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.
According to the World Bank, France has a GDP per capita of $55,000. Meanwhile, GDP per capita is $50,000 in Slovenia, $50,000 in Czechia and $48,000 in Lithuania. Eastern Europe has caught up a lot. And even though it lags behind countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, it is vastly richer than the migrants' countries of origin.
All this counts. Yet GDP measurements can conceal as much as they reveal. Also--and this is the more important point--social security benefits are less accessible in E Europe.
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.
The nazi and fascist parties that Noah is supplying as counter-examples to anti-collectivist/pro-altruistic tendencies among nordics did not define friend/enemy in moral terms. They were explicitly based on blood and soil definitions of the in-group.
Blood and soil nationalism was an ideology. You can argue that this sort of nationalism used the language of kinship, but the same is true for civic nationalism and for most ideologies. Christians and communists refer to each other as "brothers" and "sisters."
And please stop using the word "altruism" in this discussion. It has no relevance here.
"And please stop using the word "altruism" in this discussion. It has no relevance here."
Could you elaborate on this? Altruism is typically defined as a concern for the well-being of others that is not motivated by self-interest, or proxies for self-interest such as kinship networks or strategic relationships, which matches up fairly well with the "individualistic, but not low-trust" character that peoples within the Hajnal line are conjectured to have evolved.
"Blood and soil nationalism was an ideology. You can argue that this sort of nationalism used the language of kinship..."
Are ideologies accepted or rejected with no degree of influence from biological temperament?
If you help someone who is following the same rule book as your own, you are helping yourself (assuming, of course, that the rule book hasn't been altered to suit someone else's priorities). You are similarly helping yourself if you persecute someone who is not following your rule book. So where is the altruism? Frankly, I'm puzzled by your puzzlement. Jonathan Schulz did not refer to altruism in his paper. So who did?
I agree that many modern ideologies have become injurious to the very people who believe in them (e.g., modern Christianity, modern Americanism, the modern "Left" and the modern "Right"). But this is a recent development, largely due to the hacking of ideology by various interest groups.
Finally, keep in mind that nation states and kin groups are two very different things. Strong kinship ties can create clans, but they are a hindrance to the formation of larger polities. This is why State formation has been so difficult in the Middle East. People prefer to identify with their family, their extended family, and their clan -- in that order. The State is something remote and abstract. It doesn't have the same pull on people.
I believe Schulz used the phrase "impersonally prosocial (e.g., trusting of strangers) while revealing less conformity and in-group loyalty". Noah rephrased this as 'altruism' in the current article.
In either case, it is difficult to square this description with a purely strategic loyalty to individuals who share your genes and/or culture, given that you can't evaluate the loyalties of strangers and out-groups by definition either don't share the same culture or don't share the same genes. Schulz is precisely describing behaviour that can't be rationalised within your framework.
In their paper, Schulz et al. argue that the Western Church (i.e., Catholicism) replaced a morality based on kinship with a more ideological morality based on Christian teachings:
“By the start of the Common Era (CE), universalizing religions with powerful moralizing gods (or cosmic forces), universal ethical codes, and contingent afterlife beliefs had emerged across the Old World.”
“Beginning in Late Antiquity, the branch of Christianity that eventually evolved into the Roman Catholic Church—hereafter, the Western Church or simply the Church—systematically undermined Europe’s intensive kin-based institutions through a combination of religious prohibitions and prescriptions.”
The universal morality of Christianity did not result in medieval Christians being indifferently altruistic. Schulz doesn’t make that claim, and I don’t think one can infer it. Clearly, the Church was intolerant toward outsiders, not only pagans, Jews, and Muslims but also various groups of heretics who were divergent only on minor doctrinal matters. In short, medieval Christians weren't Quakers.
Yes, the Church was a means to assist “individuals who share your genes and/or culture” — not only through collective defense against outsiders but also as a collective good that optimized fertility, family stability, and reproductive success.
I do feel, however, that Schulz et al. misrepresent their findings when they state in the abstract to their paper: “the Western Church’s transformation of European kinship … fostered … less conformity.” That statement strikes me as incredible. The Church may have decreased behavioral conformity among close kin, but it greatly increased behavioral conformity among medieval Europeans as a whole. Behavior was regulated to a much greater degree by the Church than it had been by earlier pagan institutions.
