About those European elections

Will

Like George Will, media comment in general on the rise of the EU-rejectionists conflates patriotism with political ethnic nationalism.

Let's clear this up a bit.

The world is full of sovereign states that are not nation-states in the generally accepted, biological / cultural / linguistic sense of that term.

Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and even the UK are among the most markedly non-national states in Europe.

India is among the most markedly non-national states outside Europe, and very few of the settler states left by European colonialism around the world are even close to being that.

Swiss patriotism is not Swiss nationalism since the Swiss people is not in the requisite sense a nation, and the same is true of the US, Argentina, Colombia, South Africa, and many other countries around the world.

And the same is true of the countries making up the EU, none of which is without some ethnic diversity and most of which are very far from the uniformity required by the 19th Century ideal.

Too, ethnic nationalism isn't even always political, being sometimes a sentiment or a loyalty similar to familial attachment, which rarely aspires to political sovereignty.

And political ethnic nationalism is itself a diverse thing, its aims being sometimes no more than acceptance of diversity within a non-national state, sometimes preservation of majority status within an ethnically diverse state, sometimes secession and creation of a separate state in which one's own ethnos can dominate, sometimes unification of separate states of the same ethnos into a single, encompassing national state, and notoriously sometimes conquest of neighboring peoples to reduce them to permanent servitude to one's own.

Contrast, for instance, the political aspirations of ethnic Russians for language rights as an accepted minority within some mostly non-Russian states that became independent with the breakup of the Soviet Union with the aspirations of those Germans and Austrians who together welcomed the Anschluss.

On the other hand, Will is right that nationalism is something different from racism and does not entail it.

It is perfectly possible for a Slovak nationalist to be in no sense a racist, either as regards positive sentiment, loyalty, or political aspiration regarding whites or negative sentiment or aspiration regarding those of other races.

And anyway racism, either positive or negative, can involve a variety of political aspirations or none at all, being again something similar to familial feeling.

As to the matter at hand, EU-rejectionism is overwhelmingly motivated by a mix of patriotism, nationalism, and racism, and not at all exclusively by the last or even the second.

Nigel Farage has been at pains to demonstrate that his party and its program are patriotic but not racist; and I believe its domestic politics are opposed to those of both Welsh and Scottish nationalists.

And that is at the root of his wish to remain distant from Marine Le Pen's Front National since the latter, as inherited from her irrepressible and inconvenient father, is heavily influenced by leaders and supporters whose politics are indeed a brew of patriotism combined with nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism - those last being a legacy, however, she seems to be trying to overcome.

All the same, the aims of his movement and hers largely coincide: withdrawing from the EU to restore national sovereignty and shutting off immigration for economic, but also nationalist and sometimes racist reasons, as well as reasons of national security and domestic tranquility.

All of this, of course, Will distorts, spinning popular rejection of the EU like mad into some sort of Thatcherite rebellion of free-market devotees, as have many others on the American right.

And here again the FN, with its frank protectionism and support for France's family-friendly welfare state and customary dirigisme, is an inconvenient reality.

Meanwhile, others of both left and right, for exactly contrary reasons, depict the anti-EU movement as motivated entirely by various forms of tribalism of which, say, Pat Buchanan approves and those who got him fired disapprove.