There’s a cloud[1] over nationalism. As soon as you say that nations should put their own citizens and interests first, people immediately raise the specter of wars and genocides. Since the Second World War, National Socialism and the Holocaust are always evoked. But before the Second World War, anti-nationalists evoked the horrors of the First World War. Before that, it was the Napoleonic Wars, and before that catastrophes like the Seven Years’ War, the War of the Austrian Succession, the War of the Spanish Succession, the English Civil Wars, and the Thirty Years’ War.

I always bristled at the claim that the First World War was caused by nationalism. I was quick to point out that the main parties to that war were empires: Britain, France, Russia, Turkey, Austria-Hungary, and Germany. The same is true of the Napoleonic Wars. Beyond that, most of these other traumatic conflicts were not national but religious and dynastic. Why drag nationalism into it?

This is historically true, but it is really beside the point, because the essential objection remains unanswered. Whether we are dealing with an empire or a homogeneous ethnostate, putting your own state and its interests first supposedly leads inexorably to war. Thus we need to somehow transcend “nationalism.” The problem is not really nationalism, though. The problem is the willingness of any state to aggrandize itself by waging war against its neighbors. It is political predation.

One is a global government that abolishes all other sovereignties. There cannot be war between states if there is only one state. Global government is basically the idea of empire taken to the furthest extreme, for an empire gobbles up other sovereign entities. Basically, empires promise to end wars as soon as they have successfully warred with everyone around them. They promise to end the conflict that comes from diversity by becoming maximally diverse. Of course, the secret agenda of globalists is to do away with such diversity and create complete racial and cultural homogeneity.

The other option is called an intergovernmental organization (IGO), in which different sovereign states come together to preserve both peace and sovereignty. Contra Hobbes, there can be peace without an overarching power, and the thrust of international law and diplomacy since the seventeenth century has been to extend peace and reduce wars as much as possible.

In 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia gave us the modern idea of the sovereign state as the bearer of certain rights defined in international law. In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht introduced the “balance of power” as a way of preserving peace. In 1815, the post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna created the Concert of Europe to preserve the balance of power and suppress revolutionary movements.

In 1920, the League of Nations was founded after the horrors of the First World War to promote the collective security of its members (an attack on one was to be treated as an attack on all), conflict resolution between members, disarmament, and economic cooperation.

The League of Nations was the brainchild of US President Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points (1918) envisioned a post-war European order that reduced ethnic conflicts by promoting the self-determination of peoples and protections for ethnic minorities.

The League of Nations failed to prevent another world war, so statesmen went back to the drawing board and came up with the United Nations (1945), NATO (1949), and eventually the European Union (1993) to promote the same ends: peace through collective security, diplomacy, and economic cooperation.

Global government and intergovernmental organizations are fundamentally incompatible, for global government must cancel the sovereignty of individual states, whereas IGOs preserve sovereignty. But advocates of global government often regard IGOs like the European Union and the United Nations as ways to coax sovereign states to gradually surrender their powers, until they dissolve into a world state. Thus nationalists have a natural distrust of IGOs, even though nationalists need to make them work if they are to avoid the perils of global government on the one hand and fratricidal war on the other.

Dispelling the Cloud

How do we win? We win by having more power than our enemies. How do we manage that? By getting more people fighting for us and fewer people fighting against us. All people aren’t equal, of course, so we should begin by converting people who are more virtuous, intelligent, wealthy, and connected than the average. Today, our primary way to convert people is persuasion. Not everyone is persuadable, of course, but that just means we must work harder converting the ones who are.

The main impediment to conversion is the cloud over nationalism. We must dispel it. This is why in essays like “New Right vs. Old Right” I affirm universal ethnonationalism and repudiate the totalitarianism, imperialism, and genocide associated with interwar fascist movements, which I call the Old Right.[2]

White Nationalists, like all nationalists today, are obligated to show that our nationalism will not lead to catastrophic increases in violence. Basically, we must solemnly swear not to start World War III, genocide other groups, and so forth. If we can’t do that, we are not going to be taken seriously. If we reject this obligation, we will only increase opposition to our cause, perhaps fatally.

Many White Nationalists will indignantly reject this obligation. But in your heart, you know I’m right. So let’s examine your heart.

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