George Will contra European anti-nationalism and American nation-building

George Will contra European anti-nationalism and American nation-building

The normally smug and somnolent George Will has written a worthwhile article for City Journal in which, wonder of wonders, just like us regular humans, he actually expresses anxiety about something—an anxiety, he says, that troubles his sleep. What disturbs Will has two faces but, he argues, one ideological source. One face is the European Union’s attack on national sovereignty, and thus on democratic self-government and politics itself, in the name of constructing a rational, universal system. The other face is America’s confidence that it can construct democracies anywhere, on the basis of rational, universal principles divorced from culture and history.

Since the article is fairly long, I thought I’d excerpt the key passages for VFR’s readers:

I hope to trouble your sleep with a worry related to what [Woodrow] Wilson was doing in Paris [at the Versailles Conference]. My worry is the assault on the nation-state, which is an assault on self-government—the American project. It is the campaign to contract the sphere of politics by expanding the sway of supposedly disinterested experts, disconnected from democratic accountability and administering principles of universal applicability that they have discovered.
All this is pertinent to today’s headlines, for a reason that may, at first blush, seem paradoxical. The assault on the nation-state involves a breezy confidence that nations not only can be superseded by supranational laws and institutions, they can even be dispensed with. Furthermore, nations can be fabricated, and can be given this or that political attribute, by experts wielding universal principles.
The vitality of democracy everywhere is imperiled by the impulse behind the increasingly brazen and successful denial of the importance and legitimacy of nation-states. This denial is most audacious in Europe. But because many of America’s political ideas arrive on our shores after auditioning in Europe, Americans should examine the motives and implications of European attempts to dilute and transcend national sovereignty.
——
Today, European elites believe that Europe’s nations are menaced by their own sovereignty. These elites blame Europe’s recent blood-soaked history on the nation-state itself—including democratic states. For this reason, the European Union is attempting to turn itself into a single entity without sovereign nations—a federal entity, but a single political entity under a new constitution. The intended effect of the proposed constitution is to dissolve Europe’s nation-states, reducing them to administrative departments of a supranational state. Its capital: probably Brussels.
In the hundreds of pages of the EU’s proposed (and so far, rejected) constitution, you will find, among much else, the stipulation that “the physical and moral integrity of sportsmen and sportswomen” should be protected. A sweet thought, that. But what in the name of James Madison is it doing in a constitution?
The proposed constitution guarantees that children shall have the constitutional right “to express their views freely.” That will make family dinners and bedtime in Europe litigious affairs…. The EU’s constitution decrees that, to protect the environment, “preventive action should be taken.” That sentiment may seem merely vapid—until some judge discovers that it requires vast regulatory measures of his devising….
The EU constitution will before long seem as dated as a yellowing newspaper, because it gives canonical status—as fundamental rights elevated beyond debate—to policy preferences, even to mere fads, of the moment.
The aim of the proposed constitution’s more than 400 articles is to put as many matters as possible beyond debate. Beyond the reach of majorities. Beyond democracy.
Article Ten of the EU constitution says: “The Constitution, and law adopted by the Union’s Institutions in exercising competences conferred on it [sic], shall have primacy over the law of the Member States.” Queen Elizabeth has asked for a briefing on the potential implications of the EU constitution for her role as supreme guardian of the British constitution.
British Europhiles simply deny the undeniable. They deny that the EU constitution will accelerate the leeching away of sovereignty from national parliaments. On the Continent, enthusiasts of the proposed constitution acknowledge the leeching away—and say it is a virtue. For them, what is called the EU’s “democracy deficit” is not an ancillary cost of progress; it is the essence of progress.
——
It is said that international law is the consensus in action of the “international community.” Well, now.
The attempt to break nations—and especially our nation—to the saddle and bridle of international law founders on the fact that the “community of nations” is a fiction. Nothing can be properly called a “community” if it jumbles together entities as different as Saudi Arabia and New Zealand, Japan and Sudan, Italy and Iran, Norway and Libya.
The American Revolution was, at bottom, about the right of a distinctive people, conscious of itself as a single people, to govern itself in its distinctive manner, in nationhood. Here was a great eighteenth-century insight: popular sovereignty is inextricably entwined with nationality.
The nation-state has been a great instrument of emancipation. It has freed people from the idea that their self-government is subject to extra-national restraints, such as the divine right of kings or imperial prerogatives or traditional privileges of particular social classes.
——
And yet, my sleep is troubled by this worry: there may be a subtle kinship between—a common thread in—two ideas that are currently having large consequences. One is the un-American—and increasingly anti-American—idea that the nation-state is both dispensable and dangerous, and therefore that nations should increasingly be subordinated to international laws and the arrangements of the “community of nations.” The other idea—one suddenly central to America’s international exertions—is that nations are mechanical, not organic things. And therefore a can-do people with an aptitude for engineering—people like Americans—can build nations.
——
Last July, Prime Minister Tony Blair, addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress, said: It is a “myth” that “our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture,” and he added: “Ours are not Western values; they are the universal values of the human spirit. And anywhere, anytime people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.”
That assertion is important. But is it true? Everyone everywhere does not share “our attachment to freedom.” Freedom is not even understood the same way everywhere, let alone valued the same way relative to other political goods such as equality, security, and piety. Does Blair really believe that our attachment to freedom is not the product of complex and protracted acculturation by institutions and social mores that have evolved over centuries—the centuries that it took to prepare the stony social ground for seeds of democracy?
——
President Bush recently said something that is important—if true. And perhaps it is even more important if it is not true. He denounced “cultural condescension”—the belief that some cultures lack the requisite aptitudes for democracy. And the president said: “Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country, or that people, or this group are ‘ready’ for democracy—as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress.”
… His idea—that there is no necessary connection between Western political traditions and the success of democracy—is important.
But is it true? Today his hypothesis is being tested in Iraq, where an old baseball joke is pertinent. A manager says, “Our team is just two players away from being a championship team. Unfortunately, the two players are Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.” Iraq is just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.
Iraq lacks a Washington, a universally revered hero emblematic of national unity and identity. Iraq lacks a Madison, a genius of constitutional architecture, a profound student of what the president calls “Western standards of progress” and a subtle analyst of the problem of factions and their centrifugal, disintegrative tendencies. Iraq lacks a Marshall, someone who can so persuasively construe a constitution that the prestige of his court, and of law itself, ensures national compliance.
Iraq lacks a Washington, a Madison, a Marshall—and it lacks the astonishingly rich social and cultural soil from which such people sprout. From America’s social soil in the eighteenth century grew all the members of the Constitutional Convention and of all the state legislatures that created all the conventions that ratified the Constitution.
——
What is to be done in Iraq? As Robert Frost said, the best way out is always through. We are there. We dare not leave having replaced a savage state with a failed state—a vacuum into which evil forces will flow. Our aim should be the rule of law, a quickened pulse of civil society, some system of political representation. Then, let us vow not to take on such reconstructions often.
——

