by Brett Stevens on July 13, 2011

The problem of having big human brains is that sometimes we rationalize away the issues we most want to talk about.

As an example, we all live in “countries” or “nations.” How often do we think about how those are composed? Many think they don’t serve a purpose, and want to make us citizens of the world.

Our current concept of “a country” is based on a notion from 1789, called the nation-state. When the French liberal revolutionaries deposed their king, they realized that having a tribal identity clashed with their idea of total equality among citizens.

Ever since then, the left has hated the nation and wanted the nation-state, or a geographic area united not by tribe — culture, heritage, language, customs and values — but by political ideas. France was no longer a tribe; it was a political entity, and its people were subjects of that.

In contrast, the nation is a tribal identity. In this concept, the French people are what define the nation and its boundaries; whatever political dogma they choose is irrelevant, because they are all French. Government emerges from them, not imposes itself upon them for their own best interests.

Since 1789, the global trend has been a steady reduction in nations and their replacement with nation-states. This accelerated with the two disastrous world wars of the last century.

Others, perhaps with a nod to history, note quietly that there are reasons to not make humanity one big nation:

Diversity. It’s more interesting to have different approaches. One big nation creates an inevitable standardizing, utilitarian, and averaging trend.

It’s more interesting to have different approaches. One big nation creates an inevitable standardizing, utilitarian, and averaging trend. Stability. One big nation is a single point of failure. Multiple nations create redundancy and thus, a stabilizing influence.

One big nation is a single point of failure. Multiple nations create redundancy and thus, a stabilizing influence. Flexibility. Often, it is better to have many people work on a problem than one person: each takes their own approach, and one turns out to work in certain situations, but not others.

History may be listening. With the Cold War over and WWII (in which the nation-states of the world defeated the nations) receding in distant memory, our globe is reshuffling its power balance.

We are seeing each other as distinct civilizations instead, in which unity of tribe — culture, heritage, language, customs and values — trumps political associations, which we have seen are an even bigger disaster than the nationalist wars.

Saturday, the United States (and the global community) formally recognized nationalism, which is the idea that civilizations should be organic states composed of unity of tribe:

South Sudan celebrated its first day as an independent nation Saturday, raising its flag before tens of thousands of cheering citizens elated to reach the end of a 50-year struggle. U.S. President Barack Obama called the day a new dawn after the darkness of war, while visiting dignitaries offered both congratulations and prodding for South Sudan and its former ruler, Sudan, to avoid a return to conflict over serious and unresolved disagreements. {…} Saturday meant that South Sudan and its black tribesmen would for the first time be linked politically with sub-Saharan Africa. Kenya and Uganda are already laying strong economic ties with their northern neighbor, an oil-rich country that may one day ship its oil to a Kenyan port, instead of through the pipelines controlled by Khartoum. “From today our identity is southern and African, not Arabic and Muslim,” read a hand-painted sign that one man carried as he walked through the crowds. – Fox News

Our talking heads in the media are trying to rationalize away the truth of this situation, because they are paid to tell us pleasant half-truths and so keep everyone going to work and feeling good about themselves. The news is a business and the buyers pick the news they wawnt.

However, history will record that Barack Obama has supported a truly progressive notion in his support for South Sudan: bucking the nation-state trend, the United States encouraged the division of Sudan into nations.

This is what “From today our identity is southern and African, not Arabic and Muslim” means. An ethnic group is electing to preserve itself as separate from its cosmopolitan (mixed-ethnic) neighbors, and is returning to its organic state composed of culture, heritage, language, customs and values in unison.

While this would not be a shock to the American founding fathers, who envisioned the United States as a British nation that welcomed those from similar cultures, like Germans, Dutch, Swedes and the occasional Scot or Frenchman, it is most certainly a shock to those who have guided the United States since 1945.

If you want to know why modern “conservatives” have only a thin platform — big business, low taxes, small government and family values legislation — it’s that they have been neutered by liberalism, and so have lost the vision the founding fathers had.

The real notion of conservatism is the organic civilization, starting with the nation, a form of extended tribe. Its value lies in the fact that instead of creating a “proposition nation” formed of random people united under a political front, it is already a nation based in “consanguinity” as the American founding fathers stated it.

Elsewhere in the world, others are removing their nation-state blinders as well:

Belgium has been without an elected government for over a year after deep divisions between Flemish and Walloon, French speaking, political parties have led to history’s longest political impasse in a democracy. Elections last June deepened the crisis after a majority of voters in Flanders, the richer Dutch-speaking north of Belgium, supported the separatist New Flemish Alliance (NVA), which supports the break-up of the Belgian state. Negotiations to form a new Belgian government have dragged on for over a year as Belgium’s francophone Walloon minority have refused to give Flemish separatists new powers to control taxes and to run its own economy. {…} Mr De Wever upset Walloon politicians in the run up to the official 11 July celebration of “the Flemish community” by insisting that it was a “national day” for Flanders. “It is a people, a community, a democracy. It was a territory, history and common values. So this is a nation,” he said. – The Telegraph

The political entity of Belgium was not created for its people. It was created for the convenience of those forming alliances among nation-states.

In so doing, they crammed together two populations — one more French-leaning, and one more Dutch-leaning. This formed an uneasy alliance which held together for many years because the alternative was worse: assimilation by a larger nation-state or hostile power.

Years later, Belgium is rediscovering the obvious: if two separate groups exist, they are not one group for a reason. They have separate cultures, heritages, languages, value systems and customs. Those are already built-in. Changing them requires a Soviet-style totalitarian Nanny State.

Nationalism (advocacy of nations, not nation-states) is defined by its emphasis on the organic state formed of unity of these factors. Nationalism is not about picking the right political system or allies. It is about preserving, defending and nurturing the uniqueness of every group on earth.

