Alberto Mingardi on Hazony

Mingardi offers more criticism of The Virtue of Nationalism.

I find Hazony’s view of European history troublesome. For one thing, saying that Hitler wasn’t a “nationalist” is, to use a euphemism, a far more controversial claim than he acknowledges. Let’s put it in this way: can you picture national socialism raising to power without Herder, Fitche, and all the other prophets of nationalism? I doubt it.

Indeed, one reading of Hitler’s vision is that he wanted to see Germany and Great Britain as cooperative hegemonic powers in a nationalist world order. It was Churchill who was the imperialist, in two senses of the term. First, he wanted to preserve the British empire. Second, Hazony uses the term imperialist to describe any philosophy that is based on a universalist ideology. For Churchill, that ideology was individual freedom and the values of Western Civilization.

What World War II does illustrate is that transnational institutions are not a solution to the problem of war. The League of Nations was helpless in the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, all of which took place in the run-up to the larger conflagration.

Since 1945, there have been numerous wars, in spite of (and in a few cases sanctioned by) the United Nations. Perhaps there are those who are willing to defend the UN by saying that things would have been worse without it. I do not claim the expertise to adjudicate that one.

Suppose we were to describe nationalism in terms of “negative liberty” or “the non-aggression principle” for national governments. Do whatever you want internally, as long as you don’t infringe on people outside your borders. This might be more reliably libertarian than a project of world government, even though it would leave some people imprisoned by their regimes.

24 thoughts on “Alberto Mingardi on Hazony

  1. Hitler wanted to invade other countries, depopulate them, and have Germans move in. That goes all the way back to Mein Kampf. Aggressive genocidal war is certainty “imperialist” isn’t it.

    When Hitler was sticking to nationalist aims (occupation of the Rhineland) everyone said he was just reasserting internal control of his own country. Wasn’t the French occupation of he Ruhr in the 20s to extract reperations an imperialist failure? Up till he dismantled Checkslovokia he as seen as fixing the bad terms and borders of Versailles and uniting the Germans. It’s when he started invading other countries and people’s that Britain declared war.

    If some less radical governement had taken over in 1933 and done some of the same early things Hitler did but stopped at Germany’s borders nobody would be calling them imperialist and we wouldn’t have had a world war. There is plenty of evidence that the Weimar government was already circumventing Versailles.

    The big difference today is that imperialism isn’t about extending national power (like with all the European powers in the world wars), but about ideological imperialism. Flooding Europe with refugees and shoving them down other countries throats doesn’t help Germany. It is an ideological demand of progressivism.

    • I think you are projecting your perspective on what really is just a disorganized mess. Like any union of states, there are divisions. The EU has always left essential issues unresolved, and anyone could see that it was vulnerable to such serious conflicts as a result. But even if they reached the cohesion levels of the US, it wouldn’t help that much. Our nation is also badly divided on immigration issues, and is only less stressed due to geographical advantages.

      The gap between Germany and Poland on these issues isn’t that different than the gap between Alabama and California. Perhaps you feel California is shoving immigration down Alabama’s throats too, but any union has such dynamics.

      Whatever the virtues of any arrangements, whether they work or not is more due to collective consent and commitment, and there is none. We could make any of a variety of schemes work if we committed to one approach in good faith, but there is no consensus. Both peace and war has largely been an accident of circumstances, not a particular approach.

      • I am not sure that I agree with this, because there does seem to be a pattern throughout large portions of the world where the elite of a country are much more “cosmopolitan” and in some ways libertarian than the non-elite. I do think that these cosmopolitan elites have attempted to take advantage of the existence of multi-national institutions like the EU or the WTO to push through changes that the elites favored and the masses do not. These changes would not have been possible to achieve without those multi-national institutions providing some mechanisms that allowed elites to go ahead without having to really consult with the populace.

        • I tend to hate this “elite” designation, and I don’t think it explains anything. We have elites across the political spectrum.

          I think the current political climate speaks for itself. Wealthy people just want to pursue opportunities for profit. Take that away and they won’t seem so cosmopolitan. Capitalists can pursue global trade through these institutions but the politics are hardly settled. A single US election has upended the entire trend toward liberalization of markets.

