The Mass Migrations Caused by WWI
The text for the next posts is Chapter 9 of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins Of Totalitarianism, titled “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”. It’s a short chapter, 37 pages, and can be read as a stand-alone essay. I didn’t discuss it in my series on the book, partly because I didn’t think about its relevance to our current situation. I did remember her discussion of the Rights of Man; and rights are the subject of the current series.
Pre-WWI context
The book focuses on Europe, and ignores much of the rest of the world. The first chapters discuss anti-Semitism and imperialism. Both cover the period from the mid-19th Century and the early 20th. During that time most of Europe coalesced into one of two types of states, nation-states and empires, with the boundaries created by the 1815 Treaty of Vienna as a starting point..
Western Europe was mostly organized into nation-states. Here’s the Wikipedia definition:
A nation-state is a political unit where the state, a centralized political organization ruling over a population within a territory, and the nation, a community based on a common identity, are congruent.
The term “common identity” means roughly cultural homogeneity, so I use the term cultural group instead of nationality. The term nation-state itself isn’t widely used today, perhaps because there aren’t many, if any, today.
The other form, empire, included Austria-Hungary; the Czarist Empire; and, thought it’s not wholly in Europe, the Ottoman Empire. Each of these included a large number of culturally dissimilar groups, including different language groups. Many of these groups had at one time lived in their own Nation-States, including, for example, Poland and Ukraine. Cultural groups in these empires did not have national sovereignty, and often were mixed in with other groups or jammed up against others without formal borders. Ancient animosities persisted for generations. We can see it in recent history, as the break-up of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
WWI and its aftermath
Arendt describes the impact of World War I as an explosion. I usually think of WWI as a trench warfare stalemate between the English and French and later the Americans against the Germans, but across the European continent and into what we now call the Middle East, there were battles among all of the smaller cultural groups, and destruction aimed at revenge for ancient, if not forgotten, insults. Among the larger groups on the move were Armenians facing genocide by the flailing Ottoman Empire, Poles, Ukrainians, Balkans, the list is endless, and that’s just in Central and Southern Europe. Many Germans lived in the outskirts of the Austria-Hungary Empire, and they were forced out or ran for their lives. And, of course, Jews across the continent were assaulted and expelled.
The war ended in 1918, and the struggle to reorganize European states began. The basic idea was to create nation-states for the large populations, giving them defined borders and international recognition. This animated map gives an idea of the major changes in Europe. One group of people in each successor state was put in charge, and the other large minorities were assumed to somehow participate in the government, as, for example, the Slovaks in Czechoslovakia.
The enormous numbers of migrants were to be protected by the Minority Treaties, which all the new nations except Czechoslovakia signed. These offered some protection, enforceable by the League of Nations. That didn’t happen. The choice faced by the migrants was to assimilate, or to be treated as stateless people. Naturally, many didn’t like that choice.
There were two groups of stateless people: those whose nations had disappeared, like the people formerly in the Austria-Hungary Empire, and those who could not return to their homelands because they’d be murdered, like the Armenians. The Jews fell into both camps.
The entire approach was, in Arendt’s word, “preposterous”. The outcome was obvious. The minorities and stateless peoples were horribly mistreated by the dominant group. At best the minorities were forcibly assimilated, their own culture lost. At worst they were preyed on by an unchecked police force and their new neighbors. The demands of cultural groups, many of which had never controlled their own states, for self-determination were frustrated. This project was doomed, as was the whole idea of a viable nation-state for every aspiring national group.
Ultimately, the interests of nationality dominated the states across Europe. Law itself became subordinate to the demands of dominant nationalistic cultural groups. And the odd part is that across Europe about this time, the idea of self-determination for these cultural groups was gaining ground.
The Rights Of Man
The concept of the Rights Of Man springs from the American Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, a document of the French Revolution. The idea is that from birth all men are equal before the state, all are entitled to certain rights, including life and liberty, and participation in self-government. This last is critical: the state exists to insure the Rights of Man to all. As Jefferson put it: “… to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”.
The Rights of Man is a lovely sentiment. But it turns out that the second part is crucial: there are no Rights of Man without a state that can and will enforce them. High-minded principles are useless in the face of a marauding police force.
Discussion
Several of the books I’ve been writing about here, and reading but not writing about, provide evidence that in-group/out-group hostility has roots in our evolution. For example, Michael Tomasello in The Evolution of Agency says that socially normative agency, the kind he attributes to human beings, is tied to the community of which our ancestors were members. Tomasello says that individual humans can’t survive on their own, that they must belong to a group for survival. He attributes this to the inter-group struggle for scarce resources.
Even if this were true for our ancient ancestors, it doesn’t explain the hatreds we see today. Conflicts over religion, national origin, racial differences, aren’t about resources or physical needs. They’re purely abstract, purely created by us humans. Of course it matters to the rich and powerful. But why would it matter to an IT professional or a goat farmer?
What difference does it make to me who you worship or whether you worship anyone or anything? Why would it matter if long ago some Armenian Hatfield got cross-ways with some Turkish McCoy? Why does some Dublin Catholic boy care who some Derry girl worships or how? Name an inter-group conflict and ask what its basis is. It’s not going to be about whether there’s a tree with ripe fruit or a river full of fish. It’s going to be some mental construct.
It seems to me there’s a deeper issue here. If you were to go to Beijing or Delhi or Harare or Buenos Aires and pick a pair of twenty-somethings, I bet you could plop them down in Pittsburg or Mexico City and except for language you wouldn’t notice them as you walked by. They’d have no problem finding food they liked, and they might even learn to love brats or pork in molé sauce.
