July 1, 2012

NYT: Saving Euro requires a Secular Roman Empire

An Op-Ed in the New York Times by a Hungary-born historian gives an updated version of the traditional Austro-Hungarian Empire view on political structure: multiculturalism is incompatible with democracy, so down with democracy. The old Mittel-Europeans, like the late Otto Hapsburg, actually had some family memories of how to govern a multiculti state, so it's worth considering their views on where the conventional wisdom is taking us.
Where’s Charlemagne When We Need Him? 
By ISTVAN DEAK 
WRITING some 50 years ago, Archduke Otto Hapsburg, the last pretender to the crowns of Austria and Hungary, warned that economic cooperation alone would not satisfy the peoples of Europe and that European unification could not succeed unless it was imbued with an abstract principle. Only something as mystical, he wrote, as the Holy Roman Empire could give people hope, a sense of religious renewal and combat the pernicious effects of local interest, chauvinism, xenophobia and racism. 
Today’s European crisis indeed shows that great political institutions cannot be constituted solely on a rational basis or through the bureaucracy and incrementalism of Brussels. The true purpose of the European Union is to bring about peace, prosperity and equality among the diverse regions and groups. Peace has indeed prevailed on most of the Continent, but in the last few years, with prosperity endangered, continued regional inequality has become even more blatant, while radical nationalism has raised its ugly head. 
Historic empires provided ideals — whether universal Christian unity or the Marxist-Leninist dogmas of the Soviet Union — in which people were able to believe, no matter how flawed the ruler and how corrupt the imperial institutions. So long as people believe in the principles, the system is likely to endure. 
Today’s Europe possesses idealistic institutions like the Erasmus program, which allows student exchange; the European University Institute in Florence; the Jean Monnet program for distinguished scholars; and the Leonardo da Vinci program for vocational education. But these are clearly not enough to overcome regional tensions, bitter north-south divisions and a general indifference to the European project. 
... A new attempt at Christian unity, called the Holy Roman Empire, was marked by its simultaneous partnership and rivalry with the papacy. ... 
But today, where are those formidable priests and kings whose bloody clashes and spiritual challenges created the foundation of European constitutional practices and whose antics inspired the Europeans to care? Latin-speaking teachers and students once moved as freely between universities as they do today; Erasmus of Rotterdam was friends with Sir Thomas More and the entire European intellectual establishment. The fatal break in the common European Latin culture came when the Reformation elevated the vernacular to a literary level and thus created the foundations of secular, cultural nationalism. It also led to terrible internecine wars. Later empires, like those of Napoleon, Wilhelmine Germany and czarist Russia, mainly served dynastic or national interests. 
BY 1900, only two genuine multinational empires remained. One was the Ottoman, which was by then in the process of abandoning its traditional religious toleration for Turkish nationalism and even racism. The other was Austria-Hungary, home to 11 major national groups: a paradise in comparison with what it was to become. Its army had 11 official languages, and officers were obliged to address the men in up to four of them. 
It wasn’t terribly efficient, but it secured an astonishing degree of loyalty. It also brought rapid economic and cultural progress to an area extending from the Swiss border to what is today western Ukraine. During World War I, Austria-Hungary fielded eight million soldiers commanded by, among others, some 25,000 Jewish reserve officers. ... 
A new imperial construct embracing all nations, religions and non-totalitarian ideologies might well be the only alternative to the revival of tribalism with all its tragic consequences. And it will be the sacred task of leaders to make the rest of society see this as an exalted, almost religious goal: a new European faith that belongs to no church. 
Istvan Deak is an emeritus professor of history at Columbia and the author of “Beyond Nationalism” and “Essays on Hitler’s Europe.”

Of course, the Austro-Hungarian empire is precisely where World War I started ...

In general, war within Western Europe is obsolete. So, why the ever-tightening political and economic constriction?

A dozen years ago, I looked into the political problems posed by the Euro:
Can the European Union Be Multilingual and Democratic?
by Steve Sailer
UPI, September 29, 2000

Raising basic questions about whether the European Union and democracy will ever prove compatible, Danish voters Thursday rejected the European Union's floundering continental currency, the euro, in favor of keeping Denmark's traditional krone. Although eleven European governments have already adopted the euro, this was the first time any nation's citizens had been allowed to vote specifically on whether to switch currencies. 
The Danish referendum demonstrates that the most serious obstacle to the Euro-elites' plan for unifying Europe is democracy. The euro controversy is not about economics, but about political accountability. Blaming the defeat in Denmark on the euro's 25% plummet in value against the American dollar since its 1999 introduction, Italian Treasury Minister Vincenzo Visco pointed out, "The root of the problem is that the markets do not think countries can act as if they were a single country." By this logic, the only solution would appear to be to continue the process of homogenizing the historic nations of Europe into one superstate that the markets would indeed view as a single country. 
Can, however, this coming superstate become a true republic? (It's not much of one now. Most power resides with bureaucrats in Brussels.) There are fundamental reasons why multilingual governments such as the European Union have always tended to either break apart into smaller nation-states or harden into authoritarian empires. 
There is no denying the short-term economic benefits of a single European currency. Americans can imagine the inconvenience if they had to change money every time they drove from Kentucky to Indiana. And before the euro, European companies doing business in neighboring states had to pay an interest rate risk premium when borrowing due to uncertainty over currency fluctuations. For example, a Dutch firm's subsidiary in Italy could be doing wonderfully, but if the Italian lira collapsed even faster than expected, the company would have to explain to investors why profits weren't up to plan. 
So, why did 53% of Danish electorate decide to stick with the old krone, despite the lavish pro-euro campaign by Denmark's political, corporate, and media establishments? (In fact, in all of Europe, the only major party publicly opposed to the euro is Britain's Tories.) 
Denmark's left and right found themselves in an interesting alliance against the centrist euro supporters. Echoing one of the themes of Pat Buchanan's Reform Party Presidential bid, Danish rightists campaigned against giving up national sovereignty over economic policy. To them, managing the value of the currency is one of the basic responsibilities and privileges of a democratic nation-state. 
The upstart anti-immigration Danish People's Party has ridden the sovereignty issue to a new position of strength in Danish politics. Party leader Pia Kjaersgaard exulted, "The victory that we have won is one for democracy and for the Danish people against an elite." ...
Tellingly, the gender gap loomed large in Danish voting. Danish men, who work in large numbers for private firms that export to the rest of Europe, tended to back the euro. But Danish women, who mostly work for the government's vast social service bureaucracies, staunchly opposed the euro. Inga Johnson of Women Against the European Union, called it a "rich man's project," driven by the "raw forces of capitalism." She saw the euro as a threat to Denmark's pervasive system of state-funded daycare, which allows 71% of Danish women to work full time, the highest percentage in Europe. 
... "One can see why the Italians are OK with the euro," observes businessman James C. Bennett, author of the upcoming book, "The Anglosphere Challenge: The Future of the English-Speaking Nations in the Internet Era." "After all, the Italians are no more bothered by letting Germans run their currency than they are by having Swiss guard the Vatican." In contrast, the Danes have managed their own affairs quite successfully. These chilly northerners still possess the self-discipline to be able to afford the welfare state. They are loath to give up the system they invented just because it's no longer working well for the rest of Europe.