In sum, the Schulz et al. paper is a valuable work on the subject, but one should also consult papers by other writers, notably Kevin MacDonald, as well as the many blog posts written by hbd* chick.
Noah Karl's article says that the intensity of kinship ties is very low in Russia. This sounds logical to some extent: the climate in Russia is very northern and the inhabitants of the so-called Murmansk or Arkhangelsk live further north than any Scandinavians.
But culturally, it seems that Russians are radically different from Europeans with the "Western European model of marriage". Why is that?
In our 21st century, for example, Russians have become more conservative on some issues:
Nothing like this had ever happened to any northern European nation.
Unlike other people on the line of "Western marriage", Russians simply do not have a liberal culture in society. They value gender egalitarianism least of all, even in Eastern Europe:
And while all Eastern Europeans have become more "feminist" since 1991, Russians have also been the least likely to become so.
And right now there is a war with Ukraine for nationalist reasons and the majority of Russians support the occupation of Crimea and Donbass for nationalist reasons.
Russians have been essentially conservative and not at all “Western European” for many centuries in a row.
For example, in Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, Russians had an incredibly high birth rate, 7-8 children per woman - nothing like this had ever happened in Sweden and the Netherlands. Tsarist Russia itself was the most “reactionary” state in Europe - the most anti-Jewish and anti-democratic state until 1917.
And among Russians, a frequent phenomenon in the public consciousness was the feeling of themselves as a separate, special, actually non-European nation. The movement of “Slavophiles” in Tsarist Russia, the opposition of Europe and Russia by Dostoevsky, the current public consciousness in Russia, where the word “West” is used to designate Europe as something “alien”.
Why do Russians have such a low intensity of family ties, but such a “non-European” conservative culture?
First, the Hajnal line runs from Trieste to St. Petersburg. So Russia lies mostly beyond the region of strong individualism and weak kinship. That being said, we should think more in terms of a transition zone, rather than a fine line. When I talk with people from Azerbaijan and Georgia, they see Russia as being midway between them and the West. Russians are less clannish and more individualistic, but not as much as Westerners.
Keep in mind that these behavioral tendencies are partly cultural and partly genetic. Culture is a template for natural selection. A certain behavior may start off being 100% cultural and then become, with the passage of generations, more and more genetically hardwired. So the differences you see between Russia and the West may reflect a mix of cultural and genetic causes. Among the cultural causes, a major one was the Iron Curtain. That barrier didn't just keep people in. It also kept out Western culture and Western behavioral norms. Anatoly Karlin has written a lot on that subject.
The West itself has become much more individualistic over the past century. This may be a case of cultural evolution outrunning genetic evolution. A pre-existing predisposition toward individualism and weak kinship has enabled the State and the market economy to invade more and more areas of life that were previously assigned to the family and the kin group. This process has acquired a momentum of its own, and it's now pushing most of us beyond the bounds of our normal behavioral phenotype.
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.
It's odd that Ukrainians didn't try to establish a preemptive beach head, considering the Poles want to retake Galicia muh Polish Lithuanian commonwealth intermarium.
Ukrainian high time preference FTW
Or maybe it's the fact that almost all of them were 'Ukrainians' from outside Galicia who are really Russians and don't care about Galicia I don't know
This was back in 2015/16, when they had lots of Syrians about. The Pole said to me how they had Ukrainian refugees as well, but the latter sought work and behaved themselves. Those Ukrainians were probably the smart ones.
ISTR Luka hinting that opportunistic Polish land grabs wouldn’t be condoned, as it would make southwest Belarus vulnerable to being bitten off.
Demographics are destiny, but not in the way most mean it. It is not the quantity of humans but the quality. Nations/countries do not become great because of the number of people but because of positive traits.
"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.
Immigrants don't mind learning Swedish, Danish or Norwegian--hardly languages of world significance.
"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."
Good point--but again this is a matter of elite, not popular, will. The Kremlin is immigration maximalist where its ex-Soviet republics are concerned.
"...and they did just blow up a bunch of people..."
