For those of you who even remember my last post (aarggh, where does the time go?), I wanted to elaborate a little more on the pull of nationalism in the early 20th century European milieu in which fascism developed. It was a time when nationalism was the happening thing. World War I was dispiriting to western Europe, but it brought about the fulfillment of many nationalist aspirations. Poland was reconstituted after spending 150 years carved up between the Germans and the Russians; the countries of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created out of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Robert O. Paxton, in The Anatomy of Fascism, explains that liberals of the day — who were sort of cosmopolitan libertarians at that point — “wanted to organize the world by the principle of self-determination of nations. Satisfied nationalities, each within its own state, would coexist in such natural harmony, according to liberal doctrine, that no external force would be needed to keep the peace.” Of course, that’s not how it turned out. The ethnic subgroups within the new countries were unsatisfied, eventually leading to the breakup of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; in the nearer term, the states that had lost territory wanted to avenge themselves, helping augment the rise of fascist governments in those countries.
What interests me about the liberal view of the time is that, although it sounds hopelessly idealistic when Paxton spells it out like that, the idea that self-determination is a cure for expansionist ambition keeps cropping up everywhere. One of the odder examples of this was Jim Pinkerton’s 2007 essay holding up Tolkien’s hobbits as model citizens: without big dreams, simply defending their own territory and getting on with their lives. What was odd about it was that he posited this as a strategy against a rising radical Islam. He imagines “Christendom” pulling together in a sort of geographic monoculture, drawing a physical border between itself and the Islamic world which it could then militarily defend. As for Israel, he imagines that Christians and Muslims can striked a grand deal. “When all Christians, and all Muslims, are brought to the bargaining table, they all become stakeholders in a pacific outcome.”
It’s funny that this piece appeared in The American Conservative magazine, because it sounds a lot like the Wilsonian liberal international vision Paxton described above, only with religion taking the place of nation. And various libertarians, localists and social democrats have also posited versions of this idea, though usually built around smaller entities: states, communities, families, individuals, or some combination of the above. What they all have in common is a version of the idea that, if you just let people run their own lives, the urge to impose themselves on others will be greatly diminished. The error people make, this line of thinking goes, is believing in universal standards and morals; that keeps tempting people to meddle in others’ affairs.
The rise of fascism offers a serious rebuke to this idea. As I pointed out in my last post, one surprising thing about them was that they didn’t believe in universal ideologies; their doctrines, Paxton points out, were flexible, intermingled with national traits and interests, and therefore unexportable. They did not really aim to make the rest of the world like them, but that didn’t stop them from wanting to rule.
Why the difference? One factor, as I have already noted, is that the defeated imperial powers looked into themselves and their pasts and saw, well, imperial powers. To turn into hobbits wouldn’t have exactly been in character, it would have been imposed on them by losing the war. But also noteworthy is the fact that Paxton says several times that fascists saw themselves as part of a “Darwinian struggle” between peoples. I don’t know how much they literally thought of it in terms of Darwinian selection, but evidently they assumed competition to be the natural state of things. If we don’t conquer, the thinking goes, someone will conquer us.
In thinking that way, the fascists actually had a pretty good point. World history certainly supports the conquer-or-be-conquered thesis. Factors such as population growth, climate change, and resource exhaustion, that have obliged people to keep migrating throughout history, playing havoc with the everybody-stay-within-bounds idea. And it points up a fact that is often ignored, namely, the peace-through-self-determination scheme actually is a universalist ideology. Everyone in it has to be about equally hobbitlike. If just one group breaks out and decides to conquer the world, and they gain anything from it, that will pretty well wreck the general social compact. Localism, in a sense, works best if you think globally: it is best for society as a whole if I stay within my community bounds. If you really look at the world from an entirely local point of view — here are my people, and the rest of the world is alien and much bigger than we are — you can see how that wouldn’t lend itself to peace.
