by William McGimpsey

This essay examines the evolution of the concept of “neutrality” as it applies to the central institutions of liberal democracies. The paper argues that neutrality is a contested concept, that over time competing conceptions of it have arisen within liberal societies, and that those societies have evolved towards an internal balance of power between them across their institutions.

The birth of neutrality

Neutrality arose in order to solve a civilisational problem: how to mitigate the risk of existential conflict between groups with fundamentally different worldviews.

Europe was ravaged by religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The invention of the printing press had weakened the Church’s status as the sole source of truth in theological matters, enabling rival protestant theologies to spread and take hold at a mass scale. Rather than ushering in an age of peaceful religious pluralism, this resulted in war.

The Peace of Westphalia was an attempt to solve this problem. Rather than seeking to minimise conflict as the Catholic Church had done, by inculcating the population with a single, unchallenged doctrine, the new solution was borders and state sovereignty – with different rulers allowed to determine the official religion in their territories, with some protections for religious minorities, and a commitment to not interfere in other states internal affairs.

The principles of state sovereignty, non-interference, and borders were thus a type of proto-neutrality.

Then with the rise of the modern democratic nation-state, where “the people” had a say in how they were governed (rather than just the rulers), the problem of conflict between different fundamental visions within the same society emerged once more. To cope with this problem, states gradually evolved toward a stance where rather than taking a position on the correct view, they claimed to stand above it and provide fair and ‘neutral’ procedures. The legitimacy of important institutions in liberal democratic society, such as the public service, universities and media rests on this claim to neutrality.

The first form of neutrality – classical liberal neutrality – was born. Its core features were:

• Impartial procedures: The state provides fair rules and institutions (e.g. rule of law, equal basic rights) without favouring any particular conception of the good life.
• Individualism: persons, not groups, are the primary unit of moral concern.
• Universalism: principles apply equally to persons regardless of identity.
• Meritocracy: roles and rewards are distributed according to ability, not status or group membership.

This model was not derived primarily from principles of universal reason, but rather was a solution to a specific historical problem.

The postmodern challenge

In the latter part of the 20th century, classical liberal neutrality increasingly came under criticism for being covert or implicit white supremacy – individualism and meritocracy were critiqued as being features of Western culture, based on Western religious and philosophical understandings of personhood and culturally subjective value-judgements about the type of person who should be elevated to positions of responsibility. Universalism was critiqued as a cloak for imperialism – the forceful imposition of these values on minorities or foreign populations who did not share them.

This critique won over, in significant part, the Western liberal power structure. It adjusted by adopting a new form of neutrality – egalitarian pluralism (or what we colloquially refer to as wokeness or DEI).

This model of neutrality holds that institutions should actively adjudicate in favour of minorities and historically disadvantaged groups – ensuring their inclusion, a meaningful seat at the table of power, and decision-making that prioritizes equitable outcomes, even if it means differential treatment based on group membership. It treats identity groups as morally salient and regards impartial procedures as insufficient where there are background inequalities. It’s claim to legitimacy derives from inclusiveness and social justice rather than impartiality.

Backlash and the emergence of ethnic particularism

In recent decades, egalitarian pluralism has come under criticism as well – for stultifying the institutions and making them inefficient; for fostering all manner of outlandish “woke” behaviours and ideas; but perhaps most crucially, for itself being unfair and “discriminating” against certain groups – most notably historic white majority populations, and straight white males in particular.

The growth of these critiques has been accompanied by the rise of the populist-nationalist movement and politicians such as Trump, Farage, Bolsonaro, Milei, Le Pen, Meloni, etc, who have sought to push back on wokeness and DEI.

A third model of neutrality has emerged that is critical of both egalitarian pluralism AND classical liberalism – it argues that egalitarian pluralism is discriminates against traditional white majority populations, and is self-refuting, stultifying and inefficient, while also holding that classical liberalism asserts as universal elements which are particular to Western culture. This critique sees neutrality as only possible within relatively homogenous societies (in terms of ethnicity, culture, language, religion) and seeks to return to them through strict border controls, ethnically and culturally compatible immigration, and remigration.

It is not a theory of neutrality within the state in the same sense as the previous two. Rather, it is a theory about the conditions under which neutrality is possible. It argues that shared ethnicity, culture and religion are preconditions for stable institutional neutrality and that where this homogeneity erodes, institutions inevitably become arenas for zero-sum moral struggle. This perspective parallels that at Westphalia in that it views borders and sovereignty as a type of proto-neutrality that enables pluralism at a supra-national level, while reducing the risk of existential conflict within states.

According to this view, there are existential threats on both sides – under classical liberalism the embrace of civic identity threatens to erase the core ethnic group via colourblind immigration; and under egalitarian pluralism the legal and institutional frameworks needed to balance group interests suppress central aspects of Western culture and society, such as freedom of speech, meritocracy, universal reason and science and individual liberty and autonomy. Proponents argue that only under this third position can the ethnic group AND its way of life be maintained.

The intellectual and political debate now seems to be between the advocates of this new position – which I will call ethnic particularism – and those who seek to return to classical liberalism while attempting to collapse the second and third positions together into a so-called Woke Right.

