The Italian elections of March 4 carry a
theme that has become increasingly familiar among those nations in the European
Union. Britain, Germany, France, and Holland have all had elections
that swung strongly toward nationalism and the resuscitation of national
identity through new political movements that reject the centralization of
European government and open borders.
Nationalism has gotten a bad name because the left has falsely
associated it with Nazism. The Nazis, in fact, were imperialist
invaders of other nations, and it was the nationalism of nations in the path of
the Nazis – British, Swiss, Spanish, and Turkish – that blocked Nazism and confined
that evil to continental Europe. Nationalism, when that means that
the people in a nation with a distinctive language and culture ask only to be
left in peace, is the solution to many of our world's problems.
Most troublesome nations are really empires of many peoples whose
national aspiration are crushed. Iran, Iraq, China, Pakistan,
Indonesia, India, and many other large nations are highly artificial and are
held together, against common sense and good government, in a large state that has
many different languages, different religions or sects of religions, and
different cultures.
The deconstruction of these empires into smaller and rational
nations is the key to peace and understanding. The Soviet Union, as
a great Russian empire, was miserable and oppressed. Since that
empire splintered into many nations there has been virtually no desire from the
formerly oppressed peoples to rejoin Russia in some vast confederation.
Yugoslavia likewise fragmented into several different
nations. The Slovaks, forced into an unhappy union with the Czechs,
have never regretted the Velvet Divorce, which broke Czechoslovakia into two
new nations. The Irish, likewise, have never sought to rejoin the
United Kingdom, and the Scots have been making noises that suggest that the
United Kingdom should lose Scotland as well.
Nationalism reduces tensions by removing one of the major causes
of conflict in the world. What silly supranational organizations
like the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the European Union do is
submerge nationalism and remove citizens even farther from the centers of
political power. The attempt to make nations alike also removes one
of the most potent natural systems for creating peaceful competition in
economics, culture, education, and law.
The analogy in America is the marketplace of states, which the
left constantly seeks to undermine through hyper-federalization of government,
forcing states more and more to follow the dictates of Washington, whatever the
citizens of those states may wish. When Europe is made up out of a
large number of small and medium-sized nations that act independently, then
these nations follow their own paths in domestic policy. This means
experimentation and also a balancing of interests suitable to particular
nations. The people in Greece, Finland, Ireland, Holland, Portugal,
Norway, Italy, Britain, Germany, and France do not all want exactly the same
things. Why is it not their right to choose what they want and how
to handle the inevitable tradeoffs that decisions entail?
Moreover, what right do strangers have to enter these lands, where
the people find them disruptive and dangerous? The invasion of the
nations whose elections show anger at open borders is like the invasion
burglars make into the homes of others. That the burglar needs a
better place to live is no rationale at all.
We should no more think of decriminalizing entering nations
illegally than we would think about decriminalizing burglary. When
legal immigrants become violent and threatening, we should no more think these
people have a "right" to be in a nation than we would think a new
abusive husband who moves into a home has the "right" to stay there
and intimidate the rest of the household.
Elections in Europe are beginning to reflect what the natural
citizens of nations feel about remote supranational governments, the removal of
the rights of nations to their own culture, and the right of people who live in
their homeland to keep out those who are seen as a danger. This rebirth
of nationalism is a hope, not a worry, to those who love peace and want the
state to leave them alone.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/03/the_welcome_rebirth_of_nationalism.html