Our Tribe is the State

Maximilian Krah and Paul Strieder have raised a legitimate question, but those who abandon the nation-state deliver our children to a society in which they will be the weakest.

(Montage: Fragen zur Zeit; Revolution 1848: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Reichsgründung 1871: Anton von Werner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Politically, our people is organized in the state, not in families, clans, or religious communities. This simple fact means that all attempts to separate the civic nation (Staatsvolk) from the ethnic nation (ethnisches Volk) and to reabsorb the latter into society are doomed to fail. Why would anyone even try to do this? The reason for such considerations is that the alignment of the ethnic nation with the civic nation has been identified by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the courts as a pivotal point for a potential ban procedure against the AfD. The core of this argumentation can be found on page 114 of the version of the secret report published by Junge Freiheit regarding the classification of the AfD as confirmed right-wing extremist¹:

“The concept of the ethnic nation is based on the distinction between a civic nation composed of German nationals and an ethnically defined nation, which leads to not all German nationals being regarded as members of the German nation.”

Paul Strieder has described the “logic”² outlined in this passage as the core of what he sees as the problematic identification of the ethnic nation with the civic nation in the nation-state. His solution lies in separating the state from the nation, as he believes was the case before modernity. According to him and Maximilian Krah, the ethnic German nation could then exist as a mere societal phenomenon without coming into conflict with the rights of non-German citizens of the Federal Republic.

As always, when the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution targets the AfD with the concept of the ethnic nation in mind, discussions flare up about whether one could somehow circumvent this central issue of our time. I have outlined the fundamental problem sufficiently³: the moment a democratic constitutional state allows mass immigration, liberal immigration policy is transformed into the personal rights of individuals. The individual immigrant gains a right to residency. If, at some point, someone naturalizes him under any circumstances, it becomes nearly impossible to get rid of him within the legal system.

Now, two things are true at the same time:

First: Whoever accepts this hands to the operators of population replacement a ratchet that they will keep tightening, which can only be stalled for a limited time but never loosened. In the process, the national foundation of the democratic nation-state, without which it cannot exist, erodes. At best, what would emerge is a state as a ruling construct based on the inertia of mere legality, which would eventually fall apart in bloody pieces.

Second: According to prevailing jurisprudence, the concept of the ethnic nation is grounds for a ban if it leads in any way to the preferential legal treatment of ethnic Germans over citizens of non-German ethnicities. In this, Maximilian Krah is simply correct.

However, it is crucial to note that this prevailing legal opinion stems from the political realities of the existing multiethnic society, not from constitutional paragraph-juggling. “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law,” said the American constitutional judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. In the sense of legal realism, Jakob Maria Mierscheid⁴ has analyzed the prospects of a ban procedure against the AfD better than I could. My aim in the following section is solely to highlight how little the demand for a party ban is based on legal logic and how much it stems from the political situation of the current powerholders. In fact, it would be difficult, based solely on the constitution, to derive grounds for a ban even from a demand for denaturalization based on ethnic criteria or the retroactive revocation of naturalizations. However, I would advise against taking the following argument before a current German court:

The party ban is regulated in Article 21 of the German Constitution, the Basic Law or Grundgesetz, a designation originally invented to highlight the provisional nature of the order created in West Germany after the Second World War, which nevertheless, as most provisional arrangements has proven to be quite permanent and is at least since the reunification of Germany in 1990 de facto the constitution of the Federal Republic. The decisive section is Section 2, which reads:

“Parties that, by their aims or the behavior of their supporters, seek to impair or abolish the free democratic basic order or endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany are unconstitutional.”

The free democratic basic order (freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung) refers here to the preceding Article 20. To “this order” in paragraph 4 for which, in case someone should try to abolish it, the Basic Law provides a right of resistance to every German. Such a right of resistance can hardly be arbitrarily applied to any sections of the Basic Law. Neither discrimination, nor the position on citizenship law, nor even the guarantee of human dignity from Article 1 is listed as grounds for a party ban. There are other articles of the Basic Law that prohibit ethnic discrimination and denaturalization, but these are neither mentioned in Article 21, Section 2, nor do they fall under the eternity clause, which protects Articles 1 and 20 under Article 79, Section 3.

