 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to Mises Weekends. This week we are talking about perhaps the most contentious issue in politics today, namely nationalism, along with a couple of its corollary issues of self-determination and immigration. Mises wrote quite a bit about all of this, and our own Dr. Joe Salerno summarized Mises' view a couple of years ago in really a seminal paper called Mises on Nationalism, the right of self-determination, and the problems of immigration. Now Joe is going to reprise this paper at the upcoming Students for Liberty conference happening in Washington, D.C., just one week from today. So we thought you'd enjoy a conversation about Mises and his view on nationalism between myself and Dr. Salerno that we taped a year or so ago. So stay tuned. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. We're talking today with none other than Dr. Joe Salerno, our VP for Academic Affairs. Joe has written an article just about a week ago entitled Mises on Nationalism, the right of self-determination, the problem of immigration. It's really a sweeping article, Joe. I think it brings up a lot of the points of debate that are current, not only in Austrian circles but in libertarian circles, and really in greater political circles now in the U.S. and in the West as well. So I think it's worthy of discussion. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll post a link to it as well as I think a link to Guido Hulsman's biography of Mises, the Last Night of Liberalism, because there are some sections in that book that I think really pertain to what Mises was thinking and how he developed his thought on this. But Joe, what I like so much about this article is that you're willing to tackle some of these problems from Mises' perspective. The idea of subsidiarity versus universalism, the notion of free migration and immigration versus self-determination. And there's a lot of tensions inherent in these, and I think a lot of the rhetoric out there on open borders and immigration and nationalism is facile. It doesn't necessarily take in all the points that we ought to be considering. But let me start with this. Mises, of course, born in the late 1800s in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and what is now where he was born now, part of Ukraine. I mean, this is a guy who saw a lot of different languages, a lot of different nationalities, a lot of ethnicities, all sort of subjugated by monarchs. And so how does his experience of growing up in a polyglot region of the world prior to World War I, how do you think that factors into his entire world view on nationalism and migration? I think it profoundly affected his world view on nationalism and on immigration. Being in the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a multitude of nationalities, different languages, traditions, and so on, he saw that when political power was exercised by a majority in a certain area, that inevitably resulted in, let's say, a situation and an interpretation of the laws, if not the laws themselves that were oppressive to the minority, and they were oppressive both intentionally and unintentionally. People naturally thought that their culture and their way of thinking, their ideology, their Weltanshrung, their world view should be spread and imposed on the minority. Well, you talk about Mises in this article as a cosmopolitan and that that's not necessarily, certainly not Mises' view at odds with nationalism per se. I mean, first give us sort of your thumbnail definition of cosmopolitanism as Mises would have understood the term. As Mises understood the term, it was a situation where peoples, different peoples and different nationalities lived peacefully with one another and interacted through trade, free trade, and had no reason to want to extend their political control over other nationalities and peoples. And when we talk about nationalities, I mean, that's a word that's very nebulous. It can apply to different linguistic groups, which it certainly does, but also to people of similar linguistic groups, maybe of different religions or people who had lived on different sides of the mountain and had different experiences that caused them to have different cultural affinities and so on. But I think a lot of times today the term is used as a denigration towards provincial nationalists or people who want to cling to tradition or cling to their own culture as opposed to people who are more worldly and better traveled and who basically want multiculturalism as a universal value. Yeah, well, you can think today of think of the Amish in parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio. They might be provincial in some sense. They're bound very closely together by customs, traditions, and religion, but yet they're very cosmopolitan. If you visit, they're very welcoming and they buy and sell. They actually have bed and breakfast that you can stay in. But on the other hand, they look at the rest of the world as different from themselves and as their culture as being something that's to them superior to other cultures. Now, at the outset of the article, you talk about Mises' definition of liberalism or how he would have thought of it. You sort of provided two-pronged analysis for that. But you also talked about classical liberalism, which David Gordon argues is kind of a made-up expression in the 20th century because progressives came along and stole the term liberalism somewhere probably around the Great Wars when that shifted. But let's talk about your or Mises' definition of liberalism as having two problems, one being freedom and self-determination, but also the nationality principle, which you take pains to point out is not statist in nature, but I think a lot of libertarians view nationalism as inherently statist and ill-libertarian. And as you point out, digging a little deeper, Mises did not necessarily agree. Yes, so Mises saw liberalism as composed of two principles, one of which was sort of freedom and laissez-faire in domestic policy and the other of which was what he called the nationality principle. Now, by that, what he meant was that when people are free to form their own political units, that they tend to form them in a way that results in people of the same nationality, the same language, living together under the same set of laws. So what he was at pains to point out was that people did not... that this nationality principle was not the cause of different nations, but really the result of the... it was the result of people's self-determination. So the principle of self-determination resulted in people who self-identified with certain cultures and languages forming a political unit. Liberalism itself appeared on the scene as sort of a revolutionary movement against these foreign rulers that were imposing, that were despotic and oppressive. And so Mises looked on nationalities getting together in a political unit, Germans, Italians, Serbs, as an alliance of the oppressed against the foreign oppressor. That's the way he