A shared enemy alone cannot constitute national unity

Evidence

To pose the question in such a way would have meant asserting in advance an incurable “national” rift—a rift so serious that not even a federalist solution would have been able to heal it. It would have meant asserting the existence of separate nations, between which all that could have been achieved was a diplomatic-military alliance against the common enemy, Austria. (The sole element of community or solidarity, in short, would have consisted simply in having a “common” enemy.) In reality, however, there existed only certain “aspects” of such a national question, not “all” the aspects nor even the most essential ones. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 532

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to imagined-community theory: a mere negative common enemy (like anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim sentiment) is an insufficient basis for building a genuine national hegemonic bloc. — connects to: Unity demands, not royal abuses alone, delayed independence — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 160; International conflict generates nativism only when the minority links to the enemy power — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 114; Political unity is constructed, not natural, and must overcome inherent faction — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 146
• QUESTION: Worth chasing how this bears on claims that European nations cohere primarily through shared hostility toward Islam/Muslims — does attention to the Gramscian distinction predict such unity is necessarily fragile?