Nationalism, Patriotism, and Internationalism I
Recent press reports inevitably describe Serbia's Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica as a "nationalist," presumably because he thinks his primary duty is to look out for the interests of the Serbian people. Today, few newspaper readers or bloggers (in descending order of education) have the slightest idea of what terms like "nationalism" and "patriotism" mean. To realize the depth of this ignorance, you only have to look at the controversy stirred up by Pat Buchanan's new book on Churchill and by John Lukacs negative review written by historian . Since I count both men as friends, I do not intend to enter into the polemics except to say that I have found most of the discussion superficial at best and repulsive at worst. If this is conservatism or paleoconservatism or postpaleoconservatism, I want no part of it.
I would like to contribute a few pages of analysis of "nationalism" and "patriotism," a subject on which I have been sounding off in several languages for about 10 years. I'll take the argument piece by piece, posting additions and amplifications. The full context of this discussion is my book The Morality of Everyday Life, which takes up these questions in Chapter II "Citizens of the World." I will supplement, however, with a lecture I gave at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and testimony I was preparing to give in the Slobodan Milosevic "trial" at the Hague, before he fired his lawyers, reorganized his defense, and became too sick for the trial to continue. Before taking up nationalism, though, I want to eliminate two canards: 1) That national patriotism was invented by 19th century Romantics, and 2) that Internationalism is a self-evidently good remedy for ethnic conflict.
Romantic Nationalism
"Nationalism is a phenomenon of the European nineteenth century. It is a political consequence of the literary-intellectual movement called Romanticism, a Central European reaction to the universalizing, and therefore disorienting, ideas of the eighteenth century French Enlightenment." This statement, so appalling in its ignorance, comes from William Pfaff’s recent book The Wrath of Nations . The subtitle states the thesis: Civilization and the Fury of Nationalism. Nationalism—even a strong sense of nationhood—is an East-European thing, you civilized Anglos wouldn’t understand-- thank goodness. Pfaff, you may remember, is the International Herald Tribune columnist who lied his way through the Balkan Wars, and his 1066 and All That History of nationalism is the theoretical justification for the disinformation he handed out in service of the benevolent global hegemony of the US. Connor Cruise O’Brien describes his approach as “willfully obtuse” but the Irishman is too kind.
If nationalism and nationality are not the inventions of Poles and Serbs, how shall we describe them? We are going to have to make some nice distinctions. Later on I shall try to distinguish nationalism from various forms of patriotism, but at this point it is enough to point out that one can have a sense of ethnic identity—as ancient Greeks or 18th century Germans did, without wanting a unified state: Indeed, the Greeks and Germans were perfectly happy to kill each other, often in alliance with nations that were their national enemies.
II Internationalism
National and ethnic identities are an almost universal phenomenon in human history, but nationalism, as an ideological movement, is not a spontaneous growth or a natural development from the nation-state. Ideological nationalism is a response, admittedly distorted, to internationalism. Although the roots of internationalism go back to the Stoic theory of world-citizenship and to the actual facts of the Roman Empire, modern internationalism is a more recent production, a political substitute for the unity of Christendom that was shattered by the Schism of the Church, the establishment of various national churches in England, Germany, Switzerland, and the rise of powerful national states.
Large nation states began to take shape in the later Middle Ages for different reasons. One obvious reason is security: Anglo-Saxons unified their part of the island against the repeated invasions from which they suffered; Catholic Spaniards labored for centuries to unify their country against the Moorish Muslims who oppressed them. In France, Bourbon kings of the 17th and 18th century worked to repress the religious feuds and the threat to their authority posed by powerful regional nobles.
The internationalist movement, however, is almost as old. Although it is often described as an expression of disgust with war and religious intolerance—and there is an element of that—the international ideology is actually part of a more general tendency toward western self-loathing. When a French intellectual looked in the mirror in 1600, he saw a Frenchman and a Christian where he would have liked to see a Greek pagan. Since the Church was still powerful, few intellectuals were as mad as Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600, for his pagan notions. Instead, the intellectuals became sly and ironic. From Montaigne on, intellectuals began subjecting Catholic France to imaginary visitors from Latin America, Persia, and China, all of whom expressed astonishment at the silly religion, false reverence to the king, and loyalty to the nation.
Of these philosophes, Voltaire was perhaps the most evil and the most effective. Outwardly proclaiming his rational allegiance to king, church, and nation, he was forever egging on his friends and followers to find ways of undermining faith in the Consubstantiel and loyalty to the crown. His entry in the Philosophical Dictionary on “Patrie” is instructive:
A young journeyman pastry cook who had been to college, and who still knew a few of Cicero's phrases, boasted one day of loving his fatherland. "What do you mean by your fatherland'?" a neighbor asked him. "Is it your oven? Is it the village where you were born and which you have never seen since? Is it the street where dwelled your father and mother who have been ruined and have reduced you to baking little pies for a living? Is it the town hall where you will never be a police superintendent's clerk? Is it the Church of Our Lady where you have not been able to become a choirboy, while an absurd man is archbishop and duke with an income of twenty thousand golden louis?"
The journeyman pastry cook did not know what to answer. A thinker who was listening to this conversation, concluded that in a fatherland of some extent there were often many thousand men who had no fatherland.
Frenchmen, the thinker argued, do not even know the different parts of their own country, while the exploiting classes—financiers, soldiers, the nobility all treat the people of the fatherland as enemies to ruin. Your true fatherland is wherever you are comfortable, no matter what country your are in. Voltaire, who followed his own advice and went to live first in Prussia, then in Switzerland, concludes by saying: “He who should wish his fatherland might never be greater, smaller, richer, poorer, would be the citizen of the world.”
Citizen of the world was a phrase picked up from the Stoics and adopted by intellectuals like Voltaire and Adam Smith. National rivalries led to destructive wars, and what was needed was some federal union of states. The Abbé de St.-Pierre, author of Projet de Paix Perpetuelle, was a typical--perhaps stereotypical--Enlightenment intellectual with an unbounded faith in the goodness of human nature and the blessings of progress. His concern for bienfaisance (benevolence) led him to propose graduated taxation to benefit the French lower classes and, ultimately, to outline a plan for a world confederation that would eliminate war. Rousseau, who commented on and popularized St.-Pierre’s essay, concluded that it might take a revolution to bring about a European federation to end war.
Unfortunately, the revolution, when it came to France shortly after Rousseau’s death, initiated one of the bloodiest periods of European history. The French Revolution was the seminal event of modern times, the period when Enlightenment theories of liberty and equality, natural rights and the social contract assumed a concrete form. All subsequent history in the West has been a series of attempts to extend (or resist) the principles of the Revolution, and since World War II, there has been no practical opposition to the ideology of 1789.
The French Revolution is not a simple phenomenon dominated by one ideology. Influenced by Rousseau, the leaders of revolutionary France proclaimed their devotion to the nation Indeed, The Declaration of the Rights of Man states that “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.” Yet they also declared their support for other revolutionary movements that would rise up to throw off the chains of monarchy, feudalism, and Christianity. In the Proclamation of the Convention to the Nations, December 1792, they declared: “We have conquered our liberty and we shall maintain it. We offer to bring this inestimable blessing to you, for it has always been rightly ours, and only by a crime have our oppressors robbed us of it. We have driven out your tyrants. Show yourselves free men and we will protect you from their vengeance, their machinations, or their return.” In other words, the universal rights of men justify the French conquest of Europe.
In the 19th century, the revolutionary ideal would separate, temporarily, into nationalist and internationalist channels, the one leading to the formation of centralized nation-states in France, Germany, Italy, and the United States; the other inspiring Marxists with their project of establishing economic justice in an international order.
Marx and Engels viewed the nation-state (along with the family and private property) as an institution that had been created by patriarchal men solely for the purpose of oppressing women and the poor. In the Communist Manifesto, they wrote the blueprint, not merely for communist revolutions, but for an international order that would ultimately end the exploitation of poor nations and replace nation states themselves. Here, in a nutshell, is the entire modern doctrine of internationalism: an end to the exploitation of poor nations by rich nations, and, ultimately, an end to the system of nation-states.
A bit more detail on Marx:
Marx and Engels viewed the nation-state (along with the family and private property) as an institution that had been created by patriarchal men solely for the purpose of oppressing women and the poor. In the Communist Manifesto, they wrote the blueprint, not merely for communist revolutions, but for an international order that would ultimately replace communist nation states:
"The workers have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereunto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action of the leading civilized countries at least is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. "
Here, in a nutshell, is the entire doctrine of internationalism: an end to the exploitation of poor nations by rich nations, and, ultimately, an end to the system of nation-states.
Marxist theory, however, has done little to alleviate ethnic and national hostilities. Marx’s own ethnic prejudices were confirmed, rather than weakened by, his progressive view of history. Primitive and retrograde peoples, such as Highland Scots, Africans, and Jews, were viewed as so many obstacles to progress that had to be eliminated. In their correspondence, Marx and Engels frequently used the English word “nigger” as an insult for people (including Jews) with dark skin. Marx, who supported the North in the War Between the States but had initially opposed the emancipation of American slaves, frequently described his son-in-law and disciple, Paul Lafargue, who was perhaps one-eighth African, as “the negrillo” and “the gorilla,” observing that his daughter had contributed to solving the race problem “by marrying a nigger.”
Though Marx was himself ethnically Jewish (the grandson of a rabbi), and Jews predominated in the leadership of most communist parties, Marx and Engels were openly antisemitic in their writings, and the Soviet Union under Stalin eliminated most of the Jewish leaders of the party during the Purge Trials. Marx’s repulsive bigotry, combined with the record of communist states in persecuting ethnic groups (e.g., Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Mongols, Tibetans, et al.) and in engaging in aggressive wars even with other communist states (between Vietnam and Cambodia), does little to strengthen the Marxist case for an international order.
On the question of political violence, most socialists and leftists part company with revolutionary Marxists, and most have been content to advocate a gradual movement within states toward a more perfect system of social justice. There is, however, a common thread (visible already in St.-Pierre) that runs through liberal (and socialist) nationalism and internationalism: the duty we have to provide ”social justice,” either to the citizens of a nation or to citizens of the world. The brotherhood of man promised to Christians living in the kingdom of God is now to be delivered by force to the denizens of the Commonwealth of Man. But, even though the genii of human brotherhood cannot be locked up in the bottle of a nation-state, the reality of Marxism to date has been the growth of socialism within nation-states and an enhancement, rather than an elimination, of the nationalist spirit.
Nationalism
Love of country is a natural outgrowth of the love of kith and kin, but the modern concept of nationalism is largely the creation of the French Revolution, which implemented Rousseau’s theory of the general will and continued the process of centralization inaugurated by the Bourbon monarchy. The classic text is Le Contrat Social, a book as mad as it is important. Following his own injunction in his essay on the origin of Inequality,” Rousseau set aside all the facts and accepted John Locke’s state of nature and social contract lock, stock, and barrel. He then developed the social contract theory into a nightmare.
Since government rests on the mystical consent of the governed, which Rousseau terms the General Will, that national will is the sovereign. “…the act of association comprises a mutual undertaking between the public and the individuals, and that each individual, in making a contract, as we may say, with himself, is bound in a double capacity; as a member of the Sovereign he is bound to the individuals, and as a member of the State to the Sovereign. But the maxim of civil right, that no one is bound by undertakings made to himself, does not apply in this case; for there is a great difference between incurring an obligation to yourself and incurring one to a whole of which you form a part.”
The sovereignty of the national will is indivisible and inalienable—hence the language of our own nationalist Pledge of Allegiance. The General Will is also infallible, though the people in their deliberations may make mistakes. These mistakes arise from ignorance and the self-interest of factions. “It is therefore essential, if the general will is to be able to express itself, that there should be no partial society within the State, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts which was indeed the sublime and unique system established by the great Lycurgus.” In other words, the militaristic communal system of tiny Sparta can now be applied to a great nation state.