City Journal
Can We Make Iraq Democratic?
George F. Will
Winter 2004

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 24, 2004 12:45 PM | Send

Comments

Are we seeing some scales starting to peel away, ever so slightly, from Mr. Will’s eyes? I have to say I am quite astonished to see an article such as this from his hand.

The remarks of Tony Blair and George Bush quoted in the article are quite chilling in their implications for our continued existence as a distinctive people. For Tony Blair to make such remarks about the universality of freedom as he presides over what has become, in effect, a totalitarian state is truly Clintonian in its sheer bazenness. Bush and Blair are two of the most dangerous individuals on the planet. They must be defeated if we are to survive as a nation.

Posted by: Carl on January 24, 2004 3:27 PM

Dear Mr. Auster,

Thanks for posting the George Will Article, I am surprised to hear these concerns coming from him.

After hearing our President’s recent Address to Congress, it seems to me that he not only embraces both the idea of de-nationalization, but the conviction that the entire world is compatible, indeed waiting, for democracy. More, we are to lead them to it.

The de-nationalization program is being accomplished by the inundation of our land with unending millions of other nations and cultures.

But the de-nationalization program also works in commmon purpose with the greater goal: that of spreading freedom and democracy to the world’s peoples.

For to our President, the more millions that make it across the border, the more people that become “free.” Since to him, being an American is a state of being, not a people, one can be transformed by simply crossing the border. Milllions can be transformed a year if you get serious about it.

His recent address made it clear that as far as he is concerrned, all individuals and nations are compatible with democracy. Here are some exerpts from that speech:

“We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it is mistaken and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government. I believe tht God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom.”

“America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comess fom our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is democratic peace…” “…we understand our special calling: This great republic will lead the cause of freedom.

A couple of observations: Now its not just Iraq, but the greater Middle East? Second, if anyone is making assumptions about compatibility, it’s him. In fact, he’s now basing his justification of the war in large part on it.

So, it seems clear to me that W not only believes in the compatibility of all peoples and nations with democracy, but that we have a special mission, a calling in fact, to usher them to it,one way or another.

