First, all nationalism and tribalism is a functional derivative of childhood education. You are part of your family and your community teaches you that you are part of a greater whole as in tribe or nationality. So changing any of this in the adult world is slow and open to abuses by jingoistic promoters.
To change all this globally means a universal educational program and that means the resolution of obvious sources of conflict such as Islam. Add in the desirability of adaptive variability and we are certainly making soup. Can this be optimally guided at all? Of course it can. The Catholic Church has established a respected school system that still adapts to local conditions quite successfully not least by also teaching critical thinking.
Think about that for a moment. Over and over again the State fails while the church does not and it is not at all about their spiritual teachings although that surely helps. This is why catholic private schools are treasured everywhere and why often enough the elite send their children there ensuring their own continuance.
What is changing with modernism is that the spoils system of governance is under internal attack and Nationalism is moving out of that embrace as well. However, so long as we have a true State, faux nationalism will be promoted. It is just going to change more than any of us like.
Don't Fear the New Nationalism
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1752027331714385066#editor/target=post;postID=4671424105381806295
MARRIAGE BETWEEN the Economist and the New Left Review
may seem like one of Hieronymus Bosch’s stranger copulations. Liberal
capitalists and Marxists have been drawn passionately together over the
past few decades in one area: their common utopian belief in the
development of a globalized world without nationalism and national
borders, a dream now dying in the West. Elsewhere, it never really took
root beyond sections of the Western-influenced (and often
Western-subsidized) intelligentsia.
Nationalism has frequently been described as a form of religion, and as the social scientist Liah Greenfeld writes,
Like
the great religions of the past, nationalism today forms the foundation
of our social consciousness, the cognitive framework of our perception
of reality. Seen against the record of the great religions’ historical
longevity and continuous vitality over centuries of political, economic
and technological change, the recognition of this functional equivalence
may give us a more accurate idea of nationalism’s projected life span
and pace of development.
The strongest states in Asia today are those with strong
nationalisms, which are central to the legitimacy not only of the
present regimes but of the states themselves. The development of strong
senses of national identity is not only a regime strategy; it also
reflects a much broader awareness in society—bred from historical
experience—of the dreadful consequences of national disintegration. The
consequences of not possessing strong unitary state
nationalisms are all too apparent in the Middle East today, where a row
of states has been torn to pieces by the rival allegiances of
sectarianism, ethnicity and supranational religious ideology. (The same
is true of Afghanistan, where the utter fatuity of the idea of Western
“nation building” has been starkly revealed.) The disastrous results of a
lack of common national identity are also apparent across much of
Africa. Therefore, it seems that the only thing worse than having a
nationalism that is too strong is having one that is too weak.
One of the reasons why parts of Western society fell so
comprehensively for ideas of multiculturalism and the weakening of
national identities and borders was an intense complacency about the
stability, unity and strength of Western states. The European Union
itself only worked—for a while—because the states that pooled some of
their powers had real powers to pool and felt confident enough to lend
some of them to the EU. Elsewhere in the world, people remember very
well that they have no grounds for such complacency. These grounds for
complacency are now also disappearing in the United States and the West,
as political, cultural, ethnic and religious cleavages deepen and—in
the absence of strong new ideologies dedicated to reunifying
nations—risk becoming irreconcilable.
CENTRAL TO the liberal-capitalist and socialist
faith in the inevitable and desirable disappearance of nationalism has
been the belief that it is an artificial modern construct, developed by
elites and then spread to populations. And what is constructed, the
argument goes, can be deconstructed—a thought that linked the analysts
of nationalism to Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and powerful
tendencies across wide swathes of academia. The constructivist school of
studying nationalism was first developed by Ernest Gellner (for the
liberals) and Eric Hobsbawm (for the Marxists). They were joined by
legions of followers soon after.