By constantly referring to human dignity, our opponents, by the way, show how shaky the demand for an AfD ban would be, even if they were factually correct in all their claims about what the AfD stands for. I am honestly surprised that this is so rarely noted in analyses on our side. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the compliant judiciary argue as follows: the concept of the ethnic nation demands the discrimination or denaturalization of non-German citizens of the Federal Republic, and this discrimination or denaturalization violates their human dignity, which in turn justifies a ban.

This argumentation has three awkward leaps: The first, and by far the simplest to overcome, is that someone who politically refers to the concept of the ethnic nation thereby intends to discriminate against members of other ethnic groups. This is understandable insofar as any political organization representing the interests of its members tries to secure rights and privileges for them. These rights and privileges come at the expense of others, who are then discriminated against. The current preferential treatment of all sorts of minorities follows exactly the same pattern. The second leap, that discrimination—i.e., legal differentiation between people—constitutes a violation of human dignity, is absurd because every legal system, at all times, discriminates between people in some way. The question is only on what criteria and with what consequences. And no one would seriously claim that people without German citizenship lack human dignity. If they did, it would imply a right to German citizenship for the entire world.

However, even if one were to accept this premise, the goal of violating human dignity is still not listed as a ground for prohibition in Article 21, Section 2. This was not simply forgotten but has a good reason: human dignity is a very vague term. Courts have considerable leeway in interpreting it. This vagueness can be quite useful when understanding the right to human dignity, as provided in the Basic Law Articel 1, as an individual’s defensive right against the state. In that case, Article 1 enables courts to issue rulings against severe forms of state abuse of power when such abuse does not literally violate the specifically defined fundamental rights in Articles 2–19. Article 1 serves as a catch-all for anything either overlooked in the other fundamental rights or not regulated in detail. Therefore, its classic fields of application are, on the one hand, issues related to the detention of prisoners or inmates of psychiatric institutions. If these were to be written into the Basic Law, it would consist of two-thirds administrative instructions for prison guards and psychiatrists. On the other hand, it applies to issues like gene therapy, which arise due to new technologies that could not have been anticipated when the Basic Law was drafted in 1949. Thus, it is left to the discretion of judges to determine on a case-by-case basis what is considered consistent with human dignity and what is not. However, if Article 1 is used as the basis for banning a political organization, its nature changes from an individual’s defensive right against the state to a legal basis for state repression, opening the door to arbitrariness. This is especially true if one follows the bastardized Kantian interpretation of human dignity, which current jurisprudence and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution rely on. They see human dignity as being violated by using a person as a means or by subordinating the individual to a collective.⁵ The latter is the basis of all politics, and the former is constantly done by every administration. By these standards, every real existing system violates human dignity. The accusation of unconstitutionality here takes on the logic of a puritanical morality trial, where the only thing that matters is who is the accuser and who is the accused, because by the standards applied, everyone is guilty. If one accepted the violation of human dignity as a legitimate ground for banning a party, the AfD, once in power, could have all its current competitors banned based solely on their stance on abortion or their attempts to bully people into accepting prophylactic gene therapy not so long ago. Both could be construed as violating human dignity with at least the same plausibility as ethnic discrimination.

The reason our opponents constantly refer to human dignity is that Article 1, the article in the Basic Law that guarantees human dignity, like Article 20, is subject to the eternity clause, allowing it to be rhetorically linked to Article 20, which is referenced in Article 21, Section 2, when talking about the free democratic basic order. The entire prohibition rhetoric works with such three-cornered chains of association. A rather comical example of this shoddy argumentation can be found on page 111 of the secret report:

“Article 1, Paragraph 1 of the Basic Law postulates human dignity as the highest value of the constitution. Central to the concept of human dignity are the chara of each individual as a subject with a corresponding claim to respect, as well as equality, which is reflected in legal equality.

Incompatible with human dignity are, for example, ethno-nationalist, xenophobic, anti-minority, anti-Muslim, anti-Islamic, and anti-Semitic positions.”

An undigested chunk of Kantian ethics (the quality of each individual as a subject) is regurgitated with a vague demand for equality, which is supposed to establish legal equality, though it is unclear what kind of legal equality is meant here, legal equality in everything we have to assume, considering the obviously limited cognitive capacity of the author of this passage. This elaborate gibberish, whose logical consequence would be the anarcho-syndicalist commune from the famous Monty Python sketch, then culminates in a list of groups particularly protected by the regime, thus not equal but privileged.