This section is relevant to why so many people are made uncomfortable by the contemporary assumption among American elites that, of course, American political campaigns should also be conducted in Spanish.
A single language unifies a country into a shared "information sphere." When citizens can understand each other, they are much more likely to identify with their compatriots - and sacrifice for them. They can also monitor politics across their society and intelligently participate in debates. 
Bennett comments, "No one person can really follow European politics as a whole, since that would require reading and speaking such a wide variety of languages with subtlety and ability to understand context, that only a handful might even try. A 'European' politics outside of the corridors of EU headquarters in Brussels does not and cannot exist." 
Consider the difficulties posed by the need for translations of political discourse. Jamie Hamilton of AnswerLogic, a company that creates automatic translation software for technical manuals, points out, "To do cross-cultural translation right, you need a firm understanding of what the original speaker said, and how the listener is likely to (mis)interpret it." 
Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev notoriously told the U.S., "We will bury you." American citizens took that as an extremely aggressive threat. Yet, according to Hamilton, in Russian the phrase actually "connotes something fairly mild: 'we'll outlive you,' 'we'll be there at your funeral.'" 
The European establishment laid sanctions on Austria earlier this year because it didn't like it's democratically elected governments. But almost all the charges against rightwing Euroskeptic Joerg Haider consisted of objections to a few phrases he had used in past years. Concerned foreigners who don't speak German found themselves at the mercy of translators, many with axes to grind, with little way to judge between competing translations. 
And there really aren't many concerned foreigners. These days, most citizens get their political opinions from watching leaders and pundits speak on television. For example, huge numbers of Americans will decide who to vote for in the Presidential race while watching the candidates debate on TV. If the Euro-politicians were speaking different languages and therefore would have to be dubbed like a bad kung fu movie to make them intelligible to the citizens, apathy will reign. 
An older word for "superstate" is "empire." The rigorous demands of running an empire naturally tend to undermine democracy. The complexity of governing multilingual domains is so great that more and more power flows from the legislature to the executive and the permanent bureaucracies. Fewer and fewer democratic controls are tolerated since the people are deemed to be not well-enough informed to vote on the many esoteric issues that come up. 
The Roman Republic discovered this when Julius Caesar conquered Gaul. Nor is America immune to this trend. For example, the last nation the U.S. Congress declared war upon was Nazi Germany. After WWII, Washington's new imperial responsibilities made the ruling establishment reluctant to carry out its constitutional mandate to submit questions of war or peace to the elected representatives of the American people ... with, by the way, disastrous results in Vietnam. 
Europe faces an even worse problem in this regard than the US, since it lacks a shared European language. Thus, power tends to drift into the hands of self-perpetuating elites, such as the Eurocrats of Brussels. These professional Europeans are either multilingual or can afford translators. For all the deplorable aspects of the current American presidential campaign, it's only possible at all because the great majority of voters speak the same language. There will never be election campaigns for the President of Europe until enough Europeans speak the same language. And until the EU has a legitimate elected executive who can control the Eurocrats, it will remain an essentially authoritarian, anti-democratic institution. 
Ultimately, Europe would need a common language to become a democratic nation-state. There's only one feasible candidate, English, which is already a pervasive second language in Scandinavia, Holland, and Greece. Bennett, however, says, " I can't imagine the French adopting English as the language of their domestic politics (or many other nations either.) But even assuming they did, I'm not sure that a French politician would mean the same thing by the word "fair" as an English one."

72 comments:

agraves said...

Mr. Sailer, you have the best blog on the internet, no b.s.. Alex

Anonymous said...

In general, war within Western Europe is obsolete. So, why the ever-tightening political and economic constriction?

For precisely the same reason the Catholic church opposed Protestantism: Theocracy can tolerate no heresy.

Today’s theocracy is Holocaustianity. Sailer is a priest of a sect of Holocaustianity fighting the tide unleashed by the Internet — similar to the Jesuits of the previous theocracy who attempted to prevail against the rising tide of individual conscience and choice unleashed by Gutenberg. This is not to say there aren’t plenty of alternative theocracies vying for the power to tell people how to live their lives but it is certainly the case that Holocaustianity is the dominant theocracy of the West and has largely neutralized the freedom won over a hundred years of war by Protestants against the prior theocracy.

Anonymous said...

So, why the ever-tightening political and economic constriction?

The internet represents a new Gutenberg Revolution, hence “protestant” movement and “enlightenment” against the reigning theocracy. This means more individual conscience and choice and the possibility of decentralization.

The big changes I see:

1) Making the scripture more accessible to the layman.
2) Defections from the church, such as Luther based on individual interpretation of scripture.
3) Overreactions from the church, such as Galileo’s trial.
4) Bacon’s Novum Organum goes to press.
5) The US Constitution’s Laboratory of the States.

