Immigration and the dangers of sticking to outdated ideologies

As demonstrated by the fall of the Mamluks, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Moriori, among others

A version of this article was previously published in The Critic.

---

One of the most bizarre characteristics of those who want to maintain what’s left of the liberal international order is their refusal to accept reforms that might head off its destruction. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the entire rise of what is termed ‘right-wing populism’ by its opponents stems from the unwillingness of mainstream political parties to control immigration. Considering that the continued growth of right-wing populism makes the position of the old liberal consensus ever more precarious, you’d think the latter’s defenders would have decided to compromise, but mostly, they have not.

And they could have; the forms of immigration that voters most strongly object to are also those which have the fewest practical benefits. If mainstream political parties had managed to shut down the fraudulent asylum system, enabled deportation of foreign criminals, and heavily restricted flows from countries where immigrants are particularly likely to be net drains on the state or to cause social problems, this would have taken a lot of the wind out of the sails of right-wing populist parties. Yet with the partial exception of Denmark, mainstream parties have been unwilling to do this. Currently, Shabana Mahmood is attempting to save Labour from electoral extinction by adopting aspects of the Danish model, but is being met with vociferous opposition from within her own party.

The reason for this unwillingness is, of course, ideology. It’s entirely obvious that the asylum system functions primarily as a way for young men, and later on their families, to bypass formal immigration routes and achieve settlement in Britain. It’s also obvious that a disproportionate amount of the problems of immigration in general come from just a few parts of the world. Yet maintaining the universalist, human-rights based legal infrastructure constructed after the second world war takes priority over addressing these issues. The fact that this infrastructure was created for an entirely different world, where there was much less international migration, and where ‘asylum seeker’ meant a political dissident from the eastern bloc, does not matter. The system’s advocates seem to live in a world made up entirely of rhetoric where principles take precedence over reality.

I think that this failure to reform is an example of one of the most interesting and important tendencies that you can observe in history: when a system collapses because its ruling elite obstinately stick to an ideology that is no longer fit for purpose. The historical examples below are not exact parallels to the immigration situation; in many cases they show that those who resisted reforms to an outdated system had material as well as ideological reasons to oppose change. But they do share two important aspects with it. Firstly a failure among elites to recognise that the world had changed and that to survive they would need to set aside parts of their ideology. And secondly a failure to set aside special interests for the good of the body politic.

In the early 16th century the Mamluk rulers of Egypt came under attack from the expansionist Ottoman empire. While the Ottoman armies, particularly the elite janissary corps, were enthusiastic adopters of firearms, the Mamluks disdained firearms, viewing them as dishonourable. As David Ayalon describes in Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom (1978), the Mamluks had built their entire identity around the furūsiya knightly code which prioritised horsemanship and the use of the bow, the lance, and the sword. Two sultans in the last decades of Mamluk rule attempted to introduce arquebus infantry units, but this met with fierce opposition from the Mamluk elite. The few units that were produced were poorly paid and manned only by those of low status such as black slaves or foreigners. At the battle of Marj Dabiq in 1516, the Mamluks were defeated by Ottoman arquebuses and artillery, resulting in them losing control of Syria. The next year, as the Ottomans began threatening Cairo, the Mamluks attempted to adopt firearms more seriously, but it was too late, they were defeated again and the sultanate was incorporated into the Ottoman empire.

The aristocracy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth maintained the ‘golden liberty’ of their nobles’ commonwealth from the 16th century until the partitions of the late 18th century. This ensured extensive privileges for themselves, including the liberum veto; the right for any noble to nullify all legislation passed in a sejm parliamentary session. It also ensured a weak, elected monarch under the control of the nobles. This system was justified as protecting against the ‘tyranny’ that existed in centralised states like France, but it also meant that the commonwealth had no central state that could have supported a modern army, making it increasingly vulnerable to encroachments by its centralising neighbours like Sweden and Russia. Every attempt at reform was prevented by the aristocracy, fearful of losing their privileges. The final attempt was the establishment of a modern constitution at the Great Sejm of 1788 to 1792, but this also ultimately failed due to the intervention of the Russian-backed Targowica Confederation of conservative nobles. They wanted to restore their ‘golden liberty’ but ended up aiding in the final dissolution of the commonwealth in 1795.

