As noted by others, the piece misses an obvious reason why Eastern European countries have experienced little immigration: they are economically much less attractive than Western European countries. Actually, judging from the population flows since the end of the Cold War, they are not particularly attractive to their own citizens, and for the very same economic reasons. In turn the combination of significant emigration and low fertility means that Eastern European countries
tend to have the worst demographic prospects in Europe: hardly an indication of success in preserving their own peoples and culture.
The Hajnal Line, in itself, isn't a hypothesis. It's a verifiable reality: for at least the past thousand years, people north and west of that line have had weaker kinship ties, a higher proportion of nuclear families, and a higher proportion of people living alone for at least part of their adulthood.
The hypothesis begins if we say that these characteristics explain why State formation and the market economy developed earlier there than elsewhere. If people are less bound by kinship, they are better able to organize their social and economic relationships in other ways, hence the earlier emergence of the State and the market economy.
For Northwest Europeans, the line between "insiders" and "outsiders" is conceived much more in moral terms, i.e., a willingness to adhere to rules that are conceived as being universal and absolute (as opposed to being situational and relative, as in the case of kin-based morality).
"Altruism toward outsiders" doesn't follow from any of the above. If you are outside a "moral community" you are hated much more passionately than someone who is simply outside your kin group. To the extent that Northwest Europeans have shown altruism toward outsiders, this would be a consequence of their assimilation of Christianity and Christian notions of charity. But I don't see such charity as a psychological inevitability.
I do believe that Northwest Europeans are more susceptible to ideology and are much more likely to bring their personal lives into line with ideology, often to an extreme degree. But I don't think they are inherently prone to being altruistic toward outsiders, especially given their tendency to define "outsiders" in moral terms.
What a happy coincidence that I have just started an HBD-oriented substack, which also draws on the insights of HBD Chick, comparing Eastern to Western Europeans; in fact just the other day Peter Frost commented helpfully on a piece of mine discussing the Hajnal Line.
It seems to me that the HL-founded explanation is plausible but incomplete: you are are missing several possible alternative explanations for the divergence between east and west in migration numbers, attitudes and policies. To take them in turn:
First, Eastern European countries are less attractive destinations for immigrants than Western European countries. Once they get to an Eastern European country most (not all) will go on to the west by hook or by crook.
Second, Eastern Europe has lots of Gypsies, who are brown and hardly prosocial. The lesson of their troublesome presence is likely to have influenced to some degree attitudes among governments and people in the east.
Third, I doubt that the citizens of *any* democratic country have much of a say in migration policy. Look at Britain, where the Conservative Party has consistently betrayed its voters on migration (ZERO SEATS!). I do not think that in the final analysis Eastern European democracies differ appreciably in the degree to which they reflect the popular will.
For reasons of which I'm uncertain Hungary and Poland are obvious exceptions (it *could* be in part the relative strength of religious sentiment there), but *if* mass foreign immigration has ever even been a matter for electoral politics in other E European countries--and where I am it has never been a major question, except in the months following the outbreak of the Ukrainian catastrophe--it would probably have been *elite* opinion that counted. In other words, the elite would likely have done what it wanted irrespective of the popular will.
It seems to me then that the principal question is why Eastern European *elites* are not interested in initiating mass immigration, not why the public opposes it.
PS: thanks for link to article by Schultz et al., which I hadn't seen.
Keep in mind there is deeply embedded historical aversion in that region against Turks and Arabs who conquered and raped Eastern Europe for centuries (while Western Europe lived in relative safety).
Famous battles against Turks and Ottomans are still vivid in Eastern European folklore, are still taught in schools and even celebrated. Anti-Ottoman rulers are national heroes and some achieved sainthood. Vlad Tepes & Stephan the Great are good examples in Romanian lore.
Given this context, it is then difficult to reconcile history and present day Oriental migration, especially for older generations.
A Pole told me back in the initial "refugee crisis" days how Poland also received a bunch of "refugees." Fortunately for Poles, there was no free stuff to be had, so all the refugees hopped straight on the train to Germany.
