Ethnonationalism: Last Refuge of Globalism

Philip Cunliffe thinks we have no national interest in ethnonationalism.

(Long read)

Ethnonationalism has reared its head in British politics, sowing division on the Right and providing vindication once again for the Left’s perennial prophecy of a looming fascist menace. It is an unsurprising development. As the electorate has grown increasingly frustrated by the failure of successive governments to enforce the nation’s borders, the popular hostility to the open borders regime that arose after 2004, with the influx of cheap labour from central and Eastern Europe, has inevitably stirred up questions about British identity. 

What is the basis of British identity, if Britain is not to be merely a provincial hinterland for the City of London, or a global refugee hub for the wretched of the earth? Is the British state to be anything more than the armed wing of Oxfam? An increasingly vocal element of the Right has an answer: they claim that ethnicity and race must be placed at the core of British identity, irrespective of how well-integrated or assimilated any individual may be, or how many generations ago their forebears arrived in this country. 

This new ethnonationalism is often seen as a response to globalisation. For the ethnonationalist right, and those sympathetic or adjacent to them, ethnonationalism is the only rational response to the dilution of native Britons by repeat waves of legal and illegal mass migration—facilitated by an open borders policy that they believe is intended to initiate a process of demographic transformation to erode and eventually substitute the original native population as part of building a global totalitarianism. For progressive liberals and the anti-nationalist left, ethnonationalism is at best xenophobic confusion and misunderstanding on the part of the poor, the elderly and uneducated; a regrettable but predictable result of the inevitable and deserved whittling away of white racial and economic privilege following on from global economic change. At worst, the progressive left see ethnonationalism as a reactionary conspiratorial menace, the next stage in the escalation from populist demagoguery to neo-fascism, a historic script that always culminates in a new nationalist totalitarianism. 

Despite their opposed stances toward ethnonationalism, the flawed assumption shared by both Left and Right is that ethnonationalism offers an obstacle or an alternative to globalisation; the truth is that ethnonationalism is more a symptom of the decay of globalisation rather than a cure or response. What is more, ethnonationalism can be easily accommodated within the Yookay regime of inverted colonialism, in which the British nation itself is turned into the last province of the UK’s shrunken global empire, with state power focused on policing the natives while an imperious governing bureaucracy ensures the population remains divided against itself. 

Although the majority of the British electorate has little affinity for ethnonationalism, and far right parties are already tearing themselves apart, it is unsurprising that the ethnonationalists’ answer to the question of British identity has nonetheless unsettled public debate and reached beyond far-right circles. The reason for this is not that incipient fascism is swelling up among the British public, but rather because ethnonationalist claims replicate the underlying assumptions of liberal identity politics that have been at the core of public life for decades: in particular, the assumption that state legitimacy derives from its efforts to protect the rights and security of diverse communities and racially and culturally-defined groups. Venerable religious practices, socially conservative mores, diverse folk customs and backwards rituals are all welcome and even encouraged, as long as they belong to a group small and self-contained enough that it has to depend on state patronage and power for its protection. Progressive multiculturalism is the hub-and-spoke model of ethnonationalism, in which multiple minorities are the spokes fixed in their rotation around the hub of the liberal state. The state exists to promote and protect the interests of these diverse identities. The politics of multiculturalism is fully consummated when all major demographic groups begin to approach an equal size, making them all similarly dependent on the police power of the state to keep the others at bay while they compete for state favour and patronage, thereby allowing the state bureaucracy to evade democratic accountability while it balances one group against another. The possibility of majoritarian democracy is eclipsed.

The question for Britain is not whether we will be ruled by ethnonationalists in the future. Rather the question is how long can actually existing ethnonationalism be sustained as a model for organising the UK’s minorities, without calling into question the identity of the larger original group. At what point do multiple minority groups get large enough in proportion to the original majority population that the ethnic majority becomes enamoured of the kinds of cultural rights and recognition afforded to minorities by a multicultural state? Given the state’s commitment to multiculturalism and the widely publicised demographic projections indicating that white Britons will become a minority in Britain by 2063, it would be surprising if ordinary voters from the dwindling ethnic majority did not take their cue from how the state functions today and start to think about asserting their rights and security as an ethnic group. 

Many leftists and liberals have responded by ridiculing, and quibbling with, the demographic projections showing white Britons becoming a minority. They have queried the ethnic and racial definitions underpinning the projections. Yet however we might seek to slice and dice the statistics, or offer more accurate racial and ethnic categories, there is no doubt that the mass migration of the last 40 years is going to change the social and racial make-up of this country irrevocably, whenever the precise turning point may be this century. Given that so much of our current politics is legitimised around the promotion and protection of ethnic difference, it is inevitable that as members of the ethnic majority face minoritisation they will begin to articulate their interests in minoritarian terms. Therein lies the problem – framing the response to globalisation in terms of beleaguered minority rights is to remain trapped in the globalist prison-house of peoples, where every group is entitled to its cultural rights as long as it is stripped of meaningful political power. Ethnonationalism is incapable of generating such power.

