Nationalism is an abstract ideology, an -ism, a universal, metapolitical orientation. It is not a political platform or program. Nationalism merely entails thinking and behaving in the interest of one’s ethnic nation and respecting other ethnic nations pursuing the same.

Nationalism is not National Chauvinism. Chauvinism is the abstract ideology that entails thinking and behaving in the interest of one’s own group with indifference or hostility to other groups. In the case of National Chauvinism, this would be White Americans perceiving Americans who aren’t White as the enemy to be defeated, rather than as distinct and unique ethnicities to be bargained with, allied with, and (if necessary) competed with as rivals.

When most people think of the term “nationalism,” they think of a specific political construct, namely “Westphalian Nationalism.” Ethnic nationalities have, in some sense, been around as long as humans have been around, but the nation-state as we know it today was conjured up by bureaucrats in 1648. The presumption that the nationalist ideology is synonymous with Westphalian Nationalism and subsequent Romantic Nationalism movements, is an obstacle to thinking clearly about our national interest as White Americans.

I am not dismissive of Westphalian Nationalism or Romantic Nationalism. In fact, they’re perhaps viable in the remaining states that have remained supermajority ethnostates like Ireland or Hungary. I’ll only name America here to avoid arguments with foreigners over whether they can realistically reclaim their state, but there’s more than one. White Americans are not in a position to revert the United States back into a White American nation-state.

A new label is necessary, one that’s not loaded with the Westphalian/Romantic priors. Fortunately, the perfect word already exists and it’s much older than the English language itself: ethnarchy. Ethnarchism is, as the etymology suggests, rule by the ethnos. And when there’s a specific ethnarch, that’s the leader of the ethnic group in question. This is the framework the Jews depended on during their submission to the Roman Empire, as well as the framework the Greeks depended upon during their submission to the Byzantine Empire.

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