. . . but war cares about you.
For several years, I’ve been warning that the rise in nationalism will lead to more war. And now it’s happening. Here’s Bloomberg:
This week, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London published the latest edition of its authoritative annual Armed Conflict Survey, and it’s not predicting much peace for the holidays. It paints a grim picture of rising violence in in many regions, of wars chronically resistant to broking of peace. The survey — which addresses regional conflicts rather than the superpower confrontation between China, Russia, the US and its allies — documents 183 conflicts for 2023, the highest number in three decades. . . .
This may seem like a faraway problem, as most of these conflicts occur in Africa, the Middle East and south/central Asia. But as this tweet demonstrates, it is those regions that will increasingly dominate the global population:
And another Bloomberg article suggests that the problem may be spreading to the previously quiet Western Hemisphere:
In a move reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the dictator of Venezuela — Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver and acolyte of leftist strongman Hugo Chávez — sponsored a referendum in his nation last week. The subject was whether to annex a vast region of Guyana adjacent to Venezuela called Essequibo, which represents roughly two-thirds of Guyana’s territory. It is a resource-rich tract with oil, gold, fresh water and timber — and a relatively tiny population of around 100,000. . . .
In his brilliant 2018 book on geopolitics, The Jungle Grows Back, political scientist Robert Kagan laid out the case that the more international norms are eroded somewhere, the faster chaos descends regionally and even globally. It can start to look like the 1930s, when Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan began to grab increasingly large chunks of territory in Europe and Asia, respectively.
Nationalism is not patriotism. It is a zero-sum ideology, which looks at the world through the lens of us vs. them. Nationalism embraces tribalism, protectionism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, militarism, misogyny and homophobia. In my view, it has become the number one problem facing the world today. And if not addressed, I fear that it’s about to get much worse.
PS. I’ve done a number of posts discussing the difference between nationalism and patriotism. Bloomberg has a good article on the subject:
It’s patriotism when love of your own people comes first; it’s nationalism when hate for people other than your own comes first. That definition comes from Charles de Gaulle, a former national hero and president of France.
READER COMMENTS
Jim Glass
Dec 30 2023 at 7:17pm
It’s patriotism when love of your own people comes first; it’s nationalism when hate for people other than your own comes first.
This is the definition of positive versus negative “identity politics” of all kinds.
Identity politics is unavoidable and universal among human beings. We are tribal animals at all levels, fractally. (From cheering madly for your own team to attacking the other team’s fans, upward.) It is in our DNA.
This is the difference between the good and the bad of it.
Jon Murphy
Dec 30 2023 at 8:21pm
All the more reson to reject a political system that fosters such destructive behavior.
Institutions matter.
MarkLouis
Dec 31 2023 at 9:36am
Agree, nationalism is a subset of identity politics.
vince
Dec 30 2023 at 8:22pm
The distinction between nationalism and patriotism is in the eye of the beholder. The two are synonyms and share an almost identical dictionary definition.
john hare
Dec 31 2023 at 4:43am
Dictionary or not, I like the De Gaulle quote for separating the definitions. It somewhat clarifies the difference in a way that I like. The US is my country and I love it. I have worked or dealt with people from dozens of other countries and like them. Further, my wife is from Mexico. The de Gaulle definition has me as a patriot and I like that. I am a nationalist to a lessor degree though not sure how much.
Mark Z
Dec 31 2023 at 11:49am
Yes, I would bet that most Nazis sincerely loved Germany, and Italian fascists sincerely loved Italy. Moreover, they also even engaged in positive-sum thinking in addition to zero-sum thinking (e.g., seeking to improve the infrastructure of their countries). The DeGaulle quote makes for a nice bumper sticked slogan, but you can’t distinguish nationalism from patriotism by positive vs. negative emotions. At most, I think the distinction between the two is a matter of degrees, and the two tend to go hand in hand. Countries, communities, and individuals that reject nationalism also usually tend to reject patriotism as well.
