alone. And although
\nin Austria the weakness of the imperial form of unity was singularly conspicuous and its conditions exaggerated, still those
\nconditions are the same for all empires which are not at the same time national units. It was not so long ago that most political
\nthinkers perceived at least the strong possibility of an automatic dissolution of the British Empire by the self-detachment of the
\ncolonies, in spite of the close links of race, language and origin that should have bound them to the mother country. This was
\nbecause the political convenience of imperial unity, though enjoyed by the colonies, was not sufficiently appreciated by them
\nand, on the other hand, there was no living principle of national oneness. The Australians and Canadians were beginning to regard themselves as new separate nations rather than as limbs of an extended British nationality. Things are now changed in both
\nrespects, a wider formula has been discovered, and the British Empire is for the moment proportionately stronger. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNevertheless, it may be asked, why should this distinction be made of the political and the real unit when name, kind
\nand form are the same? It must be made because it is of the greatest utility to a true and profound political science and involves the most important consequences. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 305<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhen an empire like Austria, a non-national empire, is broken to pieces, it perishes for good; there is no innate tendency to recover the outward
\nunity, because there is no real inner oneness; there is only a politically manufactured aggregate. On the other hand, a real
\nnational unity broken up by circumstances will always preserve a tendency to recover and reassert its oneness. The Greek Empire has gone the way of all empires, but the Greek nation, after many centuries of political non-existence, again possesses
\nits separate body, because it has preserved its separate ego and therefore really existed under the covering rule of the Turk. So
\nhas it been with all the races under the Turkish yoke, because that powerful suzerainty, stern as it was in many respects, never
\nattempted to obliterate their national characteristics or substitute an Ottoman nationality. These nations have revived and
\nhave reconstituted or are attempting to reconstitute themselves in the measure in which they have preserved their real national
\nsense. The Serbian national idea attempted to recover and has recovered all territory in which the Serb exists or predominates.
\nGreece attempted to reconstitute herself in her mainland, islands and Asiatic colonies, but could not reconstitute the old Greece
\nbecause many parts had become Bulgarian, Albanian and Turk and no longer Hellenic. Italy became an external unity again
\nafter so many centuries because, though no longer a State, she never ceased to be a single people. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis truth of a real unity is so strong that even nations which never in the past realised an outward unification, to which
\nFate and circumstance and their own selves have been adverse, nations which have been full of centrifugal forces and easily
\noverpowered by foreign intrusions, have yet always developed a centripetal force as well and arrived inevitably at organised
\noneness. Ancient Greece clung to her separatist tendencies, her self-sufficient city or regional states, her little mutually repellent
\nautonomies; but the centripetal force was always there manifested in leagues, associations of States, suzerainties like the
\nSpartan and Athenian. It realised itself in the end, first, imperfectly and temporarily by the Macedonian overrule, then, by
\na strange enough development, through the evolution of the  Eastern Roman
\n\t\t\tworld into a Greek and Byzantine Empire, and it has again revived in
\n\t\t\tmodern Greece.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 306<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font>\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

And we have seen in
\nour own day Germany, constantly disunited since ancient times, develop at last to portentous issues its innate sense of oneness
\nformidably embodied in the Empire of the Hohenzollerns and persistent after its fall in a federal Republic. Nor would it at
\nall be surprising to those who study the working of forces and not merely the trend of outward circumstances, if one yet
\nfar-off result of the war were to be the fusion of the one Germanic element still left outside, the Austro-German, into the
\nGermanic whole, although possibly in some other embodiment than Prussian hegemony or Hohenzollern Empire.1 In both these
\nhistoric instances, as in so many others, the unification of Saxon England, mediaeval France, the formation of the United States
\nof America, it was a real unity, a psychologically distinct unit which tended at first ignorantly by the subconscious necessity
\nof its being and afterwards with a sudden or gradual awakening to the sense of political oneness, towards an inevitable external
\nunification. It is a distinct group-soul which is driven by inward necessity and uses outward circumstances to constitute for itself
\nan organised body. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut the most striking example in history is the evolution of