Domestically, our President is carrying out his mission on two fronts. He believes millions can be transformed into a state of freedom by simply opening our borders and allowing them to enter. Apparently, the more the better. Outside of our borders, the task is a litle more complicated: We have to go to them.

Posted by: Robert Cox on January 24, 2004 4:51 PM

I was rather surprised and pleased by Will’s comments, as some time ago I had written off the man as a lightweight sellout to the neocons and/or bushites.
Isn’t there an element of the comically self-defeating in Bush’s prating about our national mission? Apart from the slight problem that he seems to have little or no interest in maintaining the nation that is to carry out this mission, I think that such talk is positively counterproductive in dealing with non-Americans. “Mission” often smacks of imperialism to other peoples. They are bound to make unfavorable comparisons with other countries that have spoken of their “mission” in the past, from the Spanish role in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the “civilizing mission” of Europeans in Asia and Africa in the nineteenth. True, there is much to be said in favor of the latter, but given the emotional associations of “mission” we are damn fools to fixate on the word. I might also point out that those American Presidents who were most successful in forwarding the real interests of the United States, the West, and even in spreading democracy, from Roosevelt through Eisenhower, almost always spoke in a more cautious and reserved manner about what they were doing. Perhaps one should not attach too much importance to the blather of such an empty character as Bush, but the grandiose nature of such remarks bothers me.

Posted by: Alan Levine on January 25, 2004 12:57 PM

Bush’s Mars mission can be understand as an extension of the neoconservative world view that he’s already adopted in his “democratize the world” rhetoric. The neoconservative agenda is that we thin out the actual substance of our country even as we become the Messiah of Democracy to the rest of the world. The Mars mission extends the idea to outer space. The more we lose our actual substance as a civilization and as human beings, the more we have to spread ourselves out to the universe.

The Mars mission is like the “national greatness” conservatism proposed by William Kristol and Robert Kagan a few years ago. The wanted greatness for the sake of greatness, but had no idea of what the greatness stood for. It was a pursuit of emptiness, some vast imperial structure with nothing inside it, a highway of diamonds with nobody on it.

The Mars mission is also a neoconservative analogue to left-liberalism. The more the left-liberal lacks any actual virtue in his own life, the more he justifies his existence by talking about how he loves all mankind and wants to eliminate all barriers between people. Similarly, the more the neoconservtive lacks any real country (partly because his own ideology and policies have thinned it out to the vanishing point), the more he must extend his power to some other realm to give his existence some meaning. First he extends it to the whole human race, which is removed from our historical existence as Americans, then he extends it to outer space, which removed from our very existence as human beings.

I’m not opposed to space exploration, by the way. But having Bush’s Mars proposal come immediately after his “open-the-borders” proposal made its underlying meaning all too clear.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on January 25, 2004 1:12 PM

Latins and immigration? Check
Space and the Star Trek generation? Check
“Diversity” and blacks? Check
Steroids and sports fans? Check
Prescription drugs and the elderly? Check
What and who else? Wait until next week.

You get the picture. No, I don’t mean to undermine the ideological nature of Bush’s Napoleonic tendencies. But crass political motivation, at price of the long term health of the country, shouldn’t be discounted either. Heaven help us when the Republicans open up their presidential primaries to internet voting in Indonesia.

Posted by: Paul C. on January 25, 2004 1:32 PM

I’m not discounting the crass political motivation. As I’ve said over and over, it’s a combination of motives. But as I’ve also said, Bush tends to be drawn to political calculations that fit his underlying emotional and ideological preferences. In many instances, if he didn’t have those particular preferences, he wouldn’t have gone along with those particular calculations.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on January 25, 2004 1:35 PM

I share Paul C’s cynicism about Bush really being interested in space exploration. It is a way of pleasing his conservative base and perhaps also to aid the economies of Texas and Florida. I have to disagree with Mr. Auster on one point. My observation of neocons is that (despite their tendency toward grandiosity) they are not interested in space exploration, unlike many genuine conservatives. And left-liberals actually dislike space travel, although they occasionally pretend otherwise as a necessary gesture toward the heroism of astronauts, or in bowing toward the Kennedy legacy.

