Here was the essential problem: even with the best will in the world, the League had no power to enforce any of its edicts. For this it had to rely on Britain and France, who were notorious flakes. The United States never even joined. And so it went on. The General Secretariat would pronounce, the Permanent Court of International Justice would rule, the levers would be pulled, nothing would happen. None of their high ideals were able to survive first contact with reality — that is to say, state expediency and national egoism. Whenever it counted the powers would look to their own alliances, their own security. Mussolini was left to annex Abyssinia in 1936 despite the League’s protests, because Britain and France were trying to court him as an ally; Japan was allowed to overrun Manchuria for similar reasons. It all seemed to carry a brute lesson: whatever the merits of internationalism and international law, the facts of life ran against them. 

Why does English schooling fixate so much on the League, this odd sideshow? A corrective to teen idealism, maybe. These events, as told, seemed to be a mini fable in how the high ideas can’t compete against ordinary selfishness. It certainly had its appeal for teenage me: a smirker, an online troll.

But as a story this was over-keen and over-cynical. Too cynical, because it always underpriced the power of these ideas. “Why can’t we all just get along”, or, latterly, “global problems require global solutions” — these are powerful notions, at least among the very powerful. The armies that conquered Europe in the middle of the Forties were technically those of the United Nations, marching under its own banner of war: the “Honour Flag” — this just 10 years after the League of Nations was pronounced a dead letter. Had F.D.R. lived a little longer, something approaching a world state under the aegis of the UN would have resulted, with the planet governed as a kind of American-Soviet condominium — even Wendall Wilkie, his Republican rival, called for such a course. A lunatic idea, but not one that school-of-hard-knocks international realism can really assimilate. 

Too cynical then, and too cynical now. Over the past 10 years almost everyone has again been announcing the decline of liberal international norms and the return of the nation state. Terrorism, strongmanism, populism, migration, and global diseases would force some collision with reality, the old niceties would be forgotten, and we would then revert to a harder and simpler form of rule under sovereign nations. What would this entail? Nearly every literary or political weekly at one point carried the front piece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as its cover. Even the vogue for the term “geopolitics” spoke to the new mood: a politics founded in expediency and the facts of life, not liberal ideas.

But nothing of the sort has happened. Whatever factors might be making the case for the nation state anew, the real story of the past decade has been a huge growth in the scope and depth of international law and obligation. These are advancing over the developed world much faster than they’re receding elsewhere.

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Rishi Sunak is a millennial tragedy

By Travis Aaroe

For all the foam of the past 10 years, it’s hard to think of any period in diplomatic history that’s been less defined by expediency, national egoism, or the cold accounting of interests. A classic example is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which, unlike the old League of Nations, doesn’t require a sponsor power. In 2015, a British exit from the ECHR was Cameronite boilerplate. Now it is deemed radical and eccentric. Giorgia Meloni heads up a party that can claim lineal descent from Italy’s National Fascists. Emmanuel Macron was billed as a statesman of Jupiterian standing, a liberal answer to the age of the strongman. For all this neither can bring themselves to face down the court in Strasbourg, or even the Dublin Convention. France has now been reduced to paying the ECHR an out-of-pocket charge for each deportation. 

So too with the climate. 10 years ago climate agreements like the Kyoto Protocol were a byword for the well-meaning dead letter. These have since grown teeth. Switzerland, grand doyen of the international system, was in April ruled against by the Strasbourg court for insufficient zeal on Net Zero. The Swiss government is now drawing up a list of climate measures which it hopes will appease the court.

The same is true for technology. All the world powers have now accepted global AI regulation, even though the first to defect from these rules would surely reap huge commercial advantages for itself. So much for the new egoism.

In this sense many jumped too soon. In the 2010s, a number of political leaders and factions bet on the revival of the Westphalian system and took the national plunge, only to end up disappointed. Though China has been menacing Japan in the Spratly Islands for over a decade, this has not been enough to force a revision of Article 9 of the Constitution — which forbids Japan from waging aggressive war. Some of the more slapdash Brexiteers took it as a given that, during talks with the EU27, national interest or even the needs of European exporters would prevail, and that things like the integrity of the EEA were in fact wink-nudge negotiating positions. Wrong. The process ended up turning almost entirely on legalese such as the Good Friday Agreement — never on trade or even grand strategy. They had counted on a new smirking Bismarckianism that never actually materialised. 

Subsequent events only underline the point. Two years after this bruising course of negotiations, the United Kingdom decided to commit huge resources to defending the EU27’s eastern flank. The UK is also backing Ukraine’s accession to the EU: now a closed market to British goods. Even for a relative tearaway like Brexit Britain, the international principle is still unanswerable. Under similar circumstances, any 18th-century British cabinet would probably be concluding a treaty with Russia. 

