 Yeah, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We have a session on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Mises publication, Nation, State, and Economy, a book published under a German title in 1919, with a few other opportunities during the next few years to have anniversaries of a similar sort, because Mises published quite a few books during the 1920s. So we'll do this regularly from now on. And then, of course, there are other anniversaries that are of the 50-year sort, and of the 75 years or so. So you do the math, there are quite a few things to come. Well, so Nation, State, and Economy was written in the immediate aftermath of World War I. So Germany and Austria had lost a war. Mises writes this book while the peace negotiations in Saint-Germain and Versailles were still in process. He writes this while the Austrian Empire had collapsed. So there was a secession of all non-German-speaking parts of the empire, so Austria was a very small dwarf state or had become a dwarf state. And so Mises, in this book, tries to analyze the causes that led to World War I, the causes that led to the defeat of the Axis powers. And he focuses very largely on the conditions that prevailed in Germany and in Austria. So we don't have an international comparative approach with a certain limitation of the book. Keynes, also in his book that was published about the same time the economic consequences of the peace, focused also on the conditions that prevailed in Britain and in France. He neglected a little bit the conditions in Germany and in Austria, which is good custom to focus one's own homework first before looking at the arrows or the omissions and so on of the others. Mises' thesis was that the war resulted most notably from German imperialism. So in the book, he tries to come to grips with the nature causes of imperialism. So the book is structured in three chapters or three parts. One, the first part actually occupies almost two-thirds of the book, in which he deals with the concepts of nation and state, which is really a theory of imperialism. And the second part then deals with war socialism. And the third part with the history of the Social Democratic Party in Germany. The book has not been published again in German, at least to my knowledge. The English or the American edition has appeared in 1983 with an introduction by, so it has been translated and introduced by Leland Jäger, so as a professor at the University of Virginia and then at Auburn University and deceased last year. So it's been a great fellow traveler for many years. Today we have a distinguished panel. So I'm greeting Professor De Lorenzo, Dr. Nicola Gertschiff and Professor Solerno. And myself will also present a paper. We'll start with Professor De Lorenzo. We'll proceed in this order, then Gertschiff, then Solerno, and then Hulsmann. Each of us will have 15 minutes for presentation, and I'll watch with German jealousy on this. So it's not just because we lost the first World War, even the second, that we cannot read the Times anymore. So watch this, and then at the end we'll have hopefully enough time for discussion. OK, Guido gave me an interesting topic. He asked me to read through a nation, state, and economy and say something about the extent to which it applies to US history, because it's all about European history in Germany, the Prussian Empire, and so forth. And so that's what I did. It's very interesting to me to think about that, since I've written about US history and in the context of what Mises had to say about imperialism. So I just sat down. I ended up writing a 37-page paper about it, and I'm going to stand here and read it every word right now. I'm just going to go through some of the highlights. Here's one quote that I put at the top of the paper. And the theme, by the way, is that the sources of German imperialism that Mises wrote about, I'm going to argue were already cultivated in the United States before in Germany. And so I think the United States was already even more imperialistic than Germany was by the time you get to the World War I era. And here's what Mises said. He probably would agree with me. He said, these imperialistic doctrines are common to all peoples today. Imagine that. Not just Germans. Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans who marched off to fight imperialism in World War I are no less imperialistic than the Germans. And that's sort of one of the themes of one of the chapters. So I'm going to read just a couple of short quotes. He said, the Prussian Empire, quote, had not arisen from the will of the German people. It was a state of German princes, but not of the German people. He said, the German people sort of acquiesced in this, the Prussian Empire, as long as there was sufficient, he used the word sufficient, prosperity and military pomp. And he said, but the prosperity had nothing to do, I'm quoting, and nothing to do with the political and military successes of the German state. And then accompanying that was sort of a propaganda crusade against classical liberalism, essentially a prerequisite. And he says this. To the status school of economic policy, an economy left to its own devices appears as a wild chaos into which only state intervention can bring order. He said, the state, on the other hand, is described as all wise and all just and always wishes only the common good and has the power to fight against all evils effectively. And that's the attitude that he's writing about. And then he goes on to say, for all the difficulties that confront of the German people at home and abroad, the military solution was always recommended. Only ruthless use of power was considered rational policy. And he distinguishes between what he calls the princely state and the free state. And the princely state lives by this, the more land, the more subjects, the more revenue, and the more soldiers. Only in the size of the state does assurance of its preservation lie. Smaller states are always in danger of being swallowed up by larger ones. And then by contrast, a free state, there are no conquests, no annexations, and it forces no one against his will into the structure of the state. And he makes the case for secession here. Also, he says, when a part of a people of the state wants to drop out of the union, liberalism, that is classical liberalism, does not hinder it from doing so. Colonies that want to become independent need only to do so in the free state. And so that's how he lays out his argument here about the princely state versus the free state. And the princely state, of course, is the one that leads to imperialism, which only benefits the elite, the ruling class, at the expense of everybody else. And so what I do, the first thing I do in my paper about how this might apply to US history is to compare the Jeffersonian attitude toward secession. No people should be forced into the structure of the state to the nationalist version. In American history, we had the nationalist tradition. And Alexander Hamilton is most closely associated with that, Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, and their political descendants, and then the Jeffersonian decentralized tradition. And to give you two examples, in Jefferson's first inaugural address, he said this, if there be any among us who would wish to dissolve the union, let them stand undeserved as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left to combat it. He also wrote a letter years later, a couple of years later, to a man that asked him about the New England secession movement. The New Englanders were plotting to secede after Jefferson was elected. They actually held a secession convention in Hartford, Connecticut in 1814. And Jefferson said this, if there is to be a separation, then God bless them both, that is both sections or confederacies, and keep them in the union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better. So that was his attitude. He was a lifelong advocate of secession. And you compare that, as Murray Rothbard once said, by the way, he said, the central government was not supposed to be perpetual. Does anyone seriously believe for one minute that any of the 13 states would ratify the Constitution had they believed it was a perpetual one, a one-way Venus flytrap, a one-way ticket to sovereign suicide? That was how Murray Rothbard put it, what, a Venus flytrap. No escape. And of course, to contrast that with the nationalist tradition, when you get to Lincoln, he says this, no state can lawfully get out of the union and acts against the authority of the United States or insurrectionary or revolutionary. And in his first inaugural address, he argued that the union of the states created the states. It wasn't the other way around. The states did not create the union. And the late Joe Sobren once said that, well, that makes as much sense as saying a marriage can be older than either spouse. A union of two things cannot be older than the things themselves. But that was Lincoln's argument for invading the southern states and nevertheless. So and of course, in his first inaugural address, he bent over backwards to defend southern slavery. He had no intention to do anything about southern slavery. He even defended the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution in that speech, which would have prohibited the government from ever interfering with slavery. But on tax collection, he was uncompromising. He said there will be bloodshed and invasion. Those are the words he used of any state that failed to collect the tariff