European Rearmament and the Age of National Liberalism
A World Safe for Gaming
By Franz Pokorny
A recurrent joyful note in the funeral march of Eastern European politics during the 2010s was when, every few years, it occurred to the sons of Raiffeisenbank executives and the daughters of the reform communist intelligentsia sentenced to exile at Big Four accounting firms in Paris and Frankfurt that the Orbánocrats back home were idiots, and that only a vanguard party of their fellow emigré clerks were sufficiently well-versed in the Best Practices needed to put things to right.
This would invariably end in tears; no sooner would the sealed train pull in from Deloitte HQ Zürich than this jeunesse dorée would discover that the local tyrant was an incredibly savvy political operator who not only „knew human weakness like the back of his hand“ but also had at his disposal a crack corps of foreign consultants in oversized H&M jackets whose dark data compensated for whatever gaps existed in his homebrewed methods. The expats were also seldom as clever as they thought (an Msc in Finance at LSE just won’t teach you the ratfucking required to displace the Solntsevskaya Bratva subcontractors and Guelph peons who run things in this part of the world), and their genuine belief in ridiculous eurocrat memes about the rule of law and the rights of marginalised communities did not help them articulate themselves in the language of the people. Thus the forces of Reaction prevailed, Asia was not pushed a single inch back from the Landstrasse, and Slavdom continues to sleep its dreamless Scrutonian slumber to this very day.
It would have been easy to store this episode away on the broken memory card of a pointless woke youth were it not for the fact that the same thing seems to be happening in Western Europe. The UnHerdescenti have spent decades wryly smirking about the coming „peripheralisation of Europe“, but now that the twin pincers of Chinese mercantilism and a misleading but persuasive American marketing blitz about European decline (for what is important here is less realities than perceptions) are slowly convincing the continent’s young professionals that they really do share the lot of South American criollos, it’s not clear what they have to smile about. Semi-peripheral politics means „nihilistic“ western-educated youth vs. a regressive coalition of the Left Behind, who, out of a mixture of greed and sheer conservatism, view the country’s wellbeing as — and know their own rents to be — bound up with lower-tech sectors of the economy and the lowly forms of existence that they maintain. The ongoing bisection of the European economy between a vast hinterland of industrial malaise and a dynamic, high-tech core concentrated around military production, combined with the political class’ intellectual stagnation in the sureties of the 2010s, has produced on the continent the feverish atmosphere of a tinpot Vormärz duchy caught between the imperative to industrialise to avoid falling behind its rivals, yet terrified by the forces of progress this threatens to unleash.
It has been argued in these pages that eurocrats are psychologically prepared for this peculiar regime of simultaneous modernisation and decay because they believe it will replicate the Anglo-American experience of financialisation (a process which, having occurred, they believe to have been studied and understood, allowing its excesses to be curbed and its worst effects meliorated) with its mellow Adam Curtis aesthetics of inevitable decline. In actual fact, it will be more like the Eastern European experience of the 90s, when the collapse of Soviet industrial futurism and re-peripheralisation within the Western European economy only exacerbated the inferiority complex that has always plagued the region. Instead of the Goodhartian heuristic of high IQ anywheres in the „dynamic“ part of the economy (actually just rent-seeking) lording it over the miserable peasant somewheres that had some plausibility as a model of Anglo-American politics in the 2010s, the war economy is bifurcating European politics between a parochial apparatchik class content to mouth the stale formulas of diversity like the politburo at military parades and a globalist caste of military modernisers animated by new ideas from across the Atlantic.
To understand the current moment it is necessary to do away with two dusty old memes about rearmament that, both in their own way, misread its transformative potential and relegate it to the stale lifeworld of the long 2010s. First, certain blockers to the work of change argue that, because it so profoundly threatens the post-Cold War ideological settlement, rearmament is a mere marketing ploy; in reality just another handout to insiders; more of the cozy managed decline that Europe has experienced for decades. The first part will no doubt be true, at least to an extent, but the second part misses the point entirely — the pressures on European industry mean that the political class has to implement war keynesianism simply so that the decline stays managed.
