I think before anything else we perhaps need to disambiguate the terms 'white' and 'race': they need to be separated. Colour is
not the same thing as race. The political utility of the term, 'the white race', is null: races are not political actors. There can never be "unity of the white race", as these ridiculous American 'white nationalist' types like to harp on about. Personally I think it would be good to simply stop using the term 'white', but it probably isn't going to go away any time soon, given non-white peoples generally identify people of European heritage with that term. With regards to 'whiteness' as 'Europeanness', there hasn't been any significant admixture or large-scale population movements from North Africa or the Near East, let alone from sub-Saharan Africa into anywhere in Europe, since the Neolithic era. Furthermore, if we are to take up such ideas as 'race', we need to note that 'race' isn't a static essence:
identity is a dynamic reality. When you take 'white' to mean 'indigenous European', Southern Europeans cannot be 'less' European than Northern Europeans, unless they are also 'part' something else (what, and where is the evidence?). Even if you want to look at it in anthropological terms,
the Mediterranean Sea has actually acted as a migration and genetic barrier for millennia. It's curious, because 'racial differences' are actually emphasised or declared not to exist for political expediency: we can see this with Northern Europe and Southern Europe vaguely, but also more clearly with the example of Northern Italy and Southern Italy, where essentially 'Padanian supremacists' look down on the '
terroni', "southerners", (between which there is little anthropological difference) for political reasons.
On a similar note, it's often asserted that Italians amongst others were alienated in the United States by 'whiteness studies' people, but not for the reasons they outline. Italians amongst others were excluded or discriminated against not on the basis of their 'whiteness' ie, their being caucasian, which has never been in doubt, but rather their 'Latin' qualities, their Catholicism, and their ethnicity; and also the fact that Italians themselves may refrained from identifying with 'white culture' (read: the dominant Protestant-Puritan culture) because they identified with an 'Italian race' -
Italianità.
Simply put, it doesn't matter if the absurd American 'white nationalists' are trying to exclude 'dirty whites' from their nonsense or foist their own ethnocentrism upon others: they can be safely ignored, for they are irrelevant and will remain so. For 'race realist' types, racialism is a sort of ethnocentrism transplanted into the realm of pseudoscience. Their political goals (the ones that come close to approaching reality in a meaningful way) seem to consist in only demeaning others. In any case, the very word 'race' nowadays
triggers a great many people. And the discussion around it often attracts the wrong sort of people who are usually only interested in the scientific racism of a bygone era for questionable, misguided purposes. Advocating reconstructivism in anything or a 'return' to 'previous state' (see: neo-Nazis) could only ever be baggage. Of course, some other people believe that identifying racial differences (expressed in social terms) is tantamount to racism, but this position isn't tenable. Benoist (I could quote this piece of his at length which contains a lot more enlightening material (character limit, and to try to make sure that this post doesn't meander
too much) and I encourage anybody interested enough who hasn't read it to read it) touches on identity expressed in biological terms in his usual erudition:
Alain de Benoist, 'On Identity', pp 44-48 wrote:The most popular form of pathology of identity is essentialism. Instead of considering identity as a substantial reality, which derives from a permanent narrative of the self, it is conceptualized as an intangible essence. Identity is therefore defined as an attribute which never changes, as that which is shared by all members of the group. The individual becomes only a “type,” representative of the supposed traits of the group. The subjective part of identity is reified, transformed into objective identity. The difference is posited as absolute self-sufficiency and determination, in the very same way in which identity opponents present it; the only difference is that they are quite content with this determinism, condemned by others as eminently “carceral.” Simultaneously, the universal — often wrongly assimilated with universalism — has been renounced, without realizing that one of the functions of the particular is precisely to attain the universal starting from its particularity; that means that the universal does not have a proper content to itself, and, hence, it could only exist through the particular. […]
Faced with the “globalizing” homogenization, one could only oppose the desire for homogeneity to a lesser degree, just like the independent and separatist movements only criticized the Jacobin state in order to defend the right to establish a micro-state, which would still be the same. The narcissism of the group members is reinforced by the integration of ideals, attributed to the entity in which they recognize themselves. This narcissistic satisfaction allows everyone, including the most mediocre members, to identify themselves with the highest realizations (real or idealized) of their community. This is what Georges Devereux calls “supporting identity.”