Killing people over abstract ideas is stupid and pointless. Worse, it’s going to make it impossible to solve the worldwide problems we’ve created with climate breakdown. Right now, there’s pressure on the poor in equatorial regions to move to more temperate climates. Some of the pressure is grotesque governments, some is hunger, some is massive climate change. Think what will happen when the gulf stream stops. The pressure will be the other way, people from the north will want to move south. These problems aren’t solvable if we don’t grow up as a species. These are real problems, not the fake culture war gibberish spouted by the right wing, not abstract ideas about the proper way to worship the proper Deity.
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Thank you.
Does this only discuss movements within Europe, or across the Atlantic too?
Because the influx of immigrants from Armenia, the Balkans, Russia, Poland and elsewhere had a huge impact on places like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland and other cities in the US.
And after 5-10 years seemingly fantastic amounts of money were being sent back to places like Albania and Lithuania from people who found work in US auto plants and steel mills.
Both continents were affected in major ways, but I certainly don’t know the deeper story.
Arendt only discusses migrations in Europe. As you point out, the US was a major beneficiary of these immigrants. Many of them went to work here in Chicago. The family of a good friend moved from Moldavia to New Jersey. Many of them went into the fur business.
I grew up in South Bend, a city full of second and third generation Poles, Hungarians and Italians. They filled the factories of Studebaker and Bendix and other industries which were a big part of the war effort.
Thank you for this brilliant, yet sobering, analysis.
I’m seriously wondering if geoengineering is the only remaining potential damper on climate change. OTOH I expect it would carry high risks of making the situation worse by some unintended consequence.
Nowhere do I see governments approaching this with the necessary crisis response. Nor do I see people striving to reduce their consumption by the 40-60 percent required to stabilize anthropogenic climate change.
I’m by nature a positive person, the current dilemmas at almost every scale, push me the other way.
Geoengineering is not the only remaining potential damper. We’ve given every approach we have now half-hearted commitment at best.
We can do better and fast — the dramatic change to the environment during the lockdown phase of the pandemic in 2020 demonstrated what could happen if governments made a commitment at scale.
What we lack is political will.
I agree 100% that political will is lacking. I’m not aware (though I’d love to hear) of a single government giving climate mitigation/adaptation the necessary priority. I’m not a proponent of, nor have I technical expertise in geoengineering but don’t see action by governments happening forcefully and quickly enough to fix this.
In 2020 a report was published with ‘up to date’ climate projections for Vancouver Island. Extreme summer temperatures (20 y maxima), they said, would reach 36C by 2070 and 37 by 2080. Within a year we had a high of 41; the projections were of date in a year or less! The article in live science linked above (and the paper in Geophysical Letters it cites) made me aware of an impact from the likely extinction of the gulf stream: a 1.5m sea level rise on the eastern seaboard. I’m not sure of the time scale of the termination shock but it sounds catastrophic.
Deer in headlights, heads in the sand, rearranging deck chair on the Titanic, dancing on the edge of the volcano. Metaphors barely do justice to the impending calamity. I’ve been working to make food systems more resilient and less impactful for quite some time and I don’t see the needle moving at all. Absent a global all-out war-footing effort on climate, impacts will rapidly increase. Hence my comment on geoengineering.
If we haven’t seen adequate traction on existing known viable methods, there will be no traction on geoengineering which could cause blowback of unknown effects at scale.
Tech solutionism is problematic — just look at what tech bros thinking they could solve free speech problems with more technology have done to the political environment. Imagine them running amok in the actual environment. (Don’t get me started on what fucking blockchain and crypto has done to energy consumption.)
That’s a sobering assessment for sure. Basically, during the pandemic, the major capital based economic engines of the world did a lot less than they normally do. That meant the human environment became less polluted, less noisy, etc, etc. It also significantly reduced carbon emissions on a global scale. That could be done for a long period of time…but would mean less trucks, cars, less factories, and less profits in current capitalist profit centers…which is why it isn’t happening today, etc.
Note that when energy expenditure, the generation of heat and CO2 emissions goes down, then human R&D into possible solutions also goes down too. We could solve the problem by clamping down but at what cost might that be in the long-term is unclear. And, unfortunately, clarity is not helped when we have business and governmental interests, self-interests in some case, promulgating the notion of catastrophe as something that could be researched or “invested” around. Maybe what it really just calls for is clamping down now…but that’s not where the profits are perceived to be at by the groups running all the shows in the major countries of the world at this point.
And you can add AI to the “don’t get me started” list.
Sorry I’m coming in here late. Reading for first time today.
Geo-engineering does not make sense. I strongly recommend this book by Tom Murphy, “Energy And Human Ambition on a Finite Planet” https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#main to assess how realistic various castles in the sky are.
I have two concerns about geo-engineering. Like many things, such as nuclear power or AI, its potential may be more complicated or dangerous than those hyping it imagine. And its promise may be manipulated by industries to excuse their continued heavy pollution, in the manner that weight loss drugs can excuse the failure to address the public health crisis that is the American diet.
Have you watched Snowpiercer? I expect a high tech solution would look like that or the nifty ideas of introducing cane toads to Australia and Kudzu to the US south.
The smaller disputes during the 40 or so years leading up to WWI, and the disputes immediately following the armistice on 11-11-1918 are fascinating to study, even though largely ignored today. How many of you have heard of the self-proclaimed Republic of Tamrash? It was located in Europe during the 1880’s. Maybe more of you know about the French Cilicia campaign in which the French fought the Turks after WWI, ending in 1921.
