Vision of a Multipolar World – Tudor

The Vision of a Multipolar World

(Excerpt from “The Philosophy of Identity”)

By Lucian Tudor

 

The theory of a multipolar world has been increasingly popularized in recent times by Alexander Dugin, to whom it is widely attributed.[61] However, it should be remembered that this concept has a longer history, and can be found not only in the thought of other Russian thinkers, but also explicitly in the works of Carl Schmitt and Alain de Benoist, and more implicitly in the works of certain Identitarians such as Pierre Krebs.[62]

The theory of a multipolar world is grounded, in great part, in Carl Schmitt’s ideas in The Nomos of the Earth. In this work, the first nomos refers to the pre-colonial order which was marked by the isolation of nations from each other. The second nomos was the global order of sovereign nation-states established upon the Age of Discovery. The third nomos was the “bipolar” order established after World War II, where the world was divided into two poles (Communist or Soviet and Western or American). With the end of the Cold War, the “unipolar moment” occurred in history, where the United States became the only dominating superpower, and in which the “Western” liberal model spread its influence across the entire Earth. The fourth nomos has not yet developed: it is an open question where, increasingly, the options become either the hegemony of a single power and model (currently the Western one) or the creation of a multipolar world.[63]

The theory of the multipolar world is marked by a rejection of the “West,” which, it must be emphasized, is not a reference to Western European civilization as a whole, but a specific formulation of Western European civilization founded upon liberalism, egalitarianism, and individualism. Alexander Dugin and the present-day Eurasianists, in a manner almost identical to that of the Identitarians, distinguish the liberal “West” from true European culture, posing Europe and the West as two antagonistic entities.[64] Due to globalism and Western cultural imperialism, the system of the liberal “West,” in contrast to traditional European culture, has increasingly harmed not only the identities of European peoples, but also numerous non-European peoples: “The crisis of identity . . . has scrapped all previous identities—civilizational, historical, national, political, ethnic, religious, cultural, in favor of a universal planetary Western-style identity—with its concept of individualism, secularism, representative democracy, economic and political liberalism, cosmopolitanism and the ideology of human rights.”[65] Thus, both the Western European Identitarians and Eurasianists advocate the idea of a genuine Europe which allies with non-Europeans to combat the “Western” system:

Both the French New Right as well as the Russian one advocate a decentralized federal Europe (to a Europe of a hundred flags) and, beyond the Westernized idea of Europe, for a Eurasian Empire formed by ethnocultural regions, putting a view on countries of the Third World which supposedly embody the primitive and original communities, traditional and rooted, which are ultimately conceived as natural allies against the New World Order homogenizer of the universal, egalitarian, and totalitarian liberalism.[66]

The vision of the multipolar world means combating and putting an end to the ideological hegemony of liberalism (as well as its concomitants, individualism, egalitarianism, universalism, and globalism) and to the economic and political hegemony of the West. Multipolarity means that each country and civilization is given the right and freedom to choose its own destiny, to affirm its own unique cultural and ethnic identity, to choose its own form of politics and economics, and to possess its own sovereign existence, free from the hegemony of others. This means that in the multipolar world, each nation has the right to determine their own policies and to join or remain independent from a federalist or imperial state, just as it also means that larger and more powerful states (superpowers) do not have the right to interfere in the affairs of other countries and civilizations.

According to Dugin, “Multi-polarity should be based on the principle of equity among the different kinds of political, social and economic organisations of these nations and states. Technological progress and a growing openness of countries should promote dialogue amongst, and the prosperity of, all peoples and nations. But at the same time it shouldn’t endanger their respective identities.”[67] Part of multipolar theory is the importance of a process called “modernization without Westernization,” whereby the various non-Western peoples of the world scientifically and technologically advance without combining progress with the adoption of the cosmopolitan liberal Western model and without losing their unique cultural identity. Thus, the values of traditional society can be reconciled with what is positive in modern progress to create a new social and cultural order where the basically negative “modernity” is overcome, thus achieving the envisioned “postmodernity.” This model is, of course, also offered to Western European nations as well.[68]

In the multipolar scheme, the true Europe (grounded in the heritage of Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Latin, Slavic, and other traditions) rises to take its place among the other cultures of the world. Each culture will overcome the individualist, cosmopolitan, and universalist West, reassert its own identity, and establish a secure world order where each respects the identity of the other; the universum will be vanquished to create a pluriversum. At its foundation, the theory of the multipolar world means the restoration and defense of ethnocultural identities in the world and defending the values of tradition, ethnos, spirituality, and community.

Therefore, it implies allowing different peoples (ethnic groups, cultures, races) to live autonomously in their own territories and to resist mixing. This further means encouraging the cooperation between all peoples to achieve this world order and to resolve the problems caused by the liberal-egalitarian and globalist system (such as the problems of immigration and “multiculturalism”) in the most practical and humane way. For that reason, the theory of the multipolar world is not only compatible with Identitarianism, it is an essential part of it; Multipolarism and Identitarianism are two sides of the same coin. The ultimate international mission of the Identitarian movement is the creation of a multipolar world order—a world in which, as Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier declared, we will see “the appearance of thousands of auroras, i.e., the birth of sovereign spaces liberated from the domination of the modern.”[69]

Notes:

[61] Alexander Dugin’s most famous work in this regard is Теория многополярного мира (Мoscow: Евразийское движение, 2012). We should note that this work is currently more accessible to a Western European audience through its French translation: Pour une théorie du monde multipolaire (Nantes: Éditions Ars Magna, 2013). Explanations of the theory of the multipolar world can also be found in German in Dugin, Konflikte der Zukunft: Die Rückkehr der Geopolitik (Kiel: Arndt-Verlag, 2014), and in Spanish in ¿Qué es el eurasismo? Una conversación de Alain de Benoist con Alexander Dugin (Tarragona: Ediciones Fides, 2014), which is the Spanish translation of L’appel de l’Eurasie (Paris: Avatar Éditions, 2013).

[62] See for example Alain de Benoist, Carl Schmitt Today: Terrorism, “Just” War, and the State of Emergency (London: Arktos, 2013), 104, and Krebs, Fighting for the Essence, 20–30. Concerning other Russian thinkers, see Leonid Savin’s comments on multipolar theory in the interview with Robert Steuckers’s Euro-Synergies: “Establish a Multipolar World Order: Interview with Mr. Leonid Savin of the International Eurasian Movement,” Euro-Synergies, March 25, 2013, http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2013/03/22/interview-with-mr-leonid-savin.html.

[63] See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003).

[64] Concerning the views of the Identitarians, see: Alain de Benoist, “The ‘West’ Should Be Forgotten,” The Occidental Observer, April 21, 2011, http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/04/the-%e2%80%9cwest%e2%80%9d-should-be-forgotten/; Guillaume Faye, “Cosmopolis: The West As Nowhere,” Counter-Currents Publishing, July 6, 2012, http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/cosmopolis/; Tomislav Sunic, “The West against Europe,” The Occidental Observer, June 2, 2013, http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/06/the-west-against-europe/; Krebs, Fighting for the Essence, 31ff. Concerning Dugin’s views in particular, see his approving reference to Benoist’s distinction between Europe and the West in “Counter-Hegemony in Theory of Multi-Polar World,” The Fourth Political Theory, n.d., http://www.4pt.su/en/content/counter-hegemony-theory-multi-polar-world.

[65] Alexander Dugin, “Civilization as Political Concept: Interview with Alexander Dugin by Natella Speranskaya,” Euro-Synergies, June 13, 2012, http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2012/06/09/civilization-as-political-concept.html.

[66] Jesús J. Sebastián, “Alexander Dugin: la Nueva Derecha Rusa, entre el Neo-Eurasianismo y la Cuarta Teoría Política,” Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, no. 70 (May 2014): 7. http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n___70._dugin.

[67] Alexander Dugin, “The Greater Europe Project,” Open Revolt, December 24, 2011, http://openrevolt.info/2011/12/24/the-greater-europe-project/.

[68] A good overview of the theory of the multipolar world can be found in English in Alexander Dugin, “The Multipolar World and the Postmodern,” Journal of Eurasian Affairs 2, no. 1 (2014): 8–12, and “Multipolarism as an Open Project,” Journal of Eurasian Affairs 1, no. 1 (2013): 5–14. This journal is issued online at http://www.eurasianaffairs.net/.

[69] Benoist and Champetier, Manifesto for a European Renaissance, 14.

 

—————

Excerpt from: Tudor, Lucian. “The Philosophy of Identity: Ethnicity, Culture, and Race in Identitarian Thought.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 108-112.  This essay was also republished in Lucian Tudor’s book, From the German Conservative Revolution to the New Right: A Collection of Essays on Identitarian Philosophy (Santiago, Chile: Círculo de Investigaciones PanCriollistas, 2015).

 

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Organic Democracy – Tudor

Identity and Politics: Organic Democracy

(Excerpt from “The Philosophy of Identity”)

By Lucian Tudor

 

Translations: Ελληνικά

Identitarians distinguish between different forms of democracy, some of which can be said to be more validly democratic than others. Alain de Benoist has distinguished between three forms of democracy corresponding to the French Revolutionary motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” The first, “liberal democracy,” is based on liberal, egalitarian, and individualist ideology; it is focused on the individual as a self-interested being, is inseparable from the individualist ideology of human rights, and is characterized by the principle of “one person, one vote.” The second form is “egalitarian democracy” or “popular democracy,” based on the principle of equality and manifested itself in the totalitarian regimes of the nationalist or socialist (particularly Marxist) type. The third form of democracy is based on the principle of fraternity and is known as “organic democracy,” which, as we shall see, is regarded by Identitarians as being the only true democracy.

Organic democracy is primarily defined not by fraternity as a “universal brotherhood” (which is impossible and is based on a false, egalitarian notion of humanity), but on fraternity in the sense of ethnic solidarity and a sense of collective meaning grounded in a shared heritage: “The only ‘families’ in which genuinely ‘fraternal’ relations may be entertained are cultures, peoples and nations. Fraternity, therefore, can serve as the basis for both solidarity and social justice, for both patriotism and democratic participation.”[54] Because true democracy is essentially non-totalitarian and is based on respecting the principle of liberty, it is also, in a sense, pluralistic, allowing the existence of groups representing differing opinions and ideas. However, as Benoist points out, this does not at all justify the notion of establishing a “pluralist” society in the ethnic sense (the liberal multiculturalists’ conclusion):

The way in which the political rights assigned as a guarantee to the opposition are commonly assimilated to the rights from which social minorities wish to benefit is itself problematic: for political categories cannot always be transposed on a social level. This may lead to a serious failure to distinguish between citizen minorities and non-citizen groups installed—whether temporarily or not—in the same land as the former. “Pluralism” may here be used as a rather specious argument to justify the establishment of a “multicultural” society that severely threatens national and folk identity, while stripping the notion of the people of its essential meaning.[55]

Alongside the foundation in ethnic community, organic democracy is also defined by participation: “Democracy is a people’s [Volkes] participation in its own destiny,” to reference Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s words.[56] For that reason, a purely representative democracy is regarded as an incomplete democracy: only a participatory democracy in which the entire citizenry can take part in decision-making is a true democracy. Finally, addressing the anti-democratic arguments made by most Traditionalists, Benoist has also pointed out that democracy does not necessarily reject hierarchy. Political equality among citizens of a state does not mean regarding each of them as equal in any other sense, and organic democracy, at its essence, is perfectly reconcilable with the values of hierarchy, aristocracy, and authority, although in a unique manner differing from absolute monarchies.[57]

To support their advocacy of democracy and to counter the claim that democracy is a modern invention, a common theme in Identitarian and New Right works is the reference to ancient democracy, which has taken on participatory, representative, and various mixed forms. It is typical for Identitarians to reference examples of democracy specifically from Western European history, such as that of the ancient Germans or Greeks, although historical examples could also be found in many Eastern societies, even in entirely non-European societies (ancient Asiatic, Native American, etc.). Democracy clearly has a solid historical basis, for, to quote Benoist once more,

Democratic regimes or tendencies can be found throughout history. . . . Whether in Rome, in the Iliad, in Vedic India or among the Hittites, already at a very early date we find the existence of popular assemblies for both military and civil organisation. Moreover, in Indo-European society the King was generally elected.[58]

Alexander Dugin has also cited the history of organic democracy in Russian and “Eurasian” history, including the examples of the ancient Slavic Veche (equivalent to the Germanic Thing) and Orthodox priestly democracy.[59] Whatever the example, ancient democracy has almost always taken on organic forms based on respect for ethnic differences. Thus, Benoist rightly denounces liberal and egalitarian democracies as being only pseudo-democratic or entirely undemocratic:

Democracy means the power of the people, which is to say the power of an organic community that has historically developed in the context of one or more given political structures—for instance a city, nation, or empire. . . . Every political system which requires the disintegration or levelling of peoples in order to operate—or the erosion of individuals’ awareness of belonging to an organic folk community—is to be regarded as undemocratic.[60]

Notes:

[54] Alain de Benoist, The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos, 2011), 99.