Liberal internationalism has been challenged only to come out stronger. That’s not to say it’s come through unchanged. In the 2020s, global institutions no longer justify themselves with anything so sensible as, say, cheap imports and just-in-time supply chains — these were all torched in the name of “global action” against Coronavirus four years ago. The only argument now really made for these things is that any alternative to them is morally unconscionable. Britain can’t exit the ECHR to exercise ordinary border controls because that would put it in the same company as Belarus, and would be an aid and comfort to bad men everywhere. 

Border control. Great power politics. National rearmament. A liberal course on AI. These are not bankrupt ideas. History will probably vindicate them. But their proponents can’t count on some inevitable global crack-up to accomplish their work for them. So far, the only successful reassertions of the nation state have come not from “wider forces”, but from small, organised conspiracies like Vote Leave and Boris-Cummings that were willing to act in the face of events and force the issue. Nationalism and internationalism are moral premises. Events cannot prove or disprove them. More than anything else, what the last 10 years have shown is that these ideas are more powerful than realism, expediency, and the so-called facts of life. Those who oppose these reigning ideas shouldn’t count on reality intruding in on them.

One does not need to be a psephologist to understand the shift in the public mood. Evidence of Britain’s malaise is all around us, from pot-holed roads to a crumbling public health service, all overseen by an exhausted government desperate to be put out of its misery, as a slew of Tory parliamentarians confirm they will not stand at the next general election.

To blame this all on Brexit, however, would be to adopt the same imperialistic and conceited attitude of many Remainers, convinced that Britain is still the centre of the world. We need only look across the Channel to see that similar problems plague our EU neighbours, too: inflationary energy dependence, deindustrialisation, interest rate rises, house price inflation, regional disparities bound up with peripheral separatist movements. All of this is compounded by deep political uncertainty across the continent. In many ways, despite having formally withdrawn from the EU, Britain still resembles a member-state.

To imagine that rejoining the EU would solve our problems is Eutopian fantasy. None of these polls, nor the media hubbub around “Bregret”, should be taken at face value — no more than we should still be quailing over the absurd predictions of Britain being wiped out by asteroids for the temerity of having voted for Brexit. Indeed, the very fact that the Red Wall is edging back to Labour and away from the Tories indicates at least one absolute gain from Brexit — a growing sense of political independence among the lower-middle and working classes. The fact that traditional working-class constituencies previously under the thumb of Labour are now swing seats, able to decide the outcomes of elections by switching their support from one party to another, is a salutary reminder to Britain’s political elites of the dangers of democratic complacency.

Moreover, one suspects the polls would quickly change if the prospect of rejoining the EU was once again put to the voters. Majorities that appear overwhelming and solid would quickly melt away when people were confronted not with abstract questions, but rather with the prospect of a meaningful political choice over rejoining the Single Market, rejoining the EU without the rebate, or even having to sign up to Tony Blair’s old dream of joining the Eurozone, a commitment required of all new member-states.

Instead of holding another referendum, then, it seems more likely that the pattern of Brexit policies established under prime ministers Johnson and Sunak will continue under future governments — that is, growing rapprochement and strategic realignment with Brussels, as indicated in Britain’s participation at the second summit of the European Political Community last week. Whether this long-term trend is justified by the need to prop up seedy sectarian power-sharing arrangements in Stormont, or by the need to manage the risks created by Nato expansion, the creep back towards Brussels will be soft and gradual, with governments avoiding giving voters anything so stark as a clear choice.

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Why the nation state failed

By Mary Harrington

All this begs the question: why have the opportunities of Brexit been squandered? Thus far, the major victory claimed by Tory Brexiteers is Britain’s joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a global free-trade bloc incorporating the growing economies of the Asia-Pacific as opposed to the moribund economies of Europe. Yet this supposed achievement only underscores the problem. The very fact that one globalist trade bloc (the CPTPP) is being offered in place of another (the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union) makes clear that part of the problem is that so many leading Brexiteers continue to conceive of Brexit as if it were a vote for cheaper cornflakes through lower tariffs, rather than a vote for national renewal.

In place of efforts to expand public investment, enhance productivity, build infrastructure and renew industrial policy, economic debates over Brexit became mired in questions of trade policy, despite the low contribution of trade to economic growth. This fixation with trade reflects the intrinsic political weakness of the so-called Singaporeans — those Thatcherite Brexiteers who, despite seeming to know nothing about Singapore, hoped to make Brexit Britain a “Singapore-on-Thames” that would enjoy its combination of robust growth rates and cosmopolitan trading relations.