These, and countless other smaller disputes, are worth studying and understanding.
thank you for a very interesting post and I would like to add a few comments. I believe the map shown on the splash page dates circa 1850, when most of Europe was a potpourri of principalities. Not until the late 19th century did Europe morph into the axis-allies map of pre WWI, alongside the concept that language and country corresponded. A post on TPM by Josh Marshall at the beginning of the Ukraine-Russia War (sorry no link) delves into the word salad that typified Europe before the big sorting, paraphrased: the Polish aristocracy and elite spoke French and a smattering of Polish, the thin slice of a middle class spoke Polish + maybe a local dialect, the peasants and working class languages ranged from A to Y (Armenian to Yiddish). The elite never spoke to the lower classes, had no means to, and would relay their needs, when needed, through the middle class.
As Ed points out, when nationhood became a thing, this caused a massive flow of migrants when groups found themselves on the wrong side of newly drawn national borders. It also caused a revolution in the arts (from: The Man In The Red Coat by Julian Barnes), as old cultures coalesced into new countries with a search for cultural identity. So Wagner and the ring cycle in Germany, Dvorak and Czech folk music, the whole concept of Russian Literature.
Depressing how the concept of the EU is now at risk of splintering, but important to note that the Western powers have often sabotaged other regions when they have aspired to create pan-nation-states (kind of a contradiction of terms) that would threaten our control of resources. Pan-nation-state – a contradiction in terms using Ed’s definition – but this model, the US model where there is no national language, justice is sometimes blind, cultures and marriages mix, is one that I aspire towards. Ahh, if we could only ban corporations.
Decades ago when I was peaking I had a couple of courses from the philosopher of social science René Girard. Peter Thiel and I were in the same class when we were twenty somethings, I think, Violence and the Sacred. Back then you didn’t know who was going to be spectacular. Thiel is a big supporter of Girard scholarship, though Professor Girard was a liberal, Catholic humanist, if you could pin him down.
You wrote, “It seems to me there’s a deeper issue here. If you were to go to Beijing or Delhi or Harare or Buenos Aires and pick a pair of twenty-somethings, I bet you could plop them down in Pittsburg or Mexico City and except for language you wouldn’t notice them as you walked by. They’d have no problem finding food they liked, and they might even learn to love brats or pork in molé sauce.”
Why do they fight? They are the same! That’s why they shouldn’t fight, but in René Girard’s philosophy, it’s why they do. I don’t even own Violence and the Sacred anymore. I had a box of books stolen from the co-op I lived in a year later that was destroyed in the Loma Prieta earthquake, so it is completely gone. I’m sure of it. Here’s a gloss from Wikipedia on Girard’s ideas that is pretty decent.
> What Girard contributed to this concept is the idea that what is desired fundamentally is not the object itself, but the ontological state of the subject which possesses it, where mimicry is the aim of the competition. What Paris wanted, then, was not Helen, but to be a great king like Menelaus or Agamemnon.
> A person who desires seeks to be like the subject he imitates, through the medium of the object that is possessed by the person he imitates. Girard claims:
> “It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.”
> This was, and remains, a pessimistic view of human life, as it posits a paradox in the very act of seeking to unify and have peace, since the erasure of differences between people through mimicry is what creates conflict, not the differentiation itself.
> Fundamental anthropology
> Since the mimetic rivalry that develops from the struggle for the possession of the objects is contagious, it leads to the threat of violence. Girard himself says, “If there is a normal order in societies, it must be the fruit of an anterior crisis.” Turning his interest towards the anthropological domain, Girard began to study anthropological literature and proposed his second great hypothesis: the scapegoat mechanism, which is at the origin of archaic religion and which he sets forth in his second book Violence and the Sacred (1972), a work on fundamental anthropology.
> If two individuals desire the same thing, there will soon be a third, then a fourth. This process quickly snowballs. Since from the beginning desire is aroused by the other (and not by the object) the object is soon forgotten and the mimetic conflict transforms into a general antagonism. At this stage of the crisis the antagonists will no longer imitate each other’s desires for an object, but each other’s antagonism. They wanted to share the same object, but now they want to destroy the same enemy.
> So, a paroxysm of violence will then focus on an arbitrary victim and a unanimous antipathy would, mimetically, grow against him. The brutal elimination of the victim will reduce the appetite for violence that possessed everyone a moment before, and leaves the group, suddenly appeased and calm. The victim lies before the group, appearing simultaneously as the origin of the crisis and as the one responsible for this miracle of renewed peace. He becomes sacred, that is to say the bearer of the prodigious power of defusing the crisis and bringing peace back.
> Girard believes this to be the genesis of archaic religion, that is, ritual sacrifice as the repetition of the original event, of myth as an account of this event, of the taboos that forbid access to all the objects at the origin of the rivalries that degenerated into this absolutely traumatizing crisis. This religious elaboration takes place gradually over the course of the repetition of the mimetic crises whose resolution brings only a temporary peace. The elaboration of the rites and of the taboos constitutes a kind of “empirical” knowledge about violence.
That is really interesting. It’s a nice contrast to the idea we get in Tomasello, where inter group cooperation is the norm, suggesting that even in the group there will be rivalries over nothing much.
If you read “Violence and the Sacred” at some point in your wonderful series, I will buy the book again!
It might be interesting here. We see GOP making propaganda with show trials with Sussman or with Hunter Biden. I think sacrificial crisis and scapegoating mechanism have become the basis of GOP propaganda. It creates a social reality of what Girard calls mimetic crisis or Stalin called the terror state. I think there is a kind of concerted global production now, a self-perpetuating, ersatz, Orwellian crisis that feels like the end of the world, or once you start looking at it phenomenologically, you have to be careful not to stay grounded in evidence.