According to nationalists, the will of the nation, as defined as an historic community of blood and tongue, had to find expression in a common and unified state. Hence, the Italian nationalist Mazzini, whose political lineage goes back to the Revolution, spoke always of the twin principles of unity and nationality.
Romantic Nationalism
Is usually associated with German philosophers and propagandists of the 19th century. This is a battlefield where the bones have been picked clean by leftist internationalists. The basic argument is that beginning with the late 18th century, Germans began seeking ways of justifying unification and expansion of the German people as a superior race. The usual sources they cite are Herder’s “romantic” notions about cultural unity, the researches into folklore made by the Brothers Grimm, the bizarre but influential philosophy of Hegel who spoke of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, which could be incorporated into a nation with a special destiny—and that it was the destiny of the German nation to be the masters of the new European civilization.
Kant was not without his own nationalist strain, and he was both xenophobic and fiercely anti-semitic. German Romantic nationalism reaches its frenzied peak in one of Kant’s disciples, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In his “Address to the German Nation”:
The first, original, and truly natural boundaries of states are beyond doubt their internal boundaries. Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole.
Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality-then, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be; and only a man who either entirely lacks the notion of the rule of law and divine order, or else is an obdurate enemy thereto, could take upon himself to want to interfere with that law, which is the highest law in the spiritual world!
Since this language reappears in the mouth of Adolf Hitler, then all German nationalists going back to Herder are proto-Nazis. Not exactly. I hold no brief for Hegel or Fichte, but it is important to make some distinctions, and th easiest way to do that is to consider the thought of the godfather of German nationalism, Johann Gottlieb von Herder.
Herder was born to a humble family in East Prussia in 1744. His philosophical studies led him to Kant, but not to the Kant of the Critique, but the early Kant. At the age of 20 he went to teach in Riga, and his experience of Baltic and Slavic peoples had a profound effect on him throughout his life. To a great extent Herder was a man of his time. Although not an extreme rationalist, he was sublimely rational in his approach to most questions. His views on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind were skeptical and naturalistic, and in his famous theory of the origin of language he rejected divine and supernatural causes in favor of natural causes—much as Epicurus and Lucretius had argued in the ancient world. In politics he advocated republican and democratic principles and took a cautious “wait and see” approach to the French Revolution—though he deplored the slaughter in the Vendée.
Historians of philosophy still debate Herder’s importance, but there is not doubting his enormous influence. This is partly due to the clarity and vividness of expression. He rejected the convoluted language and style of academic philosophy and wrote powerful essays. It is not that he rejected systematic thought. In fact, he favored systematic thought, but he believed that it should be presented in such a manner as attracted intelligent but non-technical readers. I think he also felt that dogmatic philosophy stultified the reader’s brain, while the technique of Plato in his dialogues, Hume in his essays, and, I would argue, Thomas in his scholastic method, stimulates thought.
Herder very much believed in nations, even small nations, and he gives the conventional political metaphor “the ship of state” a new twist, by arguing that the members of a nation are all on board, and no matter what problems their nation has, the passengers on board must love the ship and work together to see it through a storm. “The word fatherland brought the ship afloat at the shore,” and each individual passenger “can and may no longer (unless he casts himself overboard and entrusts himself to the sea’s wild waves) stand idly by in the ship and count the waves as though he was on the shore.” Culture and language, Herder insists in the same place, are essential aspects of nationality.
Herder did not regard nations as mere ideas as Hegel seemed to regard them: Nations are “the result of a thousand cooperating causes of the whole element in which they live” and thus he concludes it would be childish “to present this formation as merely consisting in and occurring through a few brighter ideas towards which people have been trotting almost since the reinstitution of the sciences.” Arguing against Voltaire and others, who argued that human beings are pretty much the same everywhere and at all times, Herder insisted that history and observation teaches us that the character of a people can change, and in his essay on “The Change of Taste”, he compares the Enlightenment’s universalistic attitude, seeing all cultures as imperfect reflections of itself, with the ignorant xenophobia of Chinese who hardly believed in the existence of other peoples. Just as human individuals are different, even unique, so are human nations, the Germans no less than the Chinese.
Herder approached the nations of the world much as a radical environmentalist today regards endangered species. Each nation is precious because it reflects some quality within the human type, and when an imperial nation eliminates another nation, it is committing a crime against humanity. I thought I was the first humane nationalist to put forward what I called the Golden Rule of nationalism—whatever you want for your own people, whether self-determination or rights to culture and language—you must accord to people of other nations, but Herder had worked this all out before 1800. He has bitter things to say about European colonialism which not only brings misery to the peoples of Africa and the Americas, but which deforms and distorts the cultures of the enslaved peoples.
Unlike Montaigne and Voltaire, Herder was no apologist for alien cultures at the expense of the European, but as a skeptic he believed that he was not entitled to make ultimate judgments on the value of civilizations he had not experienced. Nature has made the nations separate, and world-unifiers, since the time of Nimrod, have been attempting to join by violence what nature has kept asunder.
The Liberal Critique
With his emphasis on human freedom and dignity, Herder can be understood within the context of early liberalism, and indeed he was a strong influence on JS Mill. On the other hand, his concern for nations sets him apart. Most 19th-century liberals were sympathetic to patriotic and nationalist movements of liberation and unification, and even John Stuart Mill, an arch-individualist, embraced the notion that every discrete nation should have its own state. However, other liberals, such as Jacob Burckhardt, condemned the nationalist state as spiritually and culturally mortifying. A divided Germany had produced Haydn and Goethe, but the nation-state, in its desire for power, would regard such dismemberment with shame, and Burckhardt noted “the hopelessness of any attempt at decentralization, of any voluntary restriction of power in favor of local and civilized life.
In England, Lord Acton condemned nationalism as the principle most inimical to human liberty (which liberals claimed, by definition, was the great object of all their policies). Acton, who was descended on his mother’s side from the aristocratic Dalbergs of Bavaria, was an admirer of the Holy Roman Empire, and he argued that the mixture of competing nations under one crown served to prevent the tyranny of the centralized state. He viewed a federal system, such as that of Switzerland or of the early American republic, as the best solution to ethnic conflict. States built on the national idea were, he felt, too confining to inspire the generous, cosmopolitan civilization that had been characteristic of European man.
If the nationalist point-of-view narrows the human outlook, it also implies, though it is not always expressed, a willingness to divide the human race into the categories of “us” and “them,” and to define “them” as an enemy to be eliminated or subjugated. Nationalism, as George Orwell pointed out, stems from, first, “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’” and second, from “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” Orwell distinguished this nationalist habit of mind from patriotism, which he defined as “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.“
Although nationalist ideology was born in the French Revolution, which was the “church militant” of the Enlightenment, the aspirations of European peoples to free themselves from the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian empires was not based on theory. The Poles had once been a great nation, and the partition of Poland among the great powers was a cynical expression of the imperialist urge to eliminate historic nations. The backlash was inevitable and not just among Poles: Czechs, Serbs, Croats, Greeks, and others all had a legitimate desire to live within a state that allowed their language, culture, and religion to flourish.
Nationalism, although it often has its origin in so innocent a source as the desire for national liberation, may take ugly turns, developing into a theory of the racial uniqueness and superiority of one’s own nation over all its rivals. All peoples will tend to hate the conqueror and to look down upon the conquered, but such natural feelings do not always result in implacable resentment or bitter contempt. Ancient Greek cities banded together to oppose the invading Persians, who sacked cities, destroyed temples, and killed noncombatants, and yet Aeschylus, who fought them at Marathon and Salamis, portrays the Persians sympathetically in The Persians, and later writers, such as Herodotus and Xenophon, were perfectly frank about the courage and virtues (as well as the vices) of the Greeks’ greatest enemy. Serbs, though brutally oppressed by the Ottoman Turks and their Slavic and Albanian allies, were respectful toward the sultan and freely acknowledged, in their folk poems, the heroism of their enemies. “Alas,” cried the Serbian hero Prince Marko after killing an Albanian brigand, “for I have killed the better man.”
Such respectful sentiments would be unthinkable coming from the mouth of a radical nationalist who, at his worst, depicts the imperial Russians or Austrians as savages and the neighboring Slovaks or Serbs as canaille. While soldiers in the two world wars were sometimes willing to look upon each other as human beings, their governments, which enlisted distinguished writers in their propaganda campaigns, were not. The Germans, who were portrayed as savage monsters by the Allies, ridiculed the effeminacy of Britain and France and portrayed Jews and Slavs as subhuman. The United States, in ridiculing the Japanese, resorted to the most sordid racial stereotyping.
Although such propaganda is often associated with right-wing nationalist movements, it is equally common among leftists and progressives, who are willing to demonize any opponent as racist or retrograde. This technique of propagandistic stereotyping, on the part of the American government at least, goes back to the American War Between the States, when a progressive government and its newspapers depicted Southerners as cruel and inhuman slave-drivers who deserved no sympathy. Such propaganda can be used to justify any actions undertaken by the superior government, whether it is the elimination of the Jews, the bombing of undefended cities, or Sherman’s march to the sea. It is the hallmark of the nationalist to justify every crime committed by his own people and to impute no honorable motives or actions to rival nations.
Patriotism
In general usage, patriotism signifies a person’s willingness to take risks and make sacrifices for the sake of his country and his fellow citizens. Although his devotion may spring from an instinctive “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life,” the patriot does not merely feel loyal to a spot of ground; he is willing to defend it with his life, even if he feels no particular hostility toward the enemy who wishes to take it from him.
Patriotism, as Acton understood, can transcend the blood-and-soil passions of primitive man and become an ethical force :
"Our connection with the race is merely natural or physical, whilst our duties to the political nation are ethical. One is a community of affections and instincts infinitely important and powerful in savage life, but pertaining more to the animal than to the civilized man; the other is an authority governing by laws, imposing obligations, and giving a moral sanction and character to the natural relations of society. Patriotism . . . is an extension of the family affections, as the tribe is an extension of the family. But in its real political character, patriotism consists in the development of the instinct of self-preservation into a moral duty which may involve self-sacrifice."
Acton is not alone in regarding the highest form of patriotism as ethical rather than instinctive, but such a conception is liable to misconstruction, and Burckhardt applies the words “arrogance” and “degeneration” to any state’s attempt to fulfill a moral purpose directly.
Burckhardt understood St. Thomas’s point that the state exists to make virtue possible and not to impose virtue upon the people, and his refusal to attribute moral purpose to the state is similar to the distinction made between individual charity and a government-imposed system of welfare. When a man is called “patriotic,” the implication is that he has made a moral choice to risk his own self-interest for the good of his country, which is viewed as something more than blood and soil, as a constitutional order grounded in morality and law, and yet, as a moral individual, he can have little influence over life-and-death decisions made by the semi-divine state, which may go beyond inspiring or requesting such loyalty: It may command it, backing its command with all the resources of the modern state. At that point, patriotism is so far removed from instinctive loyalty as to be almost indistinguishable from nationalism. It is not always easy to distinguish a war veteran who flies his country’s flag to honor its heroes and its resistance to aggression from the chauvinist who waves the flag as a sign of the superiority and invincibility of the nation; indeed, the patriot and the chauvinist may often be the same person.
