However, the struggle by local communities to gain greater autonomy risks, in the current European situation that is still balanced between unity and division, turning into tragedy, when claims to independence are combined with micro-nationalism, as the case of Yugoslavia demonstrates. An aspiration to autonomy is progressive only if it recognises the political priority of overcoming the national dimension of political life, because as long as peoples are forced to regulate international relations by force of arms, the reasons that in the past have caused the centralisation and bureaucratisation of the state will survive. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent unconnected sovereignties situated in the same neighbourhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages. As the latter gradually incorporates new territories there is a progressive denaturalisation. This will be one of the causes of the dissolution of the state.
Nationality restricts sentiments and genius.
Agglomeration broadens them. The Frenchman is a being of convention, he does not exist. That which it pleases us to represent in novels, in plays, in caricatures, be it soldier or cook, barber or travelling salesman, is a joke. Such a large nation can only hold itself together by force. The standing army serves above all for this.