White nationalism is a type of racial nationalism or pan-nationalism which espouses the belief that white people are a race and seeks to develop and maintain a white racial and national identity. White nationalists claim to seek and ensure the survival of the white race and the cultures of historically white states. They hold that white people should maintain their majority in majority-white countries, maintain their political and economic dominance, and that their cultures should be foremost in these countries. Many white nationalists believe that miscegenation, multiculturalism, immigration of nonwhites and low birth rates among whites are threatening the white race.
There are different means that white nationalists support to achieve their aims. In the United States most white nationalists say immigration should be restricted to people of European ancestry. There are those who support what is called remigration which is the mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry. There are those who identify with the concept of a white ethnostate.
Analysts describe white nationalism as overlapping with white supremacism and white separatism. White nationalism is sometimes described as a euphemism for, or subset of, white supremacism, and the two have been used interchangeably by journalists and analysts. White separatism is the pursuit of a "white-only state", while supremacism is the belief that white people are superior to nonwhites and should dominate them, taking ideas from social Darwinism and Nazism. Critics argue that the term "white nationalism" is simply a "rebranding", and ideas such as white pride exist solely to provide a sanitized public face for white supremacy, which white nationalists allegedly avoid using because of its negative connotations, and that most white nationalist groups promote racial violence.
History and usage
According to Merriam-Webster, the first documented use of the term "white nationalist" was 1951, to refer to a member of a militant group that espouses white supremacy and racial segregation. Merriam-Webster also notes usage of the two-word phrase as early as 1925. According to Dictionary.com, the term was first used in the title of a 1948 essay by South African writer and ecologist Thomas Chalmers Robertson titled Racism Comes to Power in South Africa: The Threat of White Nationalism.
According to Daryl Johnson, a former counterterrorism expert at the United States Department of Homeland Security, the term was used to appear more credible while also avoiding negative stereotypes about white supremacists. Modern members of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan generally favor the term and avoid self-describing as white supremacist.
Some sociologists have used white nationalism as an umbrella term for a range of white supremacist groups and ideologies, while others regard these movements as distinct. Analysis suggests that two groups largely overlap in terms of membership, ideology, and goals. Civil rights groups have described the two terms as functionally interchangeable. Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Center has said "there is really no difference", and Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has said "There is no defensible distinction that can be drawn between white supremacy, white nationalism or white separatism in society today." News reports will sometimes refer to a group or movement by one term or the other, or both interchangeably.
Views
White nationalists claim that culture is a product of race, and advocate for the self-preservation of white people. White nationalists seek to ensure the survival of the white race, and the cultures of historically white nations. They hold that white people should maintain their majority in mainly-white countries, maintain their dominance of its political and economic life, and that their culture should be foremost. Many white nationalists believe that miscegenation, multiculturalism, mass immigration of non-whites and low birth rates among whites are threatening the white race, and some argue that it amounts to white genocide.
Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington described white nationalists as arguing that the demographic shift in the United States towards non-whites would bring a new culture that is intellectually and morally inferior. White nationalists claim that this demographic shift brings affirmative action, immigrant ghettos and declining educational standards. Most American white nationalists say immigration should be restricted to people of European ancestry.
White nationalists embrace a variety of religious and non-religious beliefs, including various denominations of Christianity, generally Protestant, although some specifically overlap with white nationalist ideology (Christian Identity, for example, is a family of white supremacist denominations), Germanic neopaganism (e.g. Wotanism) and atheism.
Definitions of whiteness
Most white nationalists define white people in a restricted way. In the United States, it often—though not exclusively—implies European ancestry of non-Jewish descent. Some white nationalists draw on 19th-century racial taxonomy. White nationalist Jared Taylor has argued that Jews can be considered "white", although this is controversial within white nationalist circles. Many white nationalists oppose Israel and Zionism, while some, such as William Daniel Johnson and Taylor, have expressed support for Israel and have drawn parallels between their ideology and Zionism. Other white nationalists such as George Lincoln Rockwell exclude Jews from the definition but include Turks, who are a transcontinental ethnicity.
White nationalist sometimes use (perhaps even multiple contradictory) obsolete racial categories such as Aryanism, Nordicism, or the one-drop rule.
Regional movements
Australia
The White Australia policy was semi-official government policy in Australia until the mid twentieth century. It restricted non-white immigration to Australia and gave preference to British migrants over all others.
