The key point is this: the nation is an ideological and political construction, but it is not a construction ex nihilo. It was not conjured out of thin air and then foisted through manipulation and violence upon gullible and/or recalcitrant masses, for these types of artificial structures stand no chance to function historically for any significant duration. And God knows that for the past two centuries the nation-state, first as an idea and then as a reality on the ground, has actually served as the basic framework for world civilization -for better or worse.

As PMK notes, the reason why this construct proved so long lasting and functional was that it was anchored in underlying historical actualities, providing novel interpretations and justifications for experiential facts uniting significant populations around common practices, beliefs and symbols. Primary among these were language and to a certain extent religion. Without these vehicles of communication and shared feelings that national idea would not have inculcated itself in the popular mind. This inculcation undoubtedly came from above, on the initiative of literary elites later aligned with newfangled political authority. But they found a ground to cultivate.

This project bore remarkable fruit, revolutionized the institutional makeup and concomitantly the collective consciousness of European societies to begin with, subsequently extending overseas, and provided ever since the obligatory frame of reference for all attempts either to conserve or to further refashion in a more or less radical sense the standing institutions of society. In the words of John Dunn, himself not at all a blind champion of nationalism, as heirs today to the aforementioned systemic transformations "we are all nationalists". This, I repeat, does not imply some abject subjection to whatever version of the national concept is dominant at a given time a place. It, rather, underlines the inevitably national jumping off point of our various political discourses.

This is still true despite the fact that as of late the absoluteness of national sovereignty has been breached and mitigated through the emergence of a universalist discourse of rights transcending the closed framework of local national power. This is a hugely welcome development, but one which has not yet solidified into some functional supra-national authority whose jurisdiction is impartially and globally enforced. But even if we assume the eventual evolution in that direction it is not possible to visualize an end-state where the national dimension of life has become extinct in favor of a homogeneous and unitary world-culture in which particular identities no longer exist. We will not all some day, as it were, speak Esperanto. This is neither possible nor desirable. We all will and should speak a universal lingua franca (this being English under present conditions) at the same time as we continue to stand under the obligation to cultivate to ever greater literary depth and refinement our particular native and historical tongues (a truth sadly lost in today's Greece).

Even the chief utopian of world oneness, the noble Kant, never enunciated as a postulate of reason the suppression of unique national character, but only the erection of a world federation in which the continuing vibrancy of distinct cultural identities is dialectically subsumed under universal ethical rules. That is why the chief project today of transcending national separatism and antagonism, i.e. the European Union, has also enshrined the principle of subsidiarity, namely the active cultivation of minority cultures and languages, as the necessary counterpart to the drive for political integration.

In the light of this, the present struggle in Greece surrounding the immigration law is not in truth a confrontation between nationalism tout court and some kind of vague universalism that has allegedly shed all national traits. If this is how the main participants see it, then the only thing we can say is "a plague on both your houses". It should be perceived instead as an attempt to define and affirm alternative, even antagonistic, versions of the national idea: one, roughly, committed to antiquated notions of national exclusiveness and shot through with racialist prejudices vs. an opposed understanding of the national community as togetherness around a core of procedural concepts of justice and rights permitting the free cultivation of a stimulating variety of ethical and cultural orientations.

Liberal openness to a variety of metaphysical and ethical outlooks vs. totalitarian rejection of all cultural stances diverging from an official "orthodox" standard enforced by illiberal law: this is is the true choice. And the liberal political model, if realized, does deserve our patriotic devotion, enthusiasm and respect without this in the least implying hostility to other national ideals or racist denigration of the ethnic and cultural identity of those minority groups housed under our own.

Hence not all reference to the nation and its ideals is suspect as code for xenophobic racism, as the anti-national party in the debate assumes and declares. It all hangs on what concept of the nation one attaches his or her allegiance to. And this is a matter for concrete and detailed theoretical understanding of the varieties of the national concept together with its historical mutations and vicissitudes.

Throughout the nineteenth century the demand for the liberation of the various captive nations from their imperial prisons was seen as simply another way of putting the demand for the liberation of humankind as such. For J.S. Mill, the prime liberal thinker of the period, national self-determination was on a par with individual autonomy and self-definition within the individual state. This was not as obvious as it sounded, as Lord Acton pointed out. The nation is a collectivity, and the passion for freedom that drives its struggle to overthrow an imperial yoke easily mutates into a zeal to subject its various human ingredients to one canonic, and hence "sacred", system of beliefs once that struggle is brought to a successful conclusion. In fact the very blood shed to secure national independence seems to justify the subsequent totalitarian drive for absolute ethical and cultural uniformity in its own midst.

