Ethno-Nationalism for Liberals
In Heaven the cooks are French, the policemen are English, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and the bankers are Swiss.
In Hell the cooks are English, the policemen are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss and the bankers are Italian.
Naturally it’s a mistake to take a silly old joke like this seriously. And yet the joke is at least comprehensible. We might quibble about the virtues of British versus French cuisine, but the idea that there is a national character is something that makes intuitive sense – at least enough for the joke to land. And so what is culture? What effect does it have on laws, roles and institutions? And what does that tell us about ethno-nationalism?
This isn’t an attempt to persuade you of ethno-nationalism if you’re a liberal. But there is a big gulf of understanding between liberals and ethno-nationalists, and this is an attempt to bridge that chasm at least somewhat.
When people talk about ethno-nationalism it’s easy to presume that the “ethno” part indicates some sort of crude racism. And I’m not going argue that such crude racism doesn’t exist. But I also want to point out that ethnicity encompasses both genes and culture. Indeed, both definitionally and in practice the two are deeply intertwined. Knowing someone’s ethnicity doesn’t just tell you about the colour of their skin but also about their religion and language too.
The term ethno-nationalism tends to be applied some particular policy prescriptions, but this is an implementation detail. What I’m trying to get at here is the underlying philosophy and the set of over-arching concerns that makes the division of nations along ethnic lines make sense.
Western liberals tend to trust in their laws and institutions. To some extent they see these as the engine of their prosperity and success: anyone could achieve good outcomes if they adopted the correct framework of democracy and regulated markets.
But what would happen to your country’s institutions if you replaced the entire population with that of another country? Would laws continue to be enforced in the same way? Theodore Dalrymple reflected on his time in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) as a newly-qualified doctor:
The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. […] In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes.
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It is easy to see why a civil service, controlled and manned in its upper reaches by whites, could remain efficient and uncorrupt but could not long do so when manned by Africans who were supposed to follow the same rules and procedures. The same is true, of course, for every other administrative activity, public or private. The thick network of social obligations explains why, while it would have been out of the question to bribe most Rhodesian bureaucrats, yet in only a few years it would have been out of the question not to try to bribe most Zimbabwean ones, whose relatives would have condemned them for failing to obtain on their behalf all the advantages their official opportunities might provide. Thus do the very same tasks in the very same offices carried out by people of different cultural and social backgrounds result in very different outcomes.
Despite following ostensibly the same rules, the culture has a big impact on how those rules are followed.
When we design institutions (and more frequently, when we try to codify the design of an evolved institution), there are a lot of cultural background assumptions that go into that design. For example, we hold that the rules we create have legitimacy, we assume that they apply to everyone equally, we generally trust each other not to favour family over others, and we assume that people act according to their own conscience rather than out of tribal loyalty.
These assumptions may not hold for all cultures.
Much of what works in society runs on trust. Go out into the countryside in the UK and you will see unattended stalls outside people’s homes selling eggs or vegetables with just an honesty box for payment. Even in cities supermarkets have goods that you can just pick up off the shelf. Valuable works of art are displayed in art galleries that you can just walk into, with nothing to protect them. In the town where my parents live they are still fairly relaxed about locking their door. And while you risk getting surprised by an occasional ticket inspection, there are quite a few journeys you can make on public transport in this country without having to show a ticket. “Tiptoe through Ravenscourt Park and you won’t wake the guards,” as a friend once said to me as a teenager in the nineties.
Trust allows us to reduce enforcement costs, meaning that we can spend our energies elsewhere. Low enforcement costs make it feasible to run small scale operations such as selling a few eggs from one’s front gate. The level of trust that sustains these systems is fragile. People’s behaviour in a big city is notably different from what it is in a rural village.
Over my lifetime I’ve seen the changes wrought by terrorism on my native city of London. In the 1980’s and 90’s we lost litter bins in public places as the IRA insisted on hiding bombs in them. Then in the 2000’s ugly security barriers went up near parliament and on the major bridges to deal with Islamic terrorism.
There is substantial evidence that ethnic diversity is negatively correlated with social trust. Naturally, there is much disagreement about how to interpret these results. How much is socio-economic status a confounder? What effect do specific patterns of diversity and integration have? What is the appropriate measure of trust? And so on, and so on. But it’s not unreasonable to take the correlation seriously.
Beyond just trust there’s also pro-social behaviour. Putting unwanted possessions outside one’s house with a “free to a good home” sign, forming an orderly queue at a bus stop, picking up litter. All these things require some sense of being part of a community.
It’s a reasonable hypothesis that creating a sense of community is easier in a culturally homogeneous environment. Shared manners grease the wheels of social interaction, even when these are quite trivial things. Is it acceptable to listen to music out loud on a train? How close does one stand while having a friendly conversation? Is it acceptable to spit in the street? Getting these things wrong – from one or the the other party’s point of view – is a source of discomfort and friction.
Westerners don’t have much place for loyalty in their ethics, at least not to specific people. To the extent that people in Western societies have regard for personal loyalty as a value, they tend to be low-status, working class types. In polite society we frown upon anyone who places personal loyalty or nepotism above abstract principles of fairness or merit. Peter Singer’s style of utilitarianism that refuses to prioritise the lives of those close to us over those in other countries holds a strong fascination among Western intellectuals and is the backbone of high-status movements such as EA. Naturally there’s often a large gap between stated values and practice here. But the dominant moral and intellectual framework can’t justify any sort of favouritism.
The liberal approach is to say that we should cultivate a care for humanity as a whole over petty tribal loyalties. This idea is in itself something very specific to Western culture. There are many cultures which have never incorporated this sort of universalism, and which place the advantage of family and tribe over other concerns.