The claims for British ethnonationalism are often made in terms of a deep history of a settled population with a stable ethnic lineage reaching back to the Saxon invasions that followed the Roman withdrawal from the province of Britannia in the late 4th century CE. The truth is more prosaic. Like so many of our ills, the real roots of contemporary ethnonationalism can be traced back to New Labour prime minister Tony Blair, and in particular his drive for devolution in the late 1990s. This is evident in the striking prevalence of the cross of St George on recent protests organised by the nationalist Right as well as the spontaneous raising of flags now occurring up and down the country undertaken independently by ordinary citizens. That the English flag has tended to crowd out the Union flag ironically underscores the fact that ethnonationalism has no deep historical roots in Britain because for a quarter of a millennium, Britain itself was the political union of three historically distinct peoples – Welsh, Scottish, English. The assertion of English identity today can only come at the expense of the larger union of Britain. It consolidates neither English nor British traditions of great longstanding, but rather the Blairite project of devolution—a project that was explicitly intended to dilute the power of the central state, the better to integrate Britain into globalist structures. 

Breezy talk of an ancient ‘Anglo-Celtic’ identity or even ethnicity effaces the fact that in as much as such an identity exists, it was the result of political, not biological, efforts to unite the peoples of the island, and that it required suppressing bitter political divisions that were internal to the nation itself. This was finally achieved with the defeat of Catholic absolutism at the Battles of the Boyne (1690) and Culloden (1746)—battles that were fought between the Irish and Scottish supporters of the Stuart dynasty, on the one hand, and English-backed Protestant unionists on the other. How does this history of the Union fit the model of an Anglo-Celtic ethnonationalism? In short, ethnonationalism offers no meaningful continuity with Britain’s past. Once the history of the island’s indigenous peoples is combined with nearly a century of Britain’s post-imperial record of multi-religious, inter-ethnic coupling and mixed-race marriages ramifying both vertically across generations and horizontally across families, then even if the borders were shut tomorrow and all illegal migrants were deported, and there was no more immigration for the rest of this century, ethnonationalism would still be a shallow foundation on which to win democratic majorities across the Union. And without the legitimacy unlocked by mass democracy and collective political participation, there is no prospect of strengthening the nation.

This national history and demographic reality helps to contextualise ethnonationalism today. Casting itself as national awakening and self-assertion, ethnonationalism is in fact a defensive minority politics framed around the assertion of cultural rights. White ethnonationalism is the logic of race grifting, ethnic huckstering, ghettoised gerrymandering and ethnic block votes taken to its logical conclusion—the scenario in which everyone joins the race racket, and the existing globalist state elite retains its power through controlling access by each ethnic group to the proceeds of a diminishing world economy. Its effect will be to prolong the life of globalism more than it will be to break a path to the nation’s future. 

As Quinn Slobodian’s scholarly work has shown, the supranational logic of globalisation is predicated on gouging national states by carving enclaves out of the territory of the host state—special economic zones and trading entrepots, safe havens, devolution and regionalisation. Right-wing globalisers such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe hoped that this process of fragmentation would be accompanied by ‘voluntary physical segregation of distinct cultures’ into separate political entities, with the expectation that the new ethnically homogenous countries would reinforce global capitalism. Both smaller and more homogenous than the contemporary nation-state, these ethno-states would be more easily integrated into the global economy. ‘The smaller the country’, Hoppe reasoned, ‘the greater pressure to opt for free trade rather than protectionism.’ As Hoppe indicates, the logic of ethnonationalism pushes towards the recreation of globalism: a world of petty suzerainties for each distinct cultural or ethnic group, each one in turn swallowed up in a globalised system of free trade which will inevitably require supranational courts to regulate it and globalist policing to protect it. 

The 1992-2024 world economy that was the base for political globalism, including Hoppe’s vision of ethnonationalist capitalism, is ending. Geopolitical rivalry and Trump’s tariffs are fragmenting global trade, with the result that over-extended global supply chains are slowly being coiled back into national borders and critical industries are being re-shored. A hollowed-out British state further fragmented by English devolution will be in no position to defend its population’s interests in such circumstances. In such conditions, the crabbed and defensive politics of ethnonationalism is a non-starter.

If white ethnonationalism is a non-starter in a world after globalisation, the progressive left is also trapped by their own political logic. Given that they have staked so much of their political legitimacy on the grounds of extending protection to beleaguered minorities, the left can only criticise Britons worried about becoming a minority at the risk of undercutting their own claims for the last 50 years—namely the view that minorities are  intrinsically vulnerable and require special protection by state power over and above the equal treatment afforded under the law. The more that they continue to insist on multicultural privileges and minority protection today, the more they make the case for the white ethnonationalists of the 2040s. Shrill denunciation of ordinary voters’ fears has no answer to this question of national cohesion. Academic re-interpretations of demographic projections alongside noisy and ostentatious celebration of multiracial sports teams will not drown out the nagging question of what constitutes political belonging after globalisation. 