“Rodoljublje”
We can, however, draw a valid distinction between patriotism as an ethical and political virtue, originating in natural attachments but formed and directed by the state, and nationalism as a statist ideology that opposes and excludes other loyalties, whether those loyalties are to an international religion and civilization or to the province or region of one’s birth. A patriotic German from Hanover might have no quarrel with Catholics in Bavaria, but a German nationalist will more typically dislike a religion that divides some Germans from others and unites them to people of other nations and races. Such distinctions are often, however, more theoretical than real. If patriotism can merge into nationalism, then perhaps we are dealing with a distinction without a difference, a question of gradation and degrees. At the opposite extremes of sentimental loyalty and rabid chauvinism, however, patriotism and nationalism seem poles apart. The problem lies in the concept of patriotism itself, which (in everyday speech) seems to designate a transitional phase that may pass into nationalism but derives from something more primitive, which has no name.
Patriotism is not simply an ethical devotion to a constitution or legal order, and even where such higher sentiments have come into existence, they may not have entirely escaped the more primitive passions of love and loyalty. What Acton failed to understand, with his mind lodged securely in 18th-century rationalism, was that the stages of human social development can never be transcended; they can only be incorporated into more complex communities. The family was not eliminated, for being incorporated in a tribe, and a tribal or provincial identity can only be destroyed at grave peril to the moral health of the people.
Jacobin nationalists, in attempting to build an abstract and artificially unified French nation, made war on all other, more real loyalties: They destroyed the Church, waged a war of genocide against Catholics in the Vendée, and did their best to obliterate the regional civilizations of Provence and Brittany that were responsible for the vitality of French culture. The predictable results, in France, Britain, and the United States (to name only three examples), is a mass culture in which the only “national identity” is the creation of commercial entertainment and state propaganda. Sheltered by the stultifying effects of communist misrule, the nations of Eastern Europe were able to preserve some of their cultural traditions; exposed to the virulent forces of free trade and global commercialism, they may sink into the morass of Americanism.
As a deeply learned aristocrat, as at home in Italy or Germany as in England, Lord Acton did not grasp the fundamental and enduring importance of the instinctive attachment to family and tribe that has no name in English or in most European languages. However, Edmund Burke (a strong influence on Acton), in opposing the French Revolution, referred to the “little platoons” that command our loyalties, and we can sometimes speak in English of “local patriotism,” when referring to the attachment to neighborhood celebrated in G.K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but we are fumbling to express a concept for which we have no word. Serbian does have such a word: rodoljublje, love of kith and kin, love of the stock (rod). If we were to coin a technical term to describe such an attachment, it might be something like genophilia. This instinctive loyalty, which lies at the root of patriotism, is something quite different from--indeed, opposed to--nationalism.
To understand such loyalty requires a more anthropological approach. The historian of Sicily, Edward Freeman, following the work on kinship done by Sir Henry Sumner Maine, clearly distinguished the sentiment of attachment from ideological nationalisms such as German race theory or Russian Panslavism. As he wrote in a very pertinent essay of 1879 :
". . . there is nothing but what is perfectly simple in the feeling which calls Russia, as the most powerful of Orthodox states, to the help of her Orthodox brethren everywhere, and which calls the members of the Orthodox Church everywhere to look to Russia as their protector . . . So again, the people of Montenegro and of the neighboring lands in Herzegovina and by the Bocche of Cattaro feel themselves countrymen in every sense but the political accident which keeps them asunder. They are drawn together by a tie which everyone can understand, by the same tie which would draw together the people of three adjoining English counties, if any strange political action should part them asunder in like manner. The feeling here is that of nationality in the strictest sense, nationality in a purely local or geographical sense. It would exist all the same if Panslavism had never been heard of; it might exist though those who feel it had never heard of the Slavonic race at all. It is altogether another thing when we come to the doctrine of race, and of sympathies founded on race, in the wider sense."
Such love of kith and kin is not based in race, but in language, culture, and tradition, and while the process of loyalty begins with the family, it culminates in the commonwealth which fulfills, without superseding, lesser loyalties. As Freeman observes: “Kindred, real or artificial, is the one basis on which all society and all government have grown up.”
The love of kith and kin does not require a nation-state. It is possible to be loyal to one’s own people even when separated, as Serbians, Montenegrins, and the Serbs of Bosnia and Krajina were in the 19th century (or as Greeks were until the Roman conquest). Separate ethnic groups may also be unified in a crown--as Scots and English were under James VI/I or the peoples of Spain for many centuries. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz attributed Spain’s comparative stability (when compared with that of Mexico) to the unifying effect of the monarchy, and there are undoubted advantages, for a multiethnic state, in having a symbol of unity that transcends politics.
The difficulty comes when a multiethnic monarchy or empire begins to force assimilation, as happened in Austria-Hungary, which degenerated from the more inclusive ideal of the Holy Roman Empire into a dual monarchy, which, at the mercy of dual nationalisms (Hungarian and German), made it difficult if not impossible for Slovaks, Croats, and Serbs to preserve their identities. The Hungarian liberals, who had noisily and violently demanded their national rights, were unwilling even to take on the Croats as junior partners. Such Hungarian nationalists as Louis Kossuth portrayed themselves as enlightened patriots interested only in the good of humanity, but Kossuth’s attacks on Panslavism (a Russian plot!) and his generous declarations of support for Slavic ethnicities (made to ignorant foreigners) make interesting reading, when one is aware of the role he and his allies played in suppressing the Croats’ and Slovaks’ legitimate desire to defend their interests and preserve their identity. Like a true nationalist, Kossuth favored the Magyarization (that is, “Hungarification”) of ethnic Slavs.
The Ethnic Point of View
“Patriotism,” in Dr. Johnson’s famous phrase, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Nothing so illustrates the dishonesty of the liberal attack on national loyalty as the systematic misrepresentation of this quotation. Johnson was proud of being a patriotic Englishman, and, in his essay “The Patriot,” he praises the patriot as “he whose publick conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has, for himself, neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers every thing to the common interest."
What Johnson objected to was the cynical misappropriation of the word by Whig politicians who wished to enhance the power of Parliament at the king’s expense: “Some claim a place in the list of patriots, by an acrimonious and unremitting opposition to the court. This mark is by no means infallible. Patriotism is not necessarily included in rebellion. A man may hate his king, yet not love his country." (As a side note, John Lukacs is also entirely wrong on this point, believing, as he says, that Johnson really meant "nationalism"--a concept he would have understood very ill.
Patriotism of any kind may be drenched in blood, and, when it is perverted into nationalism, the love of nation it can be held partially accountable for many terrible wars in the 19th and early 20th centuries. All good impulses, however, can be turned to evil ends, and the ethical distortions and hatreds engendered by nationalist movements should not blind us to the moral significance of ethnic and national identity. The cosmopolitanism advocated by Stoics and Marxists has never been a reality, except for a tiny part of the international ruling class. It was not the national point of view that turned the Soviet Union and Cambodia into slaughterhouses. The spiritual unity of mankind preached by saints and taught by philosophers is an ideal to be pursued and cultivated; it cannot be imposed by any government or combination of governments except by the most tyrannical means.
I have written elsewhere about what I called "The Golden Rule of Nations," which can be summed up easily as according to other nations the respect and privileges that one demands for one's own--the very opposite of Kossuth's hypocritcal stance toward Slavs or of the liberals who attack people like Jean Raspail for defending in France what he has also defended in the case of primitive peoples. One of the great problems with internationalism and nationalism both is that they insist on speaking the language of "I" and "the state," when it is better to speak of the "We" who share common ancestry, customs, traditions, and experience. It is normal and, if I believed in human rights, I should say it is a "right" for human beings to be able to speak in the first person plural, as "we French," or "we Cajuns" or "we southerners" or "we Catholics"--so long as the we represents something real and historic. "We whites" is a fatuous abstraction that would encourage us in the delusion that we should ally ourselves with the Ainu and despise the Japanese.
But "we" is a sliding scale. Forrest McDonald used to say that in Alabama, he was a Texan; in Boston, he was a Southerner, while in Europe he was a "yankee." Identity is a series of concentric circles, as an ancient eclectic philosopher argued. The inner circle is defined by family and close kinfolks, and the expanding rings would include local communities, provincial identities, nationality or national-citizenship, and all mankind. But there are also cross-cutting identities, as anthropologists call them, such as religious affiliation, craft or profession, and membership in secret societies. A man might think of himself as a Smith from Smithfield, NC, a Southerner, but as, say, a Catholic convert he feels a loyalty even to the Mexican chicken-pluckers he sees at Mass, while as a stamp-collector he finds kinship and friendship with other philatelists around the world. These cross-cutting relationships, which in primitive societies can include marriage, have the important effect of uniting and pacifying tribal and ethnic divisions that might otherwise cause perpetual strife and violence.
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I didn't know Marx was Jewish! Of course I'm 23 and still dumb as a stick, with much to learn. That will not stop me, however, from stating my belief that the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution were brainchildren of the same ideology: leftism. Revolution simply for the sake of radical change is what the Left lives for. Blinded by their ideology, they will never admit that their most famous revolutionary heroes have nothing but blood on their hands to show for all their work.
The Morality of Everyday Life was and is the most personally influential book, politically and philosophically speaking, that I have ever read. It should be required reading for anyone who truly calls themselves 'conservative' in any real way.
People today do not know the difference between nationalism and patriotism. Perhaps, though, this is because we are taught that the only way to be truly 'patriotic' is to be nationalistic. My point is that if the modern world thinks that the nation-state is the ultimate and only actual legitimate expression of a people, and it does, then it follows that the only way to be patriotic is to be a (Insert country of origin)- nationalist. But, as Dr. Fleming points out in his book, sometimes the difference between nationalism and patriotism can be blurred. Hope you continue with the topic!
Dr. Fleming,Lukacs' review exhibits a tiresome and inaccurate characterization of Russia that unfortunately leaves me puzzled.I don't think I'm easily puzzled,but let's see.What is "Russian brutality",is it akin to the other Black Legend,"Spanish brutality"?I suspect that Lukacs gets his phrases from Anglophile historians that generally propagandized against England's enemy of the moment,whether Spain or Russia.Taking up another point,it is an insult to the Russian nation to say that the Georgian Marxist Stalin had a Russian "predecessor"but to play the game if he had one let's try the so-called Peter the Great(a Westernizer as they say,and Marxism is a German heresy).Additionally,if he believes German brutality was unprecendented (because it was part and parcel of Europe as he says) he forgot to attend the class on the Thirty Years War when he presumably took Western Civ so long ago.My final point is this:Russia is part and parcel of Europe.Because Lukacs denies this ,what is your reply? Russia liberated more Christians from Islam than any other European nation and often in the face of English and German resistance.Let me recommend the book "Russian Society and the Greek Revolution" by Theophilus Prousis.It was not just a matter of cynical politics.
Leo:
I'm turned off as well by Lukacs' comments about Russians. Many would consider such comments bigoted if they were stated about other groups.
My stated turnoff relates to how some seem to caricature Jews as reflecting a globally sinister economic and political movement. No one should be duped by the kind of Jews often represented at a number of high profile venues. I recall a politically Blue Ukrainian asking me about the views of Jews at certain venues. I reminded him of the kind of Ukrainian views often getting the nod.
A number of folks of Hungarian origin make the connection of 1848 and 1956 with Russia. Quite interesting how the Hapsburgs seem to get off the hook for what happened in 1848. Without their petitioning, there's no Russian intervention to stop the Hungarian uprising. The Russians were to regret that operation given how the Hapsburgs acted towards Russia afterwards.
TJF:
I hope you understand my revulsion with what your friend has said on the mentioned particular. I don't think I'm misunderstood on it.
Edward:
Offhand and without checking, I'm of the impression that nationalism and patriotism mean the same thing dictionary wise.
Brock H:
I've come across some Jews believing Marx to have expressed anti-Jewish views. On the other hand, his defenders have said that his attacks were class based.
In modern day political jargon, the "N" word (nationalism) seems to be suggestively used to to demean others.
