The US Supreme Court this week heard oral arguments on President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born on American soil to undocumented immigrants – the clearest legal expression yet of the nativist worldview that now drives much of the administration’s immigration policy. Although immigration tends to be a matter for domestic policy, that worldview was perhaps most clearly articulated this year in a foreign policy speech that deserves renewed attention.
In the days following US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s February speech to the Munich Security Conference, the American press reviews were glowing. Unlike President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance – both of whom had delivered remarks before European forums using insulting, harsh or threatening language – Mr Rubio was praised for his respectful tone that eased the concerns of America’s European allies.
That initial shallow reaction, so typical of US mainstream media reporting, soon gave way to political analysts who, looking beyond Mr Rubio’s softer tone, exposed the deeply troubling underpinnings of his remarks. A few quotes from his speech stand out for consideration.
First, there is this gem, which encapsulates the worldview of extreme white Christian nationalism. Mr Rubio told the assembled European leaders: “We are part of one civilisation – western civilisation. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilisation to which we have fallen heir.”
Mr Rubio noted that this civilisation of which he speaks has had a long run: “For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.” It was this civilisation that gave the world, he said, “the rule of law, the universities and the scientific revolution”.
He lamented that since the end of the Second World War, this western civilisation has been forced to face down several challenges, which he described as: communism; what he termed the “foolish” rules-based global order; free trade; international agreements to address the climate crisis; and migration. Each of them, Mr Rubio argued, erodes national sovereignty and weakens the power and independence of the West as regards the rest of the world.
The Secretary of State described what he sees as the danger posed by each of these challenges but focused his greatest attention on “mass migration”, which he warned “threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people”. In most of the press commentary and analysis devoted to Mr Rubio’s remarks, three items were largely ignored.
Although it was true that his remarks were less threatening than those of Mr Trump and Mr Vance, his views were a pure distillation of the same extreme white Christian nationalism so fervently espoused by the Vice President, the core tenets of which are shared by Mr Trump. In fact, the only differences between Mr Rubio and his bosses were tone and tactics. While Mr Trump and Mr Vance spoke down to European leaders, deriding them for their weakness and lack of action, Mr Rubio sought to convince the Europeans that he was one of them and that they had a common interest in working together to defend a shared heritage.
Secondly, Mr Rubio’s pointing to 500 years of the expansion of western civilisation was either disturbingly or deliberately ignorant of history. Europe’s ages of discovery and empire could also be described as the ages of imperial conquest and exploitation. Much of the accumulation of wealth in Europe came from its plundering of the resources of Asia, Africa and the Americas. And it is bizarre for white Christian nationalists to continue to ignore the debt Europe owes to Islamic, Arab and Asian civilisations, among others, in the arts and sciences. Western advances were built on what they inherited (or stole) from the East and South.
Also ignored in this western-centric view of the world is the devastating impact of colonial conquest on Europe’s and America’s victims. We destroyed or distorted their economies, denied them normal political development, and committed crimes against them including slavery and genocide.
In the past two centuries, western civilisation slaughtered almost 100 million of its own people in wars fought among themselves. During this same period, Europeans and Americans were responsible for an equal number of deaths of indigenous peoples in countries they conquered and dominated. As Mahatma Gandhi was reported to have said when asked what he thought of western civilisation: “It sounds like a good idea, they should try it.”
Finally, it was troubling to hear Mr Rubio echoing themes espoused by European and American fascists – that “they” (migrants) are threatening our culture. This is both ahistorical and racist. Far from threatening, immigrants historically have enriched the cultures into which they have come. One could reasonably ask: “What would American (or for that matter, British or French) food, fashion, literature, sport, art and so much more be without the contributions of immigrants?”
The bottom line is that despite the initial press reaction, Mr Rubio’s speech was flawed and dangerous and should set off alarms. That it did not, is troubling. That the same ideas are now being tested before the Supreme Court only underscores how pervasive they have become in America’s new political landscape.