For all their supposed Euroscepticism, the fact that the Thatcherite Brexiteers were so transfixed by the mirage of Singapore-on-Thames indicates how little they understood the politics of national independence. It was, after all, Margaret Thatcher who was the architect of the Single Market, a continent-sized trading zone that inevitably required supranational structures to oversee, regulate and administer it (the very same structures that she recoiled from towards the end of her time in office). Whatever her claims to be “batting for Britain”, it was Thatcher’s own efforts to build up globalist free-trading arrangements that wove the threads that would be used to entangle the British nation. Policy regimes focused on driving globalist trade inevitably legitimate supranationalism — and it is this dynamic that vitiates the Singaporeans’ efforts to re-establish national sovereignty. Substituting one globalist trading bloc for another will not solve the problem.

If Thatcherites are oblivious to the implications of their own political vision, populist Brexiteers were no more clear-sighted. They imagined that formally withdrawing from the EU was in and of itself sufficient to restore British national independence. In misconceiving the EU as a Napoleonic superstate subjugating Britain, the populist vision of Brexit reflected more the limitations of populist politics itself than any of the drab reality of the Brussels bureaucracy, where national ministers met in secret to decide national policy in common.

Far from being an overarching bureaucracy, the EU was instead focused on organising national government through diplomacy, using executive privileges to insulate policy-making from oversight and scrutiny from national legislatures. Propelled by their Spitfire nationalism, the Brexit populists imagined that withdrawing from the EU would allow the old Britain to re-emerge, the one that was supposedly submerged when Britain joined the European Economic Community back in 1972. In this, the populists failed to reckon with what political scientist Peter Mair characterised as the political void at the core of the member-states — that is, the gap between rulers and ruled.

The constitutional illegitimacy so prevalent in modern nations stems from the lack of institutionalised representation that would help ground the state in civil society. The reason our elites appear so haughty and remote is less a subjective question of their attitude, and more an objective question of social structure: our rulers and leading lights simply are not embedded in institutional structures that would give them a meaningful representative function with respect to the rest of society. With 60% of British voters no longer feeling represented by existing parties, breaking up the existing party structure with a new electoral system will be imperative. Until this gap between rulers and ruled is closed, the structures of the member-state will continue to hover above their constituents, suspended in supranational networks of globally interconnected elites, and committed to globalist politics. They busy themselves fighting forever wars in supranational military alliances, nation-building in the Third World, tackling climate change or global poverty — anything except addressing the concerns of left-behind voters in forgotten nations.

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This is not a class war

By Philip Cunliffe

Where does this leave us? If we are to deliver on the promise of Brexit and establish a politics of national sovereignty and control, then we must replace our current member-state with a nation-state. As I argue with my co-authors in our new book, Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit, this means that we must take the politics of the nation seriously. Brexit proved that there can be no return to the past. Whatever might be involved in carving out a new role for Britain in the world requires building a new nation out of the Britain of today.

Brexit was not a project of restoration but a project of renewal. Renewal will not come from new trading arrangements, however many economic gains are promised. It is only a politics of nationhood that would allow us to build up the state authority to transcend the super-charged Nimbyism that plagues the country, ensconced in the quangos, identity politics and devolutionary arrangements that disperse and diffuse all national energy and effort. Who will stand for this new nation? Only when we answer this question will we be able to exit from the shell of the European member-state in which we are still encased.

The result had been, I felt, leaders on autopilot, and a waning capacity for self-government. It might be too late to reverse this trajectory, but those of us who take civic nationalism and engaged democratic politics seriously ought to try.

This was the message condensed into the successful Vote Leave campaign message: “Take Back Control.” So there I was, doing my bit for an exercise in mass democratic engagement. We all know what happened next. Like my daughter, the Leave victory is now six years old. So how’s it going? Have we taken back control? Leaving aside Covid and the wrangling over how (or whether) to leave, there’s one clear measure where we can assess our leaders’ scorecard on returning democratic accountability to the British electorate: immigration.

If for me, supporting Leave was about democratic accountability, for many Brexit voters it was much more practical. Thanks to EU free movement rules, many felt the level of low-skilled immigration to the United Kingdom was too high, depressing wages. Many Leave voters sought to return immigration to British national control, in the hope that politicians would then use the powers they now possessed to lower immigration in line with the desires of voters.

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The failure of lockdown localism

By Mary Harrington

On this metric, Brexit has spectacularly failed. ONS statistics this week are expected to show that net migration has in fact more than doubled from the pre-Brexit level of 336,000 to over 700,000 in 2022. Some are predicting net migration for a single year could top one million. In the wake of these revelations, just 9% of Brexiters believe Brexit has been a success.

Where, then, is the “control” the Brexit campaign promised could be taken back? In truth, the real question this raises goes deeper than whether or not political leaders have betrayed their voters since 2016. It’s a question that was raised, or at least gestured at, by many at last week’s National Conservatism conference in Westminster, to shrill horror from the self-appointed Virtuous People in the press. Namely: what even is a nation? What, and who, is it for?

