So far, I have only finished the introduction to The Virtue of Nationalism. I think he fails Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing Test. He says that the opposite of nationalism is imperialism. I don’t think his opponents would accept the imperialist label. It is like telling a secular leftist that your religion is leftism. Such analysis might have a grain of truth, but it is not a good approach for engaging in dialogue.
I think there are two versions of internationalism in the U.S.: the neocon version; and the Western Guilt version. They are usually opposed to one another.
The neocon version could plausibly viewed as imperialist. They see America as the indispensable nation, supporting the peace and prosperity of the world. The term Pax Americana is positive in the neocon view. (Although they are not card-carrying neocons, Findlay and O’Rourke in Power and Plenty, if I recall correctly, make a case that periods of trade expansion, peace, and prosperity historically have coincided with strong hegemonic power.)
The Western Guilt version sees America as the nation that needs to be cut down to size. Instead of telling other people how to behave, Americans ought to learn from other cultures. The neocons disparage this view, as when they refer to “Obama’s apology tours.” But whether you love or loathe the Western Guilt proponents, they would not recognize themselves as imperialists.
Indeed, the way that Hazony describes imperialism, almost any transnational proposal becomes an imperialist project. A libertarian idea for open borders. An environmentalist proposal to fight climate change. While there is plenty of room to argue that these ideas could only be implemented in the context of a global empire with a single ruler, establishing such an empire is not the objective of these specific initiatives.
In any case, I am not ready to accept Hazony’s either/or distinction between imperialism and nationalism. I would say that there are questions of jurisdiction. You know how when two businesses sign a contract, there might be a provision saying that any dispute will be decided in a particular state? If contracting were costless, every interaction between people could have such a provision. To put it another way, one can imagine in theory a world in which the jurisdiction for every interaction is chosen voluntarily. As it happens, but that is not possible in practice.
In the real world, for most interactions there is a presumption that jurisdiction is based on location. So within the U.S., you presume that if you go to court it will be an American court, not a French court. As I see it from this jurisdictional perspective, although nationalism is not something that was dreamed up by libertarians, it can be treated as a “libertarian realist” outcome.
Part of “libertarian realism” is my belief that the ultimate arbiter of jurisdictional disputes is force. As another illustration, think of crime families. If you’re in the Corleone family territory, the Godfather has jurisdiction.
There are a lot of cross-border interactions nowadays. So how do we settle ultimate jurisdictional disputes? It could be an international body–an international Supreme Court, if you will. Or it could be ultimately the strongest country interested in the dispute.
To be cynical, I can see why an Israeli, with the Palestinian conflict in mind, would not be an advocate of deferring to an international body. To be equally cynical, I can see why a professional Weberian bureaucrat or diplomat might advocate increased deference to international organizations. I would be surprised if one can make an over-arching, overwhelming theoretical argument in favor of one model over the other.
But that is all preliminary to reading the book.
Gosh, I would have thought that “openness to interaction across national boundaries” – think citizenship of the world – was a kind of internationalism that justifies neither neocon nor Western Guilt labels…
Here, here! The sort of “peace and free enterprise” approach that was central to the ideals of the great Classical Liberals. That doesn’t fit in either of these two camps.
I have not read the book and probably won’t, but it seems to me an interesting idea to point out that trying to get everyone else to do things your way is a sort of imperialism. Maybe that’s not enough of a point for a whole book…
The foreign policy elite of both parties – whether conservative, liberal, neocon, or neoliberal – believes that it is the responsibility of the United States to manage the world, including maintaining large military presences in Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere, even though those countries are fully capable of defending themselves. The only dissenters from this view are a few libertarians, paleoconservatives, and far left-wingers who have no political or policy traction.
Reading this I feel like we are re-living the Cold War arguments where both the imperialism and Western guilt made more sense and there were still some European colonies and revolutions existing in the 1960sin to the 1970s. However a lot of these issues have diminished the last generation.
1) It was the far East Asian nations starting with Japan showed the way to economic growth in the post WW2 years. Trade with the US on manufactured goods and take the proceeds to invest in the US. It was an intense capitalism/nationalism model that did out compete the US for much of the 1970s and 1980s.
