What the European Right Believes

I recently had a conversation in Spain which reminded me of the more extreme ranges of American right-wing opinion. One claim was that under Franco, Spain was self-sufficient, producing everything for itself. Now Europe, apparently meaning the EU bureaucracy, had decided that the only thing Spain was for was tourism, shut down the mines and, presumably, factories. Now a majority of Spaniards worked in the tourist industry.

Checking online I found:

WTTC projects that by the end of 2025 the sector will account for 3.2 million jobs in Spain, equivalent to 14.4% of total employment. (World Travel and Tourism Council)

In 2021, the country produced roughly 3.8 billion euros worth of mineral products. Spain is an important producer of copper, tungsten, fluorspar, magnesite, and bentonite, among others. (Statista)

By his account, the Spanish government was trying to replace Spaniards with foreigners, largely Africans. To do so they offered immigrants, but not native Spaniards, an income without working, additional money if they had children. When I asked why the government would do that, the only answer was for votes. That raised the question of how fast the immigrants became citizens with the right to vote. I was told that that happened almost immediately, that the immigrants claimed they were miners, apparently a favored profession even though, according to him, the mines had been closed, and so got a quick route to citizenship. Checking that, I found:

If you are a refugee, you may apply after five years of residence in Spain. Nationals from Ibero-American countries or Spanish territories may apply for citizenship after only two years. Those who fall under this bracket may originate from Andorra, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea or Portugal. This policy also applies to those of Sephardic Jewish origin. (Applying for Spanish citizenship What is required)

That exchange got me curious about what the European right, as represented by something closer to an official spokesman, believed and how closely it matched beliefs on the American right. I found an answer in a talk by Victor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010 and the most successful political figure on the European right.

Most of the talk was about the lessons of the Ukraine war, Orban’s view of the future, and Hungary’s role in it. The war had shown both Ukraine and Russia to be stronger than anyone had expected, Ukraine by its performance on the very unequal battlefield, Russia by holding out economically against western pressures that were supposed to bring its economy down. As to the future, he believed that the five century period during which the West and its ideas had dominated the world was now ending.

… for the next many decades – or perhaps centuries, because the previous world system was in place for five hundred years – the dominant centre of the world will be in Asia: China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and I could go on. … I think that this is an inevitable process, because Asia has the demographic advantage, it has the technological advantage in ever more areas, it has the capital advantage, and it is bringing its military power up to equilibrium with that of the West. Asia will have – or perhaps already has – the most money, the largest financial funds, the largest companies in the world, the best universities, the best research institutes, and the largest stock exchanges.

The West has lost its influence over the world:

Up until now the West has thought and behaved as if it sees itself as a reference point, a kind of benchmark for the world. It has provided the values that the world has had to accept – for example, liberal democracy or the green transition. But most of the world has noticed this, and in the last two years there has been a 180-degree turn. Once again the West has declared its expectation, its instruction, for the world to take a moral stand against Russia and for the West. In contrast, the reality has become that, step-by-step, everyone is siding with Russia.

Part of the explanation is the rise of Asia, part progressive, ideology:

Western values – which were the essence of so-called “soft power” – have become a boomerang. It has turned out that these Western values, which were thought to be universal, are demonstratively unacceptable and rejected in ever more countries around the world. It has turned out that modernity, modern development, is not Western, or at least not exclusively Western – because China is modern, India is becoming increasingly modern, and the Arabs and Turks are modernising; and they are not becoming a modern world on the basis of Western values at all. And in the meantime Western soft power has been replaced by Russian soft power, because now the key to the propagation of Western values is LGBTQ. Anyone who does not accept this is now in the “backward” category as far as the Western world is concerned. I do not know if you have been watching, but I think it is remarkable that in the last six months pro-LGBTQ laws have been passed by countries such as Ukraine, Taiwan and Japan. But the world does not agree. Consequently, today Putin’s strongest tactical weapon is the Western imposition of LGBTQ and resistance to it, opposition to it. This has become Russia’s strongest international attraction; thus what used to be Western soft power has now been transformed into Russian soft power – like a boomerang.

North America — he anticipated the continent functioning as a single unit, assuming that Trump won the election, as Orban obviously expected, and succeeded in reviving the US — might be another major player. As for Hungary, its best option was to become neither an American puppet, his scornful view of Poland, nor a part of the Western European transnational state, his view of the EU, but to remain independent, deal with all factions, join with none.

It was an interesting account from a different point of view than I usually see, but what I was really interested in was his view of the present. A big part of it was nationalism — not commitment to his own nation, although that he certainly had, but belief in natural nations. His most fundamental criticism of the western European nations was that they had abandoned it.

Let us imagine that the worldview of us Central Europeans is based on nation states. Meanwhile the West thinks that nation states no longer exist; this is unimaginable to us, but all the same this is what it thinks. The coordinate system within which we Central Europeans think is therefore completely irrelevant. In our conception, the world is made up of nation states which exercise a domestic monopoly on the use of force, thereby creating a condition of general peace. In its relations with other states the nation state is sovereign – in other words, it has the capacity to independently determine its foreign and domestic policy. In our conception, the nation state is not a legal abstraction, not a legal construct: the nation state is rooted in a particular culture. It has a shared set of values, it has anthropological and historical depth. And from this emerge shared moral imperatives based on a joint consensus. This is what we think of as the nation state.

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If we read the European documents carefully, it is clear that the aim is to supersede the nation.

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If we project all of this onto the United States, this is the real battle that is going on over there. What should the United States be? Should it become a nation state again, or should it continue its march towards a post-national state? President Donald Trump’s precise goal is to bring the American people back from the post-national liberal state, to drag them back, to force them back, to raise them back to the nation state.

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Now, if we try to understand how this Western thinking – which for the sake of simplicity we should call “post-national” thinking and condition – came about, then we have to go back to the grand illusion of the 1960s. The grand illusion of the 1960s took two forms: the first was the sexual revolution, and the second was student rebellion. In fact, it was an expression of the belief that the individual would be freer and greater if he or she were freed from any kind of collective. More than sixty years later it has since become clear that, on the contrary, the individual can only become great through and in a community, that when alone he or she can never be free, but always lonely and doomed to be shrunken.

…

And finally, the last element of reality is that this post-national condition that we see in the West has a serious – and I would say dramatic – political consequence that is convulsing democracy. Because within societies there is growing resistance to migration, to gender, to war and to globalism. And this creates the political problem of the elite and the people – of elitism and populism.

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In fact in the Western world we are faced with a situation in which the masses of people appearing with college degrees no longer form less than 10 per cent of the population, but 30 to 40 per cent. And because of their views these people do not respect those who are less educated – who are typically working people, people who live from their labour. For the elites, only the values of graduates are acceptable, only they are legitimate.

Trump’s rise in America was in part a story of flyover country against the coastal elites. By Orban’s account that, with suitable translation, is the story of the rise of the European right as well.

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