| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Buchanan: The death of the nation-state |
| 2006-05-23 |
| Yugoslavia is gone, forever. The country that emerged from World War I and Versailles as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, land of the South Slavs, has passed into history. Sunday's vote in Montenegro, a tiny land of fewer people than the Washington, D.C., this writer grew up in, voted Sunday to secede from Belgrade, establish a nation and seek entry into the European Union. In 1991, Macedonia peacefully seceded. Slovenia and Croatia fought their way out, and Bosnia broke free after a war marked by the massacre at Srbenica and NATO intervention. Bosnia is itself subdivided into a Serb and a Croat-Muslim sector. After the 78-day U.S. bombing of Serbia by the United States and the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the province in the wake of the NATO war, Kosovo is 90 percent Muslim and Albanian. Loss of this land that was the cradle of the Serb nation seems an inevitability. The disintegration of Yugoslavia, the second partition of Czechoslovakia and the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 nations – many of which had never before existed – seem to confirm what Israeli historian Martin van Creveld and U.S. geostrategist William Lind have written. The nation-state is dying. Men have begun to transfer their allegiance, loyalty and love from the older nations both upward to the new transnational regimes that are arising and downward to the sub-nations whence they came, the true nations, united by blood and soil, language, literature, history, faith, tradition and memory. Imperial and ideological nations appear, for the foreseeable future, to be finished. The British and French, greatest of the Western empires, are long gone. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the Irish, though its sons had fought to erect and maintain the Victorian "empire on which the sun never set" – and defend it in World War I – fought relentlessly to be free of it. They wanted, and in 1921 won, a small nation of their own, on their own small island. The Irish preferred it to being part of the British Empire. The call of ethnicity, nationalism, religion, faith and history pulled apart the greatest of all the ideological empires, the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union, that "prison house of nations." Transnational institutions, the embryonic institutions of a new world government to which the elites of the West and Third World are transferring allegiance and power, include the United Nations, the EU, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the International Seabed Authority, the Kyoto Protocol, the IMF and the World Bank. The sub-nations, or ex-nations, struggling to be born or break free include Scotland, Catalonia and the Basque country of Spain, Corsica, northern Italy and Quebec in the West. Iraq, as we have seen, is a composite of peoples divided by tribe, ethnicity and faith – as are Iran, Pakistan and India. Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs, with a minority of Bedouins. Lind argues that not only are nations subdividing, losing their monopolies on the love and loyalty of their peoples, but they are being superseded by "non-state actors" that are challenging the monopoly on warfare enjoyed by the nation-state since the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War. Among the more familiar non-state actors are the Crips and Bloods, Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, the racial nationalists of MEChA, the white supremacists of Aryan Nations, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah, the Maoists of Nepal and the Tamil Tigers. Among the central questions of our time is a central question of any time: Who owns the future? Of late, the transnational vision has lost its allure. Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and most of Latin America reject the NAFTA vision of Bush and Vicente Fox. The French and Dutch voted down the EU Constitution, which now appears dead. The Doha round of world trade negotiations is headed for the rocks. Hostility is rising to bringing Turkey into the EU. Arabs and Turks in Europe identify more and more with the Islamic faith they have in common and the countries whence they came, not the one in which they live and work. So, too, do millions of illegal aliens in the United States. They march defiantly under Mexican flags in American streets demanding the rights of U.S. citizens – while an intimidated political class rushes to accommodate and appease them, assuring itself this is but the latest reincarnation of Ellis Island. As the Old Republic trudges to its death, less and less do we hear that incessant blather about the American Empire, "the world's last superpower" and "our unipolar moment." |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #9 STEVE FORBES > INDIA cannot progress or survive if it continues to promote and protect the autonomous or near-sovereign ethnic-specific or faith-specific Cantonization/Enclavization of its various ethnic groups, i.e. autonomous or Regulatory-independent, stratified State(s) within a State, Culture(s) within a Culture, Faith(s) within a Faith, etc - what the US-Western Lefts likes to disguise under the feel-good but despotic labels of DIVERSITY and alleged TOLERANCE. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2006-05-23 23:19 |
| #8 That is a wonderful article. Thanks, Mike. |
| Posted by: Matt 2006-05-23 20:07 |
| #7 Thanks for the link to Professor Schramm's article. Wow. |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2006-05-23 16:45 |
| #6 I like Buchanan as well. My point of view of the whole situation is not as doom and gloom as his but I think he makes some good points. |
| Posted by: Broadhead6 2006-05-23 14:30 |
| #5 I like Buchanan, I was offered a copy of "the death of the West", I browsed it, and I think I'll like it. True, the b&s nationalism is more european than american. |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2006-05-23 14:07 |
| #4 Finally, Pat made no mention of the collapse of much of organized religion ... his own beloved Protestantism ..." Pat is quite Irish Catholic. |
| Posted by: Craiger Groluth7886 2006-05-23 13:53 |
| #3 "Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place," That's been true of just about every non-refugee immigrant I've known. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-05-23 13:46 |
| #2 Pat's other problem is that he's a blood-and-soil nationalist, and he views this country like a blood-and-soil nationalist. The United States is not, and essentially never has been, a blood-and-soil ethnic state. Let me illustrate: I'm not ethnically Japanese. I could learn to speak flawless Japanese, develop a strong preference for tea and cherry blossoms and teriyaki and rice, study Japanese customs, memorize all 30,000 kanji, move to Tokyo, become a naturalized Japanese citizen, and I'd still be a gaijin. On the other hand, a Japanese person who adopts American ideals can move here, become naturalized, and be just as American as me. "But where are we going?" I asked. Peter W. Schramm, "Born American, but in the Wrong Place." |
| Posted by: Mike 2006-05-23 12:58 |
| #1 Pat sees everything through lenses of traditional American isolationism. He has never seen any purpose at all in "international engagement", other than the Monroe Doctrine, and then just to keep strong foreign powers out of "our" hemisphere. Other than that, foreigners can stay in their countries, and the US should be content to stay in ours. And never the two should meet. Especially if it involves sending US troops across our borders to somewhere else, for some "unwanted entanglement" overseas. In any event, Pat ignores the obvious extrapolation from his theory. That being, if it is true, then Red State America and Blue State America should break apart into two nations. Our cultural divide is as great as many others that have divided, and as Pat argued, history together doesn't act as a glue anymore. He does mention the sand fleas of racial divide, but they have been around, and laughable, for many years. If Mississippi was made a separate nation, even like an Indian Reservation, but for African-Americans, as was proposed by some of their self-appointed "leaders", in past, how many African-Americans would want to live there? Unless it was a parasitical regime, feeding off of the rest of the nation, it is obvious to most that it would soon devolve into a much more civilized version of Zimbabwe. Very few respectable and successful African-Americans would be so foolish as to embrace such a fools errand, except those who would follow the public fools who proclaim themselves "leaders". He is mistaken about organizations like MS-13 becoming nationalist. Historically, it is backwards. Nationalist movements, such as the Mafia, Camorra, Zionism, etc., first are created for a nationalistic purpose before then becoming criminal organizations (in the latter case, referring to the Stern gang, et al.) Organizations that begin as criminal enterprises almost never become nationalistic, because it is bad for "business". Finally, Pat made no mention of the collapse of much of organized religion in the world, followed by the re-emergence of primitive cults and early religions. His own beloved Protestantism is as fragile as many nation-states, with respect to both other religions and primitivistic superstition. All told, things change. It may or may not forbode some sea-change in the world, but it will find its own balance point. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-05-23 12:41 |