Future Outlook for Nation-States

 

   The future of current nation-states appears to have a very bleak outlook. But beware, because capitalism itself seemed to have a similar outlook for most of the last century. Globalism's exploitation of cultural and sexual minorities, radicalizing their rights without limits, contributes to damaging the generational renewal of Western nations, promoting mass abortion and female infertility through propaganda, and destroying the traditional family structure established in the West. This leads, in the short and medium term, to population replacement due to the much higher fertility of immigrant populations. This poses a serious problem for the preservation of the cultural identity of Western nation-states.

But the problem wouldn't be solved by drastically closing national borders to immigration in an attempt to contain the avalanche of disorderly migration that the USA and the EU are currently experiencing. Nor would it be solved by encouraging birth rates among the native population. Such measures might help to some extent. But these are measures difficult to implement efficiently without resorting to dictatorial or authoritarian methods, which could endanger liberal democracy itself, leading to the triumph of uncontrollable reactionary populism, as happened in the 1930s with the rise of Nazism.

Western nation-states need immigration, as happened in the Roman Empire when a standard of living was reached that made the hardest labor unattractive to the Roman populace. Therefore, slavery, provided by their conquests, was introduced, along with economic subsidies and the cultural entertainment of "bread and circuses." Today, the equivalent in an advanced industrial society would be so-called "migrants" (a term I dislike because it seems more appropriate for animals like birds), along with subsidized entertainment and subsistence wages paid to natives, which are demanded to be paid for life. The job destruction caused by Artificial Intelligence may even accelerate this process. Without such "migrants," the economy would collapse. But with them, serious problems of coexistence could arise, leading to struggles and confrontations, dividing their populations and resulting in civil wars or serious uprisings and riots.

Religious, racial, and cultural differences could have a significant influence on this. France was the first country where the conflictive nature of mass Muslim immigration from its former colonies was observed. Religious customs derived from Islamic law clash head-on with those derived from the laws of its glorious republican tradition. Entire neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities, where a majority of the Muslim immigrant population is concentrated, escape these laws and any state police control. England has been following the same path in recent years due to mass immigration of Muslims from Pakistan, in addition to those from its former African colonies. Germany, besides the massive immigration of Muslims resulting from the Syrian war, has the previous and persistent immigration from Türkiye. The Islamist attacks that began in France (Bataclan) have spread to several German cities. The consequence, given the inaction of governments that follow the EU's radically globalist policies, has been the growing electoral rise of parties like the AfD, Le Pen's party, Farage's party, and others.

The same thing is happening in Spain, but to a lesser extent because most of the massive irregular immigration comes from South America, which shares the same culture as the mother country. Muslim immigration, mainly from Morocco, is much smaller. This stems from the different approach to civilization implemented by Spain in the Americas and the Philippines, converting their populations to Catholicism, compared to what the British, Dutch, and others did in Asia, where they practiced purely mercantile colonialism, tolerating ancient, and often barbaric, religious beliefs and superstitions. Spain, through a skillful policy of racial mixing and integration of native populations, paid a very high economic price, but made a cultural investment that we can appreciate today, as it has an immigrant population that should not pose serious integration problems. The USA shares with Spain the majority of its South American immigrants, as well as those from Mexico and the Caribbean. The potential conflict may stem from their different customs of Hispanic or Anglo-Saxon origin, which, nevertheless, are products of countries as Western as Spain and England. Therefore, it should not lead to clashes that are unacceptable to the majority of the American population.

Japan and Australia are considered part of Western civilization. Australia maintains fairly strict immigration control laws, although globalist policies remain highly influential there. Japan is overpopulated and has a rapidly aging population. They are looking to robotics, rather than immigrants, as it can reduce the need for manual labor and replace domestic help.

Finally, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, due to their high economic development, also require massive immigration. However, as absolute monarchies, they are able to refuse to integrate migrant workers from countries like India, returning them to their countries of origin without granting them political rights.

Manuel F. Lorenzo

Will nation-states disappear?

 

The crisis of the 1930s, which led to World War II and culminated in the Cold War, ended with the economic collapse of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Capitalism endured and could not be overcome as the Marxist socialist project intended. Some, like Fukuyama, believed that history would end with the definitive triumph of liberal democracies based on this economic system. But it only took a few decades to witness the emergence of a new development of capitalism, driven by a new industrial revolution supported by the internet, powerful new computers and smartphones, artificial intelligence, and so on, which generated the new ideology of globalization. Just as socialist ideology saw capitalism as an obstacle to progress that had to be destroyed and overcome, the new progressive ideology of globalization sees the nation-state as a brake and an obstacle to its development, which must be eliminated and replaced by other forms of political administration.

The destruction or overcoming of nation-states is sought through the creation of supranational groupings, as is the case with the European Union. But in the case of the USA or China, which are large continental nation-states, they could only be overcome by creating a Global State, as some propose, with a global government, police force, and courts. The problem is that a Global State would cease to be a state in the strict sense, if we consider that a state is not a separate entity that can exist without confronting an external environment of other states or pre-state societies that threaten its borders. A Global State could only exist if extraterrestrial beings appeared on our earthly horizon, threatening our existence, and against whom we Earthlings united in a single state. But such a hypothesis belongs to the realm of historical fiction. Therefore, such a Global State is utopian and, strictly speaking, impossible.

What would happen if the current nation-states were destroyed is that their inhabitants would remain organized into regional power blocs, due to the natural persistence of tribal ties observed, for example, in the so-called ethnic nationalities resurging in Europe as a result of the weakening of national sovereignties transferred to Brussels. But such “micro-nations” or “fractional states,” which would spring up like mushrooms in the so-called “Europe of the peoples” through secessionist processes, like those of the Corsicans, Basques, Catalans, Bretons, etc., are not truly states in the sense of the political nationalism that emerged from the French Revolution, but rather a kind of return to pre-state racial and cultural tribal structures. Therefore, rather than progress, what would occur here would be a historical regression.

The philosopher Herbert Spencer prophesied, back in the 19th century, that the triumph of socialism would be unstoppable, but that wherever it occurred, instead of creating a more advanced industrial society, it would lead to a resurgence of the militaristic societies that existed before the industrial age. This happened with the growing Soviet militarism of the Cold War. We could say today that the triumph of globalist ideologies, which seek to overcome the political structures of modern nation-states, where it is already taking place, will, rather than lead to a more progressive and advanced society, unleash a return to earlier tribal societies, or even to the city-states of ancient times, before the emergence of modern nation-states.

This is the direction taken by the massive irregular immigration promoted in recent decades by supranational governments, such as those of the European Union or the USA, based on the idea that all cultures are equal and can be tolerated and coexist in harmony. The traditional tolerance of Western democracy is invoked to justify this, forgetting that its very proponents, such as Spinoza (“These men usurp all authority, declare themselves immediately chosen by God, proclaim their decrees divine and those emanating from the government merely human, in order to subject them to divine decrees, that is, to their own decrees. Who is unaware of how contrary this excess is to the good of the State?”, Theological-Political Treatise, end of Chapter XX), or John Locke, already placed limits, for example, on religious tolerance when it could endanger the very laws of the democratic state. Religions like Islam, which does not accept the Western separation of Church and State, seem difficult to reconcile with modern Western states, generating veritable medieval ghettos, with neighborhoods where Sharia law prevails over Western laws and customs. Will the nation-state withstand such changes?

Manuel F. Lorenzo