RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Richard Spencer's "Why We Need Europe" Speech at The Traditional Britain Conference (10/25/2013)

Oct. 25, 2013 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

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Richard Spencer's "Why We Need Europe" Speech at The Traditional Britain Conference (10/25/2013)

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	Thank you.
	I'd first like to thank Gregory and Louis for inviting me, and I would certainly like to thank you all for being here.
	In my view, the traditional Britain group isn't just a good thing, but it's necessary for the Anglo-Saxon, the English-speaking right, to start to think outside of the Atlantis' box.
	applause Thank you.
	I will admit that I feel a little bit intimidated as an American traveling to England to lecture Britons about Europe.
	I guess I'm a little bit like some of those hard-working immigrants who come all this way to do jobs.
	Disgusting us.
	I'm not seeing that.
	Today, my talk really has two parts.
	In the first part, I'm going to voice what could be called a Euroskepticism skepticism.
	And in the second part, I'm going to talk about the idea of sovereignty in general, and in particular, Carl Schmitt's friend and enemy distinction, and how this might help us think about the kind of order.
	The kind of sovereignty, the kind of state that we as traditionalists need in the future.
	Well, for some time now, the traditionalist right in Britain and on the continent has been animated by opposition to the European Union.
	We rage, and we probably enjoy raging, against a bureaucratic super state that seems at once impotent, annoying, Clueless and totalitarian.
	The EU, we like to think, is the triumph of everything awful of the 20th and 21st centuries.
	For John Laughlin, the tainted source of the European idea is nothing less than the Nazi occupation of Europe.
	He presumably means that as a criticism.
	On the flip side, the EU is viewed not so much as Fascist.
	But as the regime for the European last man, or probably more aptly, last woman.
	The EU is ruled, it's dominated by soulless bureaucrats who only find meaning to their existence in regulating the curvature of bananas.
	And who can simply look at people like Herman von Rumpi, the EU Council president, and not agree with Nigel Farage, We should also admit that being anti-EU has been the most effective ways to make many of our ideas relevant.
	And for people like us who are Asylum to the margins, if not yet, padded rooms.
	Being anti-Brussels is our contact to the outside world.
	And without question, by far and away the most, currently at least, the most successful alternative British political party defines itself by being anti-EU.
	I actually looked up UKIP on Google, and I got this definition from the metadata.
	Libertarian, non-racist party seeking Britain's withdrawal from the European Union.
	Libertarian and non-racist.
	We seem to have an entirely negative identity and a negative consciousness.
	We want freedom from government, but for what?
	We don't seem to be exactly sure, or we're unwilling to say.
	Maybe some kind of colorblind civic nationalism or a vague devotion to free market capitalism, I guess.
	Perhaps our critics understand this better than we understand ourselves.
	Earlier this month, the conservative politician Michael Heseltine claimed that we've seen UKIPs before and that it is a right-wing racist operation.
	Well, it's easy to scoff.
	At people like that.
	But in many ways, he makes a very important point.
	Traditionalism and nationalism, let's say traditionalist and nationalist energies, aka racism, are being channeled into UKIP.
	UKIP is benefiting from these, much as the conservatives benefited from them for years, and much as the BNP benefited from them for a short period of time.
	If that is true, Then we, as traditionalists, must be ruthlessly critical about what the implications of that are.
	Whether this is a good thing, or whether we should start to think and speculate about political alternatives to the UKIP, which seems to be defined almost entirely in terms of being anti-Brussels.
	We should also ask whether we really understand Our enemy of choice.
	And I would say the answer is no.
	And, again, to go on this negative theme, the 2005 non-vote against the European Union Constitution seemed to be paradigmatic in this respect.
	Within this negative coalition, the former, or not-so-former, communist left opposed the Constitution because it was too capitalist and neoliberal.
	Libertarians opposed the EU because it was socialist.
	The center-right and Lapinist right opposed the Constitution because it treaded upon the sovereignty of the French state, which is either too liberal or too socialist, depending on your perspective.
	Well, I guess the question is, who's right?
	Perhaps this was a bold coalition against evil, although my sense is that all involved We're engaged in a kind of lashing out at something they didn't quite understand.
	Now, if we're going to start thinking about Europe, I would suggest that we don't focus too much on the regulatory horrors that might ensue should the EU really get out of hand.
	We should instead focus on a more difficult question.
	What would happen If UKIP actually won?
	Would we be free at last?
	Free at last, out from under the pink jackboot of Brussels.
	You can insert a joke about pink jack boots.
	My sense...
