Oct. 10, 2016
Scott Malcomson wrote for the Huffington Post about nationalism in Europe:
The specter of patriotism is haunting Europe.
Last week, British Prime Minister Theresa May, giving the closing keynote at her Conservative Party’s annual conference, offered her version of Donald Trump’s call at the Republican convention for “Americanism not globalism.” She spoke twice, approvingly, of “revolution” as she described patriotic Britons, “ordinary, working-class people,” saying they have had enough of cosmopolitan ways and want a renewal of the old social contract between state and citizen.
“There is more to life than individualism and self-interest,” she said. “We form families, communities, towns, cities, counties and nations. We have a responsibility to one another.” The role of government is “to encourage and nurture those relationships” and to honor the “social contract” that should lead employers to hire locally rather than search for cheaper labor far away. “Too many people in positions of power,” she declared, “behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass in the street. But if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.”