Acton demanded that one should be alive to this inevitable degeneration of the national cause to begin with and not succumb to the sirens of a fake freedom. But this is easier said from the lofty perch of the synoptic and necessarily retrospective view of the disengaged historian, rather than done in the heat of immediate action and choice. Mill's more existential approach to the predicament of living actors seems better to capture the urgency of that concrete dilemma, and in that sense better represents the liberal impulse firing the national revolutions of the early 19th century, with the Greek one a prime case in point.

That particular national insurrection was imbued with a democratic spirit of justice and equality derived from the great example of the French Revolution. This French root was especially fortunate because it brought into play the determining legacy of ancient Greece, whose invocation endowed with axiomatic legitimacy the modern Greek quest for freedom in the eyes of educated Europeans and especially the anti-establishment portion of the restless intelligentsia of the period. This becomes clear once one delves in the writings of the ideological leaders of the Greek revolution, in whose mind the nation is just the Rousseauian community of self-governing citizens, the historical re-emergence and reinstatement in other words of the classical Hellenic demos.

The Greek revolution was certainly more than that. It was also real events on the ground such as the abominable massacres of Tripolitza and Vrachori, as well as the vicious civil wars among the Greek revolutionaries themselves. These cannot be swept under the carpet in any true historical understanding of the event, just like the French terror cannot be evaded in the assessment of the French case. But one chooses the elements that ought to be emphasized and validated as opposed to those that ought to be condemned without reservations of the "my country right or wrong" type. It was in the face of the same dilemma that the French in 1989 decided to highlight the universal declaration of human rights as the focal point of their bicentenary. In this there lay a choice of which national paradigm to honor and to promote and which to reject.

There is, hence, nothing untoward in celebrating even today that ideological dimension of the revolt of 1821, and there is nothing more historically blind and culturally obtuse than confounding the classicist admiration for the democratic experiment of classical Hellas with unreconstructed conservatism and a barren cult of our "glorious ancestors". That the classicist strain degenerated eventually into such a deadening imitation of ancient Greek prototypes no longer studied properly or even understood at all makes it all the more imperative to return to the productive and progressive mentality of truly universal spirits such as Koraes, who advised a creative and critical methexis with the political thought of the ancients as the theoretic foundation of modern Greek freedom.

The recovery of the democratic and progressive element of the national movement of the nineteenth century would effectively serve the goal of promoting today an open and truly European nation recognizing and honoring its own internal diversity. There is no more effective antidote to the inhuman vision of the closed racial community despising its neighbors and its own self. Instead of this the soi-disant "progressives" of the anti-national party systematically brandish a blanket condemnation of all reference to a national tradition as equivalent with fascism, and reject as a corollary any study of classical Greek thought and language as intellectual oppression.

In this of course they betray their utter ignorance, besides proffering a precious gift to the extreme right who come forward as the defenders of Hellenism in the only way they know, i.e. in the form of a sick and hollow rhetoric of the "chosen race". The sad thing is that it was precisely this "progressive" ignorance that ruled and governed the sphere of education and culture during the last generation, with the inevitable Herostratean result of the death and decay of both. And PMK is absolutely right in condemning this unfortunately irreversible vandalism.

I will sum up the discussion with the following thought: in any free country the act of burning the flag cannot be criminalized. But the act in itself is not commendable. It is an unconscionable and despicable act of symbolic violence, which is usually a visual announcement that the perpetrator is quite willing to proceed to physical violence as well, as the shock troops of our local "anti nationalists" have repeatedly demonstrated. For this reason alone it ought to be morally and politically condemned.

The flag, furthermore, is a multivalent sign: it has all sorts of meanings to all sorts of people. It condenses an infinitely complicated historical experience with good and bad sides. Destroying it is no proof that the perpetrator is self-evidently good. He may just as well be a pure beast. For better or worse the national flag, just as the crosses or the stars of David or the crescents on various religious buildings, enjoys the love and allegiance of the great majority of the people -for all sorts of reasons. One may consider this allegiance as misguided etc., but this -even if true- does not proffer a right to attack, efface or expunge some other person's expression of the meaning of their own lives.

One may argue against these commitments, try to get people to change their minds about them. But this is the limit of his legitimate actions. To proceed to the "cleansing" of the public space from the images that go against his or her own belief of what is right and proper is just intolerable fascist violence, an egomania of omnipotence and omniscience, a tyrannical deed whatever the ideological cap it may wear. The kernel of the current Greek tragedy is not its economic dimension. It is rather the fact that the aforementioned fascism has imposed itself as an accepted form of "revolutionary" political action.