It worries me a lot that Peter Thiel has been teaching René Girard to Silicon Valley Tech-Bros for years, and now we see a new kind of sophistication in GOP propaganda where game theory to oppose it is impossible. For him Girard’s ideas have been a management bible. In this article (https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-on-rene-girards-influence-2014-11) Thiel reveals he has a religious framework in his appreciation, but for my part I think he might be coming from a place like the Grand Inquisitor or Hotel California, but I am a Methodist.
“liberal Catholic”- maybe some pundit will prioritize demographic voting shifts that led to the current US situation. I’d nominate to the list- the majority, White Catholic vote (those who attend church regularly) shifting from Democratic to GOP. (Btw- Italian Catholics are given credit for the election of FDR.)
Immediately following the reading of Arendt’s Chap. 37, read David Kertzer’s 2022 book, “The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler.” Then, review the almost $1,000,000 spent by dioceses in Ohio in August for a GOP anti-democracy ballot issue.
When Tony Evers ran against Trump-endorsed Tim Michels in Wisconsin, we witnessed the future’s two directions. While Michels was trustee of his family’s foundation, it funded the Veritas Society which is the subject of yesterday’s Politico article focused on data gathering about individuals visiting Planned Parenthood. Michels is anti-abortion, against same sex marriage and in favor of tax support for religious schools equal to funding for public schools. If politicized, Republican, highly influential Catholics achieve their agenda, the only rights Americans will be able to keep will be those conferred by the the theocracy of the Catholic Church. Those ads you’re seeing on T.V. for Hallow Catholic prayer app – be aware the app was created by pro-Russia, pro-trump, pro-authoritarian JD Vance who converted to Catholicism with similar timing to his political ambitions.
Let’s not argue with Catholicism. For me the tax exemption of American religious organizations is like the border, I really don’t care. Tesla is bigger than the Catholic Church. As far as I can tell the Catholic Church is a money losing operation.
There used to be a Protestant view in which the divine right of kings or popes to tell you something important is bullshit. Now have these Seven Mountains weirdos too, on the Protesant side, Mike Flynn. What church does he go to?
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he is Catholic or Church of God Holiness. It is just as likely he is a Pentacostal Snake Handler as an Opus Dei weirdo in a hair shirt. Both of these religious movements in America seem to be aligning with Putin to allow him to rape Ukraine.
I remember back in the 1990’s I had a rich aunt. In the United Methodist Church the richest congregants across the country were competing then to spend the most money building the biggest new church in Russia, where all of those poor people had been living under communism without Jesus for so long.
I think in the 1990s and 2000s, ten thousand rich American religious leaders traveled to build churches and do missionary work. Some of them made friends with the Orthodox Priests, telling them how wonderful it is to eat an orange every day. Many of those were FSB agents. I don’t know! This is a scurrilous accusation, but I imagine there were many honey traps in hotel rooms for proximal and distal reasons. I can’t attribute it. Where did this massive recruitment operation happen? It’s just a theory, but what have you got?
What I am saying is that maybe all this religious conspiracy doesn’t need to be a moral commitment and mission from God so much as compromise and confusion within a seedy story for some, who have then stampeded the dopes.
Instead of secret Catholic cabals, I find it more plausible that a bunch of American donors and missionaries got compromised in Russia in the 1990’s and 2000’s, a network now willing to sell out the country. I think other large kompromat collectors, such as American oligarchs in the tech and social media sector, are beginning to recognize this new form of wealth too, for the age of digital acquisition, storage and reproduction, but a piece of kompromat would be as strong over a person within a close religious community as over a person with a public reputation.
That is just my theory but it is based on the fact that strip clubs love the GOP convention. I think even the GOP’s own opposition research, has transferred to Putin, now, though. Kompromat is transferred to the large collector along the lines of authority kompromat creates. Kompromat is a form of intellectual property that changes value from power capital to scandal or propaganda.
Imagine some donor from Wisconsin who owns a car dealership on a group along with a preacher and other congregants. They would have no idea that kompromat is something big investors collect on everyone, especially now in the digital age, because it’s difficult or impossible to know which piece of kompromat will appreciate in value. Putin has become the richest person in the world in kompromat this way, I think, from his own society and from programmatic production upon nearly every person of any influence or means from Western countries who has travelled to Russia in the last twenty five years. The Soviet apparatus never stopped collecting, and Putin’s kompromat draws all the rest towards it now by magnetic attraction.
Variants-(1) the religious right and those dancing with them who may have an affinity for the Putin model – the strong White man who loathes democracy-possible examples, Robert Hansen, Sen. JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Charles Koch, Michael Flynn, etc.)
Or, (2) the religious right who (a) impose authoritarianism with the goal of “order” (b) who want unfettered capitalism so that they can tap funds for their churches and retain power in society and, (c) who like the superiority that patriarchy confers on them.
It may matter which classification applies. However, the clear and immediate danger is the power of the well-organized, powerful, right wing Catholic political behemoth. Unless the blood letting of tax dollars to the Catholic Church and its organizations is stopped soon, there will be no going back. Concerted public anger can have impact as was seen with Issue 1 in Aug. in Ohio. Everyone who wants democracy to survive must join the fight against education vouchers and religious charter schools.
In terms of traitors for Putin operating in the US, that’s the role of government enforcement. They can, singularly, bring them to account. Other than that, one hopes for a rumor campaign that makes the politician/traitors, persona non grata at the ballot box.
I think there are many reactionary ‘forces’ at play being harnessed in a coordinated way. Reactionary force is like a sociological fuel. Reaction of white supremacy is a powerful force. Reactionary Catholicism goes back to the Inquisition. But there are many Southern whites and Catholics who wouldn’t have anything to do with this. Orthodox reaction is also driving White Russian fascism, even though Dostoevsky understood the Grand Inquisitor is serving Satan. In Ivan Ilyin’s fascism, Putin’s favorite philosopher, the nation is Christ purified through religious terror over the individuals within it who can’t be trusted to resist Satan on their own. There are many people who are coming to believe the American government should not be a democracy, anymore, but what is happening is more complex sociologically. I think we can’t help but try to attribute groups like we do people, but groups don’t have cognition but dynamics. Maybe I have misunderstood you.