[55] Ibid., 66.

[56] See Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire (London: Arktos, 2012), 15.

[57] See Benoist, The Problem of Democracy, 17. See also the chapter “A Defence of Democracy” in this same work.

[58] Ibid., 14–15.

[59] See the chapter “Органическая демократия” in Alexander Dugin, Консервативная революция (Moscow: Арктогея, 1994). We have especially relied on the online version for this research, published at Арктогея, December 1, 2002 (http://www.arcto.ru/article/38; accessed September 1, 2014). We could add to these examples the democratic practices of many of the ancient peoples of the Baltic, including the Scythians, the Sarmatians, and the Dacians (in modern-day Romania); see Ion Grumeza, Dacia: Land of Transylvania, Cornerstone of Ancient Eastern Europe (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2009), 46, 129, 132.

[60] Benoist, The Problem of Democracy, 103.

 

—————

Excerpt from: Tudor, Lucian. “The Philosophy of Identity: Ethnicity, Culture, and Race in Identitarian Thought.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 106-108. This essay was also republished in Lucian Tudor’s book, From the German Conservative Revolution to the New Right: A Collection of Essays on Identitarian Philosophy (Santiago, Chile: Círculo de Investigaciones PanCriollistas, 2015).

 

Identity & Difference – Benoist

Identity and Difference

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from the Spanish by Lucian Tudor

 

* This was translated into English from the Spanish version titled “Identidad y Diferencia,” published in the digital journal Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, No. 47 (May 2013): 3-10. The Spanish text was the translation and combination of the original French articles titled “Le droit à la différence” and “Qu’est-ce que l’identité? Réflexions sur un concept-clef,” published in Eléments, No. 77 (April 1993): 24-25 & 44-47. The translator wishes to thank Daniel Macek for reviewing the translation and Alain de Benoist for approving of the translation.

Difference

The debate about immigration has raised in a sharp manner the questions of the right to difference, the future of the mode of community life, of the diversity of human cultures and of social and political pluralism. Questions of such importance cannot be treated with brief slogans or prefabricated responses. “Let us, therefore, oppose exclusion and integration,” writes Alain Touraine. “The first is as absurd as it is scandalous, but the second has taken two forms that need to be distinguished and between them there must be searched for, at least, a complementarity. Speaking of integration only to tell the new arrivals that they have to take their position in society as such and what it was before their arrival, that is much closer to exclusion than of a true integration.”[1]

The communitarian tendency began to affirm itself in the early eighties, in liaison with certainly confusing ideological propositions about the notion of “multicultural society.” Later it seemed to be remitted due to critiques directed against it on behalf of liberal individualism and “republican” universalism: the relative abandonment of the theme of difference, considered as “dangerous,” the denunciation of communities, invariably presented as “ghettos” or “prisons,” the over-valuation of individual problems to the detriment of the groups, the return of a form of purely egalitarian anti-racism, etc. The logic of capitalism, which, to extend itself, needs to make organic social structures and traditional mentalities disappear, has also had weight in that sense. The leader of immigrant minorities, Harlem Désir, sometimes accused of having inclined towards “differentialism,”[2] has been able to boast of having “promoted the sharing of common values and not the identitarian tribalism, the republican integration around universal principles and not the construction of community lobbies.”[3]

All the critique of the mode of community life is reduced, in fact, to the belief that difference obstructs inter-human understanding and, therefore, integration. The logical conclusion of that approach is that integration will remain facilitated with the suppression of communities and the erosion of differences. This deduction is based on two assumptions:

• (1) The more “equal” are the individuals who compose a society, the more they will “resemble” each other and the less problematic their integration will be;
• (2) Xenophobia and racism are the result of the fear of the Other. Consequently, to make otherness disappear or to persuade each one that the Other is a small thing if compared with the Same, it will result in its attenuation and even its nullification.

Both assumptions are erroneous. Without doubt, in the past racism has been able to function as an ideology that legitimized a complex — colonial, for example — of domination and of exploitation. But in modern societies, racism appears rather as a pathological product of the egalitarian ideal; that is to say, as a door of obliged departure (“the only way to distinguish oneself”) in the bosom of a society that, adhering to egalitarian ideas, perceives all difference as unbearable or as abnormal: “The anti-racist discourse,” writes Jean-Pierre Dupuy in this respect, “considers as an evidence that the racist depreciation made of the other goes on par with a social organization that prioritizes beings based on the function of a criterion of value. […] [But] these presuppositions are exactly contrary to what we learn from the comparative study of human societies and of their history. The most favorable medium for mutual recognition is not the one which obeys the principle of equality, but rather that the one which obeys the principle of hierarchy. This thesis, which the works of Louis Dumont have illustrated in multiple ways, can only be comprehended with the precondition of not confusing hierarchy with inequality, but rather, on the contrary, by opposing both concepts. […] In a true hierarchical society, the hierarchically superior element does not dominate the inferior elements, but is different from them in the same sense in which all the parties are encompassed, or in the sense in which one party takes precedence over another in the constitution and in the internal coherence of the whole.”[4]

Jean-Pierre Dupuy also notes that xenophobia is not defined solely by fear of the Other, but, perhaps even more, by fear of the Same: “What people are afraid of is the indifferentiation, and this because indifferentiation is always the sign and product of social disintegration. Why? Because the unity of the whole presupposes its differentiation, that is to say, its hierarchical conformation. Equality, that principle that denies differences, is the cause of mutual fear. People are afraid of the Same, and there is the source of racism.”[5]

The fear of the Same raises mimetic rivalries without end, and egalitarianism is, in modern societies, the motor of those rivalries in which each seeks to become “more equal” than the others. But, at the same time, the fear of the Other is added to the fear of the Same, producing a game of mirrors which prolongs itself to infinity. Thus, it can be said that the xenophobic ones are just as allergic to the other identity of the immigrants (real or imagined otherness) as, conversely, to how much in these is not different, and that xenophobia is experienced as a potential threat of indifferentiation. In other words, the immigrant is considered a threat at the same time as an assimilable person and as a non-assimilable person. The Other is thus converted into a danger to the extent that it is a carrier of the Same, while the Same is a danger to the extent that it pushes the recognition of the Other. And this game of mirrors works all the more as how much atomized the society is, composed of increasingly isolated individuals and, therefore, increasingly vulnerable to all conditions.

Thus one can better understand the failure of an “anti-racism” that, in the best of cases, does not accept the Other more than to reduce it to the Same. As much as it erodes the differences with the hope of facilitating integration, the more it in reality makes it impossible. The more it thinks to battle against exclusion by desiring to make immigrants uprooted individuals “like everyone else,” the more it contributes to the advent of a society where mimetic rivalry culminates in exclusion and generalized dehumanization. And finally, the more the “anti-racism” is believed in, the more it appears like a racism classically defined as the negation or radical devaluation of group identity, a racism that has always opposed the preeminence of a single obligatory norm, judged explicitly or implicitly as “superior” (and superior because it is “universal”) over the differentiated modes of life, whose mere existence seems incongruous or detestable.

This anti-racism, universalist and egalitarian (“individuo-universalist”), extends the secular trend that, under the most diverse forms and in the name of the most contradictory imperatives (the propagation of the “true faith,” the “superiority” of the White race, the global exportation of the myths of “progress” and “development”), has not stopped practicing the conversion seeking to reduce diversity everywhere, that is to say, precisely, trying to reduce the Other to the Same. “In the West,” observes the ethno-psychiatrist Tobie Nathan, “the Other no longer exists in our cultural schemas. Now we only consider the relation with the Other from the moral point of view, meaning, not only in an inefficient way, but also without procuring ourselves the means to understand it. The condition of our education system is that we are to think that the whole world is alike […]. To say ‘I must respect the other’ is something that makes no sense. In the everyday relation, this kind of phrase has no sense if we cannot integrate our schemes to the fact that naturally, the function of the Other is precisely to be Other. […] France is the most insane country for that. […] The structure of power in France seems unable to integrate even those small fluctuations which are the regional languages​​. But it is exactly from this conception of power from which humanistic theory was constructed, up to the universal Declaration of human rights.” And Nathan concludes: “Immigration is the real problem at the foundation of our society, which does not know to think of difference.”[6]

It is time, then, to recognize the Other and to remember that the right to difference is the principle that, as such, is only worth its generality (nobody can defend their difference except to the extent that they recognize, respect, and defend also the difference of the other) and whose place is in the broader context of the right of the peoples and of ethnic groups: The right to identity and to collective existence, the right to language, to culture, to territory and self-determination, the right to live and to work in their own country, the right to natural resources and to the protection of the market, etc.

The positive attitude will be, to reference the terms of Roland Breton, “that which, starting with the recognition of the right to difference, admits pluralism as a fact which is not only ancient, durable, and permanent, but also positive, fertile, and desirable. The attitude that resolutely turns its back to the totalitarian projects of the uniformization of humanity and of society, and which does not see in the different or deviant individual one who must be punished, nor as a sick one who must be cured, nor as an abnormal one who must be helped, but rather another self, simply provided with a set of physical traits or cultural habits, generators of sensibility, of tastes, and of aspirations of their own. On a planetary scale, it is tantamount to admitting, after the consolidation of certain sovereign hegemonies, the multiplication of independencies, but also of interdependencies. On the regional scale, it is tantamount to recognizing, against centralisms, the processes of autonomy, of self-centered organization, of self-management. […] The right to difference supposes the mutual respect of the groups and of the communities, and the exaltation of the values of each one. […]To say ‘long live the difference’ does not imply any idea of superiority, of domination and of contempt: the affirmation of oneself is not the lowering of the other. The recognition of the identity of an ethnicity can only subtract from others what they have unduly monopolized.”[7]

The affirmation of the right to be different is the only way to escape a double error: that error, very widespread in the Left, that consists of believing that “human brotherhood” will be realized on the ruins of differences, the erosion of cultures, and the homogenization of communities, and that other error, widespread in the Right, which consists of the belief that the “rebirth of the nation” will be achieved by inculcating in its members an attitude of rejection towards others.

Identity

The question of identity (national, cultural, etc.) also plays a central role in the debate about immigration. To begin, two observations must be made. The first is that there is much talk of the identity of the host population, but, in general, there is much less talk of the identity of the immigrants themselves, who nevertheless seem, by far, the most threatened by the fact of immigration itself. Indeed, the immigrants, insofar as they are the minority, directly suffer the pressure of the modes of behavior of the majority. Pulled to disappearance or, inversely, exacerbated in a provocative way, their identity only survives, frequently, in a negative (or reactive) manner by the hostility of the host environment, by capitalist over-exploitation exerted on certain workers uprooted from their natural structures of defense and protection.

The second observation is the following: It is striking to see how, in certain ways, the problem of identity is situated exclusively in relation with immigration. The immigrants would be the principal “threat,” if not the only one, that weighs on French identity. But that is tantamount to overlooking the numerous factors that in the whole world, both in the countries with a strong foreign labor as in those without it, are inducing a rapid disintegration of collective identities: the primacy of consumption, the Westernization of customs, the media homogenization, the generalization of the axiomatic of self-interest, etc.

