The intellectual and moral weakness of European National Conservatism.
My journey as an immigrant in Europe has enlightened me to the stark differences between what is meant by nationhood and what constitutes the nation. These ideas, in themselves, are quintessentially European. The nation-state, being fully the creation of European statecraft, is the concept by which a defined people live inside a defined territory. The state represents their shared group identity. Mechanical and clean, the nation-state operates by and for the nation. But what or who is the nation? This is the matter of great debate, not only in Europe, but across the globe.
construction of the modern state
The nation-state is said to begin in the aftermath of the bloody sectarian Thirty Years’ War with the duel treaties collectively labeled the Peace of Westphalia. Out of this peace, a new form of internal sovereignty was established in Europe which called for states to respect the territorial boundaries of their neighbors and to withhold from interfering in other states' internal affairs. These boundaries created a state which was therefore responsible not to the powers outside its borders but to the powers from within. This delineation of power as being domestic and not foreign kicked off what we may call the ‘modern state,’ a state with defined boundaries and defined membership, led by an internal sovereign in social contract with its defined members and with a monopoly of violence in the social order.
The question of membership is the question of who is the nation. The nation that developed in Europe is complicated. While today, we may view nationality as being obvious to all observers. In the 17th century when the Peace was established, the idea of clear nationhood was more opaque. The most common definition of nationhood was in language. But language of the 17th century was varied, parochial, widespread, and not contained by established political borders. For example, German speakers lived across all the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, including present day Austria, Poland, and Belgium. But German speakers also lived in areas outside the empire: Prussia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and France. Furthermore, every language spread over the continent was rife with regional dialects and differences that made the idea of a single conceptual language difficult to operationalize.
The passage of time has helped make linguistic conceptions of nationhood easier to accept. Through the coming centuries of war, revolution, and turmoil. Linguistic borders made for easier forms of discirmination. If you are at war with the German empire then you are also at war with the German people, and if there are German speaking people within your own state, they are obvious threats to the war effort. This crystallization of peoples being associated with a particular state was new. The previous conflicts of Europe split along religious or elite lines of dispute. One king fighting with another prince and using whatever peoples at their disposal to see the war won. A Catholic lord attempting to put down a Luthern insurrection.
developments in modern nationhood
The creation of nationhood based on linguistic and cultural similarities also led to the greatest form of crime in human history: the murder of a nation, genocide. The forced destruction of another people comes directly from the creation of the nation. Conceptions of nationhood lead to the creation of national myths, of stories that reinforce the legendary nature of the nation. National myths instill a sense of pride, a sense of pride can birth chauvinism, and equipped with chauvinistic nationalism, the nation can set out to destroy ‘other’ nations.
Through two world wars in the 20th century, Europe showed the world the destructive force of nationalism. The First World War, born of tangled alliances and nationalist interests, smashed the multinational states of Europe. The Hapsburg dominated Austro-Hungarian empire dissolved following the war that had started on their soil as an outgrowth of Serbian nationalism. And the Ottoman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own technological and political stagnation, to be carved up like a cow by the butchers of imperialist France and Great Britain. The Second World War brought greater horrors, the natural destination of nationalism was born out in the genocide of Jews in the ultimate act of national chauvinism by Nazi Germany. To hold one’s own nation above all others will naturally lead to the determination that people of other nations hold little to no value in a society dominated by the ‘superior’ nation.
Nationalism is the manifestation of constructed supremacy of one over another. It is the belief that one’s nation is something to be proud of, praised, held aloft as an example for other nations to emulate. Nationalism is, by its very conception, exclusionary. One cannot be a member of all nations and therefore nationalists decide who is, and even more importantly, who isn’t of the nation. The creation of a united ‘we’ necessitates the designation of an ominous ‘them.’
weakness and fear in contemporary nationalism
The conception of nationhood in Europe today comes from a point of relative weakness. I think most European nationalists would refrain from saying their nation is the superior one. Rather they would point to all the threats that could weaken their precious culture. The increased Americanization of commercialism including the power of English as the commercial lingua franca. The flagging European identity which seeks to unite the nations of Europe under the political boundaries of the European Union. The influx of people from afar, who speak different tongues, worship different gods, and practice different customs. All these threats to the European nationalist are existential.
I find the arguments of the European nationalist to be intellectually weak, born of emotion more than reason. The premise of European nationalists is that a culture is in need of preserving from outside threat. That the ‘nation’ will cease to exist should it be altered in any way. This is an argument lacking in historical introspection. It assumes the nation to stand outside of time, that the nation has been unitary and knowable since time immemorial. To argue that no outside forces should ever be allowed to subtly change the character of the nation is a form of historical fiction. All cultures change over time and all cultures are influenced by the cultures they meet, absorb, or even compete against. The English language of today is hardly recognizable with the English language of the 9th century because the language has undergone cultural transformations from the invasion of Scandinavian Vikings in the 9th and 10th centuries, to the Franco-Norman invasion of the 11th, to the spreading of the language across the globe as an imperialist power. I don’t know of any English nationalists who wish to take the language back to it’s pre-Nordic, pre-Franco roots.
European nationalism of today is really an argument that homogeneity is superior to heterogeneity. It is made by politicians who wish to appeal to conservative voters who are afraid of people who don’t look like or speak like them. It's a form of politics by fear. The European nationalist party has to veer into demonization because they have no other political platform. If the ‘other’ is not actually dangerous then why would we need to preserve the nation? It will preserve itself. Nationalism of this sort can only come with the creation of an enemy, it does not exist in abstraction, there can be no political movement for the conservation of the culture of the now if there is not some force attempting to create the culture of the next.
Nationalist parties face the challenge of maintaining popular appeal without appearing as racist and discriminatory. It’s a fine line to walk because nationalist parties attract racists. No one is more easy to discriminate as different from ‘us’ than someone of another race. Nominally, most nationalist parties shy away from these accusations because they ground their arguments in language and culture, but the nasty truth is that all nationalist movements become ethno-nationalist, it’s simply too hard to keep those elements out. I have experienced first hand the ways in which I, as a white American of European origin living in Denmark, am treated differently than immigrants of non-European background. While it took me years to get even somewhat comfortable with speaking the Danish language I was constantly praised by friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Meanwhile, Syrian refugees who had lived here for less than a year spoke the language better than I after four years are constantly looked down upon as a burden to the Danish system, a burden to Danish life.
My conception of nationhood was shaken by moving to Europe. As an America growing up in the United States, the conception of what it means to be an ‘American’ is tied to one’s immigrant origins. Every American will gladly tell you they are half this or a quarter that, a heritage of some non-American background. Because of this conception of the Nation it never occurred to me that the child of Asian immigrants, born and raised in America, were anything other than American. On the contrary, children of immigrants in Denmark, regardless of their birth or native language, are never Danish. Ethnicity is the defining factor, regardless of how culture is dressed in political rhetoric.
To me, Europe has not yet recognized the lessons of their destructive 20th century. Nationalism is born of fear, fear breeds hate, hate justified political exclusion and violence. Europe can never be the shining example of multiculturalism that the European Union supposedly exemplifies because the individual nations are afraid. Fearful that inclusion means destruction. Fearful that integration means negation of ethnic purity. Fearful that the stretching of what of the bounds of the nation would ultimately mean a nation-state ruled by a different nation. Nationalism can never exist without its underlying definitions. Ethnicity and race above else, is the defining factor.