What is happening in DC and New York’s courts is of great interest because it’s got the cache of being sexy.
Nationally, democracy is being lost at the state level as you speculated, in your comment, forces “harnessing in a coordinated way.”
This week, the Catholic News Agency reported that the North Carolina General Assembly gave Belmont Abbey College, $9 mil. from its 2023-24 assembly budget for the school’s performing arts center. I don’t know how much accountability attaches to money doled out to religious institutions. The impression that Catholic organizations are under financial duress is undercut by Belmont Abbey’s announcement that they raised $100,000,000 two years ahead of schedule.
We agree groups have dynamics. Adding, wealthy religious right individuals e.g. GOP Catholic, Paul Weyrich (Koch-funded), have agendas. Weyrich’s training manual posted at Theocracy Watch calls for a parallel school system to destroy public schools. But, unfortunately, the topic of public schools isn’t sexy to sophisticated pundits.
wetzel-
“Secret Catholic cabals”…. a conspiracy above my pay grade?
My knowledge is about Catholic organizations like Catholic Conferences that are highly transparent (publicly available websites) and the transparency of people like Don McGahn and Leonard Leo in getting judges on SCOTUS.
Back in 1999 in Ohio, there was a behind-closed-door thing but the Akron Beacon Journal wrote about it, “Whose choice? How school choice began in Ohio.” (Dec. 14, 1999)
In terms of current journalists who appear to like and to reinforce an image of Catholics as a whole being liberal and uninvolved in politics (granted, it’s hard to pull it off given anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ successes but, they manage), I assumed that phenomenon was individual loyalists operating independently as tribalists.
Flynn stated, “only one U.S. religion.” He is Cath. Also Cath., John Eastman (Pres. of Robert P George’s National Organization for Marriage- btw-Cleta Mitchell was NOM’s attorney) and, Vermuele, Harvard Constitutional law prof “liberalism’s most dangerous critic,” who advocates for Cath. preference in immigration.
NOM’s George (Manhattan Declaration- Princeton law prof.) founded the James Madison Centers.
Tim Busch, Legatus’ founder (Cath. CEO’s) favorably compared Catholicism to Charles Koch’s book. McConahey (Playing God) details Koch’s politicking aligned with right wing Caths. 12 Jones Day lawyers were in Trump’s admin., e.g. Don McGahn. U.S. has a Cath. Medical Assn and Cath. Lawyers Assn. One in 6 hospitals are owned by Cath. orgs. The U.S.’ 3rd largest employer, gratis taxes, is Cath. orgs. Cath. Conferences, the highly successful political arm of bishops in almost every state, hire lobbyists and have sophisticated voter mobilization efforts.
4 public perceptions advantageous to Cath. power (1) the church lacks money – $14 mil. spent in KS and OH in 2022 -23 supporting 3 GOP ballot issues. (2) Christian nationalism excludes Caths. – L Brent Bozell IV convicted for Jan 6. (3) Hillsdale College is protestant – Cath. conservative activism on campus is possibly equal (4) Caths didn’t initiate school privatization laws. Colorado Cath. Conference’s Exec. Dir. was an exec. with EdChoice and worked for the Koch network. A. C. Barrett’s friend, Notre Dame Prof. Nicole Garnet, is the most influential legal scholar advancing religious charter schools (1st is Cath., in Okla.)
That is evidence there are lots of Catholics. You know who I don’t see on your list? Mormons. Mormons are stronger to temptation, and they believe the United States Constitution is divinely inspired.
Proportion?
How many right wing Mormons are on SCOTUS?
How many Republican Mormon Governors are leading red states?
A couple of points- (1) McConahey told an interviewer that there are some people who will never be able to separate two things- the Catholic religion, full stop, from the politicking of bishops/wealthy right wing Catholics advancing the GOP agenda in the public square.
(2) People on the northeast coast, regardless of religious sect, appear to be electing Democrats. Maybe, the sects lack influence. The electoral college-rich flyover states will elect the next president. What impact on voting
does the Catholic Church have in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, etc? What amount do you want to bet
on the outcome of the next presidential election, ignoring the Catholic vote? Btw- Pew reported that 63% of White Catholics who attend church regularly voted for Trump in 2020, a 3% increase from 2016.
In terms of an outcome indicator- review legislative success with school choice in the red states. In states like Ohio, almost all voucher money goes to Catholic schools. (Flyover states- voucher money for Mormon schools, how much would that amount to?)
I guess then all you can do is go up and softly kiss a Catholic person on the lips.
Putin is swimming against the tide trying to establish a Pan-Slavic new Russian Empire. Conquering and incorporating Ukraine into an intermediary USSR Lite is his necessary first step. Increasing Mongol and Turkization of current multi ethnic population in Russia is an emotional driver for his westward move.
Modest western military support for Ukraine has stymied him but if trump and his obedient GOP successful kneecap US military support for Ukraine there could be a catastrophic collapse of Ukraine nation. I think Poland and some other NATO bordering states will involve themselves increasingly directly to prevent this which could lead to a NATO vs Russia direct engagement. A Ukraine collapse will unleash another post war migration surge west.
The great question is why trump is so hell bent on undermining NATO and handing over Ukraine for Putin’s benefit? It has to be more than a few trump towers in Russia and an embarrassing golden shower video doesn’t have much power over someone who is shameless.
