A Prospective Imperium

Broad comments, not fine details.

With some of the hysterical nonsense coming from some folks over the ocean regarding “Imperium,” I would like to make a few comments concerning this, and how an Imperium does not necessarily mean that local sovereignty is completely lost and historic nations are eliminated.

I am not going to get into fine details – falling into the trap of “fascist delusion” that Roger Grifffin (with some justification) mocked in his work.  I will just outline the broad details to demonstrate that an Imperium need not entail complete loss of local sovereignty and the erasure of Europe’s ethnic and cultural distinctions. 

Consider an Imperium roughly analogous to the early American Republic – the USA in the decades in between 1783 and 1861.  There is an overarching federal structure, composed of individual states that retain considerable local sovereignty and which each have their unique histories, cultures, and economies (compare, for example, antebellum Massachusetts or New York to Virginia or South Carolina).  The federal structure was responsible for foreign affairs, national defense, and those domestic issues of a scale that involved multiple (or all) states together.  But there was a strong “states rights” principle. The federal government had a legislature composed of representatives from the member states – Senators representing the states and Representatives representing the states and more specifically representing districts (“regions”) within those states.

The Imperium in some respects would be more integrated than the early USA, in other aspects less, and in some aspects, the level of integration may fluctuate over time given circumstances.  There may be somewhat less integration with respect to military – one could envision individual nation states within the Imperium having their own military forces, which are then contributed to the Imperium as needed (e.g., like NATO).  Or there could be separate individual and joint forces, with the individual forces contributing to the joint force in times of crisis (the joint force could have the everyday job of guarding continental borders).  Economic integration is another point where it may be less in the Imperium, at least at first, than in the USA.  A fundamental problem with EU economics is the distinction between the more productive economies of the Northwest of Europe and the less productive economies of the South and East – the example of the German Ants vs .the Greek Grasshoppers.  Until such time that the South and East can pull their own weight economically, a less integrated continental economy – sans any common currency – would be prudent at first.  Although some degree of oversight and continental autarky would be encouraged.  More integration?  The old paradigm of a “states’ rights” USA fell apart primarily because of slavery and the US Civil War.  There are some things that an individual nation within the Imperium could not do – like importing alien peoples for whatever reason, including cheap (or slave) labor.  There has to be fundamental understandings – one cannot have a federal structure containing states whose entire fundamental existence is so different, and potentially incompatible, as what occurred in the early USA.  An objection to my analogy would be that the early USA system was not stable, evolving into a situation of greater federal power, and loss of basic sovereignty to the constituent states.  The instability – and eventual devolution to conflict and loss of local sovereignty – can be avoided by preventing states moving in directions that are so divergent from that of others that continued co-existence along these lines would be impossible.  So, yes, different cultures and economies are fine, but fundamentally aliens systems are not.  An Imperium based on racial nationalism simply cannot allow its states to become multiracial, to import aliens, to go back to the bad old days.  Needless to say, foreign policy would be an Imperium-wide effort.  There would also be voluntary pan-European projects, in culture, science and technics, space exploration, etc.

One area where the Imperium would be less integrated than the early USA and the current EU would be regarding the flow of people.  Internal borders would be maintained. .Just because different nations are part of the same broad general federal structure, does not mean that peoples from these different nations would have the right to freely immigrate to other nations within the Imperium. To safeguard the uniqueness of Europe’s peoples and cultures, in general, people would live within their own nation states.  Internal migration would be limited – the exception, not the rule. This point would need to be one of the absolute fundamental principles of any Imperium.  The underlying objectives are not economic, or, broadly, “standard of living, “or “freedom.”  It is the preservation and advancement of the Race and Culture, and the individual ethnic groups and cultures that form that greater Race-Culture.  The free flow of people within the Imperium would threaten that project and cannot be allowed.

I would also advise the reader to consider the distinctions between Imperium and Dominion broad vs. local sovereignty) inherent in Norman Lowell’s Imperium Europa idea.  Those ideas are in some ways similar to the general view here, and we cannot forget that even Yockey was willing to allow for local sovereignty and freedom for the regions making up his Imperium.