"Communism failed in Europe, just as it failed elsewhere. It was a grossly inefficient system that could only be maintained through massive coercion, repression and propaganda by the state". ???
Communism was thriving when I was in the USSR in the 1960s, but misgovernment–Russia's ancestral curse–drove it into a ditch.
Communism has been out-thriving Capitalism in China for generations and is on course to continue doing so.
'Capitalism was thriving when I arrived in the USA from Russia, but misgovernment–a relatively new phenomenon in America–is driving it into a ditch.
It's not about idealism. Nobody gives a damn about that stuff. It's about competent, honest governance.
Some former constituents of the Warsaw pact have significant numbers of non-European immigrants that predate its dissolution---the Vietnamese in Czechia (Czechoslovakia?) and the Chinese in Hungary, for instance. It's just that they are not causing major issues. (The immigration levels are probably lower than in the West.)
Good article and everything appears correct, but you may have missed the most important factor. As you say, immgration is path dependent. Once you have a large population of X, you keep getting more X as long as you are still richer than X's home country, thus Pakistanis will never stop coming to the UK no matter how much it stagnates economically. Thus the key factor is who was doing what in the 1960-90s when technological barriers to mmigration essentially collapsed. The key point about the ex Soviet countries is not so much their laws and atitudes, it's that they were poor. Basically, the richer you were at this key inflection point the worse off you are.
Another factor is language. Who wants to learn Slovenian, let alone Hungarian?
Finally, Russian nationalists are always compalking about immigration from the various Muslim Stans to the South, and they did just blow up a bunch of people, so perhaps they aren't as resistant to immigration as you say. The reason that immigraants don't come to Belarus is likely because it's poor and they speak some weird language.
As noted by others, the piece misses an obvious reason why Eastern European countries have experienced little immigration: they are economically much less attractive than Western European countries. Actually, judging from the population flows since the end of the Cold War, they are not particularly attractive to their own citizens, and for the very same economic reasons. In turn the combination of significant emigration and low fertility means that Eastern European countries
tend to have the worst demographic prospects in Europe: hardly an indication of success in preserving their own peoples and culture.
The Hajnal Line, in itself, isn't a hypothesis. It's a verifiable reality: for at least the past thousand years, people north and west of that line have had weaker kinship ties, a higher proportion of nuclear families, and a higher proportion of people living alone for at least part of their adulthood.
The hypothesis begins if we say that these characteristics explain why State formation and the market economy developed earlier there than elsewhere. If people are less bound by kinship, they are better able to organize their social and economic relationships in other ways, hence the earlier emergence of the State and the market economy.
For Northwest Europeans, the line between "insiders" and "outsiders" is conceived much more in moral terms, i.e., a willingness to adhere to rules that are conceived as being universal and absolute (as opposed to being situational and relative, as in the case of kin-based morality).
"Altruism toward outsiders" doesn't follow from any of the above. If you are outside a "moral community" you are hated much more passionately than someone who is simply outside your kin group. To the extent that Northwest Europeans have shown altruism toward outsiders, this would be a consequence of their assimilation of Christianity and Christian notions of charity. But I don't see such charity as a psychological inevitability.
I do believe that Northwest Europeans are more susceptible to ideology and are much more likely to bring their personal lives into line with ideology, often to an extreme degree. But I don't think they are inherently prone to being altruistic toward outsiders, especially given their tendency to define "outsiders" in moral terms.
What a happy coincidence that I have just started an HBD-oriented substack, which also draws on the insights of HBD Chick, comparing Eastern to Western Europeans; in fact just the other day Peter Frost commented helpfully on a piece of mine discussing the Hajnal Line.
It seems to me that the HL-founded explanation is plausible but incomplete: you are are missing several possible alternative explanations for the divergence between east and west in migration numbers, attitudes and policies. To take them in turn:
First, Eastern European countries are less attractive destinations for immigrants than Western European countries. Once they get to an Eastern European country most (not all) will go on to the west by hook or by crook.
