David J. Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and author of The Guarded Age: Fortification in the Twenty-First Century, spoke to an October 12 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
In his analysis of “structural conditions for civil conflict inside high income Western states,” Betz cites the U.K. as a case study. Although his thesis is not about Islamism in the U.K. per se, Islamic “law, the status of non-believers, gender, [and] the permissible range of speech” prevalent in Britain’s parallel Muslim communities are incompatible with Western values. However, Islam is not the main driver. “The post-national elite” pursuing rapid demographic transformation via migration is the driving, aggravating factor delegitimizing the preferences of the historical native population.
The twenty-first century elite is comprised of “globally mobile people” who are motivated to further post-national ideals. Most Western leaders believe that favoring mass migration is “serving the global good rather than the national good.”
The twenty-first century elite is comprised of “globally mobile people” who are motivated to further post-national ideals. Most Western leaders believe that favoring mass migration is “serving the global good rather than the national good.” National interest is treated as “morally suspect” by elites who have no understanding of “an intrinsic or inherent connection between a people and its history and its land.”
These dynamics produce “convex politics,” in which a centrist viewpoint becomes unsustainable under the stressors imposed on the structural system. Maximalist voices become louder than the centrist ones, and people retreat to their tribal affiliations in the ensuing instability. The conditions for conflict increase and are manifest in two vectors. First, the native population rises up against the post-national elite that has broken the social contract; and second, in addition to radicalized natives confronting the authorities, there is also a rise in intertribal conflict between the native majorities and the parallel communities as communal disorder intensifies.
There are six “interlocking factors” prevalent in Great Britain and “the rest of the high-income West” that create conditions conducive to civil conflict. They are:
(1) Factionalism: With “identity-driven polarization,” the fragility of civic restraint often boils over into riots. Communal political organizations give rise to parallel communities with political influence. A muscular Muslim voting block “which elevates its weight well beyond its share of the population” has been decisive for the Labour Party.
(2) Downgrading: The once dominant group—the historic population—permanently loses “political weight and demographic centrality.” These changes, combined with the massive influx of migrant men into locales that cannot absorb them, increase tension.
(3) Legitimacy crisis: Laws “are enforced or not, according to the identity of the offender.” Speech is policed, and state institutions delay investigating scandals, thereby minimizing the harm to the victims. Voting, while still in place, is where the “largest demographic decisions are taken against the repeated preference of the electorate.” The hypocrisy exhibited by the elites destroys legitimacy and public faith in governmental institutions.
(4) Economic precarity: The “expectation gap,” particularly among the youth who are frustrated by the economic and social decline, has collapsed their trust in the system. Debt-fueled consumption and the provision of subsidized comfort in the U.K. drive its GDP into the red, while the elites who benefit from the status quo know they can ignore the needs of its citizenry aggrieved over unfettered migration’s impact on wages and housing.
(5) Rising propensity to revolt, i.e., the diminishing culture of obedience: Prior consideration from the public that politics was a sufficient mechanism to solve the problems of the collective has eroded. What has replaced it in the public consciousness “is not yet organized insurgency,” but a greater willingness to organize locally and “treat official instruction as optional.”
Should conditions degrade to actual civil war, belligerents will be comprised of three groups: the post-national elite, the native mass, and the non-native faction. This three-part structure will determine how conflict unfolds.
(6) Elite incompetence and disunity: The elite is best understood as a “networked, political, corporate, cultural, administrative complex.” Its ideology is post-national, its suspicious attitude towards “inherited loyalty” is postmodern, and its treatment of populations as “mobile factors of production” is neoliberal. Its three groups are the committed “managerialists” who keep the system operating, the “institutional careerists” who participate but prioritize their own security, and the “exit-oriented layer” who plan their exit strategy with offshore assets and passports at the ready.
These six indicators, while unlikely to produce a civil war, herald conditions for a “dual vector conflict.” As politics becomes increasingly polarized, disruptions in the infrastructure increase. These disruptions include “selective violence calibrated for strategic narrative effect” via masked street protests, and atomized group formation that further splinters into groups with shared characteristics of ethnicity, race, religion, or political affiliation.
Should conditions degrade to actual civil war, belligerents will be comprised of three groups: the post-national elite, the native mass, and the non-native faction. This three-part structure will determine how conflict unfolds. The likely scenario involves the native mass simultaneously revolting against the elite that has imposed policies without democratic mandate, while the native mass is also engaged in intertribal conflict with the more recent non-natives.
In cases of “siege warfare,” cities are attacked and are rendered unlivable by having their infrastructure severed. In chronic conflict, or “dirty war,” occurrences such as targeted attacks and kidnapping are designed to produce fear and provoke the state to overreact. The police and the military carry out their roles by responding to worst-case scenarios. In the U.K., while the police are undermanned and under-trained, the state is still capable of monitoring social media. If the military remains loyal to the government, the government will survive. Given both the police’s inadequacy and the military’s small size, the likeliest scenario is that the military fractures, with a significant portion loyal to the remaining elite and capable of securing central London as well as some other places, but not much beyond that.
There are concerns that conditions in the U.K. could be replicated in the U.S. because the six factors to varying degrees exist in both places. The difference is that in the U.S., “the bulk of the inward American migration” is not primarily from Muslim countries. Rather, it is from countries whose populations may be easier to assimilate. America also has the advantage of possessing “a creedal understanding of itself” that differs from Europe’s understanding of itself. The U.S. system ensures freedom of speech and the right to bear arms, despite any polarization affecting attitudes about the ability of the political system to resolve problems faced by the collective. Any potential effects of civic unrest in the U.S. can be mitigated by guarding against cyberattacks and strengthening infrastructure to secure bridges and transport networks. Other lifelines that sustain a functioning society should be considered “with a view as to how those might be operationalized in the context of a serious domestic conflict.”
The force that made this problem insoluble is the elite’s decision “to import it, to deny its character, and to punish the native noticing of the existence of the problem.” How the native population reacts to the mounting pressure will determine what follows.
In the event of a civic breakdown in the U.K., there will likely be a breakup of the currently aligned “woke left” and the Muslim population. Any post-conflict settlement has four possible outcomes:
(1) If demographic projections that the Muslim population will outpace the native population hold true, the non-native population will still have vulnerabilities owing to their concentration in self-ghettoized locations, possession of “very low bridging capital,” and few allies.
(2) If the elites win, democracy will be terminated but will remain performative, if at all. In addition, there will be an increase in authoritarian patterns and a hardening of domestic security, “particularly the policing of speech.”
(3) In the most likely scenario, the native mass “successfully punishes its own elite enough that it [the elite] is scared and compelled into governing again as a national elite,” thereby resulting in “a mass movement of population.”
(4) There is “a long period of balkanization” in which policing collapses, martial law is applied, and intertribal violence is endemic. Local defense measures will harden while people try to maintain some degree of normal civil economic life.
The force that made this problem insoluble is the elite’s decision “to import it, to deny its character, and to punish the native noticing of the existence of the problem.” How the native population reacts to the mounting pressure will determine what follows. “I don’t think that reaction is latent anymore. It’s beginning to emerge, and on the record.”
