“European Empire,” and not “Europe of Nations”. Europeans must appeal to a sentiment of a higher order, one that is qualitatively distinct from the nationalist sentiment rooted in other layers of human existence.
The Medieval German empire was simply the continuation of universal Roman imperialism—specifically, the adoption of the idea of a universal, non-national empire by a portion of the Germanic peoples.
Everything is rotten in nationalism; from chauvinism, a narrow-minded mentality, a provincial culture, an imperialist yet, in fact, locally bourgeois language.
Nationalism, the fanatical absolutization of a particular unit. Everything in it is small, without future, without vision, without life, mechanical, bourgeois.
The pathology of the modern age is not found in empires, but in their diminishment into the national. The national framework is a contraction of vision. It fosters a chauvinism that mistakes the part for the whole, a provincialism that confutes tradition with tribalism, and a language that, however imperial in pretension, remains a tool of parochial commerce. It is a machinery of limitation—repetitive, transactional, and devoid of the animating spirit that seeks a horizon beyond itself. To confuse this constrained apparatus for a meaningful foundation is to accept a future already foreclosed, a life reduced to mechanism.
It is repetitive, transactional, mechanical—a system that confuses motion for progress.
The idea of an empire in a genuine and integrated sense (which must be sharply distinguished from any imperialism—a phenomenon that should be seen as an unfortunate extension of nationalism) was previously embodied in the European medieval world, which upheld the principles of both unity and diversity.
What are the current prospects and challenges for implementing such an idea in Europe today? Clearly, it would require both the willingness and the capacity to act against prevailing trends.
Overall, we should conceive of an organic unity that is achieved from the top down. Only the elites within individual European nations could truly understand each other and coordinate their efforts, overcoming all particularism and divisive sentiment.