Second, it is frequently argued by both left and right (usually after a few glasses of wine at nice Berlin Mitte restaurants and similar such places) that a Europe serious about rearmament and militarisation will automatically become more based. Europe’s political class perceives no such contradiction, because they are not actually serious about fighting a war and feel themselves under none of its exigencies. War is not necessarily a force for progress: Bush’s War on Terror was not the August 1914 moment that American patriots hoped for, but empowered a woke security bureaucracy whilst the armed forces wilted under Obama’s purges. But the specific conditions of European rearmament are conducive to BasedWorld for a specific reason independent of whether they put guns into the hands of Prince Heinrich’s mates, scare migrants with the threat of mandatory military service, or swoop the 1980s CDU back to power on a platform of annexing East Elbia up to the Memel. It will transform the relationship between business and the state and create a grand bourgeoisie interested not simply in maintaining stable macroeconomic conditions in the countries where they produce, as the export-oriented industry is, but reliant on their home state as their main consumer and thus interested in its rationalisation.
The danger of this military estate becoming an American-style MIC trundling along as a jobs program for insiders is overstated. The decisive role of drones in Ukraine has not obsolesced the Cold War model of military production with its complex, long-term, capital-intensive, late-fordist production processes (and associated labour relations) oriented to a war never to be fought, but it has made it less relevant. Drone production prioritises speed, cost-efficiency, and flexibility to compensate for the rapid obsolescence of the technology on a dynamic battlefield; the complexity of the software vis-a-vis the hardware also raises the premium on intellectual over physical capital — to use the Dragon’s analogy, it is increasingly no longer the case that group of unskilled workers can cooperate to beat a skilled blacksmith at producing nails. „Astonishing things are now possible with teams of three to ten capable young men and AI,“ one young industry insider told me, „95% of boomerworld is already technically obsolete“. The ability to test different models under battlefield conditions also disadvantages guelphine parvenus with political connections and well-endowed marketing departments, as Helsing’s recent struggles have demonstrated. It is also important to note that drivers of drone warfare are as much demographic as they are technological; military innovation in Ukraine has been dictated above all by the imperative to conserve relatively scarce manpower resources through automation in both fighting and material production. The defence industry of the future will have different political priorities because the current wave of expansion will shift the focus from a military fordism (although this is not going to go away) to a genuine war industry, guided by more adaptable modes of production centred around small teams of engineers.
The young defence technologist is a man of a new type. His political priorities will reflect his intellectual formation, which took place in the early 2020s in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the internet. Like the Eastern European data analysts returning from Canary Wharf to their hometowns in the 2010s, his horizons are no longer be bounded by national culture dominated by legacy institutions incestuously reproducing themselves, but shaped by new ideas emanating from the West. Like the excel clerk who measured the informal practices that persisted „back home“ against the rational-legal organisation in place at his western multinational employer, his daily bread of solving around manpower constraints through automation has disillusioned him with his country’s creaking midcentury political institutions that, trapped inside a farcical late stage of the fordist paradigm, persist in a vainglorious quest to boost GDP mainly by increasing the population. The Woke has taken note: the media furore over Palantir in Europe is a cipher for these generational angsts.
I see a day on the horizon when the state withers away and the new, complex forms of life developing within the Munich defence tech startup scene step into the void. This is not to say that it bodes revolutionary upheaval; the transition of power can be contained below the level where the formal abolition of the state or even democracy enter into the picture. It will occur because the more competent personnel of the nascent defence sector and their superior technology will better fulfil the needs of the selectorate and/or because the state can only perform the core tasks it sets itself by soliciting their services. European rearmament is only the first instance of this. Yet nothing is given in history; the finely tuned clockwork of historical dialectics can always be jammed up by a greasy human finger, and if the minority opinion within Europe’s political class that these „techbros“ represent a MAGA trojan horse prevails, they will sooner hand over every computer on the continent to Putin himself than let Dark Data have its way. The senior managers of the defence industry have no self-conception as a revolutionary vanguard in the way the lords of Silicon Valley do, and will ultimately comply with whatever Woke schemes the politicians come up with. Europe’s tech right cannot simply rely on the arc of history bending towards anime, it must engage in politics. Since this process is already in motion, this article can do little more than gesture towards certain dangers and opportunities involved.