Biological identities, considered to be unchangeable, are frequently put to the service of ethnocentrism, racism and xenophobia. However, the biological criteria of belonging (to a race, to a species) only have a relative value. Of course they do play a role, but they do not bring out anything specifically human, because human beings have no specific essence outside of their socio-historical existence. Such criteria do not allow to discriminate between friend and enemy in politics, or to determine what notion of the common good should prevail. They also fail to explain rapid political and social evolutions which occur within a homogeneous population. To reduce the definition of who is “like me” to that means to hold on to all other forms of belonging, inherited or chosen. Add to this the phantasms of purity and impurity, the phobia for mixing (all of them rooted in the Bible), which are often used in the perspective of inevitable declines, of an imminent disaster, of the conjunction of future catastrophes: this is nothing other than a reversed ideology of progress: the inevitable only changes direction.
It is true that cultures form distinct worlds, but these worlds can still communicate among themselves. These are not different species. Because they incarnate in their variations the essence of human nature, their representatives can seek to understand and accept each other without renouncing each other. (If cultures constituted separate universes, how would globalization be possible? How could one culture convert to a religion which appeared in the center of another? How could researchers from one culture become specialists in another?)
Rousseau had already warned that identity might degenerate into self-love. Essentialism is clearly rooted in the metaphysics of subjectivity. Essentialism insists on the collective “we” with the same self-centeredness which liberalism attributes to the individual “I.” This self-centeredness goes together with a self-valorization which encourages the devalorization of the other. Belonging thus ends up confused with truth, which means that there is no truth anymore. Essentialism applies to the group the same liberal principle which legitimates egoism and interest, and makes them triumph. For liberalism, individual egoism is desirable and legitimate; for racism, group egoism is such as well.
In any case, I try to address the root causes (I say this sort of thing often) of large-scale migrations to the developed world vis-à-vis the logic of modern capitalism. ('Multiculturalism' is an ideological reaction to large-scale migrations to the developed world, which occurs as a result of globalism.) If one starts from that line of thought, racial quotas become redundant. As Benoist notes in the second paragraph above, calling for assimilation into a nation in the face of a globalising homogenisation is not only questionable but replicates the logic of Jacobin assimilation, "
which saw the will to maintain traditional identities as equivalent to a refusal of "progress". The arguments against "communitarianism" used nowadays are exactly the same that were used earlier to oppress minorities or to eradicate regional cultures and languages [...]
It is obvious in the [French] Republic’s fight against regionalisms", and he notes further, "
[the h]omogenization of the world and an ethnocentric withdrawal go hand in hand", similar to Benjamin Barber's "Jihad vs McWorld".
Only individuals can be assimilated into a community, not whole ethnic groups, unless something other than migrants assimilating into the autochthonous population is happening. The result is of course a de facto multiculturalism, but one that would affirm identities in the public sphere (ethnic or national, local or regional) rather than negate them in order that no other form of identity mediates to the abstract, generic humanity or "global citizens" that some followers of liberal thought wish to see created in their image.
If I'm reading the original post correctly, I see a desire (in my words) not to associate with 'white nationalists', to protect discrete identities from a homogenising globalisation, and a desire to go beyond simple nationalism (if all of this is more or less the case, I approve), but I would have to put a question to DD: what is the aim of codifying this Southern European race? If it's for political expediency (ie, for creating a shared political framework for Southern Europe), and recognising the cultural links and shared values amongst Latin societies, and at the same time differentiating this unit from Northern European societies, recognising that differences exist there, I would be careful not to absolutise this form of Mediterraneanism as the ultimate form of identity for Southern Europeans (a quick overview on the historical developments of Mediterraneanism can be found
here), but we should perhaps say instead that it mediates a Southern European's relationship to Europe as a whole, which should not necessarily conflict with a pan-European identity, in other words, avoiding metaphysics of subjectivity that Benoist speaks of.