Scott Sumner
Dec 31 2023 at 2:42pm
The distinction is how they are used in the real world. It’s like communism. There’s communism in (Marxist) theory and communism in practice.
vince
Dec 31 2023 at 5:22pm
But they aren’t used in practice in the same way by everyone. Your communism example is good one. That’s another one that a dictionary defines almost identically to socialism. IMO, in many disputes over nationalism and patriotism and over communism and socialism, the two sides have different definitions of the same word.
Warren Platts
Jan 1 2024 at 3:00am
Xi Jinping is a true believing Marxist. He is not cynical. If you don’t believe me, just wade through, if you can, his last 30,000 word address to the PRC “Congress.”
What does that entail for us practically? Answer: China is Communist with a capital “C”.
Alex S.
Dec 30 2023 at 9:53pm
So Venezuela is finally going for it. Socialism is great until you run out of others money to steal. Once that happens just invade your neighbors and wash rinse repeat until the socialist paradise emerges. Very sad. Hopefully the people of Venezuela shoot the plan down if it’s not rigged.
Jon Murphy
Dec 31 2023 at 10:48am
I like the de Gaulle quote, although I don’t think nationalism is simply hate. Real nationalism (that is, nationalism as actually practiced by nationalists as opposed to some hypothetical political idea) does include hatred but also indifference.
For example, Adam Smith’s famous Chinese earthquake thought experiment. Smith posits (I think rightfully for the vast majority of people) that many people would hesitate to spare their little finger at the cost thousands of lives. But a nationalist would say that the finger should be spared, because the thousands of lives lost are not part of the nation and thus irrelevant to the calculation. To put it in crude economic termonology, with hate, the suffering of another enters into a person’s utility function as a positive. With indifference, the other person does not factor into the indifference curve at all.
I think a patriot would sacrifice his finger because a patriot, unlike a nationalist, reconogizes the basic level of human decency we all possess simply for being human.
I’ll note this is not a hypothetical example: read any nationalist economic literature and they will explicitly say that the costs imposed on foreigners is irrelevent.
In a sense, I think the blind indifference is much more sinister that outright hate. Hate is generally recognizable and often condemned. But indifference is hard to see, and thus harder to condemn. It can tolerate great evil simply because it feels the evil is irrelevant. For example, in the Star Wars TV show Andor, most of the bad guys are not evil; they are not the brutal Emperor Palpatine or the hate-filled and violent Darth Vader. Most of them are bureaucrats, just doing their jobs. But, in turn, enabling great evil because they are indifferent to the suffering of the people their actions are affecting.
vince
Dec 31 2023 at 11:42am
The US claims the title and duty of being the policeman of the world. Is that nationalism, patriotism, both, or neither?
Jon Murphy
Dec 31 2023 at 12:02pm
Seperate thing: imperialism
Kurt Schuler
Dec 31 2023 at 8:34pm
Jon Murphy, you are young enough to have no adult memory of the 20th century, so your ignorance is to some degree understandable. There were two world wars within the space of a generation before the United States reluctantly took on the role of the world’s hegemon. There has not been one since. When thinking about politics, libertarians often fall prey to a fallacy they are quick to criticize in economics, that change is as easy as moving men on a chessboard.
Jon Murphy
Jan 1 2024 at 12:50am
Kurt-
I was born in 1989. One of my earliest memories is the collapse of the Soviet Union and I vaguely remember the Bosnian War. But my clearest memories are of post 2000.
But all that aside, I’m afraid I don’t understand your response to me.
Vivian Darkbloom
Jan 1 2024 at 5:38am
I was living and working in Germany when the Berlin Wall Collapsed in November 1989. Even before that date the Soviet Union started to “collapse” with 15 republics gaining full independence in December 1991. Those memories are starting to fade… If you remember all that from your infancy you have a truly phenomenal memory!
Jon Murphy
Jan 1 2024 at 7:16am
Aak me what I had for breakfast and we’ll see how good my memory is 🙂
Just to clarify: i remember being in my mom’s lap and watching the news with her about the republics becoming independent, the removal of the Soviet Flag over the Kremlin, etc. I remember people thinking it was a big deal, but I wouldn’t say that I had any idea of what was going on.
steve
Dec 31 2023 at 11:43am
I dont know whether it would be considered good or bad but it looks like the increase is largely being driven as spillover effects from Russia invading Ukraine leading to food shortages and a change in the nature of the conflicts in parts of Africa. Those are changing to become mostly non-state actors and are rooted in long term ethnic/tribla conflicts mixed with a large criminal element. If you look at their survey map the actual regions involved have not changed much, we just have more groups involved.
