We must address the totem that is “nationality.” It is an essential part of understanding our reality and preparing for the future. After all, administrative nationality is a relatively recent invention, following the concept of the nation.
I also distinguish between two types of nations. The first—in its ancient sense—is almost biblical: an extended community, or even an extended family. It is the “sédimentation de milliards de choix libres, empilés génération après génération.” It is this nation that must be protected.
The other nation—the subject of this article—is consciously manufactured and imposed by positive law, which is not spontaneous. This second nation is not an addition that enriches the first, like a positive-sum game; it replaces the allegiances of the past. It must erase languages, identities, and dialects, and sterilize the geography. It’s a zero-sum game, a battle for loyalties. It is this nationality that must be fought.
Before Nationality
“[Decentralization] created the indispensable condition for what we’re calling the European miracle and that is the possibility of exit.” — Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty, p. 23
Before the French Revolution, the concept of “nationality” was meaningless. Medieval Europe was a mosaic of fiefdoms, cities, free cities, orders, and diverse communities. The governance models differed, and the feudal model made mobility and allegiance fluid realities, not fixed ones. One was a subject of a lord, a member of a guild or an order, but never a “citizen” of a state. Allégeance was negotiable: You could be Scottish, swear allegiance to the King of France, and join his guard. Nothing fixed you administratively to a territory. You were king of France, not yet king of the French.
The most important thing about this system was the possibility of leaving, of extracting oneself from it. This simple possibility was a constant and invisible constraint on power. It discouraged the authorities from being too predatory with property and individual liberties because a greedy lord would see his subjects and his wealth flee. This is what historian Ralph Raico called “the possibility of exit.” Competition between suzerains did for liberty what the market does for price.
Spontaneous Order versus Constructed Disorder
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” — F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, p. 76
A misunderstanding must be cleared up immediately. Some will say that the state is also a human fact, that it emerged from history like everything else, and that my distinction between “spontaneous” communities and an “artificial” nation is merely convenient. Either everything is spontaneous or nothing is.
A spontaneous order has never meant an order without human will. It means an order without a single architect. It is simply the result of human action, not one deliberate will imposed on everyone. When we speak of the multiplicity of conflicting wills, we are describing precisely how spontaneous institutions emerge. They are tested, validated, and invalidated as if in a market. They are retained because they work. They cross the centuries with no conscious plan through a long process of individual actions. As Hayek put it, “Tradition is not something constant, but rather the product of a process of selection guided not by reason, but by success.”
That’s why the legislature did not decree money, language, or family. These institutions emerge from human interactions; there is no identifiable architect behind them, just the sum of individual interests. Money is the best example: first money was made from silver and gold, and then the state took control of its production and issuance, thus reserving the monopoly for itself at the expense of economic actors. This is the fundamental difference between money, which is spontaneous, and minting, which is political. It is the ultimate state action: taking what the spontaneous order has produced and turning it into an instrument of power.
However, liberals do not claim that the state is an “extraterrestrial” reality, artificially imposed. It is an historical reality that can be found in many cultures throughout the centuries, and it often arises from conquest and predation. What the liberals say, however, is that historical determinism does not exist. The state is not a fatality; it is born, acts, reforms, and disappears. However, I have never spoken about the state in general. I spoke of the nation and nationality. And those, precisely, were not born, they were made.
The French Revolution
Then came the French Revolution, with its double constructivist fraud: the nation and nationality. Whereas spontaneous order allows things to grow, the Rousseauist grand mechanic models the clay. He doesn’t receive a people, he creates one. Upon reflection, one realizes that the purpose of nationality is multifaceted.
The first goal is to standardize its population in a common mold. It transcends communities, languages, and identities to leave only one: the national identity. This endeavor is not neutral; it must deconstruct and destroy what the spontaneous order took centuries to create. The word is not too strong: In 1794, Abbé Grégoire submitted his report “On the Necessity and Means of Annihilating Dialects” to the Convention. The program was written.
The second goal, related to the first, is to control the population. It’s easier to count “French” people than to navigate blindly through a thousand different communities of trust. Knowing who is who and who owns what increases the state’s tax revenue and its ability to seize, target, or mobilize.
The third goal was to control the individuals living on its territory. After all, that’s what nationality is. It’s telling your neighbor that the herd does not belong to him, that he cannot claim it. Nationality is a property right that the state has over you.
The fourth goal is to break multiple allegiances. The medieval man had multiple loyalties, sometimes contradictory, to the lord, the community, the region, the family, and the Church. These dynamic allegiances were a danger to the nation.
The fifth was to promote a single allegiance, that of the nation and state. Here, we see the destructive nature of nationality. Contrary to popular belief, the rooted individual was its enemy, just like the free and mobile individual. The state does not combat mobility; it combats any loyalty that does not pass through it. Benjamin Constant had sensed this as early as 1819 when he contrasted the freedom of the ancients, the dissolution of the individual in the city, with the freedom of the moderns, the right to be left alone. The Revolution sought to impose the freedom of the ancients on the moderns, and nationality is the administrative name of this dissolution.
Reading the Population
“Thus a state cadastral map created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law.” — James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 12
In order to break allegiances and mold people into a single entity, the state first had to take away what truly bound them together: language. Language is the primary factor that differentiates communities from one another, even more so than “nationality,” and its importance is not neutral. Beyond enabling communication, language shapes thought itself. We think in our own language, and our concepts, references, and ideas are born of it. This idea—an intuition found in philosophy from Kant onward and, above all, in Wittgenstein—is the very condition of thought. The medieval monastic orders were made up of members drawn from all over Europe. United in an order and under God, they nevertheless kept an internal organization segmented by language group. Was it a simple language barrier or a far deeper division?
Mises made the same observation in Nation, State, and Economy when defining what a nation is: “A German is one who thinks and speaks German.” He added, “In learning the language, the child absorbs a way of thinking and expressing thoughts predetermined by the language, receiving a stamp that can scarcely be removed from his life.” This is why nationalizing a language and setting it against patois is never neutral; it means interfering with the very process by which minds are formed.
The rest is nothing but legibility. This is the central thesis of Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State and James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: modern states simplify, map, survey, register, and standardize names, languages, and measures to “read” and control society more efficiently. Nationality did not merely standardize individual identities; it was an extraordinary force for eradicating the plural identities of society while enabling neighboring states to agree on one question: who owns whom?