Ok, so I messed up on Belarussian being a common language. But maybe that's the point. I'm pretty worldly, I think, at least more so than your average Somali who bungs a grand to a pirate to get on his dinghy and I don't know the first thing about Belarus. Some countries are just intrinsically less desirable as destinations. Which brings me to:
"Immigrants don't mind learning Swedish, Danish or Norwegian--hardly languages of world significance."
These are literally the best countries in the world, though, and despite, until recently, having almost comically generous immigration policies, they still only kept pace with famous European countries per capita (and by absolute numbers had far fewer).* Plus you on get there pretty well with English. I'd say that counts as evidence in favour of language barriers being a factor. All important phenomena are multi-causal, so I'd guess the magic formula for no immigrants is:
Russia should not be ignored. It has around 10-15 million recent migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus. This migration started in 2004 [1]. By now, the biggest migrant Muslim group (Uzbeks) is significantly larger than the biggest domestic Muslim group (Volga Tatars).
I think the most apparent "normie" reason is that East Bloc countries were much poorer because of communism, so there was less incentive for migrants to go there. But then we have the example of Russia, which was poor yet attracted racially distinct migrants from even poorer stans. At the same time, the government was more authoritarian and oriented towards UK-style "imperial greatness" than in e.g. Ukraine, so it crushed indigenous resistance against mass migration for the sake of "national interest".
I would say this shows the importance of the elite stratum in determining migration. Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe have similar societies in terms of norms and views, but the outcome is so radically different.
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.
According to the World Bank, France has a GDP per capita of $55,000. Meanwhile, GDP per capita is $50,000 in Slovenia, $50,000 in Czechia and $48,000 in Lithuania. Eastern Europe has caught up a lot. And even though it lags behind countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, it is vastly richer than the migrants' countries of origin.
All this counts. Yet GDP measurements can conceal as much as they reveal. Also--and this is the more important point--social security benefits are less accessible in E Europe.
That’s the main reason, but note that Japan is rich and it doesn’t have any immigrants.
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.
The nazi and fascist parties that Noah is supplying as counter-examples to anti-collectivist/pro-altruistic tendencies among nordics did not define friend/enemy in moral terms. They were explicitly based on blood and soil definitions of the in-group.
Blood and soil nationalism was an ideology. You can argue that this sort of nationalism used the language of kinship, but the same is true for civic nationalism and for most ideologies. Christians and communists refer to each other as "brothers" and "sisters."
And please stop using the word "altruism" in this discussion. It has no relevance here.
"And please stop using the word "altruism" in this discussion. It has no relevance here."
Could you elaborate on this? Altruism is typically defined as a concern for the well-being of others that is not motivated by self-interest, or proxies for self-interest such as kinship networks or strategic relationships, which matches up fairly well with the "individualistic, but not low-trust" character that peoples within the Hajnal line are conjectured to have evolved.
"Blood and soil nationalism was an ideology. You can argue that this sort of nationalism used the language of kinship..."
Are ideologies accepted or rejected with no degree of influence from biological temperament?
If you help someone who is following the same rule book as your own, you are helping yourself (assuming, of course, that the rule book hasn't been altered to suit someone else's priorities). You are similarly helping yourself if you persecute someone who is not following your rule book. So where is the altruism? Frankly, I'm puzzled by your puzzlement. Jonathan Schulz did not refer to altruism in his paper. So who did?
I agree that many modern ideologies have become injurious to the very people who believe in them (e.g., modern Christianity, modern Americanism, the modern "Left" and the modern "Right"). But this is a recent development, largely due to the hacking of ideology by various interest groups.
Finally, keep in mind that nation states and kin groups are two very different things. Strong kinship ties can create clans, but they are a hindrance to the formation of larger polities. This is why State formation has been so difficult in the Middle East. People prefer to identify with their family, their extended family, and their clan -- in that order. The State is something remote and abstract. It doesn't have the same pull on people.
I believe Schulz used the phrase "impersonally prosocial (e.g., trusting of strangers) while revealing less conformity and in-group loyalty". Noah rephrased this as 'altruism' in the current article.