We’re seeing a lot of stage 3 already. It is time to finish the work begun with the US Constitution of bringing together Luther and Bacon in a laboratory of the States.

There will be blood. How much blood is up to the elites.

TGGP said...

Razib on the benefits of being a former Hapsburg domain.

Anonymous said...

"The internet represents a new Gutenberg Revolution..."

I'm hoping for that too, but have we really seen any effects of that? The left keeps winning battles. Gay marriage, a black president. These are battles for mindshare, propaganda battles.

Maybe there will be lag time before we see results. Maybe the first generation that grew up getting more of its news and information about the world from the Internet than from TV has to mature first, to acquire some power.

But right now even on the Internet the most popular news sources are traditional and corporate. The NYT site, the CNN site, the Huffington Post, Jezebel, Slate, whatever. There's more diversity of opinion on the Net than there ever has been on TV, but dissident opinions aren't the ones that are getting the most page views.

To people with my (and apparently your) assumptions it seems like the Internet should lead to a right-wing turn in politics, in what's considered cool, but that hasn't happened yet. Either there is lag time or our assumptions are wrong in some way.

Anonymous said...


The true purpose of the European Union is to bring about peace, prosperity and equality among the diverse regions and groups.


I see that they cannot resist spouting obviously incorrect propaganda.

Kylie said...

This post dovetails nicely with the Netflix DVD I plan to watch tonight, Disc 2 of Fall of Eagles, about the collapse the Romanov, Habsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties.

Thank you.

Clutch cargo cult said...

I'd forgotten about Haider, he's about what they need right now. Second the above about best blog, your UPI column was prescient.

Anonymous said...

Galileo wasn't tried for his theories, it was for mocking the Pope over and over again after he was asked repeatedly to knock it off.

Anonymous said...

multiculturalism is incompatible with democracy, so down with democracy

So true. When ruled by a dictator who knows what he is doing, multi-culti states can be quite successful (USSR, Yugoslavia). Give them democracy and things go to hell in no time.

Anonymous said...

"To people with my (and apparently your) assumptions it seems like the Internet should lead to a right-wing turn in politics, in what's considered cool, but that hasn't happened yet. Either there is lag time or our assumptions are wrong in some way."

I think, I hope, there is a time lag.

Seems to me that any site with free speech and little comment moderation skews right. Left/liberals otoh huddle together for safety under the shore batteries of comment moderation.

Anonymous said...

"Galileo wasn't tried for his theories, it was for mocking the Pope over and over again after he was asked repeatedly to knock it off."

Your way of refuting the opposite point, made by ... no one on this thread.

Anonymous said...

"Today’s Europe possesses idealistic institutions like the Erasmus program, which allows student exchange; the European University Institute in Florence; the Jean Monnet program for distinguished scholars; and the Leonardo da Vinci program for vocational education. But these are clearly not enough to overcome regional tensions, bitter north-south divisions and a general indifference to the European project."

Who_ is_ this_ idiot? Exchange programs....exchange programs....exchange programs (calling Allen Iverson, calling Allen Iverson) aren't enough to make people forget their customs, their loyalites, their families, their peoples, their nationalism?

Well, duh, who woulda thunk it.

My gawd, what lunacy.

Duh

Anonymous said...

"Galileo wasn't tried for his theories, it was for mocking the Pope over and over again after he was asked repeatedly to knock it off."

Ah yes the endless Catholic-Galileo apologists. What apologists don't seem to "get" is that this makes the Papacy look worse, not better. Making the Pope look bad is worse than heresy! Way to go, guys.

In point of fact Galileo was condemned for his heliocentric theories: this is a fact. That the condemnation was motivated by Galileo's political ineptitude is interesting but rather beside the point.

***Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy", namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to "abjure, curse and detest" those opinions.[59]***

Anonymous said...

Galileo wasn't tried for his theories, it was for mocking the Pope over and over again after he was asked repeatedly to knock it off.

A presumptuous old man in a dress doesn't deserve to be mocked?

Anonymous said...

It also brought rapid economic and cultural progress to an area extending from the Swiss border to what is today western Ukraine. During World War I, Austria-Hungary fielded eight million soldiers commanded by, among others, some 25,000 Presbyterian reserve officers...

The Asia Times MacSpengler used to be a huge fan of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

BTW, the Scots-Irish also seem to have fond memories of the Ottoman Empire - google Marc MacGrossman Sibel Edmonds*.

I've often wondered about the Lebanese Christian & Armenian Christian viewpoints on Scots-Irish complicity with the Ottomans.

I know that by the time the 1930s came to an end, neither the Spanish nor the Ukrainians cared much for the Scots-Irish.





*Some people believe that that's why Sandy MacBurglar had to stuff all those documents in his socks.

Anonymous said...

There are some issues, like immigration restrictions that transcend the political spectrum, as demonstrated by Denmark rejecting the Euro and mass immigration. So immigration restrictionism is not an inherently "right-wing" position.

I am not even right-wing, and yet I favor immigration restrictions and thought the new law in Arizona didn't go far enough. I'm angry over how the Supreme Court almost totally neutered it. So the U.S doesn't necessarily need to swing more to the right to have a better immigration policy. Visit some left-wing sites or blogs and there is a rather huge disconnect between liberal politicians, journalists, activists and the ordinary people commenting on their blogs. There are a lot of left-wing immigration restrictionists out there whose voices get drowned out by the left-wing pro-immigrant elite.

Right and left-wing immigration restrictionists in the U.S and elsewhere should follow the example of Danish voters and put their differences aside for some important issues.

Anonymous said...

I think Secular was put in the title just to avoid the Galileo debate, which is generally, strike that, always fruitless.

Some very interesting stuff has been written by Lew Rockwell and his writers like Woods and D'Lorenzo about the ersatz religious aspects of the US government. More or less they say that government is the only tolerated religion in the US.