  2. It seem weird arguing modern labels on Hitler and Churchill being either nationalist or imperialist because both were the ‘last’ believers of the European ideology of European nationalism colonial/imperialism empire across the globe. (Colony Empires were first and Imperialist sort of followed by the United States that mostly mistrust colonial empires.) Churchill goal was to hold onto the British Empire with economic liberty for UK citizens (not social liberty) while Hitler was mass murdering dictator.

    In terms of the post-WW2 era, we have been lucky in a sense that European colonialism has most died and imperialism replaced it in the Cold War. And when one of the two Imperialist Empires fell, the Soviet Union, it was mostly an internal breakdown that occurred with limited wars and violence.

    Anyway, the United Nations and other international bodies have very marginally successful in their goals and at least creates a forum for nations to settle/deal with disputes. If a country wants to go against the UN, they certainly will choose their nationalist path but in most cases that nation usually fails in their goals. (such as say the Iraq War.) In viewing the Euro/EU body, it certainly seems like the nations most pro-Euro/EU are economically performing the best.

    Basically, the libertarian in me suggest the main reason violence is decreasing are:
    1) Free trade, increased international business relations and movement across borders long term lowers the chances of war, violence, and imperialism.
    2) The main reason why nations are learning to avoid war is it is really dumb economic decision with lots of costs and little benefit. (I suspect this is the reason Trump is dovish on using the military. It costs the US a bunch of money and resources to invade Valenzuela and what do we get? Basically nothing and we don’t get their oil. It is simplistic view of Trump foreign policy but one I tend to agree with.)
    3) I still think most large corporations even in Europe still agree with the US military being sort of Imperialist Police for international issues. (They don’t want the US to invade the world but at least protect the status quo on protecting international trade.)

    • There was a lot of trade in 1914 and war was just as dumb. It happened anyway. The difference now is nuclear weapons. Before them somebody could always argue that “total victory that solves all our problems” could be achieved and the troops home “before Christmas”. That was a batshit idea in 1914 and lots knew it, but it’s always plausible sounding before nukes. Nukes change everything.

      I don’t think it’s the better angles of our nature, but technology. However, nukes are like picking up pennies in front of a steam roller. It works great until some tail risk happens.

      I think the arguement that Pinker made is that we are genuinely better human beings or have a generally better culture. I don’t but it. I just think that technology changed the shape of violence. We don’t know if it’s truly reduced because at any moment huge casualties could be caused by any number of actors, blowing up all of his math in a moment.

      • Hell if I know why the European nations all decided to take up sides in WW1 which has to be the stupidest war in history if you take into account the causes, the tactics, all Euro nations, and the reality they resolved nothing with WW2 21 years later. (And the fact most nations had monarchs that were all cousins/second cousins from Queen Victoria.)

        I would probably simplify to the European nations were incredibly nationalist that looked to protect or increase their colonial empires. (The UK joined to control German expansion and Germany wanted more European power. The same dynamic for centuries.)

        Anyway, I figure the increase of peace is not our better angels but:
        1) Technology has really increased the number of deaths
        2) War is ridiculously stupid from an economic decision. Free trade works better and the increase of trade increases the chance of interaction. Also I do find it important that both US post war Financial Crisis/Recessions on the heals of extended wars (Vietnam/Inflation, Iraq/Housing.) I don’t think the wars caused either situation but made both Inflation higher in 1970s and the House Bust larger in 2008.

  3. If Hitler is not in your nationalist category, you need to tweak your sorting algorithm, then, because something’s gone very wrong.

    • La Wik (some abridgment):

      The German concept of Lebensraum comprises policies and practices of settler colonialism which proliferated in Germany from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I, originally, as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology was supported by the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and Nazi Germany until the end of World War II.

      Note: that’s not some variant of nationalist or pan-nationalist irredentism. This is specifically the idea of imperialist colonialism with a particular group enjoying supremacy. That is, one kind of people living in their own homeland having the legitimate right to invade territory where a different demographic group is in the majority, in order to settle and colonize it, to control it for their own group’s benefit at the expense of the other group.

