A man dressed as a crusader holds up a sword during an anti-Islam protest in Prague in 2016. © Matej Divizna/Getty
https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/all-betz-are-off/
“Everywhere we look the war is on our own doorstep”, Hans Magnus Enzensberger1
Britain, we have heard all summer, is a tinderbox. “Across the country,” warned the Telegraph, “there are protests against asylum seeker hotels, public fury about crimes committed by illegal immigrants, and a growing sense [that the country] would need just the tiniest spark to go up in flames.” In May, former government adviser Dominic Cummings said that among Britain’s political and military establishment there is a “growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence.” Matthew Goodwin, an academic analyst of the far right and adviser to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, has also repeatedly predicted violence, seeing a “rapidly deteriorating and darkening mood in Britain,” marked by a growing sense “of just how quickly the social contract is breaking down.” Even Elon Musk has joined in, recently tweeting that “Civil war in Britain is inevitable. Just a question of when.”2
Discussions like this have long been common on the more extreme fringes of the right, which prophesy not so much civil war—a war between fellow citizens that paradoxically signals commonality even amid conflict—but a far darker vision of race war, a seemingly inevitable conflict between rival ethnic blocs. Yet we can see shades of this same dark vision in the now mainstream predictions of Britain’s slide toward civil conflict. What was once whispered in hushed tones in the smoky backrooms of pubs, or in coded messages on extremist websites, is now proclaimed in TV studios and newspaper columns. Race war is mainstream news.
Chatter about Britain’s imminent explosion into civil war has been a feature in the fetid soup of the online right since the riots of summer 2024, which were sparked by the killing of three young girls at a dance class in Southport and the false rumors that the perpetrator was a Muslim or had arrived in the UK on a small boat. That week featured some of the worst acts of racist violence seen on British soil, verging in places on a pogromist reaction against Muslims and refugees. Hundreds of rioters in Rotherham attempted to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers, while in Middlesbrough makeshift roadblocks were constructed by far-right activists to check the ethnicity of passing motorists.
That excited murmur became a deafening racket in February this year, when David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at Kings College London, appeared on the podcast of the writer and journalist Louise Perry to discuss two previously obscure essays charting Britain’s descent into civil war published two years earlier in the magazine Military Strategy.3 The podcast soon racked up hundreds of thousands of listens, and led to a string of further podcast appearances and profiles. In the months since, Betz has appeared on the Spectator podcast, Heretics with Andrew Gold, the UnHerd podcast, the podcast of the New Culture Forum, and TRIGGERnometry, among others; while his work has been profiled in UnHerd, the Spectator, and the Telegraph, and internationally by Rod Dreher in the European Conservative and Ross Douthat in the New York Times.
Clearly, Betz has captured a general mood of pessimism on the right, one dominated by premonitions of social decline and civil breakdown. In them we can begin to see a new form of nationalist politics, one that may dominate right-populist politics in Europe and beyond in the coming years. By reading the work of Betz we can see an emerging structure of feeling, one ever more prominent as the right gains power and influence.
Betz begins his essay with what he claims is a characteristic piece of liberal hubris. In 2022, the EU Foreign Affairs chief Josep Borrell claimed that Europe is “a garden… Most of the rest of the world is a jungle.”4 For Borrell and the like, threats come from the outside, from the vast area of chaos and conflict beyond the walls of the peaceful and secure continent. For Betz, it is not just in the rarefied atmosphere of Brussels that such views predominate: They are the conventional visions of politics across the Global North. Europe, according to this argument, exists in a zone of relative peace and security, the borders of which must be rigorously policed. The job of European politicians is to keep the jungle out and to protect the well-tended cultivars of the garden within.
Betz see things differently. “The major threat to the security and prosperity of the West today,” he writes, “emanates from its own dire social instability, structural and economic decline, cultural desiccation and, in my view, elite pusillanimity.” For Betz, the killer comes not from without: It already lives among us. The greatest threat to Europe is not invasion from beyond, but civil war within.
If this sounds jarring to European ears that may be because, like much of the literature on how and why civil wars break out, the general assumption is that rich societies are immune to such conflicts. The societies that are susceptible to civil wars, or to any form of generalized social breakdown, are those in which the state lacks popular legitimacy or the means to enforce it. It is far more likely to occur in, say, Somalia or South Sudan—countries without a functioning state apparatus—than it is in Germany or France. Britain, many assume, will be more immune still, marked as it is by a long and deep history of democratic politics and centuries in which the absence of any notable spell of civil or political violence has been its defining feature. Politics may get heated, increasingly so in the past decade, but only within the accepted bounds of democratic contestation. Absent major crises, be they economic, political, or even ecological, wealthy societies of the Global North should remain stable.
