I’ve done a number of posts (here and here) discussing the internal contradictions of nationalism. One example:
[I]f all countries become nationalistic, they will end up clashing with each other. No such contradiction exists for neoliberalism.
Janan Ganesh has a great article discussing this issue, which begins as follows:
Bill Hicks, the late comic and grouch, dreamt of a political party for “people who hate people”. He just couldn’t get them to come together in the same room. The great egoist movement was undone by its central principle.
I think of the skit whenever the world brotherhood of jingoist authoritarians is talked up. US president Donald Trump is in this group, with, among others, the leaders of China (Xi Jinping), Russia (Vladimir Putin), India (Narendra Modi) and Brazil (Jair Bolsonaro). Mr Trump and Mr Xi are superpower rivals, America cancelled India’s preferential trading status, and still the idea of a Nationalist International survives.
It should not survive the coronavirus pandemic. Recent months have further teased out the differences between these conflated governments. Their domestic autocracy is real enough, but their coherence as a bloc is overstated. Liberalism is not confronted by anything like a unified opponent.
Read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
Shane L
Apr 23 2020 at 5:58am
I was struck by this in discussions with right-nationalist Americans who were keen that Europeans become more nationalist. They seemed to think that nationalist Europeans would be reinvigorated in a struggle with other perceived civilisations, particularly “Islam”.
Instead, it seemed to me that European nationalists would split the West into lots of small, bitterly competing states, anti-American in the face of American cultural dominance. The old enemy for most European nationalists is the country next door or the culture on tv, not some distant civilisation.
This may be why the Russian government has backed European far-right nationalists, knowing that they would undermine European/Western coherence.
Jens
Apr 23 2020 at 9:35am
That is of course true. And European nationalists hate Islam *and* transatlantic cooperation. Some hate this more and some that. In fact some Identitarians probably think, that Islam has to be kept out of Europe, but that it has more identity than the US (whatever that means). And with Trump defending (any form of) transatlantic cooperation has become very, very hard in Europe. Things change and so does the transatlantic relationship, but the current mode is nonsensical for every halfway decent person.
Scott Sumner
Apr 23 2020 at 12:18pm
Exactly.
Shyam Vasudevan
Apr 23 2020 at 9:50am
Lumping Modi, Trump and Bolsonaro with the likes of Xi, Putin, Erdogan and Orban does a disservice to the former. Trump is constrained by U.S. institutions and the Constitution and has no authority to shutdown the U.S. His main role is to cheerlead Congress and state and local responses (which he has done a bad job of). Despite personal distaste, Bolosnaro and Modi are broadly popular in their countries and are subject to regular elections. The latter group are true authoritarians but are constrained by domestic political concerns and each of their peculiar brands of nationalism. It makes even less sense lumping in normal conservatives such as Johnson and Morrison with this group. This analysis obscures more than it illuminates.
Scott Sumner
Apr 24 2020 at 1:41pm
Bolsonaro favors military dictatorships and torture, so obviously he’s an authoritarian. Modi has been denying basic human rights to Muslims, so I’d also put him in that camp.
It’s true that authoritarians who are embedded in strong democratic regimes do less damage, but that’s a separate issue from whether or not they are authoritarians.
Bernie Sanders is a socialist, but the US would not become socialist just because he was elected.
I’d add that throughout history many undeniable authoritarians have been “broadly popular”.
Mark Brady
Apr 24 2020 at 4:38pm
“Lumping Modi, Trump and Bolsonaro with the likes of Xi, Putin, Erdogan and Orban does a disservice to the former.”
I went back to the article, where Janan Ganesh does not mention either Erdogan or Orban.
Regarding Johnson and Morrison, Ganesh writes, “Notice, too, how gaping are its [the populist world’s] exit doors. By embracing a shutdown, however tardily, and not talking up a relaxation, Boris Johnson is viewed ever more as a “normal” leader. At least before his illness, the UK premier was counted unambiguously among the nativists. Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, after tackling the virus seriously, has undergone a similar reassignment. The nationalist team roster has thinned in a few weeks, which tells you how much rigour the idea ever had.”
Michael Sandifer
Apr 25 2020 at 4:57pm
The saddest thing about all of this is that these were lessons about nationalism that were thought to have been learned by the middle of the 20th century, after 2 calamitous world wars. For all of the criticism one can rightly throw at Wilson and FDR regarding foreign policy, they both at least understood that international frameworks to facilitate cooperation, where possible, were critically important. That’s not multilateralism for it’s own sake, but for the sake of avoiding needless wars, and for bringing countries together to face common challenges, like pandemics and climate problems. Wilson and FDR were certainly not afraid of going to war, but understood, at least to some helpful degree, the international nature of many problems.
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