      This was a core aspect of Hitler’s program from the very start, and indeed characterized the actions and aspirations of all the Axis governments. Calling this “Nationalism” is, I’m afraid, only the consequence of falling for neraly a century of propaganda on the subject, including, ironically, Hitler’s propaganda, in his attempt to dissemble and obfuscate the true nature of his intentions and plans for his regime.

      • I’m aware of the whole lebensraum plan for Eastern Europe. I would consider that simply an extremist form of good old fashioned 19th century blood and soil nationalism. Imperialism and nationalism are not in fact mutually exclusive categories except if you define the terms in the quirky, confusing, at odds with common usage manner Hazony has. I think this exchange is evidence enough of that.

        • I agree there is a big problem of using the terminology in a precise manner, which I mention below in a comment currently stuck in moderation (who knows why, it doesn’t even have any links.)

          The thing Hazony is trying to defend from criticism is clearly non-aggressive nationalism in which interference in one nation’s affairs by another is illegitimate. That obviously includes the extreme case of conquest and invasion for territorial aggrandizement and population replacement. (This was part of the blood and soil concept regarding ‘formerly German’ lands that happened to have a bunch of Slavs on them who would have to be pushed aside, one way or another.)

          What ends up happening is that people respond by saying, “Look, there are some examples of aggressive and belligerent governments that call themselves ‘nationalist’. Therefore nationalism means the legitimization of aggression.”

          Hazony is trying to say, “No, that means they’re not actually nationalists, just claiming to be, because they’re not committed to Westphalian multinationalism and the idea of non-intervention and peaceful coexistence of independent sovereigns.”

          It’s best not to get too hung up on the labels and step back and see the big picture.

          In the introduction, Hazony mentions that the timing of the book is inspired by all kinds of commentary decrying a purported “reemergence of nationalism” as explanation for various recent election results throughout the West. What do these commentators really mean? They aren’t complaining about people now starting to believe unprovoked conquest and invasion is legitimate. They are complaining that people in various countries think they should have independent sovereignty and not be beholden to a universal set of progressive moral principles as adjudged by foreign or international entities.

          • What ends up happening is that people respond by saying, “Look, there are some examples of aggressive and belligerent governments that call themselves ‘nationalist’. Therefore nationalism means the legitimization of aggression.”

            Hazony is trying to say, “No, that means they’re not actually nationalists, just claiming to be, because they’re not committed to Westphalian multinationalism and the idea of non-intervention and peaceful coexistence of independent sovereigns.”

            I’m sympathetic to Hazony’s argument and to nationalist sentiments more generally, but I think your paraphrase there is just a No True Scotsman fallacy, and a rather ahistorical one, at that. Using the term nationalism as a shorthand for being “committed to Westphalian multinationalism and the idea of non-intervention and peaceful coexistence of independent sovereigns” seems like a very tortured, truncated definition, nationalism being bound up with various ethnic identitarian movements, and the Nazis were nothing if not that. Here’s a choice wiki quote:

            The invention of a symbolic national identity became the concern of racial, ethnic or linguistic groups throughout Europe as they struggled to come to terms with the rise of mass politics, the decline of the traditional social elites, popular discrimination and xenophobia.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_Europe

            Doesn’t that describe Nazism to a tee? Old aristocracy overthrown/exiled after Versailles, rise of mass politics in the Weimar Republic, and the creation of this sort of phony Aryan symbolism as a rallying point? That’s a lot of quacking, if you ask me, but Hazony is asking us to believe that this is not, in fact, a duck.

  4. Lets just assume for arguments sake that Hitler was a nationalist. So what. He was also a Taurus. Just because one nationalist was supremely evil does not necessarily mean that all nationalists want to do what Hitler did or that there is anything innately evil in nationalism.

    I tend to sympathize with nationalism mostly because it strikes me as being the political equivalent of the doctrine of shareholder wealth maximization. Just as we want corporate directors to do what is best, as they determine, for the corporation’s shareholders, so too we want our political leaders to do what is best for the citizens they serve.

