Recognitions: Studies on Men and Problems from the Perspective of the Right by Julius Evola

Author:Julius Evola [Evola, Julius]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781912079162
Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd.
Published: 2018-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

27. Metternich

The climate today in Italy is not naturally favorable for an adequate appraisal of the figure of Metternich. Metternich was the bête noire of the Risorgimento, and today one likes to believe that Italy has been reborn after a new “Risorgimento,” taking that movement in its most dubious aspects. But even for those who do not hold to such a view, it is not easy to overcome certain rooted prejudices, nor to acquire that free and wide vision which certain foreign historians have already made their own. Nor have they done so without reference to the problems and the crises of contemporary Europe.

As the first among these historians, one might cite Malynski and Poncins, who in their exceedingly interesting book The Occult War (published also in Italian in 1938)290 presented Metternich as the “last great European”—the man who, elevating himself beyond every particularist point of view, was able to recognize the evil which menaced the whole European civilization, and intended to prevent it under the sign of a solidarity of the traditional and dynastic, and therefore supernational, forces. For he knew that the solidarity of the forces of subversion themselves were supernational.

A. Cecil’s Metternich291 is a more recent work along these lines, and it is interesting not only for the nationality of the author—he is English—but also because in the latest edition of the book Cecil, reacting against those who have interpreted his work as a provocation, emphasizes the overall meaning of the European intention and action of Metternich after his times and up to the Second World War. Cecil writes: “Metternich’s methods deserve closer study on the part of all who are interested in the avoidance of complete European disintegration.” Thus Cecil considers above all the European idea. It is interesting that he sees in Metternich a reaffirmation of a tradition of classical, Roman spirit. This is a tradition which understands itself as comprising divers peoples in a supernatural unity, all the while respecting their differences—a tradition which understands that true liberty is realized under the sign of a super-elevated law of order and of the hierarchical idea, not in democratic and Jacobin ideologies. And it is Metternich himself who said that “every despotism is sign of weakness.”292

Cecil justly remarks that “to sign the death warrant of Austria was to provide a formula for the destruction of Europe.” This because Austria still incorporated, at least in principle, the idea of the Holy Roman Empire—namely, that of a regime which might contain various and diverse nationalities without oppressing them and denaturalizing them. Now, without a formula of the kind, it is impossible to think that Europe will one day rediscover, in this world of exasperated nationalisms and devastating internationalisms, that unity which appears by now to be the essential condition for Europe’s very existence as an autonomous civilization.

Metternich knew rightly to see in democracy and in nationalism the principle forces which would overwhelm traditional Europe, barring some radical action. He understood the internal nexus of the various forms of

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