From the start, the constructivist approach had its critics. They
acknowledged the new elements of national consciousness introduced by
modern mass politics and mass society, but also insisted on the
antiquity and strength of collective identities and allegiances (whether
or not called “national”). The strongest modern nationalisms, they
argued, were precisely those that were able to draw on older roots. The
constructivist camp itself produced new and more sophisticated variants,
notably that of Benedict Anderson, who traced the origins of
nationalism to the appearance of print rather than to the industrial
revolution as such, and portrayed it as a process of collective
imagination—and like imagination, a partly subconscious process—rather
than of artificial and calculated creation. This gave rise to specific
studies examining how various nationalisms were generated from below, in
response to new circumstances, rather than being simply cultivated from
above.
In the meantime, however, a shallow and vulgarized version of the
constructivist theory had achieved a form of hegemony in most of
academia, the media and think tanks. The notion of nationalism,
nationalist sentiments and allegiances as an artificial creation of
cynical and self-serving elites became a standard unthinking, automatic
trope, even on the part of people who did not consciously identify with
the socialist or liberal traditions. Thus, at a
conference at Lewis and Clark College on ethnic conflict in the late
1990s, I heard that “Greeks and Turks lived together in peace on Cyprus
until politicians divided them in the 1950s”; “Bismarck was an ethnic
entrepreneur who invented German nationalism in the 1860s”; and “stories
of Croat atrocities against Serbs in the Second World War were an
invention of the Miloševic regime.”
For these ideas to gain such purchase required an unusually deep,
rich and varied set of motives, some of them noble, others less so.
First, of course, comes the ancient Judeo-Christian vision of the
Peaceable Kingdom: “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the
Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14). This tradition
flowed into modern socialism, and became mixed up with the underlying
socialist and radical liberal belief (so deep as often to be
unconscious) in the sinlessness of man in his original natural state,
uncorrupted by wicked influences.
Such feelings were given tremendous strength by the European
catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century, seen (often
rightly) as the product of nationalism run mad. The European reaction
against nationalism found its institutional expression in the
development of the European Union, seen by much of the Western
intelligentsia as the future of all humanity. The EU was, for a time,
very successful both in economic development and in banishing war from
western and central Europe. Missed in all this was the way in which
certain European states have seen the EU not as an opponent of their
nationalisms but as a new vehicle for them, and have started to turn
against the EU once it became clear that this was not the case.
This
has been evidently true of the eastern European countries that joined
the EU after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The spread of democracy
and free-market capitalism to these countries was the only substantial
victory for liberal internationalism after the end of the Cold War, and
was therefore trumpeted as a universal model, applicable all over the
world. Completely ignored in all this—one is tempted to say deliberately
ignored for ideological reasons, at least by George Soros’s Open
Society Foundations and other such bodies—was the role of nationalism.
Eastern European populations with deeply conservative social and
cultural attitudes (preserved for decades by the carapace of Communism
and socialist economic attitudes), were persuaded to accept EU policies
that they detested because this was the price of joining the EU and
NATO, and thereby getting away from the even more hated power of Moscow.
Nationalism therefore worked for EU and NATO expansion and, for a
while, for democracy and economic reform in a way that it cannot
possibly do in other parts of the world. With EU and NATO membership
secured, Poland and Hungary in particular have reverted to older
tendencies, including ethnic nationalism. This tendency has especially
been brought to the fore by what is seen as the EU’s role in enforcing
openness to Muslim migration, thereby threatening the ethnic composition
of these states in a way never attempted by Soviet Communist hegemony.
The result is a wave of anti-EU nationalist sentiment in eastern
Europe, which is contributing to the fraying of the EU as an
organization and a vision. Nowhere in the EU, however, did a common
European identity come to prevail over a sense of bounded national
communities. Even at the height of the EU’s apparent success, national
media were overwhelmingly concerned with national issues, and turnout
for elections to the European Parliament were miserable compared to
national elections.
