Think about what it means to belong to a country. Most of us would say it’s about citizenship, the place you’re born, the life you build there, the culture you share with neighbors. But in recent years, a different and far more exclusionary answer has been creeping into mainstream political conversations across the Western world. Ethnonationalist movements argue that national belonging is really about race and ancestry. In that view, you can be born in a country, hold its passport, speak its language, and still never truly belong if your roots aren’t the “right” ones. This isn’t just an abstract philosophy. It’s a worldview that has been pushed from the margins toward the center with growing confidence, often by using statistics, demographic projections, and conspiracy theories to make exclusionary policies sound rational and necessary. The underlying logic is simple: if the nation is defined by blood, then immigrants, even citizens, are a threat to its survival. And once you accept that premise, extreme policies start to feel like common sense to some people. It’s this exact mechanism worth understanding, because it’s not just happening in faraway places. It’s happening right now, in Canada, in Europe, and increasingly within the political conversations that shape the future of NATO.
Take the Dominion Society of Canada. On the surface, it presents itself as a patriotic organization that cares about preserving Canadian identity. But groups that monitor hate and extremism, including the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, have identified it as a white nationalist organization, pointing to the hardline racial and ethnic exclusion embedded in its policy proposals. The centerpiece of its platform is something called “remigration.” The organization’s leadership calls it “the only path forward to save Canadians from becoming a minority in our homelands.” That word, remigration, sounds almost polite, like a bureaucratic term for moving people around. But what it actually means is far harsher. The Dominion Society lays out an 11-step plan that includes mass deportation of temporary foreign workers, restricting birthright citizenship, and revoking existing permanent residency status. Let that sink in. People who have legally built their lives in Canada, who have work permits, who are permanent residents, would have their status terminated. This isn’t about border security or immigration reform in any conventional sense. It’s about using state power to remove people who, under the group’s logic, don’t belong because they aren’t the right race or ancestry. The severity of these proposals alone warrants attention. But what should really worry us is how the group justifies them.
The foundation of that justification is the Great Replacement Theory. This is the conspiracy theory that claims immigration and multiculturalism are part of a deliberate, coordinated effort by elites to replace predominantly white populations in Western countries with largely non-white immigrants from the developing world. It’s an idea that sounds absurd when stated plainly, yet it has become one of the most powerful narrative tools in ethnonationalist movements. The language is deliberately emotional: words like “invasion,” “survival,” and “takeover” are used to frame immigration as an existential threat. The goal is to provoke fear and sympathy among the in-group, to make people feel that their country is being stolen from them. The Dominion Society uses this exact language on its own website. To make its case, it points to a real fact: Canadian fertility rates have been declining since the 1960s and dropped below replacement level in the early 1970s. That part is true, according to Statistics Canada. But then comes the deliberate and unsupported leap. The group uses this real statistic to claim that declining fertility rates are being exploited by elites to justify immigration, and that immigration policy is actually a purposeful plan for ethnic replacement. It then extends that same faulty logic outward, blaming immigration for housing affordability, wage stagnation, and the erosion of Canadian cultural identity. This is a clever and dangerous move. It starts with something people can verify, so it feels credible. Then it builds an imaginary chain of cause and effect, and by the end, it has transformed people’s legitimate worries about the future into anger at immigrants.
Housing affordability is a perfect example of how this distortion works. Everyone in Canada knows how difficult it is to buy a home, especially in major cities. It’s a real crisis, and people are anxious about it. The Dominion Society claims that Canada now has the highest average home prices across G7 countries, and it says this is “entirely as a result of immigration.” But the evidence tells a much more complicated story. Economists at the C.D. Howe Institute point to a range of factors that have nothing to do with immigration: the concentration of jobs and housing demand in a handful of big cities, restrictive zoning and land-use regulations, and development charges that push construction costs onto new housing and drive prices sky-high. Research published by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada found that between 2006 and 2021, immigrant arrivals accounted for about 11 percent of the overall increase in median house values and rental rates across Canada. Eleven percent is not nothing, but it is hardly the whole story. Compare that to the Dominion Society’s claim that immigration is entirely responsible, and you can see the deception clearly. The group doesn’t just exaggerate. It takes a real factor, immigration’s modest effect on housing costs, and blows it up into a terrifying narrative of ethnic replacement. By doing this, it turns people’s economic insecurity into a political weapon. It gives false conclusions a veneer of credibility by wrapping them around accurate information. And once people accept that immigration is the sole cause of their struggles, the proposed solution, mass deportation, starts to look like a reasonable response.
