The Case for National Realism

Woodrow Wilson was wrong about many things, but he was a veritable hedgehog about One Big Thing: the principle of national self-determination. When it came to his dream of the League of Nations, Wilson was a utopian romantic; but on the question of how to draw national political boundaries, he was a Founding Father of what may be called National Realism....

National Realism ... acknowledges that nationalism is a fixture of modern social and political reality.

The idea that a self-described people should have the right to determine its own collective destiny was once considered progressive....

Diversity is now, supposedly, the primus inter pares of our political values. But ethnic and racial diversity, in all its colorful pageantry, is traditionally associated with empires, not republics....

As a good Progressive, Wilson understood that modern democratic government is incompatible with multi-ethnic empire. But it took the cataclysmic breakdown of the Old World empires in the meat-grinder of World War I to bring the idea of national self-determination into political focus. It would be wise to remember that that civilization-shattering conflict was blamed in large part on the lack of congruence between state and ethnic boundaries....

The self-determination principle was realized only imperfectly in the Treaty of Versailles, thus setting the stage for the even more destructive Second World War. But after World War II national self-determination became a core universal principle of human rights and international law. It was prominent in the Atlantic Charter and in the Dumbarton Oaks proposals on which the United Nations Charter was based....

It is a part of the Great Unlearning of our age that today’s progressives are forgetting the hard lessons that elevated national self-determination to center stage. Visceral hostility to the national idea is nearly universal among the West’s cosmopolitan ruling elites, who conflate it with racism and bigotry and blame it for the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century....

The transnationals share few common assumptions, beliefs, and aspirations with their geographical compatriots from the lower orders, and they have little use for the nation-state, with its flag-waving, jingoism, and other sentimental expressions of folkish unity....

Democracy requires a demos. Truly free, democratic, and stable multiethnic societies are rare, as the Europeans are learning again....

The past quarter-century has witnessed South Africa’s slow-motion descent into Rhodesian-style chaos, majoritarian despotism, and racial payback. White South Africans, especially the young, are fleeing, some 800,000 having emigrated since the end of Apartheid. Building a functioning multiethnic, multiracial democracy is very hard indeed....

Societies are ecosystems. Don’t subject them to diversity shock through hare-brained utopian open-borders experiments cooked up by economists and politicians....