The Social Democratic Logic of Romantic Nationalism

The French parliamentary elections and the emerging political horizon

The German revolution of 1848 was both the culmination of the idea of romantic nationalism, and also a foreshadowing of the eternal divergence of interests between the working and middle classes

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) - the victorious coalition of left-wing parties in Sunday night’s French parliamentary elections - has declared that the NFP will only participate in a government if allowed to implement their own program. While I’d be the first to admit that Mélenchon has better moral judgement than I do, and that he’s probably justified in refusing to compromise with either Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Parti Renaissance (PR), or Marine Le Pen’s right wing Rassemblement National (RN), there are nevertheless curious similarities between the NLP and RN platforms, similarities than under different circumstances could provide the basis for compromise in the interests of both sets of voters. Both are in favour of repealing the recent pension reform law and restoring the right to retire at 60. Both have plans for raising wages for the lowest earning cohort of workers; the NFP propose raising the minimum wage and indexing wages to inflation, while the RN propose to encourage employers to raise wages by partially exempting increases from employer social contributions, i.e. pension schemes in which employers are required to match employee contributions. The NFP want new progressive tax brackets for ultra-high earners and to re-establish the wealth tax and abolish loopholes, whereas the RN want to replace real estate wealth tax with a new tax on financial wealth. Both favour citizens’ initiative referendums, a direct democracy measure that would have the effect of halting Macron’s slow dismantling of French social democracy, as unpopular reforms such as raising the retirement age could be blocked through popular mobilizations. The extent to which the RN’s economic populism is cynical and opportunistic is certainly debatable, however both platforms are - at least on paper - clearly oriented towards the concerns of the working and lower-middle classes, but whereas the NFP platform is designed to appeal more to young renters, that of the RN leans more towards the older, property-owning middle class.

The problem that we heterodox politicos have become all too familiar with is that where interests appear to be converging, values continue to clash. The NFP want to regularize 10 year residence permits for refugees and include a new ‘climate displaced’ status, essentially encouraging further immigration. The RN, by contrast, want to repeal entitlements for undocumented migrants and largely halt immigration through the introduction of a ‘national preference’ system, the details of which remain unclear but which would most likely be similar to the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 in which quotas were set for ethnic undesirables. We ought to be asking why the incipient consensus on redistributive policies is rendered moot by the stubborn, polarizing shibboleths of multiculturalism. Because the truth is that, since unchecked global capitalism will eventually erode any tradition or value without a market function, there’s an emerging logic to using the tools of social democracy - i.e. limiting the influence of the market - in order to protect such abstract concepts as ‘national character’. This idea is already being tested in Poland, wherein a set of pro-natalist policies were introduced in 2021 that not only pay citizens for each child after their second, but also invest in new procreative health centers and include strict laws guaranteeing employer flexibility for young parents (e.g. mothers are entitled to keep irregular and reduced working hours, and neither parent of an infant child can be fired, etc). These are social democratic policies; they mitigate the influence of the market and limit the power of business in favour of poorer families, and they’re being instituted mostly by right wing parties to pre-empt demographic decline while preserving national character. A jump ball hangs mid-air over the question of whether the right or left will present the more persuasive rejection of global capitalism by synthesizing the material stability guaranteed by social democracy with the emotional appeal of romantic nationalism. 

Romantic nationalism arose in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century as a vague synthesis of various reactions to the Enlightenment, specifically the notion of a universal rationality that applied equally to all peoples and cultures. Some romantic nationalists critiqued the Enlightenment emphasis on education as a means of raising the consciousness of the masses by arguing that in fact the common people - or Völk - were the transmitters of an authentic culture and heritage that ought to be preserved rather than expunged. They disputed the supposedly objective rationality of legal frameworks such as the Napoleonic Code that had been recently adopted in some German principalities, stressing that laws and customs were the culmination of an internal, organic process of cultural development inextricable from the national spirit; to impose foreign law would be to inevitably fracture this national spirit. What ultimately united these various concerns was the idea that the distinct mingling of language, folklore, environment and history forged a mystical unity among peoples that manifested itself as a unique ‘national character’. The organizing principle of reason was explicitly rejected in favour of an emotional appeal to a transcendent fraternity.

The aims of Rassemblement National echo the romantic nationalist critique of the Enlightenment project, which has been recast in our age as the forces of so-called ‘globalism’. While the RN are frequently referred to as fascist, that anachronism becomes apparent in view of the original formulation of fascism: the merger of corporate and state power. Such an alliance is today untenable as the forces of global capital are arraigned against the very idea of a ‘national character’. The RN and other European right wing parties’ opportunistic embrace of social democratic policies is the logical response to the set of globalist-neoliberal prescriptions – mass immigration, labour market liberalization, the throttling of real wage growth – that are laying siege to the ideals they claim to defend. Much like the robust social democracy of yesteryear, the concept of romantic nationalism is fundamentally incompatible with the mandates of global capital.

