On Nationalism

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of nationalism. Left-wing and centrist thinkers generally fear that this is a throw-back to the ugly past of the early twentieth century. Cosmopolitans deride the movement as a reaction of the rural and white working classes who are too unsophisticated to understand the bigger picture. They are wrong.

Nationalism is still on the march, and it is too powerful a force to break. People hoping to improve civilization should not attempt to do so. Instead, they should embrace nationalism and civilize it.

Nationalism is not some primordial force that has existed since the first people divided themselves. It has not been on the wane since people discovered reason. Nor is it a movement that came and went as an ugly byproduct of industrialization or capitalism. In the nineteenth century it represented the widening of solidarity among the common people. I argue that it still does – and that this is a good thing. Only a small sliver of humanity considers all of humanity as their nation. Most people in the world have a dominant attachment to some – usually smaller – group of people (e.g. family, tribe, town, sect). We are a social species, with our primordial origins being in the ‘band’ of hunter-gatherers. On balance, growing solidarity with ‘the nation’ still represents a broadening of solidarity, not a retrenchment.

Nationalism is a movement that seeks to stand up for the people of the nation – who are generally society’s ‘commoners.’ Nationalism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the original people’s social movement. It undermined the powers of the monarchs and aristocrats, and began to open the franchise to the common people.

Its foundation is in national identity. It involves solidarity among those who (are presumed to) share a national identity with one another. It also frequently represents a common hostility against the enemies of the nation. Who is inside and who is outside of the nation is a matter of contested debate – a debate that can and should be waged constructively. Nationalism is also a movement that seeks to force the boundaries of the state, the market, and the culture into alignment with the boundaries of the people who espouse the national identity. Even though the correlation of these different spheres of human activity and consciousness is a historical fiction, it is nevertheless an extremely powerful fiction. It is nearly impossible to break, even in progressively-minded undergraduate students. (Believe me, I have tried.)

One reason nationalism is so powerful is because the correlative idea of state-nation-market-culture-language-etc. is one that was instilled in most people at young ages by parents and teachers. By comparison the reality of multi-level governance, intertwined markets, shifting and changing culture, and multiple layers of identity is too complex for most people to generally comprehend. Nationalism is more comfortable on the mind, and the minds of billions are not so easily discomfited.

There is also the political reality that non-state governance is a mirage. Even the non-state actors that are best positioned to provide alternatives to nationalism – ie. multinational corporations – have gone too far too fast towards globalization. They are also too numerous and too myopic to be able to have the greater good in mind – should they even be so inclined. The nation-state, for all of its faults and fictions, is still the best chance we have of creating some coherence between governance, economic exchange, common norms, and social solidarity.

The objective, however, is not to force people into molds that do not fit them, which nationalism does have the tendency to do. The objective is to civilize nationalism so that it does not again fuel the greatest nightmares of history. There are different forms of nationalism, and the job of civilization is to adopt an inclusive civil nationalism rather than an exclusive ethnic nationalism.

The means by which to do so is to force the debate between the ethnic nationalists and the civic nationalists. Force the moderates to vocally disavow the bigots – and to not be too quick to doubt the moderates. Yes, the moderate nationalists will have traces of bigotry – but all people have traces of bigotry. We are a social species, and we define our group against other groups. Our challenge is to civilize that us-vs.-them feeling by allowing the contests of us vs. them to take on friendlier – even playful – forms.

Nationalism is not the antithesis to liberal or social democracy. It is the social origin of them. It is also not the last gasp of a bygone world, that we need to endure until the illness, and the crotchety old codgers wanting to ‘take back control’ carrying the disease, pass. It is growing, and that should be welcomed. That it is now the rallying sentiment of xenophobes and bigots does not mean that nationalism itself is to be feared. Instead, inclusive civic nationalism is a social force to be embraced by those who seek progress in both their own societies as well as that of societies throughout the world. As such, the power of nationalism needs to be taken away from the xenophobes and bigots, and harnessed for the greater good.

Of course, there are problems. The relationships between nationalism and immigration, irredentism, separatism, and even climate change put spanners in the works of solving real global problems. This blog will explore these issues in forthcoming posts. Stay tuned.