By D. J. Webb
Can there be such a thing as a proposition nation? This is an interesting question, raised in the US context, but also more widely applicable to other Western countries that claim to be fostering a civic nationalism that is not based on one racial or ethnic group. The issue is also directly relevant to libertarians: the “left libertarians” support open borders, presumably in the expectation that incomers will embrace a libertarian culture as the propositional basis for the society, whereas conservative libertarians (palaeo-libertarians) see little reason to expect ethnic engulfing to support socioeconomic liberty.
Ethnic and linguistic boundaries are broadly accepted as logical national boundaries. However, the exceptions are relatively numerous: Britain, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are each different nations. As Canada is not an island and is directly contiguous to the US, the border seems nothing more than a legacy of history. Taiwan is effectively independent from China, despite having a Chinese population. The distinctions between Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine are also more than a little fuzzy: surely Belarus and the Ukraine are, in the final analysis, “Russian” — their separate languages largely play second fiddle to Russian as a spoken language on the ground, and Russian and Belarusian are in any case much closer to Russian than, say, the Taiwanese dialect is to Mandarin Chinese. The distinctions between the Arab states, the Latin American States and even India and Pakistan appear poorly grounded in ethnic or linguistic differences (there are millions of Urdu- or Punjabi-speaking Muslims living in India). Coming closer to home, the proposal for Scottish independence is not made on ethnic or linguistic grounds.
Many of these examples are essentially cases where a different political culture has emerged for historical reasons. Scotland, for example, was an independent country for centuries, and so retains a national identity quite separate to that of the English. It is argued by many that Scots prefer more public spending and greater “social solidarity” (a term that reflects a view of public spending that flatters the bureaucrats who manage it), and so, despite appearing largely identical to the English in ethnic and linguistic terms, rightly feel politically different.
Put another way, all of these examples may be instances of “proposition nations”. It is common for conservatives to argue that America is not, in fact, a proposition nation, but that is not what was indicated in the US Declaration of Independence, which began:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
The rest of the document gave “causes impelling them to separation” that amounted to a list of political and economic grievances. Not one of the causes listed argued that the Americans were not, in fact, British, or did not speak English. The grievances listed centred on claims that Britain was withholding the rights of British subjects in America that ought to have been accorded to them according to England’s age-old Common Law. Somewhat awkwardly, English liberty was the “proposition” of the new nation that justified independence from England.
Of course, the distance of the American colonies from Britain, which prevented the direct incorporation of the colonies into the metropolitan state and impeded the passage of edicts and commands across the Atlantic, provides one reason why the colonists eventually demanded independence. Similarly, independence of Australia and New Zealand came about largely because these were distant discrete territories. Yet the fact that America was far from Britain was not given in the Declaration of Independence as the essential reason for demanding independence.
In the other cases adduced above, states that have successfully established their legitimacy have rested their claims to public support on elements of political culture, at least to an extent. Canada markets itself as an extreme leftist state whose population are urged to look down on the US Yahoos. Taiwan emphasizes its capitalism and independent path to democracy, both of which contrast with the culture of the Chinese Mainland. Unsuccessful states like the Ukraine have failed to win over broader public support owing to fuzzy delineation of a separate political culture: the Ukraine has failed to make the case that, despite the fact that most of the population speaks Russian on a daily basis and are in no significant cultural details distinguishable from Russians, the country is building a unique political culture that makes them non-Russian.
So it seems that national identity, commonly rooted in ethnicity and language, has a strong component of political culture too: the political culture forms a “proposition” that may become identity-forming or contribute towards the formation of a national identity. The problem for conservatives is that the left then claim that anyone in the world who adopts the national identity (the proposition) becomes part of a civic nation of passport holders who adhere to the same political norms. According to this theory, any African or Asian who supports massive state spending, loves haggis and hates the English is well on his way to becoming a Scot. In its most reductionist form, the prevailing left-wing narrative argues that nations are nothing other than their political cultures; there is no ethnic or linguistic basis at all to society. If the US becomes Hispanic or Spanish-speaking, or if France becomes Arab or Arabic-speaking, it is argued, America and France will survive, as their political cultures are sufficiently attractive to provide a coherent identity for both natives, incomers and the descendants of incomers alike. This logic justifies wholesale population replacement: an extreme dislocation, such as Sweden becoming a Muslim country, is rationalized as a natural development from the Sweden of the Middle Ages as long as the outward forms of democracy and such like continue.