Nevertheless, as I said, I would advise no one to use this argumentation in court. What I aim to demonstrate is that the significance of the ethnic concept of the people in the debate about a possible AfD ban does not stem from a narrow reading of the Basic Law. Anyone who creates a dichotomy between legality and political objectives misses the point. Equally futile are all attempts to find a legal loophole to save the German people. The criminalization of the concept of the people does not arise from legal logic. Nor is it the result of mere ideological arbitrariness. The latter mistake is made by those who explain the population replacement solely as a product of left-wing cultural hegemony. This thesis seems plausible at first glance, as even the most superficial look at the media, universities, and the arts reveals this left-wing cultural hegemony. And there are indeed more than enough leftists who want Germans to become a minority in their own country. But any unbiased look at the history of migration shows that population replacement was never at the center of the Overton window. The fact that the great replacement is taking place is regularly denied. In reality, it is the product of the ratchet effect mentioned above: it is simply easier to let people in than to deport them, because every individual immigrant receives subjective legal entitlements to stay, which would have to be revoked before deportation. Given the massive prosperity gap between Germany and most of the rest of the world, population replacement could only have been prevented with an extremely restrictive immigration policy, as Japan long practiced. Instead, we had five decades of muddling through. Sometimes immigration was restricted, as in the 1993 asylum compromise, and sometimes borders were opened wide, as in 2015. But the development moved in only one direction, albeit at different speeds. This muddling through has created the current realities of a multi-ethnic society. Since the multi-ethnic society is now a reality, every government in Germany must somehow manage it.

Remigration would be complex and fraught with conflicts. Therefore, the governments of the current party cartel have opted for an approach that is by no means new in the history of multi-ethnic states. When a multi-ethnic state becomes a burden for the core population that sustains it, the nationalism of that core population becomes the greatest threat to its continued existencen and with it, to all the positions and privileges tied to that state. This is why the late Habsburg Empire pursued no nationalism as relentlessly as German nationalism. Vienna could negotiate with the nationalisms of other ethnic groups, but if German-Austrians lost their willingness to uphold the system, collapse loomed. Similarly, Putin can accommodate Chechens but jails Russian nationalists who protest the settlement of Caucasian peoples in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This logic applies even more strongly to today’s Federal Republic of Germany. Despite alarmist claims from liberal critics of Islam, we are not on the verge of a getting subjected to a caliphate. In fact, none of the ethnic groups that have migrated to Germany are anywhere near the numbers needed to overthrow or take over the state. However, they are often capable of locally overwhelming the state’s policing capacity.

Recently, a Dortmund resident told me how a friend’s stolen bicycle was located in Dortmund’s north end quarter via a tracker. The police responded, “We don’t go there.” This erosion of policing capability can stem from political influence when local politicians rely on the support of ethnic group leaders. The most drastic example in Europe is likely the integration of the specifically Pakistani form of patronage politics, the Baraderi or Biradari system, into English local politics, particularly within the Labour Party. It is no coincidence that grooming gangs have emerged from Pakistani communities in England for decades, often with tacit tolerance from local British politicians who depend on the block votes of clan leaders.

But in most cases, policing does not fail due to political influence from new citizens but rather due to the frictions brought about by populations with short time horizons and high impulsivity. Even a police officer does not come back to life if the person who stabbed him in the stomach is convicted. So, he avoids going to places where the likelihood of being stabbed for a trivial reason is high. While IQ 70 knife-wielders may pose a threat to citizens and police officers, they certainly do not threaten the state-supporting elites. The local loss of control is far too geographically dispersed to lead to separatist movements. Every major city has its neighbourhoods. However, the Turks or Arabs in Germany are not Chechens or Kurds, who have a cohesive settlement area they could declare an independent state. Political organization of individual migrant groups is also something that, from the system’s perspective, is manageable. Where such organization extends beyond the local level, individual migrant groups, due to their limited numbers, have no choice but to become client groups of established parties. And we are always talking about individual migrant groups. While all migrants combined already have the numerical strength to overthrow the state, they are far too different from one another for political, let alone revolutionary, organization. It is, of course, foreseeable that this will change in the coming decades, just as the current situation was foreseeable in Enoch Powell’s time. But just as the great replacement was not a tangible part of daily life outside a few underclass neighbourhoods until well into the 1990s, the system destabilization caused by immigrants and their descendants still plays no role today. Today’s decision-makers do not base their policies on the demographics ten years from now. Otherwise, the debate about the pension system would be entirely different. They certainly do not base their policies on the demographics forty years from now. They operate on a short-term basis, lurching from crisis to crisis for two decades at this point. Objectively, the systemic danger—the danger to what they call “our democracy” but actually mean “their democracy”—lies in the Germans becoming aware of their ethnic interests, refusing to tolerate these conditions any longer, and organizing as ethnic Germans toward this goal. Thus, there is an objective and irreconcilable conflict of interest between the interests of the German ethnic group and the ruling interests of the Federal Republic’s elites.

