THE Enlightenment ideas of Charles-Louis de Secondat, better known as Montesquieu (1689-1755), tend to fill me with horror but he does relate an interesting tale about a Chinese friend of his who converted to Christianity in his native country and then travelled to seventeenth-century Paris to fulfil his religious inclinations. Needless to say, when this fellow arrived in the French capital he was surprised to discover that the spirit of the Christian gospels was virtually non-existent and that when people were struck they did not turn the other cheek, after all, and very few of them bothered to observe the scriptural commands that he had read about in China.

Whilst this tale of cultural naivety later inspired Montesquieu to write a novel in which he discussed the world’s great diversity of beliefs and customs, it seems rather similar to the way that a modern visitor might arrive in contemporary London and expect to see people wandering around in bowler hats, playing cricket on every available piece of grass or stuffing their faces with fish and chips three or four times a day. In many parts of London, it is rare to see anyone genuinely English at all and no doubt our bemused tourist would return to his home country in a state of utter bewilderment.

At the same time, although it must be immensely disappointing to travel half the world only to find that a foreign city is little different to one’s own, or that every single high street is virtually indistinguishable on account of the drab chain-stores and fast food outlets that litter them like so much detritus, there are far more fundamental issues that contribute to the overall illusion. The nation-states themselves, for example, are rather similar to the shiny corporate logos that lurk behind their native (and not-so-native) politicians and once you begin to peel away layer upon layer of administrative cladding you find that there is no longer any such thing as ‘England,’ ‘France’ and ‘Germany’. In fact this is precisely the kind of crumbling edifice that enjoys persuading other people to wave its little plastic flags and yet, in reality, actively helps to obliterate true identity in the name of a contrived patriotism that serves none but a regional class of career parasites.

In the past, at least, when people did actually wander around London in bowler hats and had never even heard of a McShite burger, there was an identifiable national identity which – for the State – helped to fan the flames of pseudo-nationalist sentiment. Now that Europe is awash with millions of outsiders who can’t distinguish between the sartorial context of a bowler hat and that of a Gallic beret, the illusory construct of the modern nation-state has just about run its course.

Although this will clearly upset those who find it difficult to separate themselves from the ambitious misdeeds of their historical rulers, none of whom were really concerned about the interests of those poor brainwashed souls who hurled themselves across a blood-drenched battlefield whilst yelling “God save the King!” – in theory, at least – it certainly bodes well for those of us who wish to see the total collapse of these artificial impositions and a return to the more genuine patria of locality.