One additional way to know that internationalism has no convincing arguments, is the continual resort to smearing of loyalty to nation, as some bloodthirsty Romantic Nationalism.
If they could convince us that international super-sovereignties are not pits of depravity like the UN, the citizens of the world would do so, and not just smear loyalty to fellow nationals as fated to slide down every slippery slope. The jurisdiction is the relevant moral zone for evaluating responsibility, but the world in general never is. The minimum for the existence of the nation is that fellow citizens are loyal to each other over against the foreigner who increases the level of aggression therein, by
entering. What matters morally in this connection is: the jurisdiction for which the decision is to be made. Internationalistic accounts are irresponsible since they disregard the above.
This article is an excellent segue to Mr Richert's, hopefully, forthcoming article on the the separation of nation and state.
"Patriotism" vs "nationalism", an ugly debate between people that may or may not have defined the two words alike. One man's "patriot" is another man's "nationalist".
It becomes:
Patriotism = "good"
Nationalism = "bad"
To say "nationalism" is "evil" is, I believe, intrinsically Revolutionary. For example, the damn communist Soviets called The Great War, Part II, the "Great Patriotic War". Of course the origin of this term is, I understand, from Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812; that too was a "Great Patriotic War". My point is: don't start trying to separate the words "patriotism" and "nationalism" unless you are willing to start down the slippery-slope of Revolution. I believe even Pope John Paul II made this mistake. Often times people mix the words "patriotism", "nationalism", and, to possibly coin a new one, "regimism"; the last meaning "of or relating to one's [current] government". The Germans fighting in The Great War, Part II were patriotic, they were nationalist, but they didn't necessarily have to be "regimists", although it very well may have been the vast majority.
As for "internationalism". It requires "nationalism" to exist. It is, prima facie, Revolutionary. Like all Revolutionary ideas, "internationalism" is not an "opposite" of what it opposes, but a deformation. The most "internationalist" of traditional societies were staunch nationalists/patriots. The Venetians and the Dutch come to mind right away. The truly Revolutionary Internationalists that come to mind are Voltaire, Lenin and especially Leon Trotsky and his "neo-conservative" descendants. They all have a hate their own [nationalist] nation (see: "flyover country"), and want(ed) to replace it with something that would "reach out" (with an iron fist, velveted or not) to other nations and transform them. You see, their patriotism was contained within their nation's borders, but projected. The wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan for America are not "Great Patriotic Wars", but wars of Revolutionary Internationalism.
So, my problem with this otherwise excellent article by Mr Fleming is the treatment of "nationalism" vs "patriotism", but that is no real problem, I just read the article how I see it needs to be read. Very "Straussian" of me, no?
"the Soviet Union under Stalin eliminated most of the Jewish leaders of the party during the Purge Trials."
Wouldn't things have been different under Trotsky, and weren't things different under Lenin?
Stalin's rise to power seems to have been revolutionary like Lenin's.
My mistake, Mr Fleming doesn't separate nationalism and patriotism, that was Mr Edward.
What Mr Fleming does is point out the ideological movement of nationalism.
What caught my attention originally was the statement that "ideological nationalism is a response...to internationalism". I believe this to be incorrect. Ideological nationalism IS "internationalism", in that it can only function as an "export"; it is entirely propositional, or "credal". There is no difference between "ideological nationalism" (see: National Socialism) and "internationalism" (see: Leninist Soviet Russia). There is, however, a difference between them, and Franco's Spain. Franco's Spain was a reaction to "internationalism", but was not, in the end, "ideological", but I'm guessing you would agree with my points, because that is the natural course of my wildly flailing point(s).
Frank:
Lenin had a brutal aspect, with Trotsky having a kind of idealistic notion that advocated an aggressive foreign policy.
Bukharin might've been the best of the early Soviet leaders. The knock on him is that he was more of an ideas person as opposed to someone who could be an effective leader.
Thank you for your reply,Michael Averko.1945 is come and gone.The Western Europe that Lukacs believed Churchill saved from Russia has rotted to a point of crisis.The United States and its problematic civilization dominated this Europe.We wring our hands and talk and talk and talk about the decline of the "West" and yet when the Russians or say the Serbs resist "declining" all hell breaks loose and NATO is put on war footing. I apologize,Dr. Fleming,for straying from the 1939 paradigm,but frankly the 1854 paradigm,the Crimean War,when England and France (oh and don't forget Sardinia) attacked Russia to save the Ottoman Turks seems more relevant.
I very much loathe the idea that the USSR was a continuation of a pre-Soviet Russia that was an inherent threat to the West.
The latter wasn't true.
In the early 1990s, the West had a great opportunity to welcome Russia. Regretfully, the Captive Nations Committee way of looking at Russia has had the upper hand over folks like myself. Some Russian government involved attempts to better communicate the situation have had shortcomings.
Nevertheless, reason might eventually prevail.
Government is an invasive instrument designed for control of honest, well-intentioned idiots by the dishonest evil-intentioned idiots.
It occurs to me that Dr. Fleming's discourse here sheds some light on the previous discussion. He has caused me to see another source of misperception on the part of Mr. Buchanan's view of the origins of WW II. . He takes for granted that Germany was correct to demand incorporation of Germans in Czech, Polish, etc. territory. That assumption is nationalist, not patriotic. Germans had never been entirely unified under one state and for most of their history had been Germans without any state unification at all. There was little moral justification for the totalitarian Nazi state in command in Berlin to demand absorption of all Germans everywhere. That is nationalism, not patriotism. Besides which, the oppression of Germans in other states was exaggerated as excuse fo war.
"When a French intellectual looked in the mirror in 1600, he saw a Frenchman and a Christian where he would have liked to see a Greek pagan."
What do you make of the young Anglo-American postgraduate who looks in the mirror and sees a barbaric American heretic where he would like to see an intelligent French Roman Catholic?
(I'm actually not being cheeky here.)
"There was little moral justification for the totalitarian Nazi state in command in Berlin to demand absorption of all Germans everywhere."
The Entente-U.S. cabal had propelled the Germans to drive away the historic standard-bearers of Teutonic decentralised liberty, i.e., their monarchs, and then presumed to tell them that they were not allowed to pull themselves together based on their ethnic identity.
"Besides which, the oppression of Germans in other states was exaggerated as excuse fo war."
So was the disgusting anti-German propaganda circulated in World War I, and I'm told memories of the ludicrosity of it all actually contributed to the disbelief with which initial reports of the gas chambers were met.
The Nazis are indefensible, but the revolutionary idiots (Roundheads in England, Republicans in France and Patriots-Unionists in the U.S.) controlling the other side are from an historic standpoint illegitimate.
Usually "ideological nationalism" is used to mean a nation bound by ideas, e.g. the neocon notion that America is a nation founded on the Declaration, not a nation bound by the idea of ethnic nationalism, which is often referred to as of course "ethnic nationalism".
I don't understand Dr. Wilson's objection to nationalism... and I probably never will. I mean no disrespect by that.
---
Michael Averko,
I know enough of Soviet history to know that:
is correct, though I know little more.
My comment was directed specifically at the amiable relations each leader had with Jews in general. I doubt the Stalin purges would have taken place under Trotsky, and I'm wary of those who say Communism is anti-semitic.
I recall Rothbard saying somewhere that in NYC, there were communists Jews, Zionist Jews, and Rothbard and his father (neither was communist or Zionist.)
I think the Jewish involvement in communism an important lesson to be learned about the danger of multiethnic states, or at least multiculturalism. I do not believe Jews are any worse than other nonChristians, e.g. Muslims, and I wish Israel the best.
===
I get the impression of Bukharin that he liked the revolution, not the purpose of the revolution. He comes across as akin to a never-do-well partier, albeit one that likes revolutions rather than parties.
Brief Notes: 1) My purpose here is to distinguish between nationalism and patriotism and it will take time. Lukacs, following Lord Acton, is well known for making this distinction but neither he nor Acton really thought the matter through. 2) Yes, Marx was both of Jewish background, though an atheist, and yet a bitter anti-Semite and racist who did not hesitate to apply the "N" word to Jews, whom he and Engels regarded as one of those retrograde races that had to be eliminated.
In reading some of the other comments, I am going to say this just once. Either stick to the point or be content to observe. I would also ask Mr. Hall one last time to think before his fingers hit the keyboard. The point of this discussion is to explore the differences between nationalism and patriotism. His obiter dictum pronouncements are at best an irrelevant distraction and, in this case, seriously misleading.
To Clyde Wilson, exactly so. To others who have taken up this or that ethnic struggle, I can only say that I am not writing to condemn or justify any people's aspirations only to draw some summary conclusions as "notes toward a definition" of nationalism.
"National and ethnic identities are an almost universal phenomenon in human history, but nationalism, as an ideological movement, is not a spontaneous growth or a natural development from the nation-state."
As a means for the elite to acquire and maintain power, was nationalism as a ruling ideology a predictable (by competitive advantage) out growth of say, the egalitarian nature of the firearm that put individual on par and then ahead of the knight? That is, the King suddenly needed his people to actually fight for him, rather than just rely on the mercenaries operating under the Code of Chivalry. Thus, he needed to give his subjects a stake in the game, a neo-citizenship that had some classical elements (tied to place, common culture and ties) and eventually a means of exercising power and influence even if by illusion.
Cannon and guns being expensive, a King might then be more tempted to side with the merchant class than the landed aristocracy, a new order replaces an old, to be challenged by Leftists.
Further, Dr. Fleming, amongst the "internationalists" there was a contingent of folks at least among the 19th Century Abolitionist Copperhead Secessionists who foresaw a system of very temporary states and a powerless world forum for airing disputes--a very Jeffersonian sort of international system with a healthy republican logic.
I view it important because "nationalist" assumptions lead to pan-German thinking, either as blindness or calculated blindness. For instance, it was refused at the time to consider back-channel support for a Prussian led military coup to deal with the Bavarian-Berlin government. An inconclusive bomb on a plane, lone gun-men with Soviet ties, political murder, wouldn't have been the first or last time... It may well have led to a restoration of the monarchy, but a common Western front against the Stalinists, leaving folks like myself scratching their heads about how the period is covered.
#13
"That assumption is nationalist, not patriotic. Germans had never been entirely unified under one state and for most of their history had been Germans without any state unification at all. There was little moral justification for the totalitarian Nazi state in command in Berlin to demand absorption of all Germans everywhere. That is nationalism, not patriotism."
Dr. Wilson I agree and thank you for this post. I was wondering what the source of this Nationalist " or "self worship" arrogance really is ? Was it the break up of the common christian culture after the reformation, a result of organic growth and centralization of power , or simply the life and death cycle of civilizations in general ? Thanks for your thoughts.
"Lukacs, following Lord Acton, is well known for making this distinction but neither he nor Acton really thought the matter through."
Please explain this more Mr. Fleming. I always thought J.Lukacs was the authority on the difference between nationalism and patriotism. He hasnt thought this through?
I cant get my thoughts clear on this subject as of yet, but I suspect we'll be looking at Greek and Roman concepts of 'Patria' in some detail.
Perhaps the discussion will also touch, at some point, the matter of why American nationalism, when it can be said to have any cultural associations at all, gets boiled down to something as shallow as the phrase, 'baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and chevrolet'. Throw in Coke as well, since it's nothing but coloured sugar water with a little fizz. Could this shallow cultural association of 'Americanism' be the result of the fact that there really is no true 'American' folk or nationality, and no true 'American' culture at all? Thus ideological Americanism is all that holds this political arrangement claiming to be a 'nation' together (destroy the fable of Lincoln, and you destroy 'American' national identity).
