Nationalism and messianism

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of nationalism in its relation to the phenomenon of messianism in a political key. In this sense, since the creation of the modern state, attempts have been made to outline the phenomenon of nationalism in its symbolic recreation aspect, both in modernity and postmodernity. in order to solve the problem of personal and collective identity. The process by which the concept of nation is formed can be understood —more than with merely political categories—, as a process of transfers of religious and mythical meanings to the new political reality. To understand the phenomenon of nationalism and its new rise in postmodernity, the instruments for creating a new collective consciousness are deepened. For this purpose, reference is made mainly to the works of Joaquín de Fiore, Kant and Fichte to describe how the glimpse of a near future that already lives in the particular conscience of the person announcing has an enormous force of conviction to the point of generation of the so-called «secular religions.”