If you’d asked me this question while I was waddling around small-town England in 2016 with a bag of “Take Back Control” leaflets, I’d have said something to the effect that nation states are the generally-accepted modern scale for the governance of a people in a particular place. That in modern times this governance usually (though not always) happens via some form of electoral democracy. I might have added that nations tend to map partly, though not exclusively, onto a culture, language, and history — and that over time they often have a reciprocal structuring effect on that people’s idea of themselves as a collective with common interests.

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The death of Christian privilege

By Mary Harrington

I might have said that the history of patriotic feeling that attends this marriage of language, culture, history, geography, and democratic citizenship is sometimes criticised for its propensity to spill over into chauvinism or hostility toward outsiders. But that we should set this against the fact that to work for its citizens, as a democracy, a self-governing nation must have a sense of who is and is not a citizen, and what if anything is due only to, or expected only of, those citizens. And, at the most concrete level, everyone there needs a good idea of where this applies: in other words, a nation needs clearly marked geographical boundaries.

Everything I did in 2016 was predicated on these things still being true and the proper way to govern a place. But though it gives me no pleasure to say so, and though I was a speaker at last week’s National Conservatism conference, I’m no longer sure this is the case. My worry is structural: that the nation-state form as such is now desired only by those at the bottom of the social scale, and no one with an iota of power cares what they think. Worse still, no one with an iota of power even cares who they are, or what nation they do or don’t in principle belong to.

The whole point of a democratic nation state is that we agree who The People are and what The Place is, and that we agree to abide by the electorate’s decisions (with some qualifications) on important matters concerning that people and place. But this week’s numbers reveal that the Tories, despite routinely making hostile noises about immigration, are not listening. They’re determinedly deaf to the majority view among Britons that immigration is too high: a view held by 57% of voters overall and 75% of Conservatives: so much so, that the Cabinet recently blocked all but one of Suella Braverman’s proposals for lowering it. And as pollster Matthew Goodwin set out last week, this is hardly the only policy area in which the Tories are obdurately cloth-eared.

Meanwhile, if the meaning of “listening” is ambiguous where the Tories are concerned, for Labour so too is the meaning of “electorate”. The week before NatCon, Keir Starmer floated a proposal to extend UK voting rights to tax-paying EU citizens living in the UK, as well as to sixth-form schoolchildren. In other words: citizenship doesn’t imply a bond of belonging or loyalty, but is instead more like a gym membership. Anyone who pays the subscription can join. And perhaps this doesn’t matter, because clearly the franchise doesn’t do much. Otherwise Starmer wouldn’t be proposing to extend it to children deemed too young to buy cigarettes.

In other words: if you ignore what our leaders say, and watch what they do, it’s clear that there is now very little elite support for the geographically- and politically-bounded, democratically-governed nation state that Brexit voters sought to defend. One party harrumphs about “boat people” while treating the UK’s physical borders as an obstacle to growing the economy. Meanwhile, the other party cheers this on, albeit purportedly for humanitarian reasons, and views the franchise as obsolete, too: little more consequential than a Strictly phone-in. But perhaps this is to be expected. We’re some distance beyond Britain’s industrial era now. And I’m not sure you can have democratic nation states in a post-industrial country: for the idea of mass democratic participation as such only came into being with the urbanisation and industrialisation of working people.

For most of 19th-century Europe, as A.J.P. Taylor shows in his classic 1941 history, for example, much of the land between Italy and Russia was governed by the Habsburg dynasty. In these territories, a dizzying array of languages, national cultures, and class interests interpenetrated. Under those circumstances, nation states simply weren’t a thing in the modern sense. With Habsburg rule as a kind of political emulsifier, shared linguistic or class interests sometimes weighed more heavily than geography. The Habsburg territory known as Bohemia, for example, is now part of the Czech Republic but also contained (among others) Poles, Hungarians and a great many German-speakers, a fact that Hitler used to justify its annexation in 1938.

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Boston and the tragedy of Brexitland

By Jacob Furedi

It was industrialisation, and with it the bleeding of power from the ancient aristocracies, that drove the shift from these more porous polities toward nation states as we know them. Wealth bled from farming towards mercantile elites. Tractors replaced peasants, who flocked to the cities and demanded industrial work. And many of the disputes in this turbulent age turned on such contests of power, between the old, landed gentry and newer centres of power.

Critics of last week’s NatCon conference often treat liberalism and nationalism as antonyms — but this would have made no sense two centuries ago, when the liberals were the nationalists. When students took over Budapest in the 1848 revolution, for example, what they demanded was not a million miles from what most Brexiters wanted: a voice, in a defined nation bounded by geography and citizenship rather than elite privilege or nativism. That is, in A.J.P Taylor’s words, “a democratic constitution with universal suffrage […] and equal rights for the nationalities”.