I would be perfectly content if Dixie were part of some Christian Imperium like the later Roman empire rather than independent, if it would preserve our identity and culture. Such an imperium would be far preferable to any unified nation state.
If, as you said, 'Ideological nationalism is a response, admittedly distorted, to internationalism', perhaps this explains Lukacs' position regarding anti-communism, because it was partly nationalistic in an ideological sense, and partly an ideology all it's own, which has now morphed into the ideology of global hegemony?
Dr. Fleming's writing is always splendid, but I'm slightly surprised no one has referred yet to Jerry Muller's essay "Us and Them: the Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism":
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080301faessay87203/jerry-z-muller/us-and-them.html
Among other things, Muller argues that the realisation of ethnic nationalist ideals may be a precondition both for liberal democracy (and for interest in modern internationalism). I think, however, that the reverse is also true and that imposing liberal democracy also paves the way for ethnic nationalism as a political ideal, since it strips away the other- (or semi-other-)worldly institutions of Church and landed monarch that can override or at least temper nationalist sentiment. (For a contemporary if incomplete example, see Iraq.)
The point I tried to make with my earlier post is that once the revolution becomes a fait accompli (i.e., the monarch is overthrown; the Church is disestablished), it seems almost morally impossible to stop the rising tide of nationalism. I'm not trying to sound Pétainist, but as evil as the Nazis were, my feelings toward the liberals (Churchill, de Gaulle), socialists (Roosevelt) and Communists (Stalin) who saved the world from them can never be anything more than lukewarm.
But turning back to the specific question of nationalism versus patriotism, I'm a bit unclear on a couple of things, probably because these two words are so badly abused these days.
1. By "patriotism," Dr. Fleming, do you mean specifically loyalty to the soil and the realm (whether that be loyalty to the kingdom or the republic)? If so, we can conceive of being "patriotic" without being "nationalistic," for example, of being a Habsburg loyalist of any Danubian ethnicity, and perhaps (even if *only* conceptually) even of being a "nationalist" without being patriotic.
2. You say that "Ideological nationalism is a response, admittedly distorted, to internationalism." That is an important point on the topic but I'm not quite sure exactly how your speech was intended to build upon it; if I'm failing to read it properly, forgive me, but otherwise could you enlighten us a bit further?
"Could this shallow cultural association of ‘Americanism’ be the result of the fact that there really is no true ‘American’ folk or nationality, and no true ‘American’ culture at all?"
I was thinking the same thing. I prefer these days to call myself "Anglo-American," since that term carries an actual linguistic, ethnic and geographical designation without forcing adoption of the creed of the U.S. founding documents.
Also, that term hints at an important folk connection not only with Canadians but with Anglophones in Britain, Ireland, Australia and elsewhere. Given the state of our country lately I would think most decent "Americans" would identify at least as much with any decent Anglophone from wherever as with any other U.S. citizen.
(That doesn't mean we must or should seek political unity, although under certain circumstances it might not be such a bad thing.)
Our friend Dr. Phillips raised an important question on another web site on the topic of Chamberlain's supposed appeasement in 1938 that I believe is related to the discussion of patriotism and nationalism. Why indeed was it the United Kingdom's concern what Germany and Czechoslovakia would agree with regards to who administered which peoples and lands in central Europe?
By extension, why is it these last twenty years the concern of the United States and the United Kingdom that (again) German peoples be re-unified under one state and (again) south Slavic peoples be split up into many (some would say unviable or very weak) smaller states?
The answer in both cases would have to do with game of great power politics and the maintenance and extension of Anglo dominance over world affairs. That dominance includes spheres of economy and polity. At the center seems to always be Germany. She must always be controlled either forcefully (East/West division and occupation of both halves) or through bribery (she is allowed to 'reunite' and is allowed to break up the nations of 'her' stomping grounds in the Balkans so as to reestablish 'her' influence/dominance there).
It's all dirty, unChristian, imperial games that use and abuse genuine patriotism until it devolves into barbaric nationalism. The German variant of nationalism is allowed as 'healthy' and the south Slavic versions (say, Serbian) are 'unhealthy' expressions even though the former group is unthreatened and the latter is very much threatened with extinction in lands that its neighbors have designs on.
If I get a chance I'll look up the reference, but I must confess I have never read anything by Mr. Muller that would encourage me either to recommend him to others or to read more myself. Let me post a bit more of my argument, both here and at the end of the original.
Love of country is a natural outgrowth of the love of kith and kin, but the modern concept of nationalism is largely the creation of the French Revolution, which implemented Rousseau’s theory of the general will and continued the process of centralization inaugurated by the Bourbon monarchy. The classic text is Le Contrat Social, a book as mad as it is important. Following his own injunction in his essay on the origin of Inequality,” Rousseau set aside all the facts and accepted John Locke’s state of nature and social contract lock, stock, and barrel. He then developed the social contract theory into a nightmare.
Since government rests on the mystical consent of the governed, which Rousseau terms the General Will, that national will is the sovereign. “…the act of association comprises a mutual undertaking between the public and the individuals, and that each individual, in making a contract, as we may say, with himself, is bound in a double capacity; as a member of the Sovereign he is bound to the individuals, and as a member of the State to the Sovereign. But the maxim of civil right, that no one is bound by undertakings made to himself, does not apply in this case; for there is a great difference between incurring an obligation to yourself and incurring one to a whole of which you form a part.”
The sovereignty of the national will is indivisible and inalienable—hence the language of our own nationalist Pledge of Allegiance. The General Will is also infallible, though the people in their deliberations may make mistakes. These mistakes arise from ignorance and the self-interest of factions. “It is therefore essential, if the general will is to be able to express itself, that there should be no partial society within the State, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts which was indeed the sublime and unique system established by the great Lycurgus.” In other words, the militaristic communal system of tiny Sparta can now be applied to a great nation state.
According to nationalists, the will of the nation, as defined as an historic community of blood and tongue, had to find expression in a common and unified state. Hence, the Italian nationalist Mazzini, whose political lineage goes back to the Revolution, spoke always of the twin principles of unity and nationality.
Romantic Nationalism
Is usually associated with German philosophers and propagandists of the 19th century. This is a battlefield where the bones have been picked clean by leftist internationalists. The basic argument is that beginning with the late 18th century, Germans began seeking ways of justifying unification and expansion of the German people as a superior race. The usual sources they cite are Herder’s “romantic” notions about cultural unity, the researches into folklore made by the Brothers Grimm, the bizarre but influential philosophy of Hegel who spoke of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, which could be incorporated into a nation with a special destiny—and that it was the destiny of the German nation to be the masters of the new European civilization.
Kant was not without his own nationalist strain, and he was both xenophobic and fiercely anti-semitic. German Romantic nationalism reaches its frenzied peak in one of Kant’s disciples, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In his “Address to the German Nation”:
The first, original, and truly natural boundaries of states are beyond doubt their internal boundaries. Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole.
Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality-then, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be; and only a man who either entirely lacks the notion of the rule of law and divine order, or else is an obdurate enemy thereto, could take upon himself to want to interfere with that law, which is the highest law in the spiritual world!
Since this language reappears in the mouth of Adolf Hitler, then all German nationalists going back to Herder are proto-Nazis. Not exactly. I hold no brief for Hegel or Fichte, but it is important to make some distinctions, and th easiest way to do that is to consider the thought of the godfather of German nationalism, Johann Gottlieb von Herder.
Herder was born to a humble family in East Prussia in 1744. His philosophical studies led him to Kant, but not to the Kant of the Critique, but the early Kant. At the age of 20 he went to teach in Riga, and his experience of Baltic and Slavic peoples had a profound effect on him throughout his life. To a great extent Herder was a man of his time. Although not an extreme rationalist, he was sublimely rational in his approach to most questions. His views on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind were skeptical and naturalistic, and in his famous theory of the origin of language he rejected divine and supernatural causes in favor of natural causes—much as Epicurus and Lucretius had argued in the ancient world. In politics he advocated republican and democratic principles and took a cautious “wait and see” approach to the French Revolution—though he deplored the slaughter in the Vendée.
Historians of philosophy still debate Herder’s importance, but there is not doubting his enormous influence. This is partly due to the clarity and vividness of expression. He rejected the convoluted language and style of academic philosophy and wrote powerful essays. It is not that he rejected systematic thought. In fact, he favored systematic thought, but he believed that it should be presented in such a manner as attracted intelligent but non-technical readers. I think he also felt that dogmatic philosophy stultified the reader’s brain, while the technique of Plato in his dialogues, Hume in his essays, and, I would argue, Thomas in his scholastic method, stimulates thought.
Herder very much believed in nations, even small nations, and he gives the conventional political metaphor “the ship of state” a new twist, by arguing that the members of a nation are all on board, and no matter what problems their nation has, the passengers on board must love the ship and work together to see it through a storm. “The word fatherland brought the ship afloat at the shore,” and each individual passenger “can and may no longer (unless he casts himself overboard and entrusts himself to the sea’s wild waves) stand idly by in the ship and count the waves as though he was on the shore.” Culture and language, Herder insists in the same place, are essential aspects of nationality.
Herder did not regard nations as mere ideas as Hegel seemed to regard them: Nations are “the result of a thousand cooperating causes of the whole element in which they live” and thus he concludes it would be childish “to present this formation as merely consisting in and occurring through a few brighter ideas towards which people have been trotting almost since the reinstitution of the sciences.” Arguing against Voltaire and others, who argued that human beings are pretty much the same everywhere and at all times, Herder insisted that history and observation teaches us that the character of a people can change, and in his essay on “The Change of Taste”, he compares the Enlightenment’s universalistic attitude, seeing all cultures as imperfect reflections of itself, with the ignorant xenophobia of Chinese who hardly believed in the existence of other peoples. Just as human individuals are different, even unique, so are human nations, the Germans no less than the Chinese.
Herder approached the nations of the world much as a radical environmentalist today regards endangered species. Each nation is precious because it reflects some quality within the human type, and when an imperial nation eliminates another nation, it is committing a crime against humanity. I thought I was the first humane nationalist to put forward what I called the Golden Rule of nationalism—whatever you want for your own people, whether self-determination or rights to culture and language—you must accord to people of other nations, but Herder had worked this all out before 1800. He has bitter things to say about European colonialism which not only brings misery to the peoples of Africa and the Americas, but which deforms and distorts the cultures of the enslaved peoples.
Unlike Montaigne and Voltaire, Herder was no apologist for alien cultures at the expense of the European, but as a skeptic he believed that he was not entitled to make ultimate judgments on the value of civilizations he had not experienced. Nature has made the nations separate, and world-unifiers, since the time of Nimrod, have been attempting to join by violence what nature has kept asunder.
Well, since I have been invoked, I guess I should add some context.
For better or for worse, I think that many people treat this site and Taki Mag as if they were one. Many of the same posters and often parallel conversations going on.
Buchanan's article today is on Munich and the perpetual cry of appeasement by the neocons and their fellow traveling mainstream conservatives. He tries to put the whole appeasement issue in context. My point was that even in context, England was still being a busy body by the standards of today's "non-interventionists." Here is what I posted.
From a non-interventionist standpoint, which is admittedly easier for Americans, surrounded by vast expanses of water and friendly nations, to be than it is for the British, why was Chamberlain involved in a dispute between Germany and Czechoslovakia to begin with? Had France and Germany gone to war, why would England necessarily have been dragged in?
What drives me nuts when I discuss foreign policy and the War with interventionist conservatives is that I am constantly reminded that it is no longer the 1920's and 30's (the Old Right). "Things have changed" I am repeatedly reminded. But yet, it is ALWAYS 1939. So which is it? Not the inter-war period or always 1939? They can't have it both ways.
