For those of you who have not read Tribal Future of the West, we have effectively summarized it in a short passage in our new book Nationalism from Imperium Press' newly launched Fundamentals Series.
The passage describes the structural challenges that nationalism faces even while nativism is rising:
Just as nationalism is favoured by a particular environment, so it is disfavoured when that environment changes, as has happened increasingly since the Second World War. The first and most important pressure comes from the replacement of social homogeneity with heterogeneity. It becomes harder and more costly to maintain national solidarity as language, custom, and ethnicity become more fragmented. The emotional power of the nation may carry this cost for a time, but it cannot maintain it indefinitely—at some point the density of common feeling becomes so thin that political cohesion simply cannot be maintained.
Another pressure comes from technological decentralisation. From the second half of the twentieth century, scientific progress slowed while technological progress did not, which meant that industrial processes became cheaper while comparatively few new processes were introduced—economic gains were made at the level of optimisation, not innovation. This has caused the gap between the most and the least technically advanced societies to close, as well as between actors within the same society. This has had severe consequences for modern warfare. Now that communication, organisation, and even violence can be coordinated cheaply from dispersed networks, smaller actors have regained some of the practical advantages that large national systems once held, and in some domains, such as cybersecurity and propaganda, the advantage now tilts toward these smaller actors. An anonymous insurgent movement can now impose costs on centralised national bureaucracies that those bureaucracies cannot easily reciprocate. What was once a decisive advantage of scale has become a burden of weight.
Closely related is the decline of mass-war conditions. The current strategic environment no longer rewards vast conscript armies, continent-wide industrial mobilisation, and prolonged national discipline, and as a result one of nationalism’s greatest strengths has become less central. Meanwhile, this shift has been intensified by growing energy constraints stemming in large part from peak oil—the point at which global petroleum extraction peaks, after which production enters an irreversible decline. This has made large, highly integrated systems more expensive to maintain, while at the same time, smaller and more agile actors have reappeared as serious competitors in violence and political organisation. The nation certainly remains important, but it is no longer the only obviously effective wielder of power.
We can consider the pressures mentioned so far as pressures “from below”, but pressures also act from above in the form of transnational integration. With the near-universal financialisation of global economies, billions of dollars can migrate instantly at the flick of a switch; meanwhile elite networks have attempted—partly for ideological, and partly for practical reasons—to organise important areas of life above the national level. The nation is still symbolically potent for billions of people worldwide, but the nation is no longer the sole or even the primary unit of effective coordination.
There are also diminishing returns built into scale itself. Once identity weakens far enough and administration grows strained enough, the transactional costs of holding the whole together rise. The centre must spend more effort managing internal diversity along with the disaffection of large parts of the population, as well as bureaucratic overload. Although nothing has changed since the Second World War in terms of human nature, since then nationalism has lost much of its practical advantage because the environment that once favoured it is fast disappearing.
BUY THE BOOK HERE:
https://www.imperiumpress.org/shop/nationalism-fundamentals-series/