\nIndia. Nowhere else have the centrifugal forces been so strong, numerous, complex, obstinate. The mere time taken by the evolution has been prodigious; the disastrous vicissitudes through which it has had to work itself out have been appalling. And
\nyet through it all the inevitable tendency has worked constantly, pertinaciously, with the dull, obscure, indomitable, relentless
\nobstinacy of Nature when she is opposed in her instinctive purposes by man, and finally, after a struggle enduring through
\nmillenniums, has triumphed. And, as usually happens when she is thus opposed by her own mental and human material, it is the
\nmost adverse circumstances that the subconscious worker has turned into her most
\n\t\t\tsuccessful instruments. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t1 This possibility realised itself for a time, but by means and under circumstances which made the revival of Austrian national sentiment and a separate national existence
\ninevitable<\/font>.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 307<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font>\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The beginnings of the centripetal tendency in India go back to the earliest times
\nof which we have record and are typified in the ideal of the Samrat or Chakravarti Raja and the military and political use of
\nthe Aswamedha and Rajasuya sacrifices. The two great national epics might almost have been written to illustrate this theme; for
\n\u00af<\/i> the one recounts the establishment of a unifying dharmarajya<\/i>
\nor imperial reign of justice, the other starts with an idealised description of such a rule pictured as once existing in the ancient
\nand sacred past of the country. The political history of India is the story of a succession of empires, indigenous and foreign, each
\nof them destroyed by centrifugal forces, but each bringing the centripetal tendency nearer to its triumphant emergence. And it
\nis a significant circumstance that the more foreign the rule, the greater has been its force for the unification of the subject people.
\nThis is always a sure sign that the essential nation-unit is already there and that there is an indissoluble national vitality necessitating the inevitable emergence of the organised nation. In this instance, we see that the conversion of the psychological unity
\non which nationhood is based into the external organised unity by which it is perfectly realised, has taken a period of more than
\ntwo thousand years and is not yet complete.2 And yet, since the essentiality of the thing was there, not even the most formidable
\ndifficulties and delays, not even the most persistent incapacity for union in the people, not even the most disintegrating shocks
\nfrom outside have prevailed against the obstinate subconscious necessity. And this is only the extreme illustration of a general
\nlaw. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt will be useful to dwell a little upon this aid lent by foreign
\nrule to the process of nation-making and see how it works. History abounds with illustrations. But in some cases the phenomenon of foreign domination is momentary and imperfect, in others long-enduring and complete, in others often repeated in
\nvarious forms. In some instances the foreign element is rejected, its use once
\n\t\t\tover, in others it is absorbed, in others accepted with more or less
\n\t\t\tassimilation for a longer or briefer period as a ruling caste. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t2 But it must be remembered that France, Germany, modern Italy took each a thousand or two thousand years and more to form and set into a firm oneness.
\n \t\t\t<\/font>  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 308<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font>\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The principle is the same, but it is worked variously by Nature according to the needs of the particular case. There is
\nnone of the modern nations in Europe which has not had to pass through a phase more or less prolonged, more or less complete,
\nof foreign domination in order to realise its nationality. In Russia and England it was the domination of a foreign conquering race
\nwhich rapidly became a ruling caste and was in the end assimilated and absorbed, in Spain the succession of the Roman,
\nGoth and Moor, in Italy the overlordship of the Austrian, in the Balkans3 the long suzerainty of the Turk, in Germany the
\ntransient yoke of Napoleon. But in all cases the essential has been a shock or a pressure which would either waken a loose
\npsychological unity to the necessity of organising itself from within or would crush out, dispirit or deprive of power, vitality
\nand reality the more obstinate factors of disunion. In some cases even an entire change of name, culture and civilisation has been
\nnecessary, as well as a more or less profound modification of the race. Notably has this happened in the formation of French
\nnationality. The ancient Gallic people, in spite of or perhaps because of its Druidic civilisation and early greatness, was more
\nincapable of organising a firm political unity than even the ancient Greeks or the old Indian kingdoms and republics. It
\nneeded the Roman rule and Latin culture, the superimposition of a Teutonic ruling caste and finally the shock of the temporary
\nand partial English conquest to found the unequalled unity of modern France. Yet though name, civilisation and all else seem
\nto have changed, the French nation of today is still and has always remained the old Gallic nation with its Basque, Gaelic,
