Well, at least he's honest about it

Justin Trudeau is the liberal PM of Canada. Here he is explaining why Canada is able to integrate Muslims better than France:

Countries with a strong national identity — linguistic, religious or cultural — are finding it a challenge to effectively integrate people from different backgrounds. In France, there is still a typical citizen and an atypical citizen. Canada doesn’t have that dynamic.

In his mind, having a strong national identity is a kind of hindrance in the modern world of open borders. And I suppose he's right in this assumption. The issue is, do you really want to give up a strong national identity in order to have open borders? Is the loss of identity and connection involved really worth it?

Something that liberals don't seem to get is that having a deep sense of belonging to such communities is part of the framework for developing our personhood (in a more fundamental way than practising tolerance is). We risk losing something significant of ourselves when the opportunity for belonging to such a community is no longer there.

Horrible Bosses - of the EU

Fjordman has a good post up at Gates of Vienna. It has some recent quotes from EU leaders, spelling out what they believe ideologically. As you might guess, the beliefs are disastrous.

He begins with Federica Mogherini, who is, in a sense, the EU’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. She rejects the very possibility of culture clashes, or of Islamisation, or even the existence of different power blocs in the world, as being incompatible with the new EU identity which is based on plurality and openness.

It's similar to what I wrote in the comments to a reader recently: Western liberals don't necessarily want to be dominated, but they have adopted a set of moral beliefs and a way of creating meaning in life which then commits them to the hope that the world exists in a certain way. In other words, they are not starting with reality, they are starting with ideological commitments, and they then act in the hope and belief that the world exists in a way that fits into these commitments.

For Federica Mogherini this means hoping that there will be no power blocs in the world, no clash of civilisations, and no serious point of conflict between Islam and Western liberalism. This is what she finds herself committed to ideologically.

This is how she herself puts it:

“The very idea of a clash of civilisations is at odds with the most basic values of our European Union — let alone with reality. Throughout our European history, many have tried to unify our continent by imposing their own power, their own ideology, their own identity against the identity of someone else. With the European project, after World War II, not only we accepted diversity: we expressed a desire for diversity to be a core feature of our Union. We defined our civilisation through openness and plurality: a mind-set based on blocs does not belong to us. Some people are now trying to convince us that a Muslim cannot be a good European citizen, that more Muslims in Europe will be the end of Europe. These people are not just mistaken about Muslims: these people are mistaken about Europe — that is my core message — they have no clue what Europe and the European identity are. This is our common fight: to make this concept accepted both in Europe and beyond Europe. For Europe and Islam face some common challenges in today’s world. The so-called Islamic State is putting forward an unprecedented attempt to pervert Islam for justifying a wicked political and strategic project.”

It's worth noting, too, the "identity" that Europeans are now supposed to adopt, which is a suicidal non-identity. Europeans are now supposed to believe that their identity is based around having no particular identity, only an openness to the other.

An equally horrible EU boss is Frans Timmermans. He also manages to define away the existence of Europe as a place with particular cultures and peoples. He sees it instead as a kind of stage for the expression of liberal politics: the EU is being imagined as liberal theatre. According to Timmermans:

The rise of islamophobia is the one of the biggest challenges in Europe. It is a challenge to our vital values, to the core of who we are. Never has our societies’ capacity for openness, for tolerance, for inclusion been more tested than it is today. Diversity is now in some parts of Europe seen as a threat. Diversity comes with challenges. But diversity is humanity’s destiny.

Timmermans is not saying that tolerance, inclusion and openness can be virtues in certain circumstances. He is making the radical claim that they are vital values which constitute the core of what a European is. He believes that diversity - by which he means the loss of communal cultures - is humanity's destiny.

Finally, there is Vera Jourova who wants to curb freedom of expression on the internet to limit criticism of what bosses like herself are doing (Fjordman has the details of this).

So what is to be done? At a higher level, the liberal ideology itself needs to come under sustained attack. We should be writing books and pamphlets which systematically criticise it (as James Kalb has done).

There is also the option of reasserting our own particular identities in defiance of the elite's efforts to promote a universal liberal identity.

Punishing the elites politically is also a worthy aim, although it means supporting genuinely non-liberal groups, rather than giving unthinking support to the mainstream right.

The insurrection of the mind

Tiberge at GalliaWatch has an interesting post up about Philippe de Villiers (his wonderfully Gallic full name is Philippe Le Jolis de Villiers de Saintignon).

Villiers is a leader of the Movement for France Party; a member of the European Parliament (though a Eurosceptic); and he was a minister for culture in the Chirac administration. He also established a popular history theme park called Puy du Fou, intended to promote patriotic feeling (it gets 2 million visitors a year).

He has written a book about his political career. In an interview about the book he made comments that most readers of this site are likely to sympathise with:

Politicians refuse to find solutions because they are sold to globalism that necessitates the destruction of all vital attachments.

Behind the lies I saw high treason. This unheard-of conjunction between the interests of some and the ideology of others. On the one hand the search for a planetary market, and on the other the ideology of a nomad, rootless, de-sexed, atomized.

Ever since May '68, the "no borders" of the liberals joined with the "no limits" of the libertarians to unseal all cornerstones.

The globalist elites that I am denouncing knocked down all the sustaining walls of France.

I'd like to highlight the following as well as it so directly contradicts the liberal ideology that currently rules the West:

The drama France is experiencing is twofold: they have attacked the family, and the family of families that is the nation. The latter is a heritage. It must be restated: the nation is received, it is not chosen!

We must confront the globalist elite who have not ceased to destroy the real people, the national community, the long memory, the family, and finally France.

I have bolded the most relevant part. Liberals believe in the autonomous individual, in which freedom is thought to mean having the liberty to self-create, self-define or self-determine. But a traditional communal identity is not self-defined; it is something we are born into. Therefore liberals have set themselves against traditional identities. Villiers is challenging the reigning ideology head on when he insists that we should accept the nation as something received rather than as something chosen individually.

Villiers suggestions of what to do next are worth considering:

They want to fabricate urban manipulable atoms, it is up to us ... to work towards the insurrection of the mind!

We must increase the number of isolates of resistance, create non-government schools that develop straight thinking and ensure transmission, re-affiliation, and rooting.

We must defend the sacred nature of life, and filiation as a mark of identity, the nation as heritage, the borders as anchors and the French dream as a window on the world.

We have returned to the days of the catacombs and each of us must guard his little spark, so that the flame does not ever go out. Those who no longer have hope are those who no longer have a solution.

