Revenge of the Sovereignistas

They were all buddy-buddy for the cameras, going for a joy ride in a deluxe limo and toasting each other at a gala dinner. In June, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was determined to welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin in grand style on his first visit to Pyongyang in 24 years. A red carpet, flowers, and champagne: it was a veritable romance of rogues.

In reality, the two autocrats make a very odd couple. Kim is still a youngish man with a few extra pounds on his frame, while Putin is in his seventies and loves to appear shirtless on horses, the better to showcase his judo-trained body. Kim is the dynastic ruler of a small, isolated, homogeneous country that remains formally communist. By contrast, Putin presides over a multiethnic empire that stretches across 11 time zones and has formally turned its back on its communist past. Kim disparages religion but maintains a suffocating cult of personality, while Putin, who embraced religion to boost his own popularity, has yet to force Russian officials to wear pins with his face on them.

Sure, Putin and Kim have some friends in common (China’s Xi Jinping and America’s Donald Trump), some shared enemies (the West, most democracies), and a fondness for making threats (bombastic, sometimes nuclear). But what really binds them together is a seemingly antiquated belief system whose origins stretch back two centuries.

Kim and Putin are both ardent nationalists.

The two of them believe fervently in the supremacy of the nation-state, specifically their own. They also assert the superiority of their particular ethnic groups, with Putin increasingly using russky (ethnic Russians) instead of rosissky (citizens of Russia) in his speeches and Kim following the official North Korean tradition of purging the language and culture of all outside influences.

Above all, those two leaders are united in their opposition to outsiders — other countries, international organizations, non-governmental do-goodniks — having any say over what takes place within their borders. Putin and Kim are, in other words, spokesmen for what I call the sovereignistas, a class of world leaders who insist on their sovereign right to be exceptions to the rules that govern the rest of the planet.

In reality, ultra-nationalists like Putin and Kim hold sway over much of our world and come in all too many shapes and sizes. China’s Xi, for instance, resurrected nationalism to revive the fortunes of a communist system whose ideology no longer seemed to motivate the Chinese masses. In Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht has started a new party that officially identifies as left-wing but has right-wing nationalist takes on border controls, globalization, and green politics. Meanwhile, at the other end of the political spectrum, India’s Narendra Modi has adapted nationalism to the needs of his right-wing party’s religious chauvinism devoted to making Hindu India great again.

Far from just patrolling the edges of their societies, such nationalists are increasingly prospering at their political centers. Just ask Joe Biden, who tried to counter Trump’s populism by beefing up his own nationalist credentials through new restrictions at his country’s southern border and onerous new tariffs on China. Indeed, such nationalism has been part of the mainstream since revolutionaries took over the kingdom of France in the late eighteenth century and German romantics began championing das Volk (the people) around the same time. Some political scientists have even argued that nationalism was the essential ingredient in the establishment of modern democracies — that, without its ideological glue, a state couldn’t have mustered enough of a consensus to govern.

In today’s world, think of nationalism as a distinctly old-fashioned liqueur, like absinthe, that’s enjoying a burst of renewed popularity. Politicians of all stripes have recently been adding a splash of it to their policy cocktails to get the public’s attention. Worse yet, some of the more aggressive politicians like Modi, Putin, and Donald Trump are drinking the stuff straight. Beware: undiluted nationalism can go right to the head and make you do crazy things like invading neighboring countries or trying to overturn elections.

So, here’s a question to consider: at a time when the most extreme problems facing the world — climate change, resource depletion, and a possible nuclear Armageddon — know no borders, why has such a parochial philosophy once again become the global ideology du jour?

Not So Flat

Like colonialism, nationalism was supposed to be extinct by now, a relic of another century, an ideology that should emit a distinct odor of mothballs. After all, over the past hundred years, the prerogatives of nation-states have been gradually eroded by U.N. treaties, the growth of transnational corporations, and the spread of a global civil society.

At a time when everyone seems in touch, no matter where we are geographically speaking, borders seem so nineteenth-century. In such a flat world, crisscrossed by TikTok, Facebook, and Zoom, shouldn’t nationalism be your granddaddy’s moldy old philosophy?

