The Philosophy Of Nationalism

Paul Gilbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429975646
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book attempts to classify the accounts of nationhood that can be given in terms of the kinds of argument for statehood they support. It is based on the International Society for the Study of European Ideas conference in 1990.

Chapter One

Nationalism, Nations, and Names

The Nature of Nationalism

No easy hope or lies

Shall bring us to our goal,

But iron sacrifice

Of body, will, and soul.

There is but one task for all—

One life for each to give.

What stands if Freedom fall?

Who dies if England live?¹

These lines by Rudyard Kipling may seem the epitome of nationalism, with their appeal to personal sacrifice in pursuit of a common national task—the task of ensuring the survival and independence of the nation, which is of greater importance than the lives and interests of its individual members. However, in introducing the World War II anthology in which this poem was reprinted, Harold Nicolson uses the poem to illustrate his observation that “our patriotism”—the English kind, that is to say—”is not nationalistic.”² English patriotism, he must have thought, does not peddle the “easy hope or lies” that nationalism, as he understood it, depends upon. “English pride” is not the complacency and self-satisfaction about the country that fosters them. How, then, are we to understand nationalism? What is it, and how should it be evaluated?

At least four sorts of answers have been suggested; so before trying to characterize nationalism in detail, we need to get clear what sort of phenomenon it is. Is it a sentiment or feeling? Is it a system of practices or rituals? Is it a policy or course of political action? Is it a set of beliefs or doctrine? Nationalism, it has been suggested,³ is a certain type of sentiment, a feeling of loyalty to one’s nation. In this suggested sense, nationalism is sometimes equated with patriotism⁴ and sometimes, as it seems to be by Harold Nicolson, contrasted with it.⁵ Which of the two pertains may depend upon whether nationalism is thought well or ill of; for patriotism is generally allowed to be a virtue.⁶ Nationalism, on the other hand, is often condemned either as a bad form of patriotism—like jingoism or chauvinism—or as a sentiment contrasted with it. However, while patriotism evidently is a sentiment, nationalism is not. At most, it gives rise to sentiments, perhaps to patriotic ones. Patriotism is love of one’s country, whether one’s country is thought of in nationalist terms or not. Nationalism, I shall suggest, involves, among other things, a belief about the proper object of patriotism—namely, one’s nation. Putting this belief together with someone’s belief as to what his nation is will naturally lead him to patriotism. It may be natural, therefore, to confuse the sentiment of patriotism to which nationalism gives rise with the belief that it consists in, but such a view would be mistaken. And similarly mistaken would be the view that nationalism is a sentiment of the same order as patriotism, but to be contrasted with it because it is the wrong sort of feeling or the right sort of feeling directed at the wrong sort of object.

One reason for thinking of nationalism as a sentiment of attachment to one’s nation rather than as a belief that the nation is the proper object of such a sentiment may be the view that this attachment arises not from any belief but, rather, from a natural human disposition. Some nationalists, as we shall see, advance this view. But it is one thing to hold the view and therefore to espouse a form of nationalism, and quite another thing to have the supposedly natural sentiment it posits. Furthermore, though some nationalists may in fact have no good or adequate reason for their attachments, it does not necessarily follow that they hold no beliefs which they count as a reason. To suppose otherwise is to erect a crude dichotomy between reason, which cannot lead us astray, and passion, which often does. In this vein, patriotism is sometimes thought of as directed at the right sort of object, because it is one for which there is a reason, and nationalism as directed at the wrong sort, because there is only an irrational attachment to it.⁷ But to follow this line of thought is to avoid engaging intellectually with the nationalists’ system of beliefs which justify their choice of object.