At this point in the story, such political possibilities were just emerging. Writing on Christopher Clark’s new history of 1848, Revolutionary Spring, Daniel Zamora Vargas shows how this period also saw the emergence of the public political sphere— and with it, of the kind of engaged mass polity without which you can’t really have a democracy in the sense Brexiteers sought to preserve. It was, Vargas suggests, the inception-point for “political parties capable of disciplining their members” and of “binding them to commonly agreed positions”. In the wake of this febrile time, he writes, “the emerging working class would progressively work through parties, unions and strikes rather than coups d’états and barricades”.

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Durham has become a land of zombies

By Pip Fallow

In his forthcoming book End Times, the political scientist Peter Turchin describes a similar — though less chaotic — process of electorate-formation in 19th-century Britain. As Turchin describes it, the mid-19th century in Britain saw a “messy” negotiation between the old landowning aristocracy, emerging mercantile elites, and working-class people, over what was due to whom. This culminated in the overturning of protectionist measures for British farming, reform to welfare provisions for the poorest, and in 1867 the Second Reform Act which granted all adult male property owners the vote. And it was in the course of that negotiation that the British polity became aware of itself as such: a trajectory that would culminate, in the early 20th century, in the universal franchise.

In other words, the age referenced by National Conservatism — the age of nation states — has its beginning point in the push first by the landless bourgeoisie and then by the industrial working class for a political voice within modernity. But we might also argue that it had its end point in two global conflicts between the resulting nation states accompanied by an orgy of industrial hyper-productivity, via total civilian mobilisation for munitions manufacturing.

Since then, we’ve been living in the ashes of the nation state order. Having read Taylor since 2016, I now understand a little better why the nations of Europe might respond to that catastrophe by seeking to replace the clearly somewhat combustible nation state format with the EU: a new emulsifier, with clear structural echoes of the Habsburg empire. Britain was never part of that empire, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that many in the British Isles should view this as an alien imposition. But it’s not as though we can return to the material conditions of the Habsburg age either, however wishfully the “post-liberals” may imagine doing so.

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Alastair Campbell won't stop spinning

By Alwyn W. Turner

Our situation now is a troubling one: a Europe that is largely post-industrial and, at least as far as its elites are concerned, functionally post-national. And this means, in the terms that emerged during the industrial era, post-democratic. For if working people gained a voice by dint of being indispensable to manufacturing, events since Brexit demonstrate that they may safely be ignored now high finance has replaced making things, without the wheels coming off the state.

Thus emancipated from any meaningful working-class ability to hold their feet to the fire, it’s all too predictable that those in a position to do so should opt for what Turchin calls the “wealth pump”: that is, abandoning rule for the public good, in favour of pursuing their own narrow class interests. In this case, that means turbo-charging finance and property via mass immigration, while running social solidarity infrastructures into the ground, and looking to others of the same post-national class for political, cultural, and ideological solidarity as they do so.

It’s hard to say for sure what forms of large-scale governance will emerge from this febrile situation. A considerable amount of power is already vested in international governance and NGO networks, for example, while capital has been radically post-national for some time. Meanwhile, the masses who once found a voice in aggregate via electoral politics, in the bounded nation state, are on their way to being as radically disempowered as prior to the franchise.

The fact that one side emits platitudes about “the most vulnerable in society”, and the other invokes the aesthetics of the nation state past, is neither here nor there. The nation is over. But the reaction is just beginning.

I grew up in California, moved away in the early Nineties, and moved back in 2019. One of the new things I noticed upon my return was small signs stuck to the side of a car, or printed on posterboard and erected on a street corner, advertising “DMV services”. After some intercourse with a few of these, always conducted in halting, heavily accented English, I came to understand that these entrepreneurs are “fixers”, a species that most Americans are unacquainted with. If you want to get something done in the developing world, you often need to engage the services of a fixer. This is someone who has connections in the bureaucracy, often by virtue of kinship. Being a naïve visitor without connections, you couldn’t possibly know whom to bribe, how to approach them, or what forms must be observed. These things must be accomplished with delicacy. You, brainwashed to believe in the Weberian version of bureaucracy as impersonal rationality, are too naive to navigate a real one in most parts of the world. Too European.

They say California is the future. However that may be, the state has become more like the rest of the world, less like the erstwhile United States. The old European ways of procedure-following are anomalous, and perhaps never made a lot of sense. Or maybe they made sense only within a framework provided by something like Calvinism, Prussian organisation, ecclesiastical administration, or some similarly ascetic institutional morality that is “no respecter of persons”. By contrast, ties of kinship are easy to grasp, more robust, and make sense to more of the world’s peoples as the ground of cooperation, particularly in societies where the clan may be as far as trust extends.

