Download file 441 KB Texto completo en español More of: Arturo  Fontaine T.

This essay inquires into the sources from which national sentiment sprouts and the sources that feed nationalism or nationalist claims. It also reflects on the challenges involved in the coexistence of peoples and different traditions under a common government.
The author suggests that anxiety, the fear that our children will abandon our way of life and become unrecognizable to us, nurtures national sentiment. We human beings want to transmit genes, but we also want to transmit a way of life. The danger lies, however, in that sentiment or feeling combining with the thesis that each nation should have its corresponding state. Nationalist sentiment generally pertains to the need to assert oneself when there is a threat of merger or dissolution. It is always a search that feeds off a tale that brings one in opposition to others. We are "not them." In a willful reconstruction of the collective past, a nationalist proposes going back to the "tradition." Yet traditions are not as harmonic and coherent as they seem. They only look that way from afar. And there are choices to be made within traditions, although there is nothing less traditional than choosing a tradition. What would happen if someone voluntarily chose to be an aborigine?
Holding on to what is national, the peculiarities of each people, the author says, is perfectly compatible, in principle, with a tolerant state that governs several nations, although in social practice this is not easy. In answer to the call for ancestral forces, this essay invites recognition of the existence of a powerful call from the opposite sign. It is an invitation to join forces with what is different, to blend with what is unfamiliar to us, not to merely repeat ourselves, but instead to create something new.