Guest Post by Jeffrey A. Tucker
Sunetra Gupta became my whisperer early in the pandemic due to her comprehensive understanding of the relationship between society and infectious disease. When I met her in October 2020, and in several interviews since, she highlighted an overlooked feature of the pandemic response: its nationalism.
Every government pretended as if its pandemic response would be juridically efficacious based on borders. Since when have viruses paid any attention to lines on a map? The whole thing is ridiculous but it had to be this way the minute that states decided that they were going to set out to control the pathogen by means of political force. Governments only have juridical control within their borders, while viruses don’t care.
The entire enterprise became gamified early on, with OurWorldInData publishing charts so you could find out which nations were flattening the curve. Was Spain doing better than Germany and how does that compare with France and Portugal? Was Sweden doing better or worse than its neighbors? It was a big competition to see which state was better at crushing its citizens rights.
To complicate matters, the World Health Organization was pushing states to intensify its response even while fueling a kind of virus fear of other states that were not cracking down enough. In addition, we observed the way in which multinational corporations and nonprofit foundations were fully on board with the great effort to mitigate via coercion.
The whole border struggle tapped into a primal fear of the other to the point that even within large juridical areas, sections started turning on each. In the Northeast of the US, people were encouraged to believe that they were staying safe while rubes in Georgia and Florida were infecting everything in sight. And even in the Northeast, individual states set up quarantine rules against each other, as if New Yorkers were dirty people whereas Connecticut residents were more compliant and thus healthier.
At some point in Massachusetts, the fear of dirty people reached absurd lengths, such that Western Massachusetts came to believe that they were clean whereas the virus was circulating uncontrolled in nasty Boston. The same happened in Texas, when people in Austin feared residents coming from Dallas. I myself experienced this early on when traveling from New York: everyone just presumed I was infected.
Nationalism takes many forms and geography is only one of them. The tendency to divide people by any identifiable trait works suitably well to foment divisiveness. When the Biden administration promoted the view that the unvaccinated were spreading the disease, it was not lost on popular opinion that black Americans were vaccinated at far lower rates than white Americans. The result was obvious as it was odious.
The connection between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the growing protectionist trade barriers between the US and China, and the division of the world into warring blocs of interest, received encouragement from nationalistic trends of the virus response. If every other nation is in competition and states have unlimited power over their citizens, the tendency toward intensification of nationalist conflict in general is a result. Just as reduced trade cooperation between nations can drive war tensions, so too extreme nationalist responses to a global pathogenic problem fueled parochialism and inward-looking political movements.
Meanwhile, a political upheaval around the world seems to be favoring political parties and candidates that explicitly rejected lockdowns as a means of virus control and the resulting economic destruction that came with it. That is true in England and Italy and seems to be happening in the US.
The victories of these non-leftist candidates and parties are routinely described as right-wing nationalist but we need to be careful with such claims. The 20th century gave us two kinds of nationalism, one compatible with liberalism classically understood, and another that is inimical to it. The former is chosen, a reflection of the wishes of the community, whereas the latter is forced. It’s impossible to make sober judgments of world affairs today without understanding the difference.
The form of nationalism rooted in organic human choices is best illustrated by the situation in Europe following the Great War. Multinational, multilingual monarchies had fallen apart and war victors were in a position to draw new borders based on some criteria that included history but also language and culture. We ended up with the strange situation in which whole peoples had to lobby foreign leaders in the new carving up of the map.
This is the period in which nationalism by choice became compatible with the aspirations of human liberty. Self determination was the slogan. Ludwig von Mises, a great liberal voice of the period laid out the right principle in 1919: “No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.” The resulting border divisions were far from perfect. In some cases such as Yugoslavia they were egregious. Language divisions would have been better but even those are imperfect because dialects can differ dramatically even within the same language group: Spain is a perfect example.
We can fast forward to the interwar period in which nationalism became a beast. It became imperialist and based on race, language, geography, religion, and hereditary entitlement – the five criteria of nationalist attachment laid out in Ernst Renan’s 1882 essay “What Is a Nation?” The map of Europe turned black due to a bloodlust to purify the nation and expand it based on claims of historical justice.