This, Betz writes, remains true. The problem is the assumption that these stable conditions will continue to hold in contemporary Europe. Primary here is the question of political legitimacy, which Betz calls in one of his podcast appearances the “special sauce,” or “the magic that allows government to work.” On this, European democracies are failing. Betz quotes the findings of the Edelman Trust Barometer which over the last twenty years has concluded that “distrust is now society’s default emotion.” Faith in the institutions of democracy to deliver is increasingly eroded, worsened by the deepening polarization of politics, particularly online. Algorithms drive users to ever more specific content, creating irreconcilable gulfs between groups of people, forcing them into ever tighter digital echo chambers. While the center fragments, the extremes continue to diverge.
Much of this would seem obvious, even to liberals. Politics is increasingly polarized; online spaces are ever more partisan and divided. Yet it is at this point that Betz slips a register. It is not so much political polarization that he is concerned about, but ethnic or intercommunal violence. “What might be described as ‘intertribal conflict,’” he writes, “is by no means confined to the virtual spaces of the Internet.” For this we need only look at “the city of Leicester in Britain, which over the last year has witnessed recurring violence between the local Hindu and Muslim populations, both sides animated by intercommunal tensions in distant south Asia. A Hindu mob marched through the Muslim part of town chanting ‘Death to Pakistan.’”5
While political polarization is something that can be overcome, albeit with difficulty, intercommunal or ethnic conflict is far more intractable. What it reflects, Betz writes, “above all is the considerable irrelevance of Britishness as an aspect of the pre-political loyalty of a significant fraction of two of the largest minorities in Britain.” Politics needs, for Betz, this prior sense of national self-interest to function properly. It is this that holds the competing tribes of politics together. If it breaks down, so does society.
In his more recent discussion, Betz has sharpened his rhetoric. As he noted on the TRIGGERnometry podcast, it is multiculturalism specifically that “is the most important factor”—“like 90%”—for the civil war that he fears will soon break out. Multiculturalism “completely erodes the idea of pre-political loyalty”; it is the “killer app for destroying what has been the nation-state model.” As he sums up:
In seeing politics this way, Betz is by no means alone. Aris Roussinos, in Unherd, has written of the “creeping Ulsterisation of English politics,” driven by ethnic sectarianism, in which “flags are re-adopting a territorial nationalist or communitarian quality, just as they always have in Northern Ireland and as is increasingly the case with the Palestine flag in South Asian Muslim areas of Britain.”6 Roussinos however is skeptical of the claims that Britain is on the verge of open conflict (“at least, not yet”); even so, he sees evidence evidence that an ethnic consciousness is awakening within “previously dormant, and now increasingly volatile, majority ethnic population” as a key force driving ethnic polarization.
Likewise central for Betz is what he calls “asymmetric multiculturalism” and its nativist reaction to the breakdown of the once-dominant liberal order. Asymmetric multiculturalism is a form of multiculturalism in which “in-group preference, ethnic pride, and group solidarity—notably in voting—are acceptable for all groups except Whites7 for whom such things are considered to represent supremacist attitudes that are anathematic to social order.” In other words, all forms of ethnic pride and self-assertion are to be celebrated, except when expressed by white ethnic groups. This is further enflamed by the changing demographic composition of Britain, where the white British population is “trending rapidly toward large minority status.” The “‘Great Replacement’ theory,” he writes, careful not to explicitly endorse the idea, “is an expression of this narrative.”
The coming civil war, then, will be “demarcated along ethnic lines.” It will be, according to Betz and his followers, a race war. And because of the ethnic distribution of the British population, this will take the primary form of an urban-rural conflict, with the majority-white rural areas of the country pitted against ethnically diverse urban centers.