I'm genuinely curious, what was the opinion of Galileo's theories amongst Protestants at that time? I can't deduce it from present day Protestants, because some are so conservative and some are so liberal.

Anonymous said...

"There's more diversity of opinion on the Net than there ever has been on TV, but dissident opinions aren't the ones that are getting the most page views. To people with my (and apparently your) assumptions it seems like the Internet should lead to a right-wing turn in politics, in what's considered cool, but that hasn't happened yet. Either there is lag time or our assumptions are wrong in some way."

Read the comments on any flash-mob video or any late-night-restaurant-cat-fight video or any bus-fight video anywhere on the internet: Joe Sixpack understands HBD at a very visceral level, and his language is far more colorful than anything Komment Kontrol would ever allow us to get away with.

It's true even at the other extreme of the bell curve: All the guys at sites like ZeroHedge and Market-Ticker understand exactly what MacBernanke and MacGoldman-MacSachs are up to.

Glossy said...

"I think Secular was put in the title just to avoid the Galileo debate..."

Steve was alluding to the Holy Roman Empire. The NYT article was titled "Where's Charlemagne When We Need Him?" Charlemagne is sometimes considered the founder of the HRE. Otto I is also sometimes considered its founder. There can be debate about who actually founded it. Obviously, the NYT would never support anything holy, hence Steve's joke.

Chicago said...

He says they need a "new European faith". So, does he just happen to have the manuscript in his back pocket? Perhaps we could all get a look at it first before going any further. If it's really good perhaps we here in the US would like to believe in it also.
Why does the US press always preach to other countries on what they should do? I would guess that it comes across as arrogance personified.

Anonymous said...

I'd forgotten about Haider, he's about what they need right now.

Yeah, Europe really needs a drunk driving idiot who pitched himself into a ravine at 90 mph after a night spent picking up male teenagers at a gay bar.

J said...

The AustroHungarian Empire was multinational but not all the nationalities were equal. It was clearly an Austrian Empire and its language was German. Orders in the army were given in German. The Government was Austrian with a few Hungarians, all speaking German. However, it was bearable to all the subjects thanks to Austrian relative lazyness (a kind of tolerance), inefficiency and corruption.

Anonymous said...

Lew Rockwell and his writers like Woods and D'Lorenzo... more or less say that government is the only tolerated religion in the US

Rockwell and his libertarian followers are wrong about so many things, but the state religion of the US is negro-worship.

Saint MLK and demi-god Barack are the most obvious examples, but the worship of moronic sports heroes and the forbidden use of the n-word by whites (along with its constant use by the sainted colored folks) provide more evidence.

The style book of the MSM which never mentions the race of black criminals but trumpets the crimes of "white" racists like George Zimmerman and the Duke lacrosse crackers are also good illustrations of the national liturgy.

-Thripshaw

Anonymous said...

Paleolithic tribes eventually coalesced together to form the primitive nation-state.

In pre-Christian era Europe, there were literally thousands of different tribes with different dialets and that saw themselves as different "races" that would eventually, a thousand years latter, come together to form the feuds of medieval Europe.

In medieval Europe, there were innumerable feuds vaguely unified by racial and linguistic similarities that would eventually coalesce into the kingdoms. These kingdoms would eventually coalesce into the modern nation-state.

Saying that democracy is incompatible with multiculturalism is ridiculous. All democratic nations that exist today, without exception, were formed by tribes that had different cultures and evwntually found common ground to become one. For instance, in the ancient World, the Germanic tribes of modern Germany fought each other constantly, and regarded each tribe as a "race". They all had different customs and traditions. Tacitus writes extensively about the huge differences between the Germanic tribes. What about the Latins, Sabines and Etruscans from ancient Rome? They had extremely different cultures, and yet they came together to form the Roman people.

All nations are formed from multicultural and in many cases multiracial begginings. For instance, the Latins were not only culturally different from the Etruscans, but phenotypically as well. The European Union is being formed the SAME WAY that France or Germany were formed.

Eventually, common ground is found between different cultures, and a "grander" new culture is formed which encompasses aspects of the previous cultures that formed it with newer aspects.

Also, the ability of a multicultural state to function is directly proportional to the degree of tolerance and intelligence of it's constituents. The people in Sillicon Valley come from different cultures and yet Sillicon Valley has extremely low levels of violence, and works very well. Why? Because the people there are highly tolerant and intelligent.

Democracy is only incompatible with multiculturalism when the people involved are dumb and full of prejudices, and even the dumb people eventually learn to accept each other, just like the Angles and the Saxons, who couldn't stand each other, eventually found common ground and became a new people.

Whiskey said...

The problem with Empires is they require defacto dominance of all the other peoples by one group of people, and an elite with that group. For Rome, it was the Romans and the noble families within them. Who were militarily dominant. When that dominance ceased, against barbarians in the West, the Empire fell in the West. When it ceased to exist against the Arabs, that empire for all intents and purposes ceased to exist (around 1040) though a rump hung on for centuries mostly due to Mongol decimation of the Arabs and Turks.

When Turkey ceased to be militarily dominant, the Ottoman Sultanate fell apart. Same for the lack of dominance by the Hungarians. Or the Russian Soviets. Or the British.

All of that empire building and keeping requires military dominance to overawe internal rival groups and keep external enemies at bay. The Austrian Empire may have had 20,000 Jewish Officers, but Vienna and one Adolf Hitler were filled with hatred for Jews, as was much of Austria. The British Empire may have had Welsh, Scots, Irish, and Gurkha regiments, but Gurkhas and Irish and Scots and Welsh did not run London or the Empire.

Empires REQUIRE military dominance, it is folly to imagine one built without it, and without a hereditary, dominant elite within the military arm itself. Empires may be relatively benign (the British) or malign (the Soviet) but they are only as stable as their military power over-awing internal and external enemies and the hold of the elites.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4On8cpwfSY&feature=g-u-u

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! oops

dearieme said...

