February 12, 2006
Socialism is Mutually Exclusive with Multiculturalism
Hypothesis: Socialism can only survive in a state where almost everyone shares the same ethnic heritage (such as Israel or formerly Sweden). People might be willing to pay high taxes to help support others who are just like them but less fortunate; but people are not willing to pay high taxes when they think that someone very different is receiving them (because these "very different" are always undeserving because they don't live up to your cultural standards, such as not working hard enough). This also explains why socialism could never take hold in the USA, the most multiethnic society out there.
A relevant quote in today's NY Times, from the cultural editor of the obscure Danish newspaper who commissioned the cartoons and began the crisis:
He continued, "People are no longer willing to pay taxes to help support someone called Ali who comes from a country with a different language and culture that is 5,000 miles away."
Therefore--if this hypothesis is true--then socialism and nationalism are even more intertwined than I had previously thought.
Posted by Morgan at 05:50 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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-This is the question of the ages-I think most political entities find themselves having to broker the need for shared sacrifice with some notion of group identity, and that cuts in unexpected ways. But the biggest experiment in socialism- the Soviet Union- was always a more multiethnic composition than the US (especially if you go by language groups), but managed to distract people from (or impose upon them to overlook) it’s social instability by inventing soviet nationalism for several generations. The worsening economy of the Soviet Union was endured for at least one of those generations until it’s nationalist justification, the Cold War, collapsed and the whole thing promptly disintegrated. The US, on the other hand, employs its own techniques- most of your tax bill goes to the defense budget, which is usually justified on politically nationalist grounds, but in practice reflects a tension of whether the expenditure is made with a solely military purpose in mind (like fighting guerilla wars), or as a sort of workfare program/support for industries that have only the US government as a buyer. Socialism? I think that depends on how you interpret the spreadsheets- but a national tax is hugely intertwined with a means of structuring the civil economy, yet many claim this has had a cohesive effect on the multiethnic US.
The more abstract EU, on the other hand, always viewed itself as deriving more from an economic model than a social or national one, and traded a comparative advantage in markets for cheap labor for the import of 17 million ‘guest workers’ who have access to to social services, but are not actually citizens, with predictably tense results on all sides. Nationalism is now on the rise everywhere in Europe, among constituent states, at the expense of the transnational economic model European finance ministers originally espoused in the 70’s after socialist governments noticed their working classes had disappeared.
Right now, though, the most interesting collision of these forces is in China and India.
Posted by: ooghe at February 13, 2006 11:38 AM
"Democracy, immigration, multiculturalism. Pick any two." James Bennet
Posted by: Alex Jacobson at February 14, 2006 08:12 PM
This sounds somewhat like the thinking of David Goodhart in "The Discomfort of Strangers" --
link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/race/story/0,11374,1154684,00.html
Posted by: Bild at February 16, 2006 11:52 PM
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