While some things follow a disturbing parallel to the rise of the German National Socialists in the 1930s, I don’t think fascism or Nazi are quite the right labels. First, it’s been diluted to the point of uselessness. The ‘fascist’ HOA doesn’t like the rose bush I planted. The fascist coffee shop won’t give me a plastic straw. The Nazis on the county board made my grocery store charge me $0.05 per plastic bag. And so on. The problem is that the better labels are less sexy. They’re less evocative of righteous resistance.
Let’s start with nationalism, not as the most troubling aspect, but because it’s actually the least problematic label, and also falling to irrelevancy. During the Olympics, all the people who never follow any of the sports are suddenly cheering for their national team. Send someone abroad and they are almost guaranteed to chafe at some local law, regulation, or custom almost all in the host country find more than reasonable.
Most people forget that 200 years ago, there was no Italy (1861) and there was no Germany (1870). When the Italian fascists came to power, it was about 60 years after Italian unification. And the same for Germany. It was a sense of national self, stewing in the 1800s, that made those nationals possible. By contrast the French nation came to be in the 17th century. And prior to that most people saw themselves as Burgundian or Provencal and not French, except by language. And we are currently seeing resurgence of Welsh and Scottish nationalism in the UK, that seemed to be waning during the end of the 20th century, as the a series of governments seem to continuously stumble.
There are various reasons the nation state came to exist. One is industrialization. Having broader national boundaries provides economic and developmental benefits. It’s hard to run a rail road between two major cities if it is subject to the regulations of a series of principalities. Defense against invasion, trade regulation, and social services like education (which were entering the remit of governments) would be easier at a broader, national level. A love of being French, Italian, German, or British, even if you had a different dialect and diet from other parts of the nation, was a necessary ingredient to building the modern nation state.
Nationalism in itself is not an evil. Americans are right to admire things about their country, such as the entrepreneurial spirit, independence, belief in fundamental equality, and the idea that legitimacy comes from the people, not the church or a blood line. Where nationalism sours is in its utility as a trowel to shape an enemy. The golem could be in the form of immigrants, it could be racial, rumored foreign influence, or even the insufficiently nationalistic. It’s one thing to cheer your team at the World Cup, and it’s another round people up in mass arrests. Almost always this enemy isn’t an actual enemy, but just different and weak enough to attack with impunity. For this reason, we need to be aware of the dark and violent ends to which nationalism may be employed. Appeals to nationalism are a warning sign of dark motives.
Does that mean we rid ourselves of nationalism? An absence of nationalism is like an absence of ego. Someone completely without ego is kind of non-functional. And while the death of the self is a goal of meditation, you won’t last long in any society if you aren’t willing to assert your own needs and desires. Would you just let anyone cut in line in front of you, because you aren’t any more special than anyone else (including your beliefs about fairness and queuing)? Maybe hope that someone else would stick up for you? A nation with no nationalism, no sense of self, no belief in their distinctiveness, or that they contribute, won’t be a nation for long. Would you let the Russians just take over because you don’t believe your nation brings anything worth preserving to the world stage?
And while I don’t believe faceless bureaucrats in Brussels see the eradication of all nationalism as their goal, it does sometimes feel that way. That you could live in one Ikea decorated apartment in a major city, existing on a diet of kabobs, Thai, and curry, and move to another city’s Ikea decorated apartment with the same cuisines, without noticing you are in a new country, appears to be their ideal. Over time a national identity can expand in smaller and larger ways. It’s hard to imagine Germany without the Donner sandwich. In the span of a person’s life, the change may need to be moderated. Take the German who says they only like spicy, foreign food out of Germany for a year and they’ll be eating Spätzel the day after their flight lands. I was abroad for a year and developed a craving for KFC. I normally go years without eating KFC.
Like most normal people with a sense of self, most people have a sense of their national identity. Maybe they aren’t educated on all the fine points and interpretations of their nations’ sordid pasts, but come unification day, liberation day, constitution day or whatever, they wave a flag and happily watch a parade. They are proud of their distinctive contributions their scientists, poets, composers, philosophers, artists, or explorers made to shape the world. Even if the rest of the world doesn’t also acknowledge that contribution. They are part of that national self and often believe, in some small part, they contribute to a nation’s goodness. It is a part (to a lesser or greater degree) of who they are.