With such a perception of things, it is too easy to fall into the temptation of scapegoating. But, certainly, it is not the fault of the immigrants that the French are apparently no longer capable of producing a way of life that is their own nor to offer to the world the spectacle of an original form of thought and of being. And nor is it the fault of the immigrants that the social bond is broken wherever liberal individualism is extended, that the dictatorship of the private has extinguished the public spaces that could constitute the crucible in which to renew an active citizenry, nor that individuals, submerged in the ideology of merchandise, turn away more and more from their own nature. It is not the fault of the immigrants that the French form a people increasingly less, that the nation has become a phantasm, that the economy has been globalized nor that individuals renounce being actors of their own existence to accept that there are others who decide in their place from norms and values that they no longer contribute to forming. It is not the immigrants, finally, who colonize the collective imagination and impose on the radio and on the television sounds, images, concerns, and models “which come from outside.” If there is “globalism,” we say too with clarity that, until proven otherwise, where it comes from is the other side of the Atlantic, and not the other side of the Mediterranean. And let us add that the small Arab shopkeeper contributes more to maintain, in a convivial way, the French identity than the Americanomorphic park of attractions or the “shopping center” of a very French capital.

The true causes of the disappearance of French identity are, in fact, the same that explain the erosion of all other identities: The exhaustion of the model of the nation-state, the collapse of all traditional institutions, the rupture of the civil contract, the crisis of representation, the mimetic adoption of the American model, etc. The obsession with consumption, the cult of material and financial “success,” the disappearance of the ideas of common good and of solidarity, the dissociation of the individual future and collective destiny, the development of technology, the momentum of the exportation of capital, the alienation of economic, industrial, and media independence, these have destroyed by themselves the “homogeneity” of our peoples infinitely more than what has been done up to today by some immigrants who, by the way, are not the last to suffer the consequences of this process. “Our ‘identity’,” emphasizes Claude Imbert, “remains much more affected by the collapse of civility, more altered by the international cultural arm of the communication media, more eliminated by the impoverishment of language and of concepts, more damaged overall by the degradation of a previously centralized, potent and normative State which founded among us that famous ‘identity’.”[8] In brief, if the French (and European) identity falls apart, it is before all due to a vast movement of techno-economic homogenization of the world, whose principal vector is the transnational or Americano-centric imperialism, and which generalizes everywhere the loss of sense, that is, a feeling of the absurdity of life which destroys organic ties, dissolves the natural sociality and each day makes people be more as strangers to one another.

From this point of view, immigration plays much more a revelatory role. It is the mirror that should permit us to take the full measure of the state of latent crisis in which we find ourselves, a state of crisis in which immigration is not the cause but rather a consequence among others. An identity feels more threatened when it is known how much more vulnerable, uncertain, and undone it is. That is why such an identity is in its depth no longer able to become capable of receiving a foreign contribution and include it within itself. In this sense, it is not that our identity is threatened because there have been immigrants among us, but rather that we are not capable of facing the problem of immigration because our identity is already largely undone. And that is why, in France, the problem of immigration is only discussed by surrendering to the twin errors of angelism or of exclusion.

Xenophobes and “cosmopolitans,” on the other hand, coincide in believing that there exists an inversely proportional relationship between the affirmation of national identity and the integration of immigrants. The first believe that the greater care or greater conscience of the national identity allows us to spontaneously rid ourselves of the immigrants. The second think that the best way to facilitate the insertion of the immigrants is to favor the dissolution of national identity. The conclusions are opposites, but the premise is identical. Both the one and the other are wrong. What hinders the integration of immigrants is not the affirmation of national identity but rather, on the contrary, its erasure. Immigration becomes a problem because the national identity is uncertain. And conversely, the difficulties linked to the reception and integration of recent arrivals can be resolved thanks to a newfound national identity.

Thus we see to what point it is senseless to believe that it will suffice to invert the migration flow to “get out of the decadence.” The decadence has other causes, and if there would be not one immigrant among us, due to that we would not stop finding ourselves confronted with the same difficulties, although this time without a scapegoat. The obscuration of the problem of immigration, making immigration responsible for everything that does not work, obliterates in the same strike many other causes and other responsibilities. In other words, it carries out a prodigious diversion of attention. It would be interesting to know for whose benefit.

But there must yet be more questioning of the notion of identity. Raising the question of French identity, for example, does not fundamentally consist of asking who is French (the response is relatively simple), but much more in asking what is French. Before this question, much more essential, the singers of the “national identity” are limited in general to responding with commemorative memories or evocations of “great personalities” they consider more or less founders (Clovis, Hugh Capet, the Crusaders, Charles Martel, or Joan of Arc), ingrained in the national imagination by a conventional historiography and devotion.[9] Now this little catechism of a species of religion of France (where the “eternal France,” always identical to itself, is found in all moments ready to confront the “barbarians,” such that what is French ends up defining itself, in the end, without a further positive characteristic of its non-inclusion in the alien universe) bears no relation to but rather is very far away from the true history of a people whose specific trait, in its depth, is the way it has always known to tackle its contradictions. In fact, the religion of France is today instrumentalized to restore a national continuity stripped of all contradiction in a Manichean view where globalization (the “anti-France”) is purely and simplistically interpreted as a “plot.” The historical references thus remain situated in an ahistorical perspective, an almost essentialist perspective that does not aspire so much to tell the story as to describe a “being” that will always be the Same, which will not be defined as any more than resistance to otherness or the rejection of the Other. The identity is thus inevitably limited to the identical, to the simple replica of the “eternal yesterday,” of a past glorified by idealization, an already built entity which only remains for us to conserve and transmit as a sacred substance. In parallel, the national sentiment itself remains detached from the historical context (the appearance of modernity) which had determined its birth. The history then becomes un-broken, when the truth is that there is no history possible without rupture. It is converted into a simple duration which permits exorcising the separation, when the truth is that the duration is, by definition, dissimilarity, the separation between one and oneself, the perpetual inclusion of new separations. In brief, the national catechism serves itself by the history to proclaim its closure, instead of finding in it a stimulus to let it continue.

But identity is never one-dimensional. It has not always only associated circles of multiple belonging, but combines factors of permanence and factors of change, endogenous mutations and external contributions. The identity of a people and of a nation is also not solely the sum of its history, of its customs and their dominant characteristics. As Philippe Forget wrote, “a country may appear, at first sight, as a set of characteristics determined by customs and habits, ethnic factors, geographical factors, linguistic factors, demographic factors, etc. However, those factors can apparently describe the image or social reality of a people, but not realize what the identity of a people is as an original and perennial presence. Consequently, the foundations of identity need to be thought of in terms of the openness of sense, and here is the sense which is nothing other than the constitutive bond of a man or of a population and its world.”[10]

This presence, which means the opening of a space and time, continues Phillipe Forget, “should not refer to a substantialist conception of identity, but rather a comprehension of being as a game of differentiation. This is not to apprehend identity an immutable and fixed content, liable to be encoded into a canon … Contrary to a conservative conception of tradition, which conceives it as a sum of immutable and trans-historical factors, tradition, or better, traditionality, should be here understood as a weft of differences which are renewed and regenerated in the soil of a patrimony consisting of an aggregate of past experiences, and which are put to test in their own surpassing. In that sense, the defense cannot and should not consist of the protection of forms of existence postulated as intangibles; they should better be addressed to protect the forces that permit a society to metamorphose itself proceeding from itself. The repetition of the identical of a place or the action of ‘living’ in according to the practice of another lead equally to the disappearance and to the extinction of collective identity.”[11]

As it occurs with culture, identity is also not an essence that can be fixed or reified by speech. It is only determinant in a dynamic sense, and is only possible to be apprehended from the interactions (or retro-determinations) both of the personal decisions as from the denials of identification, and of the strategies of identification which underlie them. Even considered from the point of origin, identity is inseparable from the use which was made — or which was not made — of it in a particular cultural and social context, that is, in the context of a relation with others. That is why identity is always reflexive. In a phenomenological perspective, it implies never dissociating its own constitution and the constitution of the others. The subject of collective identity is not an “I” or a “we,” a natural entity constituted once and for all, an opaque mirror where nothing new can come to be reflected, but rather a “self” which continually appeals to new reflections.

We will recuperate the distinction formulated by Paul Ricoeur between idem identity and ipse identity. The permanence of the collective being through ceaseless change (ipse identity) cannot be limited to what pertains to the order of the event or of the repetition (idem identity). On the contrary, it is linked on the whole to a hermeneutics of the “self,” to the whole of a narrative work destined to make a “place” appear, a space-time which configures a sense and forms the same condition of the appropriation of the self. Indeed, in a phenomenological perspective, where nothing is given naturally, the object always proceeds from a constituent elaboration, from a hermeneutic relation characterized by the affirmation of a point of view which retrospectively organizes the events to give them a meaning. “The story builds the narrative identity constructing the history by constructing that of the story told,” says Ricoeur. “It is the identity of the history that makes the identity of the personage.”[12] To defend one’s own identity is not, then, to be content with ritually listing historically foundational points of reference, nor to sing of the past to better avoid confronting the present. To defend one’s own identity is to understand the identity as that which remains in the game of differences – not as the same, but rather as the always singular way of changing or not changing.

It is not, then, to choose the idem identity against the ipse identity, or vice versa, but rather to apprehend both in their reciprocal relations by means of an organizing narrative that takes into account both the understanding of the self as well as the understanding of the other. To recreate the conditions in which it returns to being possible to produce such a story which constitutes the appropriation of the self. But it is an appropriation which never stays fixed, for collective subjectivation always proceeds from an option more than from an act, and from an act more than a “fact.” A people is maintained thanks to its narrativity, appropriating its being in successive interpretations, becoming the subject by narrating itself and thus avoiding losing their identity, that is, avoiding becoming the object of the narrative of another. “An identity,” writes Forget, “is always a relation of self to self, an interpretation of itself and of the others, by itself and by others. Ultimately, it is the story of itself, elaborated in the dialectical relation with the others, which completes the human history and delivers a collectivity to history. […] The personal identity endures and reconciles stability and transformation through the act of narration. The personal identity of an individual, of a people, is built and maintained through the movement of the story, through the dynamism of the plot which underpins the narrative operation, as Ricoeur said.”[13]

Finally, what most threatens national identity today possesses a strong endogenous dimension, represented by the tendency to the implosion of the social, that is, the internal deconstruction of all forms of organic solidarity. In this respect, Roland Castro has been able to justly speak of those societies where “nobody any longer supports anyone,” where everyone excludes everyone, where every individual has become potentially foreign for every individual. To liberal individualism one must attribute the major responsibility in this regard. How can one speak of “fraternity” (in the Left) or of “common good” (in the Right) in a society where each have been submerged in the search for the maximization of their own and exclusive interests, in a mimetic rivalry without end which adopts the form of a headlong rush, of a permanent competition devoid of all purpose?

As Christian Thorel had emphasized, “the re-centering on the individual over the collective leads to the disappearance of the look towards the other.”[14] The problem of immigration runs the risk, precisely, of obliterating this evidence. On the one hand, that exclusion of immigrants of which the immigrants are victims can make us forget that today we live increasingly more in a society where exclusion is also the rule between our own “autochthonous people.” How to support the foreigners when we support ourselves increasingly less? On the other hand, certain reproaches crumble by themselves. For example, the young immigrants that “have hatred” have been frequently told that they must respect the “country which hosts them.” But why must the immigrant youths by more patriotic than some French youth who are not? The greatest risk, finally, would be to believe that the criticism of immigration, which is legitimate in itself, will be facilitated by the increase of egoism, when in fact it is that increase which has more deeply undone the social fabric. There is, on the other hand, the whole problem of xenophobia. There are some who believe in strengthening the national sentiment by basing it on the rejection of the Other. After which, having already acquired the habit, it will be their own compatriots who they will end up finding normal to reject.

A society conscious of its identity can only be strong if it achieves placing the common good before the individual interest; if it achieves placing solidarity, conviviality, and generosity towards others before the obsession for the competition of the triumph of the “Me.” A society conscious of its identity can only last if rules of disinterest and of gratuity are imposed, which are the only means to escape the reification of social relations, that is, the advent of a world where man produces himself as an object after having transformed everything surrounding him into an artifact. Because it is evident that it will not be the proclamation of egoism, not even in the name of the “struggle for life” (the simple transposition of the individualist principle of the “war of all against all”), that we can recreate that convivial and organic sociality without which there is no people worthy of the name. We will not find fraternity in a society where each has the sole goal to “win” more than the others. We will not reinstate the desire to live together by appealing to xenophobia, that is, to a hatred of the Other by principle; a hatred which, little by little, ends up extending itself to all.