"the last nation the U.S. Congress declared war upon was Nazi Germany": a fatuous act, since Germany had already declared war on her. Still, fatuous or not, it presumably honoured the Constitution, a habit pretty much abandoned by the USA since those days.

Anonymous said...

Radical nationalism would not rear its ugly head if rational nationalism were allowed to rear its beautiful head. But radical globalism/multi-culturalism has been allowed to rear its hideous head.

Establishing "rational nationalism" was no picnic. It took tremendous force and violence. Things like the War in the Vendée and Sherman's march to the sea. Establishing a globalist world gov't will take great force and violence as well, even more.

Simon in London said...

The EU has no unifying ideology other than fear-of-nationalism among the western-European elites. But most countries join the EU on the self-interested basis that it will make them richer, so when the money flow dries up they get very unhappy.

BTW the Austro-Hungarian empire is the paradigmatic example of an empire WITHOUT a unifying ideology! Catholicism at most greased the wheels a little bit. What they did have initially was the alien threat of the Turk. A powerful enemy is the best unifier.

Anonymous said...

From Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - may have quoted this before, on the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

(For most European Great Powers) a majority of the citizenry shared a common language and religion. At least 90 per cent of Frenchmen spoke French and the same proportion belonged at least nominally to the Catholic Church. More than eight in every ten Prussians were German (the rest were mostly Poles) and of the Germans 70 per cent were Protestant. The Tsar's seventy million subjects included some notable minorities (five million Poles, three and a half million Finns, Ests, Letts and Latvians, and three million assorted Caucasians), but that still left fifty millions who were both Russian and Orthodox. And the inhabitants of the British Isles were 90 per cent English-speaking and 70 per cent Protestant. Countries like this needed little holding together; they had an intrinsic cohesion.

By contrast the Austrian Emperor ruled an ethnic mishmash that must have made him groan every time he thought about it. He and eight million of his subjects were German, but twice as many were Slays of one sort or another (Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs), five million were Hungarians, five million Italians and two million Romanians. What sort of nation did that make?

The answer is none at all.

Anonymous said...

"the Ottoman, which was by then in the process of abandoning its traditional religious toleration"

Not a lot of Ottoman toleration around in Bulgaria back in the Victorian day.

http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/related/macgahan.php

Anonymous said...

"the last nation the U.S. Congress declared war upon was Nazi Germany": a fatuous act, since Germany had already declared war on her.

Not even true. After that declaration (and the one on Italy), Congress in 1942 declared war on Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, and came damned close to doing so on Finland.

Incidentally, since we're talking about WWI-era multicult empires: in 1917 the US did declare war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire but scrupulously did not on the Ottoman one. Make of that what you will.

Anonymous said...

Democracy is only incompatible with multiculturalism when the people involved are dumb and full of prejudices, and even the dumb people eventually learn to accept each other, just like the Angles and the Saxons, who couldn't stand each other, eventually found common ground and became a new people.

WTF?

The dumb old Angles-n-Saxons, who never could get beyond their pointless internecine bloodshed in order to bring you anything even remotely resembling Magna Carta, or Opus Oxoniense, or the Morningstar, or the colonies of the New World, or the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, or the United States Constitution, or the sacrifice made by 27th of Foot at Le Haye Sainte?!?

And my shit gets censored by Komment Kontrol?

[PS: Some of the aforementioned might arguably be regarded as Picts, Northumbrians, and Dal-Riatans, but, as we all know only too well, those folk are even stupider and more violent than the Angles-n-Saxons themselves.

I mean, seriously - WTF?!?]

The Anti-Gnostic said...

Democracy is only incompatible with multiculturalism when the people involved are dumb and full of prejudices, and even the dumb people eventually learn to accept each other, just like the Angles and the Saxons, who couldn't stand each other, eventually found common ground and became a new people.

This globalist best-case scenario for a single "human race" assumes outmarriage becomes the rule. It won't because of the different medians in IQ and other factors--people marry within half or less a standard deviation of each other. Even the cosmopolitan elites don't outmarry as a rule. I'll take it a step further. Even inter-ethnic assortative mating just means...more ethnicities. And here I thought liberals didn't like HBD.

Americans killed 600,000 of each other over economic differences and that's a big problem too. The inherently incompetent, corrupt, heavy-handed central bureaucracy will always squander the loot in transfer payments, inflation and eveer-increasing debt. Now that it's clear Germany is paying most of the freight for the centralized imperium, distinctions like "German" and "Greek" start mattering a lot.

Anonymous said...

25,000 Jewish reserve officers...

More evidence that their high IQ of today was similar in proportion to other races in the past.

Harry Baldwin said...

Democracy is only incompatible with multiculturalism when the people involved are dumb and full of prejudices, and even the dumb people eventually learn to accept each other, just like the Angles and the Saxons, who couldn't stand each other, eventually found common ground and became a new people.

There's something off in this analysis. In our multi-culture, the "smart" people --the elites-- have their own peculiare prejudice, which consists of loathing non-liberal whites and sanctifying NAMs. Is our society's main problem that the non-liberal whites, who are dumb and prejudiced according to liberals, don't accept the NAMs, or is it that the dysfunctional, crime-prone NAMs cause very serious problems that the elites refuse to acknowledge and address? If the non-liberal whites would only become liberals and start ignoring all those problems too, would everything then be okay?

FredR said...

Joseph Roth's "The Radetzky March" is a beautiful elegy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Anonymous said...

mutlicultral 'societies' are always empires, never democracies. Democracy is suited for small, homogenus, high iq societies, no one else.

it is not accident that we are less free and more multicultural, and the more multicultural we become , the more power the elite have and the less freedom we have.

Anonymous said...

I know that by the time the 1930s came to an end, neither the Spanish
... nor did they care for them much when Moorish rule in Spain came to an end.
I have a 'scots-irish' friend whom i was discussing moorish occupation with - he said in his community, they look at Moorish spain as their 'golden age'.. it never occurred to him, or nor did his community care, that it wasn't so golden for the Iberians.