	Is that were the EU to dissolve miraculously tomorrow morning, we would be in exactly the same situation we are in now.
	Now, some might respond that yes, dissolving the EU, or at least getting out of it, won't solve all our problems, but it's a start.
	But is that claim actually true?
	Would we really get closer to our traditionalist society?
	By returning to the nation-state as a model?
	Is there any historical evidence suggests that smaller nations, or quite relevant here, secessionist-minded parties and movements, are actually greater fonts of traditionalism?
	One could, for instance, look at the Scottish National Party, which is the largest, most successful party in the region.
	I looked into their agenda there.
	A kind of retro-social democratic organization.
	They're the kind of left of 70 years ago.
	We could also look into the die-hard Quebecois separatists and their supposed ethno-nationalist Quebec government in Canada.
	Which, we are told, bucks Anglo-Saxon hegemony and values folk and community over the market.
	At least we can say they are the only people on earth Who, non-ironically, refer to Canada as fascist.
	I actually lived in Canada for some two years, and I ate dinner with some sepratists, and I was amazed that I had been living in the fascist regime all this time.
	Well, if we look at the Quebec province, it has actually outdone Ottawa in national suicide.
	It has invited hundreds of thousands of Haitians into its province on the basis of the shared language of French.
	One could also look to the tiny nation-state of Iceland, which is a kind of localist dream, a sovereign nation-state governing what is essentially an extended family.
	They've recently elected the first openly lesbian prime minister.
	If Nigel Farage's dream came true and Britain fully divorced itself from the EU, It would be transitioning from one well-fell state bureaucracy to another.
	And in many ways, the EU offers more economic freedom than Britain, which is supposedly Farage's major concern.
	And saving Britons from the funny money of EU currency would be maintaining a currency that is just as much a vapor of digits and paper.
	And which is managed by the same people, the same gaggle of central bankers and former Goldman Sachs employees.
	We should remember that it is national governments and not the EU that in Cyprus has flirted with confiscating citizen savings.
	It is a national government in Greece which has recently arrested leaders of a party it doesn't like.
	There are some 55 trillion dollars in national public debt floating around the world.
	Though quite a bit of it is denominated in euros, the EU has issued none of it.
	More theoretically, we should ask whether a law or political decisions are really better or more just, or more effective in securing the future of our people and civilization if they are decided upon on a national basis.
	We could say about the nation-state that it might be egalitarian, but doggone it, it's our egalitarianism.
	Now, I haven't said all this as a way of unfairly picking on certain governments, and I'm certainly not claiming that all nation-states are inherently left-wing or inherently wrong or something like that.
	What I'm arguing is that the anti-Brussels crusade, along with similar secessionist movements, are not confronting our crisis at the most vital and radical level.
	And therefore, they are not open to solutions that lie outside of the nation-state box.
	Now, let's dwell, let's say, Dwell a little bit longer on what the nation state is and maybe ask what sovereignty is in general.
	I would say as traditionalists, we have viewed the nation state as, in some ways, an unsatisfying institution.
	It's both too big and too small.
	It's larger than the tribe and the extended family, and at the same time, it's too small for the civilization.
	The way I would think about the current crisis and the problem of the nation state is that it is, in a way, being torn apart by inner contradictions of its own egalitarian nature.
	And more specifically, it's being torn apart by the conflict between its dual mandate of democracy and liberalism, between the citizen and humanity.
	The nation-state, as we know, must be democratic, which in the 20th and 21st century means maintaining a certain middle-classness for its citizens.
	At the same time, all major nation-states, and I'm thinking here most prominently of the United States, the French Republican Constitution, the grounding law of Germany, have made some kind of reference to the rights of Germany.
	So the nation-state is both about the citizen and it's both about humanity.
	It's torn apart by maintaining a middle-class lifestyle for a select group of people, while at the same time making claims to being for all people.
	Now, the theme of this symposium is the future of sovereignty.
	And it seems to imply, at least tacitly, That the current model isn't going to last.
	And that we need to start thinking about a future replacement.
	And I think if we're to do that, we need to ask, on the most fundamental level, what is a state?
	There are some 200 of them around the world.
	They essentially cover every inch of land on the globe.
	We both take them for granted and hold them in awe.
	The state, we think, is the solution to major world problems.
	Not having one is unimaginable, but what are they?
	The libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard tried to get at an essential definition of the state, and he said briefly, the state is the organization of society.
	which attempts to maintain a monopoly on the use of force and violence in a given territory.
	The German jurist and political thinker Karl Schmitt added, and he was thinking in particular of the post-Westphalia system of nation-states, that the political status, the state is the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit.