tax, which had just been more than doubled two days earlier. President Buchanan signed the moral tariff into law two days earlier. So in tax collection, there will be no compromise, more land, more subjects, more soldiers, more revenues. Another comment that I found interesting that Misi's made. And this, by the way, Gido mentioned that John Maynard Cain's famous book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was published around the same time. So was Wars, the Health of the State, by Randolph Bourne, within months of this book being published. And a lot of you are familiar with that. But another of Misi's claims is that he says, the Marxists of his day were all for freedom of the press, quote, as long as they were not the ruling party. But once in power, they did nothing more quickly than set these freedoms aside. And of course, that immediately reminded me of American history because the Federalist Party, many of the same people who signed off on the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution in support of the Bill of Rights, as soon as they got in power, abolished the First Amendment with this addition act, making criticism of the Adams administration illegal. Even a member of Congress named Matthew Lyon from Vermont was imprisoned because he described the Adams administration as, quote, filled with ridiculous pomp and foolish adulation of John Adams. And for that, he was imprisoned and forced to walk barefoot through his hometown. And so they outlawed free political speech. And of course, Lincoln was the best example of this, of taking an oath, a solemn oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States and then turning around the day later, almost in suspending the writ of habeas corpus, mass arresting tens of thousands of Northern political opponents, shutting down over 300 opposition newspapers, deporting Congressman Beland again, confiscating firearms in the border states and generally censoring the newspapers and generally abolishing civil liberties altogether. You fast forward to the World War I period, the 1918 Sedition Act outlawed, quote, interfering with the war effort, couldn't interfere with the war effort. Over a thousand prosecutions with prison sentences up to 20 years were handed out during that time. And so that's another example. And of course, during World War II, the rounding up of 100,000 Japanese-Americans and forcing them into concentration camps was not really in keeping with civil liberties either by Roosevelt, who also took the exact same oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States. And of course, if you fast forward to today, the American Civil Liberties Union has been one of the biggest enemies of civil liberties because they support all these campus speech codes and political correctness gone wild in our society in the United States. I have another section called American Wars of Conquest because that after all is a big part of what Mises wrote about when he refers to the Prussian Empire and German militarism. The War of 1812, the War of 1812, the distance between 1789 and 1812 is not a big long period of history, okay? Why was there a War of 1812? Well, you can find congressional statements explaining members of Congress what they hoped to gain by the War of 1812 by invading Canada. Congressman Richard Johnson said, I shall never die contented until I see England's expulsion from North America and her territories incorporated into the United States. Congressman John Harper said, the author of Nature himself has marked our limit in the South by the Gulf of Mexico and on the North by the regions of an eternal frost. So the North Pole to South America, okay? A military general, Alexander Smith, before he led his troops into war to invade Canadians, which I call Kanukistan by the way, it's kind of Canada, he said this to the troops, you will enter a country that is to become one of the United States. So they expected Canada to be an extra state. There's a historian in Eliot Cohen, he wrote a book Conquered into Liberty. That's a kind of a neat title, isn't it? Conquered into Liberty. And he said that if the conquest of Canada was not an objective at the start of the war, it soon became an objective at the start of the war. And of course, what I call the war to prevent Southern independence was nothing if not a war of conquest. If you look up the dictionary definition of wars of conquest, they involve subjugation, plunder, cultural dominance by the victors and in some cases genocide. And I would argue that every one of these things happened to the Southern states during and after the war. And this morning, Brian McClanahan gave a talk, mentioned the cultural, what you might call cultural genocide of the South in his talk. Then right after the war was the Indian wars, General Sherman himself, three months after the American Civil War ended, was put in charge of the military district of the Missouri, the U.S. government separated the country into five different military districts. And his job was basically to wage a campaign of genocide against the Plains Indians. And Sherman himself gave the reason for this. Here's what he said. We are not gonna let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress of the railroads. So they sort of socialized the cost of building the transcontinental railroads through Indian territory. In contrast to James J. Hill, the private entrepreneur who built the privately funded Great Northern Railroad without any subsidies, and he paid the Indians for rights away with cattle, money, whatever they could trade for. He didn't have the ability to call in the army. It's a mass murder of the Indians, as the U.S. government did. I have another section called American Wars against quote, the lower races. Macy's commented how for quite a long time Prussians and the German militarists waged war against people of what he called the lower races and he's sort of mocking them because they just, they call these people the lower races. Why did they call them the lower races? Because there are people who are supposedly, quote, not ready for self-government and never will be ready. Therefore we need to conquer them and govern them, was the argument. And this also reminded me a lot of Sherman and the Indian Wars in America he said this, there's one quote from Sherman, the Indians give a fair illustration of the fate of the Negroes if they are released from the control of the white people as General Sherman. And his biographer, Michael Feldman, said that the whole Indian Wars was lasted for 30 years. The objective was what he called, quote, a racial cleansing of the land. Sherman actually used the phrase the final solution to the Indian problem in talking about this. And then we had the Filipinos, how American imperialists treated the Filipinos at the end of the 19th century when the Spanish Empire was finally kicked out and the American Empire stepped right in. You know, they assisted kicking out the Spanish Empire and the Filipinos did not want to be a part of the American Empire. They had just kicked out the Spanish Empire. And so we ended up killing, not we, but they ended up killing some 200,000 Filipinos. Although there are some books, some historians would say it might have been a million, might have been as many as a million Filipinos. And in order to justify this, of course they had to be dehumanized. You had Teddy Roosevelt calling them Chinese half-breeds, savages, barbarians, wild and ignorant people, a lesser race. Senator, U.S. Senator Albert Beverage of Indiana said the Philippines are ours forever and the Pacific Ocean is ours. It's America's duty to bring Christianity and civilization to savage and senile peoples. And the Filipinos had been Catholics for what, 200 years at that point, you know, senile people. And then Teddy said, all the great masterful races have been war-like races. Maybe Hitler got that master race thing from Teddy Roosevelt, I don't know, came later. He, Teddy Roosevelt denounced what he called, quote, the menace of peace, and afterwards he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I also quote the great William Graham Sumner who wrote about this, a famous essay, The Conquest of America by Spain. And he pointed out that, you know, and this is, you know, the turn of the century. And he said, we have a new foreign policy now because of this, war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditures, political jobbery, and a word, imperialism. So that was the new American imperialism. I'll talk about the subjugation of Hawaii also. American businessmen got the US envoy, John Stevens, to bring troops to Hawaii and they forced the King of Hawaii to sign what they called the Bayonet Constitution. You know, either sign this or we will gut you with a bayonet is what they were saying. And it basically disenfranchised all the Hawaiians and allowed, gave voting rights to wealthy American businessmen who were in Hawaii at the time and their supporters. And that was their plan. But then something happened to foil the plan. Grover Cleveland got elected president and he nixed it so he didn't allow this to happen. So they thought it happened a few years after that but he nixed it. Teddy Roosevelt of course was very upset at this that they didn't take over Hawaii. And he said this, did Teddy Roosevelt. I feel that it was a crime against the white race that we did not annex Hawaii three years ago. He told a Boston audience that. I have another section called the American unified state. Mises argues that the German wars against