Renan implicitly accepts the distinction between nations by choice and nation by force. A nation of choice is a
“possession in common of a rich legacy of memories… the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form….The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifices, and devotions. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory (by which I understand genuine glory), this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea.”
On the other hand, writes Renan, a nation by force is a moral outrage.
“A nation has no more right than a king does to say to a province: ‘You belong to me, I am seizing you.’ A province, as far as I am concerned, is its inhabitants; if anyone has the right to be consulted in such an affair, it is the inhabitant. A nation never has any real interest in annexing or holding on to a country against its will. The wish of nations is, all in all, the sole legitimate criterion, the one to which one must always return.
With regard to race, Renan was particularly virulent that race cannot and should never be the basis of nationalism.
Human history is essentially different from zoology, and race is not everything, as it is among the rodents or the felines, and one does not have the right to go through the world fingering people’s skulls, and taking them by the throat saying: ‘You are of our blood; you belong to us!’ Aside from anthropological characteristics, there are such things as reason, justice, the true, and the beautiful, which are the same for all. Be on your guard, for this ethnographic politics is in no way a stable thing and, if today you use it against others, tomorrow you may see it turned against yourselves. Can you be sure that the Germans, who have raised the banner of ethnography so high, will not see the Slavs in their turn analyse the names of villages in Saxony and Lusatia, search for any traces of the Wiltzes or of the Obotrites, and demand recompense for the massacres and the wholesale enslavements that the Ottomans inflicted upon their ancestors? It is good for everyone to know how to forget.
Thus is the spirit of Renan: affection for one’s country, language, or religion is meritorious and peaceful; the use of compulsion in service of identity is not. These days, these two forms of nationalism – one by choice and one by force – are constantly conflated in the news and commentary on world affairs today.
The new prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, for example, has been trashed as a modern-day Mussolini but a close look at the situation on the ground reveals someone who speaks for a people who share a language and history and resents attempts by global organizations such as the European Commission and World Health Organization to take those away. Her nationalism might be of the benign sort and likely is. In any case, the support behind her seems like a justifiable reaction against egregious harms.
While the mainstream media warns of her dangers, no one can deny that a beast of a different sort poses a more immediate threat to the freedoms of all peoples in the world today. The pandemic response was the most conspicuous revelation of it.
For nearly three years, most people in the world have been treated like lab rats in an experiment in bio-technocratic central management by state power, at the urging of once-respected global institutions, and this has resulted in economic crisis, demographic upheaval, and utter political panic. It will be many years before this is sorted out.
The transition will certainly involve the rise of nationalism simply because rallying people around their shared ideals can be an effective tool for beating back a machinery that otherwise seems beyond the capacity of human beings to control. Here again the aspiration is for self determination. There is nothing sinister in that.
People will deploy the remnants of democracy that still exist in order to effect change. If some elites are worried about that, they should have thought twice before locking people in their homes and destroying the means to make a living in the name of compliance with science and at the behest of large-scale industrial interests.
That is not to say there are no dangers associated with all types of nationalism, which is precisely why the pandemic response should never have dabbled in such forms in the first place. The use of force in the conduct of human life will always prompt a blowback simply because rational creatures are not inclined to live permanently in cages. If we can find our way out, humans will do our best to do so, using any tool at our disposal.
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Fuckin’ right.
My fellow citizens who wished death on me can go fuck themselves when they are hungry.
Nationalism, whoever chooses it ~ Machiavellians or Oblivions ~ is a coil in the divide/conquer noose.
Hanging together, hanging separately, heads you hang, tails you swang.
Wasn’t too long ago you wanted to go you went. No nationalists at “the border” stamping permission booklets. And to drive home the wedgie that is the point, your little book of stamps will be scrutinized if you expect to take the easy way across fictional lines.
But the whole southern “border” is stampbook-unnecessary for pedestrians hoofing north these days cuz “borders” are at best discretionary. Nary your discretion, tho; your wedgied buttocks already been branded.
Lets Go Branded?
The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society…People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against… There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Good thing those Bolsheviks made Eastern Europe safe from nationalism, cuz’ ain’t no telling what bad juju might a befell those poor people.