This absence of personal, familial or tribal loyalty in the West makes us blind to its importance for just about any other culture. Most people operate within the concentric circles of decreasing concern: immediate family, extended family, friends, local community, country, religion or race, humanity as a whole, life as a whole. They support their local football team merely because it is local. The honour killings that are so incomprehensible to a Westerner are tied up with the importance of tribal bonds. Likewise the corruption that Dalrymple describes above.
In much of the West we have the luxury of assuming that a person’s goals and actions are personal and individual. (Though there are political theories that emphasise the importance of one’s group identity, such as Marxism or more recently Critical Race Theory.) However, we can see instances where tribal loyalty does come to the fore, and the consequences can be disastrous: Northern Ireland has been wrestling with that for many years.
There is a big difference in the dynamic of one person coming to a country as opposed to a large number. If one person immigrates to a country then they will have to do some work to fit into the local community. This doesn’t mean that they have to lose their perspective as an immigrant, but they will have to learn the local language, pick up the customs, and obey the rules of their new home. If a large group comes into a country, on the other hand, and particularly if they cluster into their own community, they don’t have to learn the language or the customs, and by virtue of their presence as a group they can create their own local rules, at least to some degree.
There’s a common assumption that even if first generation immigrants don’t assimilate to the culture of their new home, the second generation who grow up there will become assimilated automatically. But once there is a distinct immigrant community, with its own faith schools and so on, those children may have little opportunity or need to interact with the native culture. The larger the immigrant community, the less opportunity there is to integrate with the native culture.
If there are a sufficient number of immigrants forming a coordinated voting block then they get to codify their local rules into law. Even before that happens their presence as a community means that they can enforce local rules even where they contradict the law. There’s a limit to what the police can enforce without community cooperation.
Indeed, policing has always been fraught in multi-ethnic states. Compare the history of policing during the twentieth century between England and Northern Ireland. In England, the Peelian principles and policing by consent worked well to create an effective, trusted police force. In Northern Ireland the situation was very different. The Royal Ulster Constabulary was majority Protestant and distrusted by the Catholic community. Furthermore, when Catholics did join the force, they were often regarded as traitors by their community.
The Ottoman Empire’s solution to the problem of policing an ethnically diverse population was the “millet system” which devolved some aspects of law-making and enforcement to the various religious communities under its rule. If the West adopted this system for its various immigrant communities then it could only be regarded a failure of liberalism’s universalism.
“From now on I’m thinking only of me.”
Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: “But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.”
“Then,” said Yossarian, “I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”
What if Yossarian had said, “from now on I’m thinking only of my tribe?”
What constitutes rational behaviour depends largely on the expected behaviour of others. Solidifying your own group identity can be a rational response to the presence of another group that sees you as an outsider. The group provides protection against other groups, and membership of a group is only achieved through demonstrations of loyalty.
Liberalism and multiculturalism may work when you can count on others to also be liberal and multicultural, but if you haven’t carefully laid that groundwork then new arrivals may not share those values. They may still see themselves as part of their own tribe. There is no reason to expect that bringing a bunch of disparate cultures together will cause multiculturalism to emerge spontaneously. It is not the default in human societies. It is the product of a very specific culture.
Some people love travel. They love to be immersed in an unfamiliar culture. They enjoy the challenge of making themselves understood armed with only a phrasebook and some enthusiastic gesturing. They crave freshness and novelty.
But for every person for whom this is an exciting challenge and learning experience, there is another for whom it is their personal vision of hell. There are cognitive styles that do not cope well with unfamiliarity and change, and find it stressful to navigate. There is nothing intrinsically morally wrong with having a preference for stability and predictability and trying to satisfy it where possible. Even if you are very positive about other cultures in the abstract, and even in the particular when you meet them, preferring to be surrounded by the culture that you know well is still a legitimate preference.
These people are often dismissed as stuffy and boring. (“Gammons” to put it in early 2020’s parlance. Or “Hobbits” to use Mencius Moldbug’s nomenclature.) But if we care about people’s legitimate preferences, we should have at least some sympathy for them. The world can’t be frozen so that nothing ever happens, but there are policies that are more or less friendly to that desire for stability and continuity.
If you want excitement and change and difference you are free to go on holiday to another country. But if you want stability while other countries are unstoppably coming to you then where can you go?
George Orwell wrote of Mein Kampf:
Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.
At the end of the day, the liberal thinks, we’re all just humans and everyone is just trying to live their lives in peace and comfort. Not only is this an incomplete view of what humanity wants, it is also an erroneous assumption of the uniformity of humanity.
Multi-culturalism doesn’t take culture seriously. It doesn’t take seriously the differences in ethical frameworks between people. Liberals think that multiculturalism means having a Chinese restaurant next to a Lebanese bakery – they get to sample the culinary delights of the world all on their doorstep. And maybe there are some curious ceremonies and celebrations in the name of gods that they no more believe in than they do the Christianity of their great-grandparents. But that is all that culture is to them.
But perhaps people not only want struggle and self-sacrifice, but also will struggle and sacrifice for different ends from culture to culture. What is to be done with gays? What is to be done with apostates? Taking culture seriously means acknowledging that there are cultures that are very much at odds with liberalism.
You might be an ethno-nationalist
“Self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law,” Wikipedia tells us. And yet, what is this self? We might not be supporters of Scottish or Quebecois independence, for example. But to the extent that those movements make sense, they do so because we recognise that the groups involved feel themselves to be distinct from the UK or Canada respectively. And that difference is not a mere line on a map, but one that comes from having – by virtue of history, tradition and descent – a different ethnicity. Or consider the Israel-Palestine conflict: the moderate and widely-favoured two-state solution – the solution that the peace process has been trying to work towards for decades – is predicated upon ethno-nationalism.
Ethno-nationalism has a bad name, but most people are, at least some of the time, ethno-nationalists.