In either case, it is difficult to square this description with a purely strategic loyalty to individuals who share your genes and/or culture, given that you can't evaluate the loyalties of strangers and out-groups by definition either don't share the same culture or don't share the same genes. Schulz is precisely describing behaviour that can't be rationalised within your framework.
In their paper, Schulz et al. argue that the Western Church (i.e., Catholicism) replaced a morality based on kinship with a more ideological morality based on Christian teachings:
“By the start of the Common Era (CE), universalizing religions with powerful moralizing gods (or cosmic forces), universal ethical codes, and contingent afterlife beliefs had emerged across the Old World.”
“Beginning in Late Antiquity, the branch of Christianity that eventually evolved into the Roman Catholic Church—hereafter, the Western Church or simply the Church—systematically undermined Europe’s intensive kin-based institutions through a combination of religious prohibitions and prescriptions.”
The universal morality of Christianity did not result in medieval Christians being indifferently altruistic. Schulz doesn’t make that claim, and I don’t think one can infer it. Clearly, the Church was intolerant toward outsiders, not only pagans, Jews, and Muslims but also various groups of heretics who were divergent only on minor doctrinal matters. In short, medieval Christians weren't Quakers.
Yes, the Church was a means to assist “individuals who share your genes and/or culture” — not only through collective defense against outsiders but also as a collective good that optimized fertility, family stability, and reproductive success.
I do feel, however, that Schulz et al. misrepresent their findings when they state in the abstract to their paper: “the Western Church’s transformation of European kinship … fostered … less conformity.” That statement strikes me as incredible. The Church may have decreased behavioral conformity among close kin, but it greatly increased behavioral conformity among medieval Europeans as a whole. Behavior was regulated to a much greater degree by the Church than it had been by earlier pagan institutions.
In sum, the Schulz et al. paper is a valuable work on the subject, but one should also consult papers by other writers, notably Kevin MacDonald, as well as the many blog posts written by hbd* chick.
I want to ask you about the Hanjnal line.
Noah Karl's article says that the intensity of kinship ties is very low in Russia. This sounds logical to some extent: the climate in Russia is very northern and the inhabitants of the so-called Murmansk or Arkhangelsk live further north than any Scandinavians.
But culturally, it seems that Russians are radically different from Europeans with the "Western European model of marriage". Why is that?
In our 21st century, for example, Russians have become more conservative on some issues:
https://blogs.elenasmodels.com/russians-have-conservative-views-on-love/
Nothing like this had ever happened to any northern European nation.
Unlike other people on the line of "Western marriage", Russians simply do not have a liberal culture in society. They value gender egalitarianism least of all, even in Eastern Europe:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/10/14/gender-equality-2/
And while all Eastern Europeans have become more "feminist" since 1991, Russians have also been the least likely to become so.
And right now there is a war with Ukraine for nationalist reasons and the majority of Russians support the occupation of Crimea and Donbass for nationalist reasons.
Russians have been essentially conservative and not at all “Western European” for many centuries in a row.
For example, in Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, Russians had an incredibly high birth rate, 7-8 children per woman - nothing like this had ever happened in Sweden and the Netherlands. Tsarist Russia itself was the most “reactionary” state in Europe - the most anti-Jewish and anti-democratic state until 1917.
And among Russians, a frequent phenomenon in the public consciousness was the feeling of themselves as a separate, special, actually non-European nation. The movement of “Slavophiles” in Tsarist Russia, the opposition of Europe and Russia by Dostoevsky, the current public consciousness in Russia, where the word “West” is used to designate Europe as something “alien”.
Why do Russians have such a low intensity of family ties, but such a “non-European” conservative culture?
First, the Hajnal line runs from Trieste to St. Petersburg. So Russia lies mostly beyond the region of strong individualism and weak kinship. That being said, we should think more in terms of a transition zone, rather than a fine line. When I talk with people from Azerbaijan and Georgia, they see Russia as being midway between them and the West. Russians are less clannish and more individualistic, but not as much as Westerners.
Keep in mind that these behavioral tendencies are partly cultural and partly genetic. Culture is a template for natural selection. A certain behavior may start off being 100% cultural and then become, with the passage of generations, more and more genetically hardwired. So the differences you see between Russia and the West may reflect a mix of cultural and genetic causes. Among the cultural causes, a major one was the Iron Curtain. That barrier didn't just keep people in. It also kept out Western culture and Western behavioral norms. Anatoly Karlin has written a lot on that subject.