phrased it. Right, and also his experience of World War I. He was obviously someone who was an Austrian patriot vis-a-vis the Russians. Absolutely. And fought personally against the Russians in World War I. I get the sense that Mises is using the term nationalism in a way that people used it before World War II. I think Hitler and the Nazis really changed in people's minds what nationalism is. Maybe the term's gotten a bad rap and I want to give you a quote from your article. He says, Mises contends that nationalism is thus a natural outcome of and in complete harmony with individual rights. I think a lot of people would not see nationalism that way today. No, in fact Mises does distinguish between sort of aggressive nationalism and peaceful or liberal nationalism. He uses those terms over and over again. Sometimes militant nationalism as being also aggressive nationalism. And so from Mises' point of view, peaceful nationalism was just a nationalism that was a natural nationalism that arose from these two principles of laissez-faire and of the nationality principle that is based on the right of self-determination. When you had polyglot territories, that is different languages, people who spoke different languages, living under the same state as we did before and after World War I, that's when militant nationalism got its start and that's how Hitler got his start. He wanted to bring all the Germans, the German nation under the control of the German state. So that was aggressive nationalism and he wanted to subject other peoples in those areas where Germans lived to the despotism of his state. I think we have to consider also, not only did Mises grow up in the old patchwork of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but he also lived in time before mass media created much more of a monoculture in the West that there were really differences among peoples and territories and languages. Now today this always gets uncomfortably mixed in with race and I think that's sort of the bed bug in this whole conversation about nationalism and immigration. But when you move on in the article, talk about Mises' views on colonialism, I was talking to you offline about how you could read something like this in the nation or hear it on NPR. I mean how the degree to which he hated European colonialism and thought that it would yield very bad things which it did and continues to do but there's a quote here from Mises, not from you, that's particularly striking today. Europeans must not be surprised if the bad example that they themselves have set in their colonies now bears evil fruit. So it almost strikes me as a parallel to colonialism of the 1800s and early 1900s versus the interventionism today of Western countries in the Middle East. Yeah, well, I mean the earlier colonialism, Mises was fighting against hypocrisy that said well even if we should leave them alone they're not fit yet to govern themselves. Of course they're not fit to govern themselves at this point because they followed your example. The suppression of the indigenous peoples was the main point of colonialism during slavery and their expropriation. Well, you know Mises of course was a Democrat. Yeah. But I think he saw democracy differently. He didn't see it as mass multicultural democracy and I think that that's evidenced by your treatment of his jaundice eye towards majoritarianism, majority rule and that for minority populations within a political area their life was much like those in the colonies. In other words, if you're a minority in a democratic political apparatus you're sort of colonized. Yeah, I mean Mises made that point very strongly. He says who cares if it's a result of foreign conquest or of a majority that you're living under certain rules and laws that you had no part because you don't speak the same language, no part in helping to formulate. Even though you might have representatives, minority representatives in the legislature there is no chance that their thoughts are going to be heard and acted on. Well, and he talks about the natural antipathies that may or may not exist between people and I think you see this even in the US today. Look at the antipathies produced by democracy. The people who hate Trump's guts right now feel that they've lost their right of self-determination. I mean this is what a vast social democratic majority welfare state looks like. I mean if you hate Trump, I guess you feel put upon right now, you feel oppressed. You feel disenfranchised, right? But what Mises would say to all that is of course you have the chance of being the majority again. Whereas someone of a different nation in Mises' sense of a people who self-identify with a certain religion, language and so on, they have no chance. There's no prospect of ever becoming a majority. Hillary might win in four years, but the Cherokee nation is never going to get its president in the United States. And the other thing I noticed that open borders libertarians, I never hear them say that Cherokee nationalism is a bad thing. In other words, I think most of our listeners would say a real Cherokee nation ought to be completely independent of the US federal government. It ought to not pay taxes, not follow federal regulations, it ought to be sovereign territory even if it exists within the borders and confines physically of the current United States. Yeah, I agree with you and I think the US government has co-opted these nations to initially the Indian nations would probably have wanted to be completely free of the US. But now they're tied into the state governments, they have casinos, they've been co-opted. So they're no longer a separate nation. They no longer have a yearning to exercise the right of self-determination unfortunately because of the welfare state. Well, then you delve into this thorny problem of physical movement of people, migration of people versus self-determination and you identify as Mises did the tensions here. And one point that Mises makes, I'd like you to touch on is that when states are illiberal, the nationality principle that he saw as part of liberalism becomes more important because the state is providing welfare. The state is controlling life through regulation, maybe through socialist ownership. So the idea of a nation within the state becomes exacerbated or heightened. Yes, it does. The nationality conflicts become heightened because the larger the state is, the more margins on which it makes decisions that impinge on the rights of the minority populations. So interventionism exacerbates any natural antipathies that may exist. But they really don't even go, nationality conflicts actually still even exist under a laissez-faire liberal democracy in which there is no right of self-determination in which people cannot opt out, languages, linguistic groups and so on. So Mises goes beyond saying that if we just get rid of the interventionist state and we have a minimal state, laissez-faire state, things would be fine. He says, well, things certainly are worse under socialism or interventionism