Should Western Nations Continue to Exist?

This is a repost of a piece by a friend of mine on X. I especially like his attempt to define “nation” and I think his definition is extremely important for how we apply Catholic Social Teaching in our age. Please follow Michael Sebastian on X if you aren’t already.
-Levi A. Russell

by Michael Sebastian

The most important question we face in the 21st Century is whether the nations of Europe and those descended from Europe will continue to exist. The demographics of Western countries have changed dramatically over the past 50 years. The United States has gone from being 90% white in 1970 to only 58% white in 2023 due to record high levels of immigration.

The changing demographics have introduced significant changes in these Western countries. As the great Lee Kuan Yew stated, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” This has been borne out by changes in voting patterns due to immigration. The U.S., which was once a solid center-right country, is now evenly divided between the right and left. States like California and Virginia, which were once safe Republican strongholds, are now reliable Democrat strongholds. And, not surprisingly, when Democrats are elected, they push for yet more immigration to increase their voter base. Public schools now need to incorporate education for an ever-increasing array of different languages as well as observe new holidays in addition to the old Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter. Finally, the increasing ethnic diversity has decreased levels of social cohesion and trust as found in a 2020 meta-analysis by Peter Dinesen and Merlin Schaffer.

Similar changes are happening in other Western countries such as the U.K., France, Sweden, and Germany. These changes have sparked a discussion as to what a nation is and whether Western nations deserve to continue to exist in their present form or whether they should cease to exist and become a conglomeration of every ethnic group on earth.

Today, we use the word nation interchangeably with the word State, but they are really two different things. The State is a government like the U.S. federal government or the British government.

Nation, on the other hand, doesn’t refer to a government, but a people. The Latin root of nation is natio which means birth, origin, race, or tribe. Catholic philosopher Henri Grenier defined nation as:

A large community of men who, because of their descent from common stock, are in certain physical characteristics and intellectual and moral qualities to some extent distinct from all other men. (Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy)

Under this definition, a nation is just a large extended family. Becoming part of a nation requires more than just becoming a citizen of a particular country. As an American with no Japanese ancestry, I could move to Japan and become a citizen. I could learn fluent Japanese and fully adopt the Japanese culture as my own, but I could never truly be Japanese.

In the modern world, most States are nation-states. That is, they are governments formed by one particular national group. Korea, Japan, and Hungary are examples of such nation-states. Conversely, the government of Russia is an example of a multi-national empire ruling over several distinct nations.

If you are talking about China, Japan, Egypt or Eswatini, no one would question Grenier’s definition that these nations share descent from common stock. It is only when the conversation shifts to Western nations such as the United States, England, or Canada that people become uncomfortable and begin insisting that these are not nations in the traditional sense but “creedal nations” which do not share common descent, but only a set of beliefs.

We can think of the history of nations in three distinct phases.

The first phase existed from pre-history until the mid-20th Century. Throughout history, humans lived in tribes that shared common descent. As tribes settled down to one particular area they evolved into nations. One of the best documented examples of this was the creation of the nation of Israel. Originally, there were twelve Hebrew tribes which traced their ancestry to one man, the patriarch Jacob. It was only after the exodus from Egypt that these twelve tribes forged into one nation in the crucible of conquering the promised land. Another familiar example is the creation of the ancient Roman nation. Rome was founded by various Italian tribes coming together.

It’s important to note that new nations could come into being at any time in history (ethnogenesis). I would argue that America was just such a new nation. Nations could also cease to exist. History is replete with peoples that came onto the scene only to later vanish. The Hittites, Sumerians, Etruscans, Minoans, Tocharians, and Olmecs are all nations which once thrived but later died either by conquest or demographic replacement.

During this first phase, nations sought to establish nation-states because that is a natural tendency in every nation, but they were not often successful.The dominant form of government at this time was empire, where one nation would rule over other nations usually with most of the benefits flowing to the imperial power.

The second phase in the history of nations occurred after the Thirty Years’ War ending with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Thirty Years’ War is usually portrayed as a religious war between Protestants and Catholics, but it was really a war between the emerging nation-states of France, the Netherlands and Sweden and the Holy Roman Empire. It was at this time that the idea of universal empire was decisively defeated, and it marked the beginning of the modern age where the nation-state would be dominant.

The third phase in the history of nations was a reaction to Adolf Hitler and the start of World War II. In the wake of this catastrophic war, the bloodiest in human history, Marxists and liberals sought to explain the war as the result of nationalism. The argument was that Hitler was a nationalist, and that is why he sought to conquer other nations. But, as Yoram Hazony argues, Hitler was not a nationalist.

Despite the appearance of the word “national” in the name of the German National Socialist party, Hitler was no advocate of nationalism… In place of the order of national states, he set out to establish a Third Reich that expressly drew its inspiration from the German Holy Roman Empire. (Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism)

In other words, Hitler was an imperialist, not a nationalist

However, the West forged the post-War consensus once the Axis powers were defeated. Under this consensus, nationalism was the cause of World War II. Consequently, all Western nation-states took action to prevent nationalism from ever rising again.

While much of this action took the form of building global institutions like the United Nations, the bigger effects were felt within the nations themselves. President John F. Kennedy wrote a book entitled A Nation of Immigrants which emphasized the idea that America was a creedal nation, not a unique people. In US education, there was a shift away from fact-heavy history about the nation to conceptual learning with a global emphasis. Politically, the US implemented the Immigration Act of 1964, in part, to move away from America being a single people and establish the State as the sole unifying factor in the US.

The post-War consensus reached its pinnacle with the woke movement that started with the Floyd riots in 2020. This movement posited that the Western nations were inherently evil because they were systems of racial and sexual oppression. The goal of the woke movement was to create social justice by completely capturing all institutions of Western nations, stamping out any remaining elements of a nation based on common descent, and establishing a multi-ethnic utopia with a strong neo-Marxist flavor. Although the Trump Administration has marked an effort to reverse this trend, current demographics tend to favor the tilt leftward as the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York City has demonstrated.

In the end, the question of what constitutes a nation needs to be answered by the people of each Western country. Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore answered this question by implementing policy to maintain its ethnic balance at roughly 75% Chinese, 15% Malay, and 7% Indian. In the U.S., the nation of immigrants/melting pot concept still holds sway. But one thing is certain: Those who believe in distinct American, French, English, Swedish nations are running out of time to protect their nations. Very soon, demographic change due to immigration will render any discussions moot and these nations will end up vanishing like the Hittites or Olmecs of old.