Notes

[1] “Vraie et fausse intégration,” Le Monde, 29 January 1992.

[2] “La timidité en paie jamais,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 March 1992, p.15.

[3] About the critique of “differentialist neo-racism,” based on the idea that “the racist argumentation has shifted from race to culture,” cf. especially Pierre-André Taguieff, La force du préjugé. Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles, Découverte, Paris, 1988, and Gallimard, París, 1990. Taguieff’s critique rests, in our judgement, on a double fallacy. On the one hand, it forgets that the right to difference, when it lays itself down as a principle, it necessarily leads to also defending the difference of others, so that it could never legimitize the unconditional affirmation of an absolute singularity (there is no difference but in relation with that one to which it is deferred). On the other hand, it ignores the fact that cultural differences and racial differences are not of the same order, so that way they cannot be instrumentalized by the same one: that would amount, paradoxically, to the assertion that nature and culture are equivalent. For a discussion on this issue, cf. Alain de Benoist, André Béjin and Pierre-André Taguieff, Razzismo e antirazzismo, La Roccia di Erec, Florencia, 1992 (partial translation of André Béjin, Julien Freund, Michael Pollak, Alain Daniélou, Michel Maffesoli et al., Racismes, antiracismes, Méridiens-Klincksieck, 1986).

[4] “La science? Un piège pour les antirracistes!,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 March 1992, p.20.

[5] Ibid., p.21.

[6] L’Autre Journal, October 1992, p.41.

[7] Les Ethnies, 2^nd ed., PUF, París, 1992, pp.114-115.

[8] “Historique?,” Le Point, 14 December 1991, p.35.

[9] Cf. in this respect the strongly demystified works of Suzanne Citron, Le Mythe national. L’Histoire de France en question (éd. Ouvrières-Études et documentation internationales, 2ª ed., 1991) and L’Histoire de France autrement (éd. Ouvrières, 1992), which frequently fall into the opposite excesses of those they denounce. Cf. also, for a different reading of the history of France, Olier Mordrel, Le Mythe de l’Hexagone, Jean Picollec, 1981.

[10] “Phénoménologie de la menace, Sujet, narration, stratégie,” Krisis, April 1992, p.3.

[11] Ibid., p.5.

[12] Soi-même comme un autre, Seuil, Paris, 1990, p.175.

[13] Art. cit., pp.6-7.

[14] Le Monde, 17 August 1990.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “Identity and Difference.” The Occidental Observer, 13-14 September 2014. < http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2014/09/identity-and-difference-part-1-difference/ >, < http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2014/09/identity-and-difference-part-2-identity/ >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Identity and Difference).

 

Regenerating History – Benoist

Regenerating History

By Alain de Benoist

What is the greatest threat today? It is the progressive disappearance of diversity from the world. The levelling down of people, the reduction of all cultures to a world civilization made up of what is the most common. It can be seen already how from one side of the planet to the other the same types of construction are being put up and the same mental habits are being engrained. Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson are the templets for the transformation of the world into a grey uniformity. I have travelled widely, on several continents. The joy which is experienced during a journey derives from seeing differentiated ways of living which are still well rooted, in seeing different people living according to the own rhythm, with a different skin colour, another culture, another mentality – and that they are proud of their difference. I believe that this diversity is the wealth of the world, and that egalitarianism is killing it. For this it is important not just to respect others but to keep alive everywhere the most legitimate desire there can be: the desire to affirm a personality which is unlike any other, to defend a heritage, to govern oneself in accordance with what one is. And this implies a head-on clash both with a pseudo-antiracism which denies differences and with a dangerous racism which is nothing less than the rejection of the Other, the rejection of diversity.

We live today in a blocked society. Globally speaking we are only now beginning to become aware of ways to break out of the order established at Yalta. Nationally speaking there has never been such marked divisions between various political factions in peace-time. Philosophically and ideologically, we oscillate constantly between different extremes without managing to find a balance. The cause and remedy for this situation is to be located within man. To say that our society is in crisis is just a platitude. Man is a crisis. He is a tragedy. In him nothing is ever definitively said. Man must constantly find within himself the theme of a new discourse corresponding to a new way of being in the world, a new form of his humanity. Man is in crisis through the very fact that he exists. The originality of our age does not lie in this fact. The originality – the sad originality – of our age lies in the fact that for the first time man is retreating in the face of the implications which flow from would instinctively be his desire and will to resolve the crisis. For the first time man believes that he is overwhelmed by the problems. And indeed they do overwhelm him in as far as he believes they do, when in fact they originate within him, and fall within the range and scope of the solutions which he carries within himself. […]

The old right in France has always been reactionary. […] It is a type of attitude which has always proved sterile. History repeats itself but never serves up the same dish twice. It offers a wealth of lessons not because it allows us to know what will happen, but because it helps us rediscover the spirit which has produced a certain type of event. This what Nietzsche meant when, in the very moment he was preaching the eternal return, he declared “it is impossible to bring back the Greeks”. To spell this out: the Greek miracle cannot be repeated, but by allowing the spirit which produced will perhaps enable us to create something analogous. It is what we could define the regeneration of history. […]

If egalitarianism is reaching its “final stage of affirmation,” what will succeed it will necessarily be something different. Moreover, if the present world is the materialization of the end of a cycle, it is equally clear that the only possible source of inspiration possible for what must be born can only be something which has preceded what has just occurred. The projective force for the future resides in the spirit of the remotest past. The “positive nihilism” of Nietzsche has only one sense: one can only build on a site which has been completely cleared and levelled. There are those who do not want to construct (a certain kind of left) and do not want to rise to the ground (a certain right). In my view both these two attitudes are to be condemned. If a new right is to be brought into being we have to start from scratch. And given the time which has to be made up it will need about a century to succeed. Which means there is not a minute to lose.

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Translated from: De Benoist, Alain. Le idee a posto. Akropolis, Naples, 1983, pp. 76-81. (this book is the Italian translation of Les idées à l’endroit [Albin Michel, Paris, 1980]). Translator not specified. Text retrieved from: <http://www.amerika.org/texts/alain-de-benoist-regenerating-history-c-g/ >.

 

Hourglass Capitalism – Benoist

Hourglass Capitalism

By Alain de Benoist

Translated by Tomislav Sunic

 

Inequalities are increasing everywhere—between countries and within each country. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, while the middle class is under threat of being downgraded. The question arises—how did we get there? The answer lies in the recent history of capitalism.

In the capitalist system of the 19th century, the class struggle was a zero-sum game: everything won by one class was automatically lost by the other—hence the ferocity of the System. In the following century, starting with the 1930s, the birth of the Fordist era introduced a major revolution that moved the entire system into second gear. The Fordist era was based on the fact that production was useless unless it becomes the object of consumption, which implied that workers needed to be more or less decently paid if they were to purchase the merchandise intended to be sold to them.

In the Fordist system, the fraction of the added value, which was given away by the capitalists and dispensed in the form of wages, flows now back to the capitalists as employees start purchasing goods and services. From then on, wages represent both the cost and benefit tool. At that moment, social consensus could emerge. In exchange for security and more or less a constantly increasing salary, workers were ready to give up their revolutionary claims. Moreover, the unions also become reformist. Besides, the Fordist system was in line with the welfare state, even if the latter curbed the financial sphere and attempted to fuse the economic dynamics into the framework of a nation- state, and insofar as the strengthening of social rights and the continued growth in wage incomes was allowed.

Thus, a relative balance was achieved between the interests of the market, productivity, competition, and a number of other protecting factors. Capitalism was no longer impoverishing its citizens: rather, it multiplied its own working poor (to increase the number of the working poor a society needs to be more affluent). Such was the nature of the system which dominated social relations until the 1970s.

The Iron Hand of the Market

It was at that time, which had already started during the interwar period, that the middle class began its gradual expansion—mainly at the expense of the working class, with its main feature being that as one entered the ranks of the middle class, there was no coming back. During the Fordist era, due to its ever increasing purchasing power, the middle class actually began to prosper. It contributed to the smooth functioning of the system characterized by mass production and mass consumption. Furthermore, the middle class played an important role in creating and keeping the demand, while absorbing quantities of ever important standardized goods and services, while also willing to pay a higher price for quality products. This, in turn, spurred innovation and investments. In addition, with the gradual improvement of parental funds, younger people were able to pursue higher education for a longer period of time, thus injecting onto the labor market a skilled workforce required by the business sector.

The alliance between the middle class and industrial capitalism was getting stronger insofar as the areas of production and consumption went hand-in-hand: whatever was produced in the North was also consumed in the North. In other words, the middle class was getting more compact just as the capital was gaining more in value. With revolutionary political parties now gone, and with the unions voicing only marginal demands, the political class found itself in tune with the voters.

However, as soon as the interests of the middle class began to diverge from those of capital, the middle class, once an ally of expanding capital, was bound to undergo its own downgrade. The cyclical nature of the middle class dynamics can be explained by the fact that after having been a factor in development and a contributor to capital growth, it now became a burden to productivity growth. At that moment governments were ready to prepare its decline. [1]

In the course of the 1970s, the Fordist era began to wither away. The explosion of the Bretton Woods monetary system, which in 1971 had put a seal on the fixed-rate system, the oil shock of 1973 and 1979, the stagflation, the debt crisis in the Southern hemisphere in 1982, the collapse of the Soviet system, the economic and financial globalization—all this led to the disconnection of the interest of the middle class from those of capital. Things changed profoundly when state interventions, which once played an important role in the establishment of national markets (i.e. when capitalism was still anchored at a national level), turned out to be incompatible with the internationalization of the markets, all of which was carried out within the context of globalization. A new brand of totally deterritorialized capitalism took the upper hand, with its major driving force being the emergence of large international firms and financial markets, spearheaded by the new American hegemony. This resulted in a considerable expansion of international trade whose rapid growth rate surpassed the growth of national wealth. What one witnessed was the end of social democratic consensus which used to be a trade mark of the immediate post-war period—a consensus that became increasingly irrelevant as about the same time the Soviet Union had disappeared.

It is from that time on that the market has attempted to resolve the economy of global society by means of a rapid liberalization of the international flows of goods and capital. From now on, as was very well explained by Bernard Conte, growth was no longer self-centered and the surpluses were no longer automatically redistributed. “Free trade allows the flooding of the markets with low-priced commodities that stand in the competition with domestic commodities, thereby showing their own lack of “competitiveness.” Consequently, in order to stay competitive, one has to lower the costs of production, both directly and indirectly. This approach entails the reduction of real wages, benefits, and, generally speaking, “clientelist” matters (corporate expenditures usually associated with corruption), as well as the reduction of expenses related to the welfare state. Under the guise of competition—profit must be boosted. In order to achieve this, it is essential to adjust national, economic and social structures to the rules of “laissez-faire,” “laissez-passer,” albeit extended, this time around, to the entire planet. As there are too many poor people amidst the population, with the rich being exempted, it is the middle class that must bear the brunt of the adjustments. Due to its unjustified existence—the fact that, in other places around the world ,the jobs of the middle-class people can be performed at lower costs—the middle class thus becomes the “enemy” of financial capitalism. Capitalism has rejected the compromise previously made and moved on to the “euthanizing of the parasitic middle class.” [2]

In order to accomplish this, state intervention—the state being now itself subject to the principles of “global governance”—proved to be indispensable. This took the form of systematic deregulation, destruction of social gains, erosion of public service, reforming of pension plans, and taxation, whose first victims was the middle class—all this against the backdrop of resurgence of a neo-liberal ideology once inspired by the Thatcherite and Reaganite reforms. About the same time, a gap between the middle class and the ruling class started to grow. The ruling class did not stop from implementing policies adverse to the interests of its traditional electorate, which only resulted in the electoral voting abstention on the one hand, and in the global crisis of legitimacy of the New Class, on the other.