PS trump’s promises to deport millions of Americans who “look illegal” including US born children is pure central & east European ethnic cleansing of this historic era. People who aren’t terrified of his public statements just don’t get it.
You can never tell with Trump, how much he understands Putin, but what you’re describing is a mechanism leading to the transformation of NATO and Russia into Oceania and Eurasia. Maybe that is Putin’s and Xi’s multi-polar world, the Orwell future. If Americans become involved on the ground in the genocide of Ukraine it will constitute Russian and American terror the GOP will form into eschatological crisis, and the United States will develop a mirror fascism. Putin, Trump and Xi will each be able to manage the nuclear terror for each other. They would run the world like a protection racket. I have a dark picture of Putin.
Er, it’s not that clear what will happen.
It is difficult to fit France into this framework, as c.1880 only 6% of the population of metropolitan France spoke French; and it was divided in religion among Catholics, protestants, Jews and skeptics; and politically between royalists (of 2 varieties) and republicans; and economically among peasants, petit bourgeois, and industrialists (owners and workers).
Any political framework that does not have room for France is problematic.
Plus, Robert Conquest would quarrel with the notion that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen meant that the state would ensure participation of all. (He spends the first half of ‘Reflections on a Ravaged Century’ disassembling that idea — or as he puts it, Idea.)
Gonna’ need a link or citation to support that claim re 6%, let alone a definition of “metropolitan France.”
Metropolitan France would refer to the metropole of the French Empire (the state or central government exercising control over an empire). More precisely in the late nineteenth century, the metropole of the French Empire was European France. Although the 6% number seems exaggerated, Eugen Weber, in his monumental Peasants into Frenchmen (1976), makes the following point about Rural France based upon contemporary data as of the 1860’s: “The Third Republic found a France in which French was a foreign language to half its citizens.” Weber, Peasants into Frenchman, 68. According to Weber, one of the ways of forging a French national identity was to engage in a reformation of the way language was taught in French schools.
You only have four comments under your belt here, so perhaps you’re not familiar with how this site’s comments work.
When I ask — especially as a moderator/contributor — for a commenter to provide a link, I mean first that they should have provided one to begin with if not a citation to a source. Secondly, I mean for that commenter to fix the deficiency.
In Harry Eagar’s case as a self-professed former news person, he knows better and he’s been here long enough now to understand this expectation.
Thanks for the generous assist but in this case it’s a bit too helpful.
It’s in one of Theodore Zeldin’s books, probably ‘The Political System of Napoleon III.’
Sorry, I don’t have a page citation to a book I read over 30 years ago.
It might seem surprising to people who do not know Europe, but as late as 1960, my French teacher, who was from Lyon, made a point of assuring us that we were NOT going to learn to speak what the Parisians spoke.
A Lyonnaise would say that, as Parisian French replaced the French spoken in Lyon as the official version. Many French speakers in and outside France probably agree with her. But then she wasn’t teaching in a French state school.
A quick review of information from wiki and elsewhere suggest the 6% number is inaccurate.
Circa 1880, Metropolitan France included mainland France (pop. 36 million) and Algeria (pop. 3 million). France was then the third most populous country in Europe, after Russia and Germany. So, yes, any framework that leaves out France, either Metropolitan France or the French empire, would be inadequate.
In 1880, about 25% of the population spoke French as their primary language. That number went up dramatically, pre- and post-WWI, as state schools proliferated and mandated instruction in Parisian French. Of the main non-French languages, Occitan was the main language in the southern quarter of France, Breton (Celtic) in Brittany, Alsatian (Germanic) in Alsace, and Basque (along the Pyrenees).
Establishing a common language through mandatory instruction in state schools was not unique to France. It was part of the widespread, 19th and 20th century nation-building enterprise. Germany and Italy are two other European examples.
Empires insisted on using their home country language throughout their empires, although formal instruction in anything was often limited. Education was considered an expensive luxury across the globe until late in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Keeping indigenous populations ignorant was also a way to control them. The American South is a good example. The English and French empires are others. The Japanese, for example, only officially permitted Japanese to be used or taught in the occupied territories of Korea and Taiwan.
Notoriously, children in central Africa were taught to read from primers whose first sentence was, ‘Nos ancetres, les Gaulois . . .’
But the French Empire was self-consciously different from other European colonizers in that its ‘mission civilizatrice’ intended to Frenchify the world.
You are correct about the limits of schooling. When Tunisians tried to start a modern high school mid-19th c., the French authorities would not permit it.
Other empires were anti-education. The sociologist Lamont Lindstrom, working in Micronesia in the ’60s, was surprised to find that the islanders had a positive view of the Japanese. When he asked, he was told, ‘They taught our children to read,’ something neither the Spaniards nor the Germans had done.
(No links; but the Pacific story is from ‘Island Encounters: Black and White Memories of the Pacific War,’ by Lindstrom and Geoffrey White.)
French colonial administrators may have described their mission as civilizing (Europeanizing) the indigenous peoples over whom they claimed dominion – it sounds better than rape and pillage – but not many subject to it would have agreed. The same with every other colonial enterprise.
‘Civilize ’em with a Krag’ was a common slogan around 1900. (Krag-Jorgensen, an infantry rifle used then.)
But colonialism was not — as seems to be almost universally believed nowadays — a European phenomenon.
My grandson, who is in 4th grade, was taught this year about the glorious (and at least partially real) empire of Haji Mansa Musa. He was NOT taught (by the school, anyway) that Musa financed his hajj by selling 14,000 women slaves in Cairo.
(Not a fact you will find in Wikipedia, but it’s in Hugh Thomas’s “The Slave Trade.”)