\nArmorican and other ancient elements modified by the Frank and Latin admixture.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThus the nation is a persistent psychological unit which Nature has
\n\t\t\tbeen busy developing throughout the world in the most various forms
\n\t\t\tand educating into physical and political unity. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t 3 Here there was no single people to be united but many separate peoples which had each to recover their separate independence or, in some cases, a coalition of kindred
\npeoples. <\/font>  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 319<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font>\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Political unity is not the essential factor; it may not yet be realised and yet the nation persists and moves inevitably
\ntowards its realisation; it may be destroyed and yet the nation persists and travails and suffers but refuses to be annihilated. In
\nformer times the nation was not always a real and vital unit; the tribe, the clan, the commune, the regional people were the living
\ngroups. Those unities which in the attempt at national evolution destroyed these older living groups without arriving at a vital
\nnationhood disappeared once the artificial or political unit was broken. But now the nation stands as the one living group-unit
\nof humanity into which all others must merge or to which they must become subservient. Even old persistent race unities and
\ncultural unities are powerless against it. The Catalonian in Spain, the Breton and Provencal and Alsatian in France, the Welsh in
\n\u00b8 England may cherish the signs of their separate existence; but
\nthe attraction of the greater living unity of the Spanish, the French, the British nation has been too powerful to be injured
\nby these persistences. The nation in modern times is practically indestructible, unless it dies from within. Poland, torn asunder
\nand crushed under the heel of three powerful empires, ceased to exist; the Polish nation survived and is once more reconstituted.
\nAlsace after forty years of the German yoke remained faithful to her French nationhood in spite of her affinities of race and
\nlanguage with the conqueror. All modern attempts to destroy by force or break up a nation are foolish and futile, because
\nthey ignore this law of the natural evolution. Empires are still perishable political units; the nation is immortal. And so it will
\nremain until a greater living unit can be found into which the nation idea can merge in obedience to a superior attraction.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd then the question arises whether the empire is not precisely that destined unit in course of evolution. The mere fact
\nthat at present not the empire, but the nation is the vital unity can be no bar to a future reversal of the relations. Obviously,
\nin order that they may be reversed the empire must cease to be a mere political and become rather a psychological entity.
\n   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 310<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font>\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

But there have been instances in the evolution of the nation in which the political unity preceded and became a basis for the
\npsychological as in the union of Scotch, English and Welsh to form the British nation. There is no insurmountable reason why
\na similar evolution should not take place on a larger scale and an imperial unity be substituted for a national unity. Nature has
\nlong been in travail of the imperial grouping, long casting about to give it a greater force of permanence, and the emergence of
\nthe conscious imperial ideal all over the earth and its attempts, though still crude, violent and blundering, to substitute itself for
\nthe national, may not irrationally be taken as the precursory sign of one of those rapid leaps and transitions by which she so often
\naccomplishes what she has long been gradually and tentatively preparing. This then is the possibility we have next to consider
\nbefore we examine the established phenomenon of nationhood in relation to the ideal of human unity. Two different ideals
\nand therefore two different possibilities were precipitated much nearer to realisation by the European conflict,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 a federation of
\nfree nations and, on the other hand, the distribution of the earth into a few great empires or imperial hegemonies. A practical
\ncombination of the two ideas became the most tangible possibility of the not distant future. It is necessary to pause and consider
\nwhether, one element of this possible combination being already a living unit, the other also could not under certain circumstances be converted into a living unit and the combination, if realised, made the foundation of an enduring new order of
\nthings. Otherwise it could be no more than a transient device without any possibility of a stable permanence.
\n  \n<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 311<\/font><\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter V   Nation and Empire: Real and Political Unities   THE PROBLEM of the unification of mankind resolves itself into two distinct difficulties. There…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-25-the-human-cycle","wpcat-58-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}