Contradictions

Last week I attended a talk by Prof Kyle Longley of Arizona State University on the subject of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and its long term aftermath.  Prof Longley did a nice job in a short time laying out how the Treaty laid the groundwork for WWII and events into the 21st century, with special emphasis on Eastern Europe, the Middle East, China and Indochina.

Prof Longley is well respected in the field and, having checked his background before attending, is of the Progressive persuasion and it was two aspects of Progressive historicity, and the contradictions they present, that unexpectedly struck me during his talk.  The first is the concept of agency, which in the social sciences refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices, a concept that becomes particularly tricky in Progressive terms as it can be turned on and off as best aligns with Progressive political theory.  One example is that of African-Americans.  During the recent decades many historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction have rightfully emphasized the agency of slaves and of recently freed slaves.  Prior to this period, slaves had primarily been portrayed as passive recipients of freedom.  Modern historians have emphasized the actions many slaves took to achieve their freedom and fought as soldiers in support of the Federal cause, though like many such revisions some historians have now gone too far in ignoring non-black actions in this regard.  However, at the same time, in a Ta-Naheisi Coates' world of white privilege and Black Lives Matter we are assured by academics that African-Americans in the 21st century have far more circumscribed agency than slaves in the 1860s, a bizarre and ahistorical take on reality.  As an aside, writing this I am reminded Help Me To Find My People, a touching and illuminating book by North Carolina State University history professor Heather Andrea Williams about the search by newly freed slaves trying to locate the wives, husbands, and children from whom they were separated through sale by their masters before the war.

Agency came up in Prof Longley's description of the creation of new states in Eastern Europe and the Middle East though he did not use the term directly.  Longley believes, rightly in many cases, that these new nations had severe problems from the beginning because of how boundaries were drawn, a fault he ascribed to the winning powers, specifically Britain and France.  However, while Britain and France did play their part, they were also besieged by competing delegations from many different nationalities pleading their cases at Versailles.  They were active lobbyists for their conflicting claims, whether Poles, Hungarians, Bulgars, Serbs, Croats, Romanians, Arabs, and a multitude of others.

A specific example comes from the Arab world.  Though the magic words Sykes-Picot often start and end the conversation on post WWI borders in the Middle East, the situation was much more complicated.  While the British and French were trying to use the Arabs, various factions of Arabs were trying to use the British and French in support of their claims against fellow Arabs.  The Hashemites portrayed in Lawrence of Arabia promoted themselves as the leaders of the Arabs, a role much disputed by others.  In fact, after the end of the war they were ejected by the Saudi tribe who rule Arabia to this day, leaving the Hashemites the consolation prizes of Jordan, which they still rule, and Iraq, from which they were deposed in 1958.  There never was any good boundary solution in the post-war Middle East.  The British and French may have made a hash of it, but so have the locals in the decades since.  To pretend the solution was the creation of a new mythical Arab nation in an area which last saw such rule in the 10th century is simply romantic nonsense.

The other concept is multiculturism.  I don't think Prof Longley viewed his presentation as an indictment of multiculturalism, but it certainly was.   In his presentation, Longley repeatedly condemned the Allied leaders and mapmakers at Versailles for jamming together incompatible peoples and cultures in their settlements of both Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  He emphasized how foolish it was to ignore cultural differences in the creation of new states.  Yet Progressives turn around and urge multiculturalism and diversity as their preferred dominant value in Western societies.

Multiculturalism, at least as defined by Progressives over the past few decades, is different from a multi ethnic and multiracial society.  We've built, not without difficulty, a successful multi ethnic and racial society in the United States.  I'm certainly part of that mix and proud to be so.  But the traditional American approach and, indeed, the approach of Progressives until the late 1960s, was an assimilationist and nationalist approach to ethnicity and race (as discussed in a prior THC post) based upon common American values and pride in country.  Modern Progressives view multiculturalism as an end in itself, rejecting assimilation, nationalism and pride in our tradition of liberty and self-reliance.  The modern definition is a recipe for creating a new Yugoslavia; why anyone would have that goal.  We should learn from the truth of Prof Longley's observations; societies consisting of members of different cultures when left to their separate ways and undigested into some level of core common values, are societies based on unresolved tensions and grievances and inherently unstable.  Identity politics as practiced today are a recipe for societal disaster.