    Anti-nationalists, be they imperialists, cosmopolitans, libertarians, etc., assert that they are supporting some higher good than the welfare of thenation’s citizens. 500 million Chinese want to move to the United States tomorrow? Super duper, they are free to do so and their freedom is more important than any adverse consequences that may accrue to the extant citizens of the US. Transfer hundreds of billions to developing countries, it will prevent climate change. Just as Elizabeth Warren would have corporations accountable to anybody who claims to be a stakeholder, anti-nationalists would have political entities accountable to some “greater good” presumably to be determined by a wise elite rather than icky plebes through democratic processes. The evils of populism and all that.

    If this type of nationalism is immoral, then fine. I would much rather be immoral than have the utopian hubris to suggest that I have the ability to divine what is the greater good.

  5. Again, this is one of those situations in which discourse is utterly confused and hopeless if we insist on using terms that have accumulated a huge amount of emotional and political baggage and which are used in multiple, vague, and shifting ways. In particular, the concept of “nationalism” has been on the receiving end of a incessant defamatory propaganda campaign for generations, as a source of hatred and bigotry and violence. And because it has acquired all these sorts of negative connotations via this process, it has become impossible to use the term in a purely neutral, technical way, for example, to compare different systems as to the risk of war, tyranny, and so forth.

    Here’s a news flash: political parties and governments lie all the time, and so using the names that governments use to characterize their own systems is not good evidence of anything and naive if meant as serious argument. E.g., the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” is neither democratic nor a republic. Just because a government or party calls itself “Nationalist” doesn’t mean it’s actually nationalist and not just using the term inaccurately for the sake of politics, or in some attempt to create an impression that its own semi-socialist system is somehow distinguishable from, for example, “internationalist socialism”.

    I am making my way through Hazony’s book now. I really don’t think some reviewers are being fair to his use of the terms and his overall thesis. Hazony goes to great lengths to clearly define what he is and is not talking about when he says “nationalism” and “imperialism” (i.e., ” a new ‘liberal empire’ “). And using those justifiable definitions, his arguments, historical and otherwise, are as logically valid as they seem to be implausible or counter-intuitive to those who have been raised understanding these terms through propaganda-influenced filters.

    Now, what Hazony is arguing for is mostly an anti-aggression form of Westphalianism, which is an inter-national political order of independent national states in healthy competition while operating under the rules of classical international law, with sovereign rights to manage their internal affairs free from external interference or intervention, and with no general right of conquest, but also subject to only the minimal customary standards of civilized behavior (e.g., no genocide or mass murder), or those to which they have consented, so long as they pose no clear and present threat to other nations.

    But Westphalianism is not a term that most people understand, and it is certainly not the subject of all kinds of recent political commentary, criticism, and complaint. It is “nationalism” that is being disparaged, and which needs defense if one is to prevent the baby from being thrown out with the bathwater.

    Here are some other common and popular ideas that are hard to justify without resorting to some kind of nationalism. People tend to remember the official dawn of WWII as being when Germany invaded Poland.

    But the Soviet Union also invaded Poland, and while not yet an ally, the allies protested, but did not treat it like Germany, even though it was being clearly belligerent and trying to conquer sovereign nations. Not just Poland, but a bunch of other countries. Yes, the history in that part of the world is extremely complicated with lots of movement of peoples and jurisdictional lines changing a lot, and people made all kinds of absurd legalistic claims to try and legitimize these brutal, unlawful, imperialistic invasions intended to subjugate.

    And after the war, the allies let Stalin keep those territories and peoples (see Lane’s I saw Poland Betrayed), and set up his iron curtain. For years, Western countries called the peoples of those lands under Communist domination, “captive nations”, and supported their eventual liberation from the “evil empire”, to which fate happily delivered them (well, mostly, it’s complicated).

    How to make sense of this without resorting to concepts such the collective self-determination inherent in Nationalism? It is possible to argue for anti-nationalistic decolonization, but in practice no one actually does, quietly acknowledging the intuitive legitimacy of independent sovereignty being more legitimately based in local demographics and territory.

    • If you believe Jews deserve a “national homeland,” you are a nationalist.

      Which is one reason Israel is disliked by many. And if nationalism is just a short step from Nazism, then it is easy to say that Israelis are the new Nazis.

      • The first line is correct, the rest is not. There are plenty of people who support the formal establishment of a fully sovereign Palestinian nation and homeland. The people who dislike Israel and claim it’s about nationalism or Zionism don’t dislike Palestine or Palestinians or call them Nazis for aspiring to what is effectively the same thing. It’s just a cover story.

