Of course, it would be even nicer if a sense of shared identity could be built at a yet higher level than the nation, but nationalism and internationalism need not be alternatives. The key word in
“Charity begins at home” is begins. Compassion is like a muscle: by exercising it toward fellow citizens we can develop feelings of regard for those who are not. Further, we now know that building a shared identity beyond the level of the nation is extremely difficult. Over the past half-century by far the world’s most successful
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supranational experiment has been the European Union. Yet even after that half-century, and the memory of when nationalism was more like anthrax than measles, the European Union redistributes far less than 1 percent of European income between countries. The travails of the euro, and the fierce opposition of Germans to the notion of a “transfer union”—read “paying for the Greeks”—is
testament to the limits of refashioning identity. Fifty years of the European Community have demonstrated that people cannot
muster enough common identity even as Europeans to support any significant redistribution. Within Europe, around forty times as much revenue is dispensed by national governments as by the European Commission. By the time we get to the global level, the mechanism for redistributive taxation—aid—is even weaker. The international system has struggled and failed for the past four decades even to reach a tax rate of 0.7 percent of income. From the perspective of cooperation between people, nations are not selfish impediments to global citizenship; they are virtually our only systems for providing public goods.
Not only does the redistribution provided by a nation utterly dominate redistributions by any higher-level systems of cooperation, it also dominates lower-level systems. Subnational governments almost invariably handle a much smaller share of revenue than the national government. The exceptions, notably Belgium and Canada, are precisely where a sense of identity is largely subnational, reflecting language divisions. For example, Canada is unusual in assigning the ownership of natural resources to the regional level rather than the nation. While this is a necessary concession in the face of a weak sense of nationhood, it is otherwise undesirable: it is more equitable if valuable natural resources are owned nationally rather than benefiting only those lucky enough to be living in the region where they are found. It is not as if Albertans put the oil in
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Alberta, they just happen to be sitting a bit nearer to it than other Canadians. Even the ultimate decentralized system of redistribution, the family, is but a pale reflection of the state. Indeed, charity does not, literally, begin at home; it begins in ministries of finance and is modestly supplemented by family generosity. The state is even heavily involved in the transfer of resources from parents to young children: in the absence of state-financed and state-required education, many children would be left uneducated, as was my
father.
Nations function as systems of redistributive taxation because, from the emotional perspective, identifying with a nation has proved to be an extremely powerful way in which people bond.
A shared sense of nationhood need not imply aggression; rather it is a practical means of establishing fraternity. There is a good reason that the French revolutionaries who ushered in modernity bundled in fraternity with liberty and equality: fraternity is the emotion that reconciles liberty with equality. Only if we see others as members of the same community do we accept that the redistributive taxation needed for equity does not infringe our liberty.
In many ways the most challenging people to socialize are young men: as teenagers they appear to be genetically programmed to be antisocially violent and contrary. Yet national identity has proved capable of drawing in wild young men, indeed, all too capable.
Think of those hordes of young men in August 1914 demonstrating in each national capital in favor of the war that subsequently slaugh-tered many of them. The prevailing wariness of nationality as identity is not usually because of its inefficacy but because of its historic propensity to warfare.
Not only are nations good at raising and redistributing tax revenue, from the technical perspective they are the level at which many collective activities are best undertaken. Collective provision reaps
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economies of scale but sacrifices variety. 8 In the trade-off between
scale economies and variety, very few activities appear to be worth organizing at the global level. But national-level provision has proved to be the norm. To an unknowable extent, the concentration of public goods provision at the national level is because nations have proved to be powerful units of collective identity, rather than because identities have been shaped by the logic of the gains from cooperation. But matching identities to collective action has been valuable.
National identity may also be helpful in motivating the workforce in the public sector. Recall the key distinction between insiders and outsiders: whether workers internalize the objectives of the organization. One criterion for assigning an activity to the public sector rather than the private market is where motivation by financial incentives is problematic. It may not be easy to link performance to pay because outputs are too amorphous to be well approximated by quantitative measures or because performance depends heavily upon teamwork.
Conversely, many activities commonly assigned to the public sector, such as teaching and caring for the sick, lend themselves readily to internalization. It is easier to get intrinsic satisfaction from teaching children to read than from selling perfume. But in building worker commitment in public organizations symbols of nationalism are manifestly useful. In Britain the public health organization is called the National Health Service, and the insider nursing union the Royal College of Nurses. The ultimate public organizations in which reliance is placed upon commitment rather than incentives are the armed forces, and they are festooned in the symbolism of the nation.
Indeed, the one illustration in Identity Economics, the book by Akerlof and Kranton, is of recruitment into the American military.