Being the transmission belt of new ferocity, this third type of capitalism, often dubbed “turbo capitalism” or “neoliberal capitalism” in the functioning of economy, sanctifies the crucial role of financial markets. Essentially, this is what financial capitalism is all about. Since the early 1980s, financial transactions have brought in more assets than the capital once invested in the manufacturing of goods. The purchase and the sale of fictitious capital on the stock markets bring in more than the value added of the productive real capital. For example, prior to the 2008 crisis, out of 3200 billion dollars traded on a single day, less than 3 percent corresponded to actual goods and services. This may give an idea as to how disconnected the speculative economy has become from the real economy. The liberal justification for this phenomenon is that financial markets must be the sole mechanisms in the efficient process of capital allocation; hence it is important not to impede, let alone regulate their operations.

This theoretical postulate (called “informational efficiency”) has no foundations: the financial crisis of 2008 has demonstrated that markets are not efficient and that financial competition does not necessarily bring about a fair pricing system. Instead it triggers inadequate pricing.

Free Trade Traps

The major error of this theory consists in transposing onto financial market the theory of ordinary goods, which is based on the classic laws of supply and demand. However, as far as the financial markets are concerned, as soon as the price of a security increases, what one sees is not a decrease but rather an increase in demand, for the simple reason that price boosting means higher yields for those who possess that security, and also based on the fact that they can henceforth pocket the added value. This is at the heart of the “speculative bubbles”: a cumulative price increase that feeds itself of its own until a big incident occurs—an unpredictable, yet an inevitable incident provoking the inversion of expectations and the big crash.

Starting with the Treaty of Maastricht (1992), we have been witnessing the introduction of the euro, which came into existence in 1999, first as the interbank exchange system and then, in 2002, in the from of notes and coins. This monetary creation, which was in itself a good endeavor, could make sense only if the two conditions were met: that is, the existence of the customs union and the awareness of economic disparities between the European countries. This, however, was not the case. The single European currency imposed a single interest rate on the 16 economies of opposing needs. In the absence of the optimal exchange rate system, which was in any case impossible to set up, the single European currency turned into a global variable for U.S. deficit adjustments. As far as the abolition of the customs barriers was concerned, its end result was the pitting of French and European employees into the competition against more than 3 billion people (1.3 billion Chinese, 1 billion Indians, 580 million inhabitants of other countries), whose salaries are disproportionally lower than those of European employees. This has resulted in trade relations taking shape in the conditions of product dumping, as well as serial relocations, and as far as France is concerned, in industrial hemorrhage. As of now, we are losing between 800 and 1,000 industrial jobs per working day! (In 2006, there were more than 3.9 million jobs in the manufacturing sector, in comparison to 5.9 million in 1970). The euro, being significantly overvalued in comparison to the dollar, is in the process of suffocating a good part of European industry by diminishing its export margins.

The policies of general dismantlement of the regulations regarding the exchange of goods and capital have been the main vehicle of globalization. In the post-Fordist system, the organization of production has become a network of interconnected flows in an economy that has become more and more competitive. The process of trans-nationalization is being accomplished through the establishment of a systemic coherence. where capital, goods, technologies, like never before, have all been made mobile, as a result of the interplay between large enterprises and the markets. “Capital mobility, crucial for the transnational system, operates in the form of direct investments abroad, while contributing to the growth of private and public debt and eventually disrupting the system of a nation’s accumulation.” [3]

Maurice Allais had clearly seen the negative role played by the “multinationals that, along with stock markets and the banking sector, are prime beneficiaries of an economic mechanism that makes them rich, while impoverishing the majority of French citizens and the world population” (“Lettres aux Français “in Marianne). Allais, who was a Nobel Prize laureate in economics and who recently passed away, had estimated that globalization and international free trade had caused the destruction of the one third of French income. If one takes into account the multiplying effects of industrial employment on global employment—in addition to outsourcing and to the pressures exerted by free trade—it seems, then, that the number of the active population has decreased by 3.5 percent.

The downward pressure on wages, already fostered by resorting to immigration, has been the result of the two factors combined. The first was the establishment of global free trade, which mainly affected Europe and has resulted in a series of relocations. “French managers align their incomes at the highest notch on the world scale, while relocating industrial service sector jobs to the areas where the labor price is the lowest. Chinese or Filipino workers can be used as a reference, whereas French workers who are laid off are offered substitute jobs hundreds or thousands of miles away from home, at a local rate, i.e. a poverty rate .” [4] Economies have thus become entangled in a spiral of creeping deflating wages, i.e. the shrinkage of the purchasing power, which is temporarily hidden, thanks to the use of credit, and while creating a “fake middle class” only aggravating existing individual debts.

The other factor results from the shareholding constraints. In the current system, like never before, companies finance shareholders. The rise of shareholder value has now encouraged the idea that a company must primarily be in the service of the shareholders—starting with those powerful shareholders who represent investment funds—and whose intentions must be honored regarding the return on their investment, and as fast and as high as possible (the norm now is that a rate of return on equity is about 15 percent to 25 percent), even if that means cutting wages, layoffs and relocations, as well as a slowdown in a company’s investments. Such a simultaneous slow down in the investment and consumption results in chronic unemployment. Thus, corporations and businesses have been used only as a tool and reduced to the level of profit-making machines.” [5]

These two phenomena, starting with the 1980s, have resulted in the rise of structural mass unemployment (and no-longer-cyclical unemployment), to which productivity gains have significantly contributed. Meanwhile, the share of labor income in the overall GDP has continued to drop in favor of capital income. The essential feature of this overwhelming “Third-World”-process in the developed economies [6] has been the declining wage share in the value added, that is to say, the increase in the rate of exploitation within a context where capital can from now introduce labor competition on a global scale.[7] Henceforth, global society no longer resembles a pyramid, as was the case during the so-called postwar “golden years”—namely when the accumulated profits at the top of the pyramid ended up sliding downwards toward the bottom, according to the “the spillover theory” formulated by Alfred Sauvy. Rather its has become a sandglass with the rich getting richer at the top, the poor getting poorer at the bottom, whilst in the middle, the middle classes getting increasingly strangled. One can observe now that this widening of inequalities belies the thesis that is at the heart of the dogma of free trade and the ideology of “laissez-faire,” and which claims that within the context of free competition, people receive an income proportional to their contribution in the production process.

In fact, the more free trade expands the more income inequality increases.

Notes:

[1] Cf. Bernard Conte, “Néolibéralisme et euthanasie des classes moyennes,” Octobre 2010.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Jérôme Maucourant et Bruno Tinel, “Avènement du néocapitalisme – d’une internationalisation à une transnationalisation des économies.”

[4] Michel Pinçon et Monique Pinçon-Charlot, Le président des riches. Enquête sur l’oligarchie dans la France de Nicolas Sarkozy, Zones, Paris 2010.

[5] Jean-Luc Gréau, entretien in Le Choc du mois, May 2010, p. 36.

[6] Cf. Bernard Conte, La tiers-mondialisation de la planète, Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, Bordeaux 2009.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “Hourglass Capitalism.” Alternative Right, 3 April 2013. <http://alternativeright.com/blog/2013/4/3/hourglass-capitalism >. Transferred to The Identitarian Congress: <http://www.identitariancongress.org/blog/2013/4/3/hourglass-capitalism >.

Note: This article was originally published as “Classes Populaires et Classe Moyennes Face au Capital”, Eléments, January –March, 2011.

 

Democracy: Representative & Participatory – Benoist

Democracy: Representative & Participatory

By Alain de Benoist

 

Representative democracy — essentially liberal and bourgeois — is the most widespread political regime in the Western world today. Representatives are authorized by election to transform the popular will into acts of government. Thus we tend to think of “democracy” and “representation” almost as synonyms. The history of ideas, however, does not at all support this.

The great theorists of representation are Hobbes and Locke. For both, the people, in effect, contractually delegates its sovereignty to governments. For Hobbes, this delegation is total. But it by no means leads to democracy: on the contrary, it invests the monarch with absolute power (the “Leviathan”). For Locke delegation is conditional: the people agrees to give up its sovereignty only in exchange for guarantees concerning fundamental rights and individual freedoms. Popular sovereignty is not so much lost between elections as suspended, so long as the government respects the terms of the contract.

Rousseau, for his part, holds that democracy is incompatible with any representative regime. The people, for him, does not contract with the sovereign. The prince is only the executive of the people, which remains the sole holder of legislative power. He is not even invested with the power belonging to the general will; indeed, it is rather the people that governs through him. Rousseau’s argument is very simple: if the people is represented, then its representatives hold power, in which case it is no longer sovereign. The sovereign people is a “collective being” that can only be represented by itself. To renounce its sovereignty would be like renouncing its freedom, i.e., destroying itself. As soon as the people elect its representatives, “it is a slave, it is nothing” (On the Social Contract, III, 15). Freedom, as an inalienable right, implies its full exercise, otherwise there cannot be true political citizenship. Under these conditions, popular sovereignty can only be undivided and inalienable. Any representation thus constitutes an abdication.

If it is granted that democracy is the regime based on the sovereignty of the people, then one must accept Rousseau’s argument.

Democracy is the form of government that corresponds to the principle of the identity of the ruled and the ruler, i.e., the popular will and the law. This identity derives from the nominal equality of the citizens, i.e., from the fact that they are all equally members of the same political unity. To say that the people is sovereign, not essentially but by vocation, means that it is from the people that the public power and the laws proceed. The rulers can thus be only agents of execution, who must conform to the ends determined by the general will. The role of the representative must be reduced as much as possible, the representative mandate losing all legitimacy as soon as it relates to ends or projects not corresponding to the general will.

Exactly the opposite is the case today. In liberal democracies, primacy is given to representation, and more precisely to whomever incarnates representation, i.e., the representative. The representative, far from being merely an “agent” expressing the will of his voters, is the very incarnation of this will by the mere fact of being elected. Election justifies him acting no longer according to the will of those who elected him, but according to his own will—in other words, he regards himself as authorized by election to do whatever he judges best.

This system is the object of those criticisms that have always been raised against parliamentarism, criticisms that assume new urgency in current debates on the “democracy deficit” and the “crisis of representation.”

In the representative system, once the voter has delegated his political will to his representative by voting, power’s center of gravity inevitably resides in the representatives and the political parties that subsume them, and no longer in the people. The political class soon forms an oligarchy of professionals who defend their own interests (the “New Class”), in a general climate of confusion and unaccountability. Today, when decision-making power is increasingly allotted by nomination or co-optation rather than election, this oligarchy is further augmented by “experts,” senior officials, and technicians.

The rule of law, whose virtues liberal theorists regularly celebrate—despite all the ambiguities attached to this expression—seems unlikely to correct the situation. Consisting of an ensemble of procedures and formal legal rules, it is actually indifferent to the specific aims of politics. Values are excluded from its concern, thus leaving an open field for the confrontation of interests. Laws have authority solely because they are legal, i.e., in conformity with the constitution and the procedures provided for their adoption. Thus legitimacy is reduced to legality. This legalist-positivist conception of legitimacy encourages respect for institutions as such, as if they constituted ends in themselves, without the popular will being able to amend them and control their operation.

However, in democracy, the legitimacy of power does not depend solely on conformity to the law, or even conformity to the Constitution, but above all on conformity of governmental practices to the aims assigned by the general will. Thus the justice and the validity of the laws cannot lie entirely in the activity of the state or the legislation of the party in power. Likewise, the law’s legitimacy cannot be guaranteed by the mere existence of jurisdictional control: it is also necessary that the law be legitimate, that it answer to the citizens’ expectations, and that it serve the common good. Finally, one can speak of constitutional legitimacy only when the authority of the constituent power is recognized as always having the right to amend the laws’ form or contents. That is to say that the constituting power cannot be completely delegated or alienated, that it continues to exist and that its authority is higher than the Constitution and constitutional laws, even if these are based on it.

Obviously we can never completely escape representation, since the idea of a controlling majority encounters insurmountable difficulties in modern societies. Representation, which is never more than a makeshift, does not, however, exhaust the democratic principle. It can to a large extent be corrected by the implementation of participatory democracy, also called organic democracy or embodied democracy. Such a reorientation appears even more necessary today given the general evolution of society.