That area in Guyana had largely been ignored by both Guyana and Venezuela before they found the oil. It has been contested in the past. I strongly suspect that many more countries than we would hope would try to take over an adjacent area to their country if oil was suddenly discovered and they thought they could get away with it.
Steve
Michael Sandifer
Dec 31 2023 at 10:16pm
Patriots love their country and want to share it with others. Nationalists love the “real citizens” of their country, and want to get rid of and keep the rest out.
Warren Platts
Dec 31 2023 at 11:16pm
I am sorry, but this article and all the comments are making a mishmash of the English language. For starters, there are states. (Statism? Have we heard that before?) A state is a political entity that has a defined physical border that’s ran by a real government, and usually has police and armies. Nations, on the other hand, are ethnic groups composed of people who identify with that ethnic group. Thus a nation state is a state set up for that nation.
But not all states are nation states. Empire states, by definition incorporate many nations within their empire. Imperialism is the doctrine that empires should expand. Nationalism is the doctrine that nations should be allowed their own political self-determination.
Hence the conundrum. Ukraine is a nation state seeking to preserve its borders. The Russian Federation is an empire seeking to expand its borders. Taiwan is a nation state seeking to preserve its borders. The People’s Republic is an empire seeking to expand its borders. The nationalists consider themselves patriots fighting for freedom. For the imperialists, though, the nationalists are secessionist traitors.
This is the source of war. But who shall we apply the blame to? American Trump deplorables! Right? Yes of course!
vince
Jan 1 2024 at 12:59pm
Or is Russia trying to create a buffer from an imperialist antiRussia NATO that is pushing to Russia’s border, a push that included a US-led coup in Ukraine in 2014?
Warren Platts
Jan 1 2024 at 2:17pm
No. I want to push back on that. NATO is not an empire state. It is an alliance of many different nation states so that they can defend themselves from empire states. Yes, Mearsheimer! But Mearsheimer merely proves the point that empire states are the main cause of the big wars. Ukraine is a nation state. Ukrainians are nationalists. The imperialists are Russia, not Ukraine nor NATO.
vince
Jan 1 2024 at 7:27pm
Maybe the imperialist here is not NATO and not even Russia, but a hegemon working through NATO. And maybe Russia is defensively responding to the threat of a hostile alliance pushing to Russia’s border. What would the US if it faced that situation?
Anonymous
Jan 2 2024 at 2:57pm
Obviously NATO was not the cause of the Ukraine war, since there was no recent NATO news that could have triggered the invasion, and there was no prospect of Ukraine joining NATO for many years, let alone in the near future. In any event, if countries near the U.S. joined an “unfriendly” alliance, the U.S. would do nothing (except diplomacy). It certainly would not invade Canada. “I had to invade because my neighbor wanted to join an alliance I don’t like” is pretty bottom of the barrel in terms of justifications.
vince
Jan 2 2024 at 6:34pm
Sure, we only meddle when it DOESN’T involve our border.
vince
Jan 2 2024 at 11:15pm
Then how low is invading other countries that you don’t like that are not your neighbor? There’s been quite a bit of that.
Carl
Jan 3 2024 at 4:47pm
The timing doesn’t make sense for that argument. In 2010 Ukraine had adopted an official non-aligned status. The triggering event in 2014 had nothing to do with NATO; it was Ukraine’s pending EU trade agreement. Then, if you take into account, that Russia had NATO countries on its border in the Baltics and one in Scandinavia that were clearly not doing anything threatening to Russia, you wonder why Russia would choose to invade once in 2014 and again in 2022. And, if Putin’s schemes had worked out in 2022, he would have ended up putting his troops on the border of four more NATO countries.
vince
Jan 3 2024 at 5:30pm
It makes sense to many. Here’s a start: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/29/1076193616/ukraine-russia-nato-explainer
Carl
Jan 3 2024 at 6:20pm
From the article:
“the more Putin has tried to control Ukraine and its foreign policy, the more he has pushed Ukrainians themselves to look toward the West, experts said.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 was a major turning point. Afterward, popular support for joining NATO rose among Ukrainians, who had once been more ambivalent about the alliance.”
