Brussels, Belgium. An attack on all of our liberties.
Thoughts on the Nation-State prompted by the assault on the National Conservatism Conference.
The attempt to shut down this week’s National Conservatism Conference in Brussels has been widely reported so, rather than repeat many of the details, I’ll provide some links … and then just explore some related ideas.
The goings-on have involved several people who I follow here on Substack - in particular, three musketeers of the finest calibre:
- … who was actually one of the organisers/sponsors of the event
- … who spoke at the event and has commented on it here
- … who also spoke at the event and has written a terrific, comprehensive account of the goings-on here
There are many ways to organize and run human societies. Of course there are. But it seems to me that there are only a few broad governing factors. My own selection of these would highlight 1) individual freedom and flourishing, 2) a sense of building on rather than pulling down the past, and 3) working with rather than against our primal instincts.
Maybe they should be listed in reverse order. Let’s start with the primal instincts factor. And I should mention that I do this cautiously because I am not an academic.
3) Primal instincts
A Google search tells me that mammals emerged between 250 million and 200 million years ago. So we have been a long time in the making. One outcome is that, despite our weediness relative to some other species, homo sapiens figures high in the predatory pecking order.
However, it seems to me that we are well-advised not to forget that we are, like every other mammal (perhaps, even, every other living thing), still subject to predator-prey factors. These factors governed our progress thus far and they have not gone away.
They include our being naturally cautious, at least initially, in our reactions to others. And, yes, this does lead to a degree of in-group versus out-group behaviour. It’s the “Who goes there? Friend or foe?” checkpoint. And it’s perhaps precisely because we are a hugely successful predatory species that it is only commonsense for us, of all species, to keep our guard up … including with members of our own species. Those who tell us that we are all the same under the skin usually omit to say that that is one of things that makes us so potentially dangerous to one another.
If you think this sounds overly negative, please be assured that I am not suggesting that we stop mingling and trusting one another. But, please, please, let’s apply a bit of commonsense and discrimination in the process.
At the moment, it seems, a significant cohort of our fellow humans in the West have not just switched off the fundamental mammalian cautions that have evolved over millions of years for our safety, but are trying to entirely eradicate those cautions. If that succeeded it would, of course, leave us entirely at the mercy of any individuals or groups with any predatory intent.
2) Reform, not revolution
Another and intimately related key factor has to do with the structure and development of our societies. It follows on from the ‘primal instincts’ point. Build, don’t destroy. Choose Reform, not Revolution.
The National Conservatism Conference was run by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a think-tank led by Yoram Hazony. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman who argued for reform rather than revolution. In his essay criticizing the French Revolution, he featured the phrase “Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna” which translates as something like, “You have obtained Sparta, embellish it.” Or, more generally, “Develop what you have received.” It’s a constructive sentiment. Indeed, regarding the French Revolution, Burke made the point that demolishing an entire history will not produce a good outcome1. Rather, it will lead to tyranny.
This point is beautifully captured in a much later volume:
The story of the French Revolution is the story of how a group of educated young Frenchmen, many of them lawyers, set about building a new state in France, on new principles based on the rule of law; of how, for a while, they succeeded; and of how, after a while, they failed.
They called it a ‘Revolution’, but it started almost entirely peacefully, and it went on being largely peaceful for another three years; and when, eventually, it began to descend into failure, chaos and Terror, it was the Revolutionaries who progressively dismantled, piece by piece, their own system of the rule of law.2
Indeed, I think it fair to say the evidence shows that all ‘Year Zero’ attempts are bloody dangerous. For example, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) in China led to the deaths of thirty million people. And yet, bizarrely, Mao Zedong’s ideas were picked up, in the 1970s, by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and used yet again, this time leading to the deaths of around a further two million people.
However, in the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century occurrences within the boundaries of a nation-state were considered sacrosanct. Indeed, this principle was ratified in the U.N. Charter under Article 2 (7). It meant, inter alia, that nation-states were granted protection against retribution for what it was possible to describe as:
a new wave of crimes shielded by sovereignty.3
Which is to say, events such as the Khmer Rouge horror in Cambodia were used to denigrate the concept of the nation-state. But this, I believe, is entirely unfair: akin to categorizing the automobile as a lethal weapon rather than a liberating mode of transport.
