In Defense of Intermediate Bodies and Sphere Sovereignty: What the NatCon Manifesto Could Take from Catholic and Reformed Thought

NOTE: The following response was drafted by Ugo Stornaiolo S. and reviewed by prominent conservatives outside the Anglo-American conservative sphere, in an attempt to truly reflect a distinctly pan-Western perspective.

As such, this response is not an outright rejection of the National Conservatism Statement of Principles, but a mindful critique of it, and an extension of its signatories’ interest to partake in future discourse and collaboration with the National Conservative movement, while promoting viewpoints from our own distinct national traditions in the larger conservative discussion, nowadays dominated by Anglo-American voices.

Signatories’ institutional affiliations are included for identification purposes only, and do not imply an endorsement on the part of any institution.

We, citizens of countries that could and should also be considered as Western, have studied the National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles, published by The European Conservative and The American Conservative in June of this year and signed by several prominent public figures and intellectuals, mostly Americans with a few Europeans.

We certainly agree with its goal as a practical manifesto for the global Right, and we particularly praise its points on God and public religion, and on the protection of family and children, as well as its rejection of imperialism and globalism.

We also accept as valid, however, the points made in many critiques of the Statement, such as its excessive reliance on its “national” element over its theological one; its seemingly inconsistent clauses on religion and race in regard to the principle of equality under the rule of law, rightly understood; its contradictions in its defense of an enterprise economy while condemning crony capitalism and embracing a sort of state capitalism; and the irony of its rejection the universalism of globalist ideologies while using an equally universalist Anglo-American understanding of national traditions.

Thus, we consider the NatCon manifesto more a statement of Anglo-American nationalist principles, and as such, we cannot support it as a presentation of Western conservatism.

The West is larger than the transatlantic project led by the United States, who follow the example of their British ancestors.

In turn, we offer an alternate statement, one based on common principles shared by a more diverse set of conservatives from all Western countries (not only from the Anglosphere), which might better present what Classical Conservatism is —and could be— in the West.

First, we consider our civilization not as one solely of nations, but one of societies, arranged and governed in various spheres that follow a certain order.

These spheres, with varying degrees of power and authority, that is, in different levels of sovereignty over their members, include states, countries, nations, peoples, races, regions, localities, associations, guilds, enterprises, churches, and families.

Each of these institutions governs itself in the full autonomy of their respective social area and no sphere superseding the realm of the others, as derived from the closely resembling ideas of both the Catholic Juan Vasquez de Mella and the Calvinist Abraham Kuyper.

This, the local and known sphere, the little platoon, as our revered Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke called it, or the intermediate body, as named by both Catholics Robert Nisbet and Plinio Correa de Oliveira, is the foundation of a truly self-governing Tocquevillian civil society, not the nation, and certainly not the State as it is currently understood.

Patriotism, honor, loyalty, reverence, all begin in the smallest sphere, and as the sphere grows, incorporating more and more members, so does its responsibility to act according to the moral freedom of its individual and collective parts, interfering the least possible so that their members can develop and prosper peacefully on their own.

As such, we are conservatives because we see these little platoons, these intermediate bodies, these sovereign spheres as the living tissue of society, in which the virtues to sustain civilization are promoted and taught in each generation, building traditions based on moral principles and institutions that are meant to preserve the historical common good for the future.

We are also classical, for we firmly believe that there are different spheres of class to which each individual person belongs, fulfilling different roles and exercising different rights in each; a set of mutually inclusive allegiances that allow the free development of the best in our nature, both individually and socially.

For a very long time, our revered spheres have been under constant attack by all sides, with ideologies and doctrine exaggerating the influence of certain spheres over the others, and misrepresenting the attributes of human nature, using economic, cultural, and state power to break into the sovereignty of the person, and interfere with all intermediate bodies, from the personal, such as marriage and family, to local, like church and municipality, and finally to countries, nations, and peoples.

Intermediate bodies and their natural sphere sovereignty have not been lost yet, for they still exist, even if their importance seems to have diminished under the attacks of bad faith actors in power, who possess the resources to pursue their destructive agenda.

But conservatism is a doctrine based, as the late Roger Scruton put it, on “the sentiment that all mature people can readily share —that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”

Thus, we don’t see our role as one of restorers of a lost order, but preservers of the eternal flame of tradition, and of the of the useful knowledge to govern society and civilization that has been given to us by our ancestors.

Nonetheless, our duty is to protect inherited institutions and their freedom against the enemies who want to take away our security and prosperity and replace it with the grey and lifeless rule of global homogeneity.

For that, our fight is founded on the following principles, which we affirm and must uphold as our Western tradition.

1. Sphere Sovereignty. We wish to see a world of self-governing, superposing, and autonomous intermediate institutions, each acting with independence in its particular sphere, organizing a spontaneous and organic network in civil society and in the organs of the state, freely providing for their own peaceful prosperity and the protection of the common good for all its individual and collective members.

2. Hierarchy and Subsidiarity. We believe that in the organization of the spheres of society, there must be a hierarchy to order their subsidiary relations, from the bottom up according to their extension, with the higher bodies interfering the least in the actions of the smaller “platoons,” with each sphere governing itself and its members with autonomous rules that do not enter into conflict with the rules of any other institution.