In other words, there was no increased military threat in 2014 from NATO.
More likely it was Putin’s anxiety about the 2014 EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and what that implied for Russian influence over Ukrainian trade that spurred Putin to attack. When you consider that NATO has been taking the rap from people such as yourself for goading Putin, it is ironic that it was actually Putin who was willing to goad NATO by invading a peaceful European country simply for trying to reorient its trade away from Russia.
vince
Jan 3 2024 at 8:01pm
There’s more to the NPR article than that. For example:
“Obviously, the more it [nato] did to stabilize the situation in central and Eastern Europe and bring them into the West, the more it antagonized the Russians,” he said.
…
“The Russians were always concerned about how far NATO enlargement was going to go. It’s one thing for Poland to come in, or the Czech Republic to come in. That’s not such a big deal. But there was always a concern about Ukraine,” Goldgeier said.
…
Putin himself has long said that he believes Ukrainians and Russians to be a single people, unified by language, culture and religion.
The NPR article is just a start.
Jon Murphy
Jan 1 2024 at 1:50pm
I think the distinction between nationalism and patriotism has become way more important in the 20th and 21st centuries, as countries have become multi-national. “Nation” and “Country” are often used interchangably, but, of course, they’re not the same thing.
Patriotism, especially American-style patriotism, is unifying under the idea of the country. All the residents of the country, regardless of race, creed, nation, etc., are equal. We all deserve the equal protection of the law.
Nationalism, on the other hand, is divisive. To the extend it tries to equate nation and country, nationalism’s goal is to seperate citizens and residents into classes of citizens: the “real” nationals (who should be “in charge” of the country), and everyone else.
Within a country, many nations can cooperate and work in peace. Within a nationalist country, other nations cannot cooperate and work in peace.
Warren Platts
Jan 2 2024 at 7:41am
Orwellian duckspeak of the worst kind. You guys should just come out and say what you really mean: that empires (“countries where many nations can cooperate and work in peace”) are the path to peace and prosperity, and that logically, Libertarianism thus implies that a one world government empire state would be the ideal solution to everything..
What is scary is when is someone like Scott Sumner says “Nationalism embraces tribalism, protectionism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, militarism, misogyny and homophobia.” This of course code for people inclined to reelect Trump or someone else of the same ilk. In Sumner’s view, that’s the number one problem facing the world today. But the real money quote is, “And if not addressed ….” What does “if not addressed” really mean? Having an election and letting the chips fall where they may? Nope…. Of course not. Hence the solution to Trumpian authoritarianism is Libertarian totalitarianism.
Jon Murphy
Jan 2 2024 at 9:08am
Given how much libertarians oppose imperialism and support the predominance of individualism, as well as staunch opposition to supranational bodies like the UN, prima facie its odd to claim libertarianism “implies” imperialism. Some evidence to back up your assertion would be nice. Or even a logical chain of events. But mere assertion doesn’t get much when the evidence is strong in the other direction.
Broadening the band beyond just libertarians, while there was a strain of classical liberal thought that considered imperialism as a means to peace (see, eg, the British Imperialists), classical liberalism nowadays opposes imperalism. Indeed, you’ll see many classical liberals both older (Smith, Hume, etc) and more modern (Hayek, Mises, Coyne, Boudreaux, myself, etc) staunchly oppose imperialist ventures. Indeed, the polycentrism of a multinational global order is preferable.
The only ones I see openly advocating such global imperialism are the neocons who think it’s the US’ role to be the world police and whatnot.
Warren Platts
Jan 3 2024 at 2:56pm
Jon, you are all over the map and thus not making any sense. The logic of Libertarian totalitarianism is this: you don’t like borders. Thus in a world without borders, there is only one border: Outer Space. There would be a one world, global empire. The only question is who or what and how that system would be ran.
