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Sunday, October 10, 2010

Failed, betrayed and plundered by our naive or socipathic internationalist elites, a return to nationalism is a return to common sense

From:
No World Order

Forget “the end of history,” “the new world order,” and “the clash of civilizations” — the force that most shapes the globe is not a paradigm, it’s simple nationalism.
(The American Conservative) -- by Leon Hadar --

Since the end of geostrategic competition between the U.S. and the (former) USSR, pundits have been proposing new conceptual frameworks for understanding the evolving global political and economic balance — or imbalance — of power.

Indeed, for close to two decades, scholars have been debating the direction that the “paradigm shift” in international relations would take. What would replace the obsolete bipolar international system and the strategic and ideological forces that had driven it?

From Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” assuming a stable unipolar system under which the process of economic globalization and the spread of democratic and liberal values would widen to Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” forecasting a challenge to American power and values from the Muslim world and other civilizational blocs, and through other complementing and competing big and small ideas warning of (or hailing) the formation of rival trading blocs, the collapse of the nation-state, the New World Order, the Coming Anarchy, or the rise of a world government, we have been bombarded with a few useful and a lot of useless foreign-policy paradigms...

Moreover, while Fukuyama, Huntington, and other pundits may have provided us with some valuable insights — capitalism and liberal democracy did emerge as winning economic and political systems in most of the West; culture and religion did become important elements in global politics; regional trading blocs did play an increasing role in global economics; globalization did challenge the power of the nation-state; failed states did produce anarchy — they have failed to provide all-encompassing explanations of the way the post-Cold War international system was working. In fact, many of these theories pretending to be grand proved to be quite insignificant in the larger scheme of things — not to mention the fact that they were full of intellectual holes. Or to put it in simple terms, reality failed to confirm the theory...

And contrary to earlier grand expectations, the EU seems to be in the process of a slow and painful disintegration, pitting the prosperous German-led “North” against the poorer economies of the “South”; NAFTA has proved to provide limited benefits to its members and has not been extended to the rest of the hemisphere; and most of the economic groupings in the Pacific, including the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) forum serve as nothing more than useful talking shops.

If anything, notwithstanding the great hopes invested in such multilateral economic regimes, ranging from the old International Monetary Fund (IMF) to the newer Group of 20 major economies (and the continuing bombastic rhetoric in support of multilateralism), the trend among the large and small economic powers in the aftermath of the economic crisis is to protect their own national economic interests including by embracing protectionist policies. The latest drift towards “currency competition” involving the U.S., China, Brazil and other economies is just the latest example of this economic nationalist trend that included the failure in Copenhagen to achieve global consensus on climate change and the rising opposition in Germany to continue backing the euro as well as the stalemate in the Doha round of global trade liberalization negotiations. The spirit of Doha is no more…

There is no reason to assume the obstacles to global economic integration would disappear anytime soon, especially if the slow economic recovery in the U.S. and the EU would not gain momentum and expose growing economic structural problems and make it clear that it would be impossible for the U.S. and other economies to spend their way towards recovery, forcing them to embrace painful austerity measures. Under these conditions, the economically distressed members of middle class in North America and Europe and other parts of the developed world would be more inclined to vote into power political leaders and movements that favor more trade protectionism and anti-immigration policies.

In a way, even under the best-case scenario of a speedy economic recovery, the rising tide of nationalism — economic and military — is going to become the default option of the powerful and less powerful nation-states worried about growing threats to their security and prosperity. Nationalism has and could prove to be the most effective way for political leaders to win support and legitimacy from their people, a process that could even affect the pacifist nations of Germany and Japan that would drive nations to form partnerships based on interests and not on “civilizational” and other values. This new and messy world would not conform to any of the fashionable and neat paradigms of the last twenty years...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

Nationalism makes sense in the same way that building a house with strong walls, and doors and windows that lock, and buying arms to defend your house if necessary makes sense. Perhaps intruders, thieves, rapists or murderers will never test those walls, doors or windows, or test whether you are armed and able to fend them off, but they might. Having all of these mechanism makes common sense.

Globalists, internationalists, open borders advocates and “one worlders” of both Left and Right generally oppose nationalism for one of two reasons: because they are naïve, or because they have criminal, predatory intentions, and don’t want those they intend to prey upon to be defended, or be able to defend themselves

You’ll note that especially in the predatory category, all of these elites pimping globalism and open borders themselves take stringent security measures for their own homes, families, and networks; live in well-secured communities; have some sort of security regime; and they go to extravagant means to protect their own assets. But when it comes to their general agenda for society, they urge the rest of us to unlock our doors, throw open our windows, disarm ourselves and throw caution to the wind.

Following the advice and political prescriptions of these lowlife “elites” is like hiring Charles Manson as a security consultant. They already have a long track record of ravaging the West to serve their own economic and social interests, yet they want us to believe that those who would lock their doors to their rapaciousness and thievery are the ones with the problem.

Nationalism is the process subordinating both the terminally naive, and the epically deranged, greedy and sociopathic globalists to the best interests of the local community.

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