The crisis of institutional structures, the disappearance of the founding “grand narratives,” the growing disaffection of the electorate for conventional political parties, the revival of community life, the emergence of new social or political movements (ecological, regionalist, identitarian) whose common characteristic is less to defend negotiable interests than existential values—all these allow us to envision the possibility of recreating a fundamentally active citizenship.

The crisis of the nation state — due in particular to the globalization of economic life and the deployment of phenomena of planetary influence — causes for its part two modes of transcendence: at the top, through various attempts to recreate at the supranational level a coherence and efficiency in decision-making that would allow at least partial regulation of the globalization process; at the bottom, through the renewed importance of small political unities and local autonomies. These two tendencies — which not only do not oppose but actually complement and imply one another — offer a remedy for today’s democracy deficit.

But the political scene is still changing. On the right we are seeing the rupture of the old “hegemonic block” because capitalism can no longer maintain its alliance with the middle classes—due to its belated modernization, the evolution of production costs, and the transnationalization of capital accelerated by the crisis. At the same time that the middle classes feel disorientated if not threatened, the lower classes are increasingly disappointed by the governmental policies of a left that, after disavowing practically all its principles, tends to identify more and more with the interests of the upper middle class. In other words, the middle classes no longer feel represented by the parties of the right, while the popular elements feel abandoned and betrayed by the parties of the left.

Moreover, the effacement of old points of reference, the collapse of models, the disintegration of the great ideologies of modernity, the absolute power of a commercial system that (may) ensure the means of existence but not the meaning of life, raise finally the crucial question of the significance of man’s earthly existence, of the meaning of individual and collective life, in an age when the economy produces more and more goods and services with less and less labor, multiplying exclusions in a context already heavily marked by unemployment, precarious employment, fear of the future, insecurity, reactive aggressiveness, and tensions of all kinds.

All these factors call for an in-depth recasting of democratic practices that can take place only in terms of true participatory democracy. Indeed, in an increasingly “illegible” society, participatory democracy has the main advantage of eliminating or correcting the distortions caused by representation, ensuring greater conformity of the law to the general will, and founding a legitimacy without which institutional legality is mere show.

It is not possible to recreate such an active citizenship at the level of the great collective institutions (parties, trade unions, churches, armies, schools, etc.) for today they are all more or less in crisis and thus no longer able to perform their traditional functions of social integration and mediation. Nor can the control of power be the sole prerogative of political parties whose activity is too often reduced to clientelism. Today, participatory democracy can be only a grassroots democracy.

The purpose of grassroots democracy is not to generalize discussion to all realms of life, but rather — with the input of as many people as possible — to arrive at new decision-making procedures in conformity with the requirements of grassroots democracy and the aspirations of the citizens. This is not merely a matter of opposing “civil society” to the public sphere, which would amount to increasing private influence and giving up political initiative for obsolete forms of power. Rather, grassroots democracy works to make it possible for individuals to prove themselves as citizens, and not as members of the private sphere, while supporting as much as possible the multiplication and flourishing of new public spheres of initiative and responsibility.

The referendum procedure (which results either from government decision or popular initiative and which is either optional or obligatory) is only one form of direct democracy among others — one whose importance is perhaps overestimated. Let us stress once again that the real political principle of democracy is not that the majority decides, but that the people is sovereign. Voting per se is only a simple technical means of consulting and revealing opinion. This means that democracy is a political principle that should not be confused with the means it uses, any more than it is to be reduced to a purely arithmetic or quantitative idea. Citizenship is not exhausted by voting, but is present in all methods allowing one to give or refuse consent, to express refusal or approval. It is thus advisable to explore systematically all possible forms of active participation in public life, which are also forms of responsibility and personal autonomy, since public life conditions the daily existence of us all.

But participatory democracy is more than just political. It also has social import. By supporting relations of reciprocity, by allowing the re-creation of social bonds, it can help reconstitute today’s weakened organic solidarity, repairing a social fabric frayed by the rise of individualism, competition, and self-interest. Insofar as it produces elementary sociality, participatory democracy goes hand in hand with the rebirth of vibrant communities, the re-creation of solidarity in neighborhoods, districts, workplaces, etc.

This participatory conception of democracy is entirely opposed to the liberal legitimation of political apathy, which indirectly encourages abstention and leads to the reign of managers, experts, and technicians. Democracy, in the final analysis, rests less on the form of government per se than on people’s participation in public life, such that the maximum of democracy merges with the maximum of participation. To participate is to take part, to prove oneself as part of a unit or a whole, and to assume the active role that results from this membership. “Participation,” René Capitant says, “is the individual act of the citizen acting as a member of the popular collectivity.” One sees by this how much the concepts of membership, citizenship, and democracy are interdependent. Participation sanctions citizenship, which results from membership. Membership justifies citizenship, which allows participation.

Everyone knows the motto of the French republic: “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” If the liberal democracies have exploited the word “liberty,” if the former people’s democracies seized upon “equality,” then organic or participatory democracy, based on active citizenship and popular sovereignty, could well be the best way to respond to the imperative of fraternity.

Note

Alain de Benoist, “Démocratie représentative et démocratie participative,” in Critiques—Théoriques (Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme, 2002), 426–30. The translator wishes to thank Alain de Benoist for permission to translate and publish this essay, and Michael O’Meara for checking and editing the translation.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “Democracy: Representative & Participatory.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 19-24. Text retrieved from: <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/democracy-representative-and-participatory/ >.

 

Fourth Dimension – Benoist

The Fourth Dimension

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from the French by Tomislav Sunic

 

Modernity successfully gave birth to three major competing political doctrines; liberalism in the eighteenth century, socialism in the nineteenth century and fascism in the twentieth century. Being the last in line, fascism was also the one that disappeared most rapidly. However, the breakdown of the Soviet system has not brought to a halt socialist aspirations and even less so the ideas of communism. Liberalism, for its part, seems to be the biggest winner in this competition. In any case the principles of liberalism, spearheaded by the ideology of human rights, and thriving now within the New Class all over the globe, are today the most widespread within the framework of the process of globalization.

None of these doctrines are totally wrong. Each one of them contains some elements of truth. Let us have a rapid look at this panorama. What needs to be retained from liberalism is the following; the idea of freedom accompanied by the sense of responsibility; the rejection of rigid determinism; the importance of the notion of autonomy; the critique of statism; a certain tendency towards republicanism, anti-Jacobinism and anti-centralism. What needs to be rejected is: possessive individualism; the focus on the anthropological concept of the producer vs. consumer in which everybody searches for his best interest; the principles based on what Adam Smith called “the gift for peddling,” that is, the inclination for tradeoffs; the ideology of progress, the bourgeois spirit, the primacy of utilitarian and mercantile values; the paradigm of the market — in short, capitalism.

What needs to be retained from socialism are the following points: its critique of the logic of the capital in so far as socialism was the first to analyze each of its economic and supra-economic dimensions; the idea that society must be defined as a whole (holism, the original key-concept of sociology); the desire for enfranchisement; the notion of solidarity and the idea of social justice. What needs to be rejected is: historicism; statism; the drive toward egalitarianism and doleful hypermoralism.

From fascism what needs to be retained is the following: the affirmation of the uniqueness of identity of each people and its national culture; the sense of heroic values; the bondage between ethics and aesthetics. What needs to be rejected is: the metaphysics of subjectivity, nationalism, Social Darwinism, racism, primitive anti-feminism and the cult of the leader, and of course, again, statism.

The Interregnum

Will the fourth political theory, the one the twenty-first century so badly needs, be a radically new doctrine, or will it provide a synthesis of what was best in the preceding ones? In any case this project has been a major focus of interest of (what one calls) the “European New Right” for well over 40 years.

The twenty-first century will also be the century of the 4^th Nomos of the Earth (general power configuration at the global level). The First Nomos, the one where nations lived relatively isolated from each other, came to an end with the discovery of America. The Second Nomos, embodied by the Eurocentric order of modern states (the Westphalian order), ended with the First World War. The Third Nomos was the one in place since 1945 and it shaped the Yalta regime and the Soviet-American condominium.

What will be the Fourth Nomos? That one may take on the form of a unipolar America-centric world, i.e. a vast global market, that is to say, an immense free trade space, or possibly a multi-polar world where major continental blocks, being both autonomous power actors and hubs of civilizations, play a regulatory role vis-à-vis globalization, preserving thus the diversity of lifestyles and cultures that make up the wealth of mankind.

But it may just as well be said that we have entered now World War IV. World War One (1914–18), which ended for the benefit of the City of London, had brought about the dismantlement of the Austro- Hungarian and the Ottoman empires. The two big winners of the Second World War (1939–45) were the United States and Stalinist Russia. World War III corresponded to the Cold War (1945–89). It ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet system, mainly to the advantage of Washington. World War IV began in 1991. It means a war led by the United States against the rest of the world; a multifaceted type of war, both militarily and economically; both at the financial, technological and cultural level and inseparable from the world-wide “enframing” and rationalization of everything (‘Gestell’) by boundless capital.

The evolution of warfare depends not only on technological advances in armaments, but also on the succession of political forms and institutions to which they are related. One can say that the well-defined military forms of conflict have gone through four stages in modern times: first came the war of sovereign states — as a fall-out of the birth of modern politics, so well described by Hobbes and Machiavelli. In other words back then we were witnessing the dispossession of the theological in favor of a pure political conception of the sovereign. Henceforth, wars were solely conducted for the interests of each state. These were limited wars — wars against justus hostis (“just enemy”), in which only a specific political order was defended.

In the 18^th century surfaced the “democratic war” of nations, who in their turn became sovereign actors. This was also the war that included irregulars while giving birth to guerillas within the context of rising nationalism, and in which what needed to be defended was a given territory as the first priority. In the nineteenth century one could witness the rise of wars conducted in the name of humanity, i.e., wars of a moralizing and criminalizing nature, wars based on an ideology in which abstract principles were defended. This type of war signaled the return of “just war” (its first apparition could be observed during the American Civil War). The fourth form of warfare is now the war against “terror” (or “Star Wars”) — a war of asymmetric and total character.

In many aspects we have already entered the fourth dimension of warfare. Entering this fourth dimension brings us closer to the moment of truth. The question remains as to what will be the general configuration of issues in this century, the major lines of demarcation and the decisive cleavages? For the time being we still live in a kind of interregnum. Yet from now on, the essential issue needs to be addressed: the enigma of the subject in the historical process in a world dominated by Capitalism, in which Capitalism is itself subject to terrible internal contradictions, while at the same time becoming stronger and stronger day after day. Who will be the historical subject to shake things up in life now?

Being a historical subject and not an object of the history of others requires full self-awareness and awareness of how to unfold oneself towards one’s own potential. Heidegger spoke of Being (Dasein), a Being shaped by his time, waiting to unfold. But there is also a Being (Dasein) of peoples in the political sense of this term. All peoples are waiting to see the end of their alienation — as peoples. Facing the objectified forms of their work — which is represented by capital — they need to affirm themselves as historical subjects in the present age — in order to become again the subjects of their own social endeavors.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “The Fourth Dimension.” The Occidental Observer, 30 January 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/01/the-fourth-dimension/ >.

Note: This article was originally published in French in Elements, Nr. 136, June 2011.

 

The “West” Should be Forgotten – Benoist

The “West” Should Be Forgotten

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from the French by Tomislav Sunic

 

The “West”? Raymond Abellio observed that “Europe is fixed in space, that is to say, in geography, as opposed to the West which is “portable.” In fact, the “West” has continued travelling and changing directions. In the beginning that term meant the land where the sun sets (Abendland), as opposed to the land of the rising sun (Morgenland). Starting with the reign of Diocletian in the late third century AD, the opposition between East and West came down to the distinction between the Western Roman Empire (whose capital was Milan and then Ravenna) and the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople. The first one disappeared in 476 AD, with the abdication of Romulus Augustulus. After that the West and Europe merged for good. However, starting with the eighteenth century the adjective “Western” came to light on nautical charts referring to the New World, also called the “American system,” as opposed to the “European system,” or the “Eastern Hemisphere” (which then included Europe, Africa and Asia).

