Seems like the “ideal nationalist states” are the economic and geopolitical power brokers and success or luck stories which can manage to silo themselves from the impact of the common crises in the world, or at least some of them. Geographic landforms have as much of a role here as anything else—both in strategic locational proximity and size. New Zealand, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland (kinda, bad example in some ways), are all places which do not need to stress over their borders—they are self evident. They also have natural domestic abundance which is a reliable foundation for creating wealth. Unsurprisingly the elite wealthy of the world, the post-nationalists all end up spending time in such places trying to become citizens or get tax breaks and own property.
Coincidentally these societies will have what we’d consider healthy nationalist views, but it’s because they have enough distance to exist as a society in their own bubble without most of the population realizing this is the case. It’s like when you meet New Yorkers or Londoners or Tokyoites who simply don’t pay attention to anything going on outside their cities and are condescending to people outside their bubbles often even without realizing it.
States like Israel or Estonia or Taiwan have prominent nationalism because it’s the only way to not be genocided by their large, violent, insecure, despotic neighboring states and entities. You didn’t mention the Korean peninsula, but it feels like the most pertinent of all places for this discussion, and for seeing what nationalism means in this century.
I don’t think societies and countries that are at the center of land masses and modern diverse continental populations can really do “healthy nationalism”. Even if people can find common national values, it’s just too wide an umbrella in such places to feel like an identity that is stable. Nationalism at this scale naturally becomes a military salute—which is why the anti-nationalism people think nationalism is equivalent to fascism or inevitably creates it. They are wrong of course, but they unknowingly represent the real problem, which is that such states cannot rely on such things for self esteem or identity or morale of its society.
Between nationalism and post-nationalism (identity with the whole human species) there is an intermediate grouping: civilisationalism, i.e. identity with one's civilisation.
Arguably the EU is a civilisational entity, at least to some extent.
Identifying with a civilization, and the broader concept of "civilization" in general, is a positive means of broadening your horizons. However, a civilization, certainly in the Western context, still requires intermediary identities like nationality. No one is "purely" a Westerner or even "purely" a European, since these are broad conglomerates of sub-identities. The EU would be more successful if it came to terms with this inherent limitation of its project.
huntington suggests the West, Orthodox, Latin America, Islam, Buddhist, Hindu, African, Chinese, Japanese. I would argue that there are more grey areas and overlaps than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations
Fukuyama (and Bush et al) certainly "bought the rip" when it comes to the success of liberalism, yet still we must remember how great the current status of liberalism is compared to what anyone thought possible before the cold war ended. Not only is most of Eastern Europe still under democratic governance, Latin America large democratized right at the same time. As did several Asian nations,
Notably, though, with some important Asian exceptions, democracy has mostly taken root in Western or adjacent civilizations. China, Russia, and much of the Islamic world and Africa have resisted the supposedly inevitable tide of liberal democracy. Thus Huntington was more prophetic than Fukuyama about the post–Cold War world.
Are India and Indonesia among those Asian exceptions? Because those are quite some exceptions, given that they are 2 out of the top 4 most populous countries worldwide.
Yes, there are important Asian democracies. (Though notably, Freedom House ranks India and Indonesia as only “partly free.”) But Fukuyama was writing in the context of the Cold War's end, when it seemed feasible to predict that liberal democracy would sweep the globe. Liberal democracy has indeed made inroads, particularly in Eastern Europe and Latin America. But we are far from a “universal homogenous state,” and cultural difference is a major reason why.
tl;dr we make the whole planet a neo schengen zone with one passport (therefore zero passport!) and abandon all nukes but every month we hard reset the entire internet and rebuild it from scratch
> the tendency of Marxist movements to become nationalist (and never the reverse)
I’m not sure this is correct. At least, I can think of one counter-example: the Cuban revolution seems like it can be fairly described as a nationalist movement that subsequently became Marxist.
That's an interesting example. However, Cuban nationalism (which was resentful of American economic and political dominance) played a role in Castro's turn to the Soviet Union. Notably, he invoked the legacy of José Martí, the 19th-century independence leader, to legitimize his rule. Castro's clash with Che Guevara, who was committed to global revolution, reflects the tension between the more nationalist and internationalist strains of Cuban Marxism.
I agree that nationalism is incredibly powerful, perhaps, the most powerful ideology ever. I don't understand why, given how artificial nations are.
Perhaps, therein lies the key. It is remarkable that Fascism and Nazis broke out in very artificial countries, that were recently unified and both had a strong north vs. south enmity. So maybe nationalism is an artificial construct for solving internal divisions.
Nations are certainly artificial in the sense that they don't exist in nature. We don't come out of the womb as self-declared Poles or Turks. My two-year-old daughter has no real idea that she's an American. Then again, if you put a bunch of children from various countries on an island together, they'd eventually start forming tribes and even (if we extended this experiment far enough in time) proto-nations.