Just as Michael Sandel laments the transfer of provision of many goods from the public sector to the private market, so, within the
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public sector, there has been a corresponding shift from commitment to incentives. As with the more general trend, much of this has been driven by an exaggerated belief in the efficacy of money.
But it may have been compounded by a growing reluctance to use national identity as a motivator and by its reduced efficacy, given that migrants often make up a substantial proportion of the public sector workforce.
Africa provides a potent example of what happens when identi-
ties and collective organization are mismatched. Nations were patched together on maps by foreigners, whereas identities had been forged through thousands of years of settlement patterns.
Only in a handful of countries have leaders got round to building a sense of common citizenship: in most, identities are predominantly subnational, and cooperation among different identities is difficult because of a lack of trust. Yet in most of Africa public provision is heavily centralized at the level of the nation: this is where revenues accrue. The outcome is that public provision works very badly.
A standard characterization of African political economy is that each clan regards the public purse as a common pool resource to be looted on behalf of the clan. It is regarded as ethical to cooperate within the clan to loot, rather than to cooperate at the level of the nation to deliver public goods. Founding president Julius Nyerere of Tanzania was a notable exception to the failure of African leaders to build a sense of common national identity. In chapter 3 I
described how Kenya’s fifty different ethnic groups impede village-level cooperation in maintaining wells. However, the same study compared not only Kenyan villages with different degrees of diversity but also Tanzanian villages just across th
e border. Because the border was an arbitrary nineteenth-century construct, the underlying ethnic mix on both sides of the border was the same; the key difference was leadership efforts at nation building. Whereas
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President Nyerere had emphasized nation over ethnic identity, his counterpart in Kenya, President Kenyatta, had played on ethnicity as a means of building a loyal following, and his successors had continued the strategy. These distinctive approaches to national identity turned out to have consequences. Whereas the different ethnic groups found cooperation difficult in Kenyan villages, they found it normal in Tanzanian villages. In fact, in Tanzania the degree of diversity made no difference to cooperation. National identity has its uses.
Between the individualists who belittle the need for social cooperation, and the universalists who are fearful of nationalism, nations as solutions to the problem of collective action have fallen out of favor. But while the need for cooperation is real, the fears of nationalism are outdated. As Steven Pinker argues, warfare between developed countries is now unthinkable. Germany currently faces difficult choices over support for Greece: without financial support Greece will have to withdraw from the euro, jeopardizing its continued existence, whereas with financial support the incentive for Greece to implement economic reforms will be diminished. Chancellor
Merkel has committed Germany to maintaining the euro at all costs, arguing that its collapse would revive the specter of war between the European powers. But this fear, though a heartfelt reflection of Germany’s past, is blatantly ridiculous as a prospect for its future.
European peace is not built on the euro or even on the European Community. We can test whether Chancellor Merkel is right in her fears, by comparing prospective German relations with Poland and Norway. During the Second World War, Germany invaded and
occupied both of them. But now, whereas Poland has adopted the euro and is a member of the European Community, Norway has
done neither. Yet is Germany one whit more likely to invade Norway than Poland? Quite evidently, Germany will never again invade
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either of these countries. What underpins European peace is not a currency and a Brussels bureaucracy, but a profound change in sen-sibilities. A century on from 1914, no European crowd is going to cheer for violence.
The more reasonable fear of nationalism is not that it will
unleash war with other nations but that it will not be inclusive: nationalism will be a front for racism. Instead of defining the nation by the people who live in it, it might be defined by the majority ethnic group. The British Nationalist Party really means the Indigenous English Party; the True Finns really means ethnic majority Finns, and so forth. But allowing racist groups to hijack the potent symbol and effective organizational unit of the nation is itself dangerous. If, by default, other politicians underplay a sense of national identity, it hands a potent political tool to evil. There need be no tension between being nationalist and yet antiracist. A superb example of just such a stance happened by a peculiar collective chemistry during the London Olympic Games in 2012. Britain, to its own amazement, won gold after gold. Those gold medals were won by a racial rainbow that was itself a part of national pride.
Identities are forged by symbols: the British reaction to the Olympics was both an expression of something already forged, and that forging in process: a multiracial nation. Analogously, the phrase
“England for the English” should be as anodyne as “Nigeria for the Nigerians.” Mainstream politicians should have defined English identity in the same way as the Scottish Nationalist Party has defined “Scottish” as “those who live in Scotland.” National identity should not have been allowed to become the presumptive
property of racists. Nations have not become obsolete. Reducing nationality to a mere legalism—a set of rights and obligations—
would be the collective equivalent of autism: life lived with rules but without empathy.
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Is National Identity Consistent with Rapid Migration?
