Globalization, Nation, Tribe

What we're really witnessing, from Europe through the Middle East and Africa to Latin America, is the reassertion of local identities and beliefs...The tribes are back... The golden age of globalization theory passed in the late 1960s and 1970s, when campus commissars insisted that tribes didn't exist and nationality was an artificial construct...The intellectual porn of left-wing fantasies foresaw the defeat of capitalism and the rise of the new, liberated, post-national man. All that's left are Che Guevara t-shirts and the dead of Srebrenica, Cambodia, Rwanda and dozens of other tributes to human solidarity....,The Tribes Are Back, Ralph Peters, The NY Post

What Ralph Peters presents here is a rare glimpse by a major syndicated columnist at the world as it is rather than the world as imagined by network executives and the editorial board of The New York Times. Peters steps off the golf course and out of the country club to look at stories out there. But, as so often happens, his analysis is undercut by a failure to analyze his own terms. His worst error is to confuse 'tribe' and 'nation'.

Let's try to help. A tribe is bound by language, religion, and custom. As we know from nomadic tribes all over the world, tribe and geography are not synonymous. In fact, they often aren't. Look at the Lakota, or Arab nomads, or Mongols, or any of dozens of other tribes.

A nation is bound by geography, but the bonds of religion and custom are loose at worst, nonexistent at best (see the United States). Language is an unnecessary bond in a nation as well. Witness Rome in classical times, or the US now. The EU is trying to do this, fumbling the ball more by bureaucratic complications than in motivating ideas. As long as agreements about common defense, within and without, are upheld, it doesn't matter what language a citizen speaks, what temple he goes to, or what customs he upholds at home. Sure, borders change a little, sometimes a lot (see Poland). But national institutions protect those borders against outside invaders and protect groups with often divergent interests within those borders. A nation can contain many tribes. Look at our own nation. The tribes agree to set up a common defense, and agree to protect each other from enemies foreign and domestic.

Understood that way, the traditional liberal avatar of "bad nationalism," the Nazis, were clearly a grotesquely evolved tribal organization. As they instituted legal changes after Hitler's coming to power in 1933, they essentially undercut all German national institutions in preparation for the advent of the greater Aryan tribe of Europe, a tribe which respected no national borders and no national institutions that protected any other group. In Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism time and again the great philosopher directs our attention to this fact, pointing out over and over that it was the disintegration and destruction of national institutions that permitted both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis to gain dominance over so much of Europe and Asia.

Understood as above, the revival that Peters is talking about is essentially tribal one. We should fear it far more than any imagined revival of nationalism. Nationalism is content within its borders. Tribalism will go anywhere. This is as true of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as it is of the some of the tribal underpinnings of the current governments of China and Iran. We don't need more globalization in the sense that it permits the systematic removal of national restraints on a global aristocracy's actions. The removal of those restraints in the name of globalism is what made Al Qaeda and other tribal terrorist organizations possible.

Luther