Arepublic is born with fine aspirations, but we often forget that there is an old connection between it and violence. The republics of Indonesia, India, China, Algeriato mention just a fewspilled blood in the twentieth century just as the French republic did in the eighteenth. The republic, says Saint-Just, a theoritician of the French Revolution, consists of the extermination of everything that opposes it.

The republic here means a nation-state t