2) I do think most economic elite across the globe are comfortable with the US playing police in the world with a weird combination of neo-con/liberal hawk ideas. (Note how much does the media love the beginning of a war.)
3) Oddly enough like free trade, it is the alt right and very progressive in the US that mistrusts military action. For all the claims about Trump toughness, he is a dove at heart. (Probably because he realizes without taking their oil, Iraq or Valenzuela, it is terrible economic decision.)
4) I think the BIG wild card here is China and how they react to a South American/Africa debt crisis. For all the issues in Valenzuela, they are keeping up with payments to China but I don’t know how long this keeps up. (Note I find it weird that Valenzuela blames the US on everything here and US military action will backfire.) However, one of Chinese foreign investments will fail and we will have to see how China reacts to it.
Hazony’s use of “imperialism” is very broad and I think would even encompass federalization of states such as in the USA. At any rate, a pejorative term like “imperialism” appears necessary given that proponents invariably obfuscate their various world domination machinations with words like “free trade” or “peace” or “climate change” which never actually mean anything other than transfer of US assets to other countries to buy whoever is the president of the US at the time a bit of historical legacy. If you ask me, the US Constitution is imperialist and the welfare of the people living within its boundaries would be much increased if the colonies had went their own separate ways. Currently if you divide the sum of national debt and unfunded federal liabilities you get $704,391 of liabililities per US household. Unequivocally, a failure of governance. Relative to all the other imperialist schemes out there maybe not the worst but that is a low bar. Every imperialist scheme from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization has been an abject failure.
I have the book, but haven’t read it yet. I think it’s a rhetorical mistake to use the loaded and provocative term ‘imperialism’, and I hope he doesn’t try to cram the actual sequence and causes of past events into some stretch of a ‘Normative History’ explanation. But I also think it’s a mistake to ignore the two poles of different principles, since they illustrate the nature of the argument, and if one pole is winning, it’s hard to say what would stop things continuing to move in the direction of that trend, all the way to extreme results.
Even within the “libertarian realism” framing, the question becomes whether interference or intervention in one jurisdiction’s affairs by another is legitimate, and if so, why, when, and when not?
One absolute position could be a kind of “sovereign pacifism” and say ‘never’, even during hostile invasion. No one says that. So the real poles are a kind of non-aggression principle (and a minimal set of classical, customary international law principles to include the natural right of self-defense), on the one hand, and Justified Interventionalism on the other hand.
The other absolute position is that jurisdictions are all constrained by some transnational ideology: a set of higher, universal principles of morality and justice and human rights. And that any nation has the right – indeed, duty – to police violations of that ideology, with pressure raise to the extent required, to include coercion, and even force if necessary and feasible.
It’s not too much of a stretch to call the latter “Moral Imperialism” (or what I’ve called “Multinational Progressivism”). What the EU is trying to do to Hungary and Poland right now is just that: Moral Imperialism. It is not treating them as sovereign nations with a legitimate right to be free of interventions in their authority over their jurisdictions (except when they consent to constrain those rights by agreement) but as subordinates violating higher values which they are obligated to obey whether they like it or not (or agreed to it or not), those violations the EU is justified and required to punish by any prudent and practicable means.
The Ideological Turing Test is about knowing how your opponents think. Yes, discourse is easier and less antagonistic if you can conduct it in the language and according to the principles, assumptions, and logic of your interlocutor. On the other hand, if they are really wrong about something, and engaging in delusional denial and self-deception, then talking to them on their terms merely embeds the error, and is particularly difficult when countering that error is the heart of the matter.
There’s just no way to expose such flaws while maintaining the frame of your opponent. Just because they would never call themselves by a certain term or see themselves that way doesn’t mean they’re correct about themselves, and so one has no choice but to call a spade a spade. It is in this precise circumstance when it’s simply unfair to hold someone to ITT standards.
It is a good point about the EU and Moral Imperialism as various European nations are dealing with increasingly popular nationalist leaders and governments. However it appears the great experiment of turning a bunch of EU into the United Nations of Europe is both losing appeal battles but yet not really losing the long run war.
1) I still can’t figure out where Brexit is heading and the UK is not winning the negotiations against Germany/France.