for the minority nationality but they're not fine under laissez-faire liberalism. In fact, we've not completed the liberal revolution yet. We have to allow the exercise of the right of self-determination of peoples and allow them to opt out because even where they're just administering the courts and contracts and so on, there's ways of the majority imposing on and oppressing the minority. So this calls into question where even if we had some kind of minimal night watchman state, would a multicultural society still be free? Would people still feel that they had self-determination? But of course at some point it's an impossible problem. I think Mises even says this, that you can always get to a smaller and smaller minority, down to a minority of one person and it's very hard to create political subgroups, however small, that really take into account every individual's thoughts or interests. So we're not talking about utopia here. We're talking about trying to improve things. One interesting point just on this, Mises makes a response to those people who always bring up Switzerland as a counter-example with their Germans, Italians and French. And they say, well look, here's a multicultural state. He says, well no, they're separated into cantons. And in fact, he makes a statement that if indeed there was internal migration where you had a substantial minority of let's say French and German canton, then you would have, he said that the peace of Switzerland would long ago have vanished. Right, right. Well, what's interesting is that Mises, really speaking here more as a political theorist and a sociologist, not an economist per se, but he said we can see that there are values above and beyond just greater productivity in the workforce or greater efficiency that could argue against mass migration of people across borders. So he was willing to acknowledge a cultural component, because as libertarians were often viewed as, you know, we'd sell our grandmothers for another point of GDP. But Mises didn't see things that way. No, he even said that in a completely free world where you didn't have, let's say a government intervening in any way, people's cultural affinities, their desire to be near their families and people who speak their language would not equalize wages throughout the world, would not bring about the maximum human productivity. So why should we aim at that as a policy? That's what I would call a kind of mystic, trying to make policy based on maximizing something or optimizing something, which unfortunately is a characteristic of the Chicago School of Economics, but not the Austrian school. Well, whenever we're talking about Mises on any subject, especially outside of economics, I always like to point out to people that he's obviously authoritative, someone we should listen to. He's not necessarily just positive or infallible. What can we take from all this? In other words, in libertarian debate these days, there tends to be this idea that you're either open borders or you're some sort of status closed borders person who wants a vast federal apparatus and checkpoints and guys with guns at the border stopping impoverished Mexicans from entering the United States or poor Syrian refugees or whatever. And of course, those aren't the two choices. In other words, we were arguing for some kind of market borders and we're a long way from a private property society where it really was up to property owners alone. I've always found it a bit facile when people say, well, you have no interest in controlling any property other than that what you particularly own in your town. And then Rothbard later in life came to see that the individual and the state were not the only two units of analysis when it comes to this. So talk about what you see as a libertarian position on borders and immigration today. Yeah, I think Mises' work is extremely important here. So overriding importance. Mises does not see, does not give a solution to immigration. He says the best that we can do is to allow state borders to be changed as people's and nations move. But he doesn't come out and set out any sort of program for that. But what he does do is to show us that immigration is always a political problem. As long as there's a state, there's going to be a problem. No matter how small the units you get, as you pointed out before, there may very well be minorities that are oppressed. So we have to start from that premise. I mean, that's a positive insight, meaning that it's, you know, he's not making any value judgment. He's saying that nations exist. Unfortunately, majorities oppress minorities. So let's start from there and see how we can have a peaceful world. So you can, you can, just reading Mises, you can reject the open border position. I mean, that, you know, they're giving, they're giving a solution and a very radical solution without even knowing really the problems. So I think this is a debate starter. Mises is not a debate ender, but a debate starter, but it does narrow the debate. It does push out sort of the completely closed border types as well as the open border types. There are people that have not examined the problem and have no insight into it at all. So I think we have to start all over again as libertarians to think about this. This is a world of states and of nations and there are two different things. Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you're interested in this issue of nationalism and immigration, you know, from the open borders perspective, Jacob Hornberger is writing a lot about this and of course our own Walter Block is writing a lot about this. You know, HAPA has written quite a bit about a private property society. We've got Salerno channeling Mises and writing about this as well. It's a fascinating topic. Again, we will post a link to Joe's article called Mises on nationalism, the right of self-determination, the problem of immigration. From my perspective, one of the most important articles of the year. And I think that it's something that we owe it to ourselves to delve into. I think that Trump's election has caused a lot of bad feelings and a lot of ill will and a lot of superficial thinking on the part of people on both the left and right. And I think it's time for us to get beyond this. And I really think that the best solution in a failed world is this principle of subsidiarity and it amazes me with Trump and power why the left in particular continues to resist this when we could all get to a place where we're perhaps not self-governed, but governed in a manner that's more amenable to our worldview. And that's really something that I think we as libertarians ought to be working towards, which is subsidiarity and secession and nullification. And if you're never Trump, you should be applauding this. It's my favorite, of course, yes. Well, Joe Salero, thanks so much for your time. A great article, a fascinating conversation and the debate's not going to go away anytime soon. You're right, thank you. 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