National Pluralism

From the Prospect article Fear Masquerading as Tolerance by Christopher Caldwell:

A central problem in welcoming people from poor countries is that Europeans have lost faith in parts of the civilisation to which migrants were drawn in the first place. ‘‘Europeans would like to exit from history, from la grande histoire, from the history that is written in letters of blood,’’ wrote the French political scientist Raymond Aron in the 1970s. ‘‘Others, by their hundreds of millions, wish to enter it.’’ It is hard to follow Europe’s rules and embrace Europe’s values, as newcomers are sometimes told they must, when Europeans themselves are rewriting those rules and reassessing those values.

In the aftermath of the French revolution, the Jewish reentry into history began. Zionism was the attempt by Jews as a collective to renter "the history that is written in letters of blood," while assimilationism and socialism offered the possibility of individual reentry. Europe lost much of its moral legitimacy by slaughtering precisely the Jewish migrants who sought to follow its rules and embrace its values:

The Europe into which immigrants began arriving in the 1950s was reeling in horror from the second world war and preoccupied with building the institutions to forestall any repetition of it. Nato was the most important of these institutions. The EU was the most ambitious. The war supplied European thinkers with all their moral categories and benchmarks. Avoiding another explosion meant purging Europe’s individual countries of nationalism, with ‘‘nationalism’’ understood to include all vestiges of racism, militarism, and cultural chauvinism—but also patriotism, pride, and unseemly competitiveness. The singing of national anthems and the waving of national flags became, in some countries, the province only of skinheads and soccer hooligans.

European nationalists have largely themselves to blame for the discrediting of European nationalism. It is not the Jews, but the killers of Jews, who are responsible for the reactive rise of rootless cosmopolitanism as the ruling ideology. However, that reaction is now fostering a counter-reaction: a reappraisal of European values in the face of the Islamic challenge.

Among Jews, the Holocaust fostered a suspicion of non-Jewish nationalism for the crimes it had committed; and an increased commitment to Jewish nationalism as a defensive, rally round the flag, reaction. Leftist Jews are shocked that their comrades see Jewish nationalism as just as racist and militarist as European nationalisms. But it is not the anti-Zionist leftists who are being inconsistent (at least no more than they always are); it is the Zionists who have refused to park their tribal affiliations at the leftward door of self-abasement.

Intellectual consistency requires that Jewish nationalists support European nationalisms (which is not to say "racism, militarism, and cultural chauvinism") in the manner described by Moses Hess in his seminal text Rome and Jerusalem: "Each nation will have to create its own historical cult; each people must become like the Jewish people, a people of God." A people of God must not massacre its fellow peoples of God; but it must also not betray its particularity as a unique people of God through dissolution into a blandly multiculturalist or universalist whole.

Judaism is a religion that discriminates between peoples. Rather than trying to hide this by becoming a dishonest shadow of Christianity, we should embrace the positive message of pluralism between nations (which requires the upbuilding of all nations, including those that historically oppressed us) our heritage contains. Pluralism, however, is not the modern model of multiculturalism:

Just because they were migrating to Europe did not mean immigrants accepted, understood, or even noticed the European project to leave behind ‘‘the history written in letters of blood.’’ On the contrary, many immigrants, and many children and grandchildren of immigrants, considered it a duty to shout from the rooftops their wish for a Palestinian state or a Kurdish homeland or an Islamist Algeria. They kept alive dreams of cultural, national, and even racial glory that were beyond the reach of Europeans’ understanding.

In the name of liberal universalism, many of the laws and customs that had held European societies together were thrown out the window. Tolerance became a higher priority than any of the traditional preoccupations of state and society—order, liberty, fairness, and intelligibility—and came to be pursued at their expense. But in recent years Europe’s ideology of neutrality has buckled under the weight of mass immigration and become a source not of strength but of what Alsana, the bitchy Bengali housewife in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, called ‘‘hosh-kosh nonsense.’’

Greater understanding between nations requires not just recognition of the national aspirations of others, but our own. Jews have historically understood themselves as a nation with a spiritual mission, not an empire with a territorial mandate. The temptation of empire destroyed other nations and nationalisms. Take Germany, which once saw itself as the bearer of a spiritual mission of bildung and kultur. It was not the Jews who subverted and finally destroyed the German spiritual mission (many ardently supported it), but the imperial nationalists and national socialists. Germany and Europe can rebuild their sense of spiritual mission from the disastrous twentieth century as surely as Judaism did from the ruins of the Bar Kochba revolt.