If you try to take that away, there are many who will react badly. You are denying them a sense of themselves. When you attack someone’s self, who they are, they will almost always take it as a deep, personal attack. An attack on their own existence, or right to exist. When we criticize any sense of empathy with “nationalist” claims because of where those ideas could lead, we forget maybe a majority of the country shares parts of that empathy. They can remember where they used to get decent fish and chips and it’s now a cell phone repair store. It’s next to the other cell phone repair store that used to sell pies. (Food, especially, is tied to national identity and a sense of self). No one seems to ever go in and out of those shops, except the young men loitering there all day. And while they also find the skinheads at protests revolting, they also see neighbors that share their concerns. While they aren’t passionate enough about pies and chips to march, they do understand the loss of part of their own identity.
One way to look at why fascism and not communism came to power in Germany after World War I is that Communism was internationalist. This is also why it made sense in Russia, a multi-ethnic empire. Germans were happy to feel German pride, as that was the path to unification. Italians were happy to feel Italian pride, and their basis for unification. While some of the fascist and Nazi leaders got their start in workers movements or self-declared soviets, they were never part of an international brotherhood of the proletariat. They were the German proletariat and the Italian proletariat. They felt betrayed by the forces of commerce and capitalism that put money, lucre, ahead of the Italian and German national interests. The takeover of industry by the state, to bend it to the needs of the international proletariat, is abstract. To make the economy and society more fair to Germans and Italians is more concrete.
This is the landscape we inhabit. A left that wants to actively minimize national distinction. This is not new and has been a feature of the far left from before World War I. A far right that is capitalizing on the push back as policies on immigration bring in new cultures. This is not new and has been a feature of the far right since before World War I. The closing of a German Christmas market is seen by one side as a sign of enlightenment by giving others a break from cultural imperialism, and by the other as evidence the national character (and by extension the individual’s self) is being killed. The sad truth is the vendors made so little money it was hardly worth the effort. But the “left infected” main stream press minimizes it, while the “far right” protesters over state it. And neither bothered shopping at the market.
And just like railroads were the kind of problem that made a nation more attractive than a string of independent duchies, more problems are regional. Easy commerce between Rotterdam and Prague means drugs, guns, and trafficked people can move easily between those same cities. Dutch police have to work with German police and German police have to work with Czech police. Your country could be picked off by the Russians, or you can create a defense pact with other countries. You could depend on your own electrical generation, or you can tie to a larger grid with better economies of scale. And so on. This does mean ceding local sovereignty to regional bodies, with the EU probably being ahead of the game. And this does mean you need to see yourself as part of a larger whole and not just German, Czech or Dutch.
As Europe ages, its relatively high wages will attract people to live and work there, providing much needed labor. The answer would be for Europeans to make more Europeans, but they seem to be unable to bring birth rates to anywhere near replacement rates. At this rate their adult populations will need to spend an inordinate percentage of their work-force on caring for the large, elderly populations. Without workers from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, the demographics for Western Europe are not in line with much economic growth. And while some come to Europe for political freedom denied to them in their homelands, others are just coming to work. They are also from societies where membership is tribal and by blood. They don’t expect to become German, French, or Italian any more than they expect to grow wings. They want their local food, local dress, and local habits. Of course this means displacing some of their host country’s food and habits in the process to create these enclaves.
While Europe is the place where these changes are most easily seen, the trends are present in highly developed parts of North America and in Asia. The native birth rate in the US is not as bad as most in Europe, but below replacement. And the Koreans and Japanese wish their birth rates were as high as Europe’s. And the reaction in America and Asia to immigration being now worse than Europe’s. With the United States engaging in a virtual pogrom and the continued, quiet racism of Japan and Korea preferring robots over non-Koreans and non-Japanese. Even in the developed parts of China and India, the birth rates are dropping well below replacement. And the same needs for regional cooperation and governance are precipitating a shared notion of defense amongst historical enemies in Asia, while the US is choosing the path of least cooperation.
Center-left politicians have been failing and threading the needle on nationalism and have elected to throw a lot of baby out with the bath water. They have bent over backwards to make themselves bland and European, or bland an American, to not antagonize the ethnic minorities residing in their countries, and to avoid the horrific excesses of their recent past. They apologize profusely, taking part in cringe-inducing rituals such as land acknowledgements. They have ceded the ground on nationalism to the right. With nationalism itself considered the providence of those with terrible ideas about race and tolerance. And as more “regular” people see more change, more foreign enclaves, more cringey prostrations, that attack their sense of self, the more fertile ground the right has found.