A second sort of reason that might be offered for rejecting the view that nationalism consists in a set of beliefs, though not necessarily for thinking of it as a sentiment, is the observation that we may describe as a nationalist someone who simply takes pride in her nation and gives it her support. But vigorous flag waving at football matches, which may be taken as an expression of nationalism, does not, it may be concluded, imply the possession of beliefs about nations. Nationalism, on this account, is not so much a system of beliefs as a set of practices,⁸ through which national loyalty is cultivated and nations are sustained. This is indeed nearer the mark than the view of nationalism as national sentiment, but it similarly confuses effects with causes or, more properly, acts with their justifications. Certainly not all nationalists could articulate the beliefs which, I shall argue, characterize their nationalism; but they take their support for a nation, even if they cannot produce the justification, to be justified. Perhaps the justificatory beliefs are articulated by nationalist intellectuals or perhaps their articulation may be the task of an observer, since it plays no part in the practices that the beliefs justify.⁹ In either event the practices in which the nationalists engage are not to be thought of as contrasted with beliefs: They are the expressions of them. Much the same can be said of the suggestion that nationalism consists in the pursuit of certain policies—namely, those taken to favor a nation. Nationalism as a form of political action would be unintelligible unless the policies that such action supported were not founded on a set of beliefs. Again, whether or not individual nationalists consciously hold the beliefs, their actions still express them.

It is necessary to establish that nationalism is a set of beliefs or a doctrine if we are to have any hope of understanding and evaluating it in terms of the reasons there may be for and against it. Yet establishing that it is a doctrine only leads us into the difficulty of determining precisely what doctrine it is, because several very different doctrines all seem to count as nationalism. Indeed, the problem of definition routinely troubles observers.

Here the diverse doctrines that different nationalists seem to hold make an answer difficult. Consider only a few examples. In Ulster, Irish nationalists challenge the existence of the Northern Irish state while Ulster Unionists support it as part of the United Kingdom. Their disagreement is not simply a factual one as to whether, by certain agreed criteria, Northern Ireland satisfies the conditions for being part of Ireland or those for being part of the United Kingdom.¹⁰ The criteria employed by the two sides in the dispute are different, and this difference reflects a disagreement in their doctrines, though even these conflicting doctrines are themselves not free of internal differences and complexities. On the Irish nationalist side a united Ireland is mainly dictated by the criterion of common occupancy of the national homeland. Irish nationalism is the doctrine that a certain territory—the island of Ireland—constitutes the national home and thereby warrants national statehood. Surely, it may seem, this doctrine is quite typical of nationalism generally.¹¹

A moment’s reflection will dispel the illusion. For, contrary to the impression created by nomenclature, we observe in Northern Ireland a contest not between nationalism and something else but between two forms of nationalism. Ulster Unionism is, of course, a type of British nationalism, attested by the Unionists’ constant asseveration of British nationality. Their criterion has nothing to do with occupancy of a British homeland. While asserting their right to occupancy of Northern Ireland, they do not base their claim to British statehood on its being part of a British national home. Rather, they base their claim on an allegiance they take themselves to share with the people of Britain. That is what they believe constitutes them as part of a British nation and entitles them to live under the British state.

The two nationalisms are so different that it seems hard to see what they have in common apart from the vocabulary of nationhood employed in support of analogous but competing political claims. Yet both are undeniably forms of nationalism: Irish nationalism is paradigmatically so and a model for many other nationalist movements, whereas British nationalism is arguably the forerunner of nationalisms generally¹² and still retains its essential features.

Welsh nationalism,¹³ by contrast with mainstream Irish nationalism, is founded on an assertion of the distinctiveness of Welsh culture from, in particular, that of England. Although Welsh nationalism has political goals, these may seem to be subordinate to its cultural ones, most notably the preservation of the Welsh language. This, too, seems a characteristic form of nationalism, to be found, for example, in Quebec and Hawaii. Indeed, many thinkers take a common culture to be essential to the nationalist conception of nations.¹⁴ These nationalisms seem quite different, however, from the British, Canadian, and American nationalisms with which they compete. The last contrast is particularly acute. The American nation is, after all, ostensibly based on quite other principles than common culture or ethnicity or even a territorial homeland.

America is West and the wind blowing.

America is a great word and the snow,

A way, a white bird, the rain falling,

A shining thing in the wind and the gull’s call.

America is neither a land nor a people….

Here we must live only as shadows.

This is our race, we that have none, that have had

Neither the old walls nor the voices around us.

