On the global boom in radical patriotism
Populist anti-imperialism

The German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is not the only party in the world that boasts a polemical excess of patriotism.^[1] Parties of this kind are successful everywhere, ones that promise to put their country at the top as it deserves, however the comparison goes; to put it “back” where it used to be according to their philosophy of history. For these parties, this is the same thing as promising their good people to “finally” put the nation “back” at the top of the official government agenda after it was toppled by a globalized establishment devoted to evil. For some such fan clubs, that is actually enough for democratically assuming power, or for at least having good prospects of doing so.

Liberal thinkers see here a “wave of right-wing populism” that can best be explained with a sociological theory of impoverishment, according to which “fear of losing social status” as a result of “critical changes” arouses a longing for “simple solutions” that the right-wing radicals serve more sympathetically than any of the established parties can. This completely ignores what such patriotic super-morality is actually about. Perhaps because the proponents of moderate patriotism have no proper notion themselves of ​​all the “crises” that they would like to see “complex solutions” for.

The objective matter bothering right-wing populists from their offended patriotic standpoint is the imperialist make-up of the modern world of states. It is a world in which money does not “rule the world,” but the “rich” countries’ money is active worldwide as credit and capital; also being used by states for the global success of their own economies. A world in which most EU countries have even managed to establish a common currency and a common budget alongside their national ones that are devoted solely to their own exclusive benefit. In which the global competition of states and their capitalists altogether involves credit relationships that create benefit in other places, which is in turn the object of fierce competition. A world in which many nations end up in catastrophic crisis through their economic and political efforts to somehow survive in the global competition for power and money. And in which the few powerful states that dominate this idyll with the power of their wealth and their superior military force relate all this — the works of their competitive power — to themselves, to their interests and their claims to rule. They define these works as challenges that they try to meet with money and force, by creating, intensifying, and controlling conflicts of all kinds; either jointly or as competitors and adversaries of each other. And so on. This is the first thing to note.

The second thing characterizes the right-wing parties: the issue they make out of this imperialist state of affairs. They adopt the standpoint of merely being affected, perceiving themselves as victims of the conditions that their own states have created, both autonomously and together with their peers, according to what their wealth requires and their national interest dictates. This view of the world is completely ignorant of the essentials of one’s nation’s imperialism, of the calculations and imperatives that the established ruling parties follow in their foreign relations. It sets any results somehow burdening one’s nation against its unconditional right to pure overall success, which the government has screwed up with its misguided internationalist policies. And what is the success the state has failed to achieve? It is seen as being identical with an abstract ideal of the common people’s welfare. This is what the government has actually betrayed by its anti-national wheeling and dealing in world affairs, as proved by the stupidest theories about a national and international conspiracy against citizens at home. These citizens, for their part, are defined by the virtue of working hard for themselves and their country without getting much out of it; by the willingness to bravely take on such work and privations; by the right to receive the highest praise and recognition for it; and above all by being sold down the river, constantly disappointed, and mocked by the governing enemies of the people with their world politics.

So this is what one’s nation’s imperialism looks like from the standpoint of modern populism: the country and the people are being robbed by a deceitful establishment. Which throws a clear light on the objective reason for the patriotic clamor spreading around the world, beyond the diagnosis that patriotic morality is going overboard.

For modern imperialism does in fact involve politically expropriating the state and its people, both formally and in terms of the demands and necessities of the business of governing — even in the powerful nations that appropriate foreign resources and efforts and thereby make themselves dependent on how well they lay hold of their esteemed partner countries. Political rule and civil society everywhere live on capitalism in their country because they live for it. People at home “work hard,” that is, with little personal success for the growth of capitalist wealth on the national location where it is taking place. The money that “ordinary people” earn so that it enriches companies and strengthens state power is and remains their absolutely crucial means of living: the material reality of the society where they work to live and live to work. With the rules of advanced capitalism making money the national credit token decreed as legal tender by the state, the national nature of this money is the basis for binding citizens to their particular state in material terms, in their practical everyday life, outside of all patriotic narratives and any imagined “national identity.” And at the same time — above all, in terms of its capitalist purpose — this money, i.e., the economic power of the national credit it embodies, is the material of and means for international capitalism, the substantial purpose of and instrument for utilizing not only the domestic location for capital but all its locations in the world. The global, critically comparing use of national moneys as capital or by capital is two things: the condition for success of the national economy, thus the condition for capitalistically suitable survival of the people; and at the same time it degrades people and homeland to the status of being one location among many for capitalist wealth to choose from for its unbridled, hence borderless growth. It is on this material economic basis that each state embroils its nation in a constant competitive struggle for the reach of and respect for its national claims, a struggle they wage by way of deterrence, i.e., also by using force in the most brutal way possible. Which gives citizens the honor of being appropriately used to the point of ruin on behalf of their homeland’s global concerns. The result is the everyday world scene, where the competencies and dependencies of the supreme powers intersect with political rulers’ power to take possession and efforts to assert themselves, and with their citizens’ relative benefit and additional hardships. In the end, the peoples in modern imperialism — this being the epochal progress of an almost eighty-year “period of peace” — are no longer simply the pawns of their political rulers and economically ruling class. Their rulers are on an international mission and acting in accordance with international power relations from the outset. Their competition for growth of wealth and power is no longer in any way a special area of ​​cross-border commercial and political relations to be separated from people’s everyday life and delimited from the nation’s inner workings. From the beginning, this competition determines the circumstances, conditions, means, limitations, and altogether the logic, of society’s life process right down to how competing bourgeois individuals work and live their lives. And what is true for the imperialist world in general has taken on the most drastic form imaginable in Europe’s euro countries. The economic substance of all those countries has actually been supranationally collectivized; the cross-border identity of the capitalist means of life — money — remains the object and the means of competition for the nations involved. This is about as contradictory as it gets.

Right-wing populist parties in Europe and elsewhere make sure that their nation’s involvement in a world of imperialist competition attracts negative attention among the citizens affected, and is blamed on those responsible, who have betrayed the national community by handing it over to foreign interests, with no distinction being made between virtuous “hard-working” citizens and state sovereignty. They cultivate a false civic consciousness that is complementary to the virtue of imperialist cosmopolitanism, being stirred up to a blind love for one’s country.

© GegenStandpunkt 2025