I’m receptive to taking an unflinching eye to one’s past, but a portion of the left wants to reduce any historical accomplishment to just ‘theft.’ And that the US and Europe especially should have nothing to say on the matter. But if we apply the same logic to the past, there is almost no region that hasn’t, at some point, waged near genocidal war on another. Whether it’s the mongol invaders, the Huns, the Egyptians, Muslim armies across parts of North Africa and Europe, or even the Africans who migrated into Europe, displacing the Neanderthals. We are now reconstructing the rich spiritual tradition those Neanderthal tribes might have had. They were displaced by new arrivals from a foreign land, and made extinct. And while not Homo Sapiens-Sapiens, the Neanderthals were close enough to breed with the new arrivals. The difference with the present is we have pictures, documentation, and detailed stories. While all we have from the past are the barest of records and trinkets dug from the ground.
What should those politicians do, going forward? How do we stop this slide to an authoritarian right that seems to be infecting Asian, American, and European politics? At the very least, your desire for a better life (as problems and opportunities are more likely regional than just national) depends on constructing a solution to this problem. The first is losing the seemingly visceral reaction against nationalism. It’s important to understand you are proud and happy to be of your nation. And not follow that sentence with a ‘but’ to elaborate or qualify what you mean. Quite a few successful politicians on the left already do this but not emphatically enough. Second, you have to define a vision of nationalism that is conducive to a better future. For America, that nationalism should be based on ideas in the constitution and declaration of independence. They’re good ideas. They just need to be implemented more broadly.
Third, there needs to be a frank conversation on immigration. It can’t be ‘this is what you need to accept, otherwise you are a bigot.’ It must be about a future as Germans, Italians, or Americans, and how that future involves new citizens. That immigration is part of the story of economic growth. But growth as a stronger Italy, Germany, America, etc. It should never be along the lines of we need to become a more diverse, more multi-ethnic, and therefore must sacrifice our national identity to make room for other identities.
And that conversation can’t just be with the native population. It must be with the immigrant population as well. Parts of Europe are already starting this process, by making sure that (men especially) understand that women are truly free. Not covered up to be free from being ogled by men, but free to dress as they chose, be with whom they chose, and become educated as they choose. And that immigrants will send their children to non-segregated schools to learn the local language, local customs, and a reasonable indoctrination as good citizens. Assimilation need not be the eradication of their cultural heritage, but they should understand they need to become good citizens in the host country, not dwellers in alien enclaves. And if they aren’t there to become good citizens, there will be no place for them. Otherwise, in the future, there might not be room for those who actually do want to be good citizens.
Finally, the center left needs to deliver. If the perceived choice is between no change and immigration changing the character of your country, or no change and no immigration, you might choose no immigration. After all, you might still be on a slow, downward slide, but at least you’ll ‘have your country.’ More layers of bureaucracy are not necessarily the solution. More committees to make more reports to be further vetted by other committees to build a single public restroom in a park is not good government. It is bad government. Not addressing the needs of the people because too many layers exist make sure all possible concerns are addressed is terrible government. At some point just do things. Even if imperfect, something accomplished beyond re-paving the same roads legitimizes your power.
Finally, if you still believe nationalism is bad and there’s no good way to court it, I’ll leave you with the example of the Ukrainians. They are countering Russian aggression because of the belief their nation, their national identity, their families, their land, and their freedom to lives as the choose are worth fighting for. It is much cheaper to live as a vassal state to Russia, like Belarus or what Hungary might prefer. It is also easier to just emigrate abroad than live in the shadow of Russian aggression. Yet they continue to resist, paying a price few of us understand, to live as they choose. Nationalism is what is helping to keep them going and to help keep them free.
[One comment was that maybe I meant patriotism instead of nationalism. That’s arguable except that I would argue patriotism can’t exist without a state or cause. Someone could be a German nationalist and have a sense of pride or love for German culture, accomplishments, food, or art in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but only be a Swiss patriot. French partisans, during World War II, were patriots, allied to the French government in exile. But some French felt they were patriots volunteering for the Charlemange SS Divsion. Even though their patriotic ideals were different, they were both likely French nationalists. Native Americans did their ‘patriotic’ duty, volunteering to serve in the US armed forces, but are probably not American nationalists, in the commonly accepted sense of the term. In fact, America is the example of a country with patriots who also love in addition to the one where they reside and may have served in the armed forces.]
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