This is our land, this is our ancient ground.—

The raw earth, the mixed bloods and the strangers….¹⁵

Quoting these lines by Archibald Macleish as the United States prepared to enter the war against fascism, Harold Nicolson countered the notion that American nationalism is “something comparatively artificial and unauthentic … not a pulsation of the blood but a deliberate form of belief,”¹⁶ by observing that its basis in an idea, rather than in “generations of gradual growth,” does not make it any the less genuine.¹⁷

The American “melting pot” absorbs a wide range of cultures and races, requiring of its members only commitment to its constitutional principles of individual liberty and formal equality. American nationalism conceives of the nation as a sovereign people whose national unity is forged by just such constitutional commitments. It is a form of nationalism that recurs in postrevolutionary France, whose example was followed by many. Some theorists regard this emphasis on the sovereignty of the people as paradigmatic of nationalism.¹⁸ But American nationalism could scarcely be more different from cultural nationalism, or from the ethnic nationalism of, say, Chicano nationalism or black nationalism directed against it in the 1960s. For here we have a nationalism that celebrates ethnic origins and yet excludes from the nation, whose interests it advocates, those who do not share these origins. In the minds of many, this has seemed the inevitable tendency of nationalism, and a deeply disturbing one, however understandable it may have been in the cases just mentioned.

What, then, among all this diversity, is nationalism? After all, even the aims seem very different: territorial integration, freedom of political association, cultural survival, popular sovereignty under a liberal and democratic constitution, ethnic segregation. Just what core of common belief could lead to such differences remains quite unclear.¹⁹ Yet it is evident that the differences spring from contrasting conceptions of what a nation is: the population of a territory, a voluntary association, a cultural community, a sovereign people, an ethnic group. Depending on how the nation is conceived, the aims of its corresponding form of nationalism differ. The implication is that if there is any unity beneath the diversity of nationalisms, it is to be found in some common core of their conceptions of the nation.

The Concept of Nation

The word “nationalism” is a relatively recent coinage,²⁰ entering common currency as late as the nineteenth century, the era of the great spread of nationalism in Europe. “Nation” is a much older word; of Latin etymology, it was used in its original sense in the eighteenth century.²¹ Vestiges of this earlier usage persist today. “Nation” meant, very roughly, what we sometimes mean by a people, when we are thinking of them as distinct from others, particularly in terms of birth or descent. It was thus applied most easily to strangers and, for this and other reasons, was readily used to refer to the Jewish people. Shakespeare, we may recall, had Shylock say about Antonio that “he hates our sacred nation.”²²

Nearly three hundred years later, George Eliot’s Jewish hero, Daniel Deronda, took a different line: “[T]he idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the globe.”²³

It is not that Jews no longer constituted the kind of entity they did in Shakespeare’s day but, rather, that a shift in the concept of nationhood had taken place. It is a shift that, notoriously, led many to make efforts to assimilate into nations instead of reconstructing their own. Thus, for example, Sean O’Faolain introduced Moll Wall, a twentieth-century “Irish speaking, Dublin born Jewess,” as follows: “[H]er real name was not Moll. It was Miriam, but since in her excessive efforts to nationalise herself she always signed her name not only in Gaelic but in an outmoded script …, her fellow students called her Moira, or Maurya, or Maureen, until she ended up by being universally known as Moll.”²⁴

What led to this change, and what concept of the nation did it leave us with? Three developments, I believe, led to the change—and each determines a somewhat different concept of the nation. The first is the rise of the modern state with its claim to sole authority over all those who live within its borders. Such a state needs a notion of those who are subject to its authority in view of their membership of it. For the power of the state must be experienced by its members not simply as an external force, nor yet as the manifestation of personal feeling, but rather as the proper expression of the state’s impersonal relation to its members. Their membership must be a clearly legal status, conferring certain rights and imposing certain duties. This status, I suggest, is what lies at the heart of the legal conception of nationality.²⁵ The aggregate of those who share their nationality in this sense is the nation, and in the same sense a single nation corresponds to every state.²⁶ The old sense of “nation” has been modified and made precise in a particular context—a context unavai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Nationalism, Nations, and Names
• 2 Identity and Community
• 3 “The Most Natural State”
• 4 The Nation as Will and Idea
• 5 The Nation-State
• 6 Geography and Economics
• 7 Language and Culture
• 8 “An Outlook on Life”
• 9 History and Destiny
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index