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In 2026, European Students for Liberty held its annual LibertyCon in Madrid, 24–26 April, where I was one of the speakers. This is part of an international network of students interested in liberty in the tradition of Friedrich A. von Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Indeed, Milton’s son, David, an original thinker in his own right, regularly speaks at its events. Students for Liberty was founded at Columbia University in early 2008 and has grown into a large organisation over the years. European Students for Liberty held its first conference in 2011. At its Madrid meeting, many distinguished thinkers presented their views on current affairs to more than 600 students. I attended most of the sessions but chose to listen and let the young participants lead the discussion. Here I offer my reflections on two interesting talks by eminent scholars.
Somin on Nationalism
Ilya Somin, Professor of Law at George Mason University, suggested that right-wing nationalism had now replaced socialism as the main threat to liberty. This had also been the case in the nineteenth century, he added, before socialism became a real force. I doubt this historical interpretation. In many European countries, including the five Nordic countries, nationalism and liberalism went hand in hand in the nineteenth century. The quest for the nation-state was seen as a liberation from dynastic pretensions. I also doubt Somin’s general point. In the twentieth century, a distinction may be made between non-aggressive nationalism, which affirms the cultural identity of a group with a shared history, and militant nationalism, when leaders of a nation seek to subdue other nations and deprive them of their identities. In Ukraine, a war is waged between these two nationalisms, Ukrainian and Russian.
Why Liberals Dismiss Nationalism
Why do modern classical liberals tend to dismiss all nationalism? First, some sophisticated defenders of liberty, including Hayek, and Karl Popper, grew up in the Habsburg Empire, in the late nineteenth century a multinational free-trade area that was replaced after the First World War by petty, protectionist, militant states, implausibly pretending to be nation-states, and unable to resist totalitarianism. Again, the conservative liberal Elie Kedourie, author of an influential indictment of nationalism, was born into the flourishing Jewish community in Baghdad, which was destroyed by militant Arab nationalism. Secondly, in the Anglosphere, nationalism was so much taken for granted that no need was felt to articulate or defend it. Patriotic Americans are nationalists without realising it, and the British have, until recently, been quietly convinced of their special worth.
Caplan on Immigration
Somin spoke in favour of open borders, the traditional view of classical liberals. So did another eloquent speaker in Madrid, Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Somin and Caplan are certainly right that, on the whole, immigration has been a force for the good: not only have immigrants been able to escape poverty and oppression in their places of origin, but also, and mainly, they are usually hardworking, law-abiding citizens, such as the Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Indians in the United States.
The European Problem
However, American scholars tend to overlook the specific European problem. It is not that Poles flock to Iceland and Romanians to Great Britain, because these immigrants usually look for and happily accept work. They adjust well to the laws and conventions of their host countries. The problem is immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa who are now swarming Europe. As individuals, they are probably no better and no worse than other human beings. But they were brought up in a culture of intolerance, violence, misogyny, homophobia, and indolence, as the record shows. Although the great conservative liberal Edmund Burke was right that there is no ‘method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people’, the European borders should not be open to criminals, loafers, and zealots.