If anything, the undoubtedly correct observation that "things change," is, if anything, a justification for examining each situation on a case by case basis instead of a one size fits all interventionism. That the situation with Hitler and Germany is analogous in any way to Iraq or Iran is ludicrous.
Dr. Fleming,
Kindly clarify this issue as an historical fact or it’s just an issue that cannot go beyond speculation. When America entered WWII did the US Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed a Normandy invasion at the beginning of the war? However Churchill squelched the idea because if it did not succeed the UK would have been more vulnerable to a Nazi invasion. Instead Churchill convinced the allies to confront the Nazis in North Africa and eventually invade Italy. Was the invasion of Italy a costly campaign that accomplished little? If the Nazis had developed a nuclear bomb and better perfected their rocket and jet engine technology before the actual Normandy invasion, victory would have been an impossibility for the allies. Churchill’s decision could have an incalculable costly blunder.
I deeply appreciate your magazine and website,
Rick F
A resolution of these questions is certainly going to take the form of relentlessly asking this one:
Is that known to be more than a false dilemma?
Since brotherhood and equality with enemies are unreasonable, it was always necessary to try to smear the loyal as facing only a dreadful alternative of caricature nationalism. The relevant dilemma here is one of assuming that national loyalty has to be about purity; about the pursuit of ethnic purity even beyond what has ever existed on a large scale. Is that known to be more than a false dilemma though, that national loyalty has to involve such a concern with purity?
Bringing loyalty and purity back into a place of prominence on this consideration of national loyalty, is itself a move up, and especially insofar as one may downgrade equality and compassion, from dominating.
Nephite,
because he reveals useful wisdom at little (subscription fee) or no charge. He's essentially a volunteer.
"Unlike Montaigne and Voltaire, Herder was no apologist for alien cultures at the expense of the European, but as a skeptic he believed that he was not entitled to make ultimate judgments on the value of civilizations he had not experienced. Nature has made the nations separate, and world-unifiers, since the time of Nimrod, have been attempting to join by violence what nature has kept asunder."
This seems to be the perspective of much of American conservatism as it is disseminated through Chronicles, AmCon, etc. At the same time, no true Occidental conservative could afford not to have at least a cynical appreciation of the Christian religion (à Charles Maurras), which is by nature a universality. It is true enough that there is room for many different liturgical practices and cultural mores to flourish within Christianity; nevertheless, many cultures--particularly those deeply informed by competing religions like Islam or Buddhism--would look profoundly different were they truly Christianised.
I have yet to buy the Œuvres of Joseph de Maistre (though it is high on my shopping list and now that you've brought out this discussion I may just capitulate and sacrifice the cash after work today), but I had the impression he had come to believe in a civilising mission of France in particular. He does seem to have been more sober about the idea than the Pilgrim Fathers were about the U.S.; Maistre understood his country was shirking its responsibilities and ruining its inheritance, whereas the latter continue to corrput the world to this day, whether through "benevolent global hegemony" or the culture of "human rights" to sin against the flesh in public and murder the resultant offspring.
True, the kingdom of God is not the kingdom of this world, but the minute we make any universal statement about humanity it seems impossible to avoid value judgments on individual nations. Even the statement "all nations must be conserved" forces us to rank the worthiness of nations in terms of how well they respect each other: what, then, are we to make of the seemingly intrinsic anti-Serb sentiment in Croat nationalism, anti-Scottish sentiment in Anglo-British nationalism, etc.? More ominously, whawhat do we make of the fact that, for example, the post-Christian Dutch are seemingly convinced of their extreme laxity in public morality as a point of national identity and pride? (That is not culture; it is anti-culture; either way, it may be seen as culture and it does need to be destroyed.)
Perhaps the problem with the Right is the mere fact that it allowed itself to become "conservative": progress has been usurped by the Left, which has of course defined "progress" along its own perverse lines. Nations need to evolve; if at once we see the urgence to remove the toxic weed of Leftism, let us not kill ourselves off with frost. That was hinted by Christopher Dawson in several of his essays.
So getting back to the central question, national sentiment may be perfectly natural, and patriotism is all well and good, but is not the more pertinent question whether these are subjected to the appropriate overarching truth and moral guidelines?
(If I've missed something, rebuke me; I do not claim to be a scholar or an expert on anything.)
Re: Jerry Muller: I confess to not reading anything else he has written, and so I will defer to Dr. Fleming's judgment. I still recommend the essay, although I will add that in judging the practical conclusions he draws from his points, we must bear in mind he is writing to a decidedly NON-paleoconservative audience in Foreign Affairs.
"Unlike Montaigne and Voltaire, Herder was no apologist for alien cultures at the expense of the European, but as a skeptic he believed that he was not entitled to make ultimate judgments on the value of civilizations he had not experienced. Nature has made the nations separate, and world-unifiers, since the time of Nimrod, have been attempting to join by violence what nature has kept asunder."
This seems to be the perspective of much of American conservatism as it is disseminated through Chronicles, AmCon, etc. At the same time, no true Occidental conservative could afford not to have at least a cynical appreciation of the Christian religion (à Charles Maurras), which is by nature a universality. It is true enough that there is room for many different liturgical practices and cultural mores to flourish within Christianity; nevertheless, many cultures--particularly those deeply informed by competing religions like Islam or Buddhism--would look profoundly different were they truly Christianised.
I have yet to buy the Œuvres of Joseph de Maistre (though it is high on my shopping list and now that you've brought out this discussion I may just capitulate and sacrifice the cash after work today), but I had the impression he had come to believe in a civilising mission of France in particular. He does seem to have been more sober about the idea than the Pilgrim Fathers were about the U.S.; Maistre understood his country was shirking its responsibilities and ruining its inheritance, whereas the latter continue to corrput the world to this day, whether through "benevolent global hegemony" or the culture of "human rights" to sin against the flesh in public and murder the resultant offspring.
True, the kingdom of God is not the kingdom of this world, but the minute we make any universal statement about humanity it seems impossible to avoid value judgments on individual nations. Even the statement "all nations must be conserved" forces us to rank the worthiness of nations in terms of how well they respect each other: what, then, are we to make of the seemingly intrinsic anti-Serb sentiment in Croat nationalism, anti-Scottish sentiment in Anglo-British nationalism (extending much further back than the industrial period), etc.? More ominously, what do we make of the fact that, for example, the post-Christian Dutch are seemingly convinced of their extreme laxity in public morality as a point of national identity and pride? (That is not culture; it is anti-culture; either way, it may be seen as culture and it does need to be destroyed.) Not to pick only on Europeans: I have said nothing of the murderous programme of American "freedom" "on-the-march."
Perhaps the problem with the Right is the mere fact that it allowed itself to become "conservative": progress has been usurped by the Left, which has of course defined "progress" along its own perverse lines. Nations need to evolve; if at once we see the urgence to remove the toxic weed of Leftism, let us not kill ourselves off with frost. That was hinted by Christopher Dawson in several of his essays.
So getting back to the central question, national sentiment may be perfectly natural, and patriotism is all well and good, but is not the more pertinent question whether these are subjected to the appropriate overarching truth and moral guidelines?
(If I've missed something, rebuke me; I do not claim to be a scholar or an expert on anything.)
Re: Jerry Muller: I confess to not reading anything else he has written, and so I will defer to Dr. Fleming's judgment. I still recommend the essay, although I will add that in judging the practical conclusions he draws from his points, we must bear in mind he is writing to a decidedly NON-paleoconservative audience in Foreign Affairs.
I do not know where that double post came from; sincerest apologies. #30 seems to be missing an important point.
The simple answer about US strategy at the beginning of the war is that I don't know and will happily defer to those who can produce evidence. In saying Acton and Lukacs have not entirely thought through the patriotism/nationalism distinction, I am making two claims: that Lukacs is right but has not expounded the distinction at any great length and that Acton was half right but as a classical liberal much too inclined to abstraction. I'll post more on this briefly.
Dr. Flelming: Great post.
There were problems with the German Romantics - some are better than others - but many were reacting against the paralyzing universalism of the Enlightenment. Herder's journey into historicism and linguistics undercut many of the assumptions of universalism. He, for example, points out that chloros in Greek cannot correspond to any modern notion of green or yellow, since the Greeks would use it to refer to both honey and grass. Conclusion: if even basic colors are viewed on a slightly different perspective, if the words do not completely match reality cross-culturally, then moral terms must differ too. In the sense of wanting to preserve what was unique to the Germans and their ancestral traditions, Herder was a conservative.
The Volkisch Movement of the German Romantics - emphasizing the organic, ancestral traditions, ethnicity - would not have had necessarily to lead to Nazism. Many cultures have had such movements without resulting in genocide. These sentiments certainly were exploited by later politicians with expansionist aims.
Regarding the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, often attributed to Orwell and Lukacs, does this distinction predate Orwell? Weren't the two words often used synonymously in the 19th century? Although the word 'nationalism' is a creation of the 19th century, the words 'natio' and 'patria' etymologically imply link by blood. As I've argued with Richert and others, I don't know whether I'm completely convinced that these two terms greatly differ. I am also not completely convinced that nationalism is always evil. It may be inferior to patriotism, but superior to internationalism. When I talk to the French nationalist (whose primary aims are to end Third World immigration and withdraw from the EU), I have nothing by sympathy.
MORE
The Liberal Critique of Nationalism
With his emphasis on human freedom and dignity, Herder can be understood within the context of early liberalism, and indeed he was a strong influence on JS Mill. On the other hand, his concern for nations sets him apart. Most 19th-century liberals were sympathetic to patriotic and nationalist movements of liberation and unification, and even John Stuart Mill, an arch-individualist, embraced the notion that every discrete nation should have its own state. However, other liberals, such as Jacob Burckhardt, condemned the nationalist state as spiritually and culturally mortifying. A divided Germany had produced Haydn and Goethe, but the nation-state, in its desire for power, would regard such dismemberment with shame, and Burckhardt noted “the hopelessness of any attempt at decentralization, of any voluntary restriction of power in favor of local and civilized life.
In England, Lord Acton condemned nationalism as the principle most inimical to human liberty (which liberals claimed, by definition, was the great object of all their policies). Acton, who was descended on his mother’s side from the aristocratic Dalbergs of Bavaria, was an admirer of the Holy Roman Empire, and he argued that the mixture of competing nations under one crown served to prevent the tyranny of the centralized state. He viewed a federal system, such as that of Switzerland or of the early American republic, as the best solution to ethnic conflict. States built on the national idea were, he felt, too confining to inspire the generous, cosmopolitan civilization that had been characteristic of European man.
If the nationalist point-of-view narrows the human outlook, it also implies, though it is not always expressed, a willingness to divide the human race into the categories of “us” and “them,” and to define “them” as an enemy to be eliminated or subjugated. Nationalism, as George Orwell pointed out, stems from, first, “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’” and second, from “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” Orwell distinguished this nationalist habit of mind from patriotism, which he defined as “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.“
Although nationalist ideology was born in the French Revolution, which was the “church militant” of the Enlightenment, the aspirations of European peoples to free themselves from the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian empires was not based on theory. The Poles had once been a great nation, and the partition of Poland among the great powers was a cynical expression of the imperialist urge to eliminate historic nations. The backlash was inevitable and not just among Poles: Czechs, Serbs, Croats, Greeks, and others all had a legitimate desire to live within a state that allowed their language, culture, and religion to flourish.
