The Utter Normality Of Ethnonationalism—Except For Whites
By Dr. Kevin MacDonald
Jerry Z. Muller’s Foreign Affairs article, Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism (March/April, 2008), is a grim and timely reminder of the power of ethnicity in human affairs. It has explosive implications for the future of the United States and the West.
Muller demonstrates that, over the last 150 years or so, the general trend in Europe and elsewhere has been toward the creation of ethnically-based states—“ethnostates”. This trend did not end with the close of World War II. In Europe, the war was followed by a forced resettlement of peoples—mainly Germans—to create ethnically homogeneous states. Indeed, the high point of ethnic homogenization in Europe was in the two generations in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Muller writes:
“As a result of this massive process of ethnic unmixing, the ethnonationalist ideal was largely realized: for the most part, each nation in Europe had its own state, and each state was made up almost exclusively of a single ethnic nationality. During the Cold War, the few exceptions to this rule included Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. But these countries’ subsequent fate only demonstrated the ongoing vitality of ethnonationalism.”
This point is crucial. While the recent spreading of the European Union imperium has given rise to a great deal of “post-nation” rhetoric, it has in fact been accompanied by an astonishing multiplication of ethnostates, split out of Yugoslavia and the former USSR — not to mention, of course, the Czech/Slovak division
Ethnic conflict is apparent as well throughout the developing world, and will likely lead to more partitioning and nation-creation. As Muller notes: “In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly”.
But a huge anomaly has arisen. Recently, Western societies have embarked on a public policy project in which the ethno nationalism of white people is officially proscribed as an unadulterated evil. Multiculturalism only is encouraged and viewed as morally superior. As Muller notes: “Americans … find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally”.
As a social scientist who takes the biological component of ethnicity seriously (although I readily agree that there is a cultural component as well), I can speak from personal experience about the hostility and moral disdain one faces from other academic social scientists when one points to these unfashionable facts…
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