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I've been trying to put into words why I'm against open borders and I think this is the piece I needed to understand my inherent distrust. A post-national state does not have a people, it has a territory. Other - real - nations can exploit that territory without regard for the people. The government of a nation is elected by the people to put their common good first.
Trudeau sees himself as some sort of steward of Canada's natural resources and land. His "postnational state" denies the existence of a category called "Canadian people." There is the land of Canada, and the people currently inhabiting it which he has jurisdiction over. But without having a category of Canadian people to even reference, his decisions are not sourced in what is the well-being of the Canadian people and their decedents.
If "Comintern" was still in the public parlance, you wouldn't have needed to search for such a term. Trudeau clearly sees himself as the General Secretary of the Canadian Union in its temporary position as a state, during its transition to an indivisible part of Communism.
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Strictly speaking, a post-national state need only lack a people defined by common birth or shared ancestry, and can have one defined in other ways. One can argue that nation-states are a superior form of social organization to those other ways, but they are neither untried nor historically novel (e.g. Rome, Islam).
I'm not sure ancient Rome is the correct analogy here. Rome was quite stingy with offering citizenship. It did happen, but it took hundreds of years. Even as late as 100 BC, when Rome was already master of the Mediterranean Sea, many cities and towns within 100 miles of Rome were merely "allies" and not citizens. This caused the Social War (91–87 BC) in which Rome was forced to offer citizenship to some "allies" in order to suppress the others.
It wasn't until three hundreds years later, (212 AD) under the reign of the notorious tyrant Caracalla, that the citizenship was extended to all free men in the Empire. By then, many people didn't actually want it, and the reason it was granted was to extract more tax revenues.
Rome was ascendant when it was a nation state composed of Romans. When it offered citizenship to others, it was generally from a position of weakness. I will concede that the Romans held out for a long time.
While they were in most respects stingy by modern standards, the fact that they had any form of naturalization at all was a radical break from all of their Mediterranean neighbors e.g. Athens where only people with two citizen parents were citizens themselves or Sparta with its permanent helot underclass, and this contributed to Roman military dominance as they were able to radically increase their available manpower over time. I also think the sort of mass granting of citizenship to allies as a reward for military service that Rome engaged in would be seen as radical even today, something akin to the US giving all inhabitants of Sonora citizenship in exchange for them suppressing the cartels (the closest modern equivalent might be the French Foreign Legion, which is relatively small).
If we're going by the standard chronology, where the zenith of Roman power is the death of Trajan in 117 AD, then I don't see how this is true. 2 of the 5 Good Emperors were Iberians and no one seems to have cared, not to mention the long string of Illyrian emperors who ended the third century crises and founded one, if not the greatest of Roman cities i.e. Constantinople. On that note, the fact that a bunch of Greeks went around for a thousand years calling themselves Romans seems evidence enough of the assimilatory power of Roman institutions (interestingly enough these Romans functioned more and more like a nation as they lost territory and became weaker, but it certainly wasn't the same as the original nation).
Assimilating elites and the masses are different things and changes in politics and technology matter here.
I don't think most Britons are worried about Asians who went to Harrow, which I suppose would be the equivalent to Greek and Gallic nobles fully buying into Rome.
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Good points all around. My person take is that Rome reached its zenith with the fall of Carthage. The territorial gains for the next 200 years were just the inevitable consolidation. But I recognize this might be a minority view.
And you are right to mention Sparta which largely died out because of sub replacement level fertility.
Sparta’s actual fertility rate is unknown; citizen oliganthropia in Sparta was caused by runaway inequality driving citizens below the property requirements for citizenship.
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A post-national state is usually known as an "empire".
And Canada has always been, to a point, an empire; if you don't live in the Triangle between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, your vote and your interests don't matter in the slightest when it comes to federal politics. This is slightly less true for the provinces east of that area, and provinces do have some overlap (and it's worth noting that, because the Triangle is not its own province, it can be overruled in Provincial politics especially when that Triangle has made those provinces their enemy... which, naturally, they have).
Thus that Triangle, for all intents and purposes, is Canada, and the rest is just territory that it has empire/dominion over (the "provinces" are more sub-administrative units in the ancient Roman sense; they are not "states"). Quebec's culture is more reactive/resistant to this state of affairs; the West, not as much, but the West has more in common (culturally, legally, linguistically) with the Triangle than Quebec does.
The "post-national" rhetoric is a Moldbug-ian call for Triangle residents to be more explicit in their supremacy (and an acknowledgement that the "post-national" government will put Triangle interests first) and stop thinking Canada is/should be like the US, with its checks and balances between states- which happen to prevent SoCal and the NY-DC corridor from exercising Imperial control over the rest of the nation to which they feel entitled (because the "I win" button in democracy is simply "have more voters than the other guy"; that's why the US [nominally] has laws to limit how much power that can ultimately yield, why most of the "it should be purely population that decides everything" rhetoric comes out of those places, and why each side has the immigration policies that they do- and this is generally seen as legitimate in the mind of the average resident, even those opposed to the Triangle, the most major effect being that this is why Quebec-minus-Montreal isn't its own nation right now).
It's worth noting that #notAllTriangleResidents, of course- even in the Triangle, Canada is still generally seen through the US lens of a collection of polities working together to accomplish some common goal, with a common-ish culture, with some differences (otherwise there would be no need to have Triangle residents see their empire for what it truly is). This is an even more popular view in the West, which is why when the West (and to a point, its elites) comes to protest the Triangle and its people -> policies they wave Canadian flags, not separatist ones.
I think that for [the idea, and "nation", of] Canada to be stable going forward the rest of the nation needs some much-needed checks and balances against the Triangle; that is what the Senate is nominally for (and, very revealingly, it was initially set up so that Ontario + Quebec alone could veto any legislation, though that's not what it does in practice). Of course, usually when this happens, a pan-dominion government can be elected in the Triangle and imposes on the Triangle elite anyway (which, naturally, deflates separatist movements); that happened post-Trudeau once, and perhaps it'll happen again.
This seems off given the history of the current edition of the Conservative Party of Canada. Stephen Harper is an Albertan, and he built his political career in a party which was initially founded with the explicit goal of providing better representation of Western interests (Reform), and gradually evolved into a generic right-populist anti-Triangle elites party (Canadian Alliance) before doing a reverse takeover of the moribund Progressive Conservative party. Poilievre represents a riding in the Ottawa suburbs, but he grew up in Alberta, was a member of Reform/Canadian Alliance before the merger, started his political career in Albertan student politics, and only moved to Ottawa because he co-founded a lobbying firm with a man who would go on to be Attorney-General of Alberta. I think it is clearly fair to describe Poilievre as Albertan as well.
Even back in the PC era, Brian Mulroney (the last PC prime minister to serve a full term) grew up in (non-Triangle) eastern Quebec and represented a riding in eastern Quebec, although he did have a non-political career in Montreal in between.
The Triangle only dominates Canadian politics when the Liberals are in government and, despite what the Liberals want you to think, that isn't all the time. The Canadian party system in 2024 absolutely represents the interests of Western-Canada-outside-metro-Vancouver - probably beyond the level of representation the population out there merits.
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