The Myth of White Unity

Safeguarding Europe’s ethnic mosaic

The Otter provides a critique of a monolithic “white culture” and a call for ethnopluralist federalism.

Bad ideas often provoke polarizing reactions, and history is replete with overcorrections aimed at eradicating errors and tipping the scales in the name of justice. The 20th century witnessed profound racial tensions, ethnic cleansing, and immense bloodshed, prompting overcorrective efforts to transcend these mistakes through post-racial ideologies.

Despite attempts to instill post-racialism—even through mechanisms of social engineering—such ideas are readily dismissed by our own senses. We encounter racial others who live, think, and speak differently from us; our intuition recognizes that the gaps between people extend far beyond skin color, encompassing divergent ways of life, thought, and morality.

For much of history, race was an uncomplicated concept: humans perceived various tribes with distinct cultures and customs as separate groups. The rise of the nation-state in the 16th century accelerated the decline of tribal associations and local cultures, as dominant groups forcibly assimilated diverse peoples.

This process intensified during the Industrial Revolution, which redefined governance as the enforcement of standardization rather than the minimal role it had traditionally played. This trend toward uniformity laid the groundwork for liberal post-racial reasoning, reframing governance from a national effort to a global endeavor driven by the logic of humanism.

Paradoxically, the ambitions of post-racialism have only heightened racial awareness while fundamentally reshaping our understanding of race. The overcorrection manifested in the form of critical theory, and governance was reframed once more to accommodate this backlash, gaining the new privilege of becoming the arbiter of equity and the corrector of historical racial grievances.

Today, we confront yet another push toward standardization—another assault on human diversity. A new racial consciousness has emerged in reaction to the excesses of critical race theory. Europe’s plurality is being encroached upon, this time from the right, by the insidious creep into discourse of liberalism’s oversimplified categories. Here, I critique a concept colloquially accepted as fact in contemporary right-wing political discussions: the notion of a monolithic “white culture,” which has been spreading from the Anglophone Dissident Right into European populist discourse.

The Myth of White Culture

The Anglo-American notion of a singular “white culture,” as a category of racial differentiation, self-sabotages the demographic defense of the very peoples it purports to represent. It embraces a post-Enlightenment conceptualization of race that bears no relation to the ethnos in its truest sense. It mirrors the liberal “individual” as an abstract, interchangeable unit devoid of particularity, reducing diverse European peoples to superficial characteristics.

In broader right-wing discourse, meaningful elements of “white culture” are rarely specified to differentiate this grouping from others. While the profound idiosyncrasies and incompatibilities among European cultures are frequently noted, the implied mutual characteristics are less often clearly defined—and when suggested, alleged elements of “white” culture are often non-exclusive to this race. Or at the least, I haven’t come across a convincing argument yet, but I’d challenge you to show me one.

Demographic realities have amplified calls for “white unity” to defend “white culture,” but pursuing unity on vague categorical grounds weakens the already fragile cultural bonds defining Europe’s diverse peoples—especially in the absence of a clearly defined unifying principle that could form a metaphysical bond and shared telos among “white cultures” to align our ambitions. Without such an anchor, claims of “white culture” merely shifts the locus of ethnos from local-particularity to a broader abstract category invented for political convenience, leaving communities that adopt this logic with a framework that deterritorializes the importance of the ethnos as decidedly local and particular.

The ethnos, sometimes interchangeable with nation, was described by Joseph de Maistre in Considérations sur la France (1796) as the organic, providential essence of a people shaped by history, customs, and religion, irreducible to biological materialism. Historically rooted communities forge bonds through their shared cultural vision, interwoven with stories of ancestors that bind people into an extended family and passing this ephemeral thing we call culture to their children who learn it through language and observation. Culture also carries symbols and meaning-laden assemblages that can only be transmitted through socialization within a culture.

Europe is not composed of a single race, but a flock of races, each with its own nomos—to borrow the term used by Carl Schmitt to denote the spatial and normative order of a people. Throughout history, these flocks interconnect and separate, behaving similarly to starling murmurations: leaders emerge at centers and peripheries; kingdoms and empires rise and fall; superflocks form; territories and social bonds recede, then crash forward as threats are faced and opportunities seized. Reducing this dynamic to a static “white culture” commits the same category error as the European Union’s “European values.” Both impose lifeless abstractions on vibrant multiplicity that ebbs and flows, like waves through the clouds.

Societies that fail to recognize differences or that regard them as insignificant are doomed either to exclude those who do not fit into the unique pattern that one seeks to impose or to bring about the disintegration of social cohesion by draining it of its organic, composite, differentiated character.

— Alain de Benoist, The Ideology of Sameness (2022)

Consider the cultural gulf between Anglo dining standards—individualistic and pragmatic—and the collective feasting of Mediterranean cultures. These habits underpin entirely different frameworks of familial bonds and norms, reflecting vastly different cultural values. A wide array of distinct behaviors is evident in cultural approaches to mundane daily activities. We also observe divergent marriage patterns: extended families in Southern Europe foster collectivism, while Anglo cultures encourage early independence, yielding individualism. Additionally, marked differences persist among collectivist European cultures, such as the Scandinavian egalitarian models versus the hierarchical collectivism of Slavic societies.

