Why Do We Care About Millions of Strangers?

A Critical Examination of Nationalism From the Right

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This week marks the 200th article on the Imperium Press Substack. We now regularly rank in the top 50 philosophy blogs on the whole site—often while making the case for a radically folkish and ancestral social ontology. Given how far outside the mainstream that position is, such a ranking is a real achievement; and we have you, the readers, to thank for it. We truly appreciate your support over the years. To celebrate, we are going to examine nationalism from a folkish perspective.

Nationalism has often been examined from the left, usually as an object of critique, as something ugly and superstitious—a remnant of our primitive nature, thankfully outgrown with the march of progress. This is a stunted view, owing more to trauma than informed opinion. Nationalism is a natural and even rational extension of kinship ties to millions of strangers. It has been responsible for building a large part of the modern world.

Nationalism is also a timely subject in light of the early success of Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain—it would have been hard to imagine a party adjacent to the mainstream in Britain 10 years ago whose rhetorical line was “if that means millions go, then millions go.” Nationalism has been on the rise for many years now, and the results are starting to speak for themselves.

And yet this does not mean that nationalism is a wholly good thing. To be sure, it is far preferable to globalism. But nationalism’s heyday is at least a century behind us, and globalism has manifested for a reason. Perhaps there is room for a nuanced evaluation from the right: a sober analysis that does not veer into advocacy.

We have made this sober analysis at book length in our recent release simply titled Nationalism, which is part of our new Fundamentals Series. If you find this article valuable, you will find the book even more so.

A Word About the Fundamentals Series

Before we begin, let us say a brief word about our new book series.

For generations now, the academic mainstream has been systematically misleading people into believing complete nonsense. This is bad enough in relatively hard disciplines like economics—by the time you get to the softer humanities you are reading journalism. This miseducation begins at the very foundation: with introductory works.

Take, for example, the opening paragraph in the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Nationalism:

What is so important about the existence of nations? Throughout history, humans have formed groups of various kinds around criteria that are used to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’. One such group is the nation. Many thousands, indeed millions, have died in wars on behalf of their nation, as they did in World Wars I and II during the 20th century, perhaps the cruellest of all centuries. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to understand what a nation is: this tendency of humanity to divide itself into distinct, and often conflicting, groups.¹

Already, before the reader has even encountered the topic, we have questioned its importance; framed it in “exclusionary” terms; invoked conflict, cruelty, and death at every turn—and above all, we have placed in the reader’s mind the supposed “worst evil in history.”

Contrast this to the more sober opening paragraph of the Imperium Press Fundamentals series entry on Nationalism:

Nationalism has profoundly shaped the modern world. It has affected nearly everything, from borders, to wars, to ideas of sovereignty and immigration and identity. Millions of people who otherwise have very little in common have identified with nationalism in one form or another. Anyone who wants to understand modern politics therefore has to understand nationalism. And yet, the moment one tries to ask what nationalism is, or what a nation is, the ground be­comes unstable.²

One of these is actual scholarship which takes its subject seriously; the other is activism.

Imperium Press has always aimed to be more than a publisher; we want nothing less than to replace the system of higher education. With what?—with real scholarship that will enable students to master disciplines as they actually are, not as political power would wish them to be. The Fundamentals series is an important step in that direction. Again, your support continues to be integral in carrying out our mission, and we are eternally grateful.

This article will articulate a version of the analysis of nationalism contained in our new book on the subject. Needless to say, that book gives nationalism a fair hearing and concludes that it is largely an adaptive phenomenon which contributes positively to the development of civilization. We are not concerned to advocate nationalism though, but rather to examine it with clarity, and a clear view of the subject uncovers serious structural weaknesses in nationalism.

Most readers of this Substack do not need to be told about the virtues of nationalism, so in this article we will focus on the other side: the core weakness in nationalism. We will give nationalism its due, but we will critique it—from the right. To do that, we must first understand where nations fit into the continuum of human belonging.

The Continuum of Human Belonging

Human beings have more than one identity. We may be Englishmen, yes—but we may also be fathers, sons, cousins, Armstrongs, Mancunians, Northumbrians, Europeans, white men, Indo-Europeans, Her Majesty’s subjects, and homo sapiens sapiens. Some of these identities are some near, some distant; some are concrete, some abstract.

We can place human beings on a continuum of identities. Many such continuums could be formulated, but for simplicity’s sake, let us take the following sequence:

family → clan → tribe → polis/city → folk → nation → race → empire → humanity

Right away, we notice that the nation is but one level in a broader field of belonging, not the starting point of social life and not the final possible identity. We can usefully place these identities not only on a line, but also within a series of concentric circles, as in the famous heatmap diagram.

As these identities expand outward, two things happen at once.