In the second part of the two-part essay, Betz sketches how this conflict might play out. First, continuing already existing trends, there will be a breakdown of order in increasingly “feral cities,” which in turn will be heightened by “metastasizing intercommunal violence and consequent internal displacement,” with the white British population forced out of the cities, for whom urban areas have been “effectively … lost to foreign occupation.” These displaced “indigenes” will then strike back, attacking the critical infrastructure that urban areas rely on—gas, electricity, transportation, and the supply of food. The resulting conflict will, he says, most likely take the form of the Latin American “dirty wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, conflicts that lacked “big conventional military operations,” being instead composed of “endemic political violence of a relatively organized and systematic nature.”8
In 1968, the Conservative secretary of state in the shadow cabinet Enoch Powell gave his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech to the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham, offering a dark premonition, much like Betz half a century later. “As I look ahead,” Powell said, “I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” The decade that followed was characterized by the racialized fear of Britain’s inner-cities, well analyzed by the cultural theorist Stuart Hall and his co-authors in their book Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. Even liberal authors got in on it. In 1972, the science fiction writer Christopher Priest published his dystopian novel Fugue for a Darkening Island, with its terrifying vision of civil war breaking out in a near-future Britain governed by a right-wing populist, voted in to combat the mass influx of violent African refugees to British cities.
If we were to characterize our era, we could see it as the age of the moral panic. Barely a month goes by without another bestseller predicting the coming collapse of complex societies, or offering advice on how to avert it. From the works of the complexity scientists Peter Turchin and Barbara F. Walters, author of How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, to films like Alex Garland’s Civil War and the TV series, and video game that preceded it, The Last of Us, Western culture is increasingly dominated by premonitions of the decline and fall of society.
In this, Betz is in good company. Tellingly (and rather predictably), he harks back to a previous age dominated by scenes of social fragmentation and polarization to illuminate our own. In his essays, he quotes WB Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” The poem was first published in 1920, in an era marked by the World War I and the incipient conflict between fascism and communism that then dominated much of interwar Europe. These were, in the words of the historian Enzo Traverso, the decades of the “European Civil War.”9 If only we were so lucky today. If interwar society was fractured by forces of economic crisis and political will, for Betz and his followers, now all is falling apart as if by force of nature.
With Betz we see something of the classic Hobbesian schema. For Hobbes, the sovereign emerges in order to quell the war of all against all in the state of nature. Now, for those like Betz, society is merely the thin veneer that covers an always-present or potential conflict between ethnic groups. Rather than eliminating social conflict, the state merely hides it until such a time as the conditions for breakdown emerge. Suffice to say, this is a deeply pessimistic vision of politics. In fact, it is distinctly pre-political; the fault lines in society are not a reflection of conscious political commitments, but products of seemingly eternal tribal loyalties.
If there is a distinct overlap between this vision and the various predictions of race war that have long been common on the far right, there are fundamental differences too. In the fascist or neo-fascist conception of race war, the objective is, in the words of the political scientist Michael Feola, “to secure the racial core of the nation against forces that might ‘corrupt’ it from within.”10 For Betz, it is not so much corruption that matters—there seems to be no fear in his work of race mixing or miscegenation, nor of demographic collapse for its own sake. Rather, ethnic groups are distinct, pre-political tribal blocs pitted against one another for status and power, thus eroding the loyalties on which democracy rests, at least in the form it has taken in the West.11 As such, particularly when one ethnic group is downgraded in status, as Betz believes that white Britons are, these groups are forced into conflict, unable to live together harmoniously.
None of which is to say that Betz is a figure, self-consciously or otherwise, of the extreme or fascist right. In his most recent book, The Guarded Age: Fortification in the Twenty-First Century (2023), he portrays himself as a kind of disabused globalist. Once, he says, he held the standard, rosy end-of-history view of globalization, in which the world was increasingly interconnected, and in which walls both metaphorical and real came tumbling down, all for the better. This changed, he says, on July 7, 2005, when four Muslim suicide bombers attacked London’s transport network, killing 52 people and injuring over 770 others. In this moment, he writes, he saw that something had gone “fundamentally wrong.”12
Perhaps Betz is the product of what the political scientist Alan Finlayson calls the new “Reactionary Digital Politics,” a “broad milieu” on the right, based online, through which people pick up whatever ideas lie to hand that are useful for the moment. This, Finlayson writes, is not to divorce it in its entirety from the fascist right, but to understand it as “more fluid, more mobile and individualised in its use than the fixed ideology of a party.” Betz’s work reflects this porous space between the extreme right and its more mainstream variants, through which distinct ideas and symbols move. Ideas once confined to the extreme fringes are finding ever-larger and more mainstream audiences. “In some respects,” Finlayson writes, “it’s more dangerous because anyone can pick up on these ideas and do their own entrepreneurial thing with them.”13
Ideas and symbols, however, can only attain currency by speaking to people’s real experiences, albeit in often hyperbolic and inflammatory terms. Under conditions of economic stagnation of the kind that Western societies have been experiencing since at least 2009, rapid social and cultural change becomes ever more difficult to justify. Compounding this has been a real and rapid increase in net migration since 2021 in Britain, reaching nearly a million people in the year preceding June 2023 in what many on the online right call the “Boriswave.”14 As living standards decline and the already staggering rates of inequality continue to escalate, and as both are compounded by a degraded public sphere and a state that no longer works for most people, it is little wonder that faith in political institutions declines and people cast around for answers.
