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League of Real Nations Male Rites & Feminist Fallacies 'Anti-Fascism' is the New Fascism Greening The Blues Bombers & Burqas A Book Whose Time Has Come Politics of The Forked Tongue THE LEAGUE OF REAL NATIONS by Dr Aidan Rankin
A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them.
Though they have armour and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbours,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die.
Tao te Ching
Lao Tzu, the founder of 'Taoism', identified true wisdom with the decentralised state, of manageable size, whose people preferred traditional craftsmanship to dehumanising technological 'progress', insight and self-discipline to mass 'education', living within limits to the constant quest for more material possessions, territory and superficial sensual experience.
A century later Aristotle observed that there are natural limits to the size of nations, as there are limits to the size of plants and animals. This was his warning against the expansion of the Greek city states, his defence of human-scale or sustainable communities.
In more recent times, Gandhi's vision of 'swadeshi', or 'home economy', based on village communities, stood in opposition to the received wisdom of 'developmentalism' imposed from above.
In the 'Blueprint for Survival', which relaunched ecological politics in post-War Britain, Edward Goldsmith and his colleagues describe their 'goal' as 'a society made up of decentralised, self-sufficient communities, in which people work near their homes (and) have the opportunity of governing themselves'.
Japan's ecologists, also, speak of the need for their society to move beyond the dominant technocratic norms, to 'harmonise the lives of human beings with the natural environment and discard materialism'.
Underlying the world's cultures, there is a shared belief in the society built to a human-scale and working with, rather than against the grain of nature. There is a sense that we lose something as human beings when we place materialism before morality and justice, that there can be neither peace nor freedom when nations subjugate other nations, when vast corporations trample over local communities or when humanity rides roughshod over the natural world.
Support for self-rule, decentralisation and politics with an ethical base stands in contradiction to the prevalent ideologies of economic growth, materialism and concentrations of global economic power. We believe that cultural diversity and political independence are part of biodiversity, that the defence of independent nations is inseparable from the defence of the natural world.
The 'League of Real Nations' has been formed by a group of concerned individuals, from many countries, regions and communities of the world, who wish to see the natural size of states restored. We reject destructive, expansionist forms of nationalism, along with anti-human, racialist ideologies and Marxist-derived 'national liberation' movements, which invariably impose collectivist tyranny. In their place, we offer the idea of self-governing peoples, exercising their responsibilities within a world community.
For us a nation means a community of manageable size whose political institutions are intelligible to individuals, and whose inhabitants share similar values and cultural assumptions. Such links can be ethnic, but they need not be - one can be 'British' without being 'white', for instance, and the Tuareg and Berber peoples of North Africa encompass a range of ethnic types.
Most commonly, it is based on shared history, linguistic affinity, ecological and geographical influences, religious belief and, save for a few nomadic peoples, occupation of territory. Often, nationality transcends the boundaries of modern states.
The Yoruba nation, for example, is not confined to Nigeria, but forms significant minorities within Benin and Togo because modern borders reflect colonial divisions rather more than ethnic or cultural resemblance.
For similar reasons, the Inuit of Greenland and Canada remain divided whilst the Native Americans remain 'First Nations' despite the loss of their independence and their land.
Nations cannot be conjured into existence by politicians and cartographers. Nor can they, ultimately, be held together by dictators.
Real nations exist where there is balance between the individual and society, authority and freedom, humanity and the rest of nature. They evolve organically and are united by consent and loyalty.
Real nations offer more hope for a peaceful world order than artificially unified 'superstates'. Yet to realise the natural human desire for independence, decentralisation and accessible institutions, we must challenge many of the assumptions governing modern political economy, which we believe to be morally wrong, ecologically perilous and stultifying to individuals and societies alike.
Democratic or otherwise, conventional politics scratch at the surface of the human predicament. For the underlying problem is spiritual more than political. It is the imbalance created by the worship of economic growth and the elevation of material prosperity over quality of life.
Real nations are not collections of solipsists competing with each other for wealth or asserting 'rights' against nature and fellow human being.
The return to human-scale politics requires us to reverse the 'historical' trend towards ever-larger units of government, ever-larger corporations, more remote centres of power and an increasingly homogenised 'global' culture.
We believe that this trend is not, in reality, historical at all. Indeed the curse of the last two centuries has been the idea of historical inevitability.
The dominant ideologies of liberal capitalism and socialism have both been equally obsessed with economic growth. Respectively, they have regarded the market and the centralised state as more important than individuals and communities. They have reduced history to a line of 'inevitable progress' from the human-scale towards the grandiose, from the spiritual towards the material, from the nation towards the supra-national, craftsmanship to mass production, the individual to mass society.
The colonial mentality imposed Western ideas of progress over indigenous cultures. Its heir today is a 'politically correct' imperialism which seeks to globalise the superficial 'liberalism' of Western consumer society, despite the ecological despoliation and social breakdown they have unleashed.
In short, the 'League of Real Nations' opposes the 'progressive'-imperialist world view as typified by Brock Chisholm, former World Health Organisation chief:
'To achieve One World Government it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, their loyalty to family traditions and national identification.'
It supports the vision of political economy expressed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident:
Society must cease to look upon 'progress' as something desirable. 'Eternal progress' is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a 'steadily expanding economy' but a zero growth economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous.The 'League of Real Nations' seeks to match the ecological movement's aim of a steady state economy, allied to rather than opposing nature, with political structures, which reflect the natural loyalties of human beings.
The new millennium enables us, some would say paradoxically, to challenge the myth of 'progress', to conserve what is best in traditional societies. We work for a realignment, or global devolution, whereby individuals regain control over their work and leisure, communities regain control over resources and nations regain their independence.
The 'League of Real Nations' rejects all forms of violence, whether at the behest of governments, commercial interests, self-styled 'liberation' movements or organised crime, and whether that violence is against the natural world or fellow human beings. Our vision of humanity is radical precisely because it is conservative.
There has been such a thing as letting mankind alone;
there has never been such a thing as governing mankind.
Letting alone springs from fear lest men's natural dispositions be perverted and their virtue left aside.
But if their natural dispositions be not perverted nor their virtue laid aside, what room is there left for government?
Chuang TzuAidan Rankin is co-Editor of New European. His book, The Politics of the Forked Tongue: Authoritarian Liberalism was published in 2002 and is available from New European Publications, 14-16 Carroun Road, London SW8 1JT, price £9.
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