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03/02/2008: "Ethnic nationalism is the future of politics"

Samuel Huntington said it first:

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19930601faessay5188/samuel-p-huntington/the-clash-of-civilizations.html

Now Pat Buchanan chimes in:

According to a compelling lead article in the new Foreign Affairs, "Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism," we may be witnessing in the Third World a re-enactment of the ethnic wars that tore Europe to pieces in the 20th century.

"Ethnonationalism," writes history professor Jerry Z. Muller of Catholic University, "has played a more profound role in modern history than is commonly understood, and the processes that led to the dominance of the ethnonational state and the separation of ethnic groups in Europe are likely to recur elsewhere."

"A familiar and influential narrative of 20th-century European history argues that nationalism twice led to war, in 1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, Europeans concluded that nationalism was a danger and gradually abandoned it. In the postwar decades, Western Europeans enmeshed themselves in a web of transnational institutions, culminating in the European Union."

Muller contends that this is a myth, that peace came to the Old Continent only after the triumph of ethnonationalism, after the peoples of Europe had sorted themselves out and each achieved its own home.

Western Man has mis-taught himself his own history.

http://www.vdare.com/buchanan/080225_nationalism.htm

[ Our view: ethnic nationalism has always been the only organic political system, and the only one that works. The nation-state is a convenient financial grouping, and an easy way to achieve political control, but is fundamentally an illusion, and one that destroys itself as it fails - and takes you with it. ]