I was very happy to have found my way to Smog Lady. I spotted her 20 minutes after I arrived at the parking lot. She was making her rounds, leaning into cars through the driver’s side window. Finally she approached me: a toothless matron who spoke only Chinese beyond a few key words in English such as “odometer” and “VIN number”. I noticed she had a large wad of cash in her hand. I gave her my $200. She then got in her car and drove out of the parking lot. I had a moment of panic, thinking I had just been ripped off. But sure enough, 30 minutes later she came back with my fraudulent smog certificate.

The Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine coined the term “service nomads” for distinct peoples, typically itinerant or diaspora, who perform functions within a society that can only be done by outsiders. That is because these functions, though indispensable, are shady in one way or another and can’t be openly avowed as necessary. Things such as usury (that is, providing credit), burying the dead, magic, puppeteering, prostitution, peddling, cobbling, knife sharpening, dispute mediation and all manner of border-crossing and go-between work that allows the principals to negotiate without losing face or being compromised.

Every society has such liminal populations (gypsies, Jains, Travellers, the “overseas Chinese,” the Sheikh Mohammadi of eastern Afghanistan) who develop some kind of “transgressor expertise”. They must keep themselves apart, as integration into the bonds of reciprocity and communal honour would make their trade impossible. As Slezkine lays out: they are regarded as unclean, and in turn they guard their own purity against contamination by the host population, from intermarriage, say, or simply by accepting hospitality from them. Dietary restrictions and other taboos of self-segregation serve to keep the boundary intact. They speak their own language, and may pretend not to understand the host language.

At first blush, the providers of DMV services appear to fit Slezkine’s description of “service nomads”. But that concept only makes sense when framed against a surrounding society that is settled and cohesive, with taken-for-granted norms that secure a basic solidarity among the host population. Without such a background of belonging, and therefore communal honour to uphold, there would seem to be no need for a separate population and social type invested in transgressor expertise. California has become a polyglot of unrelated diasporas, opportunity-seekers, guest workers, tech Brahmins and multiple-passport-holding functionaries posted to the Pacific Rim economic zone. It is more like the bar scene in Star Wars than like Tolkien’s Shire. We are all wanderers.

I think Smog Lady is not to be understood as a service nomad, then. Rather, the necessity of her services may be taken as an indication of the direction that state bureaucracy takes under conditions of multiculturalism (think Brazil), particularly in the absence of partisan political competition (think Soviet Union). These two features, multiculturalism and political monopoly, interact in interesting ways.

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Can gratitude save humanity?

By Matthew Crawford

With the collapse of the Republican Party in California, there soon emerged a political landscape resembling what the Yugoslav Communist official (turned dissident) Milovan Djilas termed the “party-state”. That is to say, there is little meaningful distinction to be made between the government and the Democratic Party. Competition for control of California takes place, not between two rival parties with different political visions and corresponding electorates in a general election, but between aspirants within the Democratic Party, under a shared political vision. In practice, this means competition for money from organised interests that fund the activist networks, which in turn translate those interests into various moralisms and thereby shape the vision of the party. The electorate largely drops out of consideration as a constituency.

Only what happens within the Party matters. In Yugoslavia in the Fifties that meant the deliberations of the “political forums”. In California, what happens within the Party is mostly determined by NGOs and foundations, public sector union leadership, expert bodies willing to generate Science in support of the Party’s program, and tech firms that are permitted unlimited capital accumulation on condition of alignment with the Party. Together these entities make up a sort of government-by-cabinet that is effectively insulated from the pressures of electoral politics. The citizenry isn’t feared.

In 2018, there was a rash of news stories about five and six hour waits at the DMV. Newspapers published DMV survival guides recommending that supplicants bring chairs, snacks and backup batteries for their devices. A state auditor’s report found a third of DMV employees not showing up for work on time. At least one data specialist slept for hours every day, year after year, without being fired, and this resulted in serious backups in the work flow.

When I returned to the state in 2019, I put off the transfer of my vehicles (I have a lot of them) and driver’s licence to California for as long as I could, knowing the rigours and uncertainties that awaited me in the attempt. Just as I was beginning the process, in March 2020, the state of California shut down.

Covid turned out to be a godsend for the DMV. On March 26, 2020 the Los Angeles Times acknowledged what those of us in bureaucratic limbo already knew: “To slow the spread of COVID-19, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has dramatically restricted customer visits to its field offices, barring people who do not have appointments and warning that no new slots to appear in person are currently available.” Now there were no lines and, more important, no embarrassing news stories about queues. Problem solved.

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California needs a recession

By Joel Kotkin

To the party-state, citizens with their unending needs are a nuisance. The DMV remained “open” because it is an essential service, but presumably this was less for public safety on the roads than for reasons of the sort that came to light in Knox v SEIU, a Supreme Court case which found that the public employee union (which DMV workers were required to join as a condition of employment) in California had “improperly charged increased dues that went towards political spending”. Those dues from DMV workers were the essential thing, to the party-state.

