Today it’s clear that migration has unsettled the politics of every developed nation. And yet, argues political theorist (and Wisdom of Crowds contributor) , the most influential political theorists of the last few decades did not anticipate how migration would challenge their notions of liberalism, international law and the nation state. Is it time to update their theories?
In this week’s essay, David refers to the work of political theorist who, faithful readers know, is something like the patron saint of Wisdom of Crowds. Here is the recording of a conversation we had with Fukuyama this past summer. Here is a CrowdSource explaining his famous “end of history” thesis. And here is an essay grappling with that thesis.
— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
As if by a lit delay fuse finally reaching its explosive charge, the issue of mass immigration has exploded the political establishments of the developed world. Many commentators have sensibly asked why so many governments not only had difficulty marshaling arguments for restricting immigration, but actively pursued what turned out to be untenably high intake levels for so many years. But what I’ve wondered is: why so few political thinkers seem to have anticipated that this phenomenon would become so widespread, to the point that it now dominates political debates around the world.
It is particularly interesting to consider the significance of both the scale of these migrations and the associated political fallout for Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. For, despite its flaws, The End of History and the Last Man remains the fullest statement of the default assumptions held by the global governing class and its auxiliaries across media, academia and both the non-profit and business sectors. As such, its reticence on the topic is a sign of a larger blind spot in our worldview.
Now, it must be admitted that questions of immigration have often been sidelined throughout the tradition of liberal political thought from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls, which tends to treat populations as relatively static quantities. And these normative assumptions are both reflected and reproduced by the formal institutions of the present international system — from basic guarantees of sovereignty to the Fourth Geneva Convention. This is all to say that, for all the concern we accord to refugees, migrants and displaced peoples, most observers basically presuppose that ours is a world of largely stable borders and populations, and this is the standard against which we measure geopolitical fluctuations.
It is not that political theorists have disregarded the topic as such. For example, Christopher Heath Wellman has defended the legitimate right of democratic states to define and enforce their preferred immigration policies; whereas Joseph Carens has argued that migrants have a strong claim to relocate as they see fit, and those who establish residency then have a strong claim to be treated as moral and political equals by existing citizens.
But even they have not really grappled with the possibility that, as a practical matter, substantial numbers of people might relocate in a manner that might cause rapid social and economic change. In other words, their conception remains one of basically stable majority populations accommodating minority rights and protections, as opposed to developments that would result in consequential impacts to those majority populations.
The rare work that has dealt with this theme at length is Jean Raspail’s novel, Camp of the Saints. The book is having a moment, having been brought back into print by Vauban Books, a self-described “dissident” press. The novel functions much like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in presenting a kind of right-wing version of a dystopian future, though its bête noire is third-world migration rather than socialist redistribution. It is also like Atlas Shrugged in being badly written and didactic; partly for this reason (though only partly), its influence has largely remained on the political fringe.
Interestingly, the one mainstream thinker of whom I’m aware to cite Raspail is Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order — a work originally conceived as a response to Fukuyama’s thesis. Even Huntington, however, limits his discussion of immigration to a short subsection. He recognizes its theoretical significance for his thesis, in other words, but seems unsure of its practical impact.
Meanwhile, it is not quite the case that Fukuyama simply ignores this question. At the end of the penultimate section of End of History, he discusses the tensions between what he calls the “historical” and the “post-historical” worlds (by which he basically means the developing and the developed worlds). The implication being that the former is at a different point along the same track as the latter (in a later work, he’ll refer to this same process as “getting to Denmark”).
In considering the points of contact between these two worlds, he makes the following points: for both political and economic reasons, there is a steady flow of people from countries that are poor and unstable to those that are rich and secure; this flow could easily be accelerated by further upheavals in the developing world; both the political conditions (in their places of origin) that produce migrants and the political conditions that they in turn produce (in their new destinations) will require management; and finally, developed countries will find it difficult to stem this migration, both because they have grown accustomed to the cheap labor it provides, and because the universalist principles to which they are otherwise committed make it difficult to exclude foreigners on racialist or nationalist grounds.
What is fascinating about this passage is how accurately it sketches the contours of the present, and yet how bland its tone and limited its consideration (just three paragraphs) in comparison with today’s political realities. It describes reasonably well the circumstances of the 2015 European migrant crisis but not the momentous impact it had on continental politics — not to mention Brexit.
Fukuyama also fails to mention the possibility that states might rapidly accelerate their intake of migrants in the absence of upheaval or pressing economic need, as Canada has done since that same time. On the other hand, he can hardly be blamed for not anticipating the case of the UK being compelled to admit thousands of Afghans into the country, after a data leak exposed them to the risk of reprisals from the Taliban — a scenario that owes more to Burn After Reading than normal political logic.