National identity is valuable and it is also permissible. So is it threatened by immigration? No glib answer is warranted: a sense of shared identity is not necessarily perturbed by immigration, but it may be.
The assimilation and fusion approaches to migration are clearly potentially consistent with the maintenance of a strong common national identity. The narrative of assimilation assigns to the indigenous population the role of being proselytizers for their nation.
Migrants are to be welcomed and inculcated with the culture. This role is not only consistent with pride in self-identity, it is reinforc-ing. For most of American history this was the country’s migration model: Americans have been proud of their nation, and immigration reinforced a common self-image of American exceptionalism.
Similarly, the French have for over a century been proselytizers for their national culture, and substantial migration has been compatible with a continuing sense of pride.
The problems with assimilation and fusion are practical. As I set out in chapter 3, the lower the rate of absorption the more rapid the rate of migration. The rate is also lower the wider the cultural distance between migrants and the indigenous. It might also be fall-ing over time as improved international communications make it easier for migrants to remain connected, day to day, with their societies of origin. This suggests that for assimilation and fusion to work, there is a need for controls on the rate of migration that are fine-tuned to take into account its composition. Neither the indigenous nor migrants can be hectored into integration, but the indigenous must be subject to requirements that all their organizations become inclusive of migrants, while migrants may need to be subject to requirements of language learning and spatial dispersion.
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The permanent cultural separation approach to migration faces different problems. It sits less comfortably with the maintenance of a common sense of national identity than the assimilation and fusion approaches. For migrants it is undemanding: instead of having to switch from one national identity to another, they can simply add citizenship of their new nation as an identifier to their other characteristics. But if the indigenous are to be relegated to the status of one cultural “community” among several, what identity are they to be given? Almost inevitably, if Bangladeshis in England are “the Bangladeshi community,” and the Somalis are
“the Somali community,” then the indigenous become “the English.”
But with this development the sense of shared nationality is forfeited: this is the royal road to “England for the English.” If the indigenous appropriate the national identifier, what term is left for the entirety? Yet more problematic, what role does the narrative of cultural separation offer to the indigenous community? In the prevailing official narrative, the dominant message delivered to the indigenous is “Don’t be racist,” “Make way,” and “Learn to celebrate other cultures.” As it stands, this is belittling. It may drive the indigenous into “hunkering down”: the dismal sentiment, now often voiced within the indigenous English working class, that “times used to be good.”
Such an uninspiring role for the indigenous is not the only one available to the cultural separation approach. It could instead be presented through a narrative in which the indigenous have a more positive role. For example, it might be that in cohabiting in the same territory, the many distinct formerly national communities are pioneers of the future “global village.” The indigenous, in choosing this strategy for their territory, are the vanguard of this future.
Within this narrative, the nation embodies a set of ethical principles of intercommunity equity made manifest in a set of legal obligations
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and entitlements that apply to all equally. It is these globally appropriate values, rather than its culture, that the indigenous community shares with others. In
Britain, the closest that officialdom came to promoting such a narrative was an initiative of Gordon Brown, while prime minister, which sought to answer the question “What is Britishness?” Since Brown strongly self-identified as Scottish but needed English votes, this had a certain comic aspect to it. The obvious answer, that to be British meant to be Scottish, English, Welsh, or Northern Irish was off the menu, and the official answer turned out to be that our defining qualities were a commitment to democracy, equity, and various other appealing characteristics commonly associated with Scandinavia. Attractive as that vision might be, in the ensuing election Mr. Brown’s vote share of the indigenous vote collapsed to the lowest his party had ever received.
In summary, while migration does not make nations obsolete,
the continued acceleration of migration in conjunction with a policy of multiculturalism might potentially threaten their viability.
Absorption has proved more difficult than anticipated. The alternative of continued cultural separation works well enough when judged by the minimalist hurdle of the preservation of social peace between groups but may not work on the more pertinent hurdles of the preservation of cooperation and redistribution within them.
Such evidence as we have is that continually increasing diversity could at some point put these critical achievements of modern societies at risk.
CHAPTER 12
Making Migration Policies
Fit for Purpose
CONTRARY TO THE PREJUDICES OF XENOPHOBES, the
evidence does not suggest that migration to date has had significantly adverse effects on the indigenous populations of host societies. Contrary to self-perceived “progressives,” the evidence does suggest that without effective controls migration would rapidly accelerate to the point at which additional migration would have adverse effects, both on the indigenous populations of host societies and on those left behind in the poorest countries. Migrants themselves, although the direct beneficiaries of the free lunch of higher productivity, suffer psychological costs that appear to be substantial. Migration thus affects many different groups, but only one has the practical power to control it: the indigenous population of host societies. Should that group act in its self-interest, or balance the interests of all the groups?
Paul Collier Page 23
