Fear, Freedom, and a New Critique of Nationalism

In this essay I want to follow the teaching of the great Italian liberal and father of political science in Italy, Gaetano Mosca: He argued that at the heart of political science lies the study of psycho­logical tendencies at the collective level. This shall exactly be the approach in this essay.

An existential fear under­lying human existence

Every human being inevitably carries within the awareness of mortality. This awareness is the source of a funda­mental fear – the fear of death, and even more so, the fear of a meaningless death. From this emerges the central contra­diction of human existence: the tension between the instinct for life and the awareness of its inevitable end. This contra­diction shapes not only individuals, but also entire commu­nities, ideologies, and political systems. It is this very awareness, gener­ating unavoidable fear, that creates the framework within which human beings and commu­nities seek meaning, security, and justi­fi­cation for their existence. In this sense, every ideology, in the words of Otto Rank, is an ideology of immor­tality. For a long time it was believed that interest and rational choice were the primary drivers of politics, yet today it has become evident that it is fear itself which consti­tutes the deepest source of political action. The approach presented here delib­er­ately distances itself from “classical” psychology. It does not proceed from Freud’s contra­diction between the life instinct and the death instinct, nor from cognitive disso­nance as the funda­mental expla­nation of human behavior. Instead, it is an existential contra­diction: life with the awareness of finality brought by the passage of time.

Nation­alism transcending fear

Nation­alism, from this perspective, can be under­stood as an ideology of fear manip­u­lation. Its appeal does not rest on economic interests or rational calcu­la­tions but on the promise of immor­tality through the nation, as an object of transcen­dence, sacralized to the point of becoming a “secular religion.” The individual, aware of mortality, finds comfort in the idea of the eternity of the people to which one belongs. Sacrifice for the nation ceases to appear as a meaningless death; on the contrary, it acquires the aura of meaning and conti­nuity  – a symbolic „victory“ over death, providing a sense of control in life. This is precisely the magnetic power of nation­alism – in the promise that individual death is not the end, but part of the eternal story of the collective.

The promise of security needs a threat from outside: Creating the Other

Yet this promise is inher­ently contra­dictory. To guarantee security “within,” nation­alism must perpet­ually generate threats from the “outside.”. Fear is not elimi­nated but renewed through myths of endan­germent, eternal enemies, and the necessity of struggle for survival. In this way, nation­alism colonizes the future through enslavement: instead of becoming a space of free creation, it is trans­formed into a prede­ter­mined path of perpetual fear and repetition of past conflicts. In this sense, nation­alism is not love or affinity for one’s own group, a Weberian cultural community, „Kulturge­mein­schaft“, but above all fear of another cultural community, and its members, which we define as a nation or a people.

Given that nation­alism repre­sents a renewed main threat to peace and stability in Europe, if not in the world, liberal thought must confront it. A new critique of nation­alism must begin precisely from this point: nation­alism does not liberate from fear, but perpet­uates it. It offers the illusion of meaning, but pays for it by suppressing plurality and individual freedom. In its essence, nation­alism closes the space for an open search for meaning, because it reduces all answers to a single community and a single symbolic framework. In doing so, it not only limits individual and social devel­opment reinforcing existential insecurity, constantly feeding the sense of threat.

Liber­alism: Collective search for meaning instead of ready-made answer

By contrast, liber­alism can be under­stood as an ideology that does not promise eternity, but space. It does not offer prede­ter­mined meaning but creates a framework in which different people, with different answers to the question of finality, can live together. Liber­alism does not attempt to suppress fear with the illusion of an eternal nation but accepts it as a starting point. Precisely for this reason, liber­alism opens the possi­bility for fear to become a driver of dialogue, solidarity, and cooper­ation, rather than a generator of conflict.

In this sense, liber­alism offers the widest space for the collective search for meaning. It accepts human beings as finite, but empha­sizes that meaning can be built through freedom of choice, exchange of ideas, and the building of trust in community. Societies that succeed in devel­oping insti­tu­tions based on law and dialogue, societies that minimize violence and meaningless deaths, become those in which fear is trans­formed from a destructive force into motivation for creation.

Former Yugoslavia: The loss of an ontological framework

The traumatic experience of the disin­te­gration of Yugoslavia, both during the Second World War and after the socialist period, clearly shows what happens when fear is instru­men­talized rather than given meaning. For decades, Yugoslavia functioned as a framework that gave different peoples and cultures a sense of shared security and meaning. Its collapse was not only a political and economic breakdown but also a profound existential trauma. People lost the ontological framework of reality, the assurance that they belonged to a community that would endure. In the vacuum that followed, Serbian nation­alism, within the Serbian cultural community, was both the cause and the outcome, offering simple but devas­tating answers: eternal fear of the other and the promise of immor­tality through the nation. Wars, ethnic cleansing, and collective traumas testified that nation­alism does not free from fear but turns it into the constant fuel of political action. A very similar, if not identical, pattern can be recog­nized in the collapse of the USSR and in today’s war in Ukraine. Reinvented Russian nation­alism simply cannot accept the existence of “others,” such as Ukrainians or the “liberal West,” who, by their very existence, are constructed as a threat to the existence of Russia and Russians—re-engineered in nation­alist terms.