Nationalism, although it often has its origin in so innocent a source as the desire for national liberation, may take ugly turns, developing into a theory of the racial uniqueness and superiority of one’s own nation over all its rivals. All peoples will tend to hate the conqueror and to look down upon the conquered, but such natural feelings do not always result in implacable resentment or bitter contempt. Ancient Greek cities banded together to oppose the invading Persians, who sacked cities, destroyed temples, and killed noncombatants, and yet Aeschylus, who fought them at Marathon and Salamis, portrays the Persians sympathetically in The Persians, and later writers, such as Herodotus and Xenophon, were perfectly frank about the courage and virtues (as well as the vices) of the Greeks’ greatest enemy. Serbs, though brutally oppressed by the Ottoman Turks and their Slavic and Albanian allies, were respectful toward the sultan and freely acknowledged, in their folk poems, the heroism of their enemies. “Alas,” cried the Serbian hero Prince Marko after killing an Albanian brigand, “for I have killed the better man.”
Such respectful sentiments would be unthinkable coming from the mouth of a radical nationalist who, at his worst, depicts the imperial Russians or Austrians as savages and the neighboring Slovaks or Serbs as canaille. While soldiers in the two world wars were sometimes willing to look upon each other as human beings, their governments, which enlisted distinguished writers in their propaganda campaigns, were not. The Germans, who were portrayed as savage monsters by the Allies, ridiculed the effeminacy of Britain and France and portrayed Jews and Slavs as subhuman. The United States, in ridiculing the Japanese, resorted to the most sordid racial stereotyping.
Although such propaganda is often associated with right-wing nationalist movements, it is equally common among leftists and progressives, who are willing to demonize any opponent as racist or retrograde. This technique of propagandistic stereotyping, on the part of the American government at least, goes back to the American War Between the States [chosen as a neutral but explicable term for a national and international discussion], when a progressive government and its newspapers depicted Southerners as cruel and inhuman slave-drivers who deserved no sympathy. Such propaganda can be used to justify any actions undertaken by the superior government, whether it is the elimination of the Jews, the bombing of undefended cities, or Sherman’s march to the sea. It is the hallmark of the nationalist to justify every crime committed by his own people and to impute no honorable motives or actions to rival nations.
Patriotism
In general usage, patriotism signifies a person’s willingness to take risks and make sacrifices for the sake of his country and his fellow citizens. Although his devotion may spring from an instinctive “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life,” the patriot does not merely feel loyal to a spot of ground; he is willing to defend it with his life, even if he feels no particular hostility toward the enemy who wishes to take it from him.
Patriotism, as Acton understood, can transcend the blood-and-soil passions of primitive man and become an ethical force :
"Our connection with the race is merely natural or physical, whilst our duties to the political nation are ethical. One is a community of affections and instincts infinitely important and powerful in savage life, but pertaining more to the animal than to the civilized man; the other is an authority governing by laws, imposing obligations, and giving a moral sanction and character to the natural relations of society. Patriotism . . . is an extension of the family affections, as the tribe is an extension of the family. But in its real political character, patriotism consists in the development of the instinct of self-preservation into a moral duty which may involve self-sacrifice."
Acton is not alone in regarding the highest form of patriotism as ethical rather than instinctive, but such a conception is liable to misconstruction, and Burckhardt applies the words “arrogance” and “degeneration” to any state’s attempt to fulfill a moral purpose directly.
Burckhardt understood St. Thomas’s point that the state exists to make virtue possible and not to impose virtue upon the people, and his refusal to attribute moral purpose to the state is similar to the distinction made between individual charity and a government-imposed system of welfare. When a man is called “patriotic,” the implication is that he has made a moral choice to risk his own self-interest for the good of his country, which is viewed as something more than blood and soil, as a constitutional order grounded in morality and law, and yet, as a moral individual, he can have little influence over life-and-death decisions made by the semi-divine state, which may go beyond inspiring or requesting such loyalty: It may command it, backing its command with all the resources of the modern state. At that point, patriotism is so far removed from instinctive loyalty as to be almost indistinguishable from nationalism. It is not always easy to distinguish a war veteran who flies his country’s flag to honor its heroes and its resistance to aggression from the chauvinist who waves the flag as a sign of the superiority and invincibility of the nation; indeed, the patriot and the chauvinist may often be the same person.
“Rodoljublje”
We can, however, draw a valid distinction between patriotism as an ethical and political virtue, originating in natural attachments but formed and directed by the state, and nationalism as a statist ideology that opposes and excludes other loyalties, whether those loyalties are to an international religion and civilization or to the province or region of one’s birth. A patriotic German from Hanover might have no quarrel with Catholics in Bavaria, but a German nationalist will more typically dislike a religion that divides some Germans from others and unites them to people of other nations and races. Such distinctions are often, however, more theoretical than real. If patriotism can merge into nationalism, then perhaps we are dealing with a distinction without a difference, a question of gradation and degrees. At the opposite extremes of sentimental loyalty and rabid chauvinism, however, patriotism and nationalism seem poles apart. The problem lies in the concept of patriotism itself, which (in everyday speech) seems to designate a transitional phase that may pass into nationalism but derives from something more primitive, which has no name.
Patriotism is not simply an ethical devotion to a constitution or legal order, and even where such higher sentiments have come into existence, they may not have entirely escaped the more primitive passions of love and loyalty. What Acton failed to understand, with his mind lodged securely in 18th-century rationalism, was that the stages of human social development can never be transcended; they can only be incorporated into more complex communities. The family was not eliminated, for being incorporated in a tribe, and a tribal or provincial identity can only be destroyed at grave peril to the moral health of the people.
Jacobin nationalists, in attempting to build an abstract and artificially unified French nation, made war on all other, more real loyalties: They destroyed the Church, waged a war of genocide against Catholics in the Vendée, and did their best to obliterate the regional civilizations of Provence and Brittany that were responsible for the vitality of French culture. The predictable results, in France, Britain, and the United States (to name only three examples), is a mass culture in which the only “national identity” is the creation of commercial entertainment and state propaganda. Sheltered by the stultifying effects of communist misrule, the nations of Eastern Europe were able to preserve some of their cultural traditions; exposed to the virulent forces of free trade and global commercialism, they may sink into the morass of Americanism.
As a deeply learned aristocrat, as at home in Italy or Germany as in England, Lord Acton did not grasp the fundamental and enduring importance of the instinctive attachment to family and tribe that has no name in English or in most European languages. However, Edmund Burke (a strong influence on Acton), in opposing the French Revolution, referred to the “little platoons” that command our loyalties, and we can sometimes speak in English of “local patriotism,” when referring to the attachment to neighborhood celebrated in G.K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but we are fumbling to express a concept for which we have no word. Serbian does have such a word: rodoljublje, love of kith and kin, love of the stock (rod). If we were to coin a technical term to describe such an attachment, it might be something like genophilia. This instinctive loyalty, which lies at the root of patriotism, is something quite different from--indeed, opposed to--nationalism.
To understand such loyalty requires a more anthropological approach. The historian of Sicily, Edward Freeman, following the work on kinship done by Sir Henry Sumner Maine, clearly distinguished the sentiment of attachment from ideological nationalisms such as German race theory or Russian Panslavism. As he wrote in a very pertinent essay of 1879 :
". . . there is nothing but what is perfectly simple in the feeling which calls Russia, as the most powerful of Orthodox states, to the help of her Orthodox brethren everywhere, and which calls the members of the Orthodox Church everywhere to look to Russia as their protector . . . So again, the people of Montenegro and of the neighboring lands in Herzegovina and by the Bocche of Cattaro feel themselves countrymen in every sense but the political accident which keeps them asunder. They are drawn together by a tie which everyone can understand, by the same tie which would draw together the people of three adjoining English counties, if any strange political action should part them asunder in like manner. The feeling here is that of nationality in the strictest sense, nationality in a purely local or geographical sense. It would exist all the same if Panslavism had never been heard of; it might exist though those who feel it had never heard of the Slavonic race at all. It is altogether another thing when we come to the doctrine of race, and of sympathies founded on race, in the wider sense."
Such love of kith and kin is not based in race, but in language, culture, and tradition, and while the process of loyalty begins with the family, it culminates in the commonwealth which fulfills, without superseding, lesser loyalties. As Freeman observes: “Kindred, real or artificial, is the one basis on which all society and all government have grown up.”
The love of kith and kin does not require a nation-state. It is possible to be loyal to one’s own people even when separated, as Serbians, Montenegrins, and the Serbs of Bosnia and Krajina were in the 19th century (or as Greeks were until the Roman conquest). Separate ethnic groups may also be unified in a crown--as Scots and English were under James VI/I or the peoples of Spain for many centuries. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz attributed Spain’s comparative stability (when compared with that of Mexico) to the unifying effect of the monarchy, and there are undoubted advantages, for a multiethnic state, in having a symbol of unity that transcends politics.
The difficulty comes when a multiethnic monarchy or empire begins to force assimilation, as happened in Austria-Hungary, which degenerated from the more inclusive ideal of the Holy Roman Empire into a dual monarchy, which, at the mercy of dual nationalisms (Hungarian and German), made it difficult if not impossible for Slovaks, Croats, and Serbs to preserve their identities. The Hungarian liberals, who had noisily and violently demanded their national rights, were unwilling even to take on the Croats as junior partners. Such Hungarian nationalists as Louis Kossuth portrayed themselves as enlightened patriots interested only in the good of humanity, but Kossuth’s attacks on Panslavism (a Russian plot!) and his generous declarations of support for Slavic ethnicities (made to ignorant foreigners) make interesting reading, when one is aware of the role he and his allies played in suppressing the Croats’ and Slovaks’ legitimate desire to defend their interests and preserve their identity. Like a true nationalist, Kossuth favored the Magyarization (that is, “Hungarification”) of ethnic Slavs.
PS In answer to Mr. Roberts, I would say yes, that the terms nationalism and patriotism are often, perhaps typically confused, but with all the loose and confusing chatter among conservatives these days, I am offering these notes, drawn both from my book and from various lectures, as an attempt to clarify. If we could then agree to use them in the way I have outlined--definitions rooted in the historical discussion--we could then avoid a lot of cross-purpose argument--always bearing in mind that many sensible people who advocate "nationalism" are really speaking about patriotism. I should add that I truly regret any bruised feelings that may have resulted from my brusque attempts to keep this discussion on track. The subject is an important one
One more little point. It occurs to me that one difference between patriotism and nationalism can be explained by reference to Toennies famous distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, that is, community and society. As I have tried to argue previously, associations and institutions based on community are rooted in the sort of nonjudgmental love family members are supposed to have for each other, while members of a society are focussed on an objective purpose--winning the game, making money, solving a problem. Both elements tend to be present in most associations but the distinction remains valuable. In this sense, the nationalist feels himself to be part of a team that will defeat other teams because of his team's superiority, while a patriot feels himself a member of a family in which there are, in addition to brave, handsome, and intelligent men and women, a fair share of losers, eccentrics, and troublemakers.
M.A. Roberts (@33):
Although the word ‘nationalism’ is a creation of the 19th century, the words ‘natio’ and ‘patria’ etymologically imply link by blood. As I’ve argued with Richert and others, I don’t know whether I’m completely convinced that these two terms greatly differ.
You're either making two separate arguments there, or you're conflating nationalism and national identity or national consciousness or even nationhood or nationality. As I pointed out in one of the essays you've alluded to ("Race, Nationalism, and Patriotism, Part III: Patriotism"), there is of course a link between natio ("meaning, most broadly, a group of people, but more specifically a tribe, a race, a nation--in other words, a people who are connected, both genetically and culturally, in a way that is a natural extension of the family") and patria ("the native land or, literally, fatherland").
That's why I wrote that "Historically in English, both patria and natio have come together in patriotism, the love of a particular people in a particular place." I think that, to this point, you and I agree, do we not?
The problem comes when we go a step further: "because natio and patria are linked, when our relationship to the latter is attenuated, the former becomes more abstract--an ideological construct, rather than a lived reality." That's one way (and a very important way, in the American context) that nationalism arises. But there's nothing about the normal relationship between patria and natio that implies that nationalism is a natural phenomenon rather than an ideological one.