3. Equal Dignity, Class Harmony, and Natural Elites. We promote the equal dignity of all human beings as created in the image of God. We recognize that each individual is unique and no human is identical to his peers. As such, their differences create a natural harmony of inequalities that must be organically ordered towards the common good, meaning that all human beings must be treated with the same respect and dignity, and that there must be free opportunity for each person to fulfil the social role for he has in his respective social spheres. This will allow for the rise of a truly virtuous natural elite to bring the best in his trade and activity for the rest of society, promoting true class cooperation between different collective bodies and institutions and individual persons.

4. Political Organization. Sphere sovereignty, in the sense developed by Abraham Kuyper and especially by Vasquez de Mella, means that not only intermediate bodies must be self-governing in civil society, but also that any larger political organization of peoples and institutions must respect the organic autonomy of their components. As such, we believe that countries can and should be internally organized in the ways their local traditions demand, entailing that nations, peoples and races should be able to arrange their own political relations to allow their development and their prosperity without the interference of other organized agents, both internal and external. This symbiosis between intermediate bodies and the body politic of the country must be one of cooperation, respect and solidarity, so that the autonomy of sovereign spheres is also met with solidarity from higher spheres, according to the principle to subsidiarity.

5. On States and Countries. As organized in an order composed of different levels, classes and bodies, the country, for it corporates all other intermediate bodies in a geographical location, is the larger sphere of sovereignty in any given society, at least on a local level. The state is its most usual form of organization, but after the failure of the managerial experiment to uphold the common good, it must be reformed to incorporate, in an organic way, the organization of free and autonomous intermediate bodies. A country must take the political form that the traditions of its internal components call for, and it must uphold subsidiarity in its relations with its smaller platoons, for the smaller and more immediate bodies are always closest and best equipped to deal with their immediate problems. The country must also be organized in a way that promotes the equal dignity of its members, so they can develop class harmony and allow for natural elites to thrive for the common good in each and all spheres.

6. Foreign Policy and Defense. Countries, as the larger sovereign sphere of any locally organized society, must be free and independent to pursue their own foreign policy, being able to associate themselves with others into unions and organizations under the same universal values, principles, and virtues based in their civilizational tradition, and with the same peaceful goals that will benefit their peoples. Countries must also be able to protect themselves from external aggression, with alliances between them to be organized under the means of common defense of their existences and local traditions.

7. Law and Justice. We believe that fair laws, created within each self-governing intermediate body and within the boundaries of the country, are the best way to organize societies so that they uphold justice and civic friendship, with each sovereign sphere governing its internal organization under clear rules, and legislating and judging its members within the extension of their relations, rights, and duties. Laws are also the best way to order the relations between countries, and they must take the form of treaties, to define the terms of mutual trade, common defense, and cultural exchange. Spontaneous aggression, internal or external, is never legitimate nor fair, but war waged in defense of the dignity of brother countries must be considered as just.

8. A Humane Economy. We consider that a truly humane economy is based on private property, markets, free association, saving and entrepreneurship. Such an economy, which could be classified as a market economy, is the best suited to promote individual and collective material prosperity. Markets are generally ordered towards the common good, and to keep them functioning good, they must be so organized according to the spontaneity of human relations, but to guide them to higher goals, they must also be kept in check by moral principles and a common business ethic. This also means that the economy cannot and should not be directed by state plans under a socialist principle, which historically has only brought misery and poverty.

9. Family, Children, and Our Duty to Future Generations. We put the traditional family as the first and foremost of all intermediate bodies, the first sovereign sphere and the institutional source of society’s virtues. As such, traditional family must be protected and its sovereign autonomy respected. Its basis, the lifelong bond between a man and a woman in marriage, and then the bond between parents and children, continues to transmit the tradition that makes civilization possible. For that, we embrace the institution of traditional marriage as a societal good, childbearing and child raising by both their mother and father as social rights and social duties towards future generations, and we wholeheartedly reject the disintegration of the family by the means of sexual license and experimentation. We thus agree that the economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are social and political priorities of the highest order.

Therefore, we, the undersigned, present these principles as truly representative of the tradition of Western civilization that we wish to conserve, as they are the eternal natural law, understandable by all reasonable people in all our countries, tied together under a long-shared cultural and historical bond.

Sincerely,

– The leaders and members of the Conservative Youth of Europe

– Ugo Stornaiolo S. (Ecuador/Italy – España – Navarra Confidencial)

– Oliver O’Brien (United Kingdom – Conservative Youth of Europe)

– Jake Scott (United Kingdom – The Mallard UK)

– Luke Doherty (United Kingdom – Orthodox Conservatives)

– Juanita Galea (Malta – Partit Popolari)

– Ángel García Carmona (Spain – España – Navarra Confidencial)

– Adrián González Fuentes (Spain – Circulo Molinari)

– Benjamín Santamaría (Spain – UNED)

– Horacio Giusto (Argentina – Fundación Libre)

– Noemí Díaz Corral (Spain – Xoán de Lugo)