If we could get just a little bit more organised we could perhaps do more to promote and publish the ideas of men like Villiers. It is fortunate that Tiberge runs her site or else English speakers would have little chance at all of accessing thinkers like Villiers.

(There is more at the original post by Tiberge which I encourage readers to visit.)

Why give up the benefits of traditional community?

I've just returned from a short holiday in the countryside. I spent some time in a couple of smaller towns, where a more settled way of life still prevails. I could feel in these towns that sense of people and place which gives a special charge to the experience of life. Another way to put this is that it gives a more spiritualised experience of life.

And yet there are many people who have chosen to commit themselves instead to an internationalist, multicultural ideal. But why?

Here are some of the possible reasons why some Westerners have chosen such an option:

1. At the top of society there are reasons for wanting to break people apart from one another. If people are allowed to have "sideways loyalties" then there is a possible source of resistance to a complete domination of society by the logic of the market and by the regulation (and remaking) of society by intellectual "expertise."

This is significant because it means that the side of politics which is opposed to traditional communities has both money and intellectual support.

2. Liberals are likely to turn against traditional communities. This is so for a number of reasons. First, liberals are (formally) committed to a pluralistic vision of society, in which society is declared to be a neutral space in which the state regulates the relations between different groups holding an equal status (except that the traditionally dominant group is often not given equal status). This view leads liberals to criticise traditional communities as being too monocultural or "whitebread".

Second, liberals are often committed to an individualistic vision of society. Liberals have rejected the classical view of man being a social creature, with some of our identity and purposes being drawn from the social entities we belong to, and have instead looked upon the abstract, atomised individual (the individual considered apart from his community or family) as being the starting point of philosophy. For this reason, liberals are not as sensitive to the importance of a traditional communal life to the individual (this is the aspect of liberalism that communitarian writers have criticised).

Third, liberals hold to a concept of freedom in which freedom is defined as individual autonomy. We are free, in this view, if we are unimpeded in living a self-determining life. This means that predetermined qualities, such as our sex or our ethny, are thought of, negatively, as restrictions or limitations that the individual should be liberated from. This concept of freedom has ruled out many of the more significant aspects of human identity; what it has left for many liberals is the idea that life is about being self-made in the market. Hence the view of the individual as "economic man" in pursuit of his rational self-interest in the market. The more that this view dominates, the more that people are seen as interchangeable units rather than as members of distinct communities.

3. There are some Christians (not all) who have set themselves against traditional communities. This is despite what I pointed to at the start of this post, namely that the experience of traditional community life is a spiritualising one that is likely to bring the individual closer to, rather than further from, the acceptance of Christian belief.

Why might some Christians promote a shift toward a more mundane internationalism? One reason is that some Christians are reductionist in their world view. They want to distil Christianity into just one principle, and sometimes choose to go with an abstract, indiscriminate love for everyone equally. The value of particular human relationships aren't recognised in this outlook.

There are also some Christians who see particular loves and relationships as competing with, rather than leading people toward (or being aspects of), the relationship with church and with God. Some Christians even claim that the only legitimate community is that of church.

4. Intellectuals often don't share the same interests as others. Growing up they can feel like the odd person out, unappreciated and unrecognised by those around them. As young adults they are likely to seek out others like themselves and to form communities which are defined against the surrounding mainstream culture. Their form of community, in other words, defines status according to how far distant its members are from the ordinary mainstream of society. Intellectual communities have therefore tended to deny that their own society has a worthwhile culture of its own and have instead set out to identify with and enjoy the cultures of others.

5. In modern times, some Westerners may simply never have had the experience of living within a traditional community. In the larger, multicultural cities it is now possible to not know what it is like to be part of a living tradition of one's own.

6. Some people are not spiritually sensitive souls. They are more inclined to understand things materialistically and are therefore less likely to recognise the value of belonging to a settled community.

7. Some people of mixed ancestry, or who belong to minority ethnic groups, don't experience the existence of the (mainstream) living tradition as positively as others, not feeling that they belong to it as closely.

You can see from this the challenge of holding onto traditional community life, no matter what it brings positively to people's lives. Traditions won't go on just by themselves, not when they are up against the forces I have listed above. There has to exist resourced, organised, institutional support for them.

Traditionalists ought to be concerned that the economic structure of a society gives business interests reasons to support community; that the theology of the churches is a sophisticated one that brings the churches into the mainstream of social life, rather than marginalising them as cults; that intellectuals are brought into normal social life rather than forming hostile sub-communities and that they are encouraged to seek status through intellectual and cultural leadership rather than through rejection of the mainstream; and that rank and file traditionalists are given the chance to exert influence through organisations of their own.

Should there be a leftist nationalist party?

I was at an Australian reddit site the other night and stumbled upon an interesting thread. Someone asked the question why there were no left-wing nationalist parties in Australia (I don't think there are any right-wing ones either).

As an insight into the mind of left-wingers, a common answer was that the left doesn't support nationalism because it wants to help everyone:

Homiros: If you are a true left party, your main focus should be the welfare of all people.

FvHound: Us lefties don't want a compromise with the right. We want to help EVERYONE

Clearly, there are left-wingers who like to see themselves as compassionate types. Perhaps, therefore, an important aspect of challenging left-wing thought is to point out the hurt and damage that left-wing positions cause to many people.

Why would the left think of itself as helping everyone? Two possible causes spring to mind. The first is the political shift that happened in the late 1800s/early 1900s. The older liberals in the U.S. believed that the Anglo-Saxons had a special dispensation to bring freedom and Evangelical Christianity to the world. The new liberals challenged this view by rejecting the ethnic particularity and (often) by rejecting Christianity, in favour of a more ecumenical, cosmopolitan and humanistic view.

If you see yourself as serving "Humanity" in a cosmic sense, rather than God, then your focus will be a universal one (you won't be focused on helping your own nation, as the entity you have set up to serve is a global Humanity).

However, another possible explanation is that the leftist view is a cut-down, secularised version of a certain type of Christian ethics. If you think that the essence of morality is a vaguely universal command to help everyone including (or especially) the stranger or the marginalised, then you might well think that being a good person means, vaguely, a commitment "to help everyone".

It's true that the modern left has become cosmopolitan. However, what is less clear is that the move to vaguely universal commitments has oriented the left toward "serving everyone". The universalism seems instead to go along with a radical individualism, in which what matters is individual rights or the unfettered pursuit of individual wants or the liberty to define one's own good.

Furthermore, where the left is oriented toward community, it is often on an "assortative" basis, i.e. it is a gathering of people who share the same intellectual aspirations, the same political values and similar lifestyle markers. The left is very good at establishing community for itself on this basis - in some ways it has replaced the idea of ethny.

