Are Provincial Separatist movements "White Nationalist"?
It felt obvious to me that they are, but I figured out one possible reason the average Canadian loyalist can't see it.
This started as a comment to this great article by David Graham.
I’m generally confused when “provincial” separatist movements (whether Quebec or Alberta) aren’t able to recognize themselves as clearly White Nationalist movements.
They operate entirely within the bounds of Westphalian sovereignty, a distinctly Western European construct.
These settler governments were imposed by European empires (primarily British and French, although Russian, Spanish, and Netherlands were also involved) over relational, Indigenous sovereign nationalities. If a Westphalian provincial government folds, yet the land title does not clearly revert back to those relational sovereign nationalities, it becomes, by definition, an effort to create yet another Western European-style nation-state outside of Europe.
Please notice the regular abuse of the word “modern” to mean “Western European” when discussing Westphalian sovereignty or other Western European ideologies. White Supremacy shows itself in language (especially European languages like English and French) all the time.
These “provincial” separatist movements are grievance/victimhood cultures manufactured by political elites who gerrymander historical facts.
Instead of French-descended nationalists holding an ongoing grievance over losing the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), they should consider the systemic timeline: the French Empire directly bankrolled and supported (navy and troops) the American Revolution out of the same spite for the British winning that war. Without the French, the United States as we know it would not exist. This was despite Quebec Act of 1774, which provided considerable protections for French Catholic settlers, being one of the “intolerable acts” passed between 1763 (Royal Proclamation, etc) and then which was used to launch that 1775 civil war.
Trapped in an individualistic and linear time limited worldview (also Western European worldviews, “Enlightenment”, etc), modern nationalists remain blind to how systems operate over time. They look at individuals like Donald Trump as isolated incidents, completely ignoring that it was their own historical empire that they have built grievances cultures out of that helped build the very machine that produced him.
For personal amusement, I threw the above comment into a Gemini account that doesn’t keep history (so doesn’t know who I am, and won’t try as hard to flatter me -- a general problem with LLMs), and asked for a fact check.
While confirming everything else in what Dave and I wrote, it suggested that since these movements didn’t self-identify as “White Nationalist”, and didn’t use specific keywords, then they weren’t. That the focus for “White Nationalism” within Western political and social sciences is whether individual non-white bodies are excluded.
It was the Genos vs Homo converstion all over again.
I posted about that earlier, for anyone who hasn’t yet thought about Eurocentric Conservatism vs Eurocentric Liberalism, both of which are recognized as “White Supremacist” outside the strict Western European Liberalism lens.
I have been finding it interesting to learn just how narrow the Western European (and colonies) Overton window is, and finally understanding many of the confusions I’ve had with mainstream Canadian politics over all the previous decades.
Funny how I’m only finally learning the basics in my late 50’s. There really is a disincentive for people living on this continent to learn about Canada or the USA (As obvious members/participants in the UN’s Western Europe and Other Group who have far more in common with Western Europe than this hemisphere).