Anonymous said...

In point of fact Galileo was condemned for his heliocentric theories: this is a fact. That the condemnation was motivated by Galileo's political ineptitude is interesting but rather beside the point.
no. the cardinal who opposed him tried him on the grounds that he was opposing the Ptolemic view of the universe.

also, we forget two things - one - spreading such a theory could spread panic. For example, what if i published a theory that there will be a major food shortage/crop failure and you better stock up - and what if it gained traction - true or not - it would cause wide spread panic, same goes for someone publishing a theory that says the earth is shooting around in space and is not stationary...... now here's the kicker...
the second 'big' part of this is that Galeio did not have all the answers- if the earth is flying around the sun, why don't we all fall off? (these questions were of course, answer later, but the point it the theory was not as wrapped up as you think).

Anonymous said...

well at least our elite are becoming more honest about what they want to do.

: 1. do away with the nation-state
2. do away with Christianity (a scots irish elite goal in particular)

fnn said...

Rockwell and his libertarian followers are wrong about so many things, but the state religion of the US is negro-worship.

That's just an aspect of the hegemonic Holocaustianity-Cultural Marxism religion. Hitler is the devil-god of this radical egalitarian faith and the 100 million killed by the Reds in the 20th Century are conveniently ignored. Holocaust museums outnumber black slavery museums in the US by about 50 to !.

Anonymous said...

And it will be the sacred task of leaders to make the rest of society see this as an exalted, almost religious goal: a new European faith that belongs to no church.
...lets see 1789, 1917 Russia yeah, great, lets try that again.
You can be sure this "new European faith" will have to eliminate the old faith first..oh and the old faithful.

Anonymous said...

"Galileo was condemned for his heliocentric theories: this is a fact."

His heliocentric theories?

I don't know whether Steve has come across this galileo correction

Anonymous said...

"Of course, the Austro-Hungarian empire is precisely where World War I started ..."

You quoted all of that, and that one glib sentence is all that you've got as a follow up? I think that's being more than a little lazy. And while I do not in principle support large, multicultural empires, it's crazy to lay the blame for World War 1 on Austria's doorstep.

Unless you want to argue that this regional dispute in the balkans was somehow of vital concern to the national interests of France and England, it seems that WW1 could have occurred on almost any pretext. The forces that precipitated WW1 were the opposite of those that animated the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It certainly required no multicultural, pan-European empire to start WW2.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBN9jpooZoM&feature=related

Peter A said...

The Austrian-Hungarian Empire was the cauldron where the Holocaust was brewed. It is no accident that Hitler was from a provincial Austrian town very near Bohemia, a town where the ethnic German population felt threatened. The five decades before WWI were a period of unrelenting German decline in an Empire they thought belonged to them. Demographic changes caused formerly German towns like Prague and Brno to become majority Czech, Hungarian elites stopped learning German and were becoming increasingly insolent, economic power was increasingly concentrating in Jewish hands, Vienna itself was filling up with Czechs, Galician Jews, Poles and Slovenes. Ethnic Austrian and Bohemian Germans reacted to this by becoming violently nationalistic, and exported these philosophies back to the Kaiser's Reich. This was the environment that created virulent German, Czech, and Hungarian nationalism, not to mention Zionism, and the resulting ethnic hatred of WWII. Multinational empires don't preserve the peace, they act more like dirty bandages on festering sores.

Anne said...

Europe is doomed. The natives just aren't having enough children. The continent will become increasingly Muslim. Harking back to the past is pointless now.

Perhaps if Germany had won WW I, things would actually be better now.

Henry Canaday said...

Well the Hapsburgs did manage to institute flood control over the multi-national Danube basin. Before that, citizens in places like Vienna and Budapest had to rebuild half their cities every time it snowed heavily in the Alps.

Anonymous said...

"And the inhabitants of the British Isles were 90 per cent English-speaking and 70 per cent Protestant. Countries like this needed little holding together; they had an intrinsic cohesion.

By contrast the Austrian Emperor ruled an ethnic mishmash that must have made him groan every time he thought about it. He and eight million of his subjects were German, but twice as many were Slays of one sort or another (Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs), five million were Hungarians, five million Italians and two million Romanians. What sort of nation did that make?

The answer is none at all."

Yes, that place was a frickin' nightmare, what with the wine cellars, coffee houses and Mozarts, Beethovens and Klimts running around the place. It's a good thing that the forces of democracy and enlightened nationalism put a stop to all of that.

In all seriousness, I don't have an opinion on whether Austro-Hungarian empire constituted a nation or not, but whatever it was, it was not without its good points. Aside from fostering the best musical culture, well, ever, they also managed to stop a couple of wide scale Muslim invasions that might otherwise have overwhelmed a significant portion of Europe.

Further, whatever, the various Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Croats, Hungarians, etc. thought of the HRE, it would be hard to argue that they had things any worse than their counterpart ethnic subjects in the British Empire, for example. If the British Isles were 90% English speaking, that's only because Gaelic speakers made up a disproportionate percentage of the millions who either starved to death or emigrated during the blight in the Scottish highlands and Ireland. The same potato blight that affected all of Europe but mysteriously only caused wide scale famine and emigration in the British Empire. However this may have contributed to the British Empire's intrinsic cohesion it did not stop it from breaking apart in the immediate aftermath of WW1 as well.

Paul Mendez said...

The EU has no unifying ideology other than fear-of-nationalism among the western-European elites.

I've come to see the EU as the ultimate example of "Fighting the last war" mentality.

Seriously, can anyone imagine old, selfish, lazy, cynical Europeans willing to sacrifice their 0.75 son each for the sake of anything?

While the EU planners were desperately working to prevent Germany and France from going at it one more time, they totally missed the Moslem Fifth Column threat.

Anonymous said...

For the all the discussion on Scot-Irish, it has to be said that a Scot-Irish man had a GREAT deal of creating all the mess in Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_FitzClarence

It doesn't tell the whole story. He was the decisive factor for winning the first battle of Ypres, thereby destroying the three empires as well as weakening the British Empire.