The Dominion Society is not an isolated case. It is following a playbook that has already been tested and refined in Europe, and the clearest example is Germany’s Alternative for Germany, or AfD. The AfD was founded in 2013 as a Euroskeptic party, mainly for people who wanted Germany to disengage from the European Union. But over time, it transformed into something much more extreme. German intelligence has classified the party as far-right extremist. Like the Dominion Society, the AfD has fully embraced the Great Replacement theory. It argues that remigration is necessary to defend German national identity against what it portrays as an immigration-driven cultural decline. The similarities are striking. The AfD devoted an entire chapter to remigration in its election program for Saxony-Anhalt, and the Dominion Society devotes an entire website page to its 11-step remigration plan. The AfD has become the most popular party in Germany nationwide, which is a stunning shift for a country that spent decades trying to leave its nationalist past behind. Its success shows that these ideas are not staying on the fringes. They are gaining real political traction. And where the AfD goes, other movements like the Dominion Society are eager to follow.
What makes the AfD especially important to watch is the way its domestic positions connect to broader security issues, particularly for NATO. Germany and Russia historically had deep economic ties. Before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russia supplied Germany with roughly a third of its crude oil imports and more than half of its natural gas. So when Berlin moved to sanction Russian oil and gas, the consequences were immediate and painful. Energy prices skyrocketed, compounding a broader economic downturn. The AfD capitalized on this discontent, pushing back against sanctions and turning public frustration into political support. Its voters reflect this shift: only about 39 percent of AfD supporters view NATO favorably, a sharp departure from the German public overall. For people struggling with higher energy costs and economic uncertainty, blaming continued support for Ukraine offers a convenient outlet for their anger. The AfD has turned those grievances into broader opposition to NATO and the political establishment, and Russian influence campaigns have been more than happy to amplify the division. For NATO, the implications are serious. Disinformation that amplifies domestic grievances can deepen opposition to alliance policies, including military support for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. This is not just a political difference. It affects real security decisions. The AfD has called for ending arms deliveries to Ukraine and lifting sanctions against Russia. And the security risks go beyond policy positions. Reports suggest the AfD played a role in Russia’s recruitment of a senior German intelligence officer in 2022, who supplied Russia with information about the war in Ukraine. That kind of breach complicates cooperation among allies and jeopardizes the protection of sensitive information. German defence officials are now reportedly considering steps to block regional state governments from accessing confidential national and NATO defence plans as the AfD enters government. This is where ethnonationalist politics and international security collide.
Now, it’s important to note that the Dominion Society has not, at least not yet, expressed an anti-NATO or pro-Russia position. But both movements are built on the same architecture, using real statistics to lend credibility to false claims about immigration. And there are signs that the connections between the Dominion Society and European ethnonationalist networks are deepening. Austrian white nationalist Martin Sellner, who is a hardline proponent of remigration and has connections to the AfD’s broader network, was selected as keynote speaker for Canada’s 2026 Dominion Conference. He will be joined by British fascist speaker Charlie Downes, who also has ties to these networks. Whether these connections remain limited to shared ideology or evolve into shared strategy is still unclear. But the path the AfD took once it began forging similar relationships is a warning. What starts with conferences and shared talking points can quickly become coordinated action, and coordinated action on behalf of ethnonationalist movements rarely stays contained. Ultimately, what began as a fringe conspiracy theory about the deliberate replacement of white populations has become an increasingly mainstream tool for exploiting economic and cultural insecurity. By wrapping real evidence around false conclusions, narratives like the Great Replacement manufacture a concrete-sounding justification for exclusionary policies. The groups that champion these narratives gain reach and perceived legitimacy, and as the AfD example shows, that legitimacy translates into real influence over security and partnership choices. It’s easy to dismiss these movements as irrelevant or extreme, but that would be a mistake. The trajectory is clear, and its potential consequences for NATO, for democratic trust, and for the very idea of belonging, are too serious to ignore.