As to your point about nationalism and internationalism, I think we're closer than you seem to think. As I wrote in another of the essays, "Race, Nationalism, and Patriotism, Part II: Nationalism," "in practical terms, nationalist movements can, paradoxically, advance the cause of internationalism. Montenegro’s secession from Serbia is a case in point." But "Within the context of the United States, with its massive internal migrations, increasing loss of national sovereignty, and the influx of huge numbers of immigrants who not only cannot (by definition) be American patriots (at least when they arrive) but are also frequently Mexican nationalists, the issue can become even more ambiguous. It is possible, for instance, that the road to a revival of patriotism in America runs through American nationalism."
The problem, as always, is for patriots to encourage the patriotic instincts of nationalists, while discouraging the ideological elements of their nationalism.
One addendum to my final line ("The problem...") above: I don't mean to imply that all nationalists have patriotic instincts. For instance, the neoconservatives who got us into the war in Iraq are entirely ideological nationalists, with no patriotic instincts whatsoever; while Pat Buchanan is a different type of nationalist, whose nationalism is tempered by his patriotism.
That is why John Lukacs, despite his disagreements with Pat Buchanan, still holds him in a certain regard, while he has nothing but contempt for the neocons. (And before people jump in and say, "He can't hold him in regard—he compared him with David Irving," I was present at the one and only meeting between Lukacs and Buchanan, some 14 or 15 years ago, and sat with Lukacs during Buchanan's dinner speech and discussed it with him afterward, so I am speaking from personal knowledge.)
Dr. Fleming: Thanks for the response. You here get to the heart of the problem:
"At the opposite extremes of sentimental loyalty and rabid chauvinism, however, patriotism and nationalism seem poles apart. The problem lies in the concept of patriotism itself, which (in everyday speech) seems to designate a transitional phase that may pass into nationalism but derives from something more primitive, which has no name."
Scott: Thanks for your response. You write: "That’s why I wrote that “Historically in English, both patria and natio have come together in patriotism, the love of a particular people in a particular place.” I think that, to this point, you and I agree, do we not?"
Yes, I think we are largely in agreement, I do think that patriotism, as defined, is preferable to nationalism, but I think that the difference between the two may be a matter of degree and not kind. I also think that nationalism manifests itself differently. Nationalism in the U.S., largely an artificial country, is different from nationalism in France, a more organic nation.
Is it possible to have a nationalism that is not ideological or expansionist in its aims?
Historically, one would say no, but some of modern nationalist movements in Europe seem not overtly ideological (wanting to save the historic people and customs of their lands from mass immigration) and are more secessionist (wanting to leave the EU) than expansionist.
Whether it is possible to have a nationalism lacking overt ideology and expansionism, I think, gets at the heart of the issue. Many of the modern nationalist movements in Europe (e.g. in the UK, Denmark, France, etc.) do not seem to me to be overtly ideological (but rather concrete, wanting to preserve a particular people and way of life) and more secessionist than expansionist. Are these movements misnamed or is there a type of nationalism that is not ideological or expansionist?
In G.K. Chesterton's Heretics, he criticizes Rudyard Kipling for his lack of patriotism:
"The great gap in his mind may be roughly called the lack of patriotism-that is to say, he lacks altogether the faculty of attaching himself to any cause or community finally and tragically; for all finality must be tragic. He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English."
A patriot loves his land because it is his. Maybe it is too simplistic to place nationalism in an opposing category, but when I think of nationalism I imagine a character like Napoleon; a revolutionary who is using the vehicle of the nation to achieve some other end, usually power. Nationalism can only see nations and peoples in comparison to other nations and peoples, whether they are better, worse, etc. When I think of patriotism, I imagine the Hobbits of the Shire.
M.A. Roberts (@38):
Is it possible to have a nationalism that is not ideological or expansionist in its aims?
Historically, one would say no, but some of modern nationalist movements in Europe seem not overtly ideological (wanting to save the historic people and customs of their lands from mass immigration) and are more secessionist (wanting to leave the EU) than expansionist.
The question is why we (and they) refer to these movements as nationalist rather than patriotic. Unless we're simply using nationalism where we should be using patriotism, then there must be something about these movements that we can point to and say, "A patriot could never agree to/act like that."
Since I don't see such elements in those movements, then I'm inclined to think that we're simply mislabeling them.
Scott: 'Argued' was probably strong word. I should have used 'discussed'. As my comments on your previous articles indicate, we are most often in agreement.
I think the important difference between patriotism and nationalism to sum it up is that patriotism can be a healthy display of one love of country or blood and can be easily limited to where you live, work and pray. Nationalism on the other hand, is broader and more abstract expression of patriotism that can lead to some very ugly outcomes.
The perfect example of this difference is Italy. Garibaldi and Mazzini assumed that speaking Italian made one an Italian, completly forgetting that Sicilians and Calabrese lived completly different lives and spoke in different dialects from those who were Napoli or Milano. Thus the unified Italian state, instead replicating the glory of Venice or Florence, became a backward, unstable mess ruled by crooked politicians and demagouges. It unification utlimatley led to Mussolini and Fascism as a way of better unifying the nation and redeemthe ideas that led to its formation. The tragic outcome however, said otherwise.
Edward, with his GKC reference, gets it exactly right. As patriots we love what is ours because it is ours, not because we think it is best or that the whole world should be like us. George Bush is acting as a nationalist when he speaks of making Iraq an American-style democracy. This is the national-liberation language of Jacobins.
As in the question of Gesellschaft v. Gemeinschaft, the elements of patriotism and nationalism are often mixed. What do we say of the great French apostle of patriotism at the turn of the last century, Maurice Barres. Here is the (typically) distorted description in Wikipedia's thumbnail sketch: "French novelist, journalist, an anti-semite nationalist politician and agitator." My goodness, what a dreadful person he must have been! And yet, anyone who has read his most important "nationalist" books (Les déracinés and La colline inspirée) will realize that the dominant note he strikes is affectionate patriotism. Unlike most real nationalists, Barres was an intense localist, celebrating his native Lorraine as the heart of France and its identity--despite the obvious fact that a large number of people in Lorraine have German names because they come from partly German ancestry. (Someone should ask how Scott Richert's German ancestors came by a French name and why their descendants in Europe today speak French!).
I think our point here should be to clear up the confusion created by misuse of these two terms, Here, in the case of Barres, we can easily say that while he deviated, in times of crisis, into Romantic nationalism, Barres is far closer to Herder than to the political nationalism that despises all local and foreign traditions.
Yes, Sean is right about this. Important to note that of the three major figures in the Risorgimento, two (the Piedmontese Cavour and Garibaldi from Nice) were as French as they were Italian--Cavour spoke French in public and Piedmontese dialect at home and had trouble with formal Italian. Mazzini, though born in Genoa, was a French-style Jacobin trained by representatives of the extreme left of the French Rev. He was an extreme anti-Christian nationalist and ja nutcase of the first order. Naturally the unbiased "just the facts" Wikipedia describes him as "an Italian patriot, philosopher and politician." What dupes and knaves we Americans have made ourselves.
Of course the nice thing about Wikipedia is one, I do believe, can get into it and change around the biographies. That might be a nice project for someone who can put right to history.
German unification was more complex situation than in Italy because while Bismark was a German nationalist, he was quite aware of the problems that nationalism caused. For example, After Prussia's victory over Austria in the 1867 war, a hardcore German nationalist would have insisted upon incorporating 5 million Austrians into the Second Reich. Bismark did not want 5 million Austrian Catholics upsetting the religious and political balance of the emerging German state. He could have destroyed the Hapsburg Empire there and then but he realized its usefulness to German interests and in providing stability in the Balkans, which he always feared would trigger a wider European War in which Germany would be surrounded by France and Russia.
However, war and other political forces (like the collapse of the Barvarian monarchy) pulled the new German state together. Perhaps Bismark felt a united Germany was a way of keeping ahead of the Socialists, whom he always feared, in the same manner that old age pensions did. The new Germany did not have the same problems as the new Italy did, but they would soon arise and lead to greater calamities for the West and the East.
A good introduction to a slippery problem. I welcome the effort at clarification. Part of the problem is that in English we don’t have a adjective for “country”, and we have to fall upon “national”. “Mother country” to the USA ear means another country than the USA: Great Britain. “Fatherland” sounds to the same ear too German, “Motherland” too Russian.
Some issues of clarification:
1. “German Romantics”: This causes a problem for English speakers. The “Romantic Movement” for the German/Middle European might be best called in German the Goethezeit, and runs from Klopstock and the “Hain und Hugel” Empfindsamkeit, to Storm and Stress (which includes Herder), to “Weimarer Klassik ” (something like a literary version of “Greek Revival”), to the Romantiker, and to those thinkers and artists called “between Klassik and Romantik” such as Heine and Kleist. These various subsets often opposed each other. The Romantiker with their inherent Medievalism (“Gothic Revival”) tended to a more international view: cf “Die Christenheit oder Europa.
2. With respect to genophilia/Gemeinschaft: Just where is the boundary upon which the genos becomes the alien xenos? Is it linguistic? Is it spacial, e.g. the frontier of my locality? my US state? Dixie? the Lincolnian USA? the Occident (which includes Latin America)? Is it genetic/tribal, e.g. my family (the Montague and Capulet, Medici and Pazzi, Orsini and Colonna, Hatfields and McCoys), my “race”? Is it shared folkways, all of which can be learned by the xenos, and which can been increased by borrowing from the xenos once on recognizes the worth of the xenos’ folkway? Or as the wit R. Emmett Tyrrell once suggested in another context and rescripted: Every gentleman who enjoys Mozart, good wine, Punch cigars?
Fleming: "Romantic Nationalism: Is usually associated with German philosophers and propagandists of the 19th century. This is a battlefield where the bones have been picked clean by leftist internationalists."
This is perhaps part of my knee-jerk reaction in favor of nationalism. Any leftist account of nationalism starts with the Holocaust (which, indeed, was a horrible event), and then proceeds to work backwards deracinating Western man from all of his natural attachments (ancestral, blood and soil, historical, etc.), finding in the Romantics and early Volkisch Movement the kernel of genocide. This narrative relates that all attendant loyalties in ancient concepts like patria or natio are evil, and that only an enlightened internationalism will save Man from himself.
Because I see internationalism as the greater threat (and all it entails: political correctness, mass immigration, unhindered free trade, etc.), my first inclination is to see nationalism as the first bulwark against this menace. But perhaps Scott Richert, who generally is wise, is correct in that nationalism fosters internationalism. But is it necessary that nationalism must foster internationalism?
I do see some good, however quixotic they may be, in some of the "nationalist" movements (maybe better labeled "patriotist movements"?) today in Europe that want to leave the EU and restrict Third World immigration. These movements are more promising than what I see in the current election cycle in the U.S.
Anti-internationalism is, as you are saying, a healthy impulse. The problem is that any "anti" movement tends to form coalitions of people who disagree on basic principles and end up empowering the worst elements. The object, it seems, to me is to help to form and guide the thinking of patriotic and provincialist movements to avoid the nationalist and separatist excesses that will damn them to either xenophobia or inconsequence or, probably, both. If the more wholesome elements of the right get taken over by strutting and chattering racial nationalists and jingoists, then the whole thing is a waste of time. I would point out that for all their defects, some groups have enjoyed a bit of success: the Scots Nats (as worthless as they have become), the Quebec separatists, who virtually run the province, the Lega Nord that has had a powerful and positive influence on Italian politics in the areas of federalism and immigration. There is no such movement in the US.
Dr Flemming:
To help me understand the terms better. In your opinion was the founder of eternal Rome, Pious Aeneas, a nationalist or patriot?