SOVEREIGNISM IS DEAD? LONG LIVE THE SOVEREIGNISM

The newly elected French President Macron showed up triumphant in a great frame: Europe’s blue flags “waving” with pride, and on a masonic background (the Louvre’s pyramid, Macron’s arms shaped like “compass”) the Ode to Joy, European Union’s anthem, resounds. There’s no doubt: for those who hoped to give a shove against that system, it’s a defeat. We must then ask ourselves: why did what I called “Sovereignism” in earlier writings on this newspaper, fail to break through? Has already been swept away by winning globalization?
The idea of sovereignty is all along tied to the States: entering the crisis these, it was inevitable that the sovereignty enters into crisis too. Yet, we ought to say: a certain concept of sovereignty, the sovereignty “of the State” as a State’s attribute is in crisis, not the sovereignist idea in itself. Taking it to the extreme, we could say that today, the new political subjects are no longer the States but the people: people fighting against the global financial elites, people with needs to satisfy.
Thus the social issue becomes a central topic to the sovereignists: young people looking for a job, adults who lose it and won’t have it anymore, old men whose only destiny is, in the words of Macron’s teacher Attali, an euthanasia’s good state program. Widespread poverty, growing. Social distress. Death, albeit sweet. Sovereignism must transform itself, becoming not only the claim to cultural and national identity, but also an instrument for the satisfaction of needs.
The Sovereignism of identity, if doesn’t joins the Sovereignism of needs, loses. For this reason, the conflict between globalization and Sovereignism can also be explained philosophically as a conflict between desire and need.
The globalists’ category is that of the desire, the desire of wealth, test-tube babies and gay marriage. At the center there’s always the individual, intended as a kind of leibnizian monad, as a machine desiring and a desire mechanized.
The sovereignists’ category is instead that of the need, as well as intended by the marxist interpretation of the hegelian “system of needs”: need to have a decent job and not rotting in a call center, to have the right to medical care, to have a home, to have a wage that allows to make a decent life for themselves and their family.
The desire is essentially a product of the «capital»’s logic, is induced by it: it’s the desire seeking desire, the infinite referral and perpetual satisfying itself that it’s lost — Hegel would say — in a “bad infinity.” The need, instead, responds to the logic of the self-realization of the human being, in his social existence, in the work mediated through that of the others, instead of, as the desire, in the continuous consumption. In short: the Sovereignism of identities isn’t enough, to win it should join that of the needs.
Human needs, to be satisfied, require a compatible environment too. That’s why in addition to the social question we have the ecological question: to satisfy your own needs, to have a decent life, you also need to have a decent atmosphere. On this issue, however, the “Sovereignism” can only affect relatively. Because the issue of ecology concerns the entire planet and only cooperation among all peoples, certainly not the global finance, can offer appropriate solutions. 
In France, we lost a battle, not the war.

English translation : Donato Mancuso