Second, Eastern Europe has lots of Gypsies, who are brown and hardly prosocial. The lesson of their troublesome presence is likely to have influenced to some degree attitudes among governments and people in the east.
Third, I doubt that the citizens of *any* democratic country have much of a say in migration policy. Look at Britain, where the Conservative Party has consistently betrayed its voters on migration (ZERO SEATS!). I do not think that in the final analysis Eastern European democracies differ appreciably in the degree to which they reflect the popular will.
For reasons of which I'm uncertain Hungary and Poland are obvious exceptions (it *could* be in part the relative strength of religious sentiment there), but *if* mass foreign immigration has ever even been a matter for electoral politics in other E European countries--and where I am it has never been a major question, except in the months following the outbreak of the Ukrainian catastrophe--it would probably have been *elite* opinion that counted. In other words, the elite would likely have done what it wanted irrespective of the popular will.
It seems to me then that the principal question is why Eastern European *elites* are not interested in initiating mass immigration, not why the public opposes it.
PS: thanks for link to article by Schultz et al., which I hadn't seen.
Keep in mind there is deeply embedded historical aversion in that region against Turks and Arabs who conquered and raped Eastern Europe for centuries (while Western Europe lived in relative safety).
Famous battles against Turks and Ottomans are still vivid in Eastern European folklore, are still taught in schools and even celebrated. Anti-Ottoman rulers are national heroes and some achieved sainthood. Vlad Tepes & Stephan the Great are good examples in Romanian lore.
Given this context, it is then difficult to reconcile history and present day Oriental migration, especially for older generations.
The reason there was mass non-European immigration in the West is because of liberal ideology among the elites (top down), not bottom up factors.
A Pole told me back in the initial "refugee crisis" days how Poland also received a bunch of "refugees." Fortunately for Poles, there was no free stuff to be had, so all the refugees hopped straight on the train to Germany.
"Communism failed in Europe, just as it failed elsewhere."
Same is true of democracy.
Demographics are destiny? The article itself dispels the myth that it's propagating.
"Communism failed in Europe, just as it failed elsewhere. It was a grossly inefficient system that could only be maintained through massive coercion, repression and propaganda by the state". ???
Communism was thriving when I was in the USSR in the 1960s, but misgovernment–Russia's ancestral curse–drove it into a ditch.
Communism has been out-thriving Capitalism in China for generations and is on course to continue doing so.
'Capitalism was thriving when I arrived in the USA from Russia, but misgovernment–a relatively new phenomenon in America–is driving it into a ditch.
It's not about idealism. Nobody gives a damn about that stuff. It's about competent, honest governance.
Some former constituents of the Warsaw pact have significant numbers of non-European immigrants that predate its dissolution---the Vietnamese in Czechia (Czechoslovakia?) and the Chinese in Hungary, for instance. It's just that they are not causing major issues. (The immigration levels are probably lower than in the West.)
Good article and everything appears correct, but you may have missed the most important factor. As you say, immgration is path dependent. Once you have a large population of X, you keep getting more X as long as you are still richer than X's home country, thus Pakistanis will never stop coming to the UK no matter how much it stagnates economically. Thus the key factor is who was doing what in the 1960-90s when technological barriers to mmigration essentially collapsed. The key point about the ex Soviet countries is not so much their laws and atitudes, it's that they were poor. Basically, the richer you were at this key inflection point the worse off you are.
Another factor is language. Who wants to learn Slovenian, let alone Hungarian?
Finally, Russian nationalists are always compalking about immigration from the various Muslim Stans to the South, and they did just blow up a bunch of people, so perhaps they aren't as resistant to immigration as you say. The reason that immigraants don't come to Belarus is likely because it's poor and they speak some weird language.
Interesting article, cosmopolitism and working class collectivism must be both opposed like Henry De Lesquen proposed for more information
https://national-liberal.com/
https://lesquen.fr/
https://carrefourdelhorloge.fr/
Hold the presses! Speaking of democracies and freedom...this just out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYdH0nuQ-to
Hanania!
Maybe a difference in mutational load could play a role too; eastern countries industrialized later than western ones