When there is a stoppage of that
impulse towards something further on, the State automatically succumbs, and the
unity which previously existed, and seemed to be its physical foundation- race,
language, natural frontier- becomes useless; the State breaks up, is dispersed,
atomised. It is only this double
aspect of each moment in the State- the unity already existing and the unity in
project- which enables us to understand the essence of the national State. We
know that there has been as yet no successful definition of a nation, taking the
word in its modern acceptation. The City-State was a clear notion, plain to the
eyes. But the new type of public unity sprung up amongst Germans and Gauls, the
political inspiration of the West, is a much vaguer, fleeting thing. The
philologue, the historian of to-day, of his nature an archaiser, feels, in
presence of this formidable fact, almost as puzzled as Caesar or Tacitus when
they tried to indicate in Roman terminology the nature of those incipient
States, transalpine, further Rhine, or Spanish. They called them civitas, gens,
natio, though realising that none of these names fits the thing.[5] They are not civitas, for the simple reason that they are not cities.
But it will not even do to leave the term vague and use it to refer to a limited
territory. The new peoples change their soil with the greatest ease, or at least
they extend or reduce the position they occupy. Neither are they ethnic unities-
gentes, nationes. However far back we go, the new States appear already formed
by groups unconnected by birth. They are combinations of different blood-stocks.
What, then, is a nation, if it is neither community of blood nor attachment to
the territory, nor anything of this nature?
[5]See Dopsch,
Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilisation, 2nd ed., 1914,
Vol. II, pp. 3, 4.