The problem is nationalists worldwide would still want their own little nation states. Therefore, a toothless UN would not be capable of maintaining tariff-free trade among individuals from opposite sides of the planet. Thus, a toothful entity will be required. Something like the “People’s Republic.
Your idea that “polycentrism of a multinational global order is preferable” sounds almost like it was cribbed from Alexandre Dugin, the Russian imperialist philosopher whose work is mandatory reading at Russian military academies. But I think it was a Canadian philosopher who said, “you aren’t going to like what comes after America….”
Jon Murphy
Jan 2 2024 at 10:26am
By the way, if anyone wants a good primer on classical liberal international relations theory, I highly recommend Edwin van de Haar’s 2023 book Human Nature and World Affairs.
It’s an excellent book that, as far as I know, is the first to bring international relations theory developed by classical liberal thinkers in scattered publications into a single place.
vince
Jan 2 2024 at 12:16pm
Noteworthy is that there were no new wars under Trump.
Jon Murphy
Jan 2 2024 at 12:39pm
Excluding the continued intervention in various global conflicts, Trump did get us involved in numerous Middle East and Africa conflicts. Various reports from inside his cabinet he wanted more wars, but his advisors talked him down.
If he won in 2020, I wonder how he would have reacted to Ukraine invasion and Israel invasion.
Carl
Jan 1 2024 at 7:34pm
I wonder if you should just use the term “jingoism” instead of “nationalism” since it always has the connotation of bellicosity and national chauvinism and never refers to just simple patriotism. That said, when I look at the IISS conflict trends map, https://www.iiss.org/en/publications/armed-conflict-survey/2023/iiss-conflict-trends-map/, I notice that a lot of the conflicts seem to be religious in nature ( e.g. Kashmir, Palestine, Burkina Faso) and not due to nationalism or jingoism.
Jon Murphy
Jan 1 2024 at 8:12pm
For that reason, I think “nationalism” is better than jingoism. Nationalism encompasses religions (eg Christian nationalism).
Carl
Jan 2 2024 at 6:09pm
Fair point. The term “jingoism” doesn’t connote religious motivation.
That said, lumping together the motives of Iran in Yemen and Gaza and Boko Haram in Burkina-Faso with those of Venezuela in Guyana, Russia in Ukraine and China in Taiwan is problematic. They run the gamut from religious reactionism to simple extractive colonialism to imperialism to straightforward nationalism. What may appear to be a rising tide of nationalism may simply be evidence of the receding ability of the hegemon to constrain regional bullies.
I think the distinction matters because looking at it as a rising tide can lead to solutions that make sense in a more bi-polar world like the one that existed during the Cold War but do not make sense in the more multi-polar world that seems to be emerging today.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 3 2024 at 8:05pm
Regardless of the labels we choose, can we at least agree that attacking non-threatening countries is bad?
Jim Glass
Jan 7 2024 at 2:06am
Nope, “we” can’t even agree who is non-threatening. Putin thinks an independent Ukraine is threatening to him. Xi thinks Taiwan is threatening to the CCP, as Hong Kong was. We thought Iraq was threatening to us — that war’s authorization vote passed the Senate 77-23, and House 296-133.
But regardless of all that, the fundamental strategy for preventing war has been known since Roman times: “Be very strong and don’t attack anybody”. It’s remained the core concept from the Pax Romana right through Thomas Schelling’s nuclear war deterrence game theory.
Of course, it’s not always going to work even if used as it should be. Externally, inevitably there will be players who calculate they can get away with something. Internally, there will be factions that figure “If we are spending all this on being strong, why don’t we use it instead of waste it?” (the Prussians just before WWI), and factions saying “Why are we wasting so much spending on what we are never going to use, let’s cut back”, which reduces one’s strength and/or others’ perceptions of it, encouraging external actors to think they can get away with something. (See the video of Osama bin Laden telling his minions they can get away with anything after the USA did nothing in response to the bombing of the USS Cole.) Etc.
The world of international violence is anarchic. Stuff is going to happen. (Schelling was a story advisor to Kubrick on “Doctor Strangelove.”)
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