Secession Rising: Welcome To The Old World Order

According to a new poll from Reuters/Ipsos, nearly a quarter of Americans support their state breaking away from the United States. That included a full 29.7 percent of Republicans, as well as 21 percent of Democrats.

The poll follows hard on the heels of a contentious vote in Scotland over secession from the United Kingdom. And in the coming months, we are sure to see a spate of new secession movements, according to the Washington Post: Venice from Italy, Catalonia from Spain, the Faroe Islands from Denmark, Flanders from Belgium, among others.

One trend is clear: the so-called New World Order, in which national boundaries disappear in favor of global consensus on important issues, is no more. Fragmentation is the order of the day. That’s because the internationalism of the socialistic left was bound to fail, and the internationalism of the capitalistic right underestimated the socialistic left. 

In many ways, today’s global order strongly resembles the global order after World War I; after the war, Woodrow Wilson, an idealistic president convinced that war is passé and that socialistic internationalism is rising, pushed for a new international order. In 1919, Wilson stumped for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, explaining:

Unless you get the united, concerted purpose and power of the great Governments of the world behind this settlement, it will fall down like a house of cards.  There is only one power to put behind the liberation of mankind, and that is the power of mankind.  It is the power of the united moral forces of the world, and in the Covenant of the League of Nations the moral forces of the world are mobilized.

Nine years later, the Pact of Paris was signed by Germany, France and the United States, renouncing war for all time. Five years later, Hitler took power in Germany. Hitler’s nationalistic movement was actually late to the scene – Mussolini had already led his Fascist revolution in 1922, then seized total power in Italy in 1925. And communist nationalism had already taken over Russia in the midst of World War I.

World War I proved the falsity of Marxist internationalism – the workers of the world did not unite to stop war. The long-term result was the rise of nationalist socialism in Nazi Germany, Italy, and Russia – and those movements burst into full, hideous flower after the alternative possibility of a globalist capitalism collapsed in the wake of the Great Depression.

After the Cold War ended, the world faced a different situation: a new consensus formed that we had reached the end of history, a new international order based on global capitalism. And for some twenty years, trade barriers came down and nationalism waned. But the rise of the socialistic left could not be contained. Organizations originally developed to remove economic barriers instead became excuses for leftist redistributionism. That undermined the internationalism of institutions like the European Union – and so disillusioned socialists turned not to capitalism but to national socialism again, as in Greece or Scotland.

Barack Obama, like Woodrow Wilson, is behind the times. There is no international order. International socialism has failed, and nationalistic socialism follows in its wake. And as nationalistic socialism fails, nationalistic capitalism will follow in its wake, as in Catalonia, Venice, and Texas.

Welcome to the Old World Order.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.