How does Spengler receive nations? For him, there are three types of people in his cultural morphology: the primitive, the cultural, and the fellah type, which come before, during, and after the age of a higher culture.
Though the first and last of these are all too similar, characterized by the lack of historical direction that inflicts the stories of those peoples, the former are at least afforded the steady crystallization into culture peoples, being the “Jews and Persians of the Seleucid age”, and “the Cimbri and Teutones through the Marcomanni and Goths to the Franks, Lombards, and Saxons”, whilst the latter include the remains of every higher culture discussed so far. For these peoples, a great tapestry of events may happen to them, or be enacted by them, but their historical significance, their impact on the future, is as insignificant as two African tribes clashing over land; for these peoples, cause and effect through time mean little, and no chieftain is looked back on as a Napoleon or a William the Conqueror.
But the culture peoples have direction. Immediately upon the West’s beginning did the Germanic tribes become Germans, Spaniards, French and English, and with their conception did a clear direction sprout for Faustian mankind. Spengler notes that the distance between the Chou period and the life of Qin Shi Hwang, the battle of Troy and the age of Augustus, and the Thinite times to the XVIII Dynasty, are all of the same length in generations, because these mark the beginnings and ends of what Spengler defines as an era of “nations”.
There are two things which Spengler qualifies his nations with that we, in the modern day, perhaps wouldn’t.
The first, referred to previously, is that peoples are not authors of their culture, but the culture is the author of the people. For this, he samples the Arabian culture which, derived from the Magian culture which began not in Arabia but with Christ and the apocalyptic Jews, unified the Arabs on the same pillars that unified the nations further north, that being a religion. Thus culture-peoples, nations, are a symbol of the higher culture, no different to a work of art or a mathematical treatise. The English embodies a certain Faustian ideal, as do the French and Germans, and their conflicts can be seen as far back as the scholastic ages. But throw an outsider to the higher culture into their conflict, such as the Islamic invasions of Europe, and suddenly we see the Faustian spirit take precedence over their small-scale squabbles, not for political reasons, nor linguistic or genetic reasons, but for spiritual ones.
The second, referring to our previous post on migrations, is that the nation is embodied in a minority sub-section of the population, but, as the higher culture develops, the national consciousness widens until the idea of the nation ceases to have meaning. The early period most clearly showcases this minority in the nobility and knightly classes, the Homeric Danai and the Norman Barons of England, but as the towns and petty cities arise, national identity is taken up by the burghers. What the traditional conservative would describe as modern nationalism, beginning with the French revolution, pluralises nationality and makes it readily accessible to all within the nation-state, peasant and king alike they are equally French, English and German by birthright. Of the time after this, as we can predict, Spengler leaves an interesting excerpt on late Rome:
“German and French piety, English and Spanish social ethics, German and English habits of life, stand so far apart that for the average man, and, therefore, for the public opinion of his community, the real inwardness of every foreign nation remains a deep secret and a source of continual and pregnant error. In the Roman empire men began generally to understand one another, but this was precisely because there had ceased to be anything worth understanding in the Classical city. With the advent of mutual comprehension this particular humanity ceased to live in nations, and ipso facto ceased to be historic.”
The final stage of nations is their dissolution, in Spengler’s time, evidenced by his work Prussianism and Socialism, no more than a hundred years ago, there were distinct qualifiers of English and German identity, but today these qualifiers cease to exist. The limitations within Faustian civilisation have been overcome and liquidated, and all differences which gave life to diverse forms have either putrefied or remained as arbitrary ghosts of a past age; today this process is simply called Globalism, but suggesting more than a top down destruction of European nations, it's emblematic of the near-death of a civilisation, these masterminds of Europe’s future being only vessels of the inevitable change, which Spengler foresaw in the death of the Roman nation with Tiberius, and by Marcus Aurelius’ time was finalized. Afterall, promoting mutual understanding and love between nations 150 years ago wouldn’t be nearly as easy as it is in an age of decay and nihilism.