	Now, what is that?
	One could look at it deeper and say that the states have its origins in the tribal chief or the big man.
	Interestingly, you could think about man himself as a kind of inherently vulnerable animal.
	He doesn't possess the natural armor of a rhinoceros or armadillo.
	He has a very lengthy child-rearing and maturation process.
	Man needs social hierarchy for his security.
	He needs to be able to channel violence in order to survive.
	In my experience, it's very hard for people to think about the state in this way.
	We're to properly define sovereignty, power, and rule.
	Because we seem to all have this fundamentally liberal, and you could say fundamentally Lockean notion of the state.
	There's a kind of fundamentally liberal and Lockean nature of the modern mind.
	Now, when I say that, I have no illusions that most people in the West have read Locke.
	Or can spell his name, and I'm not really referring to an agenda or political agenda.
	I'm referring to something much deeper and more fundamental.
	Something like a source code or a hard wiring.
	The operating system.
	If political ideas and commitments are water, this root Lockean ideology would be the glass holder.
	It's something all informing yet unseen.
	We can glimpse this root ideology in the way that words like "democracy" function in modern media and political life.
	People fret over whether a particular election was democratic enough, or whether Muslims are ready for democracy, or how unbearable it would be not to live in a democracy, or how democracy is actually one of the pillars of Western civilization.
	To ask whether masses of people voting on something might not, in fact, be a way of achieving justice or truth or the future of our civilization is to, in a sense, put oneself outside of polite discourse.
	And we, of course, have many other words like democracy to fit in that.
	Well, let's get back to the root-blockianism.
	What I'm referring to, I think, is something that Thomas Jefferson, in many ways, lay down in his famous Independence Declaration of 1776.
	In this, Jefferson asserted that the self-evident truths, which didn't seem to be particularly self-evident at all in his slave-owning milieu, but what he said is that a priori, before the state, men are created equal.
	They have done this by nature, by nature's God.
	And they are, in fact, endowed with rights before the state occurs.
	And the state is created as a means by these people to secure these innate or inalienable rights.
	Law precedes the state.
	The state itself, in this conception, is a kind of benign social institution.
	In a democracy, we are the government.
	That is to say, as citizens, we are shareholders in a commonwealth, and thus have the right to appoint managers and a CEO on the basis of majority rule.
	The state is essentially justified by its procedure.
	Jefferson's sentiments could be forgivable in a priest.
	But coming from...
	A nation of men and women who have survived the elements and were in the process of tainting the wilderness, they are quite surprising.
	And one thing I find fascinating about American history is that we have these two contradictory traditions about law and order and sovereignty that seem to exist alongside each other.
	One is the kind of loony liberalism of Thomas Jefferson.
	And this predominates certainly in the political sphere of discourse.
	And the other predominates More in folk tales and art and in cinema.
	It is the idea of the West, of the explorer, of the gunslinger, of the Texican settler who had to fend off and, to be frank, dominate Indian races.
	This is the world that's the exact opposite of Jefferson's loony liberalism.
	It is the courageous man who, as the saying goes, lays down the law.
	Force comes first.
	The law and the state come after.
	You can actually see this in one of my favorite movies, which is John Ford's masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
	There's an interesting character named Ransom Stoddard who goes out into the West carrying law books.
	He's actually attacked by an aptly named Liberty Valance who is an outlaw, a man of the gun.
	At one point, Liberty grabs as long as he beats up Ransom Stoddard.
	Now, when I'm talking about this idea of the state of nature as conflict preceding the state, I think we're probably all reminded of Hobbes and his famous description of the state of nature as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
	Hobbes is certainly much more of a realist than Locke, but he gave birth to the social contract tradition of which Locke is certainly a part.
	It was only in the 20th century that the German jurist and scholar Carl Schmitt most powerfully critiqued this notion, this fiction.
	Of a state of nature that can be kind of overcome by the benign social institution of the state.
	And one could say that Schmidt, in a way, turned Hobbes on his head.
	He didn't view the violent conflict as part of the past, something we got over, but as actually an essential nature of the state anywhere and everywhere.
	It lies just behind any pomp and circumstance.
	It's barely concealed by its social function and moral justification.
	Schmidt defines sovereignty famously in political theology as the sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
	One way of translating that statement is that the state grants itself and itself alone the power to engage in violence which it forbids in others in its domain.
	Where it is illegal for citizens to kidnap the state and imprison, whereas citizens cannot aggress against one another, the state is justified in engaging in war.