First, scale increases. As we move from family to clan up to folk and thence to humanity, more people are bound together, and with this increased scale, greater political and military power becomes possible. We can accomplish larger and larger projects.

Second, immediacy decreases. The more people in your group, the fewer you personally know. You may still be related to them by blood, but this kinship is much weaker, and as we shall discover, it must become symbolic if it is to survive. It is impossible to be loyal to what you do not know, and it is impossible to know millions of people personally, so your loyalty becomes mediated through social institutions, and through social technologies like myth, law, ritual, language, etc.

The core principle is that the wider the identity, the more politically powerful, but the more emotionally abstract and mediated. The larger the scale of belonging, the thinner that belonging is.

Family, for example, is the deepest and most immediate identity. We encounter our family daily. It is personal to us, inherited, embodied. The family does not require ideology to remain together. It is the first school where we learn what duty, loyalty, and sacrifice mean. It is the root of our sense of “mine” and “ours.” No one has to explain belonging—it is obvious. The clan extends family beyond the immediate household, then the tribe joins multiple clans or extended kin-groups into a larger people.

By the time we arrive at the city or polis, though, shared life has changed. It is still kinship writ large, but at this point people are bound together not only by blood, but by civic life—by abstractions such as office and law, and by portable identities such as citizenship. The folk is broader than the city, but usually still below the full nation. This marks another crucial point though—the folk is the smallest unit of belonging where we can develop culture. What is the culture of Boston? We have not arrived at culture yet. What is the culture of New Englanders? That is a folk, with its own customs, stories, law, and way of life. Crucially, the nation depends on the folk. If nationalism hollows out the folk, the national layer must become bureaucratic and ideological in order to hold itself together.

The nation is a late consolidation of these earlier forms, taking kinship feeling from family, clan, and tribe, taking civic order from the polis, and taking culture from the folk—but it scales them to a point where it can defend itself against other nations. The nation is large enough to organize a serious state, but still close enough to inherited belonging that people will sacrifice for it, at least under certain conditions. The nation is the largest form of belonging that can still plausibly feel like an extended people.

We can go beyond the nation too. Race is less politically definite than the nation. It can tap into a sense of kinship across nations, but it is usually too broad to function as a stable political identity by itself. Empire is wider than the nation as well. It may contain many peoples, or even many races across vast territory, commanding impressive military power. But its identity is thinner than national identity, so it depends on a strong state. Humanity is the widest identity, and is perhaps barely even morally intelligible. It can make claims at the level of universality, but it is extremely fragile as a political identity, with almost no direct emotional force compared with family, folk, or nation.

As we proceed upward in this continuum, we are forced to make a trade-off: the lower identities are thicker but smaller, however the higher identities are larger but thinner. The nation sits in the “sweet spot.” Historically, the nation became powerful because it could draw thickness from below, but could enjoy the benefits of scale.

We have said a great deal about the nation, but so far we have not defined nationalism. The nation is a thing; nationalism is a doctrine about the thing. Nationalism takes the national layer of identity and elevates it above the others. It asks us to put our family interest aside for the good of the whole—if your brother were to commit a crime against the public order, the nation would demand that you turn him in. It asks us to put the national interest above our local interest—if Texas is richer in resources than Nevada, the nation demands that these resources be reallocated to keep the whole intact.

To build national unity, nationalism has to subordinate the more fundamental loyalties. This is, to an extent, necessary. A nation cannot function if every lower loyalty refuses to yield. But if nationalism goes too far, it weakens the very identities that generate trust and loyalty in the first place. Nationalism needs the lower identities to nourish it, but it is tempted to treat them as rivals.

The Importance of the Fundamental Identities

What we think of as our singular identity is really a series of nested and mutually reinforcing identities, plural. This is rather obvious—what is less obvious is that these identities are not all equally important to the structure of who we are. And to see this we must see what holds a nation together.

A family can hold together because people know one another, but a nation is too large for direct personal loyalty. Most members will never meet. The nation has to solve a scaling problem, and it does this by extending more fundamental loyalties into symbolic and institutional forms: kinship scales up to peoplehood, local custom becomes national law, etc. The nation is not a literal family, but it borrows the emotional grammar of the family in order to produce what we call thick identity.

Thick identity is a term of art from ethnography and was popularized by Clifford Geertz, an important figure in theories of nationalism.³ A thin identity is something like “we share the same legal status.” A thick identity is more like “we come from the same people, answer to the same dead, and feel the same wounds and victories.” The nation needs thick identity because sacrifice requires more than membership in an administrative body. Men do not usually die for a tax jurisdiction; they die for fathers, children, graves, land, and destiny. The thicker the identity, the less explanation it needs. The thinner the identity, the more coercion required to keep it together.