Why is this significant? Because when a communal identity is an ethnic one it means that we show a love for, and service toward, our coethnics who may not be part of our own caste or class: they may live in the countryside and not the inner city; they may eat fast food and drink beer; they may watch Channel 10 and not the ABC; read the Herald Sun and not The Age and so on.

But the left is not challenged in this way. In practice, leftists often show a disdain for those who do not share their own lifestyle markers - that is part of the way the boundaries of leftist community are upheld.

What traditionalists would argue is that we are not called to help everyone in a vaguely universal way. Our commitments are more bracing that that. We are made for particular relationships, relationships which imply specific loves and duties. Christianity does, it is true, remind us that our commitments don't stop at those we are most closely related to; this does not mean, though, that we are stripped of our given natures, or that we disregard natural law (or much of scripture) and seek to erase the significance of all those relationships bar the single, universal one.

For that reason a leftist should, just like any other person, seek to fulfil a relationship with a spouse, with children, with a wider family, with a local community (including those who do not aspire to intellectual class status) and with coethnics, as well as then helping others.

Swedish PM doesn't like the nation

Fredrik Reinfeldt is the supposedly "conservative" PM of Sweden. But just like David Cameron in the UK, it's not obvious that he is very conservative at all.

Last week he stridently rejected the idea of nationalism and national identity, setting this against the idea of individual rights and individual differences:

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt on Wednesday urged young voters to head to the European parliamentary polls on May 25th "to cure the European disease of nationalism".

"European cooperation has created a foundation where individual rights are paramount, and has created the possibility to move freely," Reinfeldt told students at Luleå Technical University, adding that his party encouraged diversity.

The prime minister said that while the union was not perfect, it was better than the alternative.

"Let go of the age-old and revolting thought that what sticks out is dangerous," he cautioned. "Safeguard the idea that we are individuals, who are different and can live together with tolerance and mutual respect."

That's a false way of posing things. Reinfeldt is setting the idea of the individual against the idea of belonging to a nation, as if the two things were at odds.

In fact, a strong sense of belonging to a national community will generally enrich the life of the individual and add to his sense of identity, his commitment to the society he lives in, his connection to a particular culture and the meaning of his work and his efforts to raise a family.

Nor does a national community erase individual differences. If you were to take, for instance, 100 ethnic Japanese you would find a diversity in character, personality and sensibility that would more than satisfy the human urge toward difference.

It's true that jingoism - the stirring up of national feeling to support an aggressive foreign policy - is a negative thing, but it should be remembered that nationalism can also be drawn on to resist aggressors. Was it not, for instance, a love of country that helped to motivate young Australian men to defend their nation in WWII?

It seems to me that the individual loses power when he is reduced to the status of an individual consumer or careerist in a modern, internationalist, liberal state. He is no longer part of a larger community existing through time. He is no longer a participant in a unique culture, nor does he share in the achievements of a national community. He no longer has the inspiration in his life of heroes whom he is related to in a particular way; nor does he feel a sense of ownership over the particular landscape of his national homeland.

If he feels himself to be just one atomised individual in a mass society, then how can he not feel smaller than the man who feels himself to be a part of a great tradition?

Kaufmann: consensus Americanism

I've been tracing the arguments made by Eric Kaufmann in his book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. In the last post I brought the argument up to the end of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War. Kaufmann believes that by this time the avant-garde intellectuals had won over the mainstream of the intellectual class and were also now supported from within the government:

The new liberal value consensus, in which artists, writers, academics and the U.S. government were united, was social democratic, cosmopolitan, and modernist...Consensus Americanism can thus be viewed as an intellectual earthquake that elevated the new avant-garde ...to a position of cultural hegemony. Intellectual leadership...has always been a mainstay of ethnic consciousness, and its withdrawal is devastating to the group involved. In capturing Anglo-America from the top down, the American avant-garde left American dominant ethnicity rudderless. It was now only a question of time before cosmopolitanism would achieve the institutional inertia necessary for it to triumph as a mass phenomenon.

Kaufmann next looks at some of the cosmopolitan literary works of the 1940s and 50s. In 1943, Republican presidential nominee Wendell Wilkie penned a best-seller with the title One World. In it Wendell articulated a "civic nationalism" in which America was to have no dominant ethny, but a multiplicity of peoples bound together by a common liberal political framework:

Our nation is composed of no one race, faith, or cultural heritage. It is a grouping of some thirty peoples possessing varying religious concepts, philosophies, and historical backgrounds. They are linked together by their confidence in our democratic institutions as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Constitution for themselves and their children. The keystone of our union of states is freedom.

Other notable books sharing the "cosmopolitan spirit of the times" were Carey McWilliams' Brothers under the Skin and John Higham's Strangers in the Land. According to Kaufmann, Gunnar Myrdal's American Creed was also influential amongst the elites.

Toward the end of WWII, there was a shift within the US government toward the idea of open borders. President Truman gave voice to this outlook in 1952 when he gave a speech claiming that as a matter of international "moral leadership" the US should end the national origins quota system (which aimed to preserve the ethnic balance within the US) because he thought it to be "discriminatory" and in violation of "our belief in the brotherhood of man" and the belief that "all men are created equal".

At about the same time, the print media changed its line on immigration. In 1953 the Atlantic Monthly published its first cosmopolitan piece. In the same year Reader's Digest changed its editorial policy; previously it had favoured immigration restrictions, but its change of line was announced by a piece arguing for greater Asian immigration in order to improve Asian-American relations.

Do Ukrainians really want a "state nation"?

Timothy Garton Ash is a professor of European Studies at Oxford. He has also called himself an FLIO - a friend of the liberal international order.

He has written a newspaper column on the unrest in the Ukraine in which he states that the two possibilities are that the current violence will tear the country apart or else help to bring about the creation of a "state nation".

What is a state nation? Professor Garton Ash offers the following definition:

A state-nation is one in which a shared civic national identity is created by the state, rather than a single ethnic national identity being embodied in it.

A state nation would mean the end of a meaningful national tradition for Ukrainians. In reality it is just a new term for a liberal civic nationalism in which a shared commitment to liberal political institutions and values is what is supposed to hold a nation together.

I've written a detailed criticism of civic nationalism before. A civic nationalism is dissolving of a national tradition. First, it means that anyone, anywhere can be a member of the nation, just so long as they uphold liberal values. That not only encourages open borders and uncontrolled migration, it also makes a national identity indistinct - the identity of one civic nation is very close to those of the others.