That such questions trouble us reflects the fact that all previous answers to this question have either been eroded or stripped away over the course of the last 200 years. From the Napoleonic wars through to the early twentieth century, British and English identity relied on imperial affinities embedded in a transnational trading system and a globalised Protestantism diffused both across the union and the empire. The more compact British nation that constituted itself in place of empire in the middle of the twentieth century did so on the basis of nationalised industries, corporatist government and powerful unions, all of which were in turn dissolved away through the Thatcherite project of integrating Britain into globalised capitalism towards the end of the century. The props intended to substitute for imperial decline—the Single Market and European Union—were kicked away by Brexit. Since Britain has left the EU, and even the future of NATO looks less certain under the presidency of Donald Trump, there are no ready answers from abroad. 

Within the UK, devolved government has set the peoples of the island against each other in scrabbling for the resources of the central state, while simultaneously dispersing political accountability across three devolved assemblies and a host of independent regulatory agencies. The human resources ideology that dominates the practices of so many large organisations may suffice to cohere the liberal professions, but banal diktats about inclusion, diversity, open-mindedness and kindness fail once pressed into the service of national identity because they offer nothing that is specific to the political distinctiveness of any nation, let alone Britain. Aging demographics and stagnant productivity are combining to squeeze the capacities of the welfare state. As public health resources diminish over time and pension provisions are inevitably whittled away, what will being British mean if citizenship no longer entitles you to meaningful benefits in return for political loyalty: a lifetime of (increasingly onerous) taxes, productive work and community service? The occasional sporting victories of (devolved) national teams and binge-watching the latest season of the House of Windsor will offer precious little relief in such circumstances. The progressive left hope of course that once again cranking up the looming fascist menace of a resurgent ethnonationalist Right will galvanise a popular riposte stronger than all their EDI nostrums, social media witch-hunts and HR lectures combined. But anti-fascism is wearing thin from over-use, and it falls flat when masked anti-fascists try to re-enact the Battle of Cable Street against women in pink shirts rather than men in black ones.

The traditional answer to ethnonationalism, civic nationalism, has been contaminated by decades of globalism. It became the castrated form of neoliberal citizenship in which political loyalty to the nation-state was legitimated on the premise that the nation-state was itself being blended away through international integration and mass migration. Military protection would be offered by transnational bodies (NATO, the UN) in which transnational burden-sharing was intended to ensure that any national sacrifice was increasingly redundant, and with it, political loyalty to the state. Legal protection by supranational courts and conventions (the ECJ, ECHR, ICC, ICJ) cut the ties between the idea of civic ‘nationalism’ and national law. With political participation reduced to voting for different wings of the globalist uniparty, national belonging came to be defined in terms of consumption rather than productive contribution or communal participation. This was the progressive flip side of Hoppe’s globalist ethnonationalism. Such a model may have been viable during the heyday of globalisation, but in an age in which the proceeds of global growth are diminishing, the rewards of citizenship are so few and access to them so easy, what do the legal forms of state belonging amount to? And without patriotic commitment to the institutions and practices of national self-government no nation worthy of the name can be formed and nationhood regresses to cultural identification – mere brand loyalty in the global marketplace. 

If the single most important and meaningful culture is patriotic commitment to the nation’s laws and its institutions and practices of collective self-government, then how do we ensure that common practices of political participation generate a shared history and denser national culture? How do we ensure that releasing the dynamic of independent self-government spills over into the bounty of enhanced productivity and greater prosperity? How do we ensure individual and collective access to the proceeds of growth, without being reduced to performing various minority identities in order to legitimate our demands on the state bureaucracy, and on each other? 

Resolving these problems means ending the legacy of globalism. This means not only ending mass migration, but also seizing the opportunity to roll on from merely resisting white ethnonationalism to abolishing all ethnonationalism in its entirety – which means legally and politically rolling up multiculturalism. The most obvious starting point for this is to abolish the politically prescribed sectarianism that is embedded in the project of devolution, which provides the constitutional matrix within which the Yookay’s manifold minority identities shelter and thrive, a constitutional reform that will in turn provide the political basis for squashing EDI across public life. The opportunity for re-focusing the nation’s concentrated political will in a single centre—the Union parliament at Westminster—should also be the moment to strengthen and amplify that will at both the individual and collective level. At the individual level, this will be accomplished by expanding civil liberty with the abolition of all restrictions on political speech, and at the collective level, by abolishing the House of Lords and expanding the House of Commons under a new electoral system, giving the nation better representation and opportunity for political deliberation and reflection. This is the task of nation-building.     

As this affinity between the citizens and their collective institutions is deepened and strengthened over time, the nation emerges as a self-governing community in which those—and only those—who are familiar with and fully engaged with its legal practices, political customs, formal and informal rituals and understandings can meaningfully participate. The thin civic and shallow ethnic nationalisms of the globalist era are subsumed in the lived reality of a shared political community—the nation. It is this process of nation-building—understood in terms of strengthening the internal political relations and representative structures that can constitute us as a single people—that will unlock the productive forces in the population that are needed to withstand the shifts of a new global order and an unstable world economy. Instead of debating the relative merits of (globalist) ethnonationalism over (neoliberal) civic nationalism, it is time to get on with the practical politics of nation-building.