The West itself has become much more individualistic over the past century. This may be a case of cultural evolution outrunning genetic evolution. A pre-existing predisposition toward individualism and weak kinship has enabled the State and the market economy to invade more and more areas of life that were previously assigned to the family and the kin group. This process has acquired a momentum of its own, and it's now pushing most of us beyond the bounds of our normal behavioral phenotype.
Gud piece; thanks for link
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.
Eh Spain though...
Also Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean and as far north and west as Cornwall and Iceland
But yeah true--E Europe was the shield and all that and it probably does influence attitudes.
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.
But where did that aspect of the liberal elite that favoured mass immigration come from? It had no precedent before WW2.
It came from the United States, which conquered and reorganized Europe after WW2.
This is an excellent and underappreciated point madam
Yes
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.
It's odd that Ukrainians didn't try to establish a preemptive beach head, considering the Poles want to retake Galicia muh Polish Lithuanian commonwealth intermarium.
Ukrainian high time preference FTW
Or maybe it's the fact that almost all of them were 'Ukrainians' from outside Galicia who are really Russians and don't care about Galicia I don't know
This was back in 2015/16, when they had lots of Syrians about. The Pole said to me how they had Ukrainian refugees as well, but the latter sought work and behaved themselves. Those Ukrainians were probably the smart ones.
ISTR Luka hinting that opportunistic Polish land grabs wouldn’t be condoned, as it would make southwest Belarus vulnerable to being bitten off.
Aha right gotcha
"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.
"Demographics are destiny?"
Demographics are destiny, but not in the way most mean it. It is not the quantity of humans but the quality. Nations/countries do not become great because of the number of people but because of positive traits.
"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.
Belarussians speak Russian.
Immigrants don't mind learning Swedish, Danish or Norwegian--hardly languages of world significance.
"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."
Good point--but again this is a matter of elite, not popular, will. The Kremlin is immigration maximalist where its ex-Soviet republics are concerned.
"...and they did just blow up a bunch of people..."
Ah but *DID* they????
Ok, so I messed up on Belarussian being a common language. But maybe that's the point. I'm pretty worldly, I think, at least more so than your average Somali who bungs a grand to a pirate to get on his dinghy and I don't know the first thing about Belarus. Some countries are just intrinsically less desirable as destinations. Which brings me to:
"Immigrants don't mind learning Swedish, Danish or Norwegian--hardly languages of world significance."
These are literally the best countries in the world, though, and despite, until recently, having almost comically generous immigration policies, they still only kept pace with famous European countries per capita (and by absolute numbers had far fewer).* Plus you on get there pretty well with English. I'd say that counts as evidence in favour of language barriers being a factor. All important phenomena are multi-causal, so I'd guess the magic formula for no immigrants is:
1) Be poor
2) Be some place no-one has heard of
3) Speak a weird language
4) Be hostile to immigrants.
In that order.
*This time I googled it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_immigrant_and_emigrant_population
Yes ok fair enough
No intention on my part to nitpick; I just wanted to show that language hasn't got much to do with country-shopping.
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!
Russia should not be ignored. It has around 10-15 million recent migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus. This migration started in 2004 [1]. By now, the biggest migrant Muslim group (Uzbeks) is significantly larger than the biggest domestic Muslim group (Volga Tatars).
I think the most apparent "normie" reason is that East Bloc countries were much poorer because of communism, so there was less incentive for migrants to go there. But then we have the example of Russia, which was poor yet attracted racially distinct migrants from even poorer stans. At the same time, the government was more authoritarian and oriented towards UK-style "imperial greatness" than in e.g. Ukraine, so it crushed indigenous resistance against mass migration for the sake of "national interest".
I would say this shows the importance of the elite stratum in determining migration. Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe have similar societies in terms of norms and views, but the outcome is so radically different.
[1] https://www.demoscope.ru/weekly///2022/0941/barom02.php (figure 6)
Maybe a difference in mutational load could play a role too; eastern countries industrialized later than western ones