Elite insistence on Kantian universal polities (e.g., European Union, United Nations) is undermining the actual practice of republican government.
What was once understood to be the precondition of democracy or of a representative republic—the act of forming a distinct community capable of drawing from itself its own reasons for action—has become the main obstacle to what is now for us the only defensible objective of collective action: the formation of a universal society of the human species, where we will all be the “same” and separated by no borders.
We live under the authority of an idea of justice that can be summed up as follows: it is unjust to form and defend a common good that is our own.
Pierre Manet states a (unspecified) case for the French Third Republic:
The Third Republic had its faults and even its vices, but for my part I admire the way it knew how at once to impose its regime and to embed it in the continuity of France’s history, and in particular its was of conceiving the teaching of the French language and French history, so that every little French boy or girl would feel part of a long series of centuries and would be inspired to admire works produced by a world very different from his or her own and people very different from those who were familiar.
We prefer to flatten the child’s soul and to crush his or her nose into the wall of the present by making past centuries appear before our ephemeral certainties to be judged. But we will not accomplish the necessary political “reform” by invoking the glories of France against the miseries of the present. If we do not know how to link the elements of our threatened heritage with a common action to be undertaken today, then we will remain in the domain of nostalgia that may be sincere but is certainly sterile. If the two parts of our people—the ruling class and the “populist,” or simply demoralized people—manage to leave behind the mutual disdain into which they have settled, they will doubtless discover that they are both suffering, if not in the same way, from the weakening of the representative Republic and the emptying out of the nation’s interior life.