Liber­alism: Adressing existential contrdiciton of human existence

Liber­alism today faces a great challenge. If it is to remain relevant, it must confront the real and growing fears of contem­porary humanity: fear for one’s own identity as a shell of fear management; fear of the other and the different, of migration and cultural change; fear of illness, which reminds us of the body’s frailty; fear of poverty and economic insecurity; fear of old age and the loss of dignity; fear of technology slipping out of control; fear of artificial intel­li­gence, which raises the question of the future of human freedom. If it does not offer answers to these fears, liber­alism will lose its strength and yield ground to nation­alisms and author­i­tarian ideologies that offer simple but false answers.

A new critique of nation­alism, grounded in this premise, is not reduced to a mere condem­nation of its exclu­sivity, but goes further: It demon­strates that nation­alism is incapable of addressing the existential contra­diction of human existence. It merely prolongs fear, whereas liber­alism offers a framework in which fear does not need to lead to conflict, but rather to a collective search for meaning. Freedom, therefore, is not achieved by abolishing fear, but by giving it meaning – and it is precisely in this trans­for­mation that the political task of our time lies.

Reimag­ining fear: Creative response to existential fear

This perspective also opens the way to a new political ethic. If fear is the funda­mental category, then politics must not be based on its instru­men­tal­ization, but on its reimag­ining. This means building commu­nities that do not cultivate myths of an eternal enemy, but instead foster trust and solidarity. A community that succeeds in trans­forming fear into a space of freedom and dialogue, rather than into the prison of national myths, becomes truly free.

Here arises the need to recall a forgotten freedom – the freedom from fear. Upon it, in the most difficult moments of the twentieth century, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt insisted. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his 1941 speech, empha­sized that the four freedoms are the universal rights of humanity: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and – freedom from fear. Eleanor Roosevelt, a few years later, wove this idea into the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Decla­ration of Human Rights, giving it a universal, civiliza­tional significance.

Today, in a time of global insecurity, inequality, and techno­logical challenges, returning to this idea becomes essential. Freedom from fear does not mean the illusory abolition of fear but its reimag­ining through human rights, democracy and social insti­tu­tions that provide security, justice, and dignity. It is the freedom that allows human beings to face their own finality, but also to find meaning in shared life.

Fear as the inescapable starting point for politics

Contem­porary political responses, grounded in the liberal framework, must therefore be a contin­u­ation of this idea. Liber­alism can no longer be under­stood merely as a set of proce­dures and rights, but as a project of building commu­nities that will enable people to confront funda­mental fears. This means addressing the question of diversity and migration, providing health and social security, reducing economic inequal­ities, fighting organized crime, protecting the environment, devel­oping an ethical framework for technology and artificial intel­li­gence, and building global insti­tu­tions that safeguard human dignity.

The shift of focus from interest to fear as the key driver of politics repre­sents an attempt to provide new answers to the questions of the contem­porary world. In a time when global crises – wars, climate change, pandemics, organized crime, and techno­logical revolu­tions – shape the lives of millions of people, it is clear that interest is not enough to explain collective behavior. People do not vote, protest, and wage wars only out of interest; they do so because they seek to diminish fear, to find security and meaning in confronting their own mortality.

Therefore, the new critique of nation­alism and the new affir­mation of liber­alism must rest on the recog­nition that fear is the inescapable starting point of politics. Nation­alism offers a false exit, sustaining fear through constant threats and myths. Liber­alism, by contrast, is not an ideology that merely can become an alter­native, but the ideology that – compared to other great ideologies of the West – has the greatest potential to transform fear into a driving force for the constructive reimag­ining of life, primarily through the personal fulfillment of the individual, as the precon­dition for building free and solidaristic communities.

Freedom from fear

The return to the idea of freedom from fear, as the forgotten foundation of human dignity, repre­sents the most important political task of our time. It entails, above all, a clear and unequivocal moral condem­nation of nation­alism, but not the renun­ci­ation of the nation as a collective category. On the contrary, it requires the reimag­ining of the nation on the basis of the management of fear, not its manip­u­lation – a nation that no longer rests upon the production of enemies, but on the capacity to provide its members with security, trust, and meaning in shared life with „different“ human beings also organized into desacralized nations.

In this sense, what is required is also a steadfast opposition to the demand for loyalty to only one “nation-state,” as nation­alists seek to impose, and instead the affir­mation of openness to multiple commu­nities of belonging – local, national, regional, and global – that enable humanity to escape the illusion of enclosure and perpetual threat, and to transform fear into a space of solidarity and both individual and collective search for meaning. This repre­sents not only the condition for the survival of complex commu­nities such as the European Union, but also the necessary framework for managing the risks of inter­na­tional disorder arising from nation­al­istic nations driven solely by self-interest, locked in a compe­tition that may once again lead to unseen tragedies.

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