[BRIGADE] PJB: The Return of Ethnic Nationalism
Published: Tue, 02/26/08
"According to a compelling lead article in the new Foreign Affairs,
"Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism," we may be
witnessing in the Third World a re-enactment of the ethnic wars
that tore Europe to pieces in the 20th century..."
Brigade, see below another excellent history lesson from Pat -- and
a warning for Americans.
For the Cause, Linda
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The Return of Ethnic Nationalism
by Patrick J. Buchanan
February 26, 2008
In Africa last week, President Bush deplored the genocide in Rwanda
in the 1990s, defended his refusal to send U.S. troops to Darfur
and decried the ethnic slaughter in Kenya.
Following a fraudulent election, the Kikyu, the dominant tribe in
Kenya, have been subjected to merciless assault. People are
separating from one another and butchering one another along lines
of blood and soil.
According to a compelling lead article in the new Foreign Affairs,
"Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism," we may be
witnessing in the Third World a re-enactment of the ethnic wars
that tore Europe to pieces in the 20th century.
"Ethnonationalism," writes history professor Jerry Z. Muller of
Catholic University, "has played a more profound role in modern
history than is commonly understood, and the processes that led to
the dominance of the ethnonational state and the separation of
ethnic groups in Europe are likely to recur elsewhere."
Western Man has mis-taught himself his own history.
Writes Muller: "A familiar and influential narrative of
20th-century European history argues that nationalism twice led to
war, in 1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes,
Europeans concluded that nationalism was a danger and gradually
abandoned it. In the post-war decades, Western Europeans enmeshed
themselves in a web of transnational institutions, culminating in
the European Union."
Muller contends that this is a myth, that peace came to the Old
Continent only after the triumph of ethnonationalism, after the
peoples of Europe had sorted themselves out and each achieved its
own home.
At the beginning of the 20th century, there were three multi-ethnic
empires in Europe: the Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian. The
ethnonationalist Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 tore at the first.
World War I was ignited by Serbs seeking to rip Bosnia away from
Austria-Hungary. After four years of slaughter, the Serbs
succeeded, and ethnonationalism triumphed in Europe.
Out of the dead Ottoman Empire came the ethnonationalist state of
Turkey and an ethnic transfer of populations between Ankara and
Athens. Armenians were massacred and expelled from Turkey.
Out of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires came Finland,
Estonia, Lativia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
In the latter three nations, however, a majority ethnic group ruled
minorities that wished either their own national home, or to join
lost kinsmen.
In Poland, there were Ukrainians, Germans, Lithuanians and Jews. In
Czechoslovakia, half the population was German, Slovak, Hungarian,
Polish, Ruthenian or Jewish. In Yugoslavia were Slovenes, Croats,
Bosnians, Serbs, Macedonians, Montenegrins and Albanians.
The Second World War came out of Hitler's attempt to unite all
Germans in one ethnonational home - thus the Anschluss with
Austria, the demand for return of the Sudeten Deutsch, and the
pressure on Poland to return the Germans' lost city of Danzig, and
for Lithuania to give back German Memel and the Memelland it seized
in 1923.
World War II advanced the process in the most horrible of ways.
The Jews of Europe, with no national home, perished, or fled to
create one, in Israel. The Germans of the Baltic states, Prussia,
Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans and their own eastern
provinces, almost to Berlin, were expelled in the most brutal act
of ethnic cleansing in history - 13 million to 15 million Germans,
of whom 2 million perished in the exodus.
At the end of World War II, Europe's nations were more ethnically
homogenous than they had ever been, at a horrendous cost in blood.
After 45 years of Cold War, the remaining multi-ethnic states - the
Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia - broke up into more
than two dozen nation-states, all rooted in ethnonationlism.
As Muller argues, ethnonationalism may be a precondition of liberal
democracy. Only after all the tribes of Europe had their own
ethnically homogenous nation-states did peace and comity come. And
what happened in Europe in the 20th century may be a precursor of
what is to come in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
In China, Uighurs, Mongolians and Tibetans all resist assimilation.
Tatarstan may be the next problem for Russia. In the Balkans, it is
Kosovo. Serbs there and in Bosnia may emulate the Albanians and
secede.
Americans, writes Muller, "find ethnonationalism discomfiting both
intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths
to demonstrate that this is a product not of nature but of culture. ...
"But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away."
Indeed, we see it bubbling up from the Basque country of Spain, to
Belgium, Bolivia, Baghdad and Beirut. Perhaps the wisest counsel
for the United States may be to get out of the way of this
elemental force. Rather than seek to halt the inexorable, we should
seek to accommodate it and ameliorate its sometimes awful
consequences.
And we should look to our own land. According to Pew Research,
there will be 127 million Hispanics here by mid-century, tripling
today's 45 million - and almost 100 million new immigrants. No
nation faces a graver threat from this resurgence of
ethnonationalism than does our own.
Look homeward, America.
SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=956
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