In the interwar period the West, having always been associated with Europe, as for example in Spengler’s works, was contrasted to the Orient, which turned into an object of fascination (René Guenon) and a scarecrow (Henri Massis). During the Cold War, the West included Western Europe and its Anglo-Saxon allies such as England and the United States, both being at that time opposed to the “Eastern bloc,” dominated by the Soviet Russia. This view, which allowed the U.S. to legitimize its hegemony, survived the collapse of the Soviet system (also for example with Huntington).

Today, the West has again acquired new meanings. At times it can have a purely economic one: “Western” are all developed, modernized, industrialized countries, such as Japan, South Korea and Australia, including the countries of the former “Eastern Europe,” North America or Latin America. “Ex Oriente lux, luxus ex Occidente,” (Light comes from the East; luxuriousness comes from the West) quipped jokingly the Polish writer Stanislaw Jerzy Lec. The West is losing its spatial content only to become merged with the notion of modernity. On the global level and as the last incarnation of furor orientalis in the eyes of Westerners, the West is opposed to Islamism. Accordingly, a fundamental divide separates the “Judeo-Christian” West from the “Arab-Muslim East,” and some people do not hesitate to predict that the final struggle of “Rome” and “Ismaël” — the war of Gog and Magog — will culminate in the messianic era.

In reality, there is no more such thing as the unitary “West,” just as there is no homogenous “East.” As for the notion of the “Christian West,” it has lost all meaning ever since Europe sank into indifference and “practical materialism” and in view of the fact that religion has become a private matter. Europe and the West have become completely disjointed from each other — to the point that defending Europe often means fighting against the West. No longer related to any geographical domain, let alone cultural, the word ‘West’ should be forgotten for good.

Let us rather talk about Europe. By thinking objectively, that is to say, by acquiring the gift for distancing itself from its self, and in order to be able to objectively rule on the true, the just and the good, Europe, all of a sudden, wished to access the universal — a desire that is not to be found in other cultures. Jean-François Mattei rightly speaks about the “theoretical view of the universal.” This idea of the universal has later on degenerated into universalism, which originally had a religious nature and then a secular nature (there is just as much distance between the universal and universalism as there is between liberty and liberalism). In its quest for Sameness, universalism boils down to the ideology of the Same, at the expense of Difference, i.e. in affirming the primacy of Oneness over Multiplicity. But it also reflects hidden ethnocentrism to the point that any idea of universal inevitably reflects a specific conception of the universal. Initially, there was a need to grasp the Other from the point of view of the Others and not from one’s own Self — which was both commendable and necessary. Afterwards, one gave up on being his Self — which turned out to be catastrophic.

Europe seems to be now in decline at all levels. The very construction of Europe is melting away before our eyes. Not only is Europe the “sick man on the economic planet” (Marcel Gauchet); it is also facing an unprecedented crisis of intelligence and political will. It wishes to bail out of history, driven by the idea that the present state of things — the boundless capital and techno-science — are expected to continue their course forever and that there is nothing else possible, and especially that there is nothing better. Ceding to an impetus that has become a part and an object of the history of others, Europe has exempted itself from its very self. Between the destitution of its past and the fear of its future, it believes in nothing else other than abstract moralism and disembodied principles that would save her from thriving in its being — even if the price is its metamorphosis. Forgetting that history is tragic, assuming that its can reject any consideration of power, searching for consensus at any cost, floating weightless, as if in a form of lethargy, not only does it consent to its own disappearance, but it interprets its disappearance as a proof of its moral superiority. One can obviously think of the “last man” that Nietzsche talked about.

So the only thing that is not declining is the subject of the decline itself — which is the subject of the permanent “declination.” This issue is not an offshoot of the old tradition of cultural pessimism. We need to know whether history obeys intrinsic laws that go beyond human action. If there is a decline of the West, then this decline comes from far away and must not be reduced to the present state of affairs such as globalization. The fate of a culture is contained in its origin. Its very history is determined by its origin because its origin determines its historical itinerary, its narrative skill, and the content of its narration. Historically, the Western idea first expressed itself in a metaphysical form, after that in an ideological form, and then in a “scientific” form. Evidently, it is running out of steam today. The West has said everything it had to say; it conjugated all its myths in every possible manner. It is coming to an end in a chaotic dissolution, as a depletion of energy and all-out nihilism.

The real issue is whether there is another culture which, having already embraced modernity, could offer the world a new form of mastering the universal, both in theory and practice, or for that matter, whether Western culture, having reached its terminal phase, could give birth to another one. Indeed, when a culture comes to a close, another one can replace it. Europe has already been the site of many cultures and therefore, there is no reason why it can’t be again the homeland of a new culture, of which we need to detect warning signs. This new culture will follow on the preceding one, but it will not be its extension. Rather than lapsing into unnecessary lamentation, what is needed is an eye sharp enough to look at the margins where something can grow that enables hope.

We are back at Spengler’s, but with one correction; what comes to an end heralds a new beginning.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “The “West” Should Be Forgotten.” The Occidental Observer, 21 April 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/04/the-%e2%80%9cwest%e2%80%9d-should-be-forgotten/ >.

Note: This article was originally published in French in Elements, #139 (April–June, 2011).

 

End of the World – Benoist

Yes, the end of the world has happened

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from the French by Tomislav Sunic

 

The end of the world has indeed happened. It did not happen on a specific day, but has spread out over several decades. The world that disappeared was a world where most children knew how to read and write. A world where we admired the heroes rather than the victims. A world where political machines had not turned into the soul grinding machines. A world where we had more role models than rights. A world where one could understand what Pascal had meant when he wrote that entertainments distracted us from living a real human life. A world where the borders safeguarded those who lived their way of life and a life of their own.

Yes, that world had its flaws and sometimes it was a horrible world, but the daily life of great many people was at least regulated by an array of meanings provided by the landmarks. By way of memories, that was a world still familiar to many of us. Some regret its passing. But that world will never come back.

The new world is liquid. Space and time have been abolished. Stripped of its traditional mediation the society has become more and more fluid and more and more segmented, which only facilitates its reification. One lives in it by way of “zapping.” With the virtual disappearance of major collective projects, which were once the carriers of different worldviews, the religion of Self — a Self based on the unrestricted freedom of narcissistic desire, a Self self-generated out of nothing — has resulted in the across the board deterritorialization, which goes now hand in hand with the dissolution of all the landmarks and all the references, thus making the individual more and more malleable, more conditionable, more and more vulnerable, and more and more nomadic. Under the cover of emancipatory “modernization,” “for more than half a century the ideological osmosis has been taking place between the financial right and the multicultural left” (Mathieu Bock-Côté), meshing economic liberalism with societal liberalism, the market system with the fringe elements of culture, all of it due primarily to the mercantile recycling of the ideology of desire and capitalizing on the breakdown of the traditional social forms. The overall objective is the elimination of communities of meanings that refuse to operate according to the logic of the market.

Meanwhile, some real anthropological transformations have taken place. They affect the relationship to our Self, the relationship to Other, the relationship to the body, the relationship to technology. Tomorrow these transformations could rush us forward to the planned merger of the electronics and man’s own living bodies. As soon as greed for profit becomes the sole motivation, at the expense of all others, its performative result is the generalization of the mercantile spirit, which in turn breaks down the citizenry into simple customers. Within this context, “political correctness” is not just a passing and funny fad, but a powerful means to transform the process of thoughts, restrict more and more the common space as a generator of reciprocal obligations, and make it impossible to retrieve the world of the meanings which has by now disappeared.

We are finally witnessing the implementation of “governance” — a sort of financial Caesarism which boils down to ruling over the peoples, while keeping them at bay. For its part, the therapeutical and managerial state, being the dispenser of social engineering and acting as the Grand Supervisor, is working on the removal of all barriers separating order from chaos. It asserts its power on the implementation of a perfectly deliberate sub-chaotic situation against the backdrop of its own rushing ahead toward nowhere, and along with generalized timelessness, thus creating a situation of a cold civil war. The sociology of victimhood dismisses the very notion of social class, inserting in its place the denunciation of “exclusion” and the “fight against discrimination,” as well as an economic “science” which conceives of the notion of categories of people as a residual category. At the same time, though, more than ever before, the class struggle happens to be in full gear.

In Europe, under the impact of the “austerity” policies, the process of sliding into recession, if not into depression, is taking place. Mass unemployment continues to grow, the dismantling of public services leads to the reduction of social goods, while the purchasing power keeps diminishing. One quarter of the European population (120 million people) is threatened today by poverty. In the past, revolutions took place for much lesser reason than that. Today, there is no such thing. Outsourcing, layoffs, industrial relocations, abusive job dismissals and the so-called “social restructurings” can certainly trigger social protests — but nowhere near on the horizon is there any solidarity strike, let alone general strikes. The sole preoccupation to maintain one’s own job has no purpose other than its own. Why is the crisis being tolerated so passively? Are the nations so exhausted, so dazzled, so bewildered? Have they accepted the idea that there is no alternative? Nations live under the horizons of fatality. Everybody expects something to happen. But it won’t happen, because capitalism, in all objectivity, is reaching now its absolute historical limits.

We are experiencing a crisis of an absolutely unprecedented magnitude, affecting the capitalist system at a level of accumulation and productivity that has never been reached before. The crises of the nineteenth century could be overcome because Capital had not yet taken hold of the entire means of social reproduction. The crisis of 1929 was overcome due to Fordism, due to the Keynesian regulations, and because of the WWII. The current crisis, occurring now against the backdrop of the third industrial revolution, is a structural crisis, spearheaded by total empowerment of the financial markets over the real economy and plagued in addition by widespread public debt. One of its direct results is the yielding of political power to the representatives of Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. But neither of these can solve the problem, because there is no such mechanism able to overcome the present crisis. Financial bubbles, state credit and money printing, that is to say, the creation of fictitious money-capital, can no longer solve the problem of the loss of the Capital substance. In the absence of real growth, and regardless whether one moves toward an uncontrollable inflation or toward a general public default payment, or whether one moves toward an uncontrollable inflation, the current solvency crisis (which is now being treated as a liquidity crisis) — all of this will end up in the earthquake.

In a time like ours there are four kinds of people. There are those who consciously wish to sink further and deeper into chaos and darkness. There are those who willingly or unwillingly, are always ready to endure anything. Then there are also rightwing dinosaurs around who live the present situation by way of lamenting. From whining to commemorations, they imagine they can bring back the old order, which explains why they constantly score defeats.

But there are also those who yearn for a new beginning. Those who live in the darkness, but are not of the darkness; i.e. those who strive to resurrect the light. Those who know that beyond the real, there is also the possible. They like to quote George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “Yes, the end of the world has happened.” The Occidental Observer, 21 February 2013. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/02/yes-the-end-of-the-world-has-happened/ >.

Note: This articles was first published in the quarterly Eléments (n°146, January –March 2013) under the title “La fin du monde a bien eu lieu.”

 

Geopolitics Today – Benoist

Geopolitics Today

By Alain de Benoist

 

Geopolitics has long been frowned upon by public opinion. Following World War II, it became the most unpopular of the social sciences. It had been accused of being a “German science” which didn’t really mean much, except that it owes its initial impetus to the political geography principles enunciated by the German geographer Friederich Ratzel – the term “geopolitics” being used for the first time by the Swedish geographer Rudolf Kjéllen in 1889. In his book “Politische Geographie oder die Geographie der Staaten, des Verkehrs und des Krieges (1897)” Ratzel analyzed the interactions of the state, considered as a living body, in terms of its geography and its space. One of his disciples was the Bavarian General Karl Haushofer, founder of the “Zeitschrift für Geopolitik”. It was only by an obvious confusion between space in the geopolitical sense and “Lebensraum” that a connection/ proximity between Karl Haushofer and National Socialism was brought into question. This was wrongly so, and not only because Haushofer never was an ideologue of the 3rd Reich. More importantly, Hitler had much more sympathy for the Anglo Saxons than he had for the Slavs. He waged a war against Russia, a continental power, yet he would have preferred to ally with Great Britain, a sea power. Had he subscribed to the thesis of geopolitics he would have done the exact opposite.

Moreover, the definition of this discipline’s field of study or its status has never ceased to be a problem. Geopolitics studies the influence of geography on politics and history, that is to say, the relationship between space and power (political, economic or other). Yet the definition remains fuzzy, which explains that the reality of both the concept and the relationship to its objective have been disputed. It has therefore been described as a discipline aiming to legitimize retrospectively historical events or political decisions.