So where does this leave the left? Since at least the 2008 financial crash and subsequent European debt crisis the left has been the permanent junior partner enabling the globalist-neoliberal project. Each time they obtain positions of relative influence, they’re immediately denuded of socialist pretensions and proceed to haemorrhage support, having alienated the critical mass that supported them because of their ostensible commitment to socialism (Syriza, Podemos, etc.). The NFP’s victory is without doubt a shot in the arm for the left, but I suspect what happens next will follow the familiar trajectory: Mélenchon’s socialist La France Insoumise party will be sidelined, and Macron will invite a patchwork of smaller centre-left and centre-right parties to form a government with his PR in which they legislate from the centre, presiding over a largely deadlocked and unproductive parliament that further discredits the left and demoralizes erstwhile supporters. This will allow Marine Le Pen to present the RN as the party of nationalism and economic populism in 2027, while the left is forced to defend its record in a collaborationist parliament led by the increasingly reviled Macron.

If recent history is any indication, there’s a hard ceiling to what the socialist left can achieve electorally by the policy fusion of continued support for mass immigration and pro-worker social democracy; the approach is self-contradictory in that it exacerbates the downward trends on living standards and housing costs that its redistributive aspects aim to address. While the right often make the argument that mass immigration is a trojan horse bearing the seeds of the dictatorship of the proletariat, I’d argue that precisely the opposite is true; mass immigration makes even modest social democracy prohibitively unfeasible. Moreover, the upper middle class will never be reconciled to the economic populism of such platforms, and rural small town voters will always be alienated by their implicit ambivalence towards what they view as the erosion of national character. This is why so many historically socialist parties in Europe have in the past two decades reinvented themselves as Third Way liberal parties, because advocating for working class interests AND bourgeois liberal values is often a contradiction in terms. You can’t advance the cause of the renter without penalizing the rentier, and vice versa.

To break through the self-inflicted hard ceiling imposed by the fusion of multiculturalism and socialism, there’s an emergent logic in trying to outflank the right in wedding social democracy with romantic nationalism, as both represent critiques of global capital that appeal to different sections of the population, however at the moment the opposite appears to be happening: the right are tentatively adopting economic populism as a plank of their broader nationalist framework. Would a nationalist pivot represent a capitulation to ‘fascism’? I’d argue that allowing the right to become the principal representatives of working class interests is a far more disgraceful capitulation; rearticulating social democracy as a legacy of the national character is rather to defend one’s own political tradition while adopting an approach to culture that isn’t identical to that of the liberal elites we ostensibly oppose.

Although there shouldn’t be anything inhumane about being receptive to the concerns of those currently struggling in your country - including recent arrivals - it’s likely that any discussion of an ideological boogeyman like ‘nationalism’ will have squamish liberal-coded socialists (not to mention centrists) reaching for the cancelation button. Part of this is down to the subtle, Gramscian universalization of bourgeois morality. If you support a liberal immigration policy, it signifies your inherent assumption that the majority of those immigrants won’t be competing with you and your children for jobs, housing or public services. Your core interests and comfort level aren’t threatened by immigration, therefore supporting it costs you nothing and in fact substantiates your compassion for those less fortunate. The problem is that we apply the same moral calculus to those much less secure than ourselves and much more directly impacted by immigration, and presume their hostility is a sign of their moral deficiency, rather than an expression of their insecurity. What were once recognized as divergent, conflicting interests in society - bosses vs workers, bankers vs farmers - are now articulated as our shared values (e.g. diversity) vs the enemies of those values. Alternatives to the hegemonic objectives of low wages and indefinite economic growth partially spurred by a perpetual stream of immigrants are represented not as divergent material interests, but as the immoral repudiation of our shared values. In much the same way that the justification for dismantling the New Deal was that the poor were lazy and thus undeserving, today the argument for persevering with globalist-neoliberal policies is that to pivot to a more nationally-oriented economic populism would be to give in to the racists. Class struggle thus becomes symbolized as the working class once again expressing its fundamental moral deformity.

To be clear, I don’t necessarily see this strategy as a one size fits all approach that should be pursued everywhere irrespective of local conditions - immigration and multiculturalism can both work under the right conditions - nor do I consider it a silver bullet solution for the left’s stubborn ceiling of support. Maybe I’m wrong and mass immigration and social democracy are mutually enforcing phenomenon. But at least in terms of Europe, I’m skeptical of the left’s current strategy of simultaneously advocating mass immigration and economic populism; as we’ve seen, this platform is intractably at odds with itself. Intriguing developments along these lines are in fact already underway in Germany, where Sahra Wagenknecht - the former leader of the German democratic socialist party Die Linke - has recently formed a new left wing nationalist party which aims to synthesize many of the elements discussed above. Whether she’s successful remains to be seen, but new political horizons are emerging in which the old ideological correlations no longer cohere. The future belongs to whoever best harmonizes the confrontation with global capital in the language of romantic nationalism.