2) The common theme of nationalist is anti-Immigration which is focusing on African and Middle East Muslims. This issue can only go so far as these the number of these Immigrants is far lower than 2015/2016.
3) I still suspect the nationalist leaders will evidently sling mud at each other as Brexit Immigration complaints were about Polish workers in 2015. Soon or later Hungary will complain about Italy etc.
4) For all the unpopularity of Angela Merkel is across Europe and Germany somehow she still won a fourth term.
5) For the nations on the Euro there is still little interest of nations going back to their former currencies. (People really hate Bank Runs/Jogs…If Greece did not do it 2011, other nations are dealing with far less.)
6) Again, the Euro project in its very clunky way is increasing free trade and the movement of people & workers which is hard to stop. So the leader of Hungary stops Women Studies at colleges but does nothing to stop the Euro project.
The debate is precisely about what it actually means to be part of “the EU project”. What did countries actually sign up for, what aspects of sovereignty did they relinquish, and does it even matter if other countries feel free to push beyond that and meddle in the internal affairs of other memebers or coerce them into obedience?
The whole strategy of the European Union has been a kind of open-secret ‘noble fraud’. EU advocates couldn’t sell what they really wanted, so they sold something more acceptable, with the intention of moving towards what they want after the fact, knowing it would be hard for anyone to back out after the fact, even if they were perfectly justified in their objection and claims of abuse.
People or states think thought they were signing up for one deal, without many aggravating constraints. But by means of salami slicing, the freedom of maneuver for member states was gradually curtailed, and superior, unaccountable authority with veto power was progressively centralized.
The problem with such shifting understanding of what “Being in the EU” means is that, on the one hand, no one can point to the narrow text of agreements to argue against against a particular marginal abuse, and on the other hand, the lack of clarity encourages overreach precisely becuse no one can argue aginst it. Which is a recipe for premature and provocative Moral Imperialism, followed by predictable antagonistic reaction, as we now see.
As for Brexit, the UK is not ‘winning’ because its government is not even trying and doesn’t even want to ‘win’, quite the contrary. May doesn’t want Brexit, and if she could do so, she would cancel the whole thing. It’s easy to predict what will happen: nothing. There will seem to be a lot of last minute panic and brinksmanship on all sides as a kind of pretense of posturing for public consumption, and then they will all just agree to ignore the deadline because they “need more time” for negotiation and to figure things out, and the status quo modus vivendi can really go on indefinitely. Eventually Labour will take power again and scuttle the thing. My low-confidence guess is that they know which way the demographic and political winds blow, and they know if they have another vote in say, 2020, no way would it be for Brexit again. Maybe the EU could offer two deals – a completely terrible “hard-Brexit”, or a “return to the status quo ante”. Put that to future British voters and everything goes back to normal, which is precisely what the UK establishment wants.
The whole strategy of the European Union has been a kind of open-secret ‘noble fraud’. EU advocates couldn’t sell what they really wanted, so they sold something more acceptable,
Funny that is what I thought of Brexit in which supporters were a bit like a blind man and elephant joke. One voter mostly wanted to stop Eastern Europe Immigration while another wanted increase trade barriers with rest of Europe.
1) My belief is in the long run increase of trade and people decreases the power of more local governments while increasing power of international bodies. By going on the Euro nations are giving up a bit of sovereignty to use an International bodies. (So Italy lost control of their currency when they used the Euro to control inflation.)
2) My question is why should France and Germany give the UK a good deal? I have to imagine Macron is salivating at the idea of increasing Financial Europe jobs in France or even Brussels. (And didn’t London districts move more Labor even with offball Jeremy leading the Party?)
Of course people had different motivations and expectations for voting for (or against) Brexit. Most of them delusional. Welcome to modern democracy. Remember the against crowd really believing that an economic apocalypse-level sell off and collapse in GDP would happen the next day? All that said, Brexit is not some complicated and long treaty with abstruse legal language and likely to be ‘interpreted’ in ways entirely unanticipated and inconsistent with the intentions of those who agreed to it. It’s just not in the same category as the EU.