And it is quietly taking Europe by storm:

The True Finn Party in Finland has broken through the left-liberal consensus to take second place in the polls, reminding voters that Finland is not just a geographical area but a country defined by language, culture, and history, a country that has been defended at great cost against the Soviet desire to absorb it and which is now, thanks to the European Union, being robbed of its savings in order to replenish the pockets of Mediterranean kleptocrats. All across Europe the nations are beginning to boil with frustration, at a political straitjacket that prevents them from asserting their ancient rights. The causes of this are many, but two in particular stand out: immigration and the European Union. The two are connected, since it is the EU’s non-negotiable insistence on the free movement of labor that has prevented the nation-states from exerting meaningful control over their borders. At a time when unemployment in Britain stands at more than 2 million, more than a million immigrants from Eastern Europe have come to take what jobs there are. It is impossible that such a situation should endure without strong sentiments of national entitlement among the indigenous people, and our governing elites are struggling hard to prevent those sentiments from emerging into the light of day. {…} It seemed reasonable, even imperative, in 1950 to bring the nations of Europe together, in a way that would prevent the wars that had twice almost destroyed the continent. And because conflicts breed radicalism, the new Europe was conceived as a comprehensive plan — one that would eliminate the sources of European conflict, and place cooperation rather than rivalry at the heart of the continental order. – Spectator

Revealed by the light of history, the EU appears to be yet another political hack job. Its purpose is to end the last century’s wars by forcing unity. However, that analysis forgets that WWI, the cause of WWII, was itself caused by forcing nation-states upon people in order to make “good” and “bad” alliances.

Like the nation-state itself, the union of nation-states is based in the liberal idea (descended from the French Revolution in 1789) that if we are all equal citizens of the world, we will not need kings and culture. All we need is — well, liberalism, actually.

That great liberal moral crusade did not work out so well for the French. After 25 years of bloodshed, and another century of instability, France emerged as something far less than the world power, cultural leader and political giant that it once was.

We can see that in our present time, people just as delusional as those French revolutionaries are still at work, still trying to destroy what is natural and replace it with Soviet-style political dogma:

It’s racially discriminatory to prohibit racial discrimination. That’s the bottom line of a decision issued last Friday, just before the Fourth of July weekend, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. {…} The Sixth Circuit ruling seems unlikely to stand. Its citation of Supreme Court precedents is unpersuasive. The proposition that a state’s voters cannot ban racial discrimination seems palpably absurd. But it does stand as a monument to the contortions that liberal lawyers and judges will go through to perpetuate the racial quotas and preferences that have become embedded in important parts of American life. – Human Events

In the name of making peace, we sew the seeds of future conflict. We are forcing a union that does not exist, and we are doing it for political goals, not practical ones.

The great American diversity experiment enters its 145th year with mixed results. We now have an African-American president, and racial tensions are higher than ever. Flash mobs strike white people, and the Tea Party wants to end the welfare state.

Our political goals — formalized in the 1960s — make us look good, we think. We are like Christ on the cross, but secular and self-negating, a benevolent giver bestowing enlightenment, wealth, Progress and justice on our mostly ghetto-bound African cousins.

But do these policies work? Everywhere they are tried, they fail — even when combining people of the same race. Belgians, Irish, Russians and former Yugoslavian states are still wracked by conflict involving people of the same race not able to integrate.

What makes us think we can do it with people of different races? Actually, it seems like no one thought about feasibility. They were too busy riding the high of good feelings coming from the 1960s.

As in the 1860s, they thought they had eliminated the source of our division, and the future was all peace. That’s remarkably similar to what happened at the Congress of Vienna, Potsdam Conference and even the formation of the EU. If we crush the source of our difference, we will have peace (so the thinking went).

Instead, we find that forcing round pegs into square holes has resulted in constant insanity that we cannot criticize because it is linked to the political dogma that unites us — the very core of the nation-state, the proposition nation and our source of political identity:

The fire department’s gender and ethnicity quota became an unpleasant surprise for Simon Wallmark, who was informed that despite having trained as a firefighter, he was not encouraged to apply for a summer job, on account of being Swedish and male. “The response I got from SÃ¶dertÃ¶rn was that I wasn’t qualified to apply for the summer jobs, because the jobs were reserved for women and people with an immigrant background,” said Simon Wallmark to SR. He agrees that there is a need for more women and immigrants in the field, but argues that the recruiting should be done some other way. Out of the 32 people finally hired by the fire department, 10 lacked the relevant education for the job. – The Local

Barack Obama has acknowledged that each ethnic group has the right to self-determination — in the third world, at least. Since we traditionally use the third world as objects of pity, we in the West like to apply a double standard that gives them more laxity than us.

In doing so, he has revealed how badly the European and American experiments with diversity are failing. They are falling apart at the seams, not just between whites and third-worlders, but between whites and whites.

That we continue with this insane Soviet-style political experiment shows us the true roots of the West’s drive toward diversity: just as in post-Revolutionary France, the agenda is a smashing of leadership and culture.

Our liberal contingent wants to smash those forms of hierarchy so there is no hierarchy, only a giant mob of equal citizens of the world. In order to do that, they need to dissolve power and redistribute wealth so that all have an equal share. Maybe then we’ll have peace, since there will be no cause for conflict.

However, that hasn’t come true either. When you redistribute power and wealth, what you get is a form of political heat death — a stilling of decision-making since all decisions lead to the same place, which is forced equality. Both Soviet and French liberal empires collapsed in decay.

And yet on the horizon are signs that we are finally learning from those debacles, and turning away from the nation-state, and back toward the form of civilization that has been with us since the dawn of humankind — the nation.

Tags: crowdism, nation-state, nationalism, pan-nationalism

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.