Europe and the Concept of Organic Unity

by Julius Evola

Julius Evola argues that European unity should aim for an organic, spiritually grounded integration, rather than relying on reactive, unstable federalist solutions.

This essay was first published in 1951.

Today, the idea of Europe is gaining more ground among the most responsible minds on our continent. However, there is rarely clarity on a point of fundamental importance: whether this idea stems from the necessity to defend against the threatening pressure of non-European powers and interests, or whether one aims higher, striving for an organic unity that has a positive content and its own law. Should European unity have only a realpolitik significance, or should it primarily have a spiritual basis? Most federalist solutions belong to the first alternative and can only have the accidental character of a union of forces which — lacking any inner bond — fall apart again when circumstances change. The opposite solution — the organic one — is, however, associated with prerequisites that are difficult to fulfil.

Let us briefly examine this. First, it must be noted that the expression ‘nation of Europe’ may have significance as a myth, but from the standpoint of strictly systematic thinking, it is not unassailable. The concept of a nation essentially belongs more to the naturalist than to the political level and presupposes the inalienable uniqueness of a specific ethnos, language, and history. All these particularities cannot and should not be amalgamated into a single mixed entity of Europe. Similarly, we must not be deceived by the more or less standardised traits of European lifestyles. These traits are more signs of civilisation rather than culture. They are not so much European as they are modern, and they can now be found almost everywhere in the world.

European unity can only be of a higher order than any that defines the concept of a nation as such. It can only take the form of an ‘organism consisting of organisms’; at its apex and centre, the spiritual reality and the superior authority of the unum quod non est pars — to use this Dantean expression — should prevail. An organic unity is unthinkable without a principle of permanence. It is now to be considered how this permanence can be secured for European unity. It is evident that no permanence can be found in a whole if it is not already present in the parts. The prerequisite for European unity is therefore what we would like to call the organic integration of individual nations. The European structure would lack any true solidity if it relied on a kind of international parliament on the one hand, and on the other hand encompassed political systems which, like the democratic-representative system, cannot guarantee continuity of direction and leadership, as they are continually determined from below. Historical consideration confirms this connection. The dissolution of the European medieval ecumene began at the moment when the nation-states — France being the first through the jurists of Philip the Fair — renounced the overarching authority of the empire and asserted a new right, claiming that every king was an ‘emperor’ in his own fragmented and absolutist nation. It has rightly been pointed out that this usurpation led to another through a kind of historical nemesis: within the sovereign nation-states that had detached themselves from the empire, individuals in turn declared themselves sovereign, independent, and ‘free’. They renounced any higher concept of authority and asserted the atomistic and individualist principle that underlies ‘democratic’ systems.

The organic reconstruction thus presupposes a dual process of integration: national integration through the recognition of a principle of supra-individual authority as the basis for the organic and corporative structuring of political and social forces within each individual nation; and supranational integration through the recognition of an authority principle that should rise above the individual ethnic units just as the former rises above the individual members of a particular state. If these prerequisites are not met, one remains on the level of the shapeless, the incidental, and the unstable. There can hardly be any talk of unity in the higher, organic sense. Here, however, we encounter the most delicate point of the entire problem. Already, due to its superior nature, this authority cannot have a purely political character, which excludes any solution in the sense of Bonapartism or a poorly understood Caesarism. What then can be the essential inner foundation of the new order? Such a foundation should be differentiated because it has to give the European unity a unique face, providing the guarantee that it is about Europe — about the ‘nation of Europe’ — as a holistic organism that distinguishes itself from other, non-European entities and stands in opposition to them. The assumption that this foundation can be purely cultural is, in our opinion, illusory if culture is understood in the conventional, intellectualist, and modern sense.

Can one today speak of a culture distinctively European in nature? It would be bold to answer affirmatively, and the reason lies in the neutralisation (as Christoph Steding expressed) of modern culture. This culture has emancipated itself from any political idea; it is ‘private’ and at the same time cosmopolitan in tendency; it is directionless, anti-architectural, subjectivist, and even in its ‘positive’ and scientific forms faceless and thus neutralised. Only in the perverse sense of levelling ‘totalitarianism’ has there been an attempt here and there in the West to assert the idea of an absolute, political-cultural unity. In any case, it must be seen as a sure sign of frivolous and dilettantish thinking when it is claimed that something can be gained for true, masculine European unity through understandings and conferences of more or less fame-hungry intellectuals and literati. Strictly speaking, the soul of a supranational union should be religiously determined but not abstractly — rather with attachment to a precise, positive, and normative spiritual authority. Even aside from the deep processes of secularisation of general life in Europe, there is no such centre today on our continent. Catholicism is only the faith of some European nations. Already in the post-Napoleonic era, under conditions far more favourable than today’s, the Holy Alliance, through which precisely the idea of the masculine, tradition-bound unity of the European states was expressed, was holy in name only, lacking a truly religious consecration and a superior universal idea. Should one now not speak of Catholicism but only of Christianity, this would mean an all too indefinite and unstable, not exclusively European, and hardly usable foundation for European culture alone. Moreover, the compatibility of pure Christianity with a ‘metaphysics of the empire’ is questionable; this has already been shown to us by the medieval dispute between the two powers — when understood in its deeper reasons, appreciated by me elsewhere.

One often speaks of European tradition; however, this is hardly more than a phrase. For a long time, the West has no longer known what tradition means in the higher, organic, and metaphysical sense; almost since the Renaissance, Western spirit and anti-traditional spirit have nearly become synonymous. Tradition in the integral sense is a category that belongs to an almost lost time, those epochs where a single formative, metaphysically rooted force manifested itself in customs, cult, law, myth, art, and worldview — in every particular area of existence. No one will dare to claim that today there is a European tradition in this sense, which alone is decisive for our question. One must therefore start with the unpleasant realisation that we find ourselves today in a world of ruins and that, for the time being, we must be content with provisional solutions, at least striving not to lose our standards and not to be distracted by the false doctrines of the ‘West’ and the ‘East’. Rejecting the federalist-parliamentary and ‘social’ conceptions of European unity, asserting the organisational-qualitative idea within a hierarchical and functional system — this would be the first positive step! Accordingly, the principle of authority should be recognised in its various forms and stages appropriate to different areas and countries.

The supranational European unity should, for the time being, be heroically determined, even if it does not involve war or defence. If at least some elites are once again capable of acting and thinking, free from material constraints, from the narrowness of particular interests, and from nationalist hubris, then a fluidity and tension will be created that can have a creative effect. In other times, too, it has happened that behind such elemental conditions, a new principle has revealed itself. Through this principle, in an invisible and powerful way, a great political organism received a higher consecration, the idea of a supranational authority gained legitimacy, and a new epoch began. Then, from the ruins, not so much the nation of Europe but rather the empire of Europe would emerge, averting the imminent danger of the final decomposition and enslavement of our peoples.

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)