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each had its post-nationalist dream. With proletarian internationalism, communism was supposed to leave nationalism in the dust, as was capitalism with its transnational corporations and its borderless business world. The European Economic Community — later the European Union (EU) — came up with an even stronger variation on that theme as European countries began to remove barriers to trade, then to the movement of capital, and ultimately to the movement of people.

In one scenario, the EU was to serve as the building block for a more peaceful, far less nationalist global order. As Richard Caplan and I wrote in an introduction to a 1996 book on Europe’s new nationalism, “National differences — Scottish kilts, Polish hand-kissing, Swiss neutrality — would presumably continue; [however] nationalist differences, which made the continent a killing ground for centuries, would gradually fade into the history books.” The rest of the world, astounded by the tranquil prosperity of European integration, would presumably follow suit.

That, unfortunately, didn’t happen. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, nationalism came roaring back with a vengeance, particularly in Europe. Anti-immigrant fervor spiked in eastern Germany, new independence movements gained ground in Scotland and Catalonia, and, most terrifyingly, the former country of Yugoslavia dissolved into a bloodbath of ethnic groups turning on one another.

In that immediate post-Cold War era, nationalism proved to be an effective tool wielded by the periphery against a domineering center. Decades of formal accommodation within Yugoslavia among Albanians, Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes produced much intermarriage along with all too many suppressed inter-ethnic resentments, as well as rage at Belgrade for dictating policies to the other Yugoslav republics. Fratricide also surged in the former Soviet Union between Armenians and Azeris, among ethnic groups in Georgia, and most recently, of course, between Russians and Ukrainians. When not directing outright hostility toward the Kremlin, as in Ukraine, these post-Soviet conflicts displaced their anger onto regional power centers like Tbilisi and Baku.

Nor has the supposedly post-nationalist European Union proved immune to such trends. Just replace Moscow or Belgrade with the regulatory “overreach” of the EU’s capital city, Brussels, and the last eight years of political developments make more sense, starting with Great Britain’s Brexit vote in 2016. A disgust with supposedly interfering Eurocrats merged with a hitherto underappreciated nativism to send that otherwise cosmopolitan country skittering into a parochial corner.

Inspired by the British vote, Frexit, Nexit, and Grexit seemed to loom on the horizon until European sovereignistas decided that it was more useful to hijack the EU’s institutions than abandon them completely. The far right not only took over national governments in Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and almost France but also challenged Europeanists on their own turf in European Parliamentary elections. In fact, in June, the far right registered its best results ever and has formed both the third and fourth largest voting blocs in that parliament.

Why Nationalism, Why Now?

Nationalism was initially a weapon deployed against imperial centers — with the French rising up against their king, the Greeks revolting against the Ottomans, and virtually all of Latin America breaking away from Spanish or Portuguese colonials. While it can still serve that function today (just ask the Ukrainians), it’s now more often mobilized in response to a different kind of power: globalization and its political, economic, and social avatars.

The growth of the economic version of globalization, which began with steamships and the telegraph and, in our time, accelerated to the container ship and the Internet, has led, not surprisingly, to serious pushback. Nationalists now decry the way the architects of the global economy have lined the pockets of the rich, while robbing nation-states of the tools to steer their own economies. In a classic version of bait and switch, those architects of the world’s economy justified the removal of tariff walls and the construction of a global assembly line by pointing not to the increased wealth of the billionaire class, but to all the millions of people lifted from poverty.

Neglected until recently were the enormous numbers of middle- and working-class people who lost their jobs, savings, and dignity to the tsunami of globalization. Although some of the disgruntled did direct their anger at the “globalists,” they also focused it on that other vector of globalization, the ever-increasing number of desperate border-crossers searching for jobs and better lives. In that way, the rage at being left behind merged with a potent xenophobia, fueling a populist rejection of traditional parties of the center-left and center-right that backed the economic and social transformations of globalization.