Another problem with a civic nationalism is that it is not the end point in the unfolding of liberal principles. It is merely a staging post. Once it is achieved the next step for liberals is to complain that there is still discrimination on the basis of citizenship, i.e. that benefits are given by the state to citizens that are not given to non-citizens. In the longer run, the moral focus shifts from civic nationalism to internationalism.

Undefining the nation

Australia Day is coming up. There's an interesting post at Tweed Renegades on the official publicity being put out to commemorate our national day (see here).

One of the posters for Australia Day shows a group of people dressed up as Mexicans with the slogan "Australia Day: Celebrate Your Way." Below this is the following advice:

Australia Day means something different to everyone, and it's important you do what's right for you. So on Jan. 26 reflect on what you love about being Australian.

Which prompted this response at Tweed Renegades:

“Reflect on what you love about being Australian”? Evidently, what these people love about being Australian is being Mexican.

I'm afraid that the nation is being given the same treatment as the family. Just as we are told that family can be anything we want it to be, so now the nation is being similarly "undefined" to mean whatever we want it to mean.

It fits in with the liberal idea that we cannot know objective goods held in common as a community and so we must instead self-define our own subjective goods (that which is right "for us").

But a national identity has to be something that has a common element - otherwise it wouldn't be a communal identity. Such an identity works best when there is felt to be a national spirit and culture that individuals are able to participate in, draw part of their identity from, and give their loyalty to.

It doesn't mean as much when it's just something that I generate for myself alone.

A Russian looks sadly at the West

The Russians have problems of their own with migrations of peoples but, even so, it's refreshing to hear Russian state officials speak out against liberalism.

The latest is the chairman of the State Duma International Affairs' Committee, Alexei Pushkov. I don't have a complete transcript of his speech, but the highlights aren't bad. He said:

Russia is not suggesting that Western societies live according to our patterns but advocates the right of all countries and societies to live the way they find necessary instead of becoming targets of aggressive exports of values of the radical liberal revolution.

He complained that the West was witnessing an,

“accelerated de-Christianization” that is occurring “under the slogan of forming an indivisible world without borders, in particular, between sexes.

The objective”, he continued, “is to develop a qualitatively new society with no states, borders, moral norms or foundations of civilization.”

He believes it is intended to make the West,

“a common economic space… where free individuals without nationality will be roaming allegedly protected by certain norms of law but being objects of merciless manipulation, stripped of links to their land, history, religion or family in the civilized meaning of the word.”

I don't think his words will have much influence on the Western elites. But they should encourage us to keep up our own resistance to what is happening in our own countries.

John Paul II on heritage

In my post on "The Elite Consensus" I argued that a core problem with liberalism is not so much materialism or even selfishness but a faulty concept of individuality:

From the liberal perspective, what we do in the family or as members of a tribe is simply conventional and doesn't therefore express individuality. They prefer the idea of an existence in which there is no entity larger than ourselves, in which there is a purely personal identity (i.e. I identify with myself) and in which relationships are incidental to our true purposes. In other words, they identify individuality (the creative unfolding of ourselves as persons) with a kind of detached self-making.

So the problem isn't at its heart one of materialism or selfishness. Instead, it's a concept of individuality which detaches the individual from particular forms of identity, belonging and connectedness, and also from those goods embedded within our own nature and reality which guide our development in a particular direction.

If the key problem is not selfishness then the churches are not going to change the course of liberal modernity by emphasising selflessness. If, instead, the key problem is a faulty concept of individuality, one which emphasises a detached self-making, then the churches need to put forward an alternative concept of individuality, one which emphasises the way that we fulfil our individuality as created beings.

The churches are mostly failing to do this, but there are exceptions. The example I'm going to post today is a long one, but well worth reading. It's from an apostolic letter, Dilecti Amici, written by Pope John Paul II in 1985. The letter was addressed to the youth of the world; the following section is on inheritance:

11. In the vast sphere in which the plan of life, drawn up in youth, comes into contact with "other people", we have touched upon the most sensitive point. Let us go on to consider that this central point, at which our personal "I" opens up to life "with others" and "for others" in the marriage covenant, finds in Sacred Scripture a very important passage: "Man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife".

This word "leaves" deserves special attention. From its very beginning the history of humanity passes-and will do so until the end- through the family. A man enters the family through the birth which he owes to his parents, his father and mother, and at the right moment he leaves this first environment of life and love in order to pass to a new one. By "leaving father and mother", each one of you at the same time, in a certain sense, bears them within you; you assume the manifold inheritance that has its direct beginning and source in them and in their family. In this way too, when you leave, each one of you remains: the inheritance that you receive links you permanently with those who passed it on to you and to whom you owe so much. And the individual-he and she-will continue to pass on the same inheritance. Thus also the fourth commandment of the Decalogue is of such great importance: "Honour your father and your mother".

It is a question here first of all of the heritage of being a human person, and then of being one in a more precisely defined personal and social situation. Here even the physical similarity to one's parents plays its part. Still more important is the whole heritage of culture, at the almost daily centre of which is language. Your parents have taught each one of you to speak the language which constitutes the essential expression of the social bond with other people. This bond is established by limits which are wider than the family itself or a given environment. These are the limits of at least a tribe and most often those of a people or a nation into which you were born.

In this way the family inheritance grows wider. Through your upbringing in your family you share in a specific culture; you also share in the history of your people or nation. The family bond means at the same time membership of a community wider than the family and a still further basis of personal identity. If the family is the first teacher of each one of you, at the same time-through the family-you are also taught by the tribe, people or nation with which you are linked through the unity of culture, language and history.

This inheritance likewise constitutes a call in the ethical sense. By receiving and inheriting faith and the values and elements that make up the culture of your society and the history of your nation, each one of you is spiritually endowed in your individual humanity. Here we come back to the parable of the talents, the talents which we receive from the Creator through our parents and families, and also through the national community to which we belong. In regard to this inheritance we cannot maintain a passive attitude, still less a defeatist one, as did the last of the servants described in the parable of the talents. We must do everything we can to accept this spiritual inheritance, to confirm it, maintain it and increase it. This is an important task for all societies, especially perhaps for those that find themselves at the beginning of their independent existence, or for those that must defend from the danger of destruction from outside or of decay from within the very existence and essential identity of the particular nation.