Nationalism is less artificial than other ideologies because it is built from constituent elements (eg, common language, ancestry, religion, traditions, territory, political structure) that are deeply rooted in history. The fact that relatively "artificial" states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia broke apart into more "natural" nations shows that nationalism is not completely arbitrary and can't simply be imposed or invented by, say, the Treaty of Versailles.
As for Germany and Italy, yes, their relative newness as unified nation-states made aggressive ultra-nationalism appealing to them. But the fact that they survived defeat, occupation, political restructuring, and, in Germany's case, partition, with their sense of national unity intact belies the notion that they are "very artificial."
Nations might be artificial but languages certainly are not. If two people speak the same language (or closely related ones such as Spanish-Portuguese, Swedish-Norwegian, Hindi-Urdu, etc) they can communicate, if they don't they can't.
I am not sure any of this is false, but it doesn't mean it's either good or immutable. Post-nationalism is something good _even if it never existed and is an electorally losing proposition_. There have been other good ideas that appeared with no strong predecessors and were electorally unpopular. "Nullius in verba", in particular.
Something can be good in theory and impractical in reality. Post-nationalists have ideals (like peace and co-existence) that are realizable within national frameworks. My advice for them is to focus on softening the rough edges of nationalism rather than aiming for a post-national world that will never exist, and the pursuit of which only inflames nationalist sentiment.
Science also requires deference to authority: deference to scientific authority. It might be a more "rational" form of deference, but it is still well within the bounds of human nature.
Similarly, if we want to advance humanity, we need to work with humanity's natural instincts, which include groupishness, rather than denying them or futilely attempting to stamp them out of existence.
It exploited the instinct to turn it away from "Aristotle could never be wrong" style of deference into "respect the books" - that's why we aren't all eating kilograms of Vitamin C because Pauling said so. As the saying goes, "trust the expertS, but don't trust any single expert".
Likewise, you could, in principle, exploit groupishness to merge people around a larger flag that's not linked to any single nation or some such group.
You can indeed merge people around a larger flag—that's the origin of nationalism, as opposed to local tribalisms. But at a certain point, the flag becomes too expansive to unite people. After all, a flag is only an effective rallying point if it corresponds to a concrete shared identity.
The EU is a case in point, as transnational institutions have less democratic legitimacy than nations rooted in a specific history. You could build a strong pan-European identity over time, but in that case, you'd essentially be turning Europe into a nation (easier said than done).
Well, in that case you can say I have trust in building a nation of liberal humanity :P Also, I don't think democratic legitimacy is a coherent concept.
Seems like the “ideal nationalist states” are the economic and geopolitical power brokers and success or luck stories which can manage to silo themselves from the impact of the common crises in the world, or at least some of them. Geographic landforms have as much of a role here as anything else—both in strategic locational proximity and size. New Zealand, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland (kinda, bad example in some ways), are all places which do not need to stress over their borders—they are self evident. They also have natural domestic abundance which is a reliable foundation for creating wealth. Unsurprisingly the elite wealthy of the world, the post-nationalists all end up spending time in such places trying to become citizens or get tax breaks and own property.
Coincidentally these societies will have what we’d consider healthy nationalist views, but it’s because they have enough distance to exist as a society in their own bubble without most of the population realizing this is the case. It’s like when you meet New Yorkers or Londoners or Tokyoites who simply don’t pay attention to anything going on outside their cities and are condescending to people outside their bubbles often even without realizing it.
States like Israel or Estonia or Taiwan have prominent nationalism because it’s the only way to not be genocided by their large, violent, insecure, despotic neighboring states and entities. You didn’t mention the Korean peninsula, but it feels like the most pertinent of all places for this discussion, and for seeing what nationalism means in this century.
I don’t think societies and countries that are at the center of land masses and modern diverse continental populations can really do “healthy nationalism”. Even if people can find common national values, it’s just too wide an umbrella in such places to feel like an identity that is stable. Nationalism at this scale naturally becomes a military salute—which is why the anti-nationalism people think nationalism is equivalent to fascism or inevitably creates it. They are wrong of course, but they unknowingly represent the real problem, which is that such states cannot rely on such things for self esteem or identity or morale of its society.
Between nationalism and post-nationalism (identity with the whole human species) there is an intermediate grouping: civilisationalism, i.e. identity with one's civilisation.
Arguably the EU is a civilisational entity, at least to some extent.
I wrote about civilizational identity here: https://1000yearview.substack.com/p/western-civilization-would-be-a-good
Identifying with a civilization, and the broader concept of "civilization" in general, is a positive means of broadening your horizons. However, a civilization, certainly in the Western context, still requires intermediary identities like nationality. No one is "purely" a Westerner or even "purely" a European, since these are broad conglomerates of sub-identities. The EU would be more successful if it came to terms with this inherent limitation of its project.