	I think John Ford actually dramatized this almost perfectly in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in the famous duel scene where Ransom Stoddard gets essentially fed up with Trying to find a legal means why Liberty Valance is bad and decides to confront him with violence with his gun.
	Ford powerfully splits this view where he has Ransom slowly, hesitatingly walk up to Liberty Valance.
	And off in the background, there's another gunman played by John Wayne who shoots Liberty.
	But in the view of the people, it was actually Ransom Stoddard, the man of the law who shot Liberty.
	What Ford seems to be pointing out is this dual nature of the state.
	That the state can be justified in law, but it is ultimately backed up by the gun.
	And if we think about violence as conflict, as the inherent nature of the political, We should ask how we can define this, or how we can think about this.
	Schmidt famously said that in aesthetics, the basic distinction is between ugliness and beauty, and morality is between good and evil.
	In economics, the most fundamental distinction is between profit and loss.
	For the political, the most fundamental distinction is between friend and enemy.
	For an organized people in an enclosed territory, the fundamental distinction is between us and them.
	Now, when Schmidt made that argument of an organized people in an enclosed territory, he had in mind a kind of chaos that preceded that.
	And what he was thinking about in particular are the wars of religion of the 17th century.
	What could be described as the political and military implications of the Protestant Reformation that ripped apart Europe.
	And what Schmidt is thinking about is that in that tumultuous era, religion became political.
	And he didn't mean that solely in the sense of the church having Worldly power.
	But religion was able to define friend and enemy.
	There were certainly many motivations in the religious war, and you can see states like France, which was actually Catholic, rise to benefit from it.
	What Schmitt describes is a willingness to make a friend-enemy distinction on religion, so that you would kill someone, you would engage in the ultimate political act of violence.
	Due to someone's religion.
	That the creation of the Peace of Westphalia, where regions would be defined by religion, first Lutheranism and Catholicism, later Calvinism, that it essentially neutralized the religious realm.
	Religion, henceforth, would not be a source of violent conflict.
	Religion would not be the definition of friend and enemy.
	And instead, they created the institution, the post-Westphalian institution, of states that could confront themselves where the state was the monopoly of politics.
	The state was the monopoly of the fundamental friend and enemy distinction and of violence.
	Now, I guess you've indulged in a rather long political theory discussion.
	Why am I talking about this?
	Well, why am I talking about this?
	In terms of politics, is that I think we need to get to a new friend and enemy distinction that makes sense for the 21st century.
	We should think that there was certainly a time when Europeans understood themselves in terms of tribe, in terms of being Christians, in terms of being subjects of an empire.
	And the 19th and 20th centuries witnessed a kind of startling romantic notion of ethno-nationalism.
	That we are defined by our ethnicity.
	This culminated in the geopolitics of the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, in which old ethno-nation states were born like Poland, new ones came into being, was traveling Yugoslavia.
	What I would suggest is that today we are compelled to understand ourselves as a race of man.
	As an extended family of Germans, Slavs, and Ladins, which gave birth to a civilization and which is in an ongoing process of evolution.
	Race is our friend and enemy distinction.
	And in understanding that, I think in some ways the enemy might be the easy part.
	And I think many of the speakers today have hinted at that.
	I have a friend who has liberal academic parents, and he told me a story that stuck with me.
	When after the recent beheading in the outskirts of London this summer, his mother told him, well, of course, this is the result of British imperialism.
	And my friend asked her, okay, well, what empire did the white women of Sweden hold who were being attacked by Muslims?
	Thank you.
	We are fundamentally being attacked because we are white.
	And though many traditionalists don't like to think about race, understandably, race is certainly thinking about them.
	It is how we are perceived by both People of the Third World who enter our nations.
	It is how we are perceived by our enemies within our own nations.
	In a way, the friend component of this distinction is a little more difficult.
	And it's hard for traditionalists as English are used to hating the French and vice versa.
	However, However silly we might find the Eurocrats, they are nevertheless possessed by a compelling idea, and that is that Europe wants to come together.
	This European idea is really our idea, or it should be.
	It is our idea at our best moments, when we don't just understand Shakespeare, it's English, or Dostoevsky's Russian, Nietzsche as German, or Plato as just for the Greeks.
	We understand these as ours.
	And if we make this kind of friend and enemy distinction, we can develop the courage, and perhaps it's more like a leap of faith, to believe in startling historical reversals.
	To believe that the Hermann von Grumpys of the world can become our useful idiots in building the infrastructure for a racial and civilizational superstate on the European continent.
	Yes.
	Thank you.
	Well, they've certainly got the idiocy part down.
	Well, I'll leave it at that when we get a good discussion.

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