{"id":74597,"date":"2025-09-10T15:07:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T13:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libmod.de\/?p=74597"},"modified":"2025-09-10T15:30:21","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T13:30:21","slug":"fear-freedom-and-a-new-critique-of-nationalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libmod.de\/en\/fear-freedom-and-a-new-critique-of-nationalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Fear, Freedom, and a New Critique of Nationalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The existential fear of death forms the deepest root of politics, Vlatko Sekulovic writes. While nation\u00adalism offers immor\u00adtality through the nation and perpet\u00aduates hostility towards \u201cthe Other\u201d, liber\u00adalism aims at trans\u00adforming fear via creativity and freedom thus providing space for dialogue and plurality. A new critique of nation\u00adalism must therefore expose false promises, the Serbian lawyer and former Secretary of State, demands.<\/h3>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=\u201c\u201d]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 psycho\u00adlogical tendencies at the collective level. This shall exactly be the approach in this essay.<\/p>\n

An existential fear under\u00adlying human existence<\/h2>\n

Every human being inevitably carries within the awareness of mortality. This awareness is the source of a funda\u00admental fear \u2013 the fear of death, and even more so, the fear of a meaningless death. From this emerges the central contra\u00addiction of human existence: the tension between the instinct for life and the awareness of its inevitable end. This contra\u00addiction shapes not only individuals, but also entire commu\u00adnities, ideologies, and political systems. It is this very awareness, gener\u00adating unavoidable fear, that creates the framework within which human beings and commu\u00adnities seek meaning, security, and justi\u00adfi\u00adcation for their existence. In this sense, every ideology, in the words of Otto Rank, is an ideology of immor\u00adtality. 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 consti\u00adtutes the deepest source of political action. The approach presented here delib\u00ader\u00adately distances itself from \u201cclassical\u201d psychology. It does not proceed from Freud\u2019s contra\u00addiction between the life instinct and the death instinct, nor from cognitive disso\u00adnance as the funda\u00admental expla\u00adnation of human behavior. Instead, it is an existential contra\u00addiction: life with the awareness of finality brought by the passage of time.<\/p>\n

Nation\u00adalism transcending fear<\/h2>\n

Nation\u00adalism, from this perspective, can be under\u00adstood as an ideology of fear manip\u00adu\u00adlation. Its appeal does not rest on economic interests or rational calcu\u00adla\u00adtions but on the promise of immor\u00adtality through the nation, as an object of transcen\u00addence, sacralized to the point of becoming a \u201csecular religion.\u201d 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 conti\u00adnuity  \u2013 a symbolic \u201evictory\u201c over death, providing a sense of control in life. This is precisely the magnetic power of nation\u00adalism \u2013 in the promise that individual death is not the end, but part of the eternal story of the collective.<\/p>\n

The promise of security needs a threat from outside: Creating the Other<\/h2>\n

Yet this promise is inher\u00adently contra\u00addictory. To guarantee security \u201cwithin,\u201d nation\u00adalism must perpet\u00adually generate threats from the \u201coutside.\u201d. Fear is not elimi\u00adnated but renewed through myths of endan\u00adgerment, eternal enemies, and the necessity of struggle for survival. In this way, nation\u00adalism colonizes the future through enslavement: instead of becoming a space of free creation, it is trans\u00adformed into a prede\u00adter\u00admined path of perpetual fear and repetition of past conflicts. In this sense, nation\u00adalism is not love or affinity for one\u2019s own group, a Weberian cultural community, \u201eKulturge\u00admein\u00adschaft\u201c, but above all fear of another cultural community, and its members, which we define as a nation or a people.<\/p>\n

Given that nation\u00adalism repre\u00adsents a renewed main threat to peace and stability in Europe, if not in the world, liberal thought must confront it. A new critique of nation\u00adalism must begin precisely from this point: nation\u00adalism does not liberate from fear, but perpet\u00aduates it. It offers the illusion of meaning, but pays for it by suppressing plurality and individual freedom. In its essence, nation\u00adalism 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 devel\u00adopment reinforcing existential insecurity, constantly feeding the sense of threat.<\/p>\n

Liber\u00adalism: Collective search for meaning instead of ready-made answer<\/h2>\n

By contrast, liber\u00adalism can be under\u00adstood as an ideology that does not promise eternity, but space. It does not offer prede\u00adter\u00admined meaning but creates a framework in which different people, with different answers to the question of finality, can live together. Liber\u00adalism does not attempt to suppress fear with the illusion of an eternal nation but accepts it as a starting point. Precisely for this reason, liber\u00adalism opens the possi\u00adbility for fear to become a driver of dialogue, solidarity, and cooper\u00adation, rather than a generator of conflict.<\/p>\n

In this sense, liber\u00adalism offers the widest space for the collective search for meaning. It accepts human beings as finite, but empha\u00adsizes that meaning can be built through freedom of choice, exchange of ideas, and the building of trust in community. Societies that succeed in devel\u00adoping insti\u00adtu\u00adtions based on law and dialogue, societies that minimize violence and meaningless deaths, become those in which fear is trans\u00adformed from a destructive force into motivation for creation.<\/p>\n

