[Menydh]

The way I understand it, my identity starts first and foremost at my family, my lineage. I am the son of my mother and of my father, and there is a long lineage until it arrives to them and, finally, to me and to my brothers and sisters. That is a stirps (pl. stirps or stirpes). What we call here a estirpe, linaje or abolengo, or in Gaelic is known as a sliocht. Or what in Old Norse is a sifjar or in Old German, sippe. I still haven't found the voice that would define it in Old Slavonic.

It means that a long series of physical and character traits that go back to times of ancient, and their accompanying evolutions, have converged in me. This is what I call my legated identity.

There is an acquired identity, which is how that legated identity has been transformed through what my most direct ancestors --my parents-- have taught me and what I have learned through own life experience. It is part of the ever going evolution of the individual, and it is what identifies everyone as a unique individual.

Next to that identity there is what I call the gens. The idea of the gens is very similar to that of the stirps, but I use it in an extended form to the family, closer to the nation. It forms my ethnic identity, which is composed of a territorial identity that is being Valencian (gentilitas) and finally a national identity which is being Spanish (gens).

This is so because it is there where the roots of that stirps --that is my family and my ancestry-- are, in the gens that is Spain. And it is only natural that they are the people with who I identify ultimately.


I forgot Europe.. am I not an Europeanist after all? Well, this is not as easy. Let me explain.

At the start of my political life and for long years, I never even considered Europe. At best it was much of an abstract to me, as it was Africa. Gentes incognitae. At worst it was what I had already started to perceive as a hostile entity that would drag us into a nightmare.

Europe is, after all, only half way between an ethnopolitical identity and a geopolitical one. And closer to the latter the farther you move away from your roots.

Nothing has changed in those feelings ever since. If something, the contact with certain other "Europeans" confirmed and even increased those feelings.

But there is a turning point where I meditate over it and I realize that there is something more to "Europe the abstraction". I realize that there are other peoples, from other nations, with whom I share very similar preoccupations and even dreams. And that makes me think over again about Europe..

If some of those peoples sit beyond the limits of Classic Europe, symbolically delimited by the Rhin to the north and the Danube to the east --or thereabouts-- why is it that I call them Europeans?

Perhaps my error lied in having thought of that Classic World as Europe, instead of what it really was (as we discussed just a few days ago), proto-Europa. It is when those far away peoples, Germanics, Slavics and others come into contact with that Classic World of proto-Europa, that Europa starts on a final phase of its gestation, as these peoples absorb Romanitas (through Christianitas) via Rome or Byzantium, directly or indirectly.

But there is a point in this process of gestation where it turns into the wrong direction, into something else that perhaps was not meant to be and that perhaps it has been forced by external forces.. but also internal ones.

However, I realize that this should not mean that it should be destroyed as it still has a value. Rather it should be rebuilt in the right way, using the right foundations.

And this is how I see Europe today, as an ideal. An ideal of a geopolitical space for a diversity of ethnopolitical identities. An ideal, yes. But that is still far from an identity. Who knows? Maybe many generations after we have gone.. and that makes it all the more important that the foundations that we use today, are the right ones for what may be built in the future.