And, now, a twenty-first century version of the philosophy that inspired the Chinese and Cambodian Revolutions (and, earlier still, the Russian Revolution) has been achieving perhaps its greatest ever penetration into Western societies. It is a Marxist-inspired program that blithely asserts equality by destroying the nation-state and, in the process, undermining democracy and meritocracy.
Here’s a summary from 1992, written by American sociologist and political scientist Charles Tilly (1929-2008) who, to put it crudely, believed that nation-states were created by war and then perpetuated war. Here, he is writing about the EU:
Community-wide consumer protection, elimination of customs barriers, free movement of migrants, elimination of work permits for Community residents, participation of ‘foreigners’ in municipal elections, transferability of university credits, Europeanization of driver’s licences and automobile standards, creation of a modern currency, and establishment of Europe-wide television - all entailed by the Maastricht pact - will directly attack the capacity of any state to pursue a distinct and independent policy for employment, welfare, education, culture or military organization.4
Oh boy, don’t we know it! This is unquestionably Revolution, not Reform.
Not least, it seems to me, Charles Tilly could not understand the notion that someone might have affection for their nation (or ‘state’ as he saw it). And yet, to me it is the most natural thing on earth. As Roger Scruton (1944-2020) put it:
When your fundamental loyalty is to a place and its genius loci, globalisation and the loss of sovereignty bring a crisis of identity. The land loses its history and its personal face; the institutions become administrative centres, operated by anonymous bureaucrats who are not us but them. The bureaucratic disenchantment of the earth has therefore been felt more keenly in England than elsewhere. For it has induced in the English the sense that they are really living nowhere.5
1) Favour individual freedom and flourishing
So, what is the answer to the conundrum of Best Human Organizational Model?
Well, as you may have gathered from the foregoing, I favour the nation-state. It is not automatically perfect. Nothing is. But I think it’s the best basis we have yet found. Any particular example may or may not be based upon or exhibit individual freedom and human flourishing but, where these factors are not in evidence, it is not the fault of the nation-state model per se. However, the chances of ‘getting it right’ are far greater among multiple nation-states than in an inevitably bureaucratic and relatively faceless global positioning. The Nation-State is a human scale basis for organizing things.
However, let’s face it, any Human Organizational Model, whatever its scope and scale, can encourage or discourage individual freedom and human flourishing. It’s up to the members of any particular Nation-State to get that right. In this regard, let me leave the last word to Yoram Hazony. This is from an essay published in August 2020 by Quillette, titled The Challenge of Marxism:
[E]very society consists of classes or groups. These stand in various power relations to one another, which find expression in the political, legal, religious, and moral traditions that are handed down by the strongest classes or groups. It is only within the context of these traditions that we come to believe that words like freedom and equality mean one thing and not another, and to develop a “common sense” of how different interests and concerns are to be balanced against one another in actual cases.
But what happens if you dispense with those traditions? This, after all, is what Enlightenment liberalism seeks to do. Enlightenment liberals observe that inherited traditions are always flawed or unjust in certain ways, and for this reason they feel justified in setting inherited tradition aside and appealing directly to abstract principles such as freedom and equality. The trouble is, there is no such thing as a society in which everyone is free and equal in all ways. Even in a liberal society, there will always be countless ways in which a given class or group may be unfree or unequal with respect to the others. And since this is so, Marxists will always be able to say that some or all of these instances of unfreedom and inequality are instances of oppression.
Thanks for reading.
Image at top: Shutterstock
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Davidson, Ian. The French Revolution: from Enlightenment to Tyranny (2016)
Bobbitt, Philip. The Shield of Achilles (2002)
Tilly, Charles. Futures of European States. Social Research 59 (1992)
Scruton, Roger. England: An Elegy (2000)
Furedi, Goodwin & Phillips -- you keep excellent company, David :-)
The suppression of the NatCon Conference has not been reported in Norwegian MSM, only on the increasingly well-visited alternative news sites. And still they wonder why we don't trust them.
A former, long-serving Prime Minister of ours inadvertently summed it up in an interview some years ago: "We are loosing control over what people are told!"