The right, of course, has them easily to hand: immigration, race, and the conspiracy on the part of the liberal elite to dispossess the native population. Spluttering growth and the political alienation of large parts of both the working and the middle classes have resulted in a growing and often incoherent sense of resentment, one that continues to manifest in nativist and reactionary currents, seen in the rising polling figures for right populist parties like the AfD in Germany and the Rassemblement national in France, as well as in the recent 150,000-strong march through central London organized by the far-right campaigner Tommy Robinson. As society stagnates, those deemed outsiders suffer the blame. The answers offered by the right may be false, but the grievances they feed on will continue to shape politics for years to come.
Yet contrary to whatever the fantasists of the right might imagine, Britain’s Black and Asian populations are not immune to the problems of contemporary Britain. Nor have they been its beneficiaries. Quite the contrary: two-thirds of British Muslims live in areas of high unemployment,15 and research by the Institute for Race Relations has found that “people from Black, Asian, and other minority ethnic backgrounds, are [more] likely to be in poverty … than white British people.”16 This has come alongside a dramatic spike in racist and Islamophobic incidents, which rose by 43 percent between 2023 and 2024 to reach record levels.17 A recent YouGov poll found that nearly half of those surveyed felt that Muslim immigrants have had a negative impact on the UK.18 Britain’s new service class, delivering food and ferrying the middle class about—degrading work for degrading pay—is made up almost exclusively of first-generation immigrants.
Meanwhile, there is a widespread sense of alienation among often young British Muslims, furthered by the Israeli genocide in Gaza and Britain’s both active and passive complicity in it—a phenomenon we can see in the proliferation of “Palestine flags in South Asian Muslim areas of Britain” noted by Roussinos. Yet, if we follow the logic laid out by Betz, the solution is not to condemn Israeli actions, nor to take a side in what is the most pressing international issue of our age. It is to lay the blame on specific ethnic groups.
In the sudden topicality of Betz’s work, from obscure online magazines and academic monographs to a darling of the right-wing poderati, an air of respectability has been given to ideas that would until recently have been considered beyond the pale. Betz is, after all, an elite academic, ensconced in one of London’s most prestigious universities. Perhaps this is why he stops short of explicitly endorsing ideas like those of the Great Replacement, whose conspiracist implications remain far too grubby and whose far-right origins far too apparent. There is also one key respect in which Betz differs from many proponents of the Great Replacement theory. There is no prescriptive element in his diagnosis of what’s coming. What Betz stops short of above is advocating for the downtrodden indigenes to rise up against the Black and brown invaders. And while many of Betz’s fellow reactionaries seem positively excited by the prospect of civil war, trading lurid fantasies of racial violence and ethnic degradation and re-empowerment with clear psychosocial–perhaps even psychosexual–overtones, Betz’s work is surrounded by an air of melancholy resignation. Civil war will arrive regardless of what he or anyone else does to avert it.
Equally, however, we cannot divorce his work entirely from the grotesque displays of nativism and racism now common on large parts of the right. In fact, by putting up his work firmly against this resurgent and hardened far-right, we can begin to see the contours of something on which Betz has so far been coy: Just who will be on the other side of the coming civil war, facing now-assertive and racially conscious whites? Beyond his gestures at the problems of multiculturalism and the inherent dangers of multiethnic societies, Betz never tells us explicitly. But he does leave clues.
Betz ends the second part of his essay with an appendix listing what he describes as fifteen “credible national political or academic figures” from across Europe who have offered their own predictions of social collapse. It is a revealing group. Among them are the notoriously Islamophobic former French presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who in 2018 was convicted of inciting religious hatred by a French court for remarks he made about a Muslim “invasion” of France,19 along with Filip Dewinter, a leading member of the Belgian Vlaams Belang party. Both were featured guests at the recent Tommy Robinson march, where Dewinter used his platform to tell the crowd that “Islam is our real enemy, we have to get rid of Islam. Islam does not belong in Europe and Islam does not belong in the UK.”20 Also included in the list are the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party; the Irish anti-immigration campaigner Gearóid Murphy; Rasmus Paludan, the leader of the Danish Hard Line party; the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, and Farage, the leader of Reform UK.
