Digital Displacement and Ethnocentric Escalation: Nationality in a Virtual Age
In every historical scheme or model there are underlying pre-conceptions — “economics is the driving force of history”, one avers, whilst another substitutes said variable for providence; a third hails Mendel’s discovery as the essential element behind history’s manifold manifestations. And so on.
Beyond causal factors, the historian often opines on the tendencies of history - linearity and cyclicality being the predominate historiographical motifs. Theorists that run the gamut from Marquis de Condorcet to Karl Marx have argued civilisational gestation is unidirectional - depending on the theorist in question, this may or may not be tethered to a telos, or alternatively it may be indefinite (absent a deus ex machina occurrence, of course).
That progress and technology so frequently find themselves joined at the hip is by no means incidental. Technology, both a testament to, and a pre-requisite of, man’s domination of nature, ineluctably engenders for its epigones a liberationist prism - If man may conquer the limits of nature by means of technics, why not himself?
It is transparent that nationalism is an enemy of utopian techno-progressivism. Nationalism is a multi-faceted, complex phenomenon, admittedly, but one need not explicate its gross minutia to conclude that groundedness is its central leitmotif. To illustrate it ideogramically , the spirit of techno-progressivism reaches its apogee in the work of Heinrich Füger - specifically, his painting ‘Prometheus Brings Fire to Mankind’.
Opposed to nationalism’s call for tradition, rootedness, lineal inheritance, and historical memory — techno-progressivism, constrastingly, heralds a promethean age of progress, technological domination, spatial apathy, and the liberation of its central subject, the individual, from the bounds of ethnos, among other encumbering factors.
Donald Trump’s alliance with Silicon Valley brahmins (literally and figuratively) is an accident of history; the mere confluence of interests. On a sufficiently lengthy time-line, what he represents (irrespective of his dispositional incredulousness) is the obverse of their vision for the world.
Techno-progressives, as well as dispassionate diagnosticians, predicted that the attenuation, if not disappearance of nationalism, along with its deviant manifestations, xenophobia and jingoistic chauvinism, would follow the interconnectedness inherent in an internet age. Global intercommunication would bring us together, they posited; the common ground of humanness would supplant the demarcations of language, history, and blood.
Events would prove otherwise.
Across the Western world - from Trumpism in America and Reform in the UK, to Fidesz in Hungary and AfD in Germany - we are witnesses to the rising tide of national populism, a force which has provided ample proof of its ability to overcome the barriers of institutional asymmetry, a hostile media, onerous legislation, and so forth. In fact, the challenges it faces foster greater resilience amongst its party cadres and supporter bases — National Populism’s anti-fragility is one of its defining features.
The prognosis that technology signalled the death knell of the nation was adumbrated by Marxist critics of nationalism. Bourgeois modernity, they argued, was a liquefying force, destined to destroy the bond of patria - itself a purported product of nascent modernity.
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” - Karl Marx, ‘The Communist Manifesto’
Yet nationality subsisted, continuing to play as significant a role in world affairs as it did in the 20th century. In capitalist and state-socialist nations alike, nationality was invoked incessantly to rally and mobilise their populace to action. The USSR’s reliance upon nationality during the Second World War is paradigmatic; the cult of the dead, rather than the interest of the proletariat, saved Russia.
Ironically, nationality would come to haunt the USSR - the cleavage betwixt Russia and China in the post-war era, although fostered by the intrigue of Kissinger, was predicated partly upon ethnic division; the Chinese could never countenance a white face at the vanguard of the world’s impoverished.
Nationality has weathered the storm of technological evolution before - why not again? At the very least, the efficacy of the foregoing parties demonstrates that the internet is not a hindrance for nationalistic parties. The full scope, however, of the national being is not to be found within its political vanguard. The health of the latter isn’t necessarily a litmus of vitality for the former.
Objectively, the internet has exercised a homogenising effect on the world’s cultures, serving to erode distinctions, whether they be of central import or mere ephemera, such as a people’s accent. It can be said that the globalised internet age has benefited nationalism’s political expression, at the loss of its political subject: the nation.