Repeating the past with new masks

Nationalism is raising its ugly head again in Europe and elsewhere. And the collective memory seems to have lost trace of its last eruptions a century ago. Intense propaganda during the First World War had pushed nationalism to the extreme. The war did not have much else to stand on. Each side depicted the other as inhuman beasts, and those notions did not dissipate once the fighting stopped. They led to one-party dictatorships in Italy, Portugal, Turkey, Russia, Rumania, Hungary, Germany and Spain. Japan, in its own way, followed suit. It all ended up with the atrocities that preceded and accompanied the Second World War. During the Cold War, nationalism was very subdued, as all nations were obliged to give allegiance to one or the other of the contending parties, the US or the USSR. And anti-colonial national uprisings around the world were merely a change of master.

Since 1991, global capitalism has done its best to blur all national boundaries, and to encompass the planet. It has failed dismally, except with pollution. It has, through its organisms (WTO, IMF, etc.), managed to open borders to trade, but “free trade” obliges nations to compete with one another, a price competition that concerns means of production and wages. This began with nations of high productivity and wages competing with nations of low productivity and wages. But technology travels and patents are copied, so that nations are now competing with equivalent technology, while the wage differences have only been partly reduced. Low wages have risen and high wages have fallen, though a considerable gap remains, and the price competition between nations depends essentially on that factor. Global technology no longer favours the richest nations, and the coming trade wars are in fact wage wars. Import tariffs and subsidies are put in place to protect wages and profits. But global corporations reap their profits globally. They wish to produce as cheaply as possible and sell at the highest possible price. This leaves small businesses and labour, which must make do with falling margins and shrinking wages.

Nationalism is rooted at the junction of middle and working classes. The hierarchical level where up and down movements are the most apparent, and where social aspirations are the strongest. That is where alien competition hits the hardest, with immigrants at home and goods from abroad. And those external pressures make it the cradle of xenophobia. Nationalism is the sentiment of belonging to a special species, and cannot be separated from jingoism and chauvinism. When a nation is in a dominant position, at least inside its borders, these sentiments may be benign. It is when that dominion is questioned or threatened that things can get nasty. Nationalism is the great unifier of us against them and is always a temptation for reckless politicians, who may play with it and be overwhelmed by the fury they have unleashed.

Europe has already been down the road to fascism and totalitarian power. That past experience could possibly help Europeans avoid the same pitfall again. But, though it has often supported atrocious governments under its imperial rule, the US has not yet undergone the weight and tragedy of an absolute regime. Americans do not know that it installs itself progressively. Its method is to implicate everyone by conviction, social promotion, apprehension or indifference. The nation is redefined, and increasing numbers are excluded, political rivals, minorities and, finally, any form of difference. At this point, the nation is the party and the party is the leader. The state is totalitarian. Orwell described it, but Arendt detailed how it came to be the last time around. A major factor was the mass migration of refugees and “stateless” persons. “Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless, once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth.” (1) When nations begin to specify who and what they are, it is the prelude to making it a reality. And, when the ball starts rolling, there is no equivalent force still around to stop it. The free market wasteland is the seed-bed of savagery. And socialism or barbarity resounds too late once again. Just like climate change, there is already too much momentum for a conceivable turn around. The choice, as ever, is whether to collaborate or not.

1. Hannah Arendt, the Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Ch. 9, p. 267

The whole chapter entitled “The decline of the nation state and the end of the rights of man” is about the 1920s and 30s, and the similarities with today are astounding.