Is Modern Nationalism Going to Die the Death in the Next Century?
Can the centralized state hold together much longer?
Over the last couple of centuries, Anglophone countries have served as a beacon and a magnet, attracting people from all over the world. Immigrants come for the opportunity to live a better life. People in communist counties risk being shot at their own borders, or eaten by sharks when their rickety boat sinks, just to make it to our shores.
Academics and talking heads have long tried to claim that communism is awesome, and that we are all terribly oppressed by capitalism in the West, but this one-way traffic told a much louder tale. People were voting with their feet. They were trying to get in, not out.
And yet…
Over the last year or so, I am hearing more stories about a growing flow in the other direction. People from Western countries are starting to look elsewhere. I have spoken with quite a few expats who have moved, or are moving, to places that would have seemed unlikely a short time ago: Mexico. El Salvador. Tanzania. The Amazon jungle.
The reason ought to be fairly obvious. Over the last few years, the West has become an increasingly oppressive place to live. For some, the lunacy of the West’s reaction to Covid was enough. Others see the writing on the wall of worse things to come.
In light of this, so-called “third-world” countries start to seem more attractive. Part of the reasoning: A less sophisticated government may also be less sophisticated in its ability to oppress its people. Here, by contrast, government, big business, NGOs, the media, academia, and just about every other institution all seem to be in on it. Getting away from that has a definite attraction.
This nascent exodus, of course, is a worthy topic in and of itself. However, I want to focus on a different aspect right now. Specifically, will shifting migration patterns have an impact on nationalism?
Here in the modern era, we have come to take nationalism for granted. The modern state has become the locus of our identity. People now generally think of themselves as being part of a unified collective entity: their country. This produces everything from mild patriotism to raging, truculent sense of “my nation, right or wrong.” Or worse—“my nation is always right.”
Believe it or not, this is a comparatively new phenomenon. Indeed, it is just another one of the horrific outcomes of the French Revolution:
The people’s state (whether actual or prospective) gives rise to nationalism, because nothing inspires more devotion to a state-centered community than a state that the individual feels is his creation (government by the people), that serves him (for the people), and that he’s a part of (of the people). Allegiance to a crown just can’t compare. This explains why the French Revolution burned so brightly with nationalism, especially as compared to the ancien regime.
[…]
The Revolution transferred the military capacity of France from the crown to “the people” (or so the people felt). The intoxication of military power infected the French people with avarice for national conquest and glory. No longer was war a private affair of the king, which the masses paid for and suffered grudgingly. Now war was an affair of the people, an enterprise to be embraced wholeheartedly as one’s own.
[…] [Later,] Napoleon was, like the Kaiser during World War I and the Führer during World War II, a national leader of a people’s state: a state that relied on its reputation of being “for the people,” if not “of the people.”
Nationalism is also a particularly collectivist kind of community spirit, because successfully exercising collective power and violence greatly depends on group unity and strength in numbers: especially in war. In wartime, nationalist collectivism goes into overdrive. Randolph Bourne, having himself suffered greatly from rabid nationalism in America during World War I, described the phenomenon with great eloquence:
“The moment war is declared… the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.
The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government.” (…)
“War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest levels of the herd, and to its remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become — the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s businesses and attitudes and opinions.”
After two centuries of the modern nation state being the dominant organizational unit of the world, we just think of all this as normal. And yet in the past, there were many other loci of identity: clan, village, religion, feudal house, region, tribe, and others.
We have seen a decline in social cohesion in United States, and other Anglophone nations, over the last two decades. Whatever ability America once had to absorb incoming people and make them all into some variant of a prototypical “American citizen” is now disappearing into an increasingly misty past. No doubt there are numerous causes for this phenomenon, but increased population-heterogeneity is surely one of them.
Now imagine that that heterogeneity has spread throughout the world. Imagine everyone living everywhere.
At that point, how does the modern nation state create the cohesion required for nationalist sentiment to arise? Without a shared ethnicity, religion, or history, what creates the necessary sense of unity?
Shared language is probably not enough. L1 and L2 speakers of English now number two billion and counting.
How about the putative awesomeness of being a democracy—a “people’s state,” as described above? Is that really enough to get us excited at this point?
Been there, done that.
A strong leader can create cohesion, but leaders come and go.
So what is left? Just being so super-duper awesome that people love calling themselves citizens of Country X? Winning the World Cup in Soccer? How does the modern nation state get people all ginned up the way it used to?
If multidirectional migration expands and everyone starts living everywhere, can the modern nation-state model even last? Or does that model increasingly start to seem pointless, and an impediment rather than a benefit?
Those of us who yearn for greater human freedom are looking for answers. How do we decentralize? How do we escape the meddlesome tyranny of the modern state?
Could multidirectional migration be a vector we hadn’t even considered? Not just to escape one particular state, but to slowly, organically, erode the whole nation-state system?
I credit this phenomenon to the Shift in Consciousness that is nascent.
As more and more people become more self-aware, one of the aspects of that self-awareness is a hard look at how one "self-identifies."
Burgeoning self-awareness offers one a review of where and how we are duplicitous. Once we gauge where we are, we also begin to see duplicity around us. And one of the biggest purveyors of duplicity is in our Government's actions.
If we identify with our Country, that becomes a problem. We must then begin the process of de-identifying with our Country if we wish to become whole and cohesive personalities.
As this becomes more widespread, queue the Government's response by censoring true information that exposes their duplicitous actions.
Where we are now is a government that is clearly lying about anything and everything, and no longer cares about those who see the truth. Only desperately trying to maintain the veil of control over those who are less self-aware, and still prone to propaganda.
For those of us who have dispelled the illusion of a righteous, caring government, we cannot move fast enough to dis-associate ourselves from that in any and every way possible.
Will it survive? Thankfully, no. We are witnessing the death throes, and it will become increasingly more ugly, and will result in great trauma for those who cling to that identity.
And it isn't going to take a century -- a decade or two at the most.
As a Texan, I used to see us as a member of the United States. The older I've gotten, the more I desire to see Texas return to what it was in 1836: a free and independent country that could do its own thing. The United Corporation of States, which used to be the American States, is full of greed, laws meant to keep people in fear, and high taxation unless you aren't a citizen.
The government that used to be by the people, of the people, for the people, has now become by the powerful, of the powerful, for the powerful, and the common people's rights have slowly been stripped away.
It's not a matter of if communism will take over; it's a matter of when.
I think it will happen within fifteen to twenty years, if not sooner.