Posted by: Alan Levine on January 25, 2004 4:22 PM

In the immediate aftermath of the Mars announcement, at least two or three leading neoconservatives, including Charles Krauthammer, an advocate of U.S. dominance of the world and a dismisser of any concerns about mass immigration, came out strongly in favor of it. Also, while hard-headed when it comes to enemies abroad (and of course Israel’s enemies), Krauthammer is a social and moral libertarian. He was on Clinton’s side in the Lewinsky scandal and (if I remember correctly) is pro-homosexual rights. The America Krauthammer champions is not a historical nation, not a cultural and moral substance, but a power-seeking ideological void, moving outward in space until it dominates the cosmos.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on January 25, 2004 4:46 PM

I think two things, there is a clearly ethno-sociological explanation for neocon opinions. For the largely Jewish neocons a deracinated, dechristianized, liberal capitalist America would avoid even the tiniest smidgen of conflict for ethnic and religious minorities. This redefinition of America, of course, involves a lot of lies and deceit.

By pushing the levers of power and keeping the US powerful and occupied, the neocons can at least be sure that the populace/state/etc. won’t harm them and their coreligionists in some kind of nationalist spasm.

Not the world’s worst plan, nor least forgivable, but likely to backfire. People don’t like to be lied to, have their religions and culture attacked, etc. Look at the brou-ha-ha over the Passion as an archetypal over-reach.

The neocon America sounds like the borg, without the cool uniforms or the genetically/mechanically reenginered human nature at the core.

Posted by: roach on January 25, 2004 7:47 PM

The cover story in today’s Los Angles Times Magazine, which unfortunately I cannot find online, is a long explanation of what a catastrophe unchecked immigration has been for Southern California!

From the table of contents:

“COVER STORY > Infinite Ingress. The human wave that’s breaking over California is flooding freeways and schools, bloating housing prices and wreaking havoc with the power and water supplies. It’s going to get worse, and ignoring reality isn’t working.”

Anyone at all familiar with the thrice-flogworthy L.A. Times and its frenzied cult of Mexico-Lindo worship must wonder if the world has been turned upside down. What hath Bush wrought?

Posted by: Shrewsbury on January 25, 2004 10:03 PM

I’m looking in disbelief at Shrewbury’s quote from the L.A. Times.

And yet, there’s nothing surprising about it, is there? This is liberalism. Liberals believe palpably ruinous lies to be true, and they only start to admit that the lies are lies when the ruin is upon them and it’s too late to prevent it.

As I’ve said before:

A reactionary is a person who sees a threat to the well-being of his society when the threat first appears.

A conservative is a person who sees a threat to the well-being of his society when the society has been half ruined.

A liberal is a person who sees a threat to the well-being of his society when the society has been largely ruined and it’s too late to do anything about it; or else he never sees it at all.

We could put, say, Tamar Jacoby in that last category. One could easily imagine a Camp of the Saints type catastrophe overtaking America, and Tamar still chirping about how all the immigrants are assimilating.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on January 25, 2004 11:47 PM

LAT link

http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-growth04jan25,1,5397335.story?coll=la-home-magazine

Free Registration Required

Posted by: Mitchell Young on January 26, 2004 12:09 AM

Back to Will. He may be halfway home, but in the extracts from his City Journal article that Mr. Auster has posted for us (I haven’t read the rest yet), Will fails to mention the most effective tool the nation-breakers have, one pro-EU elites overwhelmingly favor: mass incompatible immigration. Nothing so quickly destroys a national consensus and vitiates the ability of a people to defend their country as their home rather than a job site and welfare office for anyone who breaks in. As guest-worker programs in France, Germany and elsewhere have shown, even if the purpose of the immigration is temporary and not intended to give the new arrivals a stake in society, that is always the result.

Of America, Will says “[t]he American Revolution was, at bottom, about the right of a distinctive people, conscious of itself as a single people, to govern itself in its distinctive manner, in nationhood. Here was a great eighteenth-century insight: popular sovereignty is inextricably entwined with nationality.” Quite true and, given that it is, what then is Will’s view of President Bush’s National Suicide Plan? HRS

Posted by: Howard Sutherland on January 26, 2004 10:30 AM

Will has always been a supporter of any immigration. A few years ago, he wrote a column lavishly praising Barone’s book. Will wrote of the increase in GOP voters in new suburbs around Las Vegas, Denver, and other places. He failed to note that these were people who had fled California to get away from Barone’s New Americans.

Posted by: David on January 26, 2004 10:37 AM

Here is a good summary of a few ‘minor’ problems unrestricted Muslem immigration causes in EU:
“Is France on the way to becoming an Islamic state?”,
http://opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/01/26/do2601.xml.

It is easy to see that virtually all arguments in Ms Amiel article apply to US as well. However, I can not see such article appearing in US publication as influential as London Telegraph.

