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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13321 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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A fascist trademark is its insistence that the country is not just a collection of individuals but a people, a Volk: a mystically defined and ethnically pure group bound together by shared blood, culture, and destiny

I hear this a lot, and I have to seriously ask: Is there a single ethnic group outside of Western Europe and America that doesn't believe this? I'm Chinese, and I can say personally that every single Chinese person I know that was raised in China believes this idea. China is not just the land, it's a people and a culture. The only Chinese people I know who don't believe this are the ones that have been either born in or raised in America, and even then it's a 50/50. Am I wrong?

You're not wrong, it's a post WW2 western based Memeplex, in some parts of the west where the post WW2 consensus had less power even that sort of notion is not really established (Center/Eastern Europe)

I would add some Latin American countries to your list of non-ethnostates, Brazil being a very obvious and notable example.

I recently got into an argument with a pro-Palestine guy, who argued that Israel is the world's sole remaining ethnostate. He did begrudgingly concede my counter-example of Liberia (in which citizenship is explicitly reserved for those of Negro heritage). However, he didn't budge when I characterised Japan, Korea and essentially every Arab nation as ethnostates in all but name. Would you think that's a fair characterisation of China?

No who you asked but yes. Though it's important to note that for Chinese this theoretically includes all the minorities too. China is a nation for the Chinese which are Han and the 55 other minorities. Though in practice less so as pretty much everyone is Han outside of a few regions.

Han is a pretty overly expansive category if you spend any meaningful time wandering around China, too.

Dongbei and Guangdong natives might both be Han but there's huge visual and behavioral differences there. Like in European terms it's like having Prussians and Southern Italians in the same category.

I'd argue that when a foundation of a state as a process entails the expulsion of ethnic minorities, it can be considered an ethnostate. Post-1945 Czechoslovakia and post-1995 Croatia, for example.

FWIW, many German men, especially older ones, also still believe this - although they know better than to speak their minds in public.

Unfortunately, it's just no longer true for Germany. It was, until maybe a generation ago, but clearly isn't anymore.

Isn't the 'German' volk just an outcome of an earlier political process as a collection of Frankish-ruled peoples east of the Rhine? Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, Alemanni, and Thuringians, etc. Though Bavaraians likely included some Celtic and Roman provincial populations, Marcomanni.

When do these older German men feel the Germans originated? Charlemagne, earlier, later?

Are the descendents of the Saxons, and Angles and Jutes that migrated to Britian still German or Dane?

We see in England Æthelstan ruling a multi-ethnic kingdom of West Saxons, Mercians, East Anglians, Northumbrians of both Anglo-Saxon and Danish descent, and Norse settlers from various backgrounds, all being folded into a single political entity unified by the English language, a common legal framework, and the Church.

Most of our modern demonyms are the result of an aglomeration of ethnicities bound together via culture and proximity / geography.

Yes, of course. Historically that's all true. But that's not really germane to my point - which is more that until very recently, there was a clearly identifiable German people, and the remaining Germans of slightly later are still viscerally aware of this. It's "lived experience", dumb as it sounds, not historiography.

viscerally aware of this. It's "lived experience", dumb as it sounds

I understand but is there reason to suspect this awareness isn't the same as it's ever been which is why historically there had been pressure to conform linguisticlly and culturally.

While teaching English in Germany I had an ethnically Korean student, Karl Heniz, who had been born in Germany and was very culturally German.

I think the conversations around many of these issues would be very different if linguistic and cultural assimilation was required / enforced.

I agree. Germany is a nation primarily of language and culture. We have so many different breeds of German - not even one core population of Han Germans or Yamato Germans; it's been a hodgepodge mix from the start. The last genetically distinct populations like the Saxons were integrated so long ago, they're thoroughly mingled in. A Karl-Heinz of Korean extraction is somewhat rare, but if he's second-generation immigrant or later, as you say? By all means, I believe it. Those kinds of people are easily more culturally German in most ways that matter than genetically european inner-city wannabe gangsters.

It's a shame our language and culture are despised by most Germans. That just makes it a hard sell on the cultural market.

Japanese and Koreans also believe this and are open about it. Some normie Dutch and Belgians are pretty open about it too, although they will use softer language and qualifications. This "nation of immigrants" idea is really just an American meme that infected the Anglosphere.

The UK and USA are both explicitly not nation-states from their foundings - that is why they have "United" in their names. (FWIW, Belgium doesn't work as a nation-state either and the Flemish-speaking Belgians who talk like it is one are somewhat ambivalent about including French-speaking Belgians in their project)

You can have a concept of Britishness as a civic identity shared by a closed class of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish (or Northern Irish) people, although there isn't an attempt to actually do that until modern right-populist movements, and it goes down like a lead balloon with the Scottish and Welsh. But the idea that an Englishman and a Scot are part of the same blood-and-soil folk community is offensive to both of us.

The US just is a nation of immigrants as a matter of historical fact. The de facto leader of the anti-immigration movement in American is the grandson and husband of immigrants.

The UK and USA are both explicitly not nation-states from their foundings - that is why they have "United" in their names.

In the sense used here, the US was, from founding, intended to be such -- but without the ethnic purity, since it was mongrel at the foundation.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

So, "one people".

The "United" was about states with different interests, not about different peoples.

You can have a concept of Britishness as a civic identity shared by a closed class of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish (or Northern Irish) people, although there isn't an attempt to actually do that until modern right-populist movements, and it goes down like a lead balloon with the Scottish and Welsh.

I think the one shared identity of those peoples was empire-building.

Germany also was originally a non-nation of immigrants, circa AD 400-700. And yet, in 1900, it clearly wasn't anymore - at some point the melting pot cools and you get something solid. And I don't think it took all of 1200 years; the migrations stopped in the first millenium AD, and from then on local and regional populations took root and it's IMO fair to see a connection of blood to soil from there on out. Well, until urbanization, the World Wars, the Gastarbeiter, the Spätaussiedler and finally the "lol whatever" mass migrations of the third millenium.

Just ruminating. I have no point.

Germany coalesces as a stateless (because the Holy Roman Empire is both over-inclusive and not really a state) nation surprisingly early - certainly before 1600, and in my read by 1400. (The academic politics of the University of Prague - now Charles University - up to and including the Hussite crisis make most sense understood as a conflict between Germans and Czechs as national groups). Post-Reformation, there is an issue to resolve about whether the German nation is Lutheran (with Catholic Austria excluded) or biconfessional, but nothing as fundamental as the Breton and Occitan issues in France.

Despite being a state, France coalesces as a nation later than Germany. Perhaps because of being a state - from the point of view of a feudal dynastic monarch national identity among your subjects is potentially awkward.

In my opinion, the 1924 immigration restriction act should have been the beginning of that sort of thing for the US: the gradual melding of the European ethnic groups into a single White American entity. (Scottish, as perceived as a separate ethnicity in the US, actually did vanish sometime in the early postwar era).

But the Hart-Cellar act, by neglecting to set hard, very low annual caps on non-European immigration, blew up the chance to have a single ethnic group composing 90% of the population.

When did Catholic-Protestant intermarriage become socially acceptable in America? You cant combine Anglos and Italians into a single "white American" ethnicity without it.

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