Enrootment

Attachment to a land, to a hereditary heritage, and to an identity that is the motor of all historical dynamism.

Enrootment opposes cosmopolitanism, cultural mixing, and the ethnic chaos of present-day civilisation.

The concept, however, is ‘slippery’, because it easily leads to certain misunderstandings. European enrootment is never an attachment to the past or to immobility. Instead, it links the ancestral heritage with creation. It shouldn’t be understood, then, in the way a museum has us understand it, which neutralises a people’s identity by freezing it in nostalgic memory. The notion of enrootment complements that of ‘disinstallation’, explained above. Enrootment is the preservation of roots, based on the knowledge that the tree must continue to grow. Roots are what live: they engender the tree and permit its growth.

Enrootment is above all based on loyalty to values and to blood. The most dangerous form of enrootment, or pseudo-enrootment, occurs in the regionalist and separatist milieu of the Left — in Provence, the Basque country, and Brittany, for example — where the region’s linguistic and cultural distinctions are forcibly asserted, but on the basis of a multiracial model. Hence, the frequently heard and astonishing litany, ‘Our immigrants are Bretons, Basques, or Occitans like us’. The contradiction is total: in the name of opposing the ‘tradition’ of Jacobin homogenisation, strangers to our soil and traditions are admitted to the country — in the name of Jacobin universalism!

If limited solely to culture, enrootment becomes a sterile folklorism. For however necessary, in itself cultural enrootment is insufficient. For Europeans of the future, enrootment ought never to be limited simply to attachment to or defence of one’s native country (region or nation); it also needs to be accompanied by an inner revolution that makes them conscious of Europe (perhaps later Eurosiberia) as a community of destiny.

(see archeofuturism; disinstallation; tradition)