the lower races was one thing. But when the German militarism was targeted against the white races in Europe, they had to come up with a theory or a justification for that. It was no longer they are incapable of governing themselves. They need us to govern them. So they came up with the theory of the unified state. We need to impose the unified state. There's too much chaos with all this decentralization. And so of course I make the case that the unified state came first in America. It's the nationalist tradition, the Lincoln tradition. I'm about out of time. I see ghettos over there making funny faces. So the final section of my paper says Mises was right to quote Robert Heilbrunner in that famous article and after the collapse of communism. Mises was right about when he said that what I have to say about imperialism applies to the Americans, the French and the British who entered World War I as well as the Germans. It wasn't just the Germans that should be held responsible for that. And I argue that we got there first before the Germans did. Good afternoon everybody. Many thanks to Professor Hülsmann for inviting me indeed to this quite prestigious panel. The title of my talk is monetary imperialism, an extension of Mises' theory of international conflict. So I will first present everything in a nutshell because apparently we have a restraint on time and then I will try to elaborate. The broad idea is to show that there are other sources of imperialism than those that Mises develops in his book and mainly state control over the money supply and in a situation of several state controlled fiat money producers naturally emerges a tendency towards unification and centralization and this tendency is what I would like to show you now. Now Mises' book is quite an achievement because in many respects it contains all the elements of the future praxeology that he will develop. And one general idea that I would like to emphasize is that causal regularities and not power politics govern social relations. This is a very strong point in the book and Mises uses this point in order to criticize the previous theories of imperialism from the end of the 19th century and the early Marxist theories according to which imperialism was due to some malfunctioning of the capitalist economy. Joseph Schumpeter tried to save capitalism but his analysis was to some extent also a bit deficient because his explanation was equally deterministic. Schumpeter did not manage to explain why individuals from some point of time preferred to cooperate together and to move from the energy for war to the energy for labor. And Mises in his genius provided precisely that rational explanation based on the capacity of individuals to understand the harmony of the rightly understood interests. So based on that starting point Mises really saved capitalism from the accusation of being imperialist and he's really putting the emphasis on private property. Quote, quote, ownership turns the fighting man into the economic man. So thanks to reason people are capable of understanding that there is a mutual harmony between their interests and on these precisely firm grounds Mises identified two major causes for international conflict. First, the social organization itself might be a flawed by design in the sense that it entails a conflict. So these would be material causes for international conflict. And second, individuals might err in their minds and fail to see what is to their true benefit. And Mises applies this very consistently in the book. He refers to the law of relative over a population of some regions, which implies that population migrations will be caused by the attraction of higher, relatively higher relative incomes in regions which are relatively underpopulated. But as a matter of fact, this law is just a specific case application of the general law of scarcity, according to which factors of production are always put to their best use. And this law operates both in a capitalist economy and in a socialist economy. So in the event of a capitalist economy, since people are moving, then the real culprit for international conflict would be the democratic regime. Because by definition, there will be a national minority. And let me stress here that Mises has a very individualistic, understanding of a national freedom, which he defines really based on individual freedom from state and society. The truth, the only true national autonomy is the freedom of the individual against the state and society. And then the second material cause of international conflict is rooted really in the commonwealth of the socialist nations where the law for the best use of social freedom the law for the best use of resources still prevails. But as nation states have monopolized resources, then the only solution to achieve this best use is to annex, to integrate foreign economic territories. So Mises' explanation of national conflicts and of imperialism is truly rooted in the analysis of collectivism, be it in its material aspects or in its ideological aspects. However, he does admit a plurality of direct driving factors. Towards the end of his book, Mises states that imperialism could flourish even within the social order of private property. Quote, he who rules the means of exchange of ideas and of goods in the economy based on the division of labor has his rule more firmly grounded than ever an imperator before. And leaving aside ideology driven imperialism which quite obviously is very important nowadays in the world of global warming and other sources of sustainable development, I would like now to expand on this other source of imperialism of a driving force which is the state control over the means of exchange of goods. So to set the stage, let me take for granted the Austrian explanation of the nature and origin of the modern two tier banking systems. In these systems, central banks produce legal tender money and act as lenders of last resort for commercial banks that expand credit by lending fiduciary media of exchange which they themselves produce in the form of deposits. And it was through a process of devolution of money and credit as put by Professor Hoppe and which Professor Salerno also has labeled the regression theorem that many substitutes that are titles initially convertible into commodity money produced within the market have been progressively transformed into fiat paper or electronic monies produced outside the market. So what can we say about the relations between these state controlled fiat money producers? To begin with and borrowing the expression from Rodbart, whoever enjoys a monopoly of fiat money production can consume without the need to produce. So by expanding the money supply which is practically costless, the money producer and his agents can attract part of the output of the economy without any productive effort. They engage in a systematic expropriation or specifically monetary exploitation in this case. In particular, the concrete institutional arrangements of producing and distributing money nowadays tend to blur the identity of the exploiters. Nevertheless, we can point out to three broad groups of beneficiaries. First, the banking industry itself which has a new source of income which on top is protected by government regulations. Second, borrowers benefit from cheaper credit and this ensures a widespread support for modern banking which is therefore seen as a source of economic prosperity which indeed to some extent in the short term it is for those who secure the credits from the banks. And third, within the group of borrowers, modern states stand out as the primary and systematic beneficiary of monetary exploitation. The special status of public debt instruments which are the de facto prerequisites for accessing the lender of last resort implies that most of any monetary expansion reaches first the state. And in itself this explains already the multitude of state enforced legal tender paper money monopolies. Now the fundamental problem in this system is that these monopolies over fiat money production do not lead to territorial exclusiveness. International exchanges imply that the use of a foreign money must be admitted for some part of the exchanges that residents do, namely the exchanges with foreigners. Foreign money producers therefore owe each other mutual recognition without which international exchanges in the present day monetary system would not be possible. And that recognition implies that they must accept to buy and sell foreign monies against their own money. In other words, any fiat money producer must accept that his territorial monopoly is to some extent permanently encroached by foreign rivals. Therefore, in such a system, conflict is the natural state. Referring to the international dimension of the famous Kantillon effects, we can understand that each fiat money producer would seek to ensure that his money is permanently held abroad as an international reserve currency. First, this would increase the demand for it, which would support his purchasing power and therefore increase the real value of monetary exploitation. And second, de facto, this would enlarge the economic theory on which he is practicing monetary exploitation. So the natural conflict between fiat money producers results, therefore, in asymmetric relations. Dominant money producers issue international currencies that are held in reserves by the dominated money producers. And Professor Hoppe has already characteristically labeled this system of a two-fold exploitation, monetary