Nations are so over
States, not so much
So, the End of History was declared prematurely. We’re not there yet, and Fukuyama got the destination wrong, too. Nationalism is the real terminus according to Ben Koan. Liberal democracy, especially of the cosmopolitan, post-national, global village variety, has less reach and appeal. It works against the natural groupishness of human nature, which nationalism so efficiently harnesses.
Post-national liberalism is on its way out, Koan says. Revitalised nationalism drives Russia and China. Semi-post-national Europe is floundering. He disapprovingly quotes Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s assertion that Canada has “no core identity, no mainstream... There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.” He observes that Trudeau is massively unpopular, partly because of encouraging massive immigration, the implication being that Trudeau’s post-national vision is doomed.
I’m Canadian. Trudeau is certainly on his way out, but his successor-in-waiting Pierre Poilievre is not a nationalist. In Canada, there is no way to be a succesful nationalist Prime Minister because the country is just too diverse. Canada is going to continue being a post-national state for the foreseeable future, but it is in no way on track to be another Lebanon, the mess Koan depicts as the endpoint of impractical post-national ideals.
I don’t know if history is ending, but I’m pretty sure nationalism isn’t the terminus. Lets begin by avoiding equivocation and confusion. The state and the nation are not the same. The state is a political entity, the nation a cultural one. Nationalists insist, however, on the importance of the nation-state. The nation should have its own state, and the unity and power of the state is inherited from the unity and power of the nation that comprises it.
Canada is not a nation-state. It was founded as a bi-national state, the French-speaking population guaranteed co-equal status with the Anglophones. This conception was replaced by official multiculturalism in the 60’s. Every Canadian schoolchild is taught about the ‘cultural mosaic’ of Canada, distinguished from America’s ‘melting pot’ that supposedly creates a unified national identity for our southern neighbour.
How important is this difference? Not especially, I don’t think. The nation-state is always to some degree a fiction in a liberal democracy. That is because liberalism mandates tolerance, and consequently the nation must make its peace with such minorities as geography and immigration bestow upon the state. The impossibility of uniform and homogeneous nation-states has been obvious since the Treaty of Versailles, assuming one shrinks from genocide. There are Poles in Hungary and Italians in Austria, and Kurds and Armenians in Turkey. What nation forms the state of India, exactly? Are the Argentines or Brazilians a nation? When did that happen? Great Britain lost its empire but it still has four official nations as far as its football teams are concerned, and rather more unofficial ones.
The benefits of nationalism in motivating patriotism is obvious. But patriotism, the love and enthusiastic support of one’s state, by no means requires nationalism to function. As Trudeau suggests, patriotism may be founded on shared values. I add shared history and accomplishments as well. In the Second World War, the western allies fought for freedom and democracy and liberal values. Britain was still an empire, not a nation state. America’s unifying myths should not be discounted, but the men it sent to war were of diverse ethnicities and cultures. Was what united them not shared ideals? America is an idea, not a nation.
Humans are innately groupish, as Koan observes. That means that it is pretty easy to generate an acceptable ‘us’ and an outside ‘them’. Citizens in a diverse state base their shared patriotism on all kinds of things. Sporting triumphs, famous citizens, scientific achievements, victorious wars. And, yes, Trudeau’s list of shared values. A non-national state may risk being torn apart from within by nationalist factions. But this, it seems to me, can be either effect or cause. Nationalism may supplant patriotism exactly when the state has lost legitimacy for other reasons.
So what does it mean to say that nationalism is the future, not liberal democracy? There are really three questions at issue, not one. Will state governments be superseded by larger collectives is one question. What role nations will play in states is another. And to what extent governments will be liberal or authoritarian is the third.
None of those questions seems easy to decide, and I am comfortable supposing that history will wobble unsteadily through various distributions of ‘all of the above’ for some time to come. But two considerations make me think that the prospects for post-national states are brighter than Ben supposes.
Firstly, over time immigration will tend to lower national cohesion within states. Immigrants integrate into local culture over time, but not to the extent that national differences vanish entirely in a generation or two. Immigration was a major reason why Canada eventually abandoned its ‘two nations’ identity in favour of its post-national ethos.
Second, the global culture of the internet is a post-national culture. It is a giant melting pot, a remix. This homogenization does not produce a new nation, it just eats away at the old ones. As global culture expands, national allegiance is replaced with a myriad self-chosen virtual communities. I will not predict how far this particular transformation will progress, but the general direction of it seems clear enough.
So perhaps the future is not the revived nationalism of Russia but post-national Canada. A liberal democracy that binds the state together with shared values and history, through national heroes and a few cultural touchstones such as hockey and maple syrup and land acknowledgements. In diversity, strength? One can hope.
(Image Credit by Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26018252)