These criticisms do not, however, go to the bottom of things: That we can identify through history, geographical constants of political action is, as a matter of fact, indisputable. Geopolitics remains thus, a discipline of great value and great importance. It is, even, essential to refer to it in a world in transition, where all the cards are being redistributed worldwide. Geopolitics puts into perspective the weight of merely ideological factors, unstable by definition, and recalls the existence of large constants that transcend political regimes as well as the intellectual debates.

Of all the concepts specific to Geopolitics, one of the most significant is undoubtedly the dialectical opposition between Sea and Land. ” World history, said Carl Schmitt, is the story of the fight of maritime powers against continental powers and of continental powers against maritime powers.” It was also the Admiral Castex’ opinion as well as that of many other geopoliticians. Halford Mackinder, for example, defines the power of Great Britain by the domination of the oceans and seas. He perceives the planet as a whole composed of a ” Global Ocean” and a “Global Island”, corresponding to the entire Eurasian space as well as Africa , and ” peripheral islands” , America and Australia. In order to dominate the world, we must seize the global island and primarily its “heart” , the Heartland, the real world’s geographical pivot stretching from Central Europe to Western Siberia and towards the Mediterranean, from Middle-East and South Asia. One of the first English great navigators, Sir Walter Raleigh, used to say: ” Whoever controls the seas controls world trade; whoever controls world trade holds all the treasures of the world in his possession, and in fact, the whole world.”

In the history of mankind, the confrontation between Land and Sea is the age-old struggle between the European continental logic and the “insular” logic embodied nowadays by the US. But the opposition between Land and Sea goes well beyond the perspectives offered by Geopolitics. The Land is a space formed by territories differentiated by borders. Its logic is based on sharp distinctions between war and peace, combatants and non-combatants, political action and trade. It is therefore the place of politics and history par excellence. ” Political existence is pure telluric nature” (Adriano Scianca). The sea is an homogenous area/stretch, the negation of differences, limits and borders. It is a space of indistinctness, the liquid equivalent of the desert. Being centre-less, it only knows ebb and flow and this is how it is related to postmodern globalization. The actual world is indeed a “liquid” world (Zygmunt Bauman), which tends to eliminate everything that is “earthly”, stable, solid, consistent, sustainable, and differentiated. It is a world of flux carried by networks. Trade itself, as well as the logic of is also formed in the manner of ebb and flow.

Geopolitics has regained its legitimacy with the various conflicts that have arisen since the 1970′ s. Most of these conflicts have been carried out by the US. Marked from their puritan origins by the conviction of being the “new chosen people” the Americans have intended to establish themselves as a universal model, which would bring to the world the benefits of “the American way of life” that is to say a model of a commercial civilization, based on the primacy of exchange value and the logic of profit. This planetary mission would be their “Manifest Destiny” . Geopolitics is precisely the discipline which helps to explain the constants of their foreign policy.

The disbanding of the Soviet system, has at the same time made globalization possible and marked the disappearance of a tremendous competitor for American power which has then had the temptation to shape a unipolar world under its hegemony. (What has been called “The New World Order” ) In the aftermath of the Soviet disbanding the US find themselves as an “Empire without shadow” (Eric Hobsbawn). Confident in their technological superiority, in their military power, in the benefits given by the dollar system, they have thought that an ” American century” was about to be forthcoming. Convinced to be from this point forward the world’s only superpower, they have pretended to play the role of the “world police”. The neo-conservatives were at the forefront of this project. This was the time Francis Fukuyama thought he could announce the “End of History”, namely the triumph of liberal capitalism and the democracy of human rights as the unsurpassable horizon of our time.

At the end of the 1990s, Gorbachev’s advisor Arbatov declared to the Americans: “We are dealing you the worst blow: we are going to deprive you of your enemy.” Significant words. The disappearance of the Soviet “Evil Empire” threatened to eradicate all ideological legitimization of American hegemony over her allies. This meant that, from then on, the Americans needed to find an alternative enemy, which provided a threat, real or imaginary, that would allow them to establish themselves as the masters of the “New World Order”. It is radical Islam, something they constantly encouraged in previous decades that will play the role of a foil. But in reality, their fundamental objective remains unchanged. This is to prevent, anywhere in the world, the emergence of a rival capable of competing with them and most importantly to control the Heartland, the “global island.”

In his book The Grand Chessboard, published in 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski enumerates explicitly the “geostrategic imperatives” the US must meet to maintain their global hegemony. Describing a project of “global management” of the world, he warns against the “creation or the emergence of an Eurasian coalition” that “could seek to challenge America’s supremacy.” In 2001, Henry Kissinger was already saying:” America must retain a presence in Asia, and its geopolitical objective must remain to prevent Asia’s coalescence into an unfriendly bloc.” Brzezinski recalled in his turn:” Who controls Eurasia, controls the world.”

To control Eurasia, means, first of of all, adopting a strategy of encirclement of Russia and China. The encirclement of Russia strategy includes the installation of new military bases in Eastern Europe, the establishment of anti missiles defense systems in Poland, Czech Republic and Romania, supporting the accession of Ukraine and Georgia to Nato, and pursuing an aggressive policy aiming to dislocate Russia’s influence in key regions around the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus. In terms of energy supply, this strategy leads to the control of Central Asia’s pipelines – Central Asia being transformed into an American protectorate – encouraging the development of pipelines in the Caspian to bypass Russia and to reach Turkey, as well as limiting as much as possible the access of Russian tankers to the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits. It is within this context that we must put the ” colour revolutions” in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan. Far from being spontaneous movements, these were organized and supported from the outside with the endorsement of the National Endowment for Democracy, a convenient front for the CIA.

The establishment of an “arc of crisis” to destabilize Russia’s traditional sphere of influence in the Caucasus, Afghanistan and Central Asia can only be understood in this context. Using the alleged “War against Terror”: in Afghanistan the US and her allies have set up military bases in the former Soviet republics, including, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The objective can be summed up in three words: encircle, destabilize, balkanize.

In parallel and simultaneously, they endeavoured to massively expand NATO in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans as far as the Russian border, even within the former Soviet Union. As of Sep 11 2001, President George Bush took a stand in favor of ” a large NATO from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea ” to pave the way from the Caspian and the Black Sea. That is to go from a relatively static structure to an expeditionary model of neocolonial interventions in all directions, global geostrategic centers of gravity slipping, thus, to the Middle East and Asia.

Maintaining NATO has two other goals. The first one is to continue to dissuade the EU to build up a a common and autonomous European defense force. Americans have always considered that European defense meant to them “the set up of NATO’s European pillar”. The second goal is to weaken the relations between Russia and Western Europe. Germany is particularly targeted, given the extent of its technological, energy and economical exchange with Russia. In this project, the EU becomes a simple American bridgehead in Eurasia.

In Middle East, where they are facing serious challenges due to the instability of the region, the failure of their military interventions and the growing isolation of their unswerving Israeli ally, the US are developing an aggressive strategy to counter the rise of Iran, which worries them because of its energy resources, its privileged relationship with China and Russia, and its increasing influence in Iraq and in the Gulf countries where there are significant Shiite minorities. Finally, they are currently engaged in a spectacular return to Africa, for two reasons, to counterbalance China’s influence and to take into account the growing importance of Africa in terms of global energy supplies.

To develop this aggressive policy, the US are not short of technological and financial means. Despite their financial difficulties and their exceptional deficits, their military budget, which is constantly increasing, is now close to $700 billion, a colossal amount, and equivalent to more than 40% of all military budgets combined in the world.

However, the question arises whether the United States have not reached the limits of their Imperial expansion capacity. Their domestic issues worsen. The dollar system, which they capitalize on, teeters on the brink. The global financial crisis that started there, back in 2008 hit them with full force. Their trade gap and the public debt have reached an all time high.

In Russia, meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, who clearly perceived their intentions, clearly broke from the catastrophic era under Boris Yeltsin, who had sanctified the omnipotence of the “oligarchs.”

The most recent events related to the civil war in Syria have, again, highlighted the importance of geopolitics. The extreme acumen of Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov against Barack Obama’s indecisiveness and Francois Holland naivety, has been symptomatic. With its intervention in the Syrian affair, Russia has regained its role as a major world power and thus showed that it (Russia) is not a negligible party in international affairs, but that it will have to be reckoned with in the future.

The “unipolar moment” has therefore not lasted for 10 years. The Americans, who now only represent 5% of the world population, have overestimated their strength. The engulfing of their troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, their domestic issues, their abyssal deficits, the instability of the dollar system and the world financial crisis have imposed limits on them. It quickly becomes apparent that they will not rule the world unchallenged. The History, which Fukuyama announced the end has already returned.

A multipolar world is emerging on the back of China’s rapid surge, followed by India, Brazil and even Iran. Emerging economies are growing dramatically. Their share in the world’s gross domestic product in purchasing power parity has gone from 36% in 1980 to 45% in 2008 and should reach 51% in 2014.

The US Eurasian strategy has led, as a reaction, to a significant rapprochement between Russia and China, which has materialized within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, founded in June 2001, which also includes four Central Asia countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) while Iran, Mongolia, India and Afghanistan participate as observers.

We know that in recent years, Iran has strengthened its relationship with China and Russia. This pragmatic alliance materializes today utilizing mutual geopolitical supports that have led some observers to consider the possibility to witness, in the coming years, the rise of a kind of “new Mongol Empire”. Between 1206 and 1294, Genghis Khan’s Turkish-Mongol Empire had spread throughout Central Asia before breaking up into four blocks. Today The SCO, whose main goal is to counter US influence in Central Asia, is associated again with Russia, China and Iran, three different countries, yet forming a real community of interests which represents 1.5 billion people. The big difference with the former Mongol Empire however, is that today Iran sees Turkey as regional rival power.

Since the end of the Soviet system, we have entered in an interregnum – a Zwischenzeit. The former Nomos of the Earth is gone but the contours of a new Nomos can only be speculated upon. The actual big world conflict is the one that opposes the Eurasian continental power to the American thalassocracy. The main question is whether we are going towards an unipolar world, an universum, or towards a multipolar world, a pluriversum.

The problem is that Europeans are rarely aware of this. Americans may have many faults but there is something we cannot deny them, they are aware of the global stakes and to try to think the world to come. In Russia and China too, they think the world to come. The Europeans, they don’t think. They only care about the present moment. They live under the horizon of fate, with institutions that condemn them to powerlessness and paralysis. Europe lives in a state of weightlessness. Facing an unprecedented moral crisis, the problem of immigration, an ageing population, economic offshoring and global competition. It appears Europe cannot defend its place in a globalized world. Bearing an identity that she (Europe) cannot anymore define, haunted by the secret desire to withdraw itself/ herself from History – thus running the risk of becoming the object of other’s history – thinking men are everywhere of the same disposition. Europe is now ” poor-in-world” (Heidegger). She (Europe) seems exhausted, beset by lassitude that leads to not wanting anything. Geopolitics of powerlessness? Rise of insignificance? The Euro banknotes are like its reflection: they only represent emptiness.

In the past, geopolitics applied its constraints mainly at state level, the same states that seem to have entered an irreversible crisis, at least in the western hemisphere. Now, it depends on the logic of continents which has long been hidden behind the disorderly conducts of the states but that is now more fundamental than ever. It (Geopolitics) helps to think in terms not only of countries but also of continents (Jordis Von Lohausen). The Sea against the Land, now it is US against the “rest of the world”, and first against the Eurasian and European continental bloc. In this sense, the collapse of the Soviet system has clarified things. There are now only two possible positions: either being on the side of the American sea power or being on the side of the Eurasian continental power. I’m with the latter.

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De Benoist, Alain. “Geopolitics Today.” Speech delivered at “The End of the Present World: The Post-American Century and Beyond Conference”, held in Central London, UK, 12 October 2013. Text of transcript retrieved from <http://www.endofthepresentworld.com/p/alain-de-benoist-geopolitics-today_21.html >.

Note: See the Romanian translation of this article (“Geopolitica azi”, Estica, 3 September 2014) which is based off of our own publication here: <http://www.estica.eu/article/geopolitica-azi/ >.