Region: Regionalism
A region is an ethno-geographic sub-grouping of a far larger bloc to which it belongs. Though not constituting a state or a people in itself, the region is a place of enrootment and a place of irreplaceable identity, especially in Europe.
Europe’s regions are fundamental to the Continent. An entity of human scale, the region is heir to a long history that has fostered an identity, a sense of place and belonging, a community that is a counter-weight to an anonymous cosmopolitanism and a bureaucratic centralism.
The regions (beyond the geographic variations provoked by centuries of hazard) represent Europe’s constituent parts, her basic elements, which have made and unmade the various empires and nation-states marking her history.
The region, as such, is the polycentric expression of the global unity of European peoples. It’s an organic sub-group, an internal division, a reserve of ethnic memory — that helps avoid the fragile rigidity of national ‘blocs’. An example of this can be seen in the fact that non-European aliens readily call themselves ‘French’ or ‘Belgian’, etc., on the basis of the catastrophic jus soli, but it’s far more difficult to call themselves ‘Scots’, ‘Burgundians’, ‘Sicilians’, ‘Bavarians’, etc.
For ethnographic reasons, globalisation can never weaken the regional imperative. Only reinforce it.
Pierre Vial sums up the question in this way: ‘Regional identities remain living and demand constant affirmation. This is obviously truer in some regions more than in others. To deny an Alsatian identity, a Breton identity, a Basque identity, or a Corsican identity is an absurdity, a non-starter . . . There’s no need to confine ourselves to the present state of France, with its cold, rigid system . . . We favour a European confederation resting on a recognition and an affirmation of the Europe of the peoples. Europe of a hundred flags?[1] Perhaps even more. In any case, we favour a Europe with flesh and blood fatherlands (patries charnelles)’.[2] In endeavouring to organically (imperially) reconcile the ideas of regional enrootment, the historic nation, and Europe, Vial continues, ‘It’s not a matter of denigrating French identity, as bad-faith critics assert, but rather of giving this identity another chance of being realised . . . We need to affirm an identity that integrates two imperatives: to transcend the nation-state from on high, through Europe — and to transcend it from below, through the region’. Vial appeals to a ‘Confederated French Republic’ (the Sixth Republic), conceived on the model of the German Länder,[3] but also on the basis of the Spanish experience, the Swiss canton, etc. He adds, ‘It’s within a regionalist framework that we’ll be able to return to the political — that is, to being citizens who act directly on their own destiny. It will be a beautiful application of subsidiarity’. He concludes by affirming the necessity of regrouping in the future all flesh and blood fatherlands (patries charnelles), all organic regional entities, of Indo-European origin, within a single continental Eurosiberian bloc, imbued with a destiny of power obviously unrelated to the parody of Europe now represented by the European Union.
This vision of things — the sole realistic and ambitious strategy of European defence — rests on the following principles:
1. There exist regions with strong identities and ones with weaker identities. Identity nevertheless constructs itself. It’s not simply a heritage, it’s also a work. The organic, imperial principle is not mechanistic.
2. The ‘regionalism of the Left’, this Trotskyite and globalist imposture, is no different from the cosmopolitan centralism of the Jacobins. Such ‘regionalists’ are as supportive of the present colonising immigration as Parisian universalists.
3. Regional attachment is not secessionist. It’s inscribed in a far larger ensemble, infused with power and sovereignty: ‘The union makes us strong’. A central state (not a centralising state), imbued with a will and a project, is now more than ever necessary.
4. The ‘French problem’ won’t be solved in an emotional manner, but constructively. A regionalist re-enrootment, moreover, will do nothing to threaten French cultural identity, just as it hasn’t in Germany, Spain, Poland, Russia, etc.
5. In the long term, regions might replace the present départements,[4] heritage of the Revolution’s abstract, identity-destroying rationalism.
6. It’s necessary to denounce the ambiguities of certain regionalists: Savoyan autonomists, for example, who, in imitation of their Breton counterparts, accord their regional identity to all residents, even non-Europeans.
The region is no panacea, no miraculous solution; it’s a fluid but undeniable reality, marking a well-identified territory. Regionalisation will enable the central state to better govern and, paradoxically, to strengthen its political function by reducing its preoccupation with local administration. The efficacy of America’s federal state system, for example, is partly due to the fact that it leaves interior administration to the states, which enables it to better defend the Union’s federal power.
(see enrootment; Europe; Eurosiberia; fatherland; nation)
- ↑ This term was coined by the Breton nationalist Yann Fouéré in his book Towards a Federal Europe: Nations or States? (Swansea: Christopher Davies, 1980).
- ↑ From Une Terre, un people.
- ↑ ‘States’, which in present-day Germany includes Bavaria and Saxony. The German states are set up on a federalist model in which the various states retain a significant degree of autonomy from the national government, such as in retaining the right to sign treaties with foreign powers.
- ↑ The present-day departments of France were set up in 1790 during the French Revolution. The departments were purposefully designed to break up the historical regions which had existed previously in an attempt to eliminate local identities in favour of a more universal, national identity.