Nations are willing to give up some sovereignty to transnational organizations, but the idea is that the restraints are narrow and limited to being directly related with the interaction and the benefits sought. So, a country may join a chemical weapon ban treaty, and give up a sovereign right to develop, possess, and use those weapons, in exchange for the benefit of not having to worry about the other signatories doing the same. It would be completely bizarre if, later on, the chem-ban transnational enforcement organization told some state that they had better subsidize broadband internet for every citizen, or else other countries could punish them. “Wait, what? That’s not what we signed up for!”
Same goes for opening trade and easing movement of people. Those can be handled by narrow agreements, which stick to the subject matter. There is no need or desire for unilateral surrender of sovereignty with some central entity or collection of other states able to arrogate plenary supremacy power to themselves whenever they feel like it. “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”
As for why give Britain a good deal, well, if “deals” are like trades and win-win, then why not? But obviously the main EU powers have no intention of doing so. The “deal” is going back to the way things were, or experiencing a lot of negative consequences, even if EU countries have to pay a cost too, both possibilities serving as an encouragement to the others, “Don’t even try it, you’ll regret it.”
He says that the opposite of nationalism is imperialism.
I don’t see these as being mutually exclusive at all . a cursory look at history shows such
Jefferson wrote about adding to the empire of liberty an extensive and fertile country. But that country wasn’t empty. The Cherokee nation. The Pawnee nation. The Shoshone nation. More nations than there are now states.
So Jefferson also wrote about “converting dangerous enemies into valuable friends.” Not in the sense that Christians talk about converting heathens, but in practice, yes. Inevitably. Because agrarian society is imperialist. Hunters and gatherers are nationalist. And egalitarian.
Think of Herder, a German contemporary of Jefferson. Herder writes that “there is only one class in the state, the Volk, (not the rabble), and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant.” Herder’s nationalism is egalitarian.
Agrarian society is imperialist and hierarchical, divided into classes. Hunters and gatherers are nationalist and egalitarian.
Jefferson again: “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.”
The first sentence is nationalist. The third sentence is imperial. Likewise when Jefferson wrote about “the present spirit of extending to the great mass of mankind the blessings of instruction.” There’s something inevitable about it. Three stages of history. First farms, then schools. Then schools without farms.
History begins in an imperial and hierarchical agrarian society. History ends with our own hierarchical and imperial castes, divided by higher ed.
Herder thought that “nationalities differ in everything, in poetry, in appearance, in tastes, in usages, customs and languages.” Which to our own inegalitarian imperialists means that they must convert.
It was the neocon dream of a Pax Americana, and their misadventures in the Middle East, that led to the flow of Muslim refugees and migrants into Europe. The fear of Islamization in Europe is giving rise to right-wing nationalist parties. Think Sweden here.
Incidentally, the Islamization of Europe is a fulfillment of divine prophecy, namely God’s promise to Abraham that his progeny would fill the earth; Jews and Christians from the line of Isaac, Muslims from the line of Ishmael.
You could say the neocons are doing God’s will here in helping to spread that progeny around. Not intentionally of course, but that’s the result.
The “Middle East and North Africa” countries were doing so well before 2002, I am SURE there would be little out-migration today if George W. Bush had just stayed away.
Roger,
While Muslims in the MENA countries would have desired to go to Europe, they have no way of getting there except to risk their lives by crossing the Mediterranean Sea. It was a risk not worth taking, until ISIS showed up.
ISIS if you recall, started in Iraq when Paul Bremer, working at the behest of George Bush, disbanded the Iraqi army.
Later, when the neocons attempted to destroy the Syrian regime to break the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis, ISIS crossed over into Syria.
ISIS was originally called “al Qaeda in Iraq”, then changed its name to “Islamic State of Iraq”, (ISI), then again to “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”, (ISIS).
So yeah, it all started in Iraq with Bush.
Incidentally, you have to make a distinction between refugees, like those fleeing ISIS, and migrants, who are basically opportunists.
I deliberately spoke of “out-migration”: leaving for any reason. Even if George W. Bush and the neo-cons had never existed, there would be a large and growing amount of out-migration from MENA (and SSA).
Lots of population increase on one side of the Mediterranean; very little on the other. Lots of opportunities and a high standard of living on one side of the Mediterranean. Not so much on the other.