Stalin’s War
Sean McMeekin
The problem with this apologia is that it was not only German
women who were raped as the Red Army crashed into Europe in
1945, but Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, and Czech women too. In
Berlin, in the belly of the Nazi beast, Red Army soldiers raped even
Jewish women, including girls interned at a Holocaust “transit camp”
on Schulstrasse. Fed on Ehrenburg’s agitprop diet of indiscriminate
bloodthirstiness, for most Red Army soldiers it was a matter of “Frau
ist Frau”: a woman is a woman. This kind of thinking was consistent
with the indiscriminate logic of retribution, of atrocity and counteratrocity, that had defined the bloodlands ever since Stalin’s pact with
Hitler had erased the borders of Eastern Europe in September 1939.
It reached its culmination in the expulsion of over six million ethnic
Germans—most of them women, children, and elderly men—from
their homes in areas of Prussia absorbed into western Poland to
accommodate Stalin’s annexation of eastern Poland, followed by
another more than six million German speakers expelled from
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. At least
500,000, and possibly as many as 1.5 million, civilians perished in
this forgotten mass deportation.32
The Soviet mass rapes, civilian murders, and deportations of
1945 were significant not because they were unique, but because
they were a harbinger of what lay in store for anyone liberated by the
Red Army. Eastern Europe had been Sovietized. Next it would be
Asia’s turn.
This writer has no idea what nationalism means.
A true nation must be an organic assemblage consisting of people of like views and values, and not imposed from without, such as the former Czechoslovakia. Catalonia feels separate from Spain, the American South wished to secede, as America seceded from England, and Providence Plantations, which would become the state of Rhode Island, declined to join the new country to the tune of 90% of its residents, and was violently invaded and forced to join. So much for freedom. Let my people go, I say. Be an organic nation.
nation (n.)
c. 1300, nacioun, “a race of people, large group of people with common ancestry and language,” from Old French nacion “birth, rank; descendants, relatives; country, homeland” (12c.) and directly from Latin nationem (nominative natio) “birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe,” literally “that which has been born,” from natus, past participle of nasci “be born” (Old Latin gnasci), from PIE root *gene- “give birth, beget,” with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups.
Maybe an ‘organic nation’, occurring naturally without undue coercion (imposed from without) is possible, but not in this world.
This nation is beyond organics. It’s destined for pyrotechnics.
The Big Nosed Nation will start the fire…
He’s sweet, tho….
It only goes to show that you simply cannot use the word juridicial enough.
Your either a nationalist or a globalist, it’s that fucking simple. In that regard there is no middle ground.
Not so. Simpler than that, tho apparently for many, not easier.
I’m a stranger in a strange land. I’m an island in the stream. Until I am not, I am earthling.
And 3rd party claims, indentures, that I never agreed to ~ & never will ~ don’t apply.
There are only variation, if one believes one Nation, One people by default your a Nationalist. By contrast, if one thinks that they are members of a world community and all have mutual interest, then by default your Globalist. It’s really that simple in my economy. For me that’s the only economy that matters. I am my Nation.
Neat trick. Seemingly. To those who don’t clock the moves.
“If one believes…” is unbounded.
And just look what the bounders (those other bounders) are up to lately. (Well, actually, from the get.)
All the lesser Borgs (thank you very much, say the “gods” who would make all Sisyphus’s singular & the third rock from the sun “theirs” for the robots to roll) are to be rolled up into the really big e. pluribus unum shoe (remember Ed Sullivan?), well boot, on the collectivized nationalized-globalized face, forever.
“If one believes” what? Hard enough? Sounds like “vote harder.”
Then “your economy.” Which is fine. But not if yours includes impressment of me.
And not if it includes any other Quantitative Easing variation, either. (More-more-more! How do you like it? How do you like it? ~ Andrea True … except, no, that’s false – pornographically false
You are a person. Singular. So am I. That might not be enough for you but it is more than enough for me.
Having local “american” assholes between me & further away “global” assholes is tempting, but … not really.
During the government response/takeover.
Monroe County FL shut down the only road, US Route 1.