Will Ethnonationalism Bring About Accelerated Decline in the West?

Understanding the Limits of Growth for an Exhausted Civilization

The development of a society and ultimately “civilizations” proper require a few key characteristics: physical security, economic growth, shared language and culture, a willingness to collaborate and a circumspect view towards out-groups or foreigners who may approach in large numbers.

In the concept of human relationships, this can be considered as simple as “defined boundaries” which allow a local population to grow in excess of its original capacity, causing it to often seek out new lands, new ideas and new ways of doing things - sometimes at the cost of other societies - in order to assert its “will to life” in the Nietzschean sense (the essential desire to grow and expand).

Alternatively, societies which fail to grow ultimately shrink and decline until they become terminal, as was the case for many ancient civilizations including that of Rome, but was also understood as recently as the decline of the Old South under Slavery (where secession was triggered by the resistance to new “slave states” entering the Union) or, indeed, Hitler’s Germany, where geographic segmentation following WWI drove revanchism, irredentism, and with consolidated power, a desire to conquer east for Lebensraum (which had been an idea of currency as early as the 19th century, long before Hitler used it as a selling point for the “master race”).

There are many small nationalities which may proclaim the desire to grow and expand - from Eastern Europe and the Balkans to West Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands - but ultimately as intergenerational globalization continues to progress, which the scale and complexity of markets demands as much new labor and capacity as can be procured - ethnonationalist states are simply not well-positioned to defeat non-ethno-essentialist peers even if their capacity to perform, their battlefield efficiency, their camaraderie or their social cohesion are much higher than their adversary.

The United States has historically been an integrationist power - all the way from English, Dutch, Irish and Scots to Swedes, Germans, Norwegians, Italians, Russian peasants and so on - and for that it has historically demonstrated more logistical capacity and greater ability to mobilize large forces than the ethnonationalist sensibilities of adversarial states could permit. Most starkly, those would be exemplified in Hitler’s Germany and the Confederate South.

In the modern day, it is actually societies which fail to welcome and integrate immigrants that are showing the most signs of ossification - particularly China, Japan and elsewhere. India still exists in a youth surplus demographically, but that will eventually subside given current birth rates. The ability of societies to enable new social and economic relationships, as well as new forms of entrepreneurship, innovation and communication, are what is essential to giving a “permission structure” for productivity and growth. Some indicate that the “fall of Rome” is a example to be weary of, but the Western Roman empire lasted 1200 years (from 700 BC to 500 AD), and in the east it lasted an additional millennium.

One could consider a form of social and political organization at such a height to “only have room to go down”, but there is no other form of social and political organization in history which is known to have lasted as long as Rome, been as durable, as capable of reform, or as responsive to external threats - yes, even if there are a myriad of examples of its failures. Contemporary speakers - uneducated ones, certainly - will make comparisons between Rome and the Third Reich, Rome and the British Empire, Rome and the Spanish Conquests of the Americas - but those institutions are incomparable. In all cases, the neophyte institutions reaffirm inequalities between ethnicities. In Rome, they incorporate them - at first through rape and slavery (shocking) - but ultimately, in the turnover of elites to ambitious commoners who may or may not have even been of roman heritage on the Italian peninsula.

In many ways, the fall of Rome was not due to the discouragement of the common people, but a lack in the willingness of elites to sacrifice in order to preserve institutions. From generations of civil war to barracks emperors to the final barbarian invasions, policy decisions imply sacrifice and compromise which - in a world of increasingly frequent “elite turnover” - become unattractive, because the pre-existing elites may ultimately not be around to benefit from the institutions they fight to preserve anyway.

In this is perhaps a lesson for the modern era. We are in an age of global capital, where elites travel the world searching for deals while workers (the modern serfs) remain domestic, tied to their land, lineage, language and heritage. Indeed, the cultural bifurcation of elites and commoners is a relationship which Spengler would have observed as requiring of discipline - discipline of the commoners by the elite. In our day and age, perhaps it is the reverse.

What should that mean? Elites need to be able to ape the “working man and woman”, but beyond that need to do it credibly if they wish to maintain control. FDR is the strongest example of this in modern political contexts - even if we was entirely endogenous as an elite, someone who had no personal experience of struggle, he represented common WASP ethics and manners which the plurality of the United States at the time still believed to be the cultural standards. He was far more of an everyman than Coolidge who preceded him or Truman who followed - even if Truman was a country bumpkin, most Americans at that stage were more urbane and cosmopolitan, notwithstanding of course the racism and segregation that still existed in his day.

Currently in the United States, there is no national leader which represents the actual ethos of the modern “working” American. They are alienated in wealth, culture and can fundamentally generate no legitimacy for greater social action. Ethnonationalist tendencies could emerge as an effort to mimic a unified state, but the dilution of both “whiteness” and broader social standards means that hardly a meaningful plurality can emerge to make life easier for a consolidated working class. In most other western countries, the actual demographic that works, produces goods and pays taxes is far more connected to modern hyper-globalized culture - bass-thumping music, short-form video, constant new spectacles in food, sports and entertainment - to have a cohesive cultural basis for social action. This is perhaps by design, hard to say if that is really the case, but it also means that an elite - if it wishes to proffer any vaguely “ethnonationalist” agenda in order to achieve a mimic of cultural unity - will gain neither and lose both in the attempt.