IF THE reaction against nationalism on the part of
European intellectuals was nonetheless understandable given Europe’s
terrible modern history, the behavior of their American equivalents was
more surprising—for the United States was founded in a national
separatist rebellion, has a political culture inexorably attached to the
idea of the absolute national sovereignty of the American people,
and—as any visitor to the United States can see—is absolutely permeated
by symbols of national allegiance and pride. Moreover, from the 1890s to
the 1950s, American nationalism had a positive connotation not just for
ordinary Americans, but for much of the progressive intelligentsia.
Though its roots lay deep in American and pre-American British history,
the term itself had been coined towards the end of the nineteenth
century by progressives seeking a way of assimilating and gaining
acceptance of the millions of new immigrants from societies radically
alien to core U.S. traditions, as well as binding up the wounds of the
Civil War.
The turning of the American intelligentsia away from the idea of U.S.
nationalism was the result of the European catastrophe, and more
immediately the effect of the influx of European academics to American
universities, knowing very little of the U.S. tradition, but naturally
imbued with hatred and fear of nationalism. This then fused with two
other ideas: that nationalism is inherently antimodern, and that the
United States is the leader and epitome of global modernity. The logical
result of this combination was a belief not that American nationalism
is bad, but that there is no such thing as American nationalism—as,
to my stupefaction, I was repeatedly told by U.S. academics when my
book on American nationalism appeared in 2004. What America had, I was
told, was patriotism—a sane, moderate, rational attachment to democratic
institutions and traditions, devoid of nationalism’s chauvinism,
paranoia, bluster and aggression. Many of the same people who said this
are now, of course, in a state of hysteria that so many Americans voted
for the dreaded Donald Trump.
The erasure of American nationalism from discussion helped allow
liberal internationalists to believe in American power and its infinite
expansion because a non-nationalist, benevolent American power could be
seen as coterminous with all the positive aspects of globalization.
Equally astounding to me, among sections of the Washington liberal
establishment in the late 1990s was the belief that globalization would
inevitably erode—even to insignificance—the power of national states,
when these people lived surrounded by symbols and expressions of
American national power and greatness, and themselves belonged to the
elite that presided over that power. The point is, however, that
globalization for them (whether they themselves are fully conscious of
this or not) is seen as an entirely U.S.-dominated process, led by
liberal Americans like them who would recruit members of other nations
to become just like them. This would, in effect, lead to the
Americanization of the world—Francis Fukuyama’s vision in The End of History and the Last Man.
The logical consequence of all of this was a belief that members of
other nations, if they were progressive, disinterested or even just
rational, had a moral and intellectual duty to “do the right thing,” not
only by adopting American institutions but by identifying with and
supporting American power in the world, since this power was identical
with all the good sides of globalization and with the general interest
of mankind. For a long time, U.S. prestige, power, funding by Western
institutions and dissent against local regimes did produce small but
voluble cadres of intellectuals and even politicians in various
countries who were prepared to identify with this view.
This
in turn contributed to the final piece of the puzzle, which brings us
back to theories of constructed nationalism. These theories in their
vulgarized form became a great way of delegitimizing and ignoring any
national sentiments, or expressions of national interest, that were in
opposition to those of the United States or the West more widely, or
were simply ones of which the writer in question disapproved. Rather
than being genuinely—or for that matter rationally—held by large parts
of the population concerned, such sentiments were portrayed simply as
the products of cynical manipulation and indoctrination of the innocent
masses by regimes and elites. When democracy dawned, the veils would be
lifted from the peoples’ eyes and they would see that their nations’
interests and those of the United States were identical.
THE INTELLECTUAL, moral and political autism
fostered by this set of attitudes has been one of the main causes of the
failures of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. The
chauvinist hysteria now being directed at Russia by supposedly
internationalist liberals has its roots not only in the Cold War but in
the fact that, after the Cold War, developments in Russia were the first
to reveal the emptiness and impracticality of the combination of
American imperialism with liberal internationalism.