The repression of ethnic particularism

While ethnic particularism offers a critique of both classical liberalism and egalitarian pluralism, it has not been treated as a legitimate participant in the debate. Liberal institutions that claim procedural fairness have ironically defined these views as beyond the bounds of permissible disagreement, and sought to marginalise, pathologise, and suppress them.

From the perspective of classical liberalism, ethnic particularism was criticised as incompatible with individualism and universalism. In the post-war period, associations with Nazism led to it being perceived as morally illegitimate within mainstream politics – it was treated not as an alternative political theory, but as a regression into authoritarianism.

The ascendance of egalitarian pluralism intensified this dynamic. Ethnic particularism was no longer classified as merely illiberal but now also as exclusionary and supremacist. Institutions committed to diversity, equity and inclusion increasingly treated arguments for homogeneity and immigration control as threats to the social order – to be suppressed rather than debated.

Yet this suppression had paradoxical effects. Making arguments for ethnic particularism unspeakable within official institutions reinforced its advocates core claim: that liberal societies cannot sustain meaningful pluralism without recurring perceptions of existential conflict.

The dance: politics and media

The political and media establishment has configured itself differently as these critiques have evolved and new ideas of neutrality have attained cultural hegemony.

Procedural liberalism was dominant in a media environment comprised of many local newspapers and radio stations. But the civil rights era, political correctness, wokeism and DEI coincided with the age of mass media, particularly television, which has enormous power to shape the ideas and worldview of the audience. It seemed just as egalitarian pluralism ascended to power in the public sector and universities that elements of classical liberalism were integrated into mass media.

However, the critique of egalitarian pluralism was accompanied by the rise of social media and development of an alternative media sphere that included the alt-right, manosphere, trad movement and many other factions all critical of aspects of the dominant woke paradigm.

And now that the populist movement has taken power in various countries we are beginning to observe a change in the alternative media sphere – the elevation of many new influencers and websites that appear to mix earlier right-wing elements with aspects of the left – both traditional economic leftism and woke social liberalism.

Many right-wing commentators, analysts or alternative news sites have begun taking counterintuitive positions, and disagreeing, if not going to war with former allies. Most noticeably, what has become glaring is the number of commentators sympathetic to ethnic particularism doing a u-turn, taking up left-wing positions and talking points, and inveighing strongly against populist figures such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage just as they commit to (in Farage’s case) and implement (in Trump’s case) historic mass deportation programmes that would have been more than they could have possibly wished for only a few years ago.

We may be observing the egalitarian pluralists – ie the woke – being displaced from the state by insurgent populists, and now taking up the role of critical opposition in the alternative media sphere, in some cases by coopting or attempting to blend their views with those of nationalist right commentators, in what some might describe as an attempt to manufacture a woke right.

It sometimes appears as if a delicate dance is unfolding, where when a new view of neutrality captures the government and bureaucracy, the old view migrates to oppositional spheres – playing a critical role and holding power to account. Whether emergent or intentional, this dynamic helps sustain a degree of fairness and balance of power between competing worldviews.

Master neutrality and slave neutrality

Classical liberalism can be seen as a “master neutrality” in that it was what the dominant group believed was right and fair, arising in a context in which they felt their own existence wasn’t under threat.

Egalitarian pluralism can be seen as a “slave neutrality” born of ressentiment – the master neutrality is demonised as evil and white supremacist and a new form of neutrality invented that treats it as one of a number of competing moral views that must be balanced.

In a Hegelian sense, if classical liberalism is thesis and egalitarian pluralism its antithesis, then ethnic particularism – which accepts elements of each – might represent a potential synthesis.

A key limitation of both classical liberalism and egalitarian pluralism was the tendency to project their core moral claims as universal. The synthesis abandons claims to universalism within states and hearkens back to the Westphalian idea of maintaining pluralism at a supranational level and seeking to mitigate existential conflict through borders.

The hypothesis summarised

This essays core hypothesis is that:

1. Despite being central to the liberal states claims to legitimacy, neutrality is a contested term without a single authoritative definition.
2. New theories of neutrality have been developed over time and attained cultural hegemony in response to historical conditions.
3. When a new conception of neutrality achieves cultural hegemony and captures the governing apparatus, opposing conceptions are displaced into other institutions, including the media and alternative media spheres.

Conclusion

The genesis of the liberal state was the need to manage existential conflict between competing fundamental visions of reality within a single polity. The concept of neutrality is central to this project – necessary at a practical level to prevent one or more of the visions from concluding that it is involved in an existential struggle for survival and resorting to violence.

However, the concept of neutrality is itself contested, and over the course of time several different conceptions of neutrality have evolved, with the liberal state attempting to maintain a balance of power between them – the maintenance of this balance has involved change in the way different conceptions of neutrality are distributed across the institutions of liberal society.

The time for change may once more be at hand, with a perception of existential conflict between all three theories of neutrality now intensifying. There is a need for a new synthesis that finds a way to creatively balance these three competing moral visions through constitutional, institutional or territorial innovations.

Originally published on Conservative Network.