imperialism. However, conflict does not end with the rise of a few dominant fiat money producers. Lack of exclusiveness, which questions the effectiveness of the monopoly, remains a problem. In addition, perceptions about money's relative qualities as revealed in foreign exchange rate movements restrain monetary exploitation. This explains why fiat money producers strive to unify the quality of their respective monies through international cooperation or by imposing fixed exchange rates. The latter, however, are an notoriously unstable solution, not the least because they tend to limit monetary exploitation while fiat money producers' problems is the precise contrary, namely how to find a way to get it facilitated. So the continuous conflicts between fiat money producers set up a tendency, which by elimination and unification reduces their number. And this monetary imperialism owes its success above all we must recognize to the legitimate expectations it creates within annexed economic areas for gaining access to a money of initially better quality. First of all, the successful imperialist money producer is the one that has been less inflationary so far, or the others have been eliminated because of overexpension of the money supply. The de facto increased demand for the international currency also objectively strengthens its quality. Finally, domestic banks and export industries voluntarily submit to a more solid lender of last resort given that this is a tool to get closer, again with reference to the continue effects to any new money. So there is support for accepting submission to a foreign dominant money producer from inside the economy. For the fractional reserve banks in particular, this means that they need not keep reserves as high as before and therefore they can engage into further credit expansion. What makes the monetary type of imperialism so much attractive included for the dominated is that it implies the transfer of a single means of exploitation only, namely the monetary exploitation and therefore it appears as a tool for a bankrupt state to recover and keep control over the other means of exploitation, taxation and regulation. Now, what are the institutional forums through which monetary imperialism operates in reality? The prima facie example is that of outright replacement of a failed money producer by a foreign money producer, dollarization whether this is official or unofficial in dollars or euros. But there is a more subtle way which is generally preferred and which allows the ousted domestic central bank to nominally stay in place by keeping its bureaucratic existence and its name even though its nature is transformed and these are the so-called currency boards. What the currency board achieves is to keep the name of the previously existing medium of exchange but to transform its nature from a real, from a money, a self-standing money into a money title, money substitute, a convertible into a foreign money and therefore the currency board is a vehicle through which a foreign money producer can expand the territory on which it can practice a monetary exploitation. However, currency boards are quite unstable, not the least because they tend to accumulate significant foreign exchange reserves and these foreign exchange reserves of course are naturally tempting the domestic governments to liquidate them, which would mean that they would just exchange these foreign government IOUs for present-day real goods. However, currency boards have an extremely useful function as they allow the creation of monetary unions. The introduction of any new money faces the problem of the regression theorem and currency boards solved this problem especially in the case of the euro area in the way the euro was created. Now, so there are many other examples of currency boards nowadays. They were mostly adopted by the ex-communist countries. Beyond the euro area, there is an example of the two French franc zones in Africa and there are many other projects that are under discussion. But I would like just in conclusion to focus on the setup of the euro area which as a matter of fact has been a real game changer. So according to official statistics published by the International Monetary Fund about 65 to 25% of foreign exchange reserves are respectively held in US dollars and in euros. And the relative stability of these figures over the years suggests that the euro has effectively contributed to achieve precisely this quality unification after which fiat money producers are. And the cooperation has been so successful that it allowed an almost doubling of the growth rate of international forex reserves since the euro has been introduced. So thanks to the euro, to the introduction of the euro and to this manifestation of monetary imperialism through a reduction of the number of money producers, monetary exploitation has been de facto intensified worldwide. So in a conclusion, I believe this is really a tribute to nation state and economy because the analysis that Mises pursues there is focused on collectivism and how collectivism leads to conflicts. And what I tried to do here, very sketchy is to show how state collectivism in the production of money creates conflicts, international of its own type that we can label monetary imperialism. And I do believe that this is indeed an example of the enduring potency and modernity of Mises' analysis. Thank you. My paper is on the discussion, that very subtle and nuanced discussion that Mises has in nation state and economy about the relationships among liberalism, nationalism and the right of self-determination. He also makes some highly interesting remarks on immigration, but I don't know if I'm gonna have time to get to that. I've really boiled it down to about seven or eight points. For Mises, nationalism was not antithetical to classical liberalism. In nations such as Germany and Italy, 19th century liberalism first emerged and expressed itself as a political movement in the form of what Mises called peaceful nationalism. It was based on two fundamental principles. First was the freedom from rule by foreign kings or what was called then the right of self-determination of peoples. Second principle was the national unity or the nationality principle. The two principles were indissolubly linked. The primary goal of the liberal nationalist movements, Italian, Polish, Greek, German, was the liberation of their peoples from the despotic rule of kings and princes. Liberal revolution against royal despotism necessarily took on a nationalist character for two reasons. First, many of the royal despots were foreign. For example, the Austrian Habsburgs and French Bourbons who ruled the Italians and the Prussian king and Russians are who subjugated the Poles. Secondly and more important, political realism dictated, quote what Mises says, is the necessity of establishing an alliance of the oppressed against the alliance of the oppressors, unquote, in order to achieve freedom and to preserve it against foreign oppressors. This alliance of the oppressed was founded on national unity based on common language, culture, heritage, customs, and literature. Even though forging wars of liberation, liberal nationalism was for Mises both peaceful and cosmopolitan. Not only did the separate national liberation movements view each other as brothers in their common struggle against royal absolutism, but they embraced the principles of economic liberalism which unites all peoples in the international division of labor. They did understand this. Point number two, as a classical liberal, Mises emphasized that the right of self-determination is not a collective right, but an individual right, quote, it is not the right of self-determination of a delimited national unit, but rather the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong, unquote. Mises also points out that for liberalism, the nationality principle, that men in the exercise of their right of self-determination as a rule, quote, vote in favor of the country where they all will not be members of a linguistic minority, is simply a fact. It's not a principle or moral law, unquote. Indeed, Mises makes it crystal clear that self-determination is an individual right that would have to be granted to quote every individual person if they were in any way possible. My third point, or Mises' third point, nations are natural social formations that exist apart from the state or states that govern them. Despite championing self-determination as an individual right, Mises recognized that the nation has a fundamental and relatively permanent being independent of the state which may govern it at any given time. Thus he refers to the nation, quote, and this scares a lot of modern libertarians, quote, an organic entity which can be neither increased nor reduced by changes in states, unquote. Accordingly, Mises characterizes a man's, what he calls compatriots, as those of his fellow men with whom he shares a common land and language and with whom he often forms an ethnic and spiritual community as well, unquote. So Mises is talking about a spiritual community, again, anathema to modern libertarians. Mises contends that nationalism is thus a natural outcome of and in complete harmony with individual rights. He states, the formation of liberal democratic states comprising all members of a national group was the result of the exercise of the right of self-determination, not its purpose. In other words, unlike, let's say, German imperialists who are trying to get all the Germans together whether they want to or not