The Return of Ethnic Nationalism

Feb 26, 2008, by Patrick J. Buchanan:

In Africa last week, President Bush deplored the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, defended his refusal to send U.S. troops to Darfur and decried the ethnic slaughter in Kenya.

Following a fraudulent election, the Kikyu, the dominant tribe in Kenya, have been subjected to merciless assault. People are separating from one another and butchering one another along lines of blood and soil.

According to a compelling lead article in the new Foreign Affairs, “Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism,” we may be witnessing in the Third World a re-enactment of the ethnic wars that tore Europe to pieces in the 20th century.

“Ethnonationalism,” writes history professor Jerry Z. Muller of Catholic University, “has played a more profound role in modern history than is commonly understood, and the processes that led to the dominance of the ethnonational state and the separation of ethnic groups in Europe are likely to recur elsewhere.”

Western Man has mis-taught himself his own history.

Writes Muller: “A familiar and influential narrative of 20th-century European history argues that nationalism twice led to war, in 1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, Europeans concluded that nationalism was a danger and gradually abandoned it. In the post-war decades, Western Europeans enmeshed themselves in a web of transnational institutions, culminating in the European Union.”

Muller contends that this is a myth, that peace came to the Old Continent only after the triumph of ethnonationalism, after the peoples of Europe had sorted themselves out and each achieved its own home.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were three multi-ethnic empires in Europe: the Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian. The ethnonationalist Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 tore at the first.

World War I was ignited by Serbs seeking to rip Bosnia away from Austria-Hungary. After four years of slaughter, the Serbs succeeded, and ethnonationalism triumphed in Europe ...

At the end of World War II, Europe’s nations were more ethnically homogenous than they had ever been, at a horrendous cost in blood.

After 45 years of Cold War, the remaining multi-ethnic states – the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia – broke up into more than two dozen nation-states, all rooted in ethnonationlism.

As Muller argues, ethnonationalism may be a precondition of liberal democracy. Only after all the tribes of Europe had their own ethnically homogenous nation-states did peace and comity come. And what happened in Europe in the 20th century may be a precursor of what is to come in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

In China, Uighurs, Mongolians and Tibetans all resist assimilation. Tatarstan may be the next problem for Russia. In the Balkans, it is Kosovo. Serbs there and in Bosnia may emulate the Albanians and secede.

Americans, writes Muller, “find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that this is a product not of nature but of culture. …

“But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away.”

Indeed, we see it bubbling up from the Basque country of Spain, to Belgium, Bolivia, Baghdad and Beirut. Perhaps the wisest counsel for the United States may be to get out of the way of this elemental force. Rather than seek to halt the inexorable, we should seek to accommodate it and ameliorate its sometimes awful consequences.

And we should look to our own land. According to Pew Research, there will be 127 million Hispanics here by mid-century, tripling today’s 45 million – and almost 100 million new immigrants. No nation faces a graver threat from this resurgence of ethnonationalism than does our own.

Look homeward, America.

Via NPI

Gotta love common sense. Give everyone their own space. What a crazy idea. Enough with diversity. OK, so some people do like diversity: I declare them a unique species in need of their own space too. Of course, this may involve giving away parts of your country - but better to cut your losses than to proceed with the demographic takeover and inevitable conflict. And some nations will end up with feral neighbours. But that's the best we can do, I reckon.

Unity is an essential asset to nuture for self-defence, and that is best done in isolation. So if your neighbours do turn out feral, at least you're defending from a position of strength.