The Barton government, which won the first elections following the Federation of Australia in 1901, was formed by the Protectionist Party with the support of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). The support of the Labor Party was contingent upon restricting non-white immigration, reflecting the attitudes of the Australian Workers' Union and other labor organizations at the time, upon whose support the Labor Party was founded. The first Parliament of Australia quickly moved to restrict immigration to maintain Australia's "British character", passing the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 and the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 before parliament rose for its first Christmas recess. The Immigration Restriction Act limited immigration to Australia and required a person seeking entry to Australia to write out a passage of 50 words dictated to them in any European language, not necessarily English, at the discretion of an immigration officer. Barton argued in favour of the bill: "The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman." The passage chosen for the test could often be very difficult, so that even if the test was given in English, a person was likely to fail. The test enabled immigration officials to exclude individuals on the basis of race without explicitly saying so. Although the test could theoretically be given to any person arriving in Australia, in practice it was given selectively on the basis of race. This test was later abolished in 1958.
Australian Prime Minister Stanley Bruce supported the White Australia policy, and made it an issue in his campaign for the 1925 Australian federal election.
It is necessary that we should determine what are the ideals towards which every Australian would desire to strive. I think those ideals might well be stated as being to secure our national safety, and to ensure the maintenance of our White Australia Policy to continue as an integral portion of the British Empire. We intend to keep this country white and not allow its peoples to be faced with the problems that at present are practically insoluble in many parts of the world.
At the beginning of World War II, Prime Minister John Curtin (ALP) expressed support for White Australia policy: "This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race."
Another (ALP) Leader of the Labor Party from 1960 to 1967 Arthur Calwell supported the White European Australia policy. This is reflected by Calwell's comments in his 1972 memoirs, Be Just and Fear Not, in which he made it clear that he maintained his view that non-European people should not be allowed to settle in Australia. He wrote:
I am proud of my white skin, just as a Chinese is proud of his yellow skin, a Japanese of his brown skin, and the Indians of their various hues from black to coffee-coloured. Anybody who is not proud of his race is not a man at all. And any man who tries to stigmatize the Australian community as racist because they want to preserve this country for the white race is doing our nation great harm ... I reject, in conscience, the idea that Australia should or ever can become a multi-racial society and survive.
He was the last leader of either the Labour or Liberal party to support it.
Canada
The Parliament of Canada passed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 to bar all Chinese from coming to Canada with the exception of diplomats, students, and those granted special permission by the Minister of Immigration. Chinese immigration to Canada had already been heavily regulated by the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 which required Chinese immigrants to pay a $50 fee to enter the country (the fee was increased to one hundred dollars in 1900 and to five hundred dollars in 1903). Groups such as the Asiatic Exclusion League, which had formed in Vancouver, British Columbia, on 12 August 1907 under the auspices of the Trades and Labour Council, pressured Parliament to halt Asian immigration. The Exclusion League's stated aim was "to keep Oriental immigrants out of British Columbia."
The Canadian government also attempted to restrict immigration from British India by passing an order-in-council on 8 January 1908. It prohibited immigration of persons who "in the opinion of the Minister of the Interior" did not "come from the country of their birth or citizenship by a continuous journey and or through tickets purchased before leaving their country of their birth or nationality." In practice, this applied only to ships that began their voyages in India, because the great distance usually necessitated a stopover in either Japan or Hawaii. These regulations came at a time when Canada was accepting massive numbers of immigrants (over 400,000 in 1913 alone), almost all of whom came from Europe. This piece of legislation has been called the "continuous journey regulation".
Finland
White nationalist "Awakening" conference is held annually in Finland, attracting some hundreds of white nationalists from around the globe. The event has been attended by white supremacists from around the world; Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, Kevin MacDonald, representatives of the National Corps and others. Some of the founders of the influential Suomen Sisu anti-immigration organization were members of the pro-Aparheid "Friends of South Africa" organization.
In a 2023 survey conducted by Iltalehti, one-third of the voters of the far-right Finns Party, the second biggest party in parliament, thought that "the European race must be prevented from mixing with darker races, otherwise the European native population will eventually become extinct". Finns Party Minister of the Interior Mari Rantanen wrote that if Finns remain naive on immigration, Finns "will not remain blue-eyed" and shared writings referring to refugees as "parasites". Toni Jalonen, at the time deputy-chair of the Finns Party Youth, posted a picture of a black family with the text "Vote for the Finns, so that Finland's future doesn't look like this".
Germany
The Thule Society developed out of the "Germanic Order" in 1918, and those who wanted to join the Order in 1917 had to sign a special "blood declaration of faith" concerning their lineage: "The signer hereby swears to the best of his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or in his wife's veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the coloured races." Heinrich Himmler, one of the main perpetrators of the Holocaust, said in a speech in 1937: "The next decades do in fact not mean some struggle of foreign politics which Germany can overcome or not ... but a question of to be or not to be for the white race ..." As the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg said on 29 May 1938 on the Steckelburg in Schlüchtern: "It is however certain that all of us share the fate of Europe, and that we shall regard this common fate as an obligation, because in the end the very existence of White people depends on the unity of the European continent."