Nationalism on the Rise
While I was working on a story about the bowel problems of my poodle, George Packer weighed in with a meditation on the global outbreak of nationalism. What he describes is a kind of reactionary fundamentalism now rampant across the world, connecting the likes of Ted Cruz to Vladimir Putin to Benjamin Netanyahu. This global tide is a reaction, mainly, to liberalism—to the idea of individual rights, tolerance, compromise, international cooperation:
The leaders and movements… are joined by what they’re against more than by what they’re for. They despise the weakness and moral flabbiness of their liberal opponents. They discount the importance of minority views—criticism is considered illegitimate. They hate the creeping pace, the flawed compromises, and the muddled outcomes of democratic politics. They build their support on the many failures of liberal societies, from crime, social decline, economic stagnation, and political paralysis to terrorism, inconclusive wars, and the impotence of international organizations. They stoke a perpetual sense of grievance rooted in history, which requires an external enemy, and also an internal one. The internal enemy (immigrants, Jews, gays, political dissidents) is, in fact, alien to the nation, and the source of all that ails its essential goodness. To the most complex problems they offer the simplest solutions, promising unity, renewal, regeneration, a return to origins, a purification of the nation through the internal enemy’s expulsion and the external enemy’s defeat.
It happens that, in July, Bosnia will mark the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, when 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were executed by ultra-nationalist Serbs. The mass rape of Bosnian women; the locking up of families in homes that were then burned to the ground; the killing of more than 100,000 civilians—all at the hands of ultra-nationalist Serbs bent on carving out a portion of eastern Bosnia—neatly demonstrate what can happen when nationalism is sufficiently stoked.
Packer's article also had me thinking about climate change. In the most powerful country on earth, of course, the leaders now stoking (and reaping the winds of) nationalism—the ones who live in an hermetically sealed ideological bubble—are doing their best to thwart efforts to prevent catastrophe. And that should give all of us pause.