This is a double-edged sword for the Federal Republic’s elites themselves. On one hand, the functional interest of the existing system, combined with the existing demographic situation, gives them a legitimization to criminalize their political opponents. On the other hand, it forces them into the absurd position of having to criminalize the core nation of the state they govern as such. The Constitutional Protection Report is the culmination so far of the internal contradiction into which the system has maneuvered itself through immigration: after its publication, it was widely considered a laughingstock. Since the report relies on publicly accessible sources, the claim of source protection as a reason for secrecy was obviously a pretext—apparently to prevent the public from knowing what it is actually based on. However, the problem for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and its political clients is not that the report is ridiculous, but that its ridiculousness is a consistent consequence of their position. To manage the multiethnic society, the German nation must be abolished, and the mere mention of its existence criminalized, because the German nation’s claim to its homeland collides with the multiethnic society. This puts them in an even more difficult situation than the one of those who want to preserve Germany as a country of the Germans. The latter is, in principle, possible. But no state can abolish its core nation, at least not by decree. Moreover, the Federal Republic is not just any state but a democratic nation-state. It is designed as such, with “democratic” being the adjective and “nation-state” the noun. The multiethnic society, with its legal and ideological superstructure, is not only on a collision course with the ethnic reality of the German nation—which, according to this ideology, should not exist and stands in the way of the multiethnic administrative logic of the Federal Republic’s elites—but also with the structure of the state as laid out in the Basic Law, whose institutions are not designed for a multiethnic society. Of course, in such a conflict, those who, as political dissidents, are exposed to the arbitrary application of governmental force are in the greatest danger.

Maximilian Krah and Paul Strieder seek to avoid this direct political and legal confrontation by openly recognizing the Federal Republic of Germany as a multiethnic state while simultaneously demanding a separation of the civic nation (Staatsvolk) and the ethnic nation (ethnisches Volk). This way, in an ethnically neutral state, a German nation could exist alongside other nations with members holding German citizenship. Even those who are fundamentally unwilling to relinquish the right of our nation to our fatherland in this manner would be ill-advised to simply ignore such considerations. As mentioned, every government faces the necessity of managing the existing multiethnic society. This has so far applied to all governments elected in protest against mass immigration. None of them have yet been able to make a clean break that would relieve them of this necessity. Therefore, it is quite possible that a future right-wing government might try the approach of Krah and Strieder, whether it can succeed or not.

A good rule of thumb for dealing with political ideas is to first ask who they are directed against. In this case, Krah and Strieder specifically target Martin Sellner’s remigration concept⁶, succinctly summarized as a step-by-step reversal of the population replacement. Krah has summarized his criticism as follows:

“Sellner’s concept is unfortunately underdeveloped, internally contradictory, based on unmet assumptions, ignores obstacles, and provides a pretext for massive repression. It is therefore doomed to fail but ties up valuable forces that are temporarily misled. Paul Strieder has explained how the German ethnicity can actually be preserved: as an Ethnos, not as a Demos. This also takes the legal situation into account and, as Kisoudis pointed out, keeps the potential of the emerging new great power order open for the German state.”⁷

I have myself pointed out⁸ that Sellner significantly overestimates the effectiveness of metapolitical means. But the practical core of this criticism is different. It lies in the accusation that the demand for remigration legitimizes state repression because it distinguishes between citizens who are Germans and citizens who are not and seeks to encourage the latter to leave. This is, of course, true insofar as the state criminalizes the concept of the ethnic nation. The question would be with what trick or maneuver this could be circumvented, with what prospects of success, and at what cost.