It should have been apparent as early as the mid-1990s that this was
never going to work. Even at its time of greatest weakness, and greatest
(apparent) democracy, Russia was not prepared to accept a role as an
impotent subordinate in a U.S. global order. India too, though a
democracy (of its own kind) with real reasons to seek alliance with the
United States, has always been absolutely determined that such an
alliance should be on India’s terms and serve India’s interests, and
that (as over Iran), India would reject American requests whenever these
conflicted with Indian interests. This was as true under the civic
nationalism of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty as it has been under the Hindu
nationalism of Narendra Modi and the BJP. As for China, the Communist
Party’s legitimacy now rests squarely on a combination of nationalism
and economic growth—and economic growth presented as necessary not just
for individual and social well-being, but for the strength of the
nation.
The rise of nationalism in western Europe and the surge in what has
been called “Jacksonian nationalism” in the United States are now
obvious, and strike the liberal-internationalist project at its very
core. These developments also greatly undermine the vulgar and didactic
version of the constructivist theory of nationalism, whereby nationalism
is invariably the product of manipulation by the state and by elites.
For if there is one thing that is absolutely clear about the resurgence
of nationalism in the United States and Europe it is its profoundly
antielitist character, and the degree to which elites have banded
together against it. Indeed, to a considerable degree over the past two
generations in western Europe, state institutions themselves have been
dedicated to discouraging nationalism.
In many European countries, this has led to a situation in which all
the mainstream parties have combined in an attempt to prevent the
nationalists from gaining power (something that, while successful in the
short term, is having visibly disastrous effects in the longer term, as
it leaves opposition to the existing government nowhere to go but the
extremes).
In a radical reversal of earlier patterns, the greater part of the
state school systems in western Europe have also dedicated themselves to
combating their own states’ nationalisms. In America, meanwhile, the
school system remains dedicated to propagating U.S. civic nationalism
(what I have called the U.S. nationalist thesis) but often with a strong
emphasis on multiculturalism and openness rather than, as previously,
on assimilation. This approach seemed to have had a remarkable success
for many years, and to have borne out the ability of elites to create
radically new cultural and political paradigms. But it is now also
visibly failing, as far as large parts of the European populations are
concerned.
This is, above all, because of the discrediting of a central but
partly unspoken assumption of the liberal-intellectual paradigm of
recent generations: that multiculturalism was both desirable and
possible because culture does not really matter. This
assumption is at the core of rational-choice theory (at least in its
cruder economic variants), and of the Washington Consensus in economics.
It found voice in Tony Blair’s (historically ludicrous) statement to
the U.S. Congress in 2003:
Ours
are not Western values, they are the universal values of the human
spirit. And anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to
choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny, democracy, not
dictatorship.
This belief underpinned the liberal (including neoconservative) case
for the invasion of Iraq, and the almost equally disastrous Western
overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi. The idea that multiculturalism is
possible because culture is unimportant and all the really important
things are shared is a profoundly American one. It has allowed the
belief that people of every ethnic, racial and religious origin can
become full Americans as long as they subscribe to the “American Creed”
of belief in the Constitution, democracy, the law, freedom of speech,
human rights, capitalism and individualism. Cultural difference then
becomes little more than a question of private religious belief (with a
marked tendency to a sort of soft Protestantism, as Michael Lind and
others have remarked), food (with a marked tendency to taste similar)
and dressing up in folkloric costume on national days. And for most of
the immigrants who arrived from Europe in the later nineteenth century,
and Asians since then, things have worked out that way, albeit only
after long and often painful struggles.
As a result, all of these groups eventually gained admittance into
the middle classes—a group with its own strong cultural as well as
ideological features. Walter Russell Mead has called them a sort of
national “folk.” Latino immigrants seemed heading down the same path,
until many American whites were driven into a state of panic by the
Latinos’ sheer weight of numbers—and especially, unlike previous
immigrants, by illegal immigration—coupled with the ghastly pictures of
state decay and gang warfare in Mexico and Central America. And this
occurred just as economic growth evaporated for much of the white middle
classes, and inequality soared.