European origin does not imply cultural compatibility. Upon brief consideration, the concept of “white culture” already appears to stand on shaky ground, unless it ignores an increasing number of particularities. Racial homogenization is futile, whether through color-blind approaches or oversimplified categories. Each culture’s trajectory is self-contained and irreducible; cultures constitute Deleuze’s “difference-in-itself,” with cultural existence unfolding as rhizomatic becomings rather than static unities—proliferating through local intensities and resisting totalizing categories. I want to live in a Deleuzional world full of unique cultures, honoring their histories and traditions while moving away from the homogenizing trends of recent years.

Numerous ethnē have been destroyed during the “enlightened” centuries, which brought radical upheavals and the disappearance of countless European languages. Today, globalization threatens the transmission of culture by displacing ethnē through rapid demographic and economic changes. We’ve reached a crossroads in history where people all over the world, including in Japan and South Korea, are facing massive declines in birth rates and beginning to worry about the possibility of immigrant populations overtaking long-rooted and established cultures.

Yet, the system demands a supply of labor, especially when such supply does not exist locally—as we’ve seen in the Middle East, which approaches this problem with strict guest-worker laws and second-class conditions for imported labor forces. Our economic models have turned the question of demographics into a global concern, even though it is most pressing in Western countries after their hubristic experiments in mass migration.

The preservation of great historic cultures appears to be of the utmost importance in the impending future. The decisions nations make today will have ramifications within our lifetimes, but for success on this front, governance needs to be conceived differently.

Althusius Redux: Symbiotic Federalism

We must return to the moment before the great error of liberalism—to Johannes Althusius, who foresaw the nation-state’s potential to destroy local ways of life, even before its brutal emergence in the French Revolution. His Politica Methodice Digesta (1603) provides a blueprint for an alternative to ethnonationalism: a model of governance that emphasizes local particularity through subsidiarity and ethnopluralist federalism.

If the European Union were realigned with Althusius’s vision, it would better reflect its original purpose as a federal confederacy—rather than the bureaucratic quagmire that stifles European innovation—and redirect attention to the Eurozone as an interdependent market instead of one hungry for foreign trade. This would create a Eurozone that honors the Treaty of Rome, cooperating to foster European peace, rather than a European Union that imports demographic chaos and mandates economic disaster.

Althusius’s governance prioritizes mutual flourishing through deliberately interdependent economic arrangements that increase access to necessary resources, as regions facilitate symbiotic economic activity. Sovereignty is distributed by association (family, guild, city, province, commonwealth). The commonwealth is a federation of federations, bound by covenants of mutual aid and shared piety. Secession is implicit: if symbiosis turns parasitic, lower associations may withdraw, protecting cultural identities through free association.

This model accommodates the compatible stranger who adopts the local ethos without demanding change—as seen in the historical Armenian quarters of Lviv or Huguenot enclaves in Brandenburg. It embodies ethnoplural diversity, rejecting liberalism’s interchangeable consumers and preserving differences through separation-in-relation. The task for governance in the coming decades is to protect differences, thereby enabling the flourishing of true diversity.

Althusius yields a Europe of historic regions—Flanders, Scotland, Bavaria, Catalonia, Padania, Transylvania—organized into voluntary confederations for trade, defense, and ecology, while retaining cultural and demographic sovereignty at the lowest level. It supports genetic continuity without fetishizing it, enabling self-determined peoples to negotiate concerns, reproduce biologically, and transmit language, customs, and sacred geography.

The path to ethnopluralism demands realigning governance with local desires, rejecting cathartic lashing out at scapegoats. Preserving European cultures requires acknowledging that Western liberal policies, NGO networks, and self-imposed immigration strategies have fueled demographic crises. Resolving historical errors—from naïve post-racialism to Europe’s tipping point—demands inward reflection alongside outward action.

This includes building organizations beyond memes, fostering cooperative partnerships rooted in shared economic interests, and revitalizing traditions through community. Such a movement welcomes those who are different yet committed to mutual benefit, while excluding only those who seek to harm it. Ethnopluralists can accept adapted strangers as kin and remigrate interlopers with judicious discernment. I believe the leaders who can articulate these concerns without devolving into bitterness or hate are destined for government—and the polls already reflect that a sensible populist poses a danger to the establishment. Let’s not lose our principles or forget our roots when victory is within our grasp.

The task ahead is for Europe to safeguard its vibrant ethnē flocks, allowing them to flourish for generations—rather than blending their unique heritages into a homogenized Anglo-European slurry for the next globalist social engineering project. The future should instead belong to a Europe of ethnē in symbiotic federation… like a starling murmuration in reactive harmony.