To grasp the importance of the bottom layers of our continuum of belonging, we must introduce another term: social capital. Social capital is the accumulated trust that allows people to cooperate without being forced at every point, and the key is that social capital is produced below the level of the nation. Trust is something inherently personal; it is produced in families and neighbourhoods, as well as cultic communities. It results from kinship, or else from shared work and shared hardship. The nation draws upon this social capital, but it does not produce it by itself.

We should think of social capital like any other capital—as a resource which must be replenished. Nationalism depends on a reservoir of trust produced by lower forms of life. If nationalism dissolves those lower forms, it drains the reservoir from which it draws its own strength.

Let us summarize thus far. Human beings begin with in-group preference and concrete relational identity, with the immediate family. But we can only scale loyalty so far with purely personal relationships; to extend this loyalty beyond the range of personal knowledge, we must invoke social technologies like myth, law, and symbol—this is how identity is scaled up while retaining its thickness, i.e. its trust. Large-scale cooperation at the national level is enabled only by this trust, which we call social capital, which is accumulated through the lower communities like a reservoir fed by groundwater. The nation then draws upon this reservoir to achieve what cannot be achieved locally.

Ethnic vs. Civic Nationalism

The larger layer of identity that is the nation depends on the more foundational layers in order to function without resorting to coercion. We could look at this another way, in terms of legitimacy. No doubt a polity can hold together by top-down force, but this is inefficient and therefore maladaptive. So much energy (whether spiritual, economic, or indeed ultimately even caloric energy) is spent managing ephemeral problems that the society loses the adaptive advantage of acting as a nation. Legitimacy is an inverse friction coefficient: the more legitimacy a form of life has, the more people will accept it voluntarily.

The legitimacy of a form of life is largely a function of feeling like it is ours. When something is “right full stop”, universally and in the abstract, it lacks natural force, and must be continually reinforced by inculturation. When something is ours, not only is it right, but the moral calculus reverses: ours is not seen in terms of right, right is judged in terms of for us. This—what we will call ours-ness⁴—gives us a powerful tool to explain what seem like totally incommensurable ideas of the nation: ethnic vs. civic nationalism.

Ethnic nationalism is the least abstract form of nationalism, defining the nation primarily through the pre-political identities beneath it: family, clan, tribe, and folk. Ethnic nationalism says: the nation is an extended people. This means it does not have to invent belonging primarily through the state. The state may protect or organize the people, but the people exists prior to the state. Civic nationalism is the most abstract form, defining the nation mainly through thinner identities beyond the level of the pre-political, in terms of citizenship, law, and creed. Civic nationalism in its modern liberal form says: the nation is a community of shared values. If the nation is defined by values, why should it remain a distinct nation at all? If the values are universal, then anyone who accepts them can belong. And if anyone can belong, then the nation ceases to be a people and devolves to a proposition.⁵

We can look at ethnic vs. civic nationalism also in terms of ours-ness. In ethnic nationalism, ours-ness comes from being of the same people: this is ours because it belongs to our inherited people. In civic nationalism, ours-ness comes from state membership or public creed: this is ours because we are citizens under the same institutions and profess the same political principles. The irony is that civic nationalism may work when it draws upon an already-existing ethnic nation, but when it tries to stand alone, it cannot hold a population together without coercion. Civic nationalism only survives by borrowing emotional force from ethnic nationalism while denying that it needs it.

Ethnic nationalism is least likely to undermine the roots of nationalism, because it stays closest to those roots. Civic nationalism is the form most likely to undermine nationalism because it detaches the nation from the pre-political identities that make nations thick. Put another way, the more civic the nationalism, the more the state must create the nation out of thin air. The healthy order is that a people makes up a nation, and the nation produces a state instrument. The civic nationalist formulation is that a state produces the category of citizenship, through which the state manufactures a nation. This is why civic nationalism is more costly, more fragile, and more coercive than ethnic nationalism.

The Core Weakness of Nationalism

Ethnic nationalism is closest to peoplehood, whereas civic nationalism is nationalism at its most abstract. The more abstract the nationalism, the more the state has to manufacture it, and this is unstable at its foundation—when the nation becomes a proposition, it has already begun to dissolve as a people.

It would seem, then, that nationalism is stable so far as it is ethnic. This is true. But it does not follow from this observation that ethnic nationalism is entirely stable. As the reader has no doubt guessed, nationalism is not stable, and there is very good reason why it has weakened in the last century, to where it must now be reborn. Why, then, did it die? The answer has less to do with technology or material conditions than with the nature of power.

Extended Analysis Below:

• The essential failure mode of nationalism

• Why Mike no longer considers himself a nationalist

• What a post nationalist right looks like