The real international struggle is between nations and governments. It is not between cabals or cliques or capitalist enterprises. It is not even between ideologies. When we read of a looming financial crisis, credit contraction or the falling dollar, we are reading about things that will affect nations. The political reaction will come on the national level. The retreat from globalization will be a retreat led by nation-states, by national sentiments ignited and inflamed. When we read about the mortgage bust, about the largest banks writing off billions of losses, we merely see that specific economic arrangements are being upset; that economic instruments are failing. Whatever happens in this regard, however great the financial hit, the nation-state remains. The nation continues to live and the struggle between nations therefore intensifies because the win-win formula of economic cooperation begins to change into the ugly view of the zero sum game. Here we find the logic of the Great Depression, the logic of rising nationalism and collapsing free trade. It is the logic that inverts present conditions and returns us to the past, to a pre-world war situation.
All our instruments of peace, all our treaties and trade agreements, are based on the logic of economic prosperity. When that logic is changed for the logic of the zero sum game, treaties and trade agreements will all die together in the same rubbish-pile. On occasion I am asked to comment on the United Nations as a threat to American sovereignty. My standard reply is to ask how many hydrogen bombs and missiles the United Nations has. The United Nations has no military power of its own (outside the military power of member states). Even more significantly, the United Nations has no power other than the power of diplomatic combination already available to every sovereign country. President Bush understood the impotence of the United Nations when he launched his war in Iraq. The United Nations had become irrelevant, he explained. It was not capable of confronting the world’s dictators. Just as the League of Nations proved ineffective in thwarting the advance of the dictator regimes of the 1930s, the United Nations cannot deal with rogue nations.
Peace is always temporary. Internationalism is a passing fad. The arms control regime between Russia and America has always been an illusion. And now the Americans are caught off guard by the appearance of a new generation of Russian weapons – new ICBMs, new submarines, new warheads and aircraft. It is wrong to believe that the United Nations, or internationalism, can stop the ambitious nation state from expanding. It is an error to think that collective security will restrain the aggressive dictatorships forever. The ideology that insists on a transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations, and the elimination of borders for the sake of free trade and world peace, is merely a strategic trick meant to disarm liberal democracy and fatten it for the kill. Some liberals and socialists believe, for example, that if nations were weakened in favor of international institutions the human race would become one people, without poverty or war. Here is a silly, childish kind of political thinking.
The achievements of the internationalists are illusory. Aside from the nation-states that make up the international order, they have no bombs or missiles or tank divisions. In the end, internationalist policies are advanced by individual nation states. And these policies will ultimately be reversed by those same states when the implications of internationalism become clear. One only has to look at the European Union and see how nationalist sentiments suddenly awake. There is nothing to stop the victory of such sentiments in one country after another, because these sentiments are natural and vital. In the course of time they are bound to appear and re-appear, and they are bound to overtake the feeble rationalism of globalist ideology. As it happens, men are not “global creatures.” They speak a specific language, relate to a specific culture, and share specific historical experiences. Although it may sound enlightened to say that we “are all one,” it is nonetheless untrue. We are not one. We are individuals with individual traits and attachments. What attaches me to the globe is nothing compared to the reality of language, culture, family and tribe. Every individual has a motherland and a mother tongue. There are national sentiments and national interests. Given the present state of public knowledge, progress and intellectual development, the nation is the largest viable political formation. It holds out the promise of peace, freedom and good order to the largest possible territory. Involve too many unassimilated ethnicities into the mix, and you have an unstable formation. Stretch that unstable formation over too great a territory and you are compelled to accept a degree of anarchy or tyranny. Make the formation too small and it cannot be defended in time of war.
The history of the West is a story of development. It entails many centuries of progress. The mechanisms evolved in the course of Western development are like rungs on a ladder. The nation-state is one such rung. The liberal utopian is standing near the top of the ladder, imagining he can do without the rungs he used to ascend. He does not appreciate that aristocracy, Christianity and the nation-state got him where he is – enjoying all the advantages he enjoys. He thinks that by breaking down the means of his ascent he can ascend higher. Never in the history of the world was there a more comical misunderstanding. When liberalism destroys the illiberal supports that made it possible, then liberalism becomes an ideology of suicide – just as James Burnham predicted four decades ago. Internationalism is merely one aspect of liberal suicide.
In a childish country, stupefied by entertainment media, softened by easy living and material abundance, it is possible to blunder. I am talking about a potentially fatal blunder. The peoples of the West are asleep. They do not see that the danger of war is increasing. The non-Western powers have been contemplating acts of vengeance. This is built-in to the situation, following the era of colonialism, following the exploitation of China (especially). The urge to revenge is natural in man. It is inherited and sublimated into ideologies of socialism, anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism. And this urge not only seeks nuclear weaponry. It already possesses large arsenals of biological, chemical and nuclear arms.
Faith in utopian notions, embedded in political correctness, can weaken a country. Policies of multiculturalism and an “open border” can leave a country vulnerable to infiltration and subversion. But in the end we are talking about nations and the need for national unity. The tribal nature of man asserts itself and the nation beneath the nation-state rises up and assumes its place – whether political theorists approve it or not.
Those who assume that internationalism is somehow winning have made an error. Internationalism cannot win. From its founding the Soviet Union was a state made up of many nations with a government committed to “proletarian internationalism.” When the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany in June 1941 the Kremlin realized that the Russian people would not fight for internationalism. So the communists in Moscow set aside their war against religion and Russian nationalism, opened the churches and declared a Great Patriotic War. Stalin and his henchmen had no choice, because the nation was real and solid and capable of defeating the Germans. Communism could not do it. And so the leaders of Russia and China recognize the lesson of World War II. They recognize the need to promote nationalism and downplay socialism.
It is a mistake to imagine that the internationalists are somehow winning; that they are taking control of the planet and subverting the nation state. They will weaken whatever states give in, momentarily, to internationalist ideas. But the nation-state is going to have its revenge. Even now it remains the strongest of political formations.
