 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. I'm so pleased to be joined from Israel, the author of a brand new book entitled The Virtue of Nationalism. His name is Dr. Yoram Hazoni and as he explains to me, that's my bad American-ish pronunciation of his last name, not the Hebrew one. So his new book is something that we rushed out and got via Amazon I read it a couple of weeks ago and it's asking some really important questions and it's getting a lot of play out there. In Time Magazine, he was recently on the Laura Ingraham show, et cetera, et cetera. This is someone you ought to be following on Twitter. So Dr. Hazoni, let me ask you this first. There's some books out there right now talking about the failures of liberalism. This book is different. From my perspective anyway, it's making, it's at least asking the question, is nationalism inherently illiberal? Right. Well, I think some of the books that you're talking about are looking at liberalism as though liberalism just is equivalent to the American experiment. And so there are people I think for, not entirely for bad reasons who are saying, look where America's ended up right now. And they're asking whether there's something fundamentally flawed about it. Now, my point of view is somewhat different. I certainly don't think that the American founding was a misfounding or a mistake. I see it as one of the greatest and noblest experiments in political history. But I definitely am sympathetic to the view that in the last generation or two or three, it depends on what you're looking at, what you're counting, that things have definitely moved away from what I see as the kind of classical American nationalist vision, which was a vision of America as an independent nation conducting its own experiment, which was going to contribute and has contributed greatly to all mankind through this experiment. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially, we've heard both from Democrats and Republicans, and this is echoed across Europe as well, an enthusiasm for a project of imposing a unified law on the entire world. And I understand that most of the people who are behind this are very well-intentioned and very well-meaning, and I think they simply don't understand that the elimination of the concept of a world of independent nations, each one of them pursuing its own course and conducting its own experiment is itself a very great danger to the American experiment and to various other countries. If you are a liberal, I myself see myself as a conservative, but if you are a liberal and you believe in American liberalism, you should definitely be extremely worried about the move to create a worldwide liberal empire, which is going to dictate to America how its liberalism or how its government and society are going to work, because Germans and French don't see things the way that Americans do. Well, this is so interesting because you have a chapter entitled Liberalism as Imperialism. I love that title. There's a sense, a growing sense that Westerners and especially Americans are trying to impose something on the rest of the world, and that's liberalism generally in the form of social democracy, and you seem to be one of the only people making this point. I don't know if I'm one of the only people pointing to the problem, but I may be one of the main people saying, imperialism is when you decide that, A, that your values, the way you see and do things are completely universalizable, that they can be applied in any time and place, and B, that you're so right that you simply have to impose it on others by force. And without quite noticing it, this definition of imperialism is exactly what Americans, Democrats, and Republicans have slipped into in the last generation, not only thinking that their own ideas can be universally applied, that we can argue in debate, but even that they should be imposed, which gives us a foreign policy that, as we can see from Yugoslavia to Somalia and Iraq to Libya, one attempt after another to try to impose by force an American view of what the world is supposed to be like. It hasn't worked out well for those nations, and it hasn't worked out well for America, and so I think it's very important to think now about political ideas and political ideals and where exactly we want to stand on these things. But here's what bothers me, is a lot of the same people who believe in universal precepts that good ideas ought to be good ideas everywhere, political precepts, for example, are the same people who spent the 20th century talking about democracy. Doesn't each level of supranational governments necessarily sort of attenuate democracy, attenuate the individual's ability to live as he or she wants? That's exactly what we see in Europe. People keep talking about the European Union as though it's an experiment in democracy, and it's nothing like a democracy. It's precisely the severing of the self-government of different nations in Europe and their self-determination. It's ending it. Just take a look at the way that the Germans are deciding what's going to happen economically in Greece, or the Italians just elected a new government. They have who they want to be finance minister, and Brussels vetoes their finance minister. You can't even imagine something like this taking place, and it's here it's taking place, and people are saying this is democracy, this is not democracy. This is actually exactly the way that democracy dies. Well, it's interesting to me, of course, we are big fans of both Ludigun Mises and Friedrich Hayek, both of whom you quote in your book. It's interesting to me, though, that you use the same term Mises frequently used, and it sounds old-fashioned now, self-determination. Don't hear that phrase anymore. Did you use that purposely? Did that strike you in Mises' book, Liberalism? Well, I think self-determination is a very popular term among nationalists. It's something that if you hang out with the kind of people who are thinking about national