I wouldn’t comment if my only sources were wikipedia, or anecdotal ones. I was suggesting how readily one could find a more accurate percentage of French speakers in Metropolitan France, c. 1880.
As to your point that colonialism is not a European-only phenomenon, I agree. But who dominates it depends on the time period. European and American empires did (and do) operate on a global scale.
Zeldin did not give a source but he is an authority with some substance. I imagine it depends upon how you treat patois.
I went to high school with a boy from Italy. His father and brothers had come to the USA to do the terrazzo work at the new North Carolina capitol building. His native language was ‘Italian’ but according to him, the only people in Italy he could converse with were from the neighboring mountain in Lombardy.
I don’t think he was exaggerating much.
The Wikipedia remark was directed at Rayne. I know it will come as a shock to young people but there is information not available on the innertubes.
Which is why citations are expected when links aren’t available. -__-
I am paraphrasing from a website “How Parisian French Became Standard” (https://alphaomegatranslations.com/foreign-language/how-parisian-french-became-standard/). It doesn’t read like AI writing, but I might have the most likely sentences instead of the facts. However, this article is leading me to think maybe Dr. Conforti’s original source relied on a stricter definition of French than the modern definition. Maybe the truth is that Parisians used to be even bigger snobs about French than today. I wouldn’t know. I speak English. English is a better language than French for poetry. It has all the latinate jewelry but stronger bones.
According to this article, it wasn’t until the 1880’s that “Metropolitan French” was regularized and taught throughout France, and other dialects were basically considered “anything but French” but “degenerate” languages, such as Breton, Picard, Basque, and Provençal. Maybe the definition of French has grown over the years so that some dialects would be French today but not fifty or a hundred years ago.
A little closer to home, when my Mom was in elementary school in southwest Louisiana, the state outlawed the use of French (the Cajun version) in school. The kids who only spoke French at home pissed themselves until they could ask to go to the toilet in what passed for English in southwest LA.
In her later years she could still speak French and was able to travel to France. She could communicate in her patois when in rural areas, but could not communicate in Paris.
The older generation of Japanese nisei in Hawaii had a similar experience. They would claim not to know Japanese if in the presence of educated Japanese of Japan, because they spoke like hicks. Their parents and grandparents were farmers from, predominantly, Hiroshima prefecture.
Please, please, PLEASE do not speak out of your ass without links or citations about the experience of persons of color.
I am speaking about people that I worked with for 25 years.
It was delicate. None ever said to me, ‘That’s my motivation’; but their friends and colleagues, also Nisei or Sansei, would explain to me, ‘That’s why she pretended to you not to know Japanese.’
I have further thoughts, but I am biting my tongue.
I have issei, nissei, and sansei family members in Hawaii. Just let them speak for themselves or find a citation because motivations can vary from family to family.
If you think it’s delicate, all the more reason not to attempt to convey it.
Please do not make assumptions about my ancestry.
If you’re not BIPOC, don’t speak about their lived experiences — more specifically, if you’re not of Japanese heritage, don’t speak about their experiences.
So far you’ve treated them as “other” and it’s not appreciated. We’re done here with this line of discussion.
I don’t know if you have read it, but the book “The Lucifer Principle” by Howard Bloom for me illustrates the roots of cultural/societal struggles that seem pointless on their face. We are not dealing with individual, rational actors, but an inchoate mob that can be led and swayed.
I haven’t read Bloom, but that’s pretty close to what I think. I often think of the Napoleonic Wars. Why would some English dairyman care whether Napoleon ruled or some in-bred king? Even by then, it wouldn’t matter at all. The only people who benefit are the filthy rich and their courtiers. The peasants die so Wellington can have a portrait in the Hermitage. It doesn’t seem like much of a bargain.
There was the whole barges and other vessels collected in the Channel ports for an invasion of the UK thingy.
While the milkmaid actually milking the cow might not have understood, the dairy farmer likely undrsood very well how the Berlin and Milan Decrees affected him/
Because of the uncertainty not just from cultural displacement but because of the potential for actual physical displacement.
Ed, thank you for this.
And for the comment asking about the effect of WW1 in other parts of the world, I have to say that I read “Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World” by Margaret MacMillan about a decade ago, and found myself asking “are there ANY current geopolitical problems we can’t trace back to Versailles?”
I’ve even read (elsewhere, I think) that Ho Chi Minh was working at a Paris hotel, and sent paperwork on behalf of what was then French Indochina requesting self-determination. Shockingly, the French didn’t grant it.
I would say the problems that preexisted Versailles continue to exist and were made worse by it. Before Versailles, many of them were considered problems internal to one empire or another, rather than to the international legal system itself.
The most prominent were probably in the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires. But the problems were not confined to Europe: The British, French, and Dutch empires, for example, contained their own, but were mostly outside of Europe – except for Ireland. Then there was Belgium’s Congo.
Very true! I could more reasonably said
But, seriously, (I’m doing this from memory, but) Russia/the Soviet Union weren’t even there (they had checked out after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk early in 1918), and the Chinese were at Versailles but didn’t sign the treaty, because it transferred German possessions in China to Japan, and that angered China. The list goes on.
Versailles wasn’t about a more just and more peaceful world order, because the first priority was to negotiate peace between countries that had been shooting at each other in November 1918. That’s understandable, but unfortunate. And it seems to me that we should spend a LOT more time teaching about the effects of Versailles in American schools!
One structural problem with Versailles was that it was run by colonial powers trying hard to keep their own empires while dismembering the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian ones. Wilson’s egalitarian rhetoric, for an empire that had grown larger after the Spanish-American war, did not help things. The reference up thread to Ho Chi Minh being in Paris at that time, which is true, is a good example of where Wilson’s rhetoric lost out to real politik.
