Ghibelline, why can't you be true?

Combat between Guelfs and Ghibellines in 14th-century Bologna. Wikipedia.

Ross Douthat, normally a reliable Guelf (we don't call him Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, for nothing), takes out a Ghibellinish stance for a test drive this morning, in favor of Empire and in opposition not so much to the liberal Papacy as to modernism, democracy, self-determination, and the Suicide of Britain, by which he means the possible devolution of the UK into its component English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and Manx and Cornish and so on nations, which hasn't actually happened but, you know, might some time:

In the headlines, last week’s British elections were a big victory for David Cameron’s Conservatives. But the deep winners were the forces of nationalism, Scottish and English, which suddenly have the United Kingdom as we know it on the ropes.

Seven months after the referendum in which the forces of Union beat the forces of Scottish nationalism 55% to 45% in Scotland, Douthat sees last week's 56 SNP wins as putting the UK on the what? (The Québec nationalist movement came a lot closer to winning its referendum in 1995, and the Parti Québécois held on to the provincial government until 2003, and Ottawa recognized the Québecois as a "nation within a united Canada" in 2006, but don't hold your breath waiting for the country to break up; the question has been pretty much resolved, through this awkward process.) Who's been put on the ropes is the Labour Party, and not for nationalist reasons but for its failure to crawl out of the sink of Blairite centrism, while the Liberal Democrats, for similar but more damaging reasons, have been thrown entirely out of the ring (BooMan thinks Cameron's repugnant policies are likely to drive Scotland out of the Union altogether, but I doubt this government will last long enough for that, seriously).

And what party, excuse me, represents the forces of English nationalism? Matter of fact, looks like it's the basically just the toff Tories for the moment, now that the buffoons of Ukip have been largely exterminated, but that doesn't mean they want to lose Scotland; running Scotland is a huge part of what English nationalism is about.

Ross really misses Empire, and it's all the fault of that dratted democracy. You think I'm exaggerating?

FOR much of European history, empire was the normal political arrangement: Large, polyglot, multiethnic and eventually multireligious, with a monarch on top and a jostling confederation underneath.

Then came modernity, democracy and nationalism, and the “nations” of Europe — half-real, half-invented — demanded self-determination and self-rule.

Between 1914 and 1945 (with a final act in the Balkans in the 1990s), this led to world-historical disaster, mass exterminations, ruthless wars for mastery.

Note the tactical weirdness of choosing 1914 as the terminus a quo, as if the quest of the half-invented nations for self-determination didn't go back to the Greek struggle against the Ottoman Empire bursting out in 1821, the Polish uprising against Russia in 1830, and the demands of the Hungarians, Bohemians, and so forth for liberation from the Hapsburg yoke in 1848 (and, if you count cultural as well as military developments, much further than that especially in the case of Poland, and then let's not forget the Dutch Republic which drove out its Spanish colonists in 1581, or the anti-Austrian Old Swiss Confederacy of 1298, and I could just keep doing this all day). This may be because he's never realized that Greece and Poland and Hungary are half-invented too, not to mention Germany and Italy, or because he doesn't in fact know what he's talking about at all.

Another weird thing about 1914 would be that, while the origins of the Great War are still a pretty confused history and will perhaps always be so, composed as they are of so many mistakes and inadvertencies, the military movement that made war inevitable wasn't a nationalist but an imperialist one, the (Austro-Hungarian) Empire Striking Back against the nationalist Kingdom of the Serbs in the last act of a series of imperial maneuvers beginning in 1908 (or 1878, when Austria took over Bosnia and Herzegovina as its price for recognizing the existence of Serbia, etc.—a lot of things happened before 1914).

As at the beginning of World War II, when expansionist Hitler made his moves against the nationalist Czechs and Poles (under the pretext of defending threatened ethnic-German communities) toward the construction of a Third Empire (Drittes Reich; the first were those starting with Charlemagne in 800 and with the 99-day Prussian Kaiser Friedrich III in 1888), it was the imperial rejection of self-determination, not the self-determination itself, that initiated the fighting.

I understand nostalgia for the old empires, particularly the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs, which developed so many ways of encouraging tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity and providing socio-economic mobility for the panoply of different peoples (and by the same token for the great empires of the East, the Tang in the 7th through 9th centuries and the Mongols in the 13th and 14th). I get the prevalence in the imperial days of peace between Sunni and Shia, the prosperity of Jews (well, in Austria when they got around to it, along with putting up with Protestants, in the 1770s, but better late than never), the concepts of meritocracy favoring Kurds and Croatians, Uhlans and Janissaries, all that stuff.

But nostalgia for the British Empire is a different matter: It's our own inexpungeable crimes, the genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans, racism as a way of political life, and that includes its European part, going right back to the medieval conquest of Ireland and forced union with Scotland. It's an aspect of England we should really be wary of, even as we love, say, English literature or the hedgerow landscape and Perpendicular cathedrals or whatever, because it's our own ugliest thing.

And sorry, Monsignor, but we like our democracy and modernism as far as they go, complaining only that they don't go far enough. The alternative to the empires isn't, in fact, a pullulation of squabbling mini-states and universal bloodshed, but what Douthat refers to sarcastically as

a kind of postmodern empire, an imperial bureaucracy without the emperor — the European Union.

Douthat thinks the Eurozone is in a bad place right now economically, compared to Britain, though of course he's largely wrong (Krugman's blog, yesterday, noting that Europe has allowed itself a little less austerity and is seeing the signs of the benefits, while last week's British election will mean a return to the austerity it gave up six months ago and worse times for Poundland). In the very long term, however, the European experiment, which has provided an unprecedented and profound peace and over-the-long-term prosperity to its members for many decades, illustrates how a huge multinational territory can learn to enjoy the benefits of empire without imperialism, whether it makes an economic mistake from time to time or not, and that idea has lost none of its power.