Writing to you young people, I try to have before my mind's eye the complex and separate situations of the tribes, peoples and nations of our world. Your youth, and the plan of life which during your young years each one of you works out, are from the very beginning part of the history of these different societies, and this happens not "from without" but pre-eminently "from within". It becomes for you a question of family awareness and consequently of national awareness: a question of the heart, a question of conscience. The concept of "homeland" develops immediately after the concept of "family", and in a certain sense one within the other. And as you gradually experience this social bond which is wider than that of the family, you also begin to share in responsibility for the common good of that larger family which is the earthly "homeland" of each one of you. The prominent figures of a nation's history, ancient or modern, also guide your youth and foster the development of that social love which is more often called "love of country".

We are not abstracted, detached beings. Our individuality unfolds within the social bonds of family and our larger family - our tribe or nation. We are spiritually endowed in our individual humanity through the social love that is more often called "love of country".

Who does Dave want to add to Europe?

David Cameron, British PM, has made a speech about expanding the boundaries of the European Union:

Talking to Kazakh students in the capital Astana he said: “Britain has always supported the widening of the EU. “Our vision of the EU is that it should be a large trading and co-operating organisation that effectively stretches, as it were, from the Atlantic to the Urals. “We have a wide vision of Europe and have always encouraged countries that want to join.”

He wants Kazakhstan to join? Kazakhstan is a country in central Asia (it shares a border with China). The Kazakhs themselves are a Muslim Turkic group (though there is a sizeable minority of Russians living in Kazakhstan).



A Kazakh wedding

It's true that 10% of Kazakhstan lies west of the Ural mountains - presumably Cameron is using this to justify the idea of Kazakhstan joining the EU.

Cameron's speech is a reminder of the weakness of the liberal approach to nationalism. Liberals have ditched the traditional idea of nationalism, in which people were connected together by a shared ethnicity - a common language, culture, race, religion and history - and instead opted for a civic nationalism, in which people were to be united by a common commitment to liberal political institutions and values.

But this liberal civic nationalism is unstable. If all that is needed to belong to a "nation" is a shared commitment to liberalism, then potentially anyone can join. If Kazakhstan proves to meet certain political criteria, then it can join a "European" union even if its population is majority Turkic and Muslim and even if its landmass is 90% in Central Asia. In other words, there are no limits to the boundaries of a civic nation and if there are no limits it becomes meaningless to talk of a particular national identity. You might as well just sign up to the UN and be done with it.

The Kazakhstan speech also shows yet again just how much David Cameron is committed to a liberal view of things rather than a traditionalist conservative one. We shouldn't be surprised by this. After all, Cameron has made his own commitment to liberalism very clear:

today we have a Conservative Party … which wants Britain to be a positive participant in the EU, as a champion of liberal values.

A little bit will become a lot

Paul Martin was the Liberal Party Prime Minister of Canada from 2003 to 2006. There is a clip of a speech he made that was uploaded to YouTube in 2009 (I don't know when the speech itself was given). In the speech he talks about the necessity of nations giving up "a little bit of our sovereignty" so that the financial affairs of nations can be regulated at a global level. He believes that this will create "a very different world" and a "new era".

I've written often about how unstable a civic nationalism is. If you claim that your national identity is defined not by a shared ethnicity but by a shared commitment to liberal political institutions, then why shouldn't those institutions go global if you think there is a managerial advantage in them doing so?

As it happens, you have to doubt the claims about global regulation made by Paul Martin in his speech. He assumes that the Western nations are well regulated and that the threat to the international economies comes from the newer players such as China and India. But not only are these countries unlikely to accept Western regulation of their economies, the most recent failures have come from Western countries anyway.

Here is a transcript of Paul Martin's speech:

One more thing on this question of sovereignty. Very difficult for a large country to accept that someone is going to come in, like the United States or the Europeans, and is going to say “You’re not doing your regulation in a proper way”.

But what’s going to happen when China and India are economies as powerful as the United States or Europe? And what’s going to happen when there’s a mortgage meltdown in India? What’s going to happen when a Chinese hedge fund goes under? And the results of that tsunami don’t stop at the Chinese or Indian border? But that you find them at Idaho and Iowa and California? Who’s going to deal with that?

Unless we’re prepared to understand that in fact we’re all going to have to give up a little bit of our sovereignty in order to make the world work.

I think that we are really at the beginning of a very different era. 1944 the great minds of the world Dexter White, John Maynard Keynes and a bunch essentially laid the foundations for the Bretton Woods institution and the United Nations. And they built a system which functioned for over 50 to 60 years.

I think that it’s time to renew that vision. A very different world than one that (?) and independent nation states simply came together but could ignore what was essentially going on inside those countries. That day is over thanks to (?) I think we’ve got to take it one step further and we’ve got to say that in fact countries have responsibilities to their neighbours. And their neighbours are in every nook and cranny of the world. And I believe that that is going to become the debate of our generation.

Paul Martin was replaced as Canadian PM by the Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper. He made similar comments in a speech of his own ("there is going to have to be global governance"). So the policy seems to be one that Canadian political leaders are determined to pursue.

More evidence that the elites are post-national

David Goodhart has written a post for the Daily Mail titled "Why we on the left made an epic mistake on immigration".

One of the most interesting bits of information in the post is this:

There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’

I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.
 

Goodhart has written about this before, in an article for Prospect:

A few years ago I was at a 60th birthday party for a well-known Labour MP. Many of the leading thinkers of the British centre-left were there and at one point the conversation turned to the infamous Gordon Brown slogan “British jobs for British workers,” from a speech he had given a few days before at the Labour conference.

The people around me entered a bidding war to express their outrage at Brown’s slogan which was finally triumphantly closed by one who declared, to general approval, that it was “racism, pure and simple.”

I remember thinking afterwards how odd the conversation would have sounded to most other people in this country. Gordon Brown’s phrase may have been clumsy and cynical but he didn’t actually say British jobs for white British workers.

In most other places in the world today, and indeed probably in Britain itself until about 25 years ago, such a statement about a job preference for national citizens would have seemed so banal as to be hardly worth uttering. Now the language of liberal universalism has ruled it beyond the pale.

My fellow partygoers were all too representative of a part of liberal, educated Britain. Shami Chakrabarti, of the human rights group Liberty, has argued: “In the modern world of transnational and multinational power we must decide if we are all ‘people’ or all ‘foreigners’ now.”

Oliver Kamm, the centrist commentator, said to me recently that it was morally wrong to discriminate on grounds of nationality, ruling out the “fellow citizen favouritism” that most people think that the modern nation state is based on.

And according to George Monbiot, a leading figure of the liberal left, “Internationalism… tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington… Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of British people [before the Congolese]. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How… do you distinguish it from racism?”