independence, it's actually a Kantian term. I'm not a great fan of Kant, but I do love this expression. I'm not a big expert in Mises, and I'm eager to learn more. I quote him in the book from the 1920s, 30s, when he and Hayek were thinking about the world as kind of like a big extension of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and I don't know so much about what they thought in later life about the independence of nations, so I'm eager to learn more about it. Well, I'll push back a little bit, and I'll say that I think Mises might have seen a bigger role for the nation state than perhaps some of his pulled quotes from Liberalism would suggest, and we will also post with this interview an article by Joe Salerno, which is very much on this topic, but nonetheless, I personally am pleased that you sought out and quoted Mises as an avatar of Liberalism in that sort of 20s genre. You know, you bring up Kant, and one thing is of course he had his idea that the only way we'll have perpetual peace, the only way reason will reign supreme is if we get rid of these old clunky nation states and finally have this global governance, and so it's not just something new, and to me there's an awful lot of hubris in that perspective, and we never call it hubris. Liberals today just assume that we should all see the rightness of this. Yeah, I agree with you. You know, I remember as a kid when I first heard John Lennon's Imagine, and I thought, oh my gosh, I must have been like 12 or something, and I thought, what a horrible song. But then I thought, you know, it's just a pop song. And then as an adult, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we suddenly start hearing about the New World Order from George H. W. Bush, President Bush is telling us that literally for a thousand generations, mankind has tried to reach this moment and failed, but now we're actually going to achieve it. And what is it? It's the replacement of the, what he called the replacement of the law of the jungle with the rule of law. Now that concept of a worldwide rule of law, that's exactly the Kantian idea. It's amazing to think about it. The 200 years after Kant, it's Republican President George Bush who becomes the spokesman for the idea that the Security Council of the United Nations or some other kind of world bodies are capable of legislating a law for all nations that's going to bind all of us. And I think that hubris is exactly the right word. It's an astonishing, absolutely astonishing piece of arrogance to think that your mind or your organization or your philosophy is so fully proven that there's no need anymore for a competition of different philosophies and different legal systems and different experiments because we've reached the final answer. And I think in that sense, my view of this actually does, I think fit very well with Mises and Hayek with their understanding of the limitations of human reason, the limitations of the ability of a particular individual or theory to grasp the whole. How about competition within a nation state, though? You have an interesting chapter about the myth of the federal solution. You point out some of the failures of the U.S. Constitution, the failures of the EU to represent individual nations' interests. What do you think of subsidiarity, localism, secession generally? Well, secession is a different subject, localism, federalism, subsidiarity. There is a way of understanding these things that I'm completely in favor of. I mean, I don't argue that federalism should not be used. My argument is that people who think that a worldwide federalism, that's the point that I'm responding to, is that people like Kant who think that federalism can be a solution for the whole globe, I think that they don't understand that the purpose of federalism is to grant the greatest possible autonomy to lower levels. And I'm completely on that side of political theory. I think that the closer you are to the ground, to a local population in terms of decision-making, the more likely it is that the decisions are going to reflect the actual needs and concerns and interests of the people. In that sense, federalism is great. But federalism also means that there is a central federal government. And that central federal government always has a responsibility, and I think people often miss this, it has a responsibility to set the boundaries for what is legitimate in the subsidiary states or locales. So examples are the American federal government determining that slavery was not going to be legal in the United States, which, you know, a decision that I certainly support, or the American federal government deciding that it was going to stamp out polygamy in Utah. These are examples that I support. You can come up with many other examples that I think are more questionable from more recent federal decisions by the American government, but the point is that federalism has two sides to it. On the one hand, the greatest possible autonomy within a certain range of subjects. On the other hand, it always is the federal government that's determining what the legitimate range is. And when you start talking about federalism, federalism works when there's a certain commonality of civilization and culture, and so the great majority of the people say in the United States are willing to accept the boundaries that the federal government is imposing. But now try to think about that on a global scale. That commonality doesn't exist. By having a world federal government, basically what you're saying is that somebody's going to determine for the whole planet what the bounds of legitimate experiment are. You can't imagine something more dangerous than that. Even if it could be benevolent and decent for one generation, what's it going to be in the next generation? You just don't want to create, none of us want to see a world power that has that kind of authority. Because human beings are just flawed. They'll be decent for the first 10 years and then just imagine