ISLAM IS different. It has gradually become apparent
in Europe that even moderately strict versions of Islam (whether of the
Koranic “fundamentalist” variety or those linked to conservative local
cultures) do produce important cultural differences, which make
assimilation difficult if not impossible, and produce separate cultural
communities. For instance, in England as in much of Europe, the most
important institution of social interaction is the pub or bar. If your
religion does not allow you to go there, then you will at the very least
be at a tangent to the rest of British society. Intermarriage is also
impossible, unless your partner converts to Islam.
To attract sufficient numbers of young Muslims to break so
definitively with their own traditions would have taken the offer of
great economic rewards for doing so—and this is precisely what the
deindustrialized European economies cannot offer to less skilled youth,
whose lack of skill in the Muslim case is being reinforced by cultural
isolation and barriers to education, especially for women. Faced with a
combination of the widespread failure of Muslim assimilation,
ever-growing numbers (the Muslim proportion of Britain’s population has
risen by an average of more than 60 percent per decade for the past half
century), and the threat of Islamist terrorism, it is hardly surprising
that growing numbers of indigenous Europeans have abandoned an ideology
of multiculturalism and open borders. Nor is it surprising that, in an
EU with stagnant economies and austerity in defense of the common
currency imposed by Germany through European institutions, this
nationalism should also have a strongly anti-EU character.
JUST HOW dangerous is the new wave of nationalism in
the West, and in the world more generally? In terms of relations
between states, not so much—or at least no more dangerous than what came
before. To draw attention to the enduring strength of nationalism in
Western democracies is not to say that those nationalisms have not
changed greatly over time. Thus, a key characteristic of nationalisms in
the West today, compared to in the past, is that they are no longer
focused on external aggression, the conquest of new territory or the
recovery of “lost” territory. The National Front in France has no desire
to conquer Belgium. Alternative für Deutschland, a new right-wing
populist party in Germany, has no plan to fight Poland and Russia in
order to recover Breslau and Königsberg.
On the contrary, the entire nationalist posture of these parties is a
defensive one: to defend the existing French and German nations (or
their ideas of what they are) against economic, social, cultural and
above all demographic threats from within and without. A relentless
emphasis on the (real or assumed) interests of ordinary citizens leads
to strong opposition to EU and NATO expansion and to confrontation with
Russia, a country which is (rightly) seen by them as posing no threat
whatsoever to ordinary Frenchmen or Germans. On the contrary, it is the
liberal-internationalist projects embodied in the EU and NATO that have
created confrontation with Russia over the past decade.
In the case of the strain of American nationalism embodied in Trump,
things are somewhat different: because of the vastly stronger element of
militarism in the United States (not boiled out of the national
consciousness by tens of millions of dead, as has been the case in
Europe), and because America’s global position embroils it inexorably in
a range of conflicts and disputes, whether or not they have anything to
do with U.S. national interests.
The
greatest threats from the new Western nationalisms are internal, not
external: that they will exacerbate political and cultural divisions to
the point that orderly government becomes impossible and countries begin
to head towards civil strife or even war. This danger is especially
great in the United States, for while America lacks Europe’s large
Muslim minorities, other divisions concerning race and culture are even
deeper. Moreover, the United States’ late-eighteenth-century, now
apparently immutable, constitution vouchsafes immense powers of
obstruction of government to the opposition, and also increasingly
produces election results that are seen by much of the population as
illegitimate.
TO BEGIN to think about how nationalism can become a
positive force in U.S. and Western affairs, it is necessary to consider
the complex historical relationship between nationalism and modernizing
reform. Most parts of the world were forced by the expansion of Western
capitalist power to try to play catch-up in terms of modernization; to
do this quickly required the savage beating down of a host of social,
economic, cultural and religious barriers to modernization.
