Scotish Independence: The Nationalist Psyche
For the French, the euro is not some bureaucratic notion dreamed up in Brussels. It is a catastrophic life-insurance policy that France, and the rest of Europe, has written for itself against the possibility of a revived German nationalism. (The crucial number to keep in mind is not the value of the currency but the number of European deaths in the thirty years between 1914 and 1944: thirty million.)
.. Once again, as is so often the case in the twentieth century, the atavistic thrill of nationalism is ballooned up by the blithe certainty that it will somehow magically lead to a progressive paradise.
.. Most of our poorer Southern and rural states are convinced that they are to the rest of America what the Germans are to Europe: hard workers who subsidize their dissolute neighbors. That the financial reality is the reverse is not a tellable truth.
.. You will never understand a nation’s psyche by inventorying its interests. You have to grasp its memories, its paranoias, its traumas, and its irrationalities—its history, in other words.