But don’t forget the backlash of the sovereignistas, those distinctly nationalistic autocratic leaders like Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and the military junta in Myanmar who continue to fervently defend the inviolability of their countries’ laws and culture. Those sovereignistas have taken aim at international agreements that chipped away at national sovereignty by limiting what countries can produce (not chlorofluorocarbons, thanks to the Montreal Protocol), whom they can discriminate against (not minority groups, according to various human rights agreements), and how many people they can kill (not entire communities, as detailed in the genocide convention).

Donald Trump is, of course, the sovereignista par excellence. He opposes all international treaties that constrain American power, even ones that ultimately serve the country’s national interests like the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accord, and the Open Skies arms control treaty. He styles himself an “anti-globalist,” even though his international businesses are anything but that. Like Xi in China, Trump is skilled at adopting and adapting an ideology fundamentally alien to his worldview to cultivate mass appeal and preempt any criticism of his world-spanning narcissism. Sure, Trump’s businesses made millions overseas, even when he was president, and have employed plenty of undocumented workers at home. But no problem, since he wraps himself in an American flag, both literally and figuratively, by promising to impose tariffs on all foreign goods and deport all undocumented migrants.

Donald Trump is riding a real wave. His criticisms of globalization resonate with significant parts of the American public who have indeed suffered because of shuttered factories, bankrupt farms, and deregulated economies.

The Future of the Past

Globalization polarizes societies, enriches plutocrats, and destroys local enterprises. It’s McDonald’s, Microsoft, and McDonnell Douglas all wrapped up in one big gut punch. But the answer to such an assault on the local and the particular shouldn’t be an appeal to nationalism or the grim language of blood and soil.

Backward-looking as it may be, nationalism is also remarkably adaptable. You can find nationalist TikTok videos, nationalist podcasts, and nationalist approaches to climate change. In the case of El Salvador’s young right-wing authoritarian, Nayib Bukele, nationalism even presents itself as “cool.”

But the solutions put forward by nationalists across the political spectrum fail to address the common threats posed by resource depletion, economic inequality, nuclear proliferation, and the desperate overheating of this planet. Whether you slice up the world according to nation-states or “pure” ethnic communities, such divisions can’t deal with force multipliers like pandemics and rising oceans.

The international community not only needs to expand cooperation in this moment of increasingly devastating globalized crises, but individual countries will need to give up a portion of their sovereignty to make anything truly work. Sovereignistas, for instance, would have let the ozone layer disappear. Only the Montreal Protocol, which required every country to alter its production of certain sprays and solvents, saved the planet’s sunscreen. The growing climate disaster needs global coordination of just that sort, but raised by the power of 10.

Yet, all too sadly, nationalism grows in soil well prepared by coercive universalism, whether the allegedly iron-clad laws of supply and demand behind globalization or the legally binding principles of international law like the Geneva Conventions. It’s a terrible paradox that the more the world demands universalism, the more devastating the pushback from the sovereignistas.

Today, the options are few. A technocratic global elite could try to force necessary changes down the throats of everyone, sovereignistas included. Or perhaps the patient organizing of liberal-minded parties could someday succeed in winning back the electoral terrain that the nationalists have been acquiring. The first, however, is likely to generate insuperable resistance, while the second may not happen quickly enough, if at all.

There is, of course, a third option, struggling to grow in the shade of public attention. A new generation of internationalists is trying to extract what’s good from globalization, including human-rights treaties and more generous immigration policies, while offering a sustainable economic model to replace the neoliberal fantasy of a flat world. They are doing so in institutions, in civil society, and even, every so often, in governments.

Here, subsidiarity should play a key role. A clunky word, largely unknown outside the European Union, it basically means that problems should be solved at the lowest feasible level — that is, in your neighborhood, if possible; if not, in your town, state, country, or region. Only truly global problems should be solved at a global level.

The sovereignistas’ claim that they alone can save their countries and cultures is a scam. In truth, they just want power for themselves, not for “the people” they claim to represent. The only truly workable alternative would be democracy in overlapping circles from your neighborhood all the way up to global institutions. Forget the talk about this planet’s nationalists and globalists. Democratic internationalists must now link arms across all those controversial borders and scale up at warp speed to save the future from all the bad ideas of the past.

Copyright 2024 John Feffer