It is not only people on the left who think like this. On a recent BBC Radio 4 Moral Maze programme about development aid, the former Tory cabinet minister and born-again liberal Michael Portillo had this to say: “It is quite old fashioned to think about national borders, and rather nationalistic to say we must help people who are only moderately poor because they happen to be in the UK rather than helping people who are desperately poor because they happen to be a long way away.”

All of the above are, in the formulation of a group of North American cultural psychologists, WEIRD—they are from a sub-culture that is Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. They are, as we have seen, universalists, suspicious of strong national loyalties. They also tend to be individualists committed to autonomy and self-realisation. Balancing that they are usually deeply concerned with social justice and unfairness and also suspicious of appeals to religion or to human nature to justify any departure from equal treatment—differences between men and women, for example, are regarded as cultural not biological.
 

I'll write more about David Goodhart in a future post. The point I'll stick to for now is that traditionalist predictions about a civic nationalism are already coming true.

Liberals didn't like a traditional nationalism, based on ties of shared ethnicity, because ethnicity is a predetermined quality that we can't autonomously choose for ourselves. So liberals opted instead for civic nationalism, in which national solidarity is based on citizenship and a shared commitment to liberal political institutions and values.

But even a civic nationalism still discriminates between people based on something that we are usually born into (citizenship), so it will still fail the test for the more rigorous kind of liberals.

For that reason, the liberal elite is moving increasingly to a post-national position - one in which they think it is wrong to discriminate in favour of people who are part of your own nation. You are no longer supposed to favour fellow citizens, let alone fellow members of your own ethny.

As Goodhart noted in his Prospect piece, this attitude is emerging on the right as well as the left. There's an election later this year in Australia and so the PM, Julia Gillard, has been trying to win working class support by promising a crackdown on the rorting of the 457 temporary visa system. The message is that qualified Australians should get first go at Australian jobs rather than overseas workers.

That was too much for some on the right. Tony Abbott criticised Gillard for engaging in a "birthplace war" whilst columnist Andrew Bolt wrote that it showed that Labor was the party of "xenophobia" and that it was an example of "moral failings".

The current drift, even on the mainstream right, is toward a post-national mentality, one in which we are not supposed to favour members of our nation.

I don't know how enduring this shift will be: can societies really continue to function well when communal loyalty is considered immoral or outdated? Can a national state prosper when the people running it no longer believe in national loyalties of any kind?

Tony, don't go there

There's been a stoush between the two major parties in Australia this week over 457 visas. In theory, these visas are meant to allow employers to fly in workers from overseas when there is no-one available to do the job in Australia.

But predictably the system has been rorted:

Evidence of widespread rorting of the controversial program has grown. One company employed more than 400 foreigners and no locals on a building site, and it has been claimed fake businesses have been set up to bring in foreigners who then seek permanent residence.
 

It's an election year and the left-liberal Labor Party are taking a populist position (and the correct position) that unemployed Australians should have preference in our job market. The Labor Party Immigration Minister, Brendan O'Connor, has said:

It is clear there have been abuses of the 457 visas and qualified Australians are missing out on jobs in a number of fields.

And what of the more right-liberal Liberal Party? They want the rorting to continue and to be expanded. The Victorian Liberal Party, for instance, wants the 457 visa system to be extended to Geelong, a town struggling with 10,000 locally unemployed people.

Even worse was a comment from the federal leader of the Liberal Party, Tony Abbott. He accused the Labor Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, of engaging in "the false birthplace war".

I hope that was just an ill-thought, throwaway line. What worries me is this. Western countries once had what might be called an ethnic nationalism. But an ethnic nationalism is something that we are born into - it is predetermined rather than self-determined. It therefore violated the liberal idea that we are made free when we are autonomous and self-defining.

So it was replaced by a civic nationalism, in which a nation was tied together by a common citizenship and a shared commitment to liberal political values. That was a weaker form of national identity and it was always going to struggle to hold ground. Why? Because it still violated the liberal ideal of autonomy as it meant giving preference to people largely on the basis of a predetermined quality, namely where they were born.

As I noted in a recent post, a host of past Labor PMs have come out and rejected even a civic nationalism on the basis that it discriminates against those who aren't Australian citizens and that it discriminates on the "arbitrary" basis of birthplace.

So it's a bit ominous to hear a Liberal leader imply that birthplace shouldn't matter when it comes to jobs, and that those who are not Australian citizens and who were born elsewhere have an equal claim to job vacancies in Australia.

If Abbott means this, then he too has moved not just beyond a deeper ethnic nationalism, but beyond the civic nationalism that was supposed to replace it. It means that we have moved one step closer to a post-national consensus amongst the major parties.

If Australians are to have no more loyalty toward each other than to those who live dispersed throughout the world, then what does it mean anymore to be an Australian? It just becomes a descriptor of where you happen to live, rather than a meaningful description of belonging to a particular people.

And if the ruling elite has no more loyalty to those who are citizens here (let alone to their ethnic kin) than to those who are not citizens and who live elsewhere, then what is the basis of loyalty to the state?

And what is to stop a generation of young Australians from being left behind? If their own government has no particular concern for them, then who will?

Rudd's missing national identity

Yesterday I wrote a post on Malcolm Turnbull's attempts to define our national identity. Turnbull, if you remember, is a right-liberal - a leading member of the Liberal Party. As such he is a true believer in a civic national identity. This means that he rejects a traditional identity based on a common ethnicity and instead believes that you can have a stable national identity based on citizenship and a shared commitment to liberal political values.

Turnbull's civic identity, when it came to the crunch, turned out to be remarkably thin. It came down to Australia spending more on welfare than the U.S.

But Turnbull's civic nationalism was less shocking that what followed. Kevin Rudd, the former Labor PM, was the next politician to talk about Australia's identity and he presented Australia's development in quasi-religious terms, as a casting out of national demons of racism and sexism to get to the promised land of tolerance, diversity and membership of a global village.

If you're at all conservative it sounds a bit mad. It is reducing the existence of an historic nation of people to the terms of Rudd's political ideology.

But I don't think we should be surprised. One of the secrets of Australian politics is that the leaders of the Labor Party have not only given up on a deeper traditional nationalism (as have the Liberals), but they've given up on a civic nationalism as well.

There's a reason for this. If you're a liberal and you believe that we should be free to self-determine who we are, then you won't like a traditional nationalism, because that's based on what liberals dismissively call "an accident of birth", namely an inherited ethnicity. With a civic nationalism, ethnicity no longer matters - anyone can become a citizen.