He was killed shortly after, but instead of the praises he got posthumously, he should have been tried for high treason and have his corpse hung, drawn and quartered.

I find his line died out. That's the least the universe can do to his evil deed - he is probably the most unknown evil person of the 20th century.

Anthony said...

The protestant rebellion destroyed the unity of Europe and made the current travails possible. One would think protestans would have enough sense to rethink the idiocies of Luther and Calvin after Napoleon and Hitler's attempts to unify Europe.

Deák Ferenc said...

The AustroHungarian Empire was multinational but not all the nationalities were equal. It was clearly an Austrian Empire and its language was German. Orders in the army were given in German. The Government was Austrian with a few Hungarians, all speaking German. However, it was bearable to all the subjects thanks to Austrian relative lazyness (a kind of tolerance), inefficiency and corruption.

Way to go, showing you have no idea what you're talking about if you want to make historical references.

After the "compromise" of 1867, the Habsburg monarchy was divided into a "dual" monarchy consisting of a rag-tag Austrian half ("Cis-Leithania") that was basically German-speaking Austria plus Czech territory and some bits of stolen Poland on the one hand and the Hungarian Crown on the other, comprising ethnic Hungary plus a lot of Slavic and Romanian territory. It's true that the comparatively few common institutions (mainly the military) were generally run by Germans, but the Kingdom of Hungary was run domestically by the traditional Hungarian landowning aristocracy, who tried to "magyarize" everybody who wasn't Hungarian. This wasn't done with Austrian "Schlamperei" (sort of "good-natured bungling"), and the Hungarians were roundly loathed by all their non-Hungarian subjects. The upshot of this was the disastrous Treaty of Trianon at the end of the First World War, which not only forcibly broke up the old Kingdom of St. Stephen but landed a large chunk of Hungarians as minorities in successor states where they had previously acted as rulers. Hungary was a "bad boy" in central Europe during the interwar years because of their revanchist desire to recoup their losses (which only made things worse in the long run), and to some extent the Hungarians have still not gotten over the trauma caused by the "crime of Trianon".

So, it helps to know what you're talking about.

Anonymous said...


He was killed shortly after, but instead of the praises he got posthumously, he should have been tried for high treason and have his corpse hung, drawn and quartered.

err... care to explain? It seems like he was a low rank officer doing his duty.

Anonymous said...

. If the British Isles were 90% English speaking, that's only because Gaelic speakers made up a disproportionate percentage of the millions who either starved to death or emigrated during the blight in the Scottish highlands and Ireland
buttercup, you forgot Cornwall and Wales.. which also were gaelic speaking.. sweetheart...

Anonymous said...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_FitzClarence

It doesn't tell the whole story. He was the decisive factor for winning the first battle of Ypres, thereby destroying the three empires as well as weakening the British Empire. He was killed shortly after, but instead of the praises he got posthumously, he should have been tried for high treason and have his corpse hung, drawn and quartered. I find his line died out. That's the least the universe can do to his evil deed - he is probably the most unknown evil person of the 20th century.


Seriously dude - could you write up maybe a 5000 word essay on the topic?

'Cause we're clueless out here.

Hunsdon said...

Nem, nem soha!

NOTA said...

I found this article on The forced relocation of Germans after WW2 interesting, and it seems to tie in peripherally to this discussion. It's striking to me how much of the common idea of WW2 is still influenced by the very effective propoganda operations of the US and UK governments.

Matra said...

For the all the discussion on Scot-Irish, it has to be said that a Scot-Irish man had a GREAT deal of creating all the mess in Europe.

Charles FitzClarence seemed to be Anglo-Irish, not Scots-Irish.

Anonymous said...

some rich should buy a full page ad in the NYT and run the best Sailer columns in it. advertize this blog. spray paint isteve on the ground. McCain doesn't even use the internet. Hopefully when the seniors who run the GOP retire the next crop maybe some will have read this blog.

Anonymous said...

did he say that the entire austro-hungarian army was run by 25 thousand jews?

Anonymous said...

i think our side needs to distinguish between immigrants. I don't mind latino or asian or muslim immigration half as much as I do african immigration. I would much rather deport Mario Balotelli the fake Italian egotist than a Mexican food worker.

Anonymous said...

He wants euros to worship the EU project as far as I can tell that means: europeans need to worship turning europa into Brazil via crazy immigration policies they don't like. Worship your destruction. what hubris. a side not: am I fool for wondering if vote outcomes are tampered with these days in the west?

Beecher Asbury said...

Anonymous said...

25,000 Jewish reserve officers...

More evidence that their high IQ of today was similar in proportion to other races in the past.

7/2/12 5:16 AM


How is this evidence of high IQ?

The article stated Austria-Hungary fielded an army of 8 million (active and reserve?). Taking a 10:1 enlisted to officer ratio, they should have had around 800 thousand officers (active and reserve) in their army. This is a ballpark figure and probably is too low. US military is around 7:1. But, keeping with the 10:1 ratio, Jews made up 25K of this 800K officer corps (active and reserve).

So that puts the Jewish share of the officer corps around 3 percent. Jews probably made up around 3 to 5 percent of Austria-Hungary, so their numbers in the officer corps seem in proportion to their population.

Anonymous said...

@Whiskey

"The problem with Empires is they require defacto dominance of all the other peoples by one group of people, and an elite with that group. For Rome, it was the Romans and the noble families within them. Who were militarily dominant. When that dominance ceased, against barbarians in the West, the Empire fell in the West. When it ceased to exist against the Arabs, that empire for all intents and purposes ceased to exist (around 1040) though a rump hung on for centuries mostly due to Mongol decimation of the Arabs and Turks........."

This is not true at all. Consider ancient Germania. It was composed of dozens of different nations(tribes) that constantly warred with each other. Today, they are one people, and there is no dominant "tribe" among them.