Several months later, as the pandemic meandered around the globe according to its own logic (in which the only perceptible correlation that emerged between lockdowns and Covid deaths was an embarrassing one), I succeeded in getting in the door of the DMV. To secure a California driver’s licence, I did not have to take a written exam, nor was there a driving test. The DMV had quietly waived these tests. The LA Times quoted an anonymous employee who wondered, “They’re saying we’re being kept open because we’re an essential part of the community… How can we be essential when we’re not protecting the public? We’re putting the public in danger by doing this.” When the same employee raised concerns with her manager about granting licences to customers who’d failed their tests multiple times, she was told, “Nope, just give them their license.” One DMV employee in the San Joaquin Valley reported her office waiving about half a dozen tests in one week, including for people who had been cited for driving under the influence.

In dropping the pretence of its ostensible mission of public safety, the official DMV was perhaps just acknowledging the reality of the unofficial DMV, the one that is likely to be called “corrupt” by people clinging to first-world norms. Having now spent some time in DMV offices in the new California, my impression is that the shop floor operates along the lines of ethnic fiefdoms that overlap somewhat, and work fairly smoothly together when necessary. The Hispanic customers speak their own language with a Hispanic teller, the warm tones and easy gestures of which seem very unlike the bureaucratic mode of address that institutional English is adapted to. There are other languages spoken as well, each with its own characteristic emotional repertoire, and some of these seem better adapted to the haggle — at least to the naïve and suspicious ear of one feeling beset by a cacophonous Babel.

The occasional appearance of an unaffiliated Anglo-American such as myself is accommodated easily enough, and in such cases tellers are able to code-switch into officialese. But one does wonder if one is being offered quite the same menu of services as those who can make appeal to one of these fiefdoms. In 2021, five employees at a DMV office in the Los Angeles area pled guilty to taking weekly cash bribes to process drivers licences for unqualified drivers. According to ringleader Atanacio Villegas, a licence registration examiner in Torrance from 2010 to 2016, “a network of ‘brokers’ would contact him on behalf of drivers who could not pass their driver exams”, and then forward the drivers’ bribes to DMV employees. The scheme involved sending the drivers to the window of a participating DMV employee who had an “identifier”, such as a red hat, as reported in the Press Democrat and LA Times.

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In a case stretching from 2013-18, various trucking schools in the Salinas area were finding their own work-arounds. “Truck school owner Pavittar Singh was sentenced to prison for paying DMV employees for fraudulent passing scores,” reported The Californian. Meanwhile, “Kulwinder Dosanjh Singh, a broker, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery and identify fraud.” Here “broker” refers to a provider of DMV services.

From the perspective of the party-state, presumably the problem with allowing corruption within the bureaucracy is that the thriving business done by these operations represents a lost revenue stream for the union, that is, for the war chest of the Party. In 2014, the California DMV went on a massive hiring blitz, adding a thousand new workers for the express purpose of providing drivers licences to illegal immigrants, per state bill AB 60. “For us, it’s more of a social justice thing,” said Ted Burnett, state-wide coordinator for Service Employees International Union Local 1000.

You, tender reader, might be scandalised by the ways of California’s DMV, but such a response is a hangover from another era. Under conditions of bureaucratic dysfunction typical of a party-state, corruption isn’t a problem, it is the solution. These new populations have found ways to get things done. Bribery is more efficient (and far less crazy-making) than clinging to first-world expectations in a world that has changed. For my part, I am sincerely grateful for the services of Smog Lady. Diversity is our strength.

Of those gathered, perhaps only a couple of us were enthusiastic proponents of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. Within the Church of England, there exists a split between the bishops and their congregations – bishops being overwhelmingly pro-Remain and regular churchgoers being slightly pro-Leave with occasional ones being significantly pro-Leave. I half imagined being rolled in a ball in the corner of the room with lots of men in purple dresses putting the boot in. But that didn’t happen. Instead, there was lots of tea and some regretful hand wringing. And, encouragingly, there were even some faint signs that church leaders were beginning to listen to their congregations.

The most interesting thing that I took away from the day, listening especially to German Christians, was how the EU became, for them, a sort of project of atonement for the consequences of German nationalism – that the shame of Nazism led them to reject any starry-eyed or romantic conception of the nation and to replace it by what Professor Heinrich Bedford-Strohm from the University of Bamberg called a “nationalism of rules”.

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In other words, that a particular people might be united not by the dangerous emotionalism of flag waving but by a decidedly unemotional common bureaucracy that could be rolled out to embrace different nations, united under a set of administrative rules and procedures. One German academic there spoke of the need for the UK to be “integrated into the European cultural synthesis”. I shuddered and thought of the Borg in Star Trek, a hive mind where all cultural distinctiveness will be assimilated. Forget subsidiarity. “Resistance is futile,” say the Borg.