It should be clear that — for Fukuyama as for most others — one’s views on the immigration question are a reflection of one’s larger understanding of nationalism. Building on the modernist thesis that views nationalism as a historically-recent development rather than an age-old political phenomenon, Fukuyama argues that just as nationalism had a recognizable beginning, so too will it have an end, as states continue to converge on a single form of government and an integrated world market. It’s important to note that he doesn’t actually envision the withering away of the state, or of the national body it represents. What he seems to mean is that, having effectively done its work in establishing a world of nation-states, nationalism as an affective force (of the kind that can launch major world wars, for example) will gradually peter out.
So far, so conventional. What’s interesting is that he treats the matter of cultural recognition more seriously than your average neoliberal type:
National groups can retain their separate languages and senses of identity, but that identity would be expressed primarily in the realm of culture rather than politics. The French can continue to savor their wines and the Germans their sausages, but this will all be done within the sphere of private life alone. Such an evolution has been taking place in the most advanced liberal democracies of Europe over the past couple of generations.
Well. The problem here should be obvious. One of the central purposes of what we now think of as nationalism is to resolve and reinforce the bounds of protection for this same sphere of private life. If a representative government is the best option for safeguarding individual rights, then one has to determine just who that government will be representing. In this sense those same cultural signifiers that Fukuyama identifies (French wines, German sausages, etc.) are mutually reinforcing with basic liberal protections insofar as they help affirm the boundaries of the community within which a government is obliged to uphold liberal rights.
This is not to say that these communal ways of life exist solely for that purpose, but that their preservation is nonetheless bound up with certain liberal, democratic expectations: those who share a certain way of life are also fellow citizens who share a common, representative government. Fukuyama’s (and not only Fukuyama’s) expectation seems to be that democratic citizens will continue to enjoy that shared way of life and to derive ordinary pride from it, without feeling inclined to put others enjoying their way of life to fire and sword.
This is something like the distinction George Orwell makes between the defensive patriot and the offensive nationalist. The former naturally prefers his particular customs, whereas the latter cannot be satisfied without demonstrating their superiority over others — by conflict if necessary.
What all of this presupposes, however, is a certain measure of distance and separation between peoples. France and Germany no longer need to recreate the tensions that led to 1871 (and 1914, and 1939, etc.), and they can surely share commerce, tourism, and the like. But for French wines and German sausages to retain their essential character, as well as their representative significance for their respective countries, requires certain limits on economic and political union.
Of course, these days we aren’t really talking about distinctions between French and German folkways, but much more intense cultural frictions. The extreme case (thus far) is probably something like the terrible grooming gang cases in middle England, in which thousands of (mostly lower-class English) girls were raped, abused, and trafficked by organized groups of Pakistani immigrants, and (this part is the kicker), the full extent of the crimes was systematically downplayed by the legal system and the media for many years for fear of giving the appearance of prejudice. In other words, when a far stronger cultural clash than any involving cuisine and viticulture revealed itself, the UK political establishment was unable to uphold basic protections for fear of revealing contradictions at the heart of its multicultural commitments. This represented a profound societal failure to fulfill both the atavistic mandate to protect its women from foreign predation and the Hobbesian/Weberian mandate to deploy its monopoly of violence for the basic security of its citizens.
But even for milder cases, the point remains: the “sphere of private life” Fukuyama mentions — which he hopes is the sphere into which nationality and ethnic culture will make its retreat, and where it will stay — is not self-perpetuating, but sustains and is sustained by the public sphere of law, regulation, and enforcement. That sphere of national or cultural practices will inevitably shrink if the state that otherwise shelters them abrogates its role as a matter of policy. The tacit assumption that one finds in his discussions, and that has I suspect guided the decision-making of leaders across the developed world since the 1990s, is that the effects of public policies would not impinge upon that private sphere in such a way as to invite blowback.
This is where we stand today in much of the developed world, but it was never the case that a majority of public thinkers and policy makers anticipated profound demographic change taking place under utopian conditions. The real problem was far more banal: they simply never thought that so many people would come, and once they did, it became easier to deny the true volume of migratory flows and to downplay the intensity of the antagonisms arising therefrom.
The irony is that neither the influx of newcomers, drawn by economic and social opportunity, nor the increasingly tumultuous consequences of their arrival, lie outside the horizons of liberal democratic capitalism. And though many found their philosophies unable to accommodate these developments, this may be more an indication of the limits of our collective political imagination at the end of history, than a sign that the end of history itself might be ending.
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