There is also the problem that the “propositions” at the heart of the political-national projects of the Western countries are too similar, coming down to a common promotion of multiracialism and multiculturalism. It seems there are still differences: at the popular level, Americans are more interested in guns and religion than the Canadians, but at the elite level all this is deprecated, and an ideal future is envisaged where American cities become more like Canada. The French approach to multiculturalism is to demand much greater adherence to secular French values than is the case in England, symbolized by the prohibition of wearing the Muslim veil in public.
Yet there is a real process of homogenization going on here: if all Western nations see themselves as proposition nations and import millions of new citizens, the end-results will be variations on the same theme of multiculturalism, depending on whether the host nations “successfully” become hyper-diverse, like England, or end up bringing in too many migrants from one source (an Arabic France? a Hispanic America?) in a way that resembles conquest from a single source and not a multiethnic free-for-all. In the end, the similarity of the “proposition” being advanced in all Western countries is a Trojan horse for globalism: our elite view global rule by multinational bureaucracies as the ultimate goal, and de-ethnicization of the Western states prepares the way for much deeper global cooperation as elite bureaucracies meld across transnational borders.
This suffers from the flaw that a political culture is only one element in national identity. The stronger national identities define themselves in terms of language, ancestry and cultural heritage, as well as political culture. It is hard to see Japan reduced to a political proposition aside from the Japanese people, their cultural traditions and their language. American resentment of England amounts to a recognition that there are other elements to national identity than political culture, and yet all of those elements tie America to an English heritage, which cannot be fully shaken off. The differences between the two nations then resolve themselves at the detailed level in the ways in which each of them conserves or traduces some part of the common cultural heritage, including the English language, a literary tradition, a religious tradition, aspects of the Common Law and much else.
This brings us back to the original problem that the US colonists advanced a “proposition” of political and economic liberty, not as a result of abstract philosophizing, but as a defence of England’s cultural heritage. The Common Law wasn’t dreamt up in politics departments of universities, but emerged from England’s history as part of our traditions. To counterpose the political proposition to the ethnic foundation of the nation is therefore quite confused. The American proposition was an ethnic one: it amounted to a claim that the American colonists would establish to a greater extent the traditional rights of Englishmen, seen to be atrophying in England itself. The Americans were creating a new and better England, one that would be a free country only because liberty was part of England’s cultural heritage.
We notice a further logical slip in all of this: immigrants to Western nations don’t really adhere to the same political norms. If they did, why would multiculturalism have to be introduced to show respect for the refusal of ethnic minorities to integrate into Anglo-Saxon societies? Surely, immigrants who adopted our traditional political values would resent the assault on free speech and freedom of expression that enforced multiculturalism amounts to. A fundamental political proposition (or accepted cultural norms) lie at the heart of a common identity shared by most citizens of any nation, but is not the only element of that identity. So it turns out that it is not possible to integrate huge numbers of incomers from totally alien cultures in a way that ensures the survival of the political-cultural proposition. Incomers bring their political cultures with them.
Where does this leave us? We are constantly told that freedom of labour should be a libertarian right, and that libertarianism is as attractive to ethnic-minority people as it is to Englishmen. Yet the huge social experiment we have been conducting for decades shows that immigrants tend to support state power, particularly where that state is committed to egalitarianism. The political proposition we (libertarians) support only makes sense when viewed from the perspective of England’s Common Law, and will not survive the demographic transformation of our society via indiscriminate immigration. Real people bear the imprint of their upbringing and the cultures of their ancestors. Ultimately, we should be arguing for the survival of our ancestral culture and not for a bare political proposition of liberty in the abstract, which cannot be achieved without the fundamental support of a cultural heritage that subsists among people whose ancestors viewed themselves as free people.
