Ethnonationalism: So Passe

I urge you to go back over to the main DTO site and read James Dellinger and Phil Brand’s piece on Hawaiian ethnonationalism. I’ve said pretty much all I need to say about the subject before, but there’s a related angle on this story that I’m increasingly fond of and is probably best captured in its least overbearingly Yankee version by Reihan, who gets as well as anyone why ethnonationalism is such a mindbendingly grave atavism coming from putative progressives. It, for example, is certain (given the reality on the ground) to doom Europe posthaste:

What if a horde of Italians flooded booming Munich, and then headed north to cheap accommodations in Berlin and lesser eastern cities? Enterprising Somalis and Bengalis and Senegalese would soon follow. I realize that this wouldn’t be terribly appealing to the neofascists and even to some of my fellow cultural conservatives, even if new arrivals were exempt from cradle-to-grave welfare protections and they brought intact families in tow. But surely Germany’s dying cities would be far better off. Some on the German right have called for “Kinder statt Inder,” i.e., children and not Indians, but Kinder aren’t always on offer, even if you accept that they are the superior alternative, which is not always obvious (though I have my pro-natalist sympathies). Economic power is shifting away from parts of Germany and Italy; surely they can shift population around in such a way as to make the best of what they have, and perhaps revive moribund cultures in the process.

Of course, it could be that I want Europe to become a continent-wide melting-pot because this is the highest expression of my American chauvinism, so Europeans should be wary.

I think this is about right. One of the most compelling reasons for serious European unification (which is not the same as administrative centralization, a lesson lost on Europeans for, I’m sorry to say, far too long) is the power of a single European state to redefine Europeanness as a political and cultural identity — a situation that, in turn, empowers Europeans to constructively face and integrate significant numbers of nonwhite immigrants. I’m sitting in St. Maarten right now, and the shadow of colonialism still lingers even though the practice itself is long dead. It’s usually no big deal but occasionally crosses over into the uncomfortable, and as much as Europeans hate to be lectured by Americans about which of our brilliant practical inventions for restless but upbeat living they ought to adopt, I must say that European unification was a European idea first, and a good one at that.