It is true that linguistic/ethnic backbones help form unified cultures, and that it is easier to form new cultures from peoples that share common linguistic and pehnotypical characteristics. But by no means it is impossible.

Consider the American nation. Originally, if you go back to the late 18th century, it was supposed to be essentially a new land for the English people. In fact, the settlers called their new home "New England". Eventually, the settlers opened exceptions to other peoples from the British Isles, such as the Irish and the Scots. The country that in 1780 was essentially a new home for the English people, had become by 1850 a "British" country. Then immigrants from northern European countries such as Germany and Sweden came, and they had some difficulty assimilating into British America, but eventually they succeeded. By 1900, the U.S was no longer a British country like it had been in 1850, but a northern European country. So immigrants from southern Europe start to come, and they had difficulties assimilating into "Nordic" America. Eventually they succeeded, and adpated to the culture and added to it aspects of their own - the only exception are Spaniard-Americans, who have been American for as long as the English. The same process of happening now with Mexican immigrants. They are having their difficulties just like the Irish and the Italians, but eventually they will assimilate.

Integrating different cultures with no linguistic or ethnic common ground is harder, but by no means impossible. The U.S is a good example of a country where peoples as different as Sicilians and Germans became the same people. If you told an European in the 19th century that Poles and Germans could live together in the same society, they would laugh at you. Unifying peoples with similar languages is easier, but by no means impossible. When unififying different cultures, emphasis should be put on a common identity based on ideals and things that are common to all humans rather than ethnic or linguistic backgrounds. One of the htings that hastens integration is intermarriage. That is how the Latins and Sabines became one people. So we should foster intermarriage between Europeans and the African and Asian immigrants, as this will smoothen the transition to an integrated society. One of the things stopping integration is the infantile attitude of a lot of white people in refusing to intermarriage. Just look at the infantile reaction of a lot of white men if their daughters bring home a black boyfriend.

You also show a profoudn ignorance of history. the Roman Empire did not fall because the national identity of Rome disappered. That is from the Arthur Kemp school of revisionist racist history. The reason why the Roman Empire fell is because it stopped expanding and the Romans learned they could make more money from commerce than war. The Roman Empire fell because the Romans went from warriors to burgeoise. The burgeoise, by their very natures, are cowards who prefer to sit back and let mercenary armies do the fighting for them.

Anonymous said...

So we should foster intermarriage between Europeans and the African and Asian immigrants, as this will smoothen the transition to an integrated society.........
The Roman Empire fell because the Romans went from warriors to burgeoise. The burgeoise, by their very natures, are cowards who prefer to sit back and let mercenary armies do the fighting for them."

By your logic Rome shouldn't have been fighting, they should have married their enemies and then the whole world would be Roman - that wouldn't work because, well, then who would the warriors fight? And maybe the Vandals had different propositions they wanted to live by.

You have an enigmatic point of view, are you a lover or a killer? Or a lover sporting a tough guy image?

R said...

@Anon 7/3/12 12:39 PM

You're just a typical leftist. You've swallowed whole the leftist elites ideology, their dreams of world empire.

You ignore the very real differences between the races. Its no surprise that Europeans peoples can assimilate when they are very similar genetically and have generally the same civilizational foundations but to pretend that non whites are just Europeans with different features is absurd, an insult to our intelligence.

And how dare you further insult us by calling the European peoples natural instincts of self preservation "infantile". It truly takes an infantile mind to not understand basic human nature, hell the nature of all living things, the instinct to survive and carry on the genetic legacy of ones ancestors.

Instead you offer only extinction for the European peoples solely for your leftist dreams of world empire which would fail regardless as only the west is being destroyed in this way. Besides the history of the Indian subcontinent and Latin American shows that wide spread race mixing provides no real unity.

You know very little about history. The Roman Empire fell because of many reasons but none as tripe as the Romans going from "warriors to bourgeois". The main reasons the Western Roman Empire fell was lack of unity, the civil wars that resulted from power struggles and ill defined succession rules, wasteful internal religions conflicts that were a by product of the Roman elites desperate moves to try and create an artificial unity through religious conformity, the repressive bureaucratic government, the technological and economic stagnation that resulted from having a massive slave labor population, the rapacious taxation that strangled the Roman economy, the debasement of the currency which further destroyed the Roman economy, the endless revolts for freedom by the oppressed subject peoples, simultaneous invasions by Germanic tribes and the Huns from the north and Persians from the east, the lack of having the economic/technological capability of having and continuously supplying a standing army large enough to secure the huge European as well as middle eastern borders, and the lack of any real incentive for the people to fight and die for the Emperor and his imperial bureaucrats, especially as they increasing ruined the peoples standard of living and the fact that the majority of Roman subjects were not ethnic Romans.

The irony is that many Romans came to see some of the new Germanic rulers as liberators as their taxes were less repressive than the Roman bureaucrats.

All that being said its obvious there was no real unifying national Roman identity during the Empire not one that meant anything more than being ruled from Roma or Roma Nova (Constantinople) and having to pay the increasing debilitating taxes to the Emperor and his bureaucrats.

Anonymous said...

So we should foster intermarriage between Europeans and the African and Asian immigrants, as this will smoothen the transition to an integrated society. One of the things stopping integration is the infantile attitude of a lot of white people in refusing to intermarriage. Just look at the infantile reaction of a lot of white men if their daughters bring home a black boyfriend.
please, someone tell me this is a troll

Anonymous said...

"One of the htings that hastens integration is intermarriage. That is how the Latins and Sabines became one people. So we should foster intermarriage between Europeans and the African and Asian immigrants, as this will smoothen the transition to an integrated society."

Whites are reluctant in such transactions because they have so much to lose. Africans have everything to gain. Are Jews infantile because they are concerned about intermarriage, or are they just aware that genetic losses can take centuries to regain if they can be regained at all.

Anonymous said...

"agraves said...
Mr. Sailer, you have the best blog on the internet, no b.s.. Alex"

Have to agree. So many different topics and many interesting often well informed commentors.