what's going to happen. So I don't ever want to see a worldwide federal government. And it's not because I'm against federalism. Federalism has to work within nations. But one of the great points you make is that the concept of a nation-state can actually limit the contagion in terms of war and famine and all kinds of problems. Yeah, this is an important point also frequently underestimated. I think people are more familiar with the idea that the family unit is a bulwark against tyranny. I think that's something that's been often discussed in the literature is the fact that each family is basically each family unit is basically a sphere in which the father, the mother create in effect they create a value system that's unique to them and they inculcated among their children. And that ability to inculcate over decades, a certain way of viewing things, that is in fact a great bulwark against tyranny because you get, when you get a tyrant who says I want everybody to be the same. I want everybody to be the way I want them to be. It's people who are raised in solid families who are immediately the first to say, well, you know I'm sorry, I have other loyalties besides, you know, the loyalty to the dictator. I have an understanding that's independent of the dictator. I think this is very well understood. I think less understood is that the variety of national states the diversity of independent national states works just like the diversity of families and independent families except on a much larger scale. It's the unique nationalisms of different independent nations which have always stood up as the most powerful resistance to worldwide empire to universal imperialism and to universal ideologies. So, I mean if you just take World War II people don't remember this way necessarily but I think it's very clear that what happened in World War II was the allies when people talk about the allies they're talking about the allied nations the way that the allies presented themselves in radio broadcasts to Europe was Hitler is an imperialist his aim is to enslave the world. Our goal is not to replace his empire with our empire. Our goal is to replace his empire with independent nations. Our goal is to free the enslaved nations and give them independence. Now it's American nationalism and English nationalism in the end even Russian nationalism because historically what happened was that even Stalin gave up on his Marxist claptrap during World War II in order to rally the Russian people by declaring that this was a great patriotic war. And so in the end the force that defeated Hitler was these three French nationalisms and Polish nationalism and it is the unique love of a given nation and its way of doing things that is the strongest political bulwark that we have against every empire every attempt to impose a single view on the world. That's a fantastic answer I agree completely you've got this new article in Time Magazine you've spent a lot of time in the United States recently you've seen all the divisiveness with Trump and you talk about commonality and federalism what could that commonality be you point out in the U.S. it's not about whiteness but neither is it about some abstract idea of what it means to be American that there's got to be something more concrete than that I feel like we're searching for it. The Americans are part of the greatest political tradition of the last thousand years which is the Anglo-American tradition of nationalism, limited government individual liberties and that tradition has to a large extent been uprooted both from the public consciousness in English-speaking countries and also in academia where most departments that study and teach political theory or political philosophy or law or history of ideas most of them are at this point divided between professors who are some version or another of Marxists and professors who are some version of let's call it revolutionary liberals liberals who think that the ideas they believe in come from pure reason without any kind of historical experience and that there's no need to know anything about that one thousand years of development of the Anglo-American political tradition and I think those traditions have to be returned to America has in fact the greatest traditions of any nation in the world but it doesn't study them and it doesn't appreciate them and let me just give you an example of what I'm talking about right now today on the bestseller list and in public debate there are quite a few professors and other intellectuals bestselling authors who talk about the United States as though it was a miracle that took place in 1776 or 1787 and what they leave out is the fact that the American Constitution is an adaptation of the traditional English Constitution to the American context what I'm talking about is due process of law the idea of checks and balances limited government the property is a cornerstone of individual liberties and economic prosperity the bicameral legislature you can just go on and on and on but that's not the only side to this tradition this tradition was also a religious tradition so I think there's still a lot of health in America as I know it but I do think that people are going to have to step forward and say look we have old and good traditions and those traditions they can be updated a little bit for our time but those traditions are what held our people together and without them all sorts of terrible things can come and I'm afraid for that well we're out of time all I can say is it's a good thing you're an academic working in Israel I can't really say these things because nobody says them in the US ladies and gentlemen the best way to follow Dr. Yoram Hezoni is probably via his twitter account there you can find at his book which is an amazon which is doing well you can find him his article in the current issue of time magazine doctor we appreciate your time so much and we congratulate you on all your success ladies and gentlemen have a great weekend you