In recent years, the European right has gained a new watchword: remigration, a euphemism for the mass deportation of foreign-born residents. Much like the fears of an imminent race war, until recently this was spoken of only on the extreme fringes of the right. Now it too has broken containment. In October 2025, the Conservative MP Katie Lam, while never explicitly mentioning the term, told the Telegraph that “a large number” of non-British-born residents with settled status will need to go “home.” Robert Jenrick, meanwhile, another rising star of the Conservative Party, is now a noted advocate of deportation and whose rhetoric has come to ape the style and language of the far-right “Yookay” meme, a derogatory term used online to mock multicultural Britain.
In this context, predictions like those made by Betz can end up being self-fulfilling. Rather than a form of political contestation, social conflict becomes a seemingly natural process, moving as if by its own motive force. Preventing it is not a question of economics or foreign policy, but of ethnic or immigration policy. Like Lam’s and Jenrick’s, Betz’s claims may be softer than those from the extreme far-right, rooted as they are in his seemingly cool and detached academic analysis of the real situation rather than any apparent underlying racist or nativist sentiment. The results, however, are much the same.
John Merrick is deputy editor at The BREAK–DOWN.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Civil War, (Granta Books, 1994) 69. ↩︎
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1983444964848873569 ↩︎
David Betz, “Civil War Comes to the West,” Military Strategy Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 1, Summer 2023, 20-26, https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west/; and Betz, “Civil War Comes to the West, Part II: Strategic Realities,” Military Strategy Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 2, Spring 2025, 6-16, https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west-part-ii-strategic-realities/ ↩︎
Betz, however, leaves out the rest of the sentence: “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle,” Borrell said, “and the jungle could invade the garden.” ↩︎
For a far more nuanced, and more informed, discussion of the events in Leicester, see Yohann Koshy’s Long Read article in the Guardian, “What the unrest in Leicester revealed about Britain—and Modi’s India,” which, unlike the sensationalized portrayal of intercommunal strife tearing a city apart, stresses that “the events of that weekend were, at least on the surface, relatively minor.” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/08/unrest-leicester-muslim-hindu-revealed-britain-modi-india-2022 ↩︎
Aris Roussinos, “The Ulsterisation of English politics: Westminster is losing legitimacy”, UnHerd, July 8, 2025, https://unherd.com/2025/07/the-ulsterisation-of-english-politics/ ↩︎
“Whites” is capitalized in the original quote, perhaps in a pointed reference to the recent trend of capitalizing “Black” that emerged following the BLM movement. ↩︎
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gid48FgiHho ↩︎
Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945 (Verso, 2017). ↩︎
Michael Feola, The Rage of Replacement: Far Right Politics and Demographic Fear (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), 34. ↩︎
There are, of course, other forms of ethnic composition of society that, Betz says, are less susceptible to civil war alongside very homogenous societies. These are “extremely heterogeneous societies,” in which no ethnic group makes up more than 20 percent or so of a society and thus is not able to dominate all the others, and in which exist high “coordination costs” between ethnic groups. ↩︎
Betz, The Guarded Age: Fortification in the Twenty-First Century (Polity, 2024), 23. ↩︎
Alan Finlayson, “The left (still) doesn’t understand the internet,” Renewal, Volume.33 Issue 2, Nov. 11, 2025, https://renewal.org.uk/articles/the-left-still-doesnt-understand-the-internet/ ↩︎
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/23/first-edition-boriswave-online-origins ↩︎
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/24/two-thirds-muslims-england-wales-areas-high-unemployment ↩︎
Black and Minority Ethnic statistics on poverty and deprivation, IRR, April 25, 2024, https://irr.org.uk/research/statistics/poverty/ ↩︎
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyjlx2e4l8o ↩︎
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/25/public-think-islam-not-compatible-with-british-values/ ↩︎
https://www.lemonde.fr/police-justice/article/2018/05/03/eric-zemmour-condamne-en-appel-pour-des-propos-islamophobes_5293921_1653578.html ↩︎
https://hopenothate.org.uk/2025/09/13/britains-biggest-far-right-protest-more-than-100000-attend-tommy-robinsons-unite-the-kingdom-rally/ ↩︎
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