A Volt-style, transnational political party — let us call it the National Liberal Party, because that is what these things have usually been called in Europe — would act as a Schelling point for the continent’s disorganised tech right. It would give the abstract and confusing historical forces that it represents a respectable face and help maintain message discipline, or at least „not frighten the girls“. It would dispel the phantom of shadowy Palantir executives plotting the death of democracy in smoky backrooms and replace it with fresh-faced young men concerned about the future of Europe. This cannot be allowed to degenerate into a Lawrence Newport-style branding exercise; it cannot rely on vague appeals to „competence“, but must wield the dark arts of populism, particularly of the anti-immigrant variety, since mass immigration is the main barrier to growth in Europe today. Sebastian Kurz and Lee Kuan Yew — the populist Lee Kuan Yew, that is — point the way forward. The party organisation itself should be modelled on Missão, whose Portuguese branch will serve as a kind of test-run for this strategy in Europe. Its campaign strategy should be low cost and virtual: the German Left Party’s TikTok-fuelled revival ought to be closely studied.
National Liberal Parties would fill an empty niche on the European political scene. The continent’s youth, having lost its political innocence to lockdowns, is extremely materialistic, individualistic, and impervious to the entire metaphysical spooks’ cabinet of the 19th-20th centuries. Having had its geography shaped by the internet, it is also unmoved by the nationalist pieties of the old right and their frankly quite kooky representatives, and finds itself reluctant — whatever the opinion polls have to say on this matter — to throw in its lot with a populism no less wedded to the old economic order than its opponents on the government benches. It knows the universalist welfare state to be a ponzi scheme to which it arrived too late to benefit and sees its own advances blocked by „red tape“ and fiscal largesse, yet has no sentimental attachment to small business of any type and will mutatis mutandis always favour scale, does not reject state action (i.e. on housing) so long as it directly stands to profit. It is tired of bad-breathed Africans on public transit and greasy-goateed Arabs splashing their saliva all over the streets. Purely going off of anecdotal experience and half-forgotten opinion polls I once scrolled past on twitter, I estimate a party of this type would be able to achieve parliamentary representation in most European countries, although it would never be capable of leading a government.
The aim of this party would be to work across the aisle to advance all the above-listed causes while allowing the techbros to do their work in the background. Its hardline platform on deregulation, social benefits and migration would allow it to deprive the populists of a great portion of their vote while making it a natural partner for the centre-right, while its resolute support for European integration and Militarism would allow it to remain in the good books of a liberal establishment that finds itself under pressure from a left all too willing to play into the hands of Mr. Putin by leveraging economic anxieties to launch a populist assault on the „war economy“. And it would be able to add its own accents, critiquing mass conscription on zeitenwendist grounds by pointing out how in Ukraine, both armies recruited heavily among middle-aged men and burned through these first while conserving their younger recruits. National Liberalism 1.0 was always a liminal phenomenon, its economic base placing it outside the social order of Nigel Carlsbad’s Europe while its lawyerly ethos kept it inside, surrounding it with a countercultural nimbus while also holding out the possibility of cooptation to the powers-that-were — a National Liberal Party would find itself in a similar position.
National Liberalism 1.0 was fundamentally about bringing the bourgeoisie into the state and allowing them to run it like a business. Doing this required a new political geography; the geography of industry, which in the 19th century was the geography of the railway — the nation state. Treitschke explained the logic by way of the German Zollverein; „the businessman’s thoughts followed the bales of goods he freely sent throughout the German lands; he grew accustomed, like the scholar long before him, to look beyond the borders of his native small state; his eye, attuned to grander affairs, regarded the smallness of his immediate fatherland with ironic indifference.“ The equivalent project today is European unification, which, like the Zollverein, has already been half-realised under the aegis of Reaction, but falters because its elites lack the legitimacy amongst the selectorate to sweep away the Kleinstaaterei through a sovereign decision.
National Liberalism’s historical legacy was to provide a popular constituency for the intellectual vanguard of a Prussian junkerdom skeptical of the popular legitimacy that the revolutionary nationalism of the Napoleonic era invoked, but equally worried about the future of their way of life and values in a world wrenched by social forces seemingly beyond their control. In the rearview mirror, its triumph looks like the roll of grand historical tides; at the time, it must have seemed like QAnon, with Bismarck and Bleichröder’s white hats steering the process from the shadows. NATO, take note — gamers will inherit the earth, and they have more to offer you than strange women with little dog avatars or Gunther Fehlinger.