Posted by: mik on January 26, 2004 11:52 PM

For links to work, you have to separate them from punctuation:

http://opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/01/26/do2601.xml

(You may have to be registered at the Telegraph as well.)

About 20 years ago when Canada was going through one of her periodic constitutional farces, Miss Amiel made one of my favorite political observations— that it was impossible to adopt a “liberal” (i.e., Philadelphian) constitution in the modern world as it is. She’s done it again, though quite inadvertently, by redefining normal people who think straight as “extreme Right-wingers and nativists”. As an extreme Right-winger and nativist I thank her for the compliment.

What she doesn’t offer is a path to a solution. An ushering to the exits, à la Amin, Ataturk or Andy Jackson, is out, as is, needless to say, a “wogocaust” of any kind. (“Out” as in “shouldn’t have to”, not “won’t”, happen.) But an answer is hinted at in a piece in November’s Population Research Institute Review.

It appears that “prolifers” (i.e., normal people who think straight) are having children at about three times the rate of “prochoicers” (i.e., the useful idiots of Islamicization). The resultant demographic effect is blunted by the fact that both groups are a fraction of the populace, but it may explain why recent teenagers are showing more, not less, resistance to the abortion culture than their elders.

Now, I am not suggesting here that even the hypererotic French can outbreed the Mohammedans. That may be impossible. What I am saying is that the patriotic French remnant can significantly outbreed the liberals. Indeed, they should. The quality is as critical as the quantity of your army, and this is war. Or will be, shortly.

An old principle among marketers states that if sales are slipping, they are more easily pumped up among existing customers than by chasing new markets. Instead of exhorting the great mass of hedonist French couples to have another (or even a first) child, get those already having three or four to consider having eight or ten or twelve. This cohort is already much more patriotic and religious than the masses. Thirty years from now the Saracens will be in for one hell of a fight.

Kill off liberalism first. White folks with bad ideas are the most dangerous people in the world.

Posted by: Reg Caesar on January 27, 2004 4:45 AM

Sorry to go on about Miss Amiel’s demography. To return to Mr. Will’s argument, take a close look at how he phrases the current situation:

“Today, European elites believe that Europe’s nations are menaced by their own sovereignty… For this reason, the European Union is attempting to turn itself into a single entity without sovereign nations… The intended effect of the proposed constitution is to dissolve Europe’s nation-states, reducing them to administrative departments of a supranational state…”

Exactly how does this differ from the worldview of Napoleon and Hitler? (Both immigrants, by the way.) They were open borders men, too. The only difference was in the direction of flow!

Posted by: Reg Cæsar on January 27, 2004 5:07 AM

I’m not impressed by Barbara Amiel at all. She is a liberal. On one hand, she criticizes the establishment for ignoring the growing problem of unassimilated (and unassimilable) Moslems in France. On the other hand, she dismisses as “extreme Right-wingers and nativists” the only people who do recognize the problem. She continues to believe that the Moslems, while unassimilated, are not unassimilable. This chimera allows her to be superior both to the establishment which ignores the problem and the “extremists” who in fact are the only ones looking at it realistically.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on January 27, 2004 5:30 AM

Mr. Auster hits the nail on the head about Amiel. BTW, she is married to the owner of The Daily Telegraph, Lord Black, who renounced his Canadian citizenship in order to take a seat (awarded under Tony Blair, I believe) in the House of Lords. Despite the fact that Black owns the two premier “conservative” publications in Britain, The Daily Telegraph and the quirky Spectator, there is in both publications a commitment the same underlying transnationalism Mr. Auster has identified in American Republicans. Besides, the only people who read the Spectator today are folks who would be happy if Britain turned into Bombay North, as long as they could pursue fox hunting without being picketed.

Posted by: Paul C. on January 27, 2004 10:04 AM

In fact, Amiel’s own assumed superiority in this case is exactly analogous to that of the Thernstroms and all their conservative supporters when it comes to race differences. The Thernstrom types can say: “The liberal establishment ignores the reality of blacks’ lower academic ability, either because they have a blind belief that racial differences are either non-existent or, if they do exist, are a product of white racism. There are also those who believe that blacks are less intelligent than whites, but they nasty white racists with whom we have nothing to do. But we, the Thernstroms/conservatives, have the real truth, which is that blacks at present are vastly behind whites in intellectual abilities, AND that blacks through proper educational methods can be raised to the level of whites.”

Of course the position is a chimera, but it makes the Thernstroms and the establishment conservative types feel infinitely superior both to the politically correct liberals AND to the “racist” whites who in fact are the only ones who recognize the truth.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on January 27, 2004 10:27 AM