More generally, American schools have a hard time teaching American history. Texas and Florida are good examples of doing it badly. Teaching the histories of various empires, including the American one, would be harder, but it’s an aspiration. Given the right’s refusal to address the perspectives of American people of color, I’m not optimistic about extending a similar discussion to people’s overseas.
The general understanding of the pre=Versailles world is very, very low, as just about any thumb-sucking article about IsraelPalestine in the slick magazines will demonstrate.
In these, you will sooner or later encounter a reference to colonialism, and it will always mean the 26 years of the British Mandste, never the 300 years of Ottoman colonialism.
“These problems aren’t solvable if we don’t grow up as a species.” No person or group can grow up or move on if s/he or it is fixated. From what I can make of history some fixated person or some fixated group is always trying to impose that fixated person’s or group’s will and/or beliefs on someone else. Conflict always arises because who wants someone else’s will or beliefs imposed on them?
There are two remarkably intelligent and accomplished persons on this blog that are currently trying to impose their opinions on each other in a degenerating spat. Neither is going to change. The spat is intensifying. How can we expect the world to move on if they can’t move on and find a way to co-exist, as one tiny example?
“imposed… beliefs… ” Thoughts about the Judicial Crisis Network and Adeel Mangi’s nomination?
A profile that explains the power behind Ann Corkery (JCN) is posted at DeSmog’s website.
“Mole sauce” is redundant, like “with au jus” and “The Los Angeles Angels.” I once enjoyed the unmitigated pleasure of living next door to a Oaxacan family. The grandma would send over a quart of mole negro and roasted chicken a couple of times a year. At Christmas there was mole rojo. God I miss them.
I have just been reading the letters of Pliny the Younger. A pretty fair nation/state commentator who lived during the cross currents of Paganism and Christianity.
He recognizes that these competing ideologies are destroying the unanimity of the empire.
He greatly laments what was once a multicultural empire devolving in front of him because of the conflict.
He also says his government is populated by incompetents and wonders where all of the great leaders have gone.
This was a great post Ed, let’s have more!!
Oh, one more thing…I think a lot of people misunderstand Putin when they say he wants to reconstitute the Russian Empire.
I think he wants to recreate the USSR. Because I don’t recall Warsaw or East Berlin ever being governed by Peter or Catherine the Great.
Warsaw was Russian, off and on, from 1772.
It is my opinion — idiosyncratic, I know — that even stalin was in thrall to the boundaries of the tsarist empire. Evidence: the Red Army never — until 1979 — set foot outside the borders of the tsarist empire except in pursuing defeated invaders, and it took every opportunity to reach those tsarist borders.
The behavior of Stalin following the victory at Khalkin Gol is instructive. He restored the old border scrupulously.
Also, Stalin withdrew — with ill grace — from Iran and Austria (never parts of the tsarist empire) but his heirs were not so willing closer to home.
The brigade in Cuba is a special case, perhaps arguing against my position.
I do not think there is much difference between ‘restoring the tsarist empire’ and ‘restoring the USSR.’ No doubt in my mind that Putin wants Georgia and Armenia
I imagine what Putin ignores is the survival of Russia beyond a nuclear shell of military power but is getting some form of warning information from economic and military advisors that Russia is losing population and therefore won’t be able to sustain a significant industrial or military population base at some near future point (and care for its own population going forward.) It is sort of like the fall of Sparta.You can see from the attached that Russia is significantly losing population and is projected to drop from 146 million in 2020 to 112 million. Putin may want to recreate the USSR by, e.g., annexing Ukraine but it far more important for him to pick up Ukraine’s population of about 40-45 million and maintain population. That is probably a long-term futile gesture because the internal strife in Ukraine after any Russian annexation would offset any real economic gains. Currently everything Putin does is designed to reduce population growth and insure Russia’s demise. He’s an idiot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth
The true short-sighted silliness of those that oppose funding Ukraine’s war is that for a relatively few billion, the US can pretty well assure Ukraine’s separate existence and accelerate Russia’s population loss (killing off its young men in the military like Napoleon killed off “the flower of France” in his time) and its industrial erosion.
Drop from 146MM in 2020 to 112MM in 2100 – 76 years from now! Russia’s military generals and planners should be singing Sam Smith to Putin – Writing’s On The Wall”
https://genius.com/Sam-smith-writings-on-the-wall-lyrics
I don’t usually venture into the book disucssion threads, but this one piqued my interest.
Firstly, I think the reason why Arendt focuses on nation-states in Europe is that Europe is the main area that nation-states even exist. I’m not aware of any exhaustive list, but I believe states in Africa and South-east Asia would qualify, and perhaps some in the Middle-East as well, but most of these were not states at that point in time.
When it comes to WW1, I can heartily recommend Byron Farwell’s The Great War in Africa: 1914-1918, which has an interesting take on the in-/out-group dilemma. According to Farwell, the European colonial administrations didn’t envision the war creeping into their theatre, since it was necessary to show a unified and civilzed front towards the “natives”. Needless to say, this didn’t hold, and the first offensive actions of the war actually took place in Africa. Personally I found it very interesting to read about how different the approach to colonial administration was, and Germany was the only nation that used local forces for more than carrying equipment; The British Empire even important waves of conscript troops from India.
The early Soviet Union did something similar – the official position was that every one of the many ethnicities within the union should have:
– a homeland, aka an SSR, autonomous republic, whatever fits
– their own government, which speaks their language
– their own schools
– a writing system in order to preserve their language and culture
This led to cyrillic being adapted to a lot of previously unwritten languages and a short lived Jewish autonomous republic.
Of course Stalin put an end to this.
Great article. You really should post it to twitter.
We are still living in a post-WW1 world.