into a single state, that's not what liberal nationalism was. It was a choice among those who were oppressed by foreign despots to fight back and to unify themselves for purposes of defense. Should be emphasized here that in contrast to many libertarians today who view individuals as atomistic beings, lacking emotional affinities and spiritual bonds with selected fellow human beings, Mises affirms the reality of the nation as an organic entity. For Mises, the nation comprises humans who perceive and act toward one another in a way that separates them from other groups of people based on the meaning and significance the compatriots attached to objective factors such as shared language, traditions, ancestry, and so on. Membership in a nation, no less than in a family involves concrete acts of volition based on subjective perceptions and preferences with a background of objective historical circumstances. Okay, that was me talking, not Mises. Mises' fourth point or the fourth point that we can derive from the nation's state and economy. Colonialism is the denial of the right of self-determination. Unlike many late 19th and early 20th century liberals, Mises was a passionate anti-colonialist. As a radical liberal, he recognized the universality of the right of self-determination and the nationality principle for all peoples and races. He wrote powerful and scathing indictments against the European subjugation and mistreatment of African and Asian peoples and demanded a quick and complete dismantling of colonial regimes. It's worthwhile quoting Mises on this. And there are long, juicy quotes in the book about this. I'll just give you one. The basic idea of colonial policy was to take advantage of the military superiority of the white race over the members of other races. The Europeans set out, equipped with all the weapons and contrivances that their civilization placed at their disposal to subjugate weaker peoples, to rob them of their property and to enslave them. No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste, whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. European conquerors have brought arms and engines of destruction of all kinds of the colonies. At the point of the sword, they have set up colonial rule that in its sanguinary cruelty, rivals the despotic system of the Bolsheviks. Unquote. In those areas where native peoples were strong enough to mount armed resistance to colonial despotism, Mises, who, like Rothbard, was very enthusiastic, he supported and cheered on the national liberation movements. It was very interesting. He says, this is Mises, in Abyssinia, in Mexico, in the Caucasus, in Persia, in China. Everywhere we see the imperialist aggressors in retreat or at least already in great difficulties, unquote. So he was gleeful about this. As you can see, Murray was. Okay, fifth point, majoritarian democracy, even in states with liberal constitutions, results in the irreconcilable conflict between nationalities and the inevitable oppression of national minorities. Mises therefore maintains that two or more nations cannot peacefully coexist under a single democratic government. National minorities in a democracy are, quote, completely politically powerless, unquote, because they have no chance of peacefully influencing the majority linguistic group. Even where majority groups are proportionally represented in the legislature, the national minority, quote, still remains excluded from collaboration and political life. Mises writes that even if the members of the minority nation, quote, according to the letter of the law, be a citizen with full rights, in truth, he's politically without rights, a second class citizen, a pariah, unquote. In fact, Mises characterizes majority rule as a form of colonialism from the point of view of national minority living in a multilingual territory. For the minority nation, democracy, quote, is not popular rule, but foreign rule and seems like oppression to the minority, where only the choice is open to oneself to suppress or be suppressed, be suppressed, one easily decides for the former, unquote. Mises was adamant in his view that democracy means oppression for the minority. He insists that for the minority, democracy is, quote, subjugation under the rule of others. And this, quote, holds true everywhere and so far for all times, unquote. And he dismisses the off-sided counter example of Switzerland, he says it's irrelevant, he says local self-rule was not disturbed by internal migrations between the different nationalities. Had significant migration established the presence of substantial national minorities in some of the Swiss cantons, so if you had intermingling, Mises says, quote, the national piece of Switzerland would already have vanished long ago. Point six, economic interventionism aggravates the conflict between nationalities. And Mises points out that an interventionist states where education is compulsory, and, quote, peoples speaking different languages live together side by side and intermingled in polyglot confusion, unquote. Formal schooling is a source of, quote, spiritual coercion, unquote. And one means of oppressing nationalities. The very choice of the language of instruction can, quote, alienate children from the nationality to which their parents belong. And over the years, the term of the nationality of a whole area, unquote. And compulsory education is only one example of how interventionism exacerbates, doesn't, isn't the underlying cause, but exacerbates the inevitable conflict between different nationalities that are living together under a single state. Mises states, quote, every interference on the part of government in economic life can become a means of persecuting the members of nationality speaking in a different language from that of the ruling group. Okay, point number seven, and this is very important, even under a laissez-faire system, the national minority will find ways to oppress the national minorities using the state. This perhaps Mises's most important insight. He argues that even where government is rigorously restricted to, quote, protecting and preserving life, liberty, property, and health of the individual citizen, unquote, the political arena still degenerates into a battleground between the different nationalities residing within its geographical jurisdiction. Even the routine activities of the police and courts in this ideal liberal regime, again, quoting Mises, can become dangerous in areas where any basis at all can be found for discriminating between one group and another in the conduct of official business, unquote. Mises gives the example of a judge who acts consciously or still more often unconsciously in a biased manner, unquote, because he believes he is fulfilling a higher duty when he makes use of the powers and prerogatives of his office in the service of his own group. Not only are the members of a national minority subjected to ingrained and routine bias in the political sphere, but because of deep cultural and ideological differences, they are often unable to grasp the thought and the ideology that shape political affairs. So the result of the political impotence of the national minority in even a liberal democracy is that it perceives itself to be a conqueror colonized people. As Mises puts it, quote, the situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as a consequence of military conquest. The ninth point, well, actually I comment on this in my paper, and I say the inevitable outcome of mixed nation states was a suppression of minorities by the majority nationality, a bitter struggle for control of the state apparatus, and the creation of mutual and self and deep seated distrust and hatred. This state of affairs often culminated in state sanctioned physical violence, including expropriation and expulsion and even the murder of minority populations. Okay, so the ninth point, and I think I'll stop after the ninth point. Do you know what, I have a few minutes? Okay. Only the full implementation of the liberal program will bring to an end national conflicts. Almost alone among classical liberals of Izera and modern libertarians, Mises clearly recognizes that laissez-faire capitalism and free trade are necessary, but not sufficient to ensure peace among different groups of individuals forced to live under a single state who may naturally self-identify as different peoples or nations on the basis of language, shared customs, traditions, religions, heritage, or any other objective factor that is subjectively meaningful to them. As Mises states, quote, all these disadvantages experienced by minorities are felt to be very oppressive even in a state with a liberal constitution in which the activity of the government is restricted to the protection of the life and property of the citizens, but they become quite intolerable in an interventionist or socialist state. So they're not just a result of collectivism, the result of more than one nation or peoples that identify as different nations living under a single political regime or a single state. For Mises, the best that can be said of a government whose functions are strictly limited to protection of person and property and enforcement of contract is that it does not, quote, aggravate artificially the friction that must arise from the living together of different groups is for this reason that Mises defends the complete, what I call the complete liberal agenda, not only domestic laissez-faire, but the right of self-determination. He does not believe that the violent antagonisms