1. A disappointingly simplistic article in the Guardian by Ivan Krastev who's repeatedly been recommended to me as one of the best writers on populism and central Europe
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
2. Start with what he gets broadly right: in central Europe, anti-immigration feeling has remained constant rather than increasing, and the governments populists replaced foundered on an empty gospel of economic prosperity
3. But he's wrong to think that their main opponents are anti-nationalists. Civic Platform in Poland is not the German Green Party. Jobbik in Hungary even less so.
4. Law and Justice in Poland and Viktor Orban in Hungary both made hay out of the surge in refugees from Syria. As Krastev is right to point out the fear they exploited is one of demographic and civilisational decline.
5. Orban (and incidentally Jobbik) and also Law and Justice do best in places of relative economic, and absolute demographic decline. They tell people they're the victim of a two pronged attack:
6. The claim is that cultural relativists and "liberals" in the cities, and Islamic fundamentalists from the middle east conspiring to undermine traditional Polish/Hungarian or otherwise national values.
7. (Note this narrative works at a European level, and Orban is trying to do just that, posing as a defender of Christian Europe against the atheists and infidels)
8. There is a fissure here between countries that have become multi-ethnic (or whose main cities at least have done so) and those that haven't.
9. It doesn't mean that the two-pronged-attack argument doesn't have adherents in France, or Germany: it does - but they are fewer.
10. Krastev suggests that we've misunderstood nationalism by extrapolating from Yugoslavia, or, as Germany does from the Nazi period, but that populism arises from suppressing its more moderate expressions.
11. In both Hungary and Poland this doesn't apply - the main opponents of anti-constitutional populists there are not globalist idealists.
12. In Poland they're moderate patriots of a normal centre right kind. In Hungary they are an explicitly nationalist party.
13. In any case presenting Yugoslavia or Nazi Germany as impossibly distant is wrong. They are the opposite - all too real warnings of how dangerous nationalism is.
14. Implicit in his argument is the question of Islam. It may be foolish to begin a discussion of this on twitter, but, there is no alternative.
15. The last half century has seen a revival of self-consciously religious Muslim cultural and political movements that say that the Islamic religion has the answers to life and that Muslims shouldn't have to emulate the West any more.
16. The movements range from the peacefully spiritual to the political to the blodcurdlingly violent.
17. At the same time, liberalism in the West has first evolved into a status quo doctrine disingenuously presenting itself as a neutral referee between different ways of living.
18. Worse, it's come to believe its own neutrality, and forgotten that it stands for substantive ideas: freedom; equality; governments that serve the people, not the other way around.
19. This means there's an element of truth to the claim that liberal societies don't know how to assert pride their own achievements against their enemies.
20. The catch is their enemies are two-fold: not only Islamist extremists, but also anti-liberals within.
21. But the answer is not to embrace nationalism, but to revive liberalism as a substantive ideal.
22. This will include difficult debates around Islam - the conclusion should be to treat it as other religions were treated. Neither making special exceptions in its favour it nor singling it out for particular exclusion.
23. But other religions had to adapt to become compatible with a broadly liberal constitution. This process of adaptation in Islam is already under way --- and trenchantly opposed by both traditionalists and modern fundamentalist revivalists of Muslim faith.
24. And liberals will also need to fight nationalism and fundamentalism on emotional terrain. What I hoped Krastev might have said was this:
25. Don't abandon identity, pride and collective belonging to nationalists (and I would add other fundamentalists). Make them part of your story.
26. We've got countries and continents to build. We've got to help people feel the ground beneath them is stable, because traditional, nationalist borders can't do that any more.
27. As we do so we have to reject two ideas: First walls - what kind of civilisation have we become when we let thousands of people drown because there might be a terrorist among them?
28. And second neutrality: we're not neutral. We stand for a universal principle and every generation born here as much as anyone who comes to live here needs to be educated in the tradition in has produced.
29. The principle is that everyone, man or and woman, Christian or Muslim, gay or straight, black or white, and so on is of equal moral worth and they should be free to live as they choose as long as they don't prevent anyone else from doing the same.
30. This is Martin Luther King's appeal that people be judged "according to the content of their character". But note that it says people should be *judged*.
31. These judgements will be difficult and contested. Traditional discrimination - within liberal societies; against outsiders; and among immigrant communities who bring illiberal practices with them has constantly to be fought.
32. The mistake was not the making of insufficient concessions to nationalism, but to forget that Jefferson's tree of liberty needs to be watered every generation not, we must hope, with the blood of patriots, but with their arguments. END
