I can't really tell whether they're getting more racist or I'm getting more sensitive to dog-whistles, but I've found them (even) more objectionable recently than I used to.

Their slogan for the EP election is "Give Denmark back to us." "Us" being symbolised by their candidate, Morten Messerschmidt: White, blond, Danish-speaking Christian.

Yes that's his real name, by the way. With a name like that and a worldview like his, you'd think that he'd keep a somewhat lower profile. But apparently not...

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Well duh: one is an officially recognised territorial unit, the other is a group of people that may or may not have an officially recognised territorial unit that "belongs to them".

You can be a nationalist without being a patriot, and a patriot without being a nationalist.

Yes on the first, but no on the second. Anyone who views him/herself as a patriot can be seen by someone else as a nationalist.

Nationalism is inherently a movement that seeks to fracture the state into numerous sub-groups

Nope. Even the separatist ones only until they do get their own country -- then that nationalism will turn on even smaller separatisms within its territory. See the history of the Balkans. At the other end, nationalisms may have imperial ambitions, either by conquest (Nazis, Chinese assimilation by settlement) or the theorising of wider senses of nation (Panslavism, Pan-Germanism, French nationalism, India).

Of course, with that definition of patriotism, a jingoist cannot be a patriot either, because jingoism does not serve the interests of his country...

So, you do sense that the patriot-nationalist distinction (which, BTW, is more common in Western Europe and the USA than further East) is a form of No True Scotsman...

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Thankfully we have the EU now, so one one needs to worry about borders anymore. If you're the grandchild of some Prussian aristocrat who lost everything in 1945 you can stop smouldering about Willy Brandt and the Oder-Neisse line and just move to Poland and buy back the ancestral manor from the current owners.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

However France is really the first nation-state; when one looks at borders, demographics, and language.  The French revolution was pretty homogenous.

Yes and no... It is debatable whether the French nation even existed at the time, at least in any for m that would be recognisable today...

All of Europe was, especially in demographic maps - except the Balkans, the Balkans look like a polka dotted skirt.

And Austria-Hungary. Unless, of course, you count those as "Balkans."

And the Netherlands. And Belgium. And pretty much everywhere on the edges of what would later become Germany.

The point here is not that the border revisions were huge. They weren't, by any stretch of the imagination. The point is that they were often extremely vicious and de-stabilising.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

That's correct in my view. The assimilation process started at the end of the 100 Years War, with the absolutist kings applying it already when pushing their borders West towards the Rhine. Still, it wasn't finished until WWI... or maybe not until the loss of Algeria (which was legally part of Metropolitan France).

The French revolution was pretty homogenous.

Nope, that's quite far from the truth.

The French Revolution was primarily a Paris thing, but France was so centralised that that was enough. There was a pretty nasty civil war Southwest of Paris: the Vendée uprising. The educational and official language measures of the French Revolution did much to create a French cultural unity at the same time it triggered other nationalisms in resistance (especially Pangermanism) when applied Europe-wide under Napoleon. Even then, the Italian/French/local identities in Provence, Savoy and the upper Po basin didn't sort themselves out for a century. (Or more, if you watch Fernandel's border guard identity crisis comedy in La legge è legge.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

pretty homogenous.  All of Europe was, especially in demographic maps - except the Balkans look like a polka dotted skirt

Nah, the rest of the Habsburg Empire looked like a polka dotted skirt (in some areas it still does), not to speak of the hazy German-Polish and Polish-Russian (resp. Belorussian/Ukrainian/etc.) borders. Those were 'sorted out' with WWII and mass deportations afterwards. All apparent ethnic homogeneity was created with blood and deportations and assimilation, maybe except for Iceland.

the aristocrats patronized the German Romantics to write against Napoleon through folklore to propagandize the peasants to fight against their interests when Napoleon was setting up republics, especially in the Rhineland

How much was it the aristocrats' doing? After all, the nationalists tended to be liberals, which got them in conflict with aristocrats by default -- not to mention pure power interests in keeping their local power vs. pan-German calls (something the nationalists would decry very effectively as "provincialism").

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Or rather, setting up puppet states to consolidate his empire. You should realise that Napoleon's propaganda was for his time like Bush's for ours.

But yes, I agree, the Bolsheviks were indeed cosmopolitan in that they wanted a world-wide movement rather than a local national movement.

That's not fully correct, and this happens to be the subject of a diary I planned years ago but which couldn't get itself written.

World Revolution was a basic communist concept; and internationalism was a key point in the original split between Social Democrats and communists/socialists. But the Bolsheviks in Russia gave up on World Revolution pretty fast after the Revolution. They even felt the need to underpin this deviation from classical Marxism ideologically, e.g. the possibility of "socialism in one country". Thereafter, relations with communists elsewhere became foreign policy, that is, they were in the service of a country's interests.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

cf 'honour', 'liberty', the american way' etc

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

How so? The natural state of being of man is the (small) tribe. That's what our mind and social behaviour developed: we are related, know and trust each other, the other tribes are enemies, or at least dangerous. Then agriculture arrived, tribes grew to villages, cities, and regions and with the advent of better bureaucracy, rudimentary mass media, faster transportation and the 19th century push for centralism made possible by these advances, the tribe had grown to encompass an entire country. The nation state was born, and in spite of the predictions of many academic scribblers, it is still strong. Probably because it feels so... natural, because it activates the feeling and relationships with which we have coevolved for tens of thousands of years.

Or something like that.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

I would say that both concepts, "patriot" and "nation", well pre-date Enlightement, but the Enlightement changed both. You'll find "PRO PATRIA" inscriptions on the tombs of both 17th-18th-century Habsburg generals and revolutionaries who fought their 19th-century successors. While the "nation" used to be the aristocratic class that had its autonomy under (some) European kings.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}