Former Yugoslavia: The loss of an ontological framework<\/h2>\n

The traumatic experience of the disin\u00adte\u00adgration of Yugoslavia, both during the Second World War and after the socialist period, clearly shows what happens when fear is instru\u00admen\u00adtalized 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 nation\u00adalism, within the Serbian cultural community, was both the cause and the outcome, offering simple but devas\u00adtating answers: eternal fear of the other and the promise of immor\u00adtality through the nation. Wars, ethnic cleansing, and collective traumas testified that nation\u00adalism does not free from fear but turns it into the constant fuel of political action. A very similar, if not identical, pattern can be recog\u00adnized in the collapse of the USSR and in today\u2019s war in Ukraine. Reinvented Russian nation\u00adalism simply cannot accept the existence of \u201cothers,\u201d such as Ukrainians or the \u201cliberal West,\u201d who, by their very existence, are constructed as a threat to the existence of Russia and Russians\u2014re-engineered in nation\u00adalist terms.<\/p>\n

Liber\u00adalism: Adressing existential contrdiciton of human existence<\/h2>\n

Liber\u00adalism today faces a great challenge. If it is to remain relevant, it must confront the real and growing fears of contem\u00adporary humanity: fear for one\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 intel\u00adli\u00adgence, which raises the question of the future of human freedom. If it does not offer answers to these fears, liber\u00adalism will lose its strength and yield ground to nation\u00adalisms and author\u00adi\u00adtarian ideologies that offer simple but false answers.<\/p>\n

A new critique of nation\u00adalism, grounded in this premise, is not reduced to a mere condem\u00adnation of its exclu\u00adsivity, but goes further: It demon\u00adstrates that nation\u00adalism is incapable of addressing the existential contra\u00addiction of human existence. It merely prolongs fear, whereas liber\u00adalism 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 \u2013 and it is precisely in this trans\u00adfor\u00admation that the political task of our time lies.<\/p>\n

Reimag\u00adining fear: Creative response to existential fear<\/h2>\n

This perspective also opens the way to a new political ethic. If fear is the funda\u00admental category, then politics must not be based on its instru\u00admen\u00adtal\u00adization, but on its reimag\u00adining. This means building commu\u00adnities that do not cultivate myths of an eternal enemy, but instead foster trust and solidarity. A community that succeeds in trans\u00adforming fear into a space of freedom and dialogue, rather than into the prison of national myths, becomes truly free.<\/p>\n

Here arises the need to recall a forgotten freedom \u2013 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, empha\u00adsized that the four freedoms are the universal rights of humanity: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and \u2013 freedom from fear. Eleanor Roosevelt, a few years later, wove this idea into the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Decla\u00adration of Human Rights, giving it a universal, civiliza\u00adtional significance.<\/p>\n

Today, in a time of global insecurity, inequality, and techno\u00adlogical challenges, returning to this idea becomes essential. Freedom from fear does not mean the illusory abolition of fear but its reimag\u00adining through human rights, democracy and social insti\u00adtu\u00adtions 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.<\/p>\n

Fear as the inescapable starting point for politics<\/h2>\n

Contem\u00adporary political responses, grounded in the liberal framework, must therefore be a contin\u00adu\u00adation of this idea. Liber\u00adalism can no longer be under\u00adstood merely as a set of proce\u00addures and rights, but as a project of building commu\u00adnities that will enable people to confront funda\u00admental fears. This means addressing the question of diversity and migration, providing health and social security, reducing economic inequal\u00adities, fighting organized crime, protecting the environment, devel\u00adoping an ethical framework for technology and artificial intel\u00adli\u00adgence, and building global insti\u00adtu\u00adtions that safeguard human dignity.<\/p>\n

The shift of focus from interest to fear as the key driver of politics repre\u00adsents an attempt to provide new answers to the questions of the contem\u00adporary world. In a time when global crises \u2013 wars, climate change, pandemics, organized crime, and techno\u00adlogical revolu\u00adtions \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Therefore, the new critique of nation\u00adalism and the new affir\u00admation of liber\u00adalism must rest on the recog\u00adnition that fear is the inescapable starting point of politics. Nation\u00adalism offers a false exit, sustaining fear through constant threats and myths. Liber\u00adalism, by contrast, is not an ideology that merely can become an alter\u00adnative, but the ideology that \u2013 compared to other great ideologies of the West \u2013 has the greatest potential to transform fear into a driving force for the constructive reimag\u00adining of life, primarily through the personal fulfillment of the individual, as the precon\u00addition for building free and solidaristic communities.<\/p>\n

Freedom from fear<\/h2>\n

The return to the idea of freedom from fear, as the forgotten foundation of human dignity, repre\u00adsents the most important political task of our time. It entails, above all, a clear and unequivocal moral condem\u00adnation of nation\u00adalism, but not the renun\u00adci\u00adation of the nation as a collective category. On the contrary, it requires the reimag\u00adining of the nation on the basis of the management of fear, not its manip\u00adu\u00adlation \u2013 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 \u201edifferent\u201c human beings also organized into desacralized nations.<\/p>\n

In this sense, what is required is also a steadfast opposition to the demand for loyalty to only one \u201cnation-state,\u201d as nation\u00adalists seek to impose, and instead the affir\u00admation of openness to multiple commu\u00adnities of belonging \u2013 local, national, regional, and global \u2013 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 repre\u00adsents not only the condition for the survival of complex commu\u00adnities such as the European Union, but also the necessary framework for managing the risks of inter\u00adna\u00adtional disorder arising from nation\u00adal\u00adistic nations driven solely by self-interest, locked in a compe\u00adtition that may once again lead to unseen tragedies.<\/p>\n

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