What might some civilisations be?
huntington suggests the West, Orthodox, Latin America, Islam, Buddhist, Hindu, African, Chinese, Japanese. I would argue that there are more grey areas and overlaps than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations
Fukuyama (and Bush et al) certainly "bought the rip" when it comes to the success of liberalism, yet still we must remember how great the current status of liberalism is compared to what anyone thought possible before the cold war ended. Not only is most of Eastern Europe still under democratic governance, Latin America large democratized right at the same time. As did several Asian nations,
Notably, though, with some important Asian exceptions, democracy has mostly taken root in Western or adjacent civilizations. China, Russia, and much of the Islamic world and Africa have resisted the supposedly inevitable tide of liberal democracy. Thus Huntington was more prophetic than Fukuyama about the post–Cold War world.
Are India and Indonesia among those Asian exceptions? Because those are quite some exceptions, given that they are 2 out of the top 4 most populous countries worldwide.
Yes, there are important Asian democracies. (Though notably, Freedom House ranks India and Indonesia as only “partly free.”) But Fukuyama was writing in the context of the Cold War's end, when it seemed feasible to predict that liberal democracy would sweep the globe. Liberal democracy has indeed made inroads, particularly in Eastern Europe and Latin America. But we are far from a “universal homogenous state,” and cultural difference is a major reason why.
tl;dr we make the whole planet a neo schengen zone with one passport (therefore zero passport!) and abandon all nukes but every month we hard reset the entire internet and rebuild it from scratch
> the tendency of Marxist movements to become nationalist (and never the reverse)
I’m not sure this is correct. At least, I can think of one counter-example: the Cuban revolution seems like it can be fairly described as a nationalist movement that subsequently became Marxist.
That's an interesting example. However, Cuban nationalism (which was resentful of American economic and political dominance) played a role in Castro's turn to the Soviet Union. Notably, he invoked the legacy of José Martí, the 19th-century independence leader, to legitimize his rule. Castro's clash with Che Guevara, who was committed to global revolution, reflects the tension between the more nationalist and internationalist strains of Cuban Marxism.
I agree that nationalism is incredibly powerful, perhaps, the most powerful ideology ever. I don't understand why, given how artificial nations are.
Perhaps, therein lies the key. It is remarkable that Fascism and Nazis broke out in very artificial countries, that were recently unified and both had a strong north vs. south enmity. So maybe nationalism is an artificial construct for solving internal divisions.
Nations are certainly artificial in the sense that they don't exist in nature. We don't come out of the womb as self-declared Poles or Turks. My two-year-old daughter has no real idea that she's an American. Then again, if you put a bunch of children from various countries on an island together, they'd eventually start forming tribes and even (if we extended this experiment far enough in time) proto-nations.
Nationalism is less artificial than other ideologies because it is built from constituent elements (eg, common language, ancestry, religion, traditions, territory, political structure) that are deeply rooted in history. The fact that relatively "artificial" states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia broke apart into more "natural" nations shows that nationalism is not completely arbitrary and can't simply be imposed or invented by, say, the Treaty of Versailles.
As for Germany and Italy, yes, their relative newness as unified nation-states made aggressive ultra-nationalism appealing to them. But the fact that they survived defeat, occupation, political restructuring, and, in Germany's case, partition, with their sense of national unity intact belies the notion that they are "very artificial."
Nations might be artificial but languages certainly are not. If two people speak the same language (or closely related ones such as Spanish-Portuguese, Swedish-Norwegian, Hindi-Urdu, etc) they can communicate, if they don't they can't.
I am not sure any of this is false, but it doesn't mean it's either good or immutable. Post-nationalism is something good _even if it never existed and is an electorally losing proposition_. There have been other good ideas that appeared with no strong predecessors and were electorally unpopular. "Nullius in verba", in particular.
Something can be good in theory and impractical in reality. Post-nationalists have ideals (like peace and co-existence) that are realizable within national frameworks. My advice for them is to focus on softening the rough edges of nationalism rather than aiming for a post-national world that will never exist, and the pursuit of which only inflames nationalist sentiment.
Deference to authority is also human-natural, which didn't stop science from existing and rising. I guess I am just more optimistic on the topic.
Science also requires deference to authority: deference to scientific authority. It might be a more "rational" form of deference, but it is still well within the bounds of human nature.
Similarly, if we want to advance humanity, we need to work with humanity's natural instincts, which include groupishness, rather than denying them or futilely attempting to stamp them out of existence.
It exploited the instinct to turn it away from "Aristotle could never be wrong" style of deference into "respect the books" - that's why we aren't all eating kilograms of Vitamin C because Pauling said so. As the saying goes, "trust the expertS, but don't trust any single expert".
Likewise, you could, in principle, exploit groupishness to merge people around a larger flag that's not linked to any single nation or some such group.
You can indeed merge people around a larger flag—that's the origin of nationalism, as opposed to local tribalisms. But at a certain point, the flag becomes too expansive to unite people. After all, a flag is only an effective rallying point if it corresponds to a concrete shared identity.
The EU is a case in point, as transnational institutions have less democratic legitimacy than nations rooted in a specific history. You could build a strong pan-European identity over time, but in that case, you'd essentially be turning Europe into a nation (easier said than done).
Well, in that case you can say I have trust in building a nation of liberal humanity :P Also, I don't think democratic legitimacy is a coherent concept.