between nations living in a single political jurisdiction is due to an antipathy between peoples. To the contrary, Mises points out that despite the hatreds that may naturally exist between different groups of people of the same nationality, and he gives the example of Prussians and Bavarians here, I don't know what's going on there, maybe Hans can enlighten us, but he says even though there's these antipathies between them, they find a way to live peacefully together because of the same nationalities. Okay, so Mises goes on to say they are able to get along peacefully when living under the jurisdiction of the same state, while different nationalities that are forcibly bound together under common political arrangements are in constant conflict. So it is not these natural antipathies between people, but the political denial of the right of self-determination that is the underlying cause of national, and I would say nationality conflicts. In this vein, Mises issued a dire and prescient warning, quote, as long as a liberal program is not completely carried out in the territories of mixed nationality, hatred between members of different nations must become ever fiercer and continue to ignite new wars and rebellions, unquote. So this is certainly true of today, right? We live in a world, particularly in Asia and Africa, where European imperialists and colonialists forced different nations, tribes, chiefdoms, linguistic groups, ethnicities, religions into deeply dysfunctional political unions. Most of the 40 wars currently being waged on these continents are interstate or civil wars. And as global security, a website that tracks this has said, most of these wars are fueled, quote, as much by racial, ethnic, or religious animosities as by ideological fervor. At their root, unquote, at their root lie the attempts of minority groups to resist or end oppression by the majority by either seizing the existing state apparatus, seceding from the state or creating a new state like ISIS has done, okay? And yeah, okay, so one last sentence. I have a long section on what all this means for immigration, mass immigration, and Mises gives us a lot of good insights on this. But basically what I'll say is that the universal right of self-determination and the breakup of existing states and not the artificial opening or closing of borders of existing states is the proper solution to the conflict that we're seeing today among nationalities. Okay, thank you. Two or three of my pages. Oh, did I? Yeah. Oh, somebody else with already. All right, I'll recover them. Nikolai took everything. Nikolai took everything, okay, yeah, that's okay. Well, in my paper, I deal with the, thank you, sir, with the political economy of nations. We have learned from Professor Salerno's, Mises defines nations as a language community. So, and he makes a very important contribution to the, in fact he pioneers this field because I'm not aware of any discussion of the economic of the nature, the causes, the consequences, the growth, the decline and the death of nations before Mises. So, he really delivers elements to such an analysis. And the four most important elements are that the nations are not creatures of the state, that nations result from individual decisions, that government interventions, that nations are the consequence but not necessarily the intended consequence of human action. And the fourth one is that interventions by governments to glorify the nation, so to increase the power of the nation and so on usually have the contrary effect. So, they are not either necessary nor efficient. So, they bring about usually the contrary, right? So, we have here a very promising approach that is an extension of the Mongolian program to study larger collective holds in terms of methodological individualism. So, what I do in my paper is to criticize Mises approach, so certain limitations and then try to show how they can overcome with a slightly modified approach. So, as far as I can see, there are three shortcomings or limitations in Mises approach. The first one is to equate a nation with a language community. And that is a problem because a community very often is an intended community. So, a community is not something that just occurs spontaneously. That is, it's the result of human action but not of human design. The community as a rule is a consequence of design. So, people want to live together. I want to be in a society or in a community and so on. This is the first point. So, language itself is an unintended consequence, right? So, language is a consequence of community but it's not preceding community. Of course, there are mutual reinforcements and once the language is in place then of course it modifies colors, further development of the community but it's not the original cause. So, it's the original, I would say there, really the nature of a community of a nation. The second shortcoming is that Mises compares government interventions that seek to glorify the nation so increase the power of the nation to the ideals of 1789, right? So, the ideas of the French Revolution. That, now let's leave aside all political questions but from a purely methodological point of view that is a problem for an economist because what we do usually in economic analysis is we compare how things would occur under the respect of property rights. On the one hand, to what would happen if property rights are infringed, not respected, not enforced and so on. On the other hand, and so the political economy means then the comparison of the two sets of consequences that result. Now, Mises refers to the ideas of 1789 and okay, among the ideas of 1789, we have indeed the respect of property rights and so on but that's not the only thing, there's two other things that he also mentions in which are crucial for his analysis, namely on the one hand democracy and on the other hand, the idea of a free movement of people, goods and capital. Now, as Hans Hopper has pointed out in several publications dealing with the problem of migrations is that this is very loose language, likely to induce us into error. In fact, if we look at free trade, free trade is not based on the principle of free movement of goods, right? Goods do not move freely, they do not float across space or something like this but it's always their concrete persons who accept them willingly, right? So if there's no banana that just floats into my fridge but it's I who go to the shop or maybe I ask somebody to deliver a banana but then I want to have it and so then I put it into the fridge and so on, right? So it's a decision. And so similarly, so the problem in the mainstream analysis of migration is just free movement of people and people if you don't let them, some of them they roam freely across, not only across national borders but also come into your house and serve themselves, help themselves to your fridge and other things. That's in the case of migration there too, right? There must be ownership somewhere. Some people must be owners of the land, must be owners of houses and so on. And so for the same reason for which we have walls and houses and doors and houses so we decide whom we let in or not let in. So for the same reason it's also legitimate that we decide whom we let into national borders and so on. So Mises does not have this and that's of course a problem if we are talking about the development of national communities however we define them because it's just a result of free movement while this free movement might actually not be a free market phenomenon it might be an interventionist phenomenon, right? In which case would be on the other side of the political economy analysis. Then in the case of language, right? The specific problem related in the case of language is that language as a rule, right? As Mises himself observes is the consequence of government intervention, right? So a common national language is typically not the natural consequence of people that are just living together but it's very much a consequence of government intervention imposing this and that language in schools, in public schools, repressing the use of other languages and so on. So the starting point is vitiated or perverted if you wish. It's a little bit as if you start the analysis of monetary systems by looking at fiat money as a standard case. You can do this but of course if you do this then you wouldn't notice certain consequences that follow from fiat money which you can only understand once you compare it to natural money. So to free market money, right? So here's the same thing, right? It's not perceived wrong to start your analysis with the phenomenon of a language community but since the language community is itself is already the consequence of government intervention so you don't have the standard of comparison, the free market comparison, you don't have it. And the third limitation lacking element is that Mises has really no theory of the decline and of the death of nations. Now that was not the current actual problem in 1919 but it is very much a problem for us today because we have the death knell not only of German culture but also European civilization in general, right? Clearly if we just have open borders and so on we let everybody in just and we pursue the current destructive interventionist policies not only immigration but in other fields as well then clearly we are on the way to destroying nations and civilizations. Okay, so how to get to a more realistic analysis, more realistic understanding of nation and then also to different policy conclusions. So