Should Libertarians Support Ethnic Nationalism?

The relationship between libertarianism and the alt-right has become a controversial issue in recent years. Views on the issue run the gamut from complete opposition to imperative alliance, with nearly every conceivable position between being advocated by someone noteworthy. Let us thoroughly explore the issue to see what support, if any, libertarians should provide to ethnic nationalist movements.

Ethnic Nationalism and Ethno-statism

Many people who support ethnic nationalism are also ethno-statists. That is, they seek to form nation-states that are ethnically homogeneous or nearly so, and they want these states to advance the interests of the majority population in an explicitly racial sense. While many ethnic nationalists advocate voluntary separation, it is unlikely that enough people would do this on a large enough scale to form the desired ethnic separation on the scale of contemporary nation-states. It would thus be necessary to initiate the use of force in order to achieve this goal, and this is nearly certain to occur regardless of whether leaders of ethno-state movements wish it to occur.

Libertarianism is a philosophical position on what constitutes the acceptable use of force. It says that initiating the use of force is never moral, but responding to an initiation of force with defensive force is always moral. This puts libertarians directly at odds with those who would use state power to force people into different associations from those which they would choose. In fact, libertarian philosophy justifies the use of any amount of force to defend against ethno-statists who attempt to forcibly separate people.

At first glance, this may appear to be an open-and-shut case, but there is far more nuance to consider. Unfortunately, most libertarian commentators stop here, failing to consider anarchic forms of ethnic nationalism as well as the role that ethno-statists may play in moving toward a free society, however unwittingly. Let us examine these and other considerations.

Anarcho-ethno-nationalism

The starting point for libertarian ethics is self-ownership; that each person has a right of exclusive control over one's physical body and full responsibility for actions committed with said control. Note that in order to argue against self-ownership, one must exercise exclusive control of one's physical body for the purpose of communication. This results in a performative contradiction because the content of the argument is at odds with the act of making the argument. By the laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction, self-ownership must be true because it must be either true or false, and any argument that self-ownership is false leads to a contradiction.

Each person has a right to exclusive control of one's physical body, so it is wrong for one person to initiate interference with another person's exclusive control of their physical body without their consent. This is how the non-aggression principle is derived from self-ownership. Each person has full responsibility for the actions that one commits with one's physical body, so one may gain property rights in external objects by laboring upon unowned natural resources, and one owes restitution for any acts of aggression that one commits against other people or their property. The reason for this is that one is responsible for the improvements that one has made upon the natural resources, and it is impossible to own the improvements without owning the resources themselves. To initiate interference with another person's property without their consent also violates the non-aggression principle because it denies them the just fruits of their labors.

Read the entire article at ZerothPosition.com