However, civic nationalism is still in its own way exclusive. A civic identity might make our ethnicity not matter, but it still makes our nationality matter. And nationality is usually just as arbitrary as ethnicity - we gain our national citizenship because of the state we happen to be born into.

Therefore, the drift of liberalism is to move away from all distinctions of nationality.

The leadership of the Labor Party seem to have reached that point decades ago. For instance, when former PM Bob Hawke was asked what defined an Australian he answered:

An Australian is someone who chooses to live here, obey the law and pays taxes
 

That's the answer of someone who doesn't take distinctions of nationality very seriously. The next Labor PM made his position even clearer. Paul Keating once ranted against the idea of civic nationalism, complaining that it was "exclusive" and that it relied on:

constructing arbitrary and parochial distinctions between the civic and the human community ... if you ask what is the common policy of the Le Pens, the Terreblanches, Hansons and Howards of this world, in a word, it is “citizenship”. Who is in and who is out.
 

Keating, in other words, had openly moved beyond distinctions of nationality, even those based on citizenship and a civic identity. And what of Rudd himself?  Back in 2005 a Labor Party committee recommended the formation of a Pacific Community:

There would be a Pacific Parliament, a Pacific Court, a Pacific Common Market, a common currency and military integration.
 

Far from having a strong sense of a distinctly Australian national identity, the Labor Party was already at the stage of wanting to merge Australia's sovereignty into a larger regional state. When Rudd became PM in 2007 he decided on an even more ambitious project, that of creating an Asia-Pacific regional bloc:

Kevin Rudd wants to spearhead the creation of an Asia-Pacific Union similar to the European Union by 2020.
 

Which leaves us with the current Labor Party PM, Julia Gillard. Her Government has created draft legislation which would make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of nationality or citizenship - a law which doesn't exactly uphold the spirit of a civic nationalism.

So when a Labor leader is asked to talk about a specifically Australian identity they're in an even more difficult position than a Liberal leader. They have already moved a long way toward the idea that nationality shouldn't matter, not even a civic based one.

So it's not surprising that Kevin Rudd should present Australia's development in political-ideological terms as a shift toward an ever greater liberalism. What else could someone who is "post-national" do?

So how do our politicians deal with national identity?

It's Australia Day. On the positive side, that means a lot of family get togethers around a BBQ. On the negative side, the papers are full of liberal politicians busily redefining Australia's national identity.

The Financial Review has offered us two politicians: Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd. In the interests of brevity I'll deal with Turnbull in this post and Rudd in the next one.

Malcolm Turnbull is on the left-wing of the Liberal Party, which is our right-liberal party. There are no surprises in his reflections on Australia's identity. He argues that Australia is special because it has a civic identity rather than a traditional ethnic one:

...unlike most other countries (the US being a notable exception), we do not regard national identity by reference to a common race, ethnicity, religion or cultural background.

Our national identity is defined by a common commitment to Australian civic values of democracy, the rule of law, respect for the rights of individual men and women, a healthy scepticism for authority and a deep intuitive sense of a fair go.
 

But what of the problems with a civic identity, in which it is a common commitment to liberal political institutions and values which is supposed to unite us?

One problem is that identity becomes indistinct. If being Australian means being committed to democracy and the rights of individual men and women, then how is that different to what it means to be American or Canadian or English or Swedish?

Turnbull tries to solve this issue in two ways. First, he pretends that the European nations still hold to a traditional ethnic nationalism and that Australia and the U.S. are somehow exceptional in being civic nations.

But that's Turnbull just making things up. All of the Western nations define themselves explicitly now in terms of a civic, rather than an ethnic, nationalism: the UK, Canada, New Zealand, France, Sweden - the list goes on.

Second, Turnbull admits that the components of a civic nationalism are the same everywhere, but he thinks that there are other distinguishing aspects of society that define us:

There is no individual component in our civic values unique to Australia. But the combination is distinctly Australian – for example, we are much less deferential than the British, more caring, with a stronger safety net than the Americans.
 

But that is an exceptionally thin foundation for a national identity. It's like Canadians thinking they're different because they have a national health insurance scheme. What if the Australian and American safety nets become more alike? Does that then mean we've lost our national identity?

The rest of Turnbull's column is, as you would expect from a right liberal, focused on the ideal of individuals being self-made in the market and the need for freedom from state regulation of the economy. (Right-liberals believe that you can regulate society best through the market rather than through state bureaucracy.)

Knocking Australia Day

The 26th of January is Australia Day. In the lead up to this day, without fail, the Melbourne Age newspaper runs a series of columns attacking the idea of Australian patriotism.

They've kicked off this year with a column by a staff travel writer, Ben Groundwater, titled "Why I'm not a proud Aussie". It begins:

Sorry proud Aussies, I don't get you. I don't agree with you.

This is not just the Southern Cross-tattooed proud Aussies I'm talking about, the VB drinkers watching footy in the bars of Kuta. This is all the Australians who pronounce pride in their place of birth
 

So it's not just assertive displays of patriotism he dislikes, it's the very fact of feeling a sense of pride in your country of birth.

Why? He explains:

...the more I travel the more I become convinced that the whole concept of nationality and nationhood is irrelevant. Where do you come from? It shouldn't matter.

That's interesting. The liberal argument is that predetermined qualities like race and ethnicity are impediments to individual self-determination and so should be made not to matter. Therefore, traditional ethnic nationalism has been ruled out of bounds. The idea was that it would be replaced by a civic nationalism, in which we would be united as a country not by a common ethny but by a shared commitment to liberal political institutions and values.

But civic nationalism, predictably, isn't holding. That's not only because it lacks depth, but because it's illogical. After all, most people don't choose to be members of their civic nation, any more than they choose to be members of their race or ethny. They just happen to be born in a particular country. So even membership of a civic nation is something that is largely predetermined rather than self-determined. To a consistent liberal it all seems merely arbitrary.

That's why he writes:

what are we really so proud of? The dumb luck of having been born on a certain piece of land that then becomes "yours"? And what makes your country so much better than everyone else's – other than your familiarity with it?

I dislike the whole concept of nationhood, the way people support their country like it's a football team playing in a grand final. Like we have to choose sides. How much better would it be if we'd all stop taking pride in the little slices of the globe we happened to pop out in and starting just being citizens of the world?

It might sound corny, but it could happen. We could ditch the parochialism and the patriotism and just treat other human beings as other human beings.
 

He sees a civic nationalism as arbitrary, as dumb luck, and urges instead that we just become individual human beings without attachments to any particular place or people - citizens of the world.

