MOSAIC: Nationalism and Future of Western Freedom – PART V

T. Belman. In essence this is the struggle Israel has waged since its founding. In 1896, Herzl launched the effort to create a Jewish state. It was the age of nationalism. That age ended in WWII when nationalism was discredited to be displaced by universalism, United Nations, European Union, multiculturalism, diversity, and globalism. All these forces have attempted to destroy Zionism, the last bastion of nationalism.

Not only has the nation state been discredited but so has the nation.

Thankfully nationalism is coming back as witnessed by Brexit, the rise of Trump and the rise of nationalistic parties in Europe. The state of Israel is a testament to its virtues.

THIS PROFOUND ESSAY WILL BE PUBLISHED IN SIX PARTS.

A conflict is brewing over the shape of the international order. It centers around an idea—a biblical idea—long thought discredited by political elites.

By Yoram Hazony, MOSAIC

PART I, PART II, PART III, PART IV

V. The New Universalism

Until not very long ago, support for the independence and self-determination of nations was an indication of a progressive politics and a generous spirit. It was not only American independence that well-meaning and decent people celebrated each year with fireworks and music, parades, church bells, and barbeques. As late as the middle of the 20th century, the establishment of self-determining national states like Greece, Italy, and Poland, no less than Israel, India, and Ethiopia, was widely hailed as a victory for morality and enlightened opinion, and associated with progressive intellectual and political figures like John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson.

But at the same time, a tidal shift in attitudes toward expressions of national and religious particularism was getting under way in Europe and the United States. As the West wrestled to make sense of the monstrous crimes that German forces had committed against the Jews and other groups and peoples, it was impossible to miss the connection between Nazi race theories, which provided the normative framework for these crimes, and anti-Semitic themes that had been ubiquitous in German thought going back at least to Luther. Soon enough, the German government’s decision to murder the world’s Jews was being attributed—first by leftists and Communists, and then also by liberals—to German “nationalism.” By the 1960s at the latest, the revulsion against Nazi genocide, a category into which other evils such as racial segregation in the American south and South African apartheid were often assimilated, was moving liberal elites toward an identification of national or religious particularism of any kind with Nazism and racism.

This line of thought was never altogether coherent. Despite the appearance of the word “national” in the name of the German National Socialist party, Hitler was no advocate of nationalism. He was a harsh critic not only of the Protestant construction in general but of the institution of the national state in particular, which he saw as an effete contrivance of the English and French and vastly inferior to the Germans’ historic imperial legacy. In place of the order of national states, he set out to establish a Third Reich that expressly drew its inspiration from the “First Reich”—that is, from the German Holy Roman Empire with its universal aspirations and thousand-year reign. Hitler’s Germany was thus an imperial state in every sense, seeking to put an end to the principle of the national independence and the self-determination of peoples once and for all.

Nor is there any sense in which Germany’s effort to destroy the Jews can be seen as resulting from the Westphalian principle of national self-determination. The Nazi extermination program, directed at all of the Jews in Poland, Russia, and the rest of Europe and North Africa, was not a national policy but a global one, exerting influence as far away as the Shanghai Jewish ghetto established by the Japanese at the Nazis’ behest. It could not have been conceived or attempted outside the context of Hitler’s attempt to revive and perfect longstanding German aspirations to universal empire.

These things were perfectly clear during the war itself. In their radio broadcasts, the United States and Britain consistently emphasized that as an alliance of independent nations, their aim was to restore the independence and self-determination of national states throughout Europe. And in the end, it was American, British, and Russian nationalism—even Stalin had abandoned Marxist claptrap about “world revolution” in favor of open appeals to Russian patriotism—that defeated Germany’s bid for world empire.

But none of this seemed significant to Western liberals, who moved swiftly after the war toward the view that, in light of German atrocities, national independence could no longer be accepted as the basis for the international order. Among the most ardent of the new anti-nationalists was the West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, who repeatedly called for the creation of a federal European union, arguing that only the elimination of the national state could prevent a repetition of the horrors of the war. As he wrote in his book World Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for All(English edition, 1955):

The age of national states has come to an end. . . . We in Europe must break ourselves of the habit of thinking in terms of national states. . . . European agreements . . . are intended to make war among European nations impossible in the future. . . . If the idea of European community should survive for 50 years, there will never again be a European war.

According to this way of thinking, the answer to the overwhelming evil of Nazi-era Germany was to dismantle the system of independent nation states that had given Germany the right to make decisions for itself, and to replace it with an overarching European union that would be capable of restraining Germany. Take away German self-determination, and you would bring prosperity and peace to Europe.

The argument that eliminating the national states of Europe was meant to “restrain” Germany is repeated endlessly in Europe today. But it is closer to being a good joke than competent political analysis. The German-speaking peoples of central Europe never really had a national state to speak of. There was no German history of national unity and independence comparable to that of Britain, France, or the Netherlands. Those West European nations had not feared the Germans because of their nationalism, but because of their universalism and imperialism—their aim of bringing peace to Europe by unifying it under a German emperor. It was this tradition that had made it so easy for Kant, the preeminent German philosopher of enlightenment, to assert that the only rational form of government would be one in which the national states of Europe (and later the world) would be dismantled in favor of a single universal government that would usher in an era of “perpetual peace.” In repeating this theory, Kant offered yet another version of the German-led Holy Roman Empire.

Adenauer’s mid-20th-century proposals to restrain Germany by eliminating the Westphalian system of national states did not, for this reason, envision Germans giving up very much. The chancellor was in fact only reiterating a venerable German tradition as to what political arrangements in Europe should look like. By contrast, nations that had won their independence from the German emperors at such cost three or four centuries earlier were being asked to make quite a considerable sacrifice for the sake of the promised peace and prosperity.

In supporting the idea of unification on the European continent, both the British and the Americans, for their part, thought that their own national independence would not be affected. But they miscalculated. The Kantian argument for the moral superiority of international government cannot coexist in a single political order with the principle of national independence. Once that argument was unleashed again in postwar Europe, it quickly demolished the commitment to the Protestant construction previously held by much of the educated elite in Britain and even America. And this collapse only made sense. After all, why should anyone want to stand up for the idea of national independence, if national independence is what had brought the Holocaust and the horrors of two world wars?

The result is the political landscape we see around us. Advocate the virtues of the national state today, and you are not recognized as strengthening the foundations of the political order on which the West’s freedoms were built. Instead, you are seeking to revive national and religious particularism, which is now considered akin to racism or fascism—the bad old world that was supposed to have died in 1945.