In this struggle, nationalism was an essential ally of modernizing
reform, because it was the only force that could create legitimacy for
the reformist elites in the mass of the population (and in the military,
necessary as the last modernizing argument against conservative
resistance). Nationalism was at the heart of what Antonio Gramsci called
the achievement of cultural hegemony by the bourgeois liberal elites in
nineteenth-century Italy and elsewhere in Catholic Europe. Elsewhere in
the world, too, nationalism was central to the success of modernizing
elites wherever they did succeed, notably in Japan of the Meiji period
and Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Once again, the failure of the
Arab world and most of Africa to generate this kind of nationalism has
been central to these regions’ failure to develop.
Like other parts of the world that previously had to reckon with
Western-driven globalization, the West is now facing its own economic,
social and cultural crisis produced by Asian-driven globalization. So
far the return of nationalism in the West has been, above all, a
reaction against these tendencies on the part of classes and groups
endangered by them, and linked to attempts to maintain, as far as
possible, the “moral economy” of Western states as they existed in the
golden decades after the Second World War.
These efforts are understandable. But they are also, to a
considerable extent, futile. Even if the spread of industry to Asia had
not doomed the old Western industrial economies, then automation would
have done so; and if automation didn’t, then climate change would sooner
or later require fundamental economic change. There can be no return to
the golden age of mass, well-paid industrial employment. If the strains
of globalization and economic change are not to tear our societies
apart—as they are very visibly beginning to do—then we need to introduce
a range of radical reforms leading to a very new kind of society, with a
vastly stronger emphasis on social solidarity and the virtues of
austerity. In the United States, there is an increasingly obvious need
to reform the Constitution, despite the sacred view of it held by much
of the U.S. population. This will be a change so wrenching as to be
entirely comparable to those required of traditional societies in the
past faced by the need to modernize, and the only way to create national
acceptance for such changes is through nationalism, and appeals to
national solidarity and strengthening the nation.
The United States has done this once before, when faced by the utter
transformation of American rural and small-town Protestant society by
industrialization and mass immigration in the last decades of the
nineteenth century. One intellectual and political response was
precisely the “New Nationalism” of Herbert Croly, given political form
by Theodore and, later, Franklin Roosevelt. At the heart of the New
Nationalism were the imperatives of creating a stronger American
nationalism (civic, but with strong cultural elements) to both
assimilate and gain acceptance for the millions of new immigrants, and
the need to create new policies of social solidarity and justice to
mitigate the colossal inequalities and inequities thrown up by the
Gilded Age. In this way, it helped to form the foundation for the New
Deal. The New Nationalism aimed at solidarity across class, ethnicity
and religion (and now needs to be extended across the races), but it was
most emphatically not multicultural, and insisted on loyalty to the
nation as a fundamental principle.
Such a unifying spirit most assuredly cannot be achieved either by
Trump’s populist rodomontade or by the Democrats’ pandering to a
disparate bunch of smaller and smaller identity groups, united only in
their ostentatious, insulting and politically disastrous contempt for
middle-class white society. No amount of Clintonesque rhetoric about
America’s international role as the “indispensable nation” and leader of
the free world is going to unite Americans, given these yawning gulfs
at home. Indeed, for a considerable time to come, it seems that no
Western political party is capable of this kind of approach; but—like
the New Nationalism and Progressivism of the early twentieth
century—such profound changes in political culture always take a long
time to develop. The serious thought about what needs to happen should
begin now.
Anatol Lieven is a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar
and a senior fellow at New America in Washington DC. He is the author,
among other books, of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism.
This essay was published in the July/August 2017 print magazine under the headline “The New Nationalism.”
Image: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivers a speech
during a session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum
(SPIEF), Russia, June 2, 2017. REUTERS/Valery Sharifulin/TASS/Host Photo
Agency/Pool
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