Bilderbergers nixed Iran attack / Nationalism
1. Daniel Estulin is the author of the bestselling European book on the Bilderbergers (finally out this fall in the U.S.). He’s been reporting on the conferences since the early 90s. His reports are based on info from BB members who leak because they think it should be public.
Here’s a radio show he did a few weeks ago, during which he says among other things that the Russian, Chinese and French BB members “drew a line” around Iran at the 2007 meeting in Ottawa.
He concludes that the BB consensus is against an attack, but emphasizes the Americans (in June) still wanted to attack. He compares the situation to 2002 re the proposed attack on Iraq, which Euro BB members stridently opposed at that year’s meeting. He guesses the Americans will not attack, but also warns that if they do there will be “blood in the water.”
Offered as context for the rather surprising events last week — with the US intel octopus abruptly estimating that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and Bush the next day flailing at a press conference trying to rescue the casus belli.
2. If you listen to Mr Estulin’s interview, you will find he is a rather doctrinaire Nationalist. I don’t share his perfect confidence that the nation-state is (historically has been) the best guarantor of the rights of individuals.
The Ottoman empire, for example, multinational, multireligious in flesh and law, was a more temperate administrator of the Balkan peninsula than the Byzantine, Bulgar and Serbian christian kingdoms that preceded it, and the nation-state “structure” that followed its collapse. (And it seems war is again brewing in the Kosovo region of the state of Serbia, where muslim Albanians are in the large marjority.)
As for external relations: The world wars were caused by nation-states shanghaied by militarists. And the world-shaking turmoil in the mideast is in good part an effect of the creation of a nation-state there in 1948 with a war of conquest (which has never ceased), and, in particular, of the seizure by that new nation-state of multicultural Jerusalem.
The term “nation-state” is so broadly misused that perhaps it’s worth defining. Klutzes everywhere seem to use it as a synonym of “state.”
All one needs is to recall that “nation” means people, not a polity. The Cherokee Nation is the body of Cherokee people, not whatever political structures they may have erected.
A nation-state then is a state that unites a People in a single polity. And the big move in the 19th century, when this modern Nationalism seized Europe’s mind, was to define a People by language — an idea that feels right, yet has proven problematic in many applications.
Italy, for example — a curious case. The language is more or less the same tongue throughout the peninsula (Sicily excluded), but whether the Italian Nation yet exists is a question. The “unification” in the late 19th century was a conquest, by the Piedmontese in the far north, of the south. And for the past two decades there has been a movement in the north to secede from the state that Garribaldi cobbled together with a few flashy victories on the field of battle. Northern Leaguers resent the corruption and poverty of the southern culture, which they consider foreign.
People can still be found who proudly call themselves not Italians but, eg, Eugubbini (the people of Gubbio, in Umbria). Or Tadese (of the nearby hamlet of Gualdo Tadino). Bolognese. Milanese. People in Sicily still think of Rome as a foreign occupier. Those in Naples, mezzo mezzo.
Young Churchill famously predicted the unprecedented violence of the world wars as a consequence of the Nationalist revolution in Europe. It seems the passions of people are more easily manipulated and harnessed for war by a Nationalist government than a multinational one that bears less fleshy relationship to the individuals throughout the state.
How odd this strikes our ears in 2007, after thirty years (in the States) of Identity Politics. Who might think that the least dangerous government may be one composed of aliens rather than one’s own quite specific type, down to gonads, skin tone and appetites?
Money and mad scientists are the central problems. Whether these can be controlled better with (and within) nation-states or multinational states or a world government seems a question not susceptible to a priori reasoning. Rather, working democracy seems the essential ingredient (and we certainly don’t have it at the federal level in the U.S.).
Purists of Nationalism theorize that the ideal structure is a nation-state that unites all the individuals of the Nation under one sovereign.
Consider modern German. Formed as Bismarck gathered skeeteen hundred german-speaking principalities under a single king. The nazis then perfected the nation-state by seizing neighboring lands where German speakers predominated: Austria, the Sudetenland of Czech-oslovakia, and bits of western Poland.
But that meant war, which led to the division of the nation-state into entities redrawn based on other doctrines and realities consequent to the Soviet Union’s possession of Berlin and most of Europe east of the Elbe. In 1991 the nation-state of Bismarck was reconstituted.
There seems little reason to characterize the United States as a nation-state. We were from the start multinational, and immigration makes us more so decade by decade, particularly since Identity Politics have shouted down the old Melting Pot ideal.
Then again, the term “the american people” rather clearly denotes a body of individuals; and the U.S. is clearly the state that contains them.
But “nation-state” implies cohesion — social care — among a country’s constituent classes which is missing more and more in the U.S. as the decades descend. Since the supposed Gilded Age certain Americans have boasted “The business of America is business.” This was mitigated in the 30s, when the Depression momentarily knocked the businessmen back on their heels.
But since their rejection of Fordism and the New Deal in the 1980s, and with the influx of foreign capital since, the owner-operators of the USA have come to have too little in common with the general populace to exert the kind of care that the societies of healthy bona fide nation-states exhibit. The whole point of Nationalism is to protect the People. The United States is a labor camp and a military- industrial complex.
True nation-states: The Scandavian countries. And those that fell out of Yugoslavia. Indeed, all of Balkania. (The adjective “balkanized” is a pejorative synonym of “nationalized.”) Japan. Germany. Poland. France, I guess. The Czech Republic, and old mate Slovakia. And jolly old England, before the creation of multinational Great Britain.
The list is long. The Nationalism idea did indeed conquer Europe in the 19th century, then spread to the third world — and the first half of the 20th century might be seen as a test of the idea. Does the European Union mean that the test was failed?
Theorists sometimes argue that the best of all possible worlds would be composed entirely of nation-states. The aging multinational empires of the 19th century were the first targets here — the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian.
Yet today we have most of non-EU Europe, and many countries beyond, even Turkey, scrambling to enter the EU, which has already achieved something like sovereign parity with the member states, and is about to go one better with new powers of foreign policy. All of which Mr Estulin — a Russian who lives in Spain with a Canadian passport — decries.
Yet today, too, the dutch-speaking Flemish are moving to reconstitute Flanders out of Belgium, thinking to leave the latter rump state to the french-speaking Walloons. And francophone nationalists in Quebec want to carve their nation-state out of Canada.
Here’s a good view by Roger Cohen of the NY Times about Belgium and Europe generally, where Nationalism and its opposites seem Mix-Mastered to hell at the moment. Read, e.g., the Scot, who would like to see Scotland secede from Great Britain, but enter the European Union.
William Pfaff wrote an excellent book about all this in the early 90s, as Yugoslavia (a nation-state in name but in spirit multinational, despite a common tongue) was disintegrating under pressure from Serbian (chiefly), Croatian and Slovenian nationalists: The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism (1993).
Pfaff seems now blacklisted in stateside newspapers, after a long career as a columnist at the L.A. Times. Perhaps his other recent books make clear why:
– The Bullet’s Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia (2004)
– Fear, Anger and Failure: A Chronicle of the Bush Administration’s War against Terror from the Attacks of September 11, 2001 to Defeat in Baghdad (2004)
– Barbarian Sentiments: America in the New Century (2000) — a revision of Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends (1989)
But you can read Mr Pfaff regularly in the International Herald Tribune — eg here, recently, on topic — and on occasion in the NYROB.