my past constituents, I have tried to base myself on a more general approach, right? Which allows me to think of nations as being a particular instantiation most not really an interventionist form of community. Next to many other forms and free market forms most notably. The most general approach that I could think of is based on Aristotle's theory of friendship which Aristotle presents in chapter eight and following of the ethics, the Nicomathian ethics. So here Aristotle distinguishes three types of friendship. And friendship is relevant because friendship is really is the immediate cause of community, right? If you have friends, well then you have community it's the definition almost, say of a community. So there's the friendship based on pleasure, games, drink, food, sex and whatever. The friendship based on utility, the business friendship, the friendship of the people engaged in a robber bank, trade corporation and what so ever of a state, right? And the friendship based on shared virtues, okay? Now from there on we can develop this in different ways, right? And I don't have time now to go into much detail but these are the following points which I would underline. Namely that there is a certain, of course in a free setting you get overlapping communities, overlapping circles of friendship that do not necessarily run around a language barriers around ethnic barriers and so on, right? So they are overlapping, overlapping circles of friendship but then of course you get certain homogenization effects through the circumstance that certain communities develop so they grow, they grow stronger or more quicker than others. And that is based on the fact that certain virtues are more conducive to economic flourishing than others respect of property rights, I mean the usual thing, right? Respect of persons, honesty and various other things. So these are truly the foundation of, as we know of a free market economy and therefore make those community and those forms of friendship that are based on utility particularly efficient, right? So the most fundamental, the most important form of friendship is the friendship based on virtue. And depending on which kind of virtues and to which extent these virtues are really the basis of community, well the community in question then develops economically stronger than others and by through this way then indeed it exercises an attraction on many other people. So what are the causes then of such communities? The two most important causes is well is the transmission of the constitutive values or the constitutive virtues which occurs most notably through education, right? So we have the family, it's interesting that the word nation of course derives from natus, right? From born, right? I mean the community in which you are born which raises you is in fact the most important cause of your membership, of your adherence to those values or those virtues that constitute truly the most fundamental community. And the other form is adoption or what we today call sometimes assimilation, right? If you say immigrants they have to assimilate to the prevailing culture. I mean there's really, they have to adopt our culture and in that context, of course we should always remind ourselves that we ourselves of course we have adopted foreign cultures, right? In a way we are all Germans today are much more in fact Greek and Roman, we are Germans of whatever the first or second century before Christ, right? And similar then of course for other countries. So we adopt those virtues and those values that are first developed in other nations and the Greeks themselves and the Romans themselves of course is the French cultural historian Remi Braga. His books, some of his books have been translated into English. It's a very nice book, one book is titled Via Romana so the Roman way and he argues that the cultural specific of the Romans was to be transmitters of culture that we received from elsewhere namely from the Greeks. The Romans were very anxious not to be too original in their approach as far as culture is concerned but just to transmit what they had received from higher grounds. And interestingly the Greeks themselves distinguished themselves from all the peoples living in the Eastern Mediterranean by the fact that they were the most innovative that is the most ready to adopt foreign practices for example Phoenician alphabet, right? Or the idea the way the Phoenicians approach the alphabet in giving up their own customs their own ways if it was less conducive to their welfare. So we have birth, right? And so family, culture, transmission and adoption on the other hand. And language is in fact very much as a consequence. It's a very much an unintended consequence. Nobody plans in a free market setting to impose a common language, the common language results from the fact is just the most useful way to interact with other people. Now the political economy element then leads us to consider the phenomenon of feared communities, right? So these are the communities that are then being formed under the impact of government interventionism. And in particular under the guise or the pretext of glorifying or increasing the nation. Of course, like all government interventions the effective consequences are usually the opposite of the desired result, right? I mean what feared communities do or what government interventions do typically is to inflate first of all, the short run consequence is to inflate the object on behalf of which you act, right? For example, if governments want to promote economic growth so they can spend more money and so on in the short run you can increase GDP figures and you can do this by consuming capital. And that's the dirty secret behind this. So in the case of nation of course in the short run government intervention of the use of violence can increase the relative position of one community relative to others but at the expense of undermining the very causes that brought the community into being in its present state, right? So the consequence always short run inflation but a loss of substance, a centralization of the organization of the community and dependence on the center and ultimately a decline. So I guess that this approach is helpful in analyzing not only the conditions prevailing in 1919 but especially also in our current day which was the main motivation for me writing this paper. Thank you for your attention. Okay, so now we have a question and answer time. We have about 15 minutes left. I ask all my fellow panelists to join me on the stage. We have two mics to share and you have all the questions to us. We will have questions. As in the story to sort of a monkey wrench into the discussion but maybe it's me as I am criticizing rather than the presenters but it seems to me that kings played a vital role in creating nations. The French nation was to some extent created by kings who forcibly eradicated or tried to eradicate provincial cultures. I think it was the goal who made the remark that France was the product of 30 kings in 40 provinces but it was the kings who amalgamated them and forced them into a unified nation even creating an academy of Francaise and doing other things to create nation. And the same thing can be shown in other countries so that although Mises does not like what he sees as non-liberal democratic nationalism, in fact, national or nations as an historical phenomenon were very much dependent on pre-democratic or non-democratic forms of control. The other point is I'm surprised that Mises did not notice that one of the most benevolent governments was in fact a monarchy, the Hopsburg Monarchy, which was a multi, a polyglot empire which on the whole was quite benevolent and at least in its declining years very much open to Austrian economics. The nation states which replaced it were generally vile. In every way inferior to the Hopsburg Empire they were more repressive, they were less open to free market economics and they oppressed minorities, much worse than the Hopsburg Empire. So I'm wondering how we would address, how Mises would have addressed the fact that one of the, that a polyglot multinational empire had in fact ruled his part of the world better than the nation states which succeeded it. I can give you something, I did mention my quote just in my paper and that is that Mises said that unlike German and Italian nationalism, which was the sort of liberal nationalism, the nationalism of the Poles, the Czechs and so on was a non-liberal, right. And Mises said that unlike, I mentioned my quote but Mises said that the principle of nationality is a fact that is a people self-identified coordination but with the Czechs and Poles and a few other, many others later on in the 19th century they wanted to force people within the borders of their nations to use their language and hold the impression that Mises is like. So that's where liberal nationalism began to become aggressive, actually. How the Germans, how the Greeks, they were like the Czechs and so on. So he wasn't aware of it, it's my own. But he did recognize that. For you, Dr. Herzman, is like, do you think the, based on what you said, do you think that libertarians are much closer to conservatives? Like, I mean, in the way to see the word, like one depends upon another or, because I think about it and like, I tend to see that connection and I think you were touching on some points like that. Like you cannot be a libertarian without like this moral ground of family and religion and stuff like that. I'd like you to comment on that if