The paper takes J-J Rousseau's The Government of Poland as a point of departure in the analysis of the construction of European and national identities in modern Europe, with references to the contemporary attempts at creating a viable European identity as an aspect of the European Union enlargement. The particular focus is put on Rousseau's ambiguous notion of nature of the nation. It is used in the paper as "the undecidable" in the deconstruction of his projects of individual and civic education and of nation-building politics (Emil, The Social Contract, The Government of Poland). It is claimed that in terms of the relation between nature on the one hand, and education and politics on the other, the conception of nation in The Government of Poland is discursively constructed in a position strikingly similar to that of the child in Emil. The similarity between "nations" and "children" brings in the issue of discrepancy between the projects of individual education and politics of nation-building on the hand, and the projects of civic education (collective rather than individualistic) on the other. The suggested solution is constructed in course of the analysis of how Rousseau's notion of nature grounds in "the singular", hence the projects of civic education may be understood as aiming at constructing "singularity" which makes it possible for a displaced notion of nature to be inscribed "back" into the concept of the nation. The discursive space analyzed in (and "around") J.-J. Rousseau's books, with specific metaphorical constructions of nature, nations, and children, is projected onto the contemporary debates on European politics, especially those concerning the issues of integration between Western and Eastern Europe. The process of integration involves series of re-definitions: "Europe" in the West usually meant Western Europe so far, and the EU enlargement must first involve a conceptual construction of "the East" as "the Other" of the Western Europe that is then becoming subject to appropriation. This discourse seems to be similar to that of XIX-century orientalism, and this is where Rousseau's tacit metaphors of nations as children are now being employed.