Josef Roth, right, with Stefan Zweig in Belgium. 1936. Credit: Imagno / Getty
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In his short story, The Bust of the Emperor, the Austrian literary journalist and novelist Joseph Roth commented on the rise of nationalism in the last years of the Habsburg Empire:
“Everyone aligned themselves — whether they wanted to, or merely pretended to want to — with one or other of the many peoples there used to be in the old monarchy. For it had been discovered in the course of the nineteenth century that every individual had to belong to a particular race or nation, if he wanted to be a fully rounded bourgeois individual… All those people who had never been other than Austrians … now began to call themselves part of the Polish, the Czech, the Ukrainian, the Slovenian, the Croatian ‘nation’ — and so on.”
Born in 1894 into a Galician Jewish family and growing up to be a Left-leaning liberal journalist, Roth came to regard the empire of Franz Joseph as the embodiment of a civilised order. Its replacement by self-determining nation-states would not enable individuals to live more freely. Instead, there would be anarchy, a struggle for power and an era of barbaric dictatorship. Writing to Stefan Zweig in 1933, he warned: “We are drifting to great catastrophes … I won’t bet a penny on our lives.”
Roth understood the dangers of identity politics long before the term was invented. What he grasped is not only that societies that secure personal freedom are easily broken. There is an inherent instability in the liberal project that promotes the freedom to shape your own identity as you please.
With all of its faults — including a virulently anti-Semitic mayor in fin-de-siècle Vienna — the Austro-Hungarian Empire allowed its subjects to live with one another without having to define themselves as belonging in any particular group. It was not the Great War alone that killed off the Habsburg realm. Its collapse illustrated a self-defeating logic in liberalism. The pursuit of national self-determination in the disintegrating empire — aided and abetted by the US President, Woodrow Wilson — revealed a fatal contradiction in the liberal understanding of human identity.
For liberals, human beings fashion their identities according to how they choose to think of themselves. Any attempt to obstruct this choice is an assault on freedom. But as Roth knew all too well, human identity is not a unilateral act of self-assertion. It requires recognition by others, and this is a process fraught with difficulties. Not only is recognition sometimes denied — as when demands for nationhood are rejected by existing states. Worse, people find projected onto them identities they do not themselves recognise.
Defining yourself as part of the Polish, Czech or Ukrainian “nation” doesn’t only exclude being a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It means you don’t belong in any of the other nations either. Electing to have an identity for yourself inescapably entails attributing a different identity from other people. Having one’s identity defined by others is rarely auspicious, and during the 20th century was often lethal. What is choice for some, is fate for others.
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SubscribeI remember my first questionings of what is called left-liberalism just after I left university. I noticed that my right-on acquaintances wanted the state to take up the burden of family that they wanted to put down. They especially wanted to be able to have libertine love-lives. By promoting a cradle-to-grave state they salved their consciences: romance was sovereign (the ambiguity of the word love aided this segue), but Christian charity was to be maintained through the welfare state.
The problem is not so much perhaps that liberals are wrong in their assessment of the trajectory of mankind, but that that trajectory is nightmarish: liberalism is not just an economic matter. In an imagined state of nature – pure liberalism? – there is varied mating success. The moment this is accepted as a fact of life, all egalitarian ideologies seem ridiculous. It was Christianity’s presumption of monogamy that was the foundation of all Western egalitarian law and progressivism, for better or worse.
What has this to do with identity politics and borders? As follows. Any polity in which monogamy is not enforced in some way moves rapidly to being a kind of slave-state. A too large class of mateless males emerges and the second-class and undignified nature of their lives is impossible to cover-up. Ideologies of citizenship become laughable and the state becomes more authoritarian in order to maintain the blatantly unequal order, from the male point of view.
Liberalism thus brings the end of consensual civilisation.
“A too large class of mateless males emerges and the second-class and undignified nature of their lives is impossible to cover-up”
Nothing to do with the average “incel” being a charming as a fatal road accident? Entitled whiners are rarely successful in the mating game.
“In practice, identitarianism is principally a movement hostile to Muslim immigrants.” That is true. Moreover identitarianism has right-wing and anti-democratic tendencies. However the most powerful forces within Muslim minorities in Europe, namely salafism and the Muslim Brotherhood cluster, are themselves right-wing and anti-democratic, and are furthermore largely controlled by governments outside Europe that seek to advance their own interests in Europe and care little for the fate of Europeans, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.
Thus European democrats must join to oppose both authoritarian movements that oppose Muslim influence and authoritarian movements that seek to expand the power of Muslim countries in Europe.
“The abuse heaped on more than 17 million Brexit supporters in the UK and
60-odd million Trump voters in America by liberal exemplars of
universal humanity is telling”
Hmmm … rather one-sided mud throwing. The earnest prof reveals his ideological biases. As an opponent of brexit I have been abused as a traitor, quisling, maniac, etc. I have had my life threatened. There are parts of the UK I would not now travel to for if I were honest about my opinions, my life would be in jeopardy. If I were not facing retirement I would certainly leave the country but I am not as energetic as I was 30 years ago. Fortunately I live in a neighbourhood where I feel relatively safe. Though I still see fleeing as a possibility if the UK leaves with no deal and the government blames people like me for the consequences. Thanks mum for the Irish passport! It seems inevitable that the mass of brexit supporters will seek scapegoats when brexit tuns out not to be what they wanted and we are building up to a Dolchstoßlegende of massive proportions
What is commonly perceived as “diversity” – varieties of dress, food, etc. – is not the essence of the problem. The real issue is that government is the only means by which monogamy can be promoted to the whole of society. Therefore civilisation requires a single-minded and active state on this issue if not on others.
Of course it is impossible to imagine such a state in the Western world today. Not only would such a premeditated social policy run into opposition from feminists and others, we can also feel sure that many of those with sufficient power to promote such a policy will feel no inclination to do so.
The really necessary – illiberal – purpose of the of the state is the promotion of monogamy. Of course this requires a degree of “social cohesion”.