possible. As far as causal analysis is concerned, the case is crystal clear, right? I mean, so you need to come from somewhere. And of course, I mean, there's also reason, right? I mean, all ideas have sprung up in the course of time somehow, right? So we're not handed down from anybody else or some individuals who came up with new ideas. But a matter of fact is that this process is very, very slow. So if we were to forget all political ideas until tomorrow, then of course it would take whatever, hundreds of thousands of years until we came back to the current state of the discussion, good or bad, right? But I think, of course, the libertarian looks at these things from a very different point of view than the conservative, right? A conservative looks at community or tends to look at community as a desirable objective, to be preserved, to be achieved and so on. Whereas for a libertarian, you're more concerned about the process. You're more concerned about the liberty of action, right? Exercise within the rules of the game. And the important thing is then to have the right rules of the game, property rights, respect of property rights, definition rights, forms of appropriation and so on. Now, both points of view are to some extent complementary, the libertarian can very much benefit from the conservative as we can benefit also from socialists because it will also look only at results, right? Because sometimes if things are really moving in a very bad direction, if you just look from a purely, from an aesthetic point of view, it doesn't look right, right? You can have, for example, the Pope's do this all the time, right? Look at the situation, it doesn't look right. I mean, you figure this out, right? And the current Pope is very adamant where you have these left wing intuitions, what the causes might be and he professes them loud, but really, I mean, this is just his personal opinion. But he says, well, look, there's something is not right. And that's helpful sometimes because you say, okay, is it really the case that all the rules are respected as we would like them to see? Do we have the right rules? Is our property rights really in place? Or is it not? And indeed, in the current situation, we get the result of many decades of monetary interventionism, which produces massive inequality in income and in wealth. And unless you understand something about monetary interventionism, and you see, well, I mean, central banks are just part of the free market, you would never guess this, right? Then you invariably come to the conclusion, yes, it's capitalism that doesn't work, right? Whereas if you say, okay, there's something wrong, maybe you come to the conclusion, yes, indeed, the problem, one of the problems is not the only one. One of the problems is monetary interventionism, monetary imperialism, and as a consequence, right, we get these effects. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. To what extent was Mises' view of liberal nationalism influenced by Ernest Renan and his idea of the spirituality, we're talking about the spirituality? And second, to what extent can we reconciliate Mises' view on the French Revolution to some extent as being sort of a positive view on the French Revolution with respect to nationalism and his idea at the same time that the nation is both based on objective factors and at the same time based upon the subjective meaningfulness according to the individuals of those objective factors? Because it seems to me that the French Revolution sort of redefines nation, which as Professor Holtzmann said is a propertaristic concept, comes from where you're born, so it's a real concept, it's a real factor, and the French Revolution makes it as an ideological or a broad abstract concept that is used then to justify state action. So I was wondering to what extent is that compatible with Mises' analysis, these two views? Anyone hear this? Okay, well, I'll give it a shot. Yeah, I mean, he quotes Ernest Renan, right, in the book, right, he quotes Ernest Renan's 1871 article just my response to Renan argues that the nation is a community defined by a common history and common projects, right? So it's not a language, not necessarily a language community, it's something that has a common history and we have common outlook, a common project. Of course, that's a very reductionist also view, right, because it simulates all communities to some sort of a society, that you pursue a common goal, you have a common organization or something like this, right? Which is not characteristic of, I mean, there are of course commercial societies, most notably have this, right? Political societies, parties and so on, right? They have objectives that they pursue and so on, but that's not characteristic of all human communities, right? And then Renan, of course, himself, I mean, the theory, Haig would probably call this, it's a constructivist theory, right? I mean, first of all, Renan was of course, not very much concerned about applying this theory in Alsace-Lorraine after 1914, right? Okay, he was dead, right? He was not concerned about applying this doctrine in Brittany, let's say, in the 16th century or in Africa, which France had colonized after 1830, right? So there are two, right? I mean, there was no community, no common history with the peoples there, no common project, and still, right, you impose French culture, French language on them, right? And so he doesn't really discuss this. He just mentions, Renan says, yes, so there is one element, even in the late 19th century, in the period of imperialism, there's one remnant, one stroke of light of the old liberal worldview, right? But the fact is, of course, that Renan's theory is pretty much self, could be interpreted, right? As a self-serving vindication of French rights pertaining to the population of Alsace-Lorraine, which had been annexed by the Prussians, right? With reference to this theory, which is, again, might be characteristic for this and that community, but it's not a general conception of what a nation is. For Professor Salardo, if I understand well what you said, is that Mrs. considered a self-determination for a bad element of democracy that is the operation of a majority ethnic to a minority ethnic. So maybe Mrs. was for democracy but also so bad element of democracy. And then he proposed self-determination to compense that hero, or that were wrong. You're right. Mises was a Democrat with a small d. He was very pro-democracy and he was criticized by the old right here in the United States like Isabel Patterson and others for being so pro-democracy. And if you read his letters, they're very naive about the democracy, the letters that he exchanged with some of the people on the old right. He didn't understand what the criticism was of democracy. But that aside, what you're saying is correct. He saw the right of self-determination as resolving this problem, which was inherent in polyglot areas. Or I think even, he didn't just define it as a nation. I think he saw it as more than just as a nation. I mean, he said the spiritual community, that implies a sharing of values and culture and heritage. One point I want to make on terminology, Mises used the word nationalism and distinguish between aggressive and liberal in nation-state and economy. Then later on, during World War II and after World War II, he dropped that. He dropped the idea of liberal nationalism and he only talked about economic nationalism in the negative sense of protectionism. And in fact, even in substance, he had a plan for the reconstruction that he wrote during the 1940s of Eastern Europe. He was very constructivist. He said, forget about the nationality principle will not work in Eastern Europe. So he wanted to have a very centralized government there in this plan. But of course, I mean, this was towards the end of the war. He was very depressed and so he seemed to have abandoned this and then he never really talked about it much after that. But one point I want to make about terminology is that there was a French, I don't know his name, but he's quoted in Guido Ruggieri's book, The History of European Liberalism and he used the word nationalitariens rather than nationalists. He thought that was a better word to describe what Mises was talking about, nationalitarianism. In other words, the nationality principle was the voluntary principle of voluntary self-determination. Yeah, if assimilation is one of the causes of building community, then maybe to Dr. De Lorenzo, would that mean that the efforts to assimilate Native Americans in the United States to take the Carlisle Indian School would have been something that would have been viewed as a positive as opposed to, of course, the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans? How should we view assimilation efforts like that? Yeah, I'm always in favor of civil assimilation over mass murder, yeah. That would have been, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think something Guido said, you know, about when he's talking about cultural assimilation, they remind me of Thomas Sowell wrote this book, Migrations and Cultures, big fat book. And one of the themes of it is that people tend to adopt cultures that they think are superior to their own culture and dump their own culture. Like when the Europeans came to America, the Indians ditched their culture of hunting by foot and adopted the European culture of hunting on horseback. For he gives that example, obvious example. So I'm all in favor of assimilation over mass murder, yeah, any day, yeah. Yeah.