By Sumantra Maitra
Thursday, May 23, 2019
I talked with Dr. Yoram Hazony, the philosopher and
author of the conservative bestseller, “The Virtue of Nationalism,” ahead of
his book launch in London, prior to the Europe at a Crossroads conference. The
conference featured some of the top conservative writers and philosophers,
including Dr. John Fonte of the Hudson Institute, the author of the post-Trump
national-conservative foreign policy, and Sir Roger Scruton.
Scruton called for something conservatives have been
pondering on both sides of the pond for a while now: the abolition of
universities in their current form, because they have turned into
indoctrination chambers. The conference also tackled one of the biggest topics
in front of Anglo-American grand strategy—the future of Europe, the European
Union, and the coming rivalry between nation-states and a borderless marauding
liberalism.
The conference came ahead of a crucial EU Parliament
election, after a thorough betrayal of the biggest mandate in the history of
British democracy by a prime minister whom a large section of the country
perceives at best to be an incompetent imbecile, and at worst a traitor.
Britain should have been out of the EU imperium by now. But as the latest BBC
documentary shows, British Prime Minister Theresa May
destroyed the negotiation from within.
The European Union, meanwhile, is not even pretending
anymore, with Orwellian tweets that demonstrate how cultist the organization
has become since it was formed to increase free trade and institutionalize
peace within the continent. Meanwhile, a section of delusional American
liberals, and even some conservatives still mentally living in the early 1990s,
think the EU is a benevolent ally, despite all evidence to the contrary, from
trade fines to military buck-passing. Yet the EU leaders are not even hiding
their imperial ambitions.
“The world is developing into one not of nation-states,
but of empires. China is an empire. India is an empire. The U.S. is an empire.
We need to create a European Union that is capable of defending our interests,”
said Guy Verhofstadt, the cantankerous leader of the liberal group of the EU
Parliament. He supports further centralization.
The same sentiment is prevalent in Germany, the EU’s
driving power. “Europe must reposition itself to stand up to the challenges
posed by its three big global rivals, China, Russia and the U.S.,” The Guardian
reported Angela Merkel saying before the elections.
So why do even otherwise sensible international relations
theorists like Stephen Walt lament for the EU? It defies logic, as well as
history. Under no circumstances can two hegemons coexist in one hemisphere, and
the EU is slowly morphing into an imperial entity, with one parliament and one
foreign policy. It might not have the same military power as the United States
has, but does have enough trade power to throw its support behind China or
Russia, unless divided.
I asked Hazony about that. According to Hazony, a future
conflict between the EU and United States is almost inevitable. The EU is
already a German-dominated empire, he said, but one that has cleverly managed
to toss the continent’s entire security burden to American taxpayers, even when
it has spent a record amount of 23 billion Euros on welfare for refugees.
Because American policymakers and taxpayers, either due
to misguided optimism, delusion, or naivete, do not see what the EU is slowly
morphing into, Germany can carry on the coercive imperium, but without the
burden of paying for it and providing all the manpower. Hazony noted this is
unsustainable. As the EU consolidates, and U.S. power and control over the EU
declines, the EU will inevitably chart its own path, and side with U.S.
adversaries.
At the end of the day, the United States is, like the
United Kingdom, a maritime, free-trading great power and nation-state, and will
inevitably come into conflict with an imperial entity trying to set rules. But
even when there’s acceptance between Euro-conservatives about the EU’s imperial
designs, there’s no uniformity.
The Poles and Hungarians want to change the EU from
within, towards a more federal direction with more national sovereign rights.
The British want to break the EU and quit. According to British conservatives,
it is delusional to imagine the push for a centralized EU would stop at any
national border. And the Americans have not, for the better part, even
understood what the threat is turning up to be.
The question I was most interested in was: Why? We are
clearly observing a new, national, sovereigntist-conservatism rise from the
ashes of the last 20 years of liberal internationalism. But why is that taking
time, and what challenges does it face?
“The establishment conservatism of the post-Reagan and
Thatcher years is fundamentally libertarian,” Hazony insists, adding, “Today
this conservatism is essentially acting as a reactionary edifice, fighting to
prevent a genuine debate and re-evaluation, which could lead to the emergence
of a new national-conservative philosophy and possibly a different conservative
establishment.” Change, after all, takes time, and these new shocks didn’t come
with a brain trust, funding, and research.
“The conservatism of the last generation failed
catastrophically,” Hazony said. “Yet despite its failures, libertarian doctrine
is still massively influential on the political right. It’s still preventing
the emergence of the new national conservatism that’s so badly needed in
America, the U.K., and Europe. Conservative scholars, think tanks, media, and
philanthropists are only gradually beginning to wake up from a generation of
ideological regimentation and dogmatism.”
With regards to the EU, and other threats, the changes in
the United States are structural as well. “It turns out that President Trump is
more reliable for conservatives than the Bushes or John Major,” Hazony said.
“You don’t have to agree with everything he says. But on the big things, we’ve
learned that Trump is willing to stand up to China and the European Union,
which is much more than can be said of previous conservative leaders. And he’s
willing to aggressively safeguard the religious traditions of his nation in the
face of a no-holds-barred onslaught by progressives. These are things we
haven’t seen before.”
There’s hope. While it is easy to imagine Trump as an
aberration, he is probably not, as the global direction returns to Westphalian
norms of nation-states, as opposed to a transnational globalism, is evident
from Brasilia to Brighton, Mumbai to Melbourne.
“There will obviously be a liberal backlash,” Hazony
said. “The control of the political culture by the liberal establishment is
deeply entrenched, and it will take time to restore a real two-party democracy
in which conservatives have legitimate place in the public sphere.”
Nowhere will it be more visible than the capitals of
conservative countries, with heavily funded liberal groups and losing
electorates engaging in “resistance,” whether in Europe or the United States.
But the institutional and financial support for conservative rethinking and
revival is coming, even when the movement in this direction is still terribly
slow.
As predicted, it will lead to a clash of ideas between
one side that believes in borders and nation-states (which doesn’t prevent
cooperation between different nations), and the other side believes in an
ever-consolidating, borderless liberal march, destroying every single nation
and its individual character.
“Independent nations cannot co-exist with a liberal
imperialism that is unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of national
independence and national borders,” Hazony noted.
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