Ernest Renan and the critique of national determinism

The fourteenth of Woodrow Wilson's ‘fourteen points’ envisaged a system of international association in order to guarantee the peaceful coexistence of the self-determining nationalities now achieving statehood. It stipulated that:

The idea that no nation-state is an island, but that they form part of a system that can ideally control itself was to lead to the ill-fated League of Nations. It has roots as long as the history of nationalism itself: it was foreshadowed by Mazzini's (and Victor Hugo’s) ideal that the nationalities of Europe, once sovereign, should cluster into a ‘United States of Europe’; and we may even see a forerunner of this notion in Immanuel Kant's project for an ‘Everlasting Peace’.

The League of Nations was notoriously unsuccessful in achieving peace and stability after Versailles; the system derailed with the rise of the totalitarian states in Europe. At the same time, its underlying goal was kept alive in other forms of international association and mutual control such as the United Nations and the European Union. The need to counteract a chauvinistic, hegemonistic nationalism by limiting the unilateralist sovereignty of the nation-state is an ongoing concern in twentieth-century Europe, and its immediate origins may be found in one of the most influential and oft-quoted essays of the last two centuries, Ernest Renan's Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? of 1882.

Renan himself (1823-1892) was one of the leading French intellectuals of his day. Originally trained to become a priest, he had, upon losing his faith, gained fame with a remarkable life of Christ (Vie de Jésus, 1863), and established himself as an agnostic intellectual as well as a specialist in the culture and spirituality of the Middle East; his standing as an Orientalist was high, although he lost his chair at the Collège de France for a while for political reasons.

Intellectually, Renan was a child of his time. With other intellectuals like Hippolyte Taine he believed that scientific progress and a scientific mode of thinking would come to dominate human affairs; and a quasi-ethnographical belief in the racial underpinning of culture formed part of that ‘scientific’ outlook.