Central Government Requires Strong Borders

In yesterday's post, Gun Control Requires a Weak Military and Strong Borders, we made the case that gun control requires strong borders. It's in no way a novel thought. (Although I don't hear anyone talking about the other part: that the ethos of the 2nd Amendment demands either a weak military or a strongly armed citizenry.) We can't have gun control without strong borders. Likewise, we can't have drug enforcement without strong borders. We can't have an immigration policy without strong borders. There's a general principle here, laid out by Heartiste in his post Age of Chaos. He quotes a commenter from Steve Sailor's blog,

One of the main functions of a central government is to control the country’s borders. That is why there is a central government. This used to be more military based, with occasional actual wars, but today it is about who comes across the border, who gets to stay, in other words migration policies.

In the last few decades this core function performed by central governments has been gradually abandoned. So when parts of these larger states – like Catalonia in Spain – look at their capitals they don’t see much value. With unguarded and open borders, large centralised states make no sense.

This is one reason for the rapid increase in separatism. There are of course many others, cultural, economic, linguistic, etc… But I believe opening borders also creates a vacuum in the centre of the current states. Almost nothing they do makes sense with open borders and mass migration. How can there be educational or health policies with open access from outside? Or a normal labor market leading to a normal economy? Or cultural policies? Mass migration with effectively unprotected borders make all central state functions pointless. One reaction is an increased desire to separate by constituent parts of the state. This is what the Brussels (and Washington) ruling elites don’t get. They have been so obsessed with not allowing a ‘power vacuum’ internationally, that they stopped caring about not creating a de facto governing vacuums inside the countries they are supposed to be governing.

Disintegration is one consequence of not having effective external boundaries. The global mandarins have been dreaming about a seamless, integrated, one-world with no borders global super-state (or a smaller European one), but they lost sight of how that changes the dynamic inside their existing countries. We are heading towards a period of more nationalism, more separatism, more disintegration that is really just re-integrating in a different way what has been stupidly abandoned by the global utopians. It will be messy. I wish both Catalans and Spaniards good luck – but if Madrid wants to stop the separatism, they should do their job and control the external borders.

The principle is that you can't have central government at all without strong borders. And the great irony is this hits liberals harder than conservatives, as they are generally the big-government affecionados. Pick the liberal agenda, and it's failures can be described in terms of weak borders. Healthcare/welfare: unaffordable when one fourth of all Mexicans are in the US trying to get on the dole. Gun control: laid out in yesterday's post. Heavy handed policing: essential when cops are fighting well-funded narco-terrorists on American streets. Gay rights: most threatened by the type of immigrants who would shoot up a gay night club. This is just as true for state and local governments as it is for the federal government. Witness the success of California's extra gun control, or in Massachusetts's attempt at statewide healthcare.

At this point the federal government doesn't really do much other than operate a military and try to bribe votes by redistributing wealth just the right way. That is not a recipe for long-term success. A government that no longer protects its borders is like when a popular company is bought up by a corporate holder, who cuts costs to profit off the name brand. Eventually the name brand is ruined, but no matter; the corporation made its profit. The same is true of government that is taken over by globalist influences. The government no longer offers the quality service it once did. It can go for some time in that manner, living off its fatty reserves, but eventually people wisen up.

Life is a continuous series of forces and counterforces; trends and countertrends. Ebb follows flow. We on the dissident right are horrified at the collapse of national borders by liberal central governments, and yet that collapse will be what does those same governments in. To quote Sun Tzu, as we frequently do here: Stand by the river long enough and the bodies of your enemies will float by.