#140: The EU, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Multi-Culturalism

May 30, 2018

We cannot understand the politics of current Europe without appreciating this critical fact, namely that Socialism in every one of its forms is inherently imperialistic.

This is camouflaged by the fact that post WW II Leftists have identified two culprits in history’s most recent horrors: nationalism and imperialism (aka now as “colonialism”). Modern political convenience made them parse imperialism as exclusively governance by force of non-contiguous (distant) culturally distinct regions and populations. This was partly so that they could agitate third-world populations and their widely distributed descendants, but also to distract attention from the bothersome fact that they were themselves imperialistic. But clearly empires were not only based on distant colonies.

Really, any European not ideologically blinded should find it hard to miss from where he is standing that Socialism is itself intrinsically imperialistic. And further, realizing that, failing some very harsh medicine, it is fated inevitably to disintegrate. But why?

The problem that empires encounter is that culturally distinct populations resent and resist governance from a distance. This is true even when the culturally distinct populations are geographically contiguous. This is called nationalism and it leads to revolution, sometimes afar and sometimes quite close.

This means that the Left’s public position on nationalism and imperialism is not quite as represented. The Left is so hostile to nationalism not because it leads to horrors such as those found in Nazism, but because nationalism is imperialism’s deadliest foe. And Socialism is an imperialism!

Most Socialist (read: Communist) nations have actually recognized this fact and have attempted to deal with the problem by forcibly “re-educating” or culturally homogenizing their populations.

Karl Popper famously accused Plato of fascism in The Republic because he argued that the perfect state could only be achieved if it were begun with young children, the parents having been eliminated. The children could then be properly “educated” into perfect citizens.

The Jacobins of the French Revolution sought to erase the ancien regime partly by elimination (the clergy and the aristocracy) and partly by an enforced newly minted culture of their own devising.

The Bolshevik Russians followed the same recipe, as did the Chinese in their own “cultural revolution.”

This strategy has been successful to varying degrees. Czarism remains beneath the surface in Russia in various mutated forms. Catholicism and Confucianism remains beneath the surface in China in various mutated forms, not to mention its problems with the various resisting minorities on its peripheries.

But, as we know, Europe has opted for its famous “third way” governance, “Social Democracy,” which abjures the use of force in governance. Yet, failing forcible cultural cleansing, Socialism faces exactly the same disintegrative forces faced by the conventional distant empires of the past, and this applies precisely to the EU.

Brexit was no accident. Norway and Switzerland never joined. Italy is threatening to leave, and Hungary and Poland are telling Brussels to get lost. There should be no surprise about this. It is happening precisely where Europe’s most dramatic imperial death took place, that of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The EU is nothing but a Social-Democrat attempt at empire along the Hapsburg line, namely the governance of culturally distinct but geographically contiguous populations without cultural cleansing. The Hapsburgs did not attempt to make all their contiguous “colonies” become Austrian, they allowed them to retain their local cultures. For this reason, we can say that both the Hapsburg empire and the EU are today’s multi-culturalism writ large upon a continent.

We’ve seen how the Hapsburgs fared. We’ve seen how all the conventional empires fared.

The leaders of the EU knew quite well the problem that they faced and they knew quite well that the measures implemented by Communist nations were not available to them. And so they embarked on another, new, strategy to combat nationalism, the threat to their imperialism. It’s very clever.

Their strategy applied exactly the same force that was threatening their empire-in-the-making against their nation-state constituents. Here’s how.

Multi-culturalism in the form of different nation-states was threatening EU disintegration. So the EU leaders decided to force multi-culturalism upon the nation-states themselves to dissolve their unity, hence neutralizing them.

This is the entire point of the EU government’s insisting that member states take in massive doses of third world migrants.

What we’re seeing are culturally cohesive nation-states who are members of an empire insisting on their cultural distinctiveness to govern themselves, while the empire attempts to erase their cultural distinctiveness so as to gain hegemony over them.

A hell of a fight.