And that's the logical end point of liberalism: not just to make traditional ethnic nationalism not matter, but any identity that is larger than the individual unit. We are to ditch the larger and meaningful traditions we belong to in order to identify with ourselves alone.

The better option would be to ditch the underlying assumptions of liberalism, the ones which make self-determination the overriding good. If you do that, then a traditional national identity does make sense. It is based on real forms of connectedness between people: a shared kinship, history, language, religion and culture, one that over time logically creates a sense of being a distinct people and which links individuals to generations past and present, to a cultural heritage, to a love of place and to a willingness to work to maintain or improve standards and achievements.

German far left hates Germany, maybe themselves

Early this month the German far left demonstrated in several cities. In Munich about 300 demonstrators marched; what was most interesting were the banners they held. Here are the two banners they marched behind:

Far left banners in Munich
 

The banner at the bottom simply reads "No love for a Germany". The top one is "We love genocide: for something better than the nation".

They want their own "Volkstod" - the death of the German people.

Here's another banner from Munich:

This one says "We love treason: against nationalism, historical revisionism and against Germany too".

In the German town of Rostock a similar march featured this banner:

The slogan simply says "Against Germany".

According to a witness the 300 far leftists at the Munich rally chanted the slogan "Deutschland ist scheiße, wir sind Beweise" which means "Germany is crap, we are evidence/proof". This suggests that they are not only against Germany but themselves too.

The problem for us is not so much the 300 radical leftists in Munich who are willing to march behind banners demanding the demise of their own nation and people. The problem is that mainstream liberal politicians on both the left and right are also stuck in a politics which leads to the same thing.

There is some variation when it comes to mainstream politics. You get some liberal politicians who think it's a good thing to be proud of your identity at an individual level but that government policy should be liberal in the sense that ethnicity/nationality shouldn't be allowed to matter when it comes to immigration policy. In this case, state policy runs counter to what matters to people at an individual level.

There are also more mainstream voices on both the right and left who believe that we should identity only with ourselves rather than with a nation or ethnicity. On the right Andrew Bolt holds this view:

To be frank, I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth.

This is much the same view as that held by the blogger Osmond, who is a social democratic/Fabian leftist. He tells us that he's inclined to adopt a stance,

of individual identity, that I’m just “me”, I’m not locked into the confines of my heritage or culture.

There are some on the right who identify so much with Economic Man that they put the free movement of labour across national borders as a higher good than the preservation of distinct nations. And there are some on the left who blame inequality on the social construction of whiteness and who therefore look forward to the demise of white majority countries as the key step in the achievement of social justice.

So what we need to do is not so much the easy thing of rejecting the outright self-hating anti-nationalism of far leftists, but all of the political currents on both the left and right which lead in the long run to much the same thing.

A shallow identity

A final installment of the chapter on nation and ethny in my e-book.

A final problem with a civic identity is that it is shallow compared to a traditional one. All that connects me to my conationals in a civic nationalism is a common set of political institutions and values. There is not the same depth of connection that comes with belonging to a larger tradition, one in which there is a sense of being a distinct people, sharing a history, kinship, religion and culture through time.

Michael Ignatieff, who I quoted earlier as a strong supporter of civic nationalism, admits that traditional nationalism's "psychology of belonging" has "greater depth than civic nationalism's".

Similarly, two academics from the University of Melbourne, Brian Gallagan and Winsome Roberts, have worried that civic nationalism is too insubstantial. They have described an Australian identity defined solely in terms of shared political institutions and values as "hollow, lacking in cultural richness and human content." They are critical of "an empty and flaccid citizenship based on abstract principles that lack the inspirational power to represent what it means to be Australian."

In contrast, Professor West has written of a traditional ethnic nationalism that,

...the sense of identity is so strong that it is an inseparable part of the personalities of most of the individuals in the group. People are born and raised to conceive of themselves as being a part of the nation, and rarely lose that self-conception in the course of their lives. There is a feeling of pride and a deep sense of loyalty associated with it.

When explaining why many Anglo-Australians want to retain links to the UK, the writer David Malouf explained that it has to do with a traditional kind of identity:

it has to do with family .. identity in that sense ...It is a link of language, too, and of culture in the sense of shared associations and understanding, of shared objects of affection, and a history of which we are a branch - a growth quite separate and itself, but drawing its strength from an ancient root ...

The fact is that the part of ourselves in which we live most deeply, most fully, goes further back than one or two generations and takes in more than we ourselves have known

According to Professor Anthony Smith a traditional national identity,

... is felt by many people to satisfy their needs for cultural fulfilment, rootedness, security and fraternity ... Nations are linked by the chains of memory, myth and symbol to that widespread and enduring type of community, the ethnie, and this is what gives them their unique character and their profound hold over the feelings and imaginations of so many people.

So why then accept the loss of such deep forms of identity? An English journalist, Janet Daley, believes that in giving up the "hereditary baggage" of "homogenous local cultures" people get to experience "the great secret of individual self-determination". Even if this creates "social unease" and makes a society "perpetually unstable" it is what is required for a "free society".

That's the liberal position in a nutshell. It's a belief that the overriding good is individual freedom, understood to mean that the individual is liberated from whatever cannot be self-determined, such as the "hereditary baggage" of a traditional national identity.

And this is where opponents of liberalism have to take a stand. There is no reason why we have to understand freedom this way, nor why freedom can't be upheld amongst other goods that are important to people. After all, if being Korean or Nigerian or Danish is part of who we are, then if we are going to be free we have to be free as Koreans or Nigerians or Danes. Otherwise we will experience freedom as a loss, as a diminishing of self rather than as a liberation.

The author D.H. Lawrence understood that it was not liberating to lose your communal identity. He believed that,

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away...Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community...

I'll let the English writer Paul Kingsnorth have the final word. He considers himself a progressive but doesn't see a loss of traditional identity as an advance:

It has long been a touchstone of "progress" that place, and attachment to it, is an anachronism...Barriers are broken down by the mass media, technology and trade laws. Rootless, we gain freedom, placeless, we belong everywhere. Yet placelessness and rootlessness create not contentment but despair...

The rising tide of this global progress, we are told, will lift all boats. The trouble is that some of our boats are anchored; anchored by place, tradition, identity, a sense of belonging...

...the citizens of nowhere ultimately inhabit an empty world ... Disconnected from reality, they can make decisions that destroy real places, to which people are connected, at the stroke of a pen.

The rest of us can join the citizens of nowhere in their empire of the placeless, or we can build new relationships with our own landscapes and our own communities. We can build on our pasts or dismiss them...