      • You are absolutely right that there is a double standard. “The Palestinians”, as an oppressed non-European people, have a moral standing that Israel doesn’t. It is, in the hearts of many, the last European colony–and European colonialism was one of the worst things that ever happened to the world. For many people, the Palestinians were there first and deserve it; the Israelis invaded.

  6. Was Napoleon’s army imperialist or nationalist? If you’re fleeing from it, like Fichte, you might believe it’s imperialist. Even if every individual French soldier on the march into Berlin sees himself as fighting for his nation, and not for any empire or for progress or for a rational legal code, or for some kind of mission civilisatrice on the European continent, a German civilian could take a different view.

    And if Fichte had never been born? Hitler could still have followed Napoleon’s example, and Wilhelm’s example, and the example of Lothar von Trotha in what was then called German Southwest Africa. Chimpanzees are imperialist too.

    Chimpanzees don’t need an 18th century ideology of nationalism to justify the kind of massacres that people and chimps have always carried out. A much older ideology of imperialism would be more relevant.

    The name that every human tribe uses to refer to itself is “the human beings.” And if a chimp could talk, then within that chimp’s tribe their word would mean “the chimpanzees.” So these talking chimps would see their own particular customs as universal laws. They would talk like imperialists. They already behave that way.

    It would be a step forward for this tribe of chimps to see themselves and the other tribes in some vaguely analogous situation. Live and let live, in other words. That would be true progress. Napoleon could learn from them.

    • Easy, Napolean was an imperialist in terms of a basic definition of a policy of extending a government’s power and influence through military force by conquering those other jurisdictions and subjugating those other people. He didn’t crown himself “emperor” in 1804 for nothing!

      The transition from the pre-revolutionary conception of states enjoying Westphalian sovereignty and independence as “territories owned as personal feudal possession” to “governments constituted of and for a particular people in their homeland” does not at all imply a license for aggradiving conquest. In France the new nation state was first a “Republic”, at least in name, before Napoleon turned it into a constitutional monarchy and then, effectively, an imperial dictatorship, though of course without changing the name of what it pretended to be.

      Feudal imperialism of course needed no connection to ideological or demographic nationalism – or meaningful correspondence between rulers and ruled – at all to declare wars of conquest for all the same old reasons. The trick that Napoleon played was pretending that these wars were for the benefit and in the name of “the French Nation” instead of for his glorificaiton and satisfaction of his own ambitions. But whatever titles are given to try and justify such projects, one people using military force to vanquish another, for the benefit of the former, is a supremacist policy of imperialism, and has nothing to do with a vision of an international political order organized on the principle of independence, non-interference, and the illegitimacy of aggression.

  7. Timothy Snyder also says in “Bloodlands” and especially in “Black Earth” that Hitler was not a nationalist.
    Snyder: “and read all the major Hitler primary sources, and I was really astonished at how clearly these ideas came out—that, in fact, Hitler’s quite explicitly an ecological thinker, that the planetary level is the most important level. This is something that he says right from the beginning of Mein Kampf, all the way through.”

    /…/
    “Hitler doesn’t believe in the state as an institution.”

    /…/
    “He wasn’t really a nationalist. He was a kind of racial anarchist who thought that the only good in the world was for races to compete, and so he thought that the Germans would probably win in a racial competition, but he wasn’t sure. And as far as he was concerned, if the Germans lost, that was also alright. And that’s just not a view that a nationalist can hold.”

    https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/hitler-holocaust-antisemitism-timothy-snyder/404260/

  8. The use of imperialism for universalist ideology is probematic.

    The issue that needs to be discussed is not nationalism per se, but something closer to ‘the spatial/temporal/phylogenetic (family)/social/economic structure of human society.’ How much should local communities, related people have special rights and responsibilities with regard to each other? What about with neighboring communities? What about with distant communities tied by bounds other that space and blood (like a common industry)? How many ‘layers’ should there be and should any authorities be ‘orthogonal’ to each other? That is, should there be countervailing authorities embodied in the markets, the governments, the families, and the churches of the world, that interpenetrate and live in tension?

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