In the lead-up to the American civil war, the doctrine of states’ rights was frequently employed by the south. The constitution of the Confederacy, in its very first line, replaced “in order to form a more perfect union” with “each state acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government”. During the war, this doctrine seriously impeded the war effort. A famous example was Georgia’s governor Joseph E. Brown’s attempts to stop Georgia’s troops being used out of state; Brown also opposed central conscription, as did governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina. Historian Frank Lawrence Owsley argued that states’ rights were the seeds of death of the confederacy and that its gravestone would have read “Died of State Rights”.

The Moriori of the Chatham Islands, who had branched off from the Māori hundreds of years earlier, were invaded by two Māori tribes from the north island of New Zealand in 1835. Michael King’s 1989 book Moriori: A People Rediscovered describes how over the centuries the Moriori had developed a doctrine of nonviolence, with conflicts being resolved by ritual combat which would stop at the first sight of blood. When the Māori invaded, a council was held among the Moriori:

“The younger men spoke first. They argued that the prohibitions on killing devised by Rongomaiwhenua, Pakehau and Nunuku were intended to prevent a small population of related people destroying themselves in a chain of blood feuds. Such principles did not envisage, nor were they appropriate for, an outright invasion by people who were prepared to kill on a large scale […] The Owenga chiefs Tapata and Torea put the contrary case: the law of Nunuku was not a strategy for survival, to be varied as conditions changed; it was a moral imperative.” [...] Finally, because it was the wish of all the elders, the view of Torea prevailed. There would be no killing from the Moriori side. They would return to their villages from Te Awapatiki and offer the New Zealanders peace and friendship and an opportunity to share the resources of Rekohu in partnership, without rancour or resentment [...] What mattered above all else, Torea stressed, was that they did not compromise their mana.” (King 1989: ch. 3)

This resulted in the numerically superior Moriori being massacred by the Maori invaders, and the survivors enslaved, in what is now known as the Moriori genocide. The slavery of the Moriori was ended by the British administration in 1863, but the population never recovered; the last full-blooded Moriori died in 1933.

In 1912 Tibet gained its independence from the collapsing Qing empire. During this period, the 13th Dalai Lama (r. 1895 to 1933), who had previously lived in exile and had become aware of how dangerously far behind his country was falling, attempted reform. He made strenuous efforts to modernise, introducing Western-style education and improving the military and taxation systems. However, these efforts were resisted by the powerful monasteries, who resented the taxes and considered the reforms to be anti-Buddhist, and these efforts foundered in the mid 1920s. In his final testament of 1933, the Dalai Lama warned of the coming destruction of Tibet’s traditions and identity if they could not defend their land. Tibet belatedly started trying to modernise their military in 1949, but was defeated when China invaded in 1951, and was subsequently incorporated into the PRC.

So, will our societies follow the same pattern? I remain optimistic about the chance to enact necessary reforms on immigration and asylum, although I am pessimistic about the ability of mainstream parties to do so. Despite growing calls from, for example, The Economist, to scrap the asylum system, the examples above show that elite groups will often hold to a failing ideology right until the end. In this scenario, as with the Mamluks or the Polish aristocracy, they will be replaced by those not beholden to outdated ideology. If and when this change occurs, I am confident that we will look back with utter astonishment that the current system was allowed to go on for so long, and with contempt for those who enabled it.

Bibliography

Ayalon, D. (1978). Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom. Frank Cass.

Chase, K. (2003). Firearms: A Global History to 1700. Cambridge University Press.

King, M. (1989) Moriori: A People Rediscovered. Penguin Random House.

Related articles