As Brits, our reaction to the Second World War was inevitably entirely different from that of the Germans. We didn’t experience the humiliation of our nationalism, but quite the opposite: its overwhelming endorsement. For it was precisely through the sort of communal solidarity and fellow feeling that nationalism provides that we summoned the strength to stand against Nazism and help defeat it.

The massive outpouring of feeling and relief at the end of the war, the “never surrender” attitude, the solidarity forged by the Blitz, those familiar images of thousands of demobilised soldiers waving the union flag in Piccadilly, all that and more is why it is inevitable that the Germans and the British are going to have entirely different approaches to the moral valence of the nation state.

In the course of our discussion at Lambeth Palace, the former Chairman of HSBC bank, and ordained member of the Church of England, Lord Stephen Green, raised the issue of nationalism by speaking of his unease at the worlds of the hymn, “I vow to thee my country”, and in particular:

“The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.”

For Lord Green, such words suggest an uncritical estimation of the nation state, and one that is dangerously allied with a sense that we are better than other people. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed some unease with the words of that hymn.

Lord Green, of course, ran a bank whose advertising has consistently presented itself as the world’s bank. One of his bank’s recent ads stars Richard Ayoade as a ‘Global Citizen’ speaking about his love of Columbian or Costa Rican coffee, that we enjoy with a Danish. We drive German and Japanese cars, he says. We watch American movies on Korean tablets, or football heroes are Brazilian or Belgium, and so on. Ayoade places a small jigsaw piece of Britain into a map of the world, “We are not an island. We are part of something far, far bigger.” The end card reads: “Together we thrive.”

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The socialist in me believes that large international banks such as HSBC deploy the soft and apparently inclusive language of globalisation as PR for the triumph of international capitalism. And that it is capitalism that has done more to set the agenda for the internationalism of the post-war period than the trans-national rules-based order to which Professor Bedford-Strohm was referring. There are those who argue that only a international rules based order such as the EU is big enough to set limits on the detrimental effects of global capitalism. Others see it as complicit and enabling.

It struck me as odd that the national church should have so little so say that was positive about the very idea of the nation state. The Bishop of Burnley complained that too many clergy squirm uncomfortably through Remembrance Day services. He’s right: despite the Queen being the head of the Church of England, some look as though they are crossing their fingers behind their backs when they sing the National Anthem.

At the meeting, David Goodhart expressed some frustration with Church leaders:

“The trouble with this bit of the Church is that they have turned themselves into a subaltern ideological sub-set of the Anywhere liberal class – the educated, mobile, secular, cognitive class, with its bias toward the rational, the open, the autonomous, the individual – a quick witted, goal oriented, solution focused worldview.”

These are the clients to whom HSBC has pitched its ad. For Goodhart, however, the whole point of a family, a church and a nation is that they accept people uncritically – and not on the basis of how clever they are, how mobile, how rich or how solution focused. This is indeed the love that asks no question. You belong to the group and are valued by it simply because you are a member of it. The family, the church and the nation are spaces where all are welcomed and esteemed irrespective of class, talent or ethnicity. This is the moral case for the nation state.

The final verse of “I vow to thee my Country” sets the nation state in the context of a wider vision of God’s inclusive love:

“And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace”

The job of the church is not to be a faintly Left-wing lobbying group for a slightly more redistributive tax policy or a more European focused Brexit deal. The job of the church is to point to this “other country”, God’s kingdom, and to set family, church and nation under its domain. The churches of the European Union, indeed the Churches of the world, should be united here, in communion – and not by a placeless bureaucracy of rules. It was rather telling that when the Archbishop celebrated communion at lunchtime that not all of those present were able to receive. It is a bit rich for the church to lecture the country on unity when it cannot achieve it itself.

The Remain/Leave division is not the same as this. One contributor, Ben Ryan from the Theos think tank, described it as being something more akin to the divide between head and soul. The head speaks about power and economic strength, the soul seeks belonging and communal solidarity or what we used to call love. Love is specific, never abstract or general. Christ expressed his love for the world by coming into the world in a specific place and to a specific people. The incarnation of that ‘other country’ was shockingly particular.

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At its best, and when not trying to be bit-players in policy debates, the church does indeed do precisely this. The parish system roots the church in the specifics of time and space. It refuses the abstract political and concentrates on real lives lived by real people – and political, yes, when urgent themes of injustice grow out of that specificity.

But church leaders and bishops, having been promoted out of the parishes, onward and upward, and into the job of church management, can sometimes put their faith too much in that bureaucracy of rules and love-as-management. Those in the pews are longing for something different.

The historian and futurist Yuval Noah Harari has characterised modernity as that point in world history where